New Books in Critical Theory

So what is metamodernity you may ask, and what does it have to do with systems thinking and cybernetics? Well, I recently had a chance to find out for myself during my conversation with Lene Rachel Andersen about her book Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World (Nordic Bildung, 2019). The short answer is metamodernity is a systems perspective; "it is about seeing the world as a process and not as fixed circumstances, a world in which there are not isolated phenomena but where everything is interconnected and interdependent..." (p. 94). The book's premise is that as our old understandings and the answers we get from them are insufficient, the ways we are used to reacting and behaving do not work well anymore either. Our cultural compass cannot contain and judge the world properly because the challenges we are facing were not a part of our world when we came of age and learned what the world was like.More than a cultural trend (or 'ism'), metamodernity is a meaning-making code—one that encompasses cultural codes from every epoch of the human experience. Andersen argues that "we need metamodern minds that can relate to the intimate indigenous, the existential premodern, the democratic & scientific modern, and the deconstructing postmodern simultaneously" (p. 128). It is only through this synthesis and adoption of the metamodern code, she stresses, that we'll have the capacity to make good decisions to guide the necessary changes to our current systems and institutions. The 'hyper-modern' alternative is not a good one; think: much an exaggerated version of what will turn out to be mere glimpses of what we're seeing right now—such as rise in authoritarianism, surveillance society, extreme inequality, and of course, climate change.Metamodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a more complex way. Metamodernity is a way of strengthening local, national, continental, and global cultural heritage among all. It thus has the potential to dismantle the fear of losing one's culture as the global economy as well as the internet and exponential technologies are disrupting our current modes of societal organization and governance. Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World is thought-provoking and a wonderful complement to many of the books I've covered in previous episodes. I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with Lene, and I invite you to check out the rest of her work at https://www.lenerachelandersen.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

According to the definition offered by Tate on the occasion of the exhibition Surrealism Without Borders, Surrealism “aims to revolutionise human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” Surrealism, therefore, produces images and artefacts that are rooted outside the real and that evade rational description.For many artists, however, the practice of Surrealist art took on an explicitly political and therefore practical dimensions. In Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester UP, 2021), art historian Abigail Susik argues that many Surrealists tried to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work.Abigail Susik speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about what the politics of work meant to the early French Surrealists, the ambiguous labour practices of artists like Simone Breton, and the imagery of typewriters and sewing machines that permeates the work of artists such as Oscar Domínguez. She brings these questions into the present by engaging with the work of the Chicago Surrealists of the 1960s and 70s.Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and co-editor of Surrealism and film after 1945. Man Ray, Séance de rêve éveiillé Oscar Domínguez, Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle Surrealism Without Borders at Tate Modern Abigail’s op-eds in the Washington Post and New York Times Abigail’s forthcoming book Radical Dreams Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Although the dividing line between private life and public responsibilities can never be definite and clear, there is a moral threshold which is crossed both by those who assume power to change the lives of many men through public action and by those who undertake to represent in a public role the will and interests of many other men. A new responsibility, and even a new kind of responsibility, and new moral conflicts, present themselves.– Stuart Hampshire, foreword to Public and Private Morality (1978)Hampshire’s thoughts help articulate the inherent tensions underlying an institutionalized system of monopoly medicine that has commandeered the myth of free-market ideology in an ongoing and highly successful effort to profit from pharmaceutical patents generated by U.S. government-funded scientific research. This is the broader thesis of investigative journalist Alexander Zaitchik’s latest book, Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 published by Counterpoint in March of 2022.Zaitchik highlights the politics and players from founding fathers to the FDA’s Francis Kelsey to Hayek and the Chicago School in an engaging and well-researched narrative laying bare the situational ethics across the professional domains of the pharmaceutical industry, publicly-funded university research, and medicine more broadly while highlighting the public-private tension baked into our ‘free market’ political economy and its reification of knowledge through patent and intellectual property law.Zaitchik’s narrative deftly outlines how generations of public health and science advocates have attempted to hold the line against pharmaceutical special interests and their allies in government while documenting privatized medicine’s evolution in the U.S. and its globalizing effects. From the controversial arrival of patent-seeking German chemical companies in the late nineteenth century to present-day coordination between industry and philanthropic organizations—including the influential Gates Foundation—that defeated efforts to loosen intellectual property restrictions for countries to produce vaccines against COVID-19. Relevant and smartly written with a disturbing message for everyone who cares about the cost and access of medicine.Listeners will find the book and Zaitchik’s observations in this interview engaging as well as his 2018 article in The New Republic that previews part of the book’s larger thesis:Complement and expand the topic focus with these recent NBN segments:1) Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World (2022) written by Peter S. Goodman andinterviewed by Caleb Zakarin.2) Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine (2021) written by PeterS. Swanson and interviewed by Stephen Pimpare.Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist and contributor to Atlantic magazine, The New Republic, The Nation and Foreign Policy among others, and has authored four books including this latest just published by Counterpoint Press in Berkeley.Keith Krueger lectures at the SILC Business School in Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2020), Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas focuses on the parenting practices of Latin American urban elites to analyze how everyday experiences of whiteness, privilege, and inequality reinforce national and hemispheric idioms of anti-corruption and austerity. Ramos-Zayas shows that for upper-class residents in the affluent neighborhoods of Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro) and El Condado (San Juan), parenting is particularly effective in providing moral grounding for neoliberal projects that disadvantage the overwhelmingly poor and racialized people who care for and teach their children. Wealthy parents in Ipanema and El Condado cultivate a liberal cosmopolitanism by living in multicultural city neighborhoods rather than gated suburban communities. Yet as Ramos-Zayas reveals, their parenting strategies, which stress spirituality, empathy, and equality, allow them to preserve and reproduce their white privilege. Defining this moral economy as “parenting empires,” she sheds light on how child-rearing practices permit urban elites in the Global South to sustain and profit from entrenched social and racial hierarchies.Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is Professor of American Studies; Ethnicity, Race, and Migration; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He can be found on Twitter @arman_c. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

