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Due to the 'civilizing process' (Elias), the overall level of violence is decreasing; yet its transforming patterns persist. The article aims at examining the contemporary structures and mechanisms responsible for violence control, while also exploring the newly emerging, naturalized patterns of cruelty. Firstly, René Girard's mimetic theory is overviewed: while in archaic societies, mimetic crisis is controlled by sacrificial rites, modernization reconfigures this paradigm. Secondly, these transformations are mapped: mimetic desire is channelled into the market processes, while mimetic crisis is managed by the state monopolizing violence. Thirdly, the structural transformations of late modernity upsetting the fragile balance of state and market are analysed: secular scapegoating becomes part of the political toolset, while the private sphere is overwhelmed by undetectable new forms of hurting and self-harming. As a culture of cruelty is naturalized, mimetic crisis becomes a continuous threat, which generates a need for the functional equivalents of sacrificial violence control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary conspiracism draws on both long-standing traditions and the current cultural and political environment as it constructs mythic knowledge that often includes apocalyptic prophecies. Such knowledge is constantly altered and reinterpreted by the conspiracy activists who invest in its transmission and reproduction. This article examines how conspiracist mythologies emerge in the use of these activists as mythic discourse that fluidly adapts both to include past sources and to comment on late modern phenomena. Illustrative cases of Christian and popular millennial conspiracist narratives are analyzed in terms of how they construct the actors, organizations, power positions, and historical trajectories of the world. The article highlights how different conspiracist myths share features and stances, influenced by the currents of late modernity, but also contest each other based on what their sources and purposes are, and how they differ in their evaluation of the apocalyptic event's nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on the case study of four newspapers in Odisha, namely Utkala Dipika, The Samaj, Prajatantra and the Sambad. It traces the early beginning of Odia print media in the 19th century that marked the beginnings of an Odia national identity. Media then was seen as an institution committed to societal welfare. The print media in Odia played a defining role in the making of its public sphere. Each newspaper studied in this article in some way or other reshaped the public sphere. This holds true of the print media in both its early years and in the globalised era where media operated primarily as an industry. This article is based upon a historical approach that entailed archival sources as well as case studies of thirty journalists from both rural and urban backgrounds working in different capacities starting from reputed editors to stringers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late modern existence is built around ambivalences: subjects experience the structural paradoxes of global capitalism or information society as social suffering; yet they follow behaviour patterns reinforcing the unsustainable trajectories. The article explores the discourses justifying such structural paradoxes, while normalizing the related suffering. First, the pragmatic theory of justification (Boltanski, Thévenot) is reinterpreted from a modernization theoretical perspective: a distinction is drawn between traditional, classic and late modern 'tests', 'critique' and 'cités'. In the second and third sections, the gradual emptying of critique is analysed: as disillusionment reaches the sphere of subjective experiences, not even personal suffering can ground critique any more (Berlant), thus the impossibility of critique is demonstrated in a cynical manner (Sloterdijk). In the fourth section, the various cynical modalities of justification fitting the ambivalent contemporary existence are overviewed. Finally, a way out from the naturalized, quotidian cynicism is sketched: by turning cynicism's logic against itself, the dialectics of justification can move forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a reply to George Pattison's magistral triology on a "Philosophy of Christian Life" – focusing on its second part: "A Rhetorics of the Words" (2019). The paper offers an analysis of the main concept, namely the 'call' or the 'vocation'. This leads to three basic questions concerning the lack of vocation's communal character in Pattison's account; his one-sided inclination to pessimism in his cultural critique; and, the only marginal role that other articulations than the call might play within a "devout life" and its ambivalent authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis examines an archaeology of statal narratives as they relate to the multilingual linguistic milieu of the Philippines since independence at mid-20th century. Critical transformations to statal narratives linked to language over the last century have been shaped by interacting, sometimes competing discourses, deriving from a paradoxical mix of influences: on one hand, contemporary narratives of language have been shaped by modernist discourses focused on the unification of the nation through language, but more recently, these discourses have shifted to focus also on the possibilities of figuring certain local and regional languages in pragmatic terms that index an increasing orientation to preoccupations inherent in discourses of late modernity. In late modern contexts, discourses of multilingualism and multiculturalism in the Philippines have been intertwined with ideological orientations that promote regional peace, cooperation, and economic growth in part informed by the country's involvement in ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), where the recognition and maintenance of the multilingual and multicultural character of participating nations are framed as key mandates. By examining the emergence and transformation of discourses from modern to late modern ones at the level of the statal narrative, this analysis sheds light on emergent forms of nationalist narratives focused on both the instrumental value of global languages such as English, but also the valuation and figuration of certain local and regional languages in new ways and the contentious processes in history though which these discourses have taken hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the issue of the relationship between existentialism and late modern projectivity interpreted in terms of project work and of biographical projectivity. It does so from the perspective of transformations of subjectivity in modernity and late modernity, and, therefore, from the perspective of the process of individualization. The objective is to answer the question of the belonging of existentialism to one of these sociocultural formations. For these purposes, some major categories of existentialism such as project, anxiety, and temporality are analyzed. Their analysis leads to the conclusion that there is a close, structural correlation between existentialism and sociocultural structures of modernity as well as that existentialism, in contrast to late modern projectivity, has some emancipatory potential related to its alienating status in modernity. The article refers to the methodology of qualitative sociology.

