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This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls for a rethinking of critical sociology. Representing classical critical sociology, the Bourdieusian paradigm illustrated domination, but its negative foundation removed actors' power, privileging sociological knowledge as capable of identifying (social) transcendental categories of thought. Latour's constructivism challenged this privilege, giving actors the political power of aggregating collectives around their common concerns at the cost of emphasizing domination and critique. We propose a critical approach that evades a transcendental perspective reliant on pure negation, producing a more positive critical sociology founded on processualist phenomenological and pragmatic perspectives, principally Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. Actors and researchers can collectively ruminate on their perspectives and concerns to challenge power structures and transform their worlds. At the center of this is the social-mien, a creative reimagination of habitus. A brief discussion of the protests and scholarship surrounding the Notre-Dame-des-Landes activists' practice of democracy highlights the utility of the approach and serves as a model for future application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Achille Mbembe's theorization of necropolitics and surplus life in dialogue with three comparable theorizations: Agamben's 'bare life', Marxist scholarship on 'relative surplus populations', and Afropessimist theorizations of 'social death'. I argue that Mbembe's work allows us to develop a critique of sacrifice that at the same time (contra Agamben) recognizes how it plays a structural role within necropolitics. Examining the influence of Georges Bataille's writings on sacrifice allows me to clarify this argument. The second part of the article examines the 'surplus life' of necropolitics in comparative analysis, tracing some of the limits of Mbembe's reading through a dialogue with Marxist and Afropessimist readings. I characterize Mbembe's work in terms of a poetics and politics of surplus: 'reserves of life' are affirmed against the excess of violence characterizing the present. However, this critique of violence relies upon abrupt leaps from politics to abstract ethical appeals in ways that obscure the implications of Mbembe's own analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the place of the child in the metaphysics and imaginary of Western colonization, racialization, and decolonization. In the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, children appear not only as victims but also as a problem for which Fanon struggles to account as a theorist of decolonization as much as a psychiatric practitioner. Through a reading of one of the cases, this article interrogates the ways in which colonization attempts to infantilize colonized populations while erasing childhood, and the ways in which decolonization meets colonization by regarding childhood in the end as a misfortune. The work of decolonization, to proceed, thus would demand us to rethink childhood, and in doing so break free of Western metaphysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Stuart Hall's reading of Louis Althusser's main theoretical works. Since the early 1970s, Hall has undertaken a critical confrontation with Althusser's 'structural Marxism', rescuing those useful concepts to think cultural difference and identity, without failing to criticize his 'superstructuralist' interpretation of Marx. However, what Hall will retain as Althusser's most important contribution is, above all, his theory of ideology. In this context, I follow an idea formulated by Hall that could be read as summarizing the theoretical and political scope of Althusser's contribution to Cultural Studies: 'he enabled me to live in and with difference'. By complicating classical interpretations schemes in the Marxist tradition, Hall's Althusser may be read as a 'thinker of difference' who opens up a whole research program to reconsider class conflicts as traversed (or 'overdetermined') by gender, racial or colonial conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud completed his last book, on Moses and Monotheism, in 1939, while in his London exile. Its publication was deemed untimely, as its two main theses could be construed as a form of Jewish self-hatred. The first claim questions Moses' Jewish origins and contends that the founder of the Jews was in fact an Egyptian; the second suggests that the Jews killed Moses and then created his myth as a coping mechanism for concealing their terrible deed. In this article, I contend that Moses and Monotheism can be read as Freud's intervention in debates on the 'Jewish Question'. After revisiting Freud's original argument (I), I assess its reception among leading Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century (II). I then use Freud's arguments to look at the two key themes of the Jewish Question: understanding the defining features of Jewish identity (III) and the pervasiveness of antisemitism in Western culture (IV). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows that Habermas's modernism and Lyotard's postmodernism are not as antithetical as they are often taken to be. First, we argue that Habermas is not a strong foundationalist concerned with identifying universal rules for language, as postmodern critiques have often interpreted him. Instead, he develops a social pragmatics in which the communicative use of language is the fundamental presupposition of any meaningful interaction. Second, we argue that Lyotard is not a relativist who denies any universal linguistic structure. Instead, he claims that language involves a universal element of dissensus that cannot be subordinated to consensus. Third, we show that neither does Habermas defend a new version of the kind of philosophy of history characteristic of the Enlightenment, nor is Lyotard a historical relativist, but instead they both seek alternatives to these positions. The conclusion calls for more nuance in the interpretation of both perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the conceptual and methodological points of convergence and divergence of two intellectual currents frequently referred to as the decolonial and ontological turns in social and anthropological theory. Salient points considered are the ways both theoretical projects unsettle modernity's dominant ontological and epistemological foundations by seriously engaging the conceptual potential of thinking with alterity (ethical dimension) and from exteriority (geopolitical dimension). I compare their subversive methodological contributions, examining, in particular, Enrique Dussel's analectical hermeneutic approach and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's ethnographic method of controlled equivocation. Lastly, I discuss how both theories and approaches complement each other's efforts to destabilize Western modernity's philosophical and anthropological foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A profusion of jobs has arisen in contemporary capitalism involving 'connective labor', or the work of emotional recognition. Yet the expansion of this interpersonal work occurs at the same time as its systematization, as pressures of efficiency, measurement and automation reshape the work, generating a 'colliding intensification'. Existing scholarship offers three different ways of understanding the role of emotions in connective labor – as tool, commodity or vulnerability – depending on their view of systematization as useful, inseparable or dehumanizing. Based on 106 in-depth interviews and 300+ hours of observations, I found that vestiges of all three models lurked in the experience of providing connective labor, yet none fully captured the profound meaning practitioners reported finding in their work. Systems varied on three dimensions, reflecting the relative worth of worker, recipient or the work, extracting value from the forged connections, while the meanings workers derived shaped their perspective on its systematization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates in ecological social theory are characterised by dualisms of nature and society. The author proposes the notion of 'ecological aporias' to account for these dualisms, focusing on three landmark examples of ecological thought over the past four decades from Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour and Jason W. Moore. He shows the persistence in this work of paradoxes and intractable contradictions revolving around the nature/society dualism. Rather than trying to dissolve these ecological aporias, he draws on recent work in eco-deconstruction to suggest that the ecological is itself an aporetic category and that this enables a new perspective for political ecology in an age of climate crisis. Rejecting Latour's identification of political ecology with the politics of dwelling, he argues that climate change demands we recognise forms of life irreducible to the ontological security on which the concept of the ecological has long been based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the sociological insight that it is left to the art system what counts as art, new artistic forms inevitably alter the prevailing concept of art. The article examines how artistic morphogenesis occurs in a twofold manner in the case of contemporary art: as self-referential process through new form combinatorics or asynchronous artistic operations whose artworks elude the gaze, and as other-referential relation. One of the main features of contemporary art lies in its strong reference to the present, based on a conception of operative time. Time is not understood as a sequence of past, present, future, but rather as the linking of respective presences. Contemporary art shares this understanding of time with event-based social theories. This is analysed as other-referential act of synchronization within the art system with its societal environment. Empirical evidence is provided by select works of art and by self-descriptions of the art system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the documentary photography of Eugène Atget in late 19th and early 20th-century Paris. I will begin by exploring Atget's position as a pioneering documentary photographer in the field, followed by an engagement with the urban environment of Paris, in which Atget worked almost exclusively. Finally, I will analyse a single photograph in depth while discussing it in relation to the work of Charles Baudelaire and Jacques Rancière. This text is a contribution to a literature of critical engagement with documentary photography, urban history and the politics of class visibility. I will do so by arguing for the political significance of reading Atget's images in a critical, political manner that engages with Rancière's concept of the 'anonymous multiple'. Atget is considered a key documentary photographer, and, as such, he is exemplary of the history of documentary photography and its treatment of its subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case for an unprecedented penetration of life mechanisms into the politics of Western modernity has been a cornerstone of 20th-century social theory. Working with and beyond Foucault, this article challenges established views about the history of biopower by focusing on ancient medical writings and practices of corporeal permeability. Through an analysis of three Roman institutions: a) bathing; b) urban architecture; and c) the military, it shows that technologies aimed at fostering and regulating life did exist in classical antiquity at the population scale. The article highlights zones of indistinction between natural and political processes, zoē and bíos, that are not captured by a view of destructive incorporation of or over life by sovereign power. In conclusion, the article discusses the theoretical potential of this historical evidence for contemporary debates on 'affirmative biopolitics' and 'environmental biopower'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay presents the experimental subject as a figure of modernity. It addresses notions of control, sensory thresholds, automatism, and human agency through a study of experimental psychology and psychological apparatus from the late 19th century to the First World War, juxtaposing this with notions of experimentation in early 20th-century avant-garde movements. The human subject of experimental psychology, defined by its inexpression as it awaits the stimuli of testing and measurement, is treated as a prototype for the present-day user of technological interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'We are before Dante': In this interview, held via email in March 2020 amid the massive outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jean-Luc Nancy leads us on a brief but far-reaching foray through his thought. He succeeds in providing an overview of the subjects that he has raised since the beginning of his career as a philosopher, while maintaining a focus on their pertinence for what we are currently facing in the world today. He supplements his insight that 'we are before Dante' with the equally remarkable conclusion: 'Desire is what is born par excellence'. In between these two propositions, and in between the lines and words documented here – touching upon topics as diverse as the moai statues of Easter Island, the music of Schumann, Wagner, and techno, as well as the writing of Artaud, Proust, and Verlaine – we find an exciting, up-to-date treatment of the question of how to 'deal with the world intellectually' (Musil) without, in doing so, participating in the modern claim to 'master' it. Instead, Nancy suggests, we ought to be attentive to what escapes us by its very principle, with philosophy, literature, and art serving as witnesses of what has always been absent from our mind, that is, the sensibility of meaning, in order to become aware that, since we are always already before and after birth, 'we come from nowhere and everywhere'. This realization enables us to understand the political consequences that it has for our understanding of a world in metamorphosis, including for highly controversial issues such as colonialism, anti-Semitism, the far right, neo-liberalism, and other totalitarian forms that supposedly manifest a return of the myth, as well as its consequences for the insurmountability of Marx(ism). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2018 marked the centenary of Georg Simmel's death, coinciding with the publication of several monographs dealing with his oeuvre and legacy. The four monographs discussed here deal with Simmel from the perspective of scholars who have specialized in cultural and sociological theory and/or philosophy whilst addressing the intellectual and social challenges of our times. These problems, questions and even anxieties are beyond those Simmel ever knew or could have envisioned, despite his extraordinary capacity to detect tendencies and to analyse potentialities in his own present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present interview, Jürgen Habermas answers questions about his wide-ranging work in philosophy and social theory, as well as concerning current social and political developments to whose understanding he has made important theoretical contributions. Among the aspects of his work addressed are his conception of communicative rationality as a countervailing force to the colonization of the lifeworld by capitalism and his understanding of philosophy after Hegel as postmetaphysical thinking, for which he has recently provided a comprehensive historical grounding. The scope and relevance of his ideas can be seen from his reflections on current issues, ranging from the prospects of translational democracy at a time of resurgent nationalism and populism, to political developments in Germany since reunification, to the role of religion in the public sphere and the impact of the new social media on democratic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization is now at its most disjunctive phase in human history. The planetary COVID-19 crisis has combined with the vulnerabilities of global capitalism to break down social routines. Yet, the current moment of the Great Unsettling also offers a critical opportunity to take stock of the present state of globalization. To this end, this article revisits and re-engages some pertinent themes raised in the pathbreaking 1990 TCS Global Culture issue. In particular, the article explores the crucial role of structural divergences that have been developing among major formations of globalization. Gaining a better understanding of the current globalization system requires a new conceptual framework that captures different formations of globalization, ranging from the embodied to the disembodied. The multiple disjunctive relationships that have developed among and within these formations shape not only the morphology of the contemporary globalization system but also cast a long shadow on its future dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This e-special issue of Theory, Culture & Society showcases work published in the journal by and about the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1944–2015). Beck became known as a pioneering and inventive thinker, continuously engaged in a quest to capture the essence of the modern age, whilst simultaneously wrestling with the upcoming horizons of the future. During his career, he was responsible for developing some of the defining sociological concepts of the late 20th and early 21st century, including risk, reflexive modernization, individualization and cosmopolitanism. He published many articles in Theory, Culture & Society, inspiring acolytes to mobilize his ideas and provoking critics to dispute them. Complementing articles written by Beck, this collection also includes critical commentaries, applications of his work, a selection of interviews and several reflective pieces which consider his legacy. The key aspiration of this special issue is to encourage contemplation on both the richness and the range of Ulrich Beck's academic contribution. The contents stimulate reflection on the intricacies of Beck's method of inquiry and flag up ways in which his work can influence the future trajectory of social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Michel Serres' work has become relatively well-known among social theoreticians in recent years, his explicit thematization of the foundations of human collectives has gained surprisingly little attention. This article claims that Serres' approach to the theme of foundations can be clarified by scrutinizing the way in which he poses and answers the following three questions: How are we together? What and whom do we exclude from our togetherness and how? Who are we today? Instead of starting with a ready-made order, be it in the form of individuals or society, Serres pushes social research to take up the challenge of examining the point at which order is about to emerge out of noise and chaos, but where the outcome of the process remains uncertain. Especially relevant to the discussion are Serres' books Rome, Statues and Geometry, all three of which bear the subtitle Book of Foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Including empirical examples and theoretical clarifications on many of the analytical issues raised in his recently published Down to Earth (2018), this conversation with Bruno Latour and his collaborator, Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, offers key insights into Latour's recent and ongoing work. Revolving around questions on political ecology and social theory in our 'New Climatic Regime', Latour argues that in order to have politics you need a land and you need a people. This interview present reflections on such politics, such land and such people, and it ends with a call for a sociology that takes up the task of connecting the three by investigating what he and Schultz call 'geo-social classes'. The interview was conducted by Jakob Stein in Paris in November 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text derives from a recording, and transcripts, of the introduction which Althusser gave on 6 December 1963, to a seminar for students in the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, offered at his invitation by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron. Althusser takes the opportunity to raise questions about the status of social science and suggests that Bourdieu and Passeron represent slightly different strands of contemporary research practice, partly as a result of their different formation and practice since themselves leaving the École. Althusser first considers the relation between the human sciences and the traditionally instituted Faculty of Letters or Humanities. What is the origin of the compulsion to constitute a science of human relations? Given that the social sciences have established themselves, Althusser then tries to define their nature. He suggests that they have three forms: as abstract and general theory, as ethnology, and as empirical sociology. He discusses the pros and cons of each in some detail. Althusser then asks what are the features which constitute sciences and concludes that they must always possess discrete theoretical perspectives corresponding with discrete components of reality but must also possess an element of self-referentiality or, as he puts it, must be objects to themselves. Althusser suggests that his contemporary social sciences are not philosophically adequate by the criteria which he advances. He proceeds to introduce Bourdieu and Passeron in such a way as to invite consideration of whether their practices meet his criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Vicki Kirby discusses her research into the relationship between nature and culture, focusing in particular on her recent edited collection, What If Culture Was Nature All Along? The volume appears in the 'New Materialisms' series, and so the interview begins by situating the collection with respect to the recent materialist turn in social theory. Kirby discusses the influence of deconstruction on her thought, and the way that she draws upon Derrida to think through recent research in the life sciences and its implications for understanding the relationship between matter, life, and communication. She also goes into the political implications of her work and the relationship between biopolitics and biodeconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its publication in the 1920s, Mannheim's essay, 'The Problem of Generations' (1952[1928]), has attained seminal status in marked contrast to Norbert Elias's theoretical formulations on generations. Despite Elias's close relationship over many years with Mannheim, the symmetries in their sociological programmes, and, crucially, that Elias's work specifically addresses generational conflict, he remains invisible within the sociology of generations literature. Yet Elias's contributions on this subject are quite extensive, traversing many of his major works. This article begins by reviewing Mannheim's and Elias's formulations on generations and goes on to consider the relevance of Elias's theoretical ideas in relation to contemporary work on generations. The paper contends that Elias's approach is a more empirically employable theoretical frame and also a stronger one for explaining intergenerational conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1970s and early 1980s French philosopher Gilles Deleuze authored a series of articles in which he reflected on the formation of the state of Israel and its subsequent dispossession and colonisation of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Naming the state of Israel as a colonial state, Deleuze's under-discussed texts connect Israel's programme of colonisation to that of the United States and the persisting dispossession of indigenous peoples. In so doing, this article argues, Deleuze offers an analysis of the development of capitalism that takes seriously its relation to colonial violence. Having called attention to Deleuze's writings on Palestine, the conclusion of this article asks why these texts have been marginalised by Deleuze scholars. It asks how we might think of this marginalisation as contributing to the subjugation of Palestinian life, and as indicative of how relations of colonialism structure western social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the German sociologist Ulrich Beck's final contribution, The Metamorphosis of the World (2016). The drivers of the process of metamorphosis are appraised and the approach adopted by Beck is considered within the broader context of his oeuvre. Continuities with previous work are illuminated and novel developments identified. In order to provide a critical but sympathetic assessment of the theory of metamorphosis, Beck's epistemological position and his sociological modus operandi are considered. It is argued that, despite elisions, the theory of metamorphosis breaks new ground in social theory and offers valuable opportunities for future empirical investigation and conceptual debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent 'material turn' in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. 'New materialist' theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interview comprises different key aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s work. Amongst others, the following topics are treated: the development of Frédéric Lebaron’s collaboration with Bourdieu, the political and ideological conditions prevailing at the time of Bourdieu’s early works and during the phase of his establishment, the epistemological foundations of Bourdieu’s relationism, the relationship to other modern paradigms such as Fligstein’s and McAdam’s field theory, Hedström’s analytical sociology, discourse analysis, network analysis, and a debate on relationalism, causality, and rationality within the architecture of Bourdieu’s theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The philosophical assumptions that organize moral sociology as practical philosophy are the outcome of a secular quest to investigate the principles, norms and values behind the constitution of society. As a protracted response to the whole utilitarian-atomistic-individualistic tradition that systematically deemphasizes the constitutive role that morality plays in the structuration of self and society, the sociological tradition has continued, by its own means, the tradition of moral and practical philosophy in theoretically informed empirical research of social practices. Going back to classic moral philosophy, I want to show in this article how social theory is involved in the quest for ‘the good life with and for the others in just institutions’ (Ricoeur). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues of measure and measurement, and their relation to value and values, are of concern in several major threads in contemporary social theory and social research. In this article, the notion of ‘measure–value environments’ is introduced as a theoretical lens through which the life of measures can be better understood. A number of points are made which represent both a continuation and a slight change in emphasis vis-à-vis the existing scholarship. First, it is argued that the relation between measure and value is necessarily circular – better, entangled. Second, a conceptualization of measures as territorializing devices is advanced. Third, importance is given to the fact that measures are not simply tools in our hands, they are also environments in which we live. Fourth, attention is drawn to the fact that the unit (n = 1) is not just a quantitative happening among others, but is qualitatively distinct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immunity has established itself as one of the most exciting and productive conceptual lenses being used in contemporary social theory. Ulbricht’s first book demonstrates why this is the case, through using the imaginary of immunity to explicate a selection of the features of liberal multicultural theory. Influenced by the work of Italian philosopher Robert Esposito, the book traces ideas of tolerance, consensus and rights as they appear across a selection of liberal theoretical interventions. After engaging with an impressive swathe of literature throughout his book, Ulbricht’s critical arrival point is an exciting use of Lefebvrian rhythmanalysis in a bid to supplant universal theories of multiculturalism with a recognition of multiculturalism as an intensely local and ad hoc human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010, I have been organizing David Frisby’s archive. While there are two identical copies of the David Frisby Electronic Archive, in Glasgow and in Athens, each archive holds single hard copies of the original documents. As Tanya Frisby intended, the primary aim of the archive is to invite further explorations of Frisby’s social theory close to, but not necessarily limited to, Simmel studies. In this context, this article introduces and discusses Frisby’s last unpublished writings on streets and suggests that, if placed in the wider context of his work, they suggest various ways of deciphering ‘modern society’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many disciplines in the arts and social sciences are currently redirecting their attention to surfaces, and ways of treating them, as primary conditions for the generation of meaning. With regard to visual perception, this has entailed a switch from its optical to its haptic modality. How does this switch affect the way surfaces are understood? It is argued that with haptic vision, the emphasis is not on conformation but texture, as revealed in flows of material composition and in patterns of self-shadowing – or in a word, in complexion. This makes the surface, whether of face, skin or landscape, quite distinct from that of a body or an object. Drawing on the ideas of John Ruskin, the haptically perceived surface is compared to a veil that is worn in the double sense of adornment and erosion, of affective expression and weathering. The article concludes that it is in the relations between such surfaces that social life is lived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Introduction to a special section on ‘Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision’, the authors argue that to conceive vision in the contemporary world it is necessary to examine its embedding within, expression via and organization on the surface. First, they review recent social and cultural theories to demonstrate how and why an attention to surfaces is salient today. Second, they consider how vision may be understood in terms of surfaces, discussing the emergence of the term ‘surface’, and its transhistorical relationship with vision. Third, they introduce the contributions to the special section, which cover written articles and artworks. They make connections between them, including their exploration of reflexivity and recursion, observation, objectivity and agency, ontology and epistemology, relationality, process, and two- and three-dimensionality. Fourth, the authors consider some implications of an understanding of visualizing surfaces/surfacing vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a special electronic collection of many of the key works published by the late British sociologist John Urry (1946 - 2016) in the journals Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society. It serves both to commemorate and to continue Urry's profound contributions as a social theorist, as a network builder, and as a public intellectual who changed the face of British, and indeed global, social science. The selections range from 1982 to 2014, including articles and introductions to collections, both sole-authored and collaborative pieces, all of which are put into context here in relation to his wider body of work. By gathering this portion of his work in one place we seek to make it easily accessible, as well as marking the signal importance of his impact on contemporary social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This E-Special issue brings together a range of articles from the Theory, Culture, & Society archive that directly explore the relations between fiction and social theory. Each article develops a different perspective on these relations, yet they all share a common interest in probing at the different ways in which fiction might enrich and provoke our conceptual imaginations. These articles ask how theory might be used to understand or illuminate fiction, whilst also considering how theory might be extended, challenged or informed by fictional resources. In general terms, the articles take three types of overlapping approach. First, there are those that use fiction to extend the imagination of social theory. Second are the articles that use fiction as a documentary resource and platform for theorizing. And, finally, there are those articles that use theory to reanimate and re-examine fictional forms. In exploring these three intersecting branches the pieces illustrate the different ways in which fiction and social theory might interweave in our thinking. The articles gathered here provide frameworks, ideas and resources through which the reader might continue to think imaginatively and creatively about the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the value of gift exchange in online social media. In the first part, the authors show how most of the commentators have considered online gifting as an alternative to the classical market economy. Yet the recent (re)territorialization of the web challenges this perspective. As a consequence, the internet can no longer be considered a reply to capitalism. In the second part, the authors argue that in anthropology and social philosophy the term ‘gift’ has often been used improperly, and that gift exchange has nothing to do with goods exchange, but with mutual recognition. In the third part, they use this definition to stress the importance of gift circulation through Facebook’s ‘Like’ button and the Twitter feature called ‘Mention’. In conclusion, the authors deal with the ‘Like economy’, i.e. the interference between gift exchange and market economy which is daily at work online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the affirmative biopolitics that Roberto Esposito intimates in his trilogy – Communitas, Immunitas and Bíos. The key to this affirmative biopolitics lies in the relationship between the munus, a form of gift that is the root of communitas and immunitas, and the gift discourse that developed throughout the 20th century. The article expands upon Esposito’s interpretation of four theoretical sources that are crucial to his biopolitical perspective: Mauss and the gift-exchange tradition; Hobbes’s social contract theory, which Esposito presents as the anti-gift that founded modernity’s thanatopolitical ‘immunization paradigm’; Bataille’s dangerous concept of sacrifice, which gestures toward an affirmative biopolitical community; and, finally, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, L’Intrus, which reflects on the near-decade Nancy lived as the recipient of the gift of a transplanted heart. This discussion of Mauss, Hobbes and Bataille is used to further develop Esposito’s interpretation of L’Intrus in a manner that supports his conception of an affirmative biopolitics ‘of, not over, life’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards fossil-fuelled ‘internal combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Energy forms and their extensive scale are remarkably significant for the ways that societies are organized. This article shows the importance of how societies are ‘energized’ and especially the global growth of ‘fossil fuel societies’. Much social thought remains oblivious to the energy revolution realized over the past two to three centuries which set the ‘West’ onto a distinct trajectory. Energy is troubling for social thought because different energy systems with their ‘lock-ins’ are not subject to simple human intervention and control. Analyses are provided here of different fossil fuel societies, of coal and oil, with the latter enabling the liquid, mobilized 20th century. Consideration is paid to the possibilities of reducing fossil fuel dependence but it is shown how unlikely such a ‘powering down’ will be. The author demonstrates how energy is a massive problem for social theory and for 21st-century societies. Developing post-carbon theory and especially practice is far away but is especially urgent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Energy has an ambivalent status in social theory, variously figuring as a driver or an outcome of social and institutional change, or as something that is woven into the fabric of society itself. In this article the authors consider the underlying models on which different approaches depend. One common strategy is to view energy as a resource base, the management and organization of which depends on various intersecting systems: political, economic and technological. This is not the only route to take. The authors develop an alternative approach, viewing energy supply and energy demand as part of the ongoing reproduction of bundles and complexes of social practice. In articulating and comparing these two positions they show how social-theoretical commitments influence the ways in which problems like those of reducing carbon emissions are framed and addressed. Whereas theories of practice highlight basic questions about what energy is for, these issues are routinely and perhaps necessarily obscured by those who see energy as an abstract resource that structures or that is structured by a range of interlocking social systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Today, somewhat counter-intuitively, we no longer have an obvious venue for thinking-in-the world about our actuality. Despite, or because of, the endless conferences, seminars, mobility, publication outlets, new media and the like in which it is easier and easier to be connected, it is increasingly difficult to avoid the diagnostic that it is harder and harder to relate. This Foreword to the special issue ‘Social Theory After Strathern’ considers the contemporary problem of the inversion of connectedness and relatedness in the light of Marilyn Strathern’s oeuvre. Proceeding from a discussion of the three kinds of friendship distinguished by Aristotle, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of conceptual persona is invoked as a way of thinking through conceptual friendship and the forms of relationality that an engagement with Strathern’s work requires and sustains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]