As the US contends with issues of populism and de-democratization, this timely study considers the impacts of digital technologies on the country’s politics and society.In Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life (Bristol University Press, 2021), Dr. Scott Timcke provides a Marxist analysis of the rise of digital media, social networks and technology giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. He looks at the impact of these new platforms and technologies on their users who have made them among the most valuable firms in the world.Offering bold new thinking across data politics and digital and economic sociology, this is a powerful demonstration of how algorithms have come to shape everyday life and political legitimacy in the US and beyond.Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How should we understand the history of post-war Britain? In The Welfare State Generation Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2022), Eve Worth, a Research Fellow on the Changing Elites project in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford, explores this question by foregrounding the lives of women who grew up, worked, and retired as the first ‘welfare state generation’. The book uses oral history methods to tease out the changing role and changing experiences of the welfare state, along with the role of women in working in and administering that welfare state. It thinks through the sense of autonomy and control, as well as changing perceptions of class identity and feminism, in the lives of women, and thus tells a new story of post-war British history. The book speaks to a huge range of academic audiences and is also essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Britain.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care practices have trans subjects and communities cultivated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion?Trans Care (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) is a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. A serious consideration of trans survival and flourishing requires a radical rethinking of how care operates. Trans Care is the recipient of the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature.Hil Malatino is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. Dr. Malatino was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University and Assistant Director and Lecturer in Women’s Studies at East Tennessee State University. His first book, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) examines the relationship between intersex embodiment, biomedical technologies, and the forms of subjectivity both enabled and constrained by the medicalization of gender non-conformance. His articles can be found in TSQ, Rhizomes, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and Angelaki, as well as in multiple edited volumes.Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