The article describes the dialectic of the process of individualization in modernity and late modernity from the perspective of critical theory, particularly in its classical form (Frankfurt School). This dialectic consists in the transformation of individualization as a medium of emancipation into individualization understood not only as an ideology but most of all as a productive force of neoliberal capitalism, as a principle of its functioning. The article discusses the social-cultural determinants of this transformation, and subsequently the way in which late-modern individualism in the form of self-realization is functionalized by the market and subjected to the requirements of profit and efficiency in individual areas of economic and social life in the neoliberal world. The article refers to the methodology of qualitative sociology.

Copyright of Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej is the property of Redakcja Przegladu Socjologii Jakosciowej and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej is the property of Redakcja Przegladu Socjologii Jakosciowej and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper focuses on the contemporary Irish poet Alan Gillis's latest collection, The Readiness, with special attention paid to "Metropolis" and "Vespers," two long poems that come in the latter part of the volume. In them, the pressures of late modernity, which are thematised throughout The Readiness, are given sustained attention, revealing loneliness and dereliction as the most excruciating aspects of an individual's life. While the bleak perspective on late modern existence is characteristic of Gillis work to date, I show that the poems included in this collection, each in its own distinct way, discover relief from the alienation in the establishment of meaningful relationships with other people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Philologist / Filolog: Journal of Language, Literary & Cultural Studies is the property of University of Banja Luka, Faculty of Philology / Univerzitet u Banjoj Luci, Filoloski Fakultet and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, the interrelatedness of contemporary populism and fear is analysed. It is argued that contemporary populism is burdened with the uncertainties and contingencies of late modernity. Therefore, it is not capable of merely "instrumentalizing" fear (i.e., relying on fear as an instrument of ideological goals). Instead, populism is forced to "juggle" with fear in a continuously changing, unpredictable constellation. In the first section, the ideal type of instrumentalizing fear is introduced. In the second section, this ideal type is developed into the model of juggling with fear based on theories of late modernity: the impact of the narrowing of political agency, the reconfiguration of the public sphere, and the interiorization of uncertainty are analysed. In the third section, this ideal type is further explored through a case study of illiberal Hungary: the empirical patterns of juggling with quotidian and virtual fears reveal the micro-mechanisms and the broader consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Omran for Social Sciences is the property of Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article scrutinizes the mediatization of dating and love as part of a broader mediatization process of the life-world, with a focus on the experience of using the popular dating app Tinder. Central to the analysis is how interfacial features, algorithmic structuration, and user perceptions create the affordances of the application and, in the process, shape the experience of using it. The experience of using Tinder is characterized by a "swipe logic," marked by speediness, visuality, and (self-)objectification, but also by the prevalence of cynicism and boredom on the platform. Under these circumstances, users of Tinder are confronted with new challenges, and to tackle these, they make use of their life-world knowledge as well as creating novel forms of knowledge. While using Tinder, they apply and modify their life-world stock of knowledge. Tinder as a tool of online dating is marked by the duality of reflectivity versus impulsive affectivity, superficiality versus depth, and instrumentality versus striving for relations thought of as authentic. All in all, the mediatization of partner selection is interpreted as a special form of the colonization of the life-world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blumenberg's philosophical anthropology, about the origin and development of imaginative thinking among early human beings, serves as the backdrop to this article about the reasons art exists as a human activity. The article could be read in conjunction with a prior set of two articles by myself (in Afrikaans), "Hans Blumenberg's philosophical anthropology" and "Hans Blumenberg's model for the evolution of thought". Blumenberg posited that a strong connection exists between the earliest existential anxiety and the development of self-consciousness in humans and that this sets the human apart from the natural animal. My article looks at the evolution of thinking about art in the European human being, the way it occurred in various historical times, against the backdrop of the first thinking responses in primordial times. Art originated as a form of wishful thinking, as part of a survival response, which compensated for the early human's sudden lack of belonging in the world. This sudden lack occurred when the creature accidently strayed from its earliest natural habitat - that of being enclosed by primordial forests - and ended up on the open grasslands exposed to all kinds of dangers. As a result of this catastrophe, the early creature was confronted by the "absolutism of reality", as Blumenberg calls it, i.e. a near total lack of control over his own destiny in the face of overpowering factors of reality. The creation of art had a direct connection to this abysmal existential anxiety because it featured forms of imaging that assuaged the anxiety. Through the ages and to this day art plays a pacifying role in human culture. Blumenberg points out that the earliest developed forms of thinking were mostly of a mythical nature, i.e. of a wished-for or dreamt-up nature, such as the creation of the gods, and art in its first forms was part of this response. The primordial humans placed the gods between themselves and the absolutism of reality. They could approach the gods for favours or at least ascribe their sufferings to the wilful actions of these all-powerful beings. The humans made art as a form of assuaging their anxieties but as makers they had to make sure that they did not transgress on the gods' primary right of creation. Move on now from primordial time to historical time. Especially in the Middle Ages, the human being found itself in a position of intense negotiation with Christian theology and with God as the Creator to make sure that while they created things they still could rely on the favour of the Creator. My article looks at Blumenberg's analyses of historical epochs, defined as such by him, that preceded the Modern Epoch and how this diachronic historical process eventually opened up the space for modern art to make its appearance. According to Blumenberg, the nature of the epochs and the reality concepts that govern these epochs, as well as their intermediary junctures, can only become apparent in retrospect. It is Modernity and the phenomenological ability that comes with modern times that enables this retrospective awareness in people. Blumenberg believes that the shapes of knowledge - be it philosophy, religion, culture or art - exist in particular ways within the broad machinations of an epoch - a way that pertains to that epoch alone. Knowledge has certain functions that may change in a follow-up epoch. Every epoch's institutions and traditions have the primary goal to ensure the survival of the human being as a social being (i.e. a failed natural creature). Aristotle's idea of "art as mimesis of nature" was the conception of art that reigned from European Antiquity through the Renaissance to early modernity. It was an idea designed to keep the favour of Providence while humankind slowly, and hidden to itself, expanded human autonomy in its self-expression. The Aristotelian God was the maker of things, based on the Forms of Plato, through the influence of Neoplatonism, and people did not exist as anything else but a subsidiary part of God's creation. The article traces several reoccupations within the Aristotelian scheme towards the eventually fully autonomous modern artist. All the reoccupations happened within reigning Christian theology, including the last vital one, the freeing of the human will on account of the expanding influence of Augustine's free-will thesis. It was theology that governed all knowing and its possibilities. But the changing of the guard in the reoccupation process leading to the meanings of modern art was laborious and slow. The "logic" of a particular threshold-period, namely the Renaissance of Leonardo da Vinci, was still bound up with the idea of a privileged viewpoint within the Aristotelian mimesis structure, much comparable in structure to the scientific observations of Copernicus. Both thinkers were still coming to terms with the unseating of the centrality of the given world. Blumenberg's critique of Paul Valèry's wished-for analysis of Leonardo in Valery's own modern terms, argues that premodern art can only be understood for what it says if judged within the function of its own epochal frame. However, Blumenberg admires Valèry's terms for modern art, especially the term objet ambigu, which finally leaves behind the privileged window image of art that reigned supreme during the Renaissance. The objet ambigu is an art product that has full spacial dexterity and movement. My article argues that the hard-earned freedoms that characterise the objet ambigu bring new securities as well as insecurities to the human being's world concept. One of the great gains for the modern mind is that it can consciously view meanings in terms of phenomenology, that is in a distanced way as if he is in the other time despite being in his own time. The earliest patterns of meaning that were devised by a primordial mind are mythical. These are so basic to thinking that they are imperishable, and still very instrumental in the communication modes of modern art, as my analysis of a Robert Frost poem shows. But the metaphorology underlying these "significance structures" has now been rendered self-conscious in the human, compared to the human of premodern and primordial art. In conclusion, it is postulated that certain shifts in late modernity are bringing about new forms of the absolutism of reality and existential anxiety, and that these have definite implications for the art product. Blumenberg's reality concept (Wirklichkeitsbegriff) of Widerstand ("withstanding") - of a world utterly traumatised by its freedoms and divisions - seems particularly apt, and my article cautions that the late modern state of affairs holds a threat to the freedom and intentional dimensionality of the objet ambigu. The reason for this, I propose, is that a world disunited in its attempts to save its rhetorical bulwark - i.e. the broad range of human mind activities that sets him apart as a social being - will be inclined to demand simplicity and partisan allegiance from the late modern artist, which amounts to an anti-modern and retrogressive stance despite all our means available to the contrary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work will describe and analyze the issues of the individuals considered as the inhabitants of the space called "the unreasonable" throughout the history of western modernity, and their opportunity to be considered citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Zealand Covid-19 strategy received praise at home and abroad. However, despite the epidemiological success of the strategy, it amplified social inequalities and exclusion, highlighted existing frustration and mistrust of the government, and in turn produced reactionary forms of conformity and noncompliance as well as prosocial forms of resistance. This article focuses on three types of social responses to the pandemic in New Zealand between 2020 and 2022. It looks at hostile conformity exemplified in antipathy against Pacific Island communities dealing with Covid-19 outbreaks, reactionary noncompliance seen in the anti-mandate protests and parliament occupation, and prosocial resistance to the state's neglect of Indigenous public health seen in the Māori organized effort to protect communities left out of the pandemic preparedness plans. The article presents a critical understanding of the limits of New Zealand's Covid-19 strategy and the resulting social responses of conformity and nonconformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phenomenological analyses of enjoyment are relatively rare; also, the few known attempts (e.g. Levinas) are elaborated in a transcendental fashion, without reflecting on the socio-historical constituents. The article aims at filling this gap by elaborating a social phenomenology of late modern enjoyment. Firstly, the experience is analysed with the help of general phenomenological descriptions: the visceral, existential and ethical constituents are mapped. The second section explores the structural transformations affecting these constituents, based on various critical theories of modernization: the impact of the reified control over the visceral; social disintegration; persistent inequalities; over-burdening of intimacy is analysed. In the concluding section, a diagnosis of times is elaborated: the cost of controlling enjoyment on the visceral level is the giving up of its existential and ethical constituents. To break this paradoxical cycle, the "actor-networks" (Latour) of visceral stimulation need to be "hacked" by including existential and ethical dimensions as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalysis knows two things at least. First, that all human endeavour and all human failure is imbued with anxiety, and that, therefore, to diagnose human endeavour, or to diagnose failure, is to locate the nature and origin of anxiety. And second, that anxiety itself amplifies the need to "diagnose" human being, and human beings. Psychoanalysts, in other words, know that for them to be able to do the work of psychoanalysis, they need to be (cultural) anthropologists first. In this contribution an attempt is made to sketch out the broad outlines, and the deep anthropological backdrop, of a cultural undercurrent which has come to dominate Western culture in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Building on Peter Sloterdijk's work, and using the image of the 'line of anxiety' as a heuristic tool, we've named this cultural undercurrent radical bastardy, i.e. the aspiration to live as sovereign—absolutely sovereign-a life as possible. This cultural trend-which has a long history, and which many are now drawn to- is, however, shot through with anxiety. To live the life of an aspiring sovereign is to live a life in nagging anxiety. It is to live a life of unrelenting attempts to "diagnose" anything that even vaguely resembles law, or code, in order to avoid it, elude it, keep it at bay, or, if necessary, eradicate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the dynamics of education in the interplay of power and seduction as creatively displayed in Takarazuka Revue's performances re-enacting the major players of the Cold War: USA and Russia (rather than former Soviet Union). Oceans 11 (cosmos troupe, 2019) and Once Upon a Time in America (snow troupe, 2020), on the one hand, and Land of Gods (cosmos troupe, 2017) and Anastasia (cosmos troupe, 2020), on the other hand, lavishly display subtle interactions of longing and belonging, ecstasy and rage, love and betrayal, envy, hatred and passion, while painstakingly building up irresistible tensions between the instances involved in the performative process: actresses, administrators, audiences. The theoretical support is delivered by Robert Greene's pragmatic elaborations in his seminal works The 48 Laws of Power (1998) and The Art of Seduction (2001): education is never a linear process between a 'master' and a 'disciple', but an interactive game, governed by the pursuit of joy in overcoming challenges and finding ingenious solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of transnational fans to the globalisation of European football, there have not been many studies that aim to understand why they support specific overseas clubs. On the basis of qualitative interviews with transnational fans in Hong Kong and supplemented by findings from an online fan survey, I argue that most of them lack genuine choices when choosing their favourite overseas clubs. Even when all English Premier League matches are shown live in Hong Kong and with information about many European clubs available on the Internet, transnational fans tend to support teams that they were familiar with when they were still young, and clubs that star players play for. Such clubs are usually the richest ones that can help them achieve success on the pitch. Also, family members and peers can be influential to the origin of football fandom, but there is little pressure to support the same overseas club as their family members or peers. The choices of transnational fans based in Hong Kong should also be understood by taking the historical context of the city into account. Such findings suggest that globalisation has freed Hong Kong football fans from geographical constraints, but the individualisation thesis in the late modern era needs to be qualified since the wealth of European clubs and fans' immediate social context do often have important impacts on their decision to support an overseas club. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ideas y Valores is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Speculative fiction is a particularly relevant genre at the moment when, apart from the troubling global impact of late-modern phenomena, the ongoing pandemic and the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War have raised universal concern. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of two novels which describe a postapocalyptic world after a deadly plague and a nuclear conflict, respectively: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2004 [2003]) and Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033 (2010 [2005]). It approaches the texts as critiques of late-modern neoliberal capitalism, employing the theory by Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Mark Fisher. Additionally, it scrutinises the representation of the neoliberal subject in Atwood's book and utilises Svetlana Boym's reflection on nostalgia in post-Soviet Russia to comment on Glukhovsky's work. Lastly, it examines the posthuman alternative the two authors present for the deeply flawed human social orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper inquires into a practical logic of what can be called socially just education in late modern societies, based on a reexamination of critical pedagogy, and clarifies the boundary-crossing nature of this education and the dilemmas that it inevitably entails. The discussion first addresses and reexamines certain oppositional arguments made by the most influential authorities of critical pedagogy, Michael Apple and Henry Giroux, to discern the directionality for a practical logic of socially just education. Second, to underpin the theoretical considerations, the paper refers to Nancy Fraser's concepts of social justice--the politics of recognition, redistribution, and representation--and, by reinterpreting the politics of redistribution based on the theory of cultural capital of Pierre Bourdieu, seeks to construct the vital part of a practical logic of socially just education in late modernity. To complement this model, the paper invokes Gert Biesta's discussion of how schools should teach democracy. Last is an overview of the dilemmas that must be faced when attempting to put socially just education into practice in the late modern era, along with proposed guidelines for tackling these dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speculative fiction is a particularly relevant genre at the moment when, apart from the troubling global impact of late-modern phenomena, the ongoing pandemic and the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War have raised universal concern. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of two novels which describe a postapocalyptic world after a deadly plague and a nuclear conflict, respectively: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2004 [2003]) and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 (2010 [2005]). It approaches the texts as critiques of late-modern neoliberal capitalism, employing the theory by Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Mark Fisher. Additionally, it scrutinises the representation of the neoliberal subject in Atwood’s book and utilises Svetlana Boym’s reflection on nostalgia in post-Soviet Russia to comment on Glukhovsky’s work. Lastly, it examines the posthuman alternative the two authors present for the deeply flawed human social orders.

This paper reports a single case study of counselling a 50-year-old woman refugee newly arrived and evacuated from Afghanistan in the August 2021 crisis. It utilised a faith-based therapeutic model of Islamic counselling. The experience and lessons learnt gained from the case are discussed and concluded with our assessment on the significance of Islamic counselling in working with Afghan refugees within the context of late modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forensic mental health care is situated across both criminal justice and healthcare systems and is subject to political, cultural, legal and economic shifts in these contexts. The implementation of strength- and recovery-based models of care should be understood in light of these social and structural processes. Drawing on novel empirical fieldwork and the extant literature, we argue that full realisation of strength- and recovery-based principles is at odds with aspects of late modern social control. Not wholly compatible, we highlight how concepts of empowerment, autonomy, identity and connectedness can unhelpfully rub-up against the concepts of punitiveness, otherness and risk management. Conceptually this is problematic, but in frontline forensic psychiatry settings, this has real lived-experience detrimental effects for patients – as our data demonstrate. To address this, a human rights approach might be fruitful. Grounding arguments for strength- and recovery-based principles in the heuristic framework of human rights can offer a set of common values to stimulate reform in forensic mental healthcare. The right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms offers a particularly promising, robust and well-defined framework for these future changes – as we outline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution focuses on Andreas Reckwitz's considerations on phenomena of 'exhausted self-realization' and 'disappointment' in The Society of Singularities, as well as in his follow-up volume, The End of Illusions. Under discussion is the range of analytical distinctions that tend to come into play in this area between what one might call a generally primordial concept of self-realization and more derivative articulations of the concept that exhibit various aspects of instrumentalization—variously termed 'self-maximization' or 'self-optimization'. The paper argues that while Reckwitz's work offers great resources for an understanding of how and why 'self-realization' so frequently appears to take on an instrumentalizing character in late-modern social behaviour, the extent to which his work attributes this tendency to a wholly immanent cultural-cognitive logic of lifestyle singularization is open to criticism. The reasons must also be sought from within the more directly economic contexts of diminished material security and solidarity typical of contemporary societies shaped by neoliberal economic governance orders at the level of policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article summarizes the content of Andreas Reckwitz's book The Society of Singularities in 10 theses and briefly links it to the author's overall work. The Society of Singularities applies a practice theory approach in order to outline a theory of Western (late-)modernity which recognizes in it a basic rivalry between two logics of social evaluation: a social logic of the general and a social logic of the particular/ singular. The question arises which historical causes for the surge of the social logic of uniqueness since the 1980s can be discerned, which structural features this type of society unfolds and which social and political consequences it has. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Don DeLillo's conspiracy novels Players, Running Dog, and The Names respond to, and imaginatively frame, what Giovanni Arrighi calls the 'signal crisis' of US hegemony. Despite mapping the spatio-temporal unfolding of US capital as it financialises accumulation, commodifies visual attention, and imposes neo-colonial economic reforms on 'underdeveloped' nations, Marxist critics have dismissed DeLillo's pastiche thrillers as politically disappointing texts 'constrained' by an inability to supply alternative models of reality. In contrast, this article argues that DeLillo's so-called formal defeats register a 'discord' between history and its conceptualisation, an enigma related to their discovery of 'edge zones of modernity'. Drawing on ideas of historical lateness, the article re-situates DeLillo's poetics through the optics of uneven and combined development, reflecting on the significance of surplus populations – both for DeLillo's off-kilter conspiracies but also contemporary Marxist political economy. The article offers a close reading of Running Dog, a porno-political caper in which non-synchronicity manifests itself through the appearance of an object, perhaps the object: an adult film starring Hitler. Running Dog juxtaposes commodity frontiers based on violent appropriation with frontiers of immiseration where labour-power has been exiled from social reproduction altogether. In doing so, DeLillo refunctions romance into a genre of secular stagnation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of 'ethical infrastructure': the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists' striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the 'profane', often unassuming or religiously unmarked, yet essential material scaffolding constituting the 'material conditions of possibility' for pious life in the lifeworld of late modernity. Halalness is conceptualised not as an inherent quality of a clearly defined set of things, but as a (sometimes complicated) relationship between humans, ethical intentionality, and infrastructurally organised habitats. Pointing beyond the case of halal, this article syncretises theories of self-cultivation, material religion, ethical consumption, and infrastructure to address current lacunas and explore fresh theoretical and methodological ground. This 'ethical infrastructure' framework enables us to conceptualise the embeddedness of contemporary ethicists in complex environments and the process by which processes of inner self-fashioning change and are changed by material worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across three key texts, the historian Alan Atkinson has projected an unease with twenty-first-century Australia into the past development of the Australian nation. Atkinson traces a 'singularity' from the 'age of Australian Federation ... fixed on the Centre as the pivot of a new national domain'. By the early twenty-first century, for him, the nation had become an all-consuming focus of identity, degraded by globalisation. Atkinson's 'single Australia' is a claim with significant implications for the historiography of the emerging Australian Commonwealth and historicising the nature of late modern Australia. Atkinson's focus on late modernity addresses a theme developed in international scholarship but one largely absent in Australian historiography. Assessing Atkinson's narrative construction of singularity offers insights into the relationship between past and present described in historical narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Covid19-pandemic has had a profound impact on the way we live and on the social reality in the world around us. Except for the enormous strain on public and health of individuals, it has affected social functioning to great extent, at least temporarily. It has sped up digitalization and forced social activities to transfer to the digital realm to an unprecedented level. It has simultaenously confined social actors to their geographical localities. In all of this, it has offered an opportunity of different observational point of human being in the world in the context of late modernity. It is possible to assume that this kind of social situation has the potential to affect the sense of ontological security of social actors, as well as their experience of space. The contradictory implications of the transfer of the social activitiy to the digital communicative spaces to current extent are also discussed.

The disruptions of life in late modernity render self-identity fragile. Consequently, individuals must reflexively manage their emotions and periodically reinvent themselves to maintain a coherent narrative of the self. The rise of psychology as a discursive regime across the 20th century, and its intersections with a plethora of wellness industries, has furnished a new language of selfhood and greater public attention to emotions and personal narratives of suffering. Celebrities, who engage in public identity work to ensure their continued relatability, increasingly provide models for navigating emotional trials. In this article we explore representations of selfhood and identity work in celebrity interviews. We focus on media veterans Nigella Lawson and Ruby Wax, both of whom are skilled in re-storying the self after personal crises. We argue that interpretive capital as a peculiarly late modern resource confers emotional advantages and life chances on individuals as they navigate upheavals, uncertainties, and intimate dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideologies on linguistic variation among teachers of the Irish language are the focus of this article. Participants completed an experiment in which they responded to speech samples representing traditional dialectal varieties in the Irish‐speaking communities (the Gaeltacht) and a sample representing the Irish of new speakers outside the Gaeltacht (the post‐Gaeltacht). When participants directly rate the speech varieties, the traditional Gaeltacht samples are rated significantly more positively than the post‐Gaeltacht sample. However, the post‐Gaeltacht new speaker variety is on top for standardness. When participants rate the speakers' characteristics, a more levelled, destandardised value system is also evident. The results are related to the official regimentation of Irish today, where authority is increasingly nebulous and negotiable. The results illustrate how teacher ideologies can develop in late modernity, whether in a minority context, in a context where authority is based on authenticity and a dialect ideology is established, or where language transmission occurs largely through education and substantial numbers of new speakers use the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various authors have shown how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are transforming the travel experience to the point of undermining the original traveler objectives. Largely based on the traveler and technology relationship, most previous analyses have assumed that the changing travel experience is attributable to ICTs. From a survey based on 53 semistructured interviews, this article shows the inadequacy of seeking to understood traveler attempts to disconnect from ICTs as symptomatic of the relationship between travelers and technologies. The authors contend that it is equally important to understand travelers' use of ICTs within the wider context of late modernity, which has induced particular relationships among relatives and the deployment of ICTs. The article highlights limitations of previous ethnographic approaches in ICT studies using the example of their role in the travel experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emancipation serves not only as a midwife for progressive agendas such as greater equality and sustainability but also as their gravedigger. This diagnosis underpins Ingolfur Blühdorn's 'dialectic of emancipation', which depicts a dilemma but offers no perspective on how to deal with it. By drawing on Foucault, this article suggests conceiving of emancipation as a task moderns are confronted with even if a given emancipatory project has come to devour its children. Claiming autonomy from given social constellations is key to this task; key also is judging between legitimate and illegitimate claims to autonomy. In late modernity, the criteria for such judgement are no longer universally given. Instead of regarding the latter as entry into mere subjectivism (Blühdorn), this article presents judgement as a key political, 'world building'-activity (Arendt), a critical social theory may join in, by not only observing the world but by also taking sides in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]