It is slowly becoming clear that we are heading towards a deep ecological catastrophe. Our societies carbon footprint and its impact have been known for some time, and already we are starting to see the effects in terms of melting ice, warming oceans and more frequent extreme weather. This will contribute to food and water shortages, political unrest and migration crises that we are ill-prepared for.In a context such as this, it has become urgent that we rethink the natural world and our relationship to it, but knowing where to start is difficult. Fortunately, John Bellamy Foster has stepped forward with just such a book. Picking up where his book Marx’s Ecology left off 20 years ago, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2021) starts with the funerals of both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, kicking off a story of the many people who worked in their combined shadow. Foster guides us through a century of scientific development in the relatively new field of ecology, showing how many of it’s founders were influenced by the socialist critique of capitalism, and vice-versa. What readers will find are a collection of texts and figures who understood that an economic model that prioritizes profit above all else will eventually have to start asking more of the earth than it can afford to give, incurring long and deep debts that we are now starting to pay. On the one hand, many ecologists have found Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism helpful for thinking dynamically about nature and scientific practice. On the other hand, ecologists have offered socialists a number of theoretical concepts and frameworks for their own thinking. In between are a number of other characters who make their own contributions to discussions on economics and nature, as well as literature, history, epidemiology, race, oppression and emancipation.The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives. It reveals a hidden history of the relationship between science and sociology, between economics and nature and gives us characters who were able to see the seeds we were sowing, but also an unyielding faith that it doesn’t have to be this way, that a more sustainable world is possible.John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of a number of books, including Marx’s Ecology. With The Return of Nature he won the 2020 Isaac Deutscher Memorial prize. He is also the editor and a frequent contributor at the socialist periodical The Monthly Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Jonathan Katz’s Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) tells the story of the birth and maturation of modern American imperialism, and its culmination in an alleged domestic coup attempt in 1934 led by a shadowy capitalist cabal and modeled on foreign interventions. The protagonist, Smedley Butler, is one of the most decorated war heroes in American history, a man with a singular legacy as a soldier that began when an idealistic 16-year-old boy from a privileged Quaker background joined the Marines to avenge the “sinking” of the USS Maine in 1899. From there, the career of the “Fighting Quaker” put Butler on the frontlines of nearly every important venue for the expansion of American formal and informal empire. Especially in the Caribbean―and above all in Haiti―he crushed local resistance and installed US-business friendly regimes and pioneered counterinsurgency and the so-called “banana republics” before bringing those hardnosed imperialist violent suppression tactics home to American shores as the chief of the Philadelphia police. Increasingly cynical, demoralized, and traumatized by what he had seen and done, Butler eventually became a great critic of the empire and imperialism he had devoted his life to, calling himself a “racketeer for capitalism.” As Katz writes, Butler’s “contradictions are America’s,” and these contradictions are on full display in Gangsters of Capitalism as Butler simultaneously killed and conquered for American interests and established despotic and pliable regimes in countries around the globe―Cuba, the Philippines, China, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti―all while upholding the “principles of equality and fairness.”Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

People with disabilities have always struggled to make ends meet. Finding a job you can actually do, a housing situation you can afford that meets your needs, and simply going about the various daily tasks most of us take for granted all compound to make life under capitalism especially challenging. This makes the many disabled people who not only rise to meet their life-circumstances but go beyond them particularly inspiring.One such figure in this category would be E.T. Kingsley, a socialist activist at the turn of the 20th century. After an injury working on railway lines in Montana left him a double-amputee, Kingsley traveled west, first to California and then eventually to British Columbia where he would work as a political speaker, candidate for office, editor and writer in the radical left.His life is the focus of the book under discussion today, Able to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E.T. Kingsley (U British Columbia Press, 2021) coauthored by Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt. Pooling their combined academic backgrounds and intellectual resources, the authors are able to tease out a number of quiet yet profound elements of Kingsley’s life and times, from the legal status of injuries and workers compensation to discussions around freedom of speech and the changing nature of the security-state. In all this contextual discussion, the authors still never allow Kingsley to disappear as a dynamic and passionate activist, one who managed to stand as a unique example of what it means to tirelessly fight for a better world. Drawing from a number of fields, the book will be of interest to a number of people, from labor historians and disability activists to legal scholars and political theorists, showing us that even as we are flung into circumstances not of our choosing, we can still rise above our circumstances and change the world.Ravi Malhotra is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. Benjamin Isitt is a historian and legal scholar based in Victoria, British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory