Ideology and Discourse Analysis

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

در اين مقاله، براي تحليل صفحة اول روزنامهها و گفتمان حاكم بر آنها
دورههاي چند ماههاي از چندين روزنامة كثيرالانتشار را مطالعه كرديم تا
دريابيم آيا صفحهآرايي صفحة اول روزنامهها به شيوهاي هدفمند انجام
ميشود يا برحسب اتفاق و صرفاً بر مبنايي زيباييشناسانه. در انجام اين كار از
مدل چندوجهي گونتر كرس و تئوفان ليوون استفاده شد كه براي صفحهآرايي
روزنامه چهار شيوه قائل است و اكثر روزنامهها براساس يكي يا تركيبي از
آنها صفحهآرايي ميشوند. در تحليل صفحة اول روزنامههاي ايراني به نتايج
مشابه تحقيق كرس و فان ليوون رسيديم كه معتقدند صفحهآرايي صفحة اول
روزنامهها نوعي جهتدهي ايدئولوژيك براي هدايت خواننده و القاي معاني
خاص به او وجود دارد.

This article deals with identity political discourse in situations of cultural movements, precisely in situations of migration. It addresses the question of migration through the interpretation of past and in the making events. In this context, it focuses on the perception of Other, and on its representation. As such, it observes spatiotypies in their discursive specificities. Spatiotypies are attributions of power and discourse. They state, mentally and politically, the social life of individuals. The corpus is composed of French newspaper articles, from the middle of 2015 to the end of 2016. This period saw the dismantling of the "Camps de Calais" and the distribution of migrants to other locations on the French territory.

The paper attempts to reach at an understanding of the concepts of ‘science’ and ‘scientism’ as constructed and ideological concepts and how they contribute in shaping our commonsensical understanding of the body in terms of its relation to social identity and role. While attempting to expose modern science as a “constructed” discipline and ideology operating in tandem with the dominant hegemonic structures, the paper also attempts to briefly throw light on the limits of the current trend of interdisciplinary approaches and the concepts of “agency” and “critique” as well. Using a post-structuralist approach the paper therefore attempts not only to open-up the closed structures of both “science” and “scientism” but also to reach at an understanding how it goes on to affect questions of representation, reality, social and the body itself

Kraj dvadesetog veka je obeležila promena epohalne svesti koja je, između ostalog, podrazumevala i promenu shvatanja političkih opcija levog i desnog spektra. U kontekstu savremenog srpskog društva koje je formirano na nasleđu građanskih ratova podjednako kao i na kapitalističkoj transformaciji, desni ekstremizam postaje legitimna politička opcija. Cilj ovog rada je da istraži narativ o mestu žene iz perspektive Srpskog pokreta Dveri, jedine parlamentarne desne stranke koja je značajan deo svoje političke agende posvetila ženskom pitanju. Analizom narativa o mestu žene pokušaću da ukažem na to kako se retorika desnih političkih partija menja, kooptirajući feminističke politike u cilju privlačenja što većeg broja potencijalnih glasača, pri čemu tradicionalno shvaćena desnica postaje desnica sa ženskim licem.

Ključne reči:
desnica, levica, desni ekstremizam, ideologija, materinstvo, Srpski pokret Dveri, feminističke politike, mesto žene, studije roda

Segundo encuentro del Seminario Permanente de Discurso Político. Julián Melo (CONICET-IDAES) va a exponer su trabajo "Avanzar con la marea. Nota sobre el pensamiento político de Juan Perón".
Los que quieran acceder a un texto de lectura optativa pueden hacerlo escribiendo a ceap@sociales.uba.ar

Los discursos políticos de rompimiento tienen el mérito de haber cuestionado el dogma neoliberal que elevó un paradigma económico, de entre otros posibles, al rango de ciencia exacta, por encima de consideraciones políticas o sociales. A la par, es notorio que otras discusiones han logrado trascender a la agenda pública, poniendo en jaque al statu quo. No necesariamente hay coherencia ideológica entre los distintos cuestionamientos, pero es innegable que se han visibilizado actores antes ignorados y problemáticas naturalizadas hasta hace poco.

Uno de las discusiones que necesita mayor profundidad es la crítica a la academia, como se suele conocer a la comunidad científica. Si bien es cierto que la lógica neoliberal permeó en las concepciones y prácticas dentro de las universidades, siempre es prudente recordar que esto ocurrió a la par del resto de la sociedad. Es comprensible que el cuestionamiento sea mucho más duro y reiterado en las universidades, al tratarse de espacios en los que la discusión es algo cotidiano y la juventud –así como sus inherentes expectativas de cambio– es la población que les nutre. No obstante, cuando la crítica no es contextualizada, puede caer en excesos preocupantes.

This book offers a novel analysis of “experience”: the vast and influential concept that has shaped Western social theory and political practice for the past half-millennium. 

While it is difficult to find a branch of modern thought, science, industry, or art that has not relied in some way on the notion of “experience” in defining its assumptions or aims, no study has yet applied a politically-conscious and psychologically-sensitive critique to the construct of experience.

Doing so reveals that most of the qualities that have been attributed to experience over the centuries — particularly its literality, its incommunicability, and its correspondence with suffering — are part of an unlikely fantasy or ideology.

By analyzing a series of related cases, including the experiential education movement, the ascendency of trauma theory, the philosophy of the social contract, and the psychological study of social isolation, the book builds a convincing case that the ideology of experience is invoked not to keep us close to lived realities and ‘things-in-themselves,’ but, rather, to distort and destroy true knowledge of ourselves and others. 

In spite of enduring admiration for those who may be called champions of experience, such as Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others treated throughout the work, the ideology of experience ultimately discourages individuals and groups from creating, resisting, and changing our experience, urging us instead to embrace trauma, failure, and self-abandonment.

This thesis aims to provide a historical study of colonialism and coloniality in the period 1900-2003 through a comparison of the British invasion of Iraq at the start of the 1900s and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 in order to identify continuities as well as changes. The study employs a comparative research method in order to demonstrate that there were significant similarities between the two invasions. However, comparing two colonial invasions in the same country in different time periods also has the potential to reveal significant changes over time in colonial strategies. The thesis compares the two invasions in terms of Quijano’s four spheres of the colonial matrix of power, namely the struggle for control of authority, the struggle for economic control, the struggle for hegemony of information and the transformation of gender relations. The thesis will demonstrate that the colonial strategies adopted by both imperial powers were strikingly similar. Moreover, the thesis will argue that these similarities were part of a continuation of a colonial system since many of the structures that were established by the British, such as tribalisation within an imposed nation-state, have remained in place and were reinforced by the U.S. Additionally, the same ways of seeing and representing colonised peoples that were present during the British invasion, were used to justify the American invasion. Every sphere of both invasions was thoroughly gendered. Not only did colonial invasions effect gender relations in Iraq considerably, but the ideologies used to justify the invasions were also based on gendered assumptions. Finally, in accordance with decolonial theory, the thesis calls for “a declaration of war against naturalised war."

This article proposes an interdisciplinary framework designed to analyse discourse, affect and surveillance. By revisiting the "omniopticon" (the many watching the many) and proposing “civeillance” as an affective dynamic of surveillance culture, it considers communicative mechanisms that reflect the interchangeable functions and normalisations of surveillance technologies in personal and public spaces. When 17-year-old Austin Haughwout was using his drone to film aerial shots of Hammonasset Beach in Connecticut, 23-year-old Andrea Mears accused him of photographing people on the beach. Mears physically attacked Haughwout, called the police and accused him of assault. During the attack, Haughwout used his phone to record the incident without Mears’ knowledge. The video was used by the police who arrested Mears for assault. The recording then featured in news stories online, where Mears was subjected to sexist abuse. The following analysis shows how affective practices and embodied meaning-making are personally, socially and technologically embedded within discursive processes of representation. Contrary to non-representational theories of affect, this framework sees affective-discursive practice as a multimodal complex of communicative components. Dialogical mechanisms of discourse and contextual complexities function through physical practices and cultural conducts, which are ideologically influenced by social relations and power structures. Discourse both affects, and is affected by, the feelings, emotions, minds, ideologies and interactive experiences that we have in personal spaces and social contexts.

Keywords: Discourse; affect; surveillance; gender; ideology; omniopticon; civeillance; drones

El libro se perfila como un espacio de reflexión de dos tendencias políticas y sociales contrapuestas con el objetivo de comprender el dinámico proceso de construcción de ambas identidades y aprehender la realidad de los protagonistas sociales que se reconocen en ellas. Politólogos, historiadores y comunicólogos conforman el elenco de autores con reflexiones, análisis y estudios de caso acerca de Cuba, Brasil, Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Italia y España.

چارچوبی تبیینی برای تحلیل گفتمان سیاست¬خارجی امام خمینی
(ایدئولوژی، استراتژی و دیپلماسی)


Abstract:
After the Islamic revolution and the rise of the system of the Islamic Republic of Iran over the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, a new wave of ideas and opinions entered Iran's foreign policy domain and the international relations structure. The principles and concepts of this revolution and the newly emerged political system are generally affected by Imam Khomeini's thought and action as its ideologue and leader. This article questions the semiotic structure and articulatory system of Imam Khomeini’s foreign policy is about giving a descriptive framework for analyzing it. According to the hypothesis, from the writers' viewpoint, the articulating system of his foreign policy discourse is describeable in a three-dimentional framework of ideology, strategy and diplomacy. Ideology beholds some principles and belief-related standards that generally nurture from Islam's revolutionary-critical source. Strategy involves the security-based calculations and the hardware policy. Moreover, diplomacy includes the accepted diagrams of conversation and negotiation for achieving national interests. The results of this discourse are represented in propositions that are based on concepts of the revolutionary-critical, pragmatic-realist, and prudent-modernist Islam.


Key words:
The Foreign Policy of the I.R of Iran, Ideology, Strategy, Diplomacy, Imam Khomeini.

Liberal democracy is based on the idea of free and unlimited discourse on the values, aims, and decisions of a political society. This concept, epitomized in Jürgen Habermas´ catch-phrase "herrschaftsfreier Diskurs", precludes criticism as to the aspects of  power involved in the ostensibly open debate among the "informed public". My essay on "Political Semantics" provides  an analysis of the mechanisms at work in  "public discourse". In contrast to  to the popular concept  of "civil society",  political reality - aside from the evident structures  of  political and economic  power -  is characterized by "elites" providing  "the public" with an ostensibly  unquestionable set of semantics. Discourse is steered from "above". Certain key words charged with meaning and morality are conveyed into the lingua politica and into  popular language. Instead of liberal discourse, public debate is tinged with ideology for the most part derived from American liberalism. Command over semantics is exercised within a socio-poliitcal framework favoring  intellectual conformism.

В статье на примере исследовательской практики британской школы “исследований культуры” (cultural studies) исследуются возможности применения (нео)марксистского понятия идеологии в области изучения масс-медиа и популярной культуры (popular culture). Автор рассматривает «исследования культуры» 1970-1980-х годов с точки зрения их вклада в развитие (нео)марксистской проблематики идеологии. Указанная проблематика задавала рамку для конкретных исследований масс-медиа и популярной культуры, отличающихся, в свою очередь, высоким уровнем теоретической рефлексии.
Как показано в статье, наиболее ценные результаты в указанных областях были достигнуты за счет синтеза марксистского понятия идеологии в трактовке Л.Альтюссера,  концепции гегемонии А.Грамши и (пост)структуралистской семиотики и теории дискурса. В статье проводится мысль о том, что отход более поздних «исследований культуры» от (нео)марксистской проблематики идеологии оставляет незавершенным проект критического исследования сложного взаимодействия культурных практик и структур классового доминирования в современном обществе.

In this article I consider how gendered hierarchies are constitutive of neo-liberal development and the violence attendant upon it. Building on Arturo Escobar's observation that violence is constitutive of development, I explore how the violent imposition of neo-liberal development is legitimised through the inscription of gendered imaginative geographies, which define ‘savage’ spaces of exclusion in need of ‘civilising’ development interventions. Drawing on the example of contemporary Colombia, I trace how the development discourse produces space in this way by normalising certain identities and political rationalities—those associated with competition and rational economic behaviour—while representing others as errant, as hyper-masculine subjects prone to violence or ‘pre-rational’ feminised subjects.

It is now more than 30 years since the publication of Edward W. Said’s seminal text Orientalism. With his discourse analysis of an astounding number of academic, bureaucratic and literary texts from the colonial period, Said was able to demonstrate that the western colonial project was premised on a matrix of interdependent discourses, institutions and practices, which he termed ‘orientalism’. The net output of such orientalism was an ideological fantasy, a fantasy that bore no relation to the reality and complexity of non-european society with its myriad cultures, religions, peoples, customs and histories. Instead, orientalism has served to homogenize, demonize and stereotype the non-european world according to fairly reductive and negative terms, so that the oriental was viewed as the ‘other’. Clearly the unquestioned tendency to view the people of the orient as eficient and inferior ‘others’ served the colonial agenda of continuing to dominate and control sections of the East.

One cannot overstate the significance and impact of orientalism. Indeed, in the years that followed, Said’s work was both contested and applied by a whole range of different disciplines including middle-east studies, media analyses, international relations and history. It has also spawned an entirely new sub-discipline known as postcolonial studies. What has long been missing in the field of research is a sustained engagement with Said’s work from the perspective of defence studies and military history.

Presque trente ans après sa disparition, le critique-écrivain suscite toujours autant la lecture et le commentaire. Cette fois, il « refait signe », comme le déclare le titre d'un numéro du Magazine littéraire, à travers deux publications posthumes, les Carnets du voyage en Chine et le Journal de deuil, où on retrouve avec bonheur l'intellectuel émouvant et personnel, fragilisé par le deuil, reclus dans sa solitude méditative, en éternel décrochage des effets de mode et des discours trop répétés.

There has been a continuous attack on education, particularly alternative, progressive, democratic and liberatory forms of education that seek social justice and an equality of opportunity for all to develop.  In the UK this has led to an attack on educators as 'the enemies of promise' by the Secretary of State for Education.  However, what is being proposed by policy makers are the old 'know your station in life' strategies of managing inequality.  These have always resulted in a violation of the intelligence of people.

The amount of new semantic content circulated in a society is limited by implicit norms and explicit rules. Belonging to a community means knowing, mastering, and even interiorizing such restrictions. Some of them are imposed by economy, as in the case of copyright, some by moral, as with pornography, and some for political reasons. In times of international tension such restrictions are tightened, giving rise to state ideologies and rhetorics of taciturnity. The essay explores those that came about in Italy, German, and Japan during World War II but also those that were circulated in their democratic opposers, USA and UK. The study seeks to show the relevance of a semiotic analysis of this corpus of propaganda materials not only for the sake of historical knowledge but also so as to cast new light on urgent present-day issues concerning both private and public conversation.

A tablet from the 6th century BC succeeded in revealing the giant six-level Ziggurat which became known as the Tower of Babel. According to the biblical text narrative in Genesis 11: 1-9, the construction of the Ziggurat was successful because the perpetrators were in one Babylonian language. If this theory is correct, then the concept of one language can be implemented in various lines of life so that all who are planned to succeed in its implementation with the involvement of all group members. To discuss, test these assumptions, and analyze the phenomenon of one language, research in the form of literature studies is carried out through this paper. The research aims to reveal the power of one language behind the success of the development, and at the same time, the irony of the destruction of the Babylonian Ziggurat. The Group Communication Theory and Critical Discourse are using analysis scissors. The results of the study show that one language can create unity and convergence for any purpose and design in a group or community. Even the unity of language builds internal filters within each person who is part of the community to distinguish good and bad information, which builds or breaks down positive or negative information because the unity of language plays a role in decision making and the formation of actions.

Often, efforts by schools to standardize marginalized children with histories of domestic violence have alarming effects. More recent efforts of standardization typically find a sustained existence in the discourse of “best” practices predicated upon a religiouslike adherence to behavioral data driven frameworks. This article traces how children and youth with histories of domestic violence (or HDV youth) navigate and resist deficit laden school subjectivities shaped by special education discourses of medicalization and pathologization. In one case study, I spell out how an elementary school created and maintained an HDV child’s EBD (emotional behavioral disordered) subjectivity with detrimental effects. The article ends with further critique of the social and emotional (behavioral) frameworks populating our schools today and their relationship to the school-to-prison pipeline for children and youth with histories of domestic violence. If we stand back from proximate contexts and th...

The infrastructure of cinematic cityscapes manifests as spectacular utopian capitalist fantasies, or as the sites of detritus and abjection, usually stratified by visual metaphors of decadent heights or sewer-level depths respectively. This division frequently depends on an ideological mandate congruent with the social and economic conditions under which a film was constructed. As cinema has become an increasingly global product, depictions of the city have found articulations that stretch far beyond the comforting bourgeois fantasies of classical Hollywood productions. Especially following the introduction of revolutionary Third Cinema in the 1960s, filmmakers from many parts of the globe have taken to producing cinema that is directly concerned with cityscape and how it has participated with global capitalism in the production of class stratifications and social constructs. In “Dreaming of Infrastructure,” Patricia Yaeger proposes “a new practicum for looking at city literature, including (1) the fact of overurbanization, (2) the predicament of decaying or absent infrastructures, [and] (3) the unevenness of shelter (which, along with food, energy, health care, and water make up the mythos and ethos of the nurturing city).”  In the context of the mythos and ethos of the nurturing city, Yaeger makes specific reference to infrastructures concerned with the disposal of human excrement, and their symbolic representation in texts that use excrement to challenge such a mythos. Extending Yaeger’s call into cinematic text, Mark Shiel proposes a challenge “to produce a sociology of the cinema in the sense of a sociology of motion picture production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption, with a specific focus on the role of cinema in the physical, social, cultural, and economic development of cities.”  In this paper, I take up Yaeger’s new practicum for looking at city literature to investigate how the global discourse on urban and capitalist constructs is negotiated. While much of the explicitly revolutionary impulse of ostensibly Third Cinema seems to have faded out in the 1970s, its revolutionary impulse can be found in more contemporary examples of cinema that have become a hybrid of dominant forms in capitalist distribution networks, but which narratively include a form of cultural critique. Using a number of cinematic artefacts that are specifically concerned with contemporary urban infrastructure, I argue that historical examples of Third Cinema have been answered by more contemporary examples of Hollywood fantasy cinema in an ideological dialectic. From that point of departure, I further argue that certain examples of Canadian-influenced cinema, particularly the films of Don McKellar, plagued by a subordinate position within the U.S. market but imbued with a more socialist ideology, maintain a critical middle-ground between the polarized depictions of First and Third cinema. In these films, excrement and waste become a symbolic taboo through which to effect criticisms of the capitalist mega-city in a framework which systemically recuperates such dissent back into the Western mythos of the nurturing city.

The concept of soft power occupies a prominent place in International Relations, foreign policy, and security studies. Primarily developed by Joseph S. Nye, the concept is typically drawn upon to emphasize the more intangible dimensions of power in a field long dominated by overtly material (i.e. military) power. Recently, some scholars have reframed soft power — specifically the key notion of attraction — as a narrative and linguistic process. This literature, however, has downplayed some of the other deep-seated underpinnings of soft power, which this article argues lie in the dynamics of affect. Building upon the International Relations affect and aesthetics literatures, this article develops the concept of soft power as rooted in the political dynamics of emotion and introduces the concept of affective investment. The attraction of soft power stems not only from its cultural influence or narrative construction, but more fundamentally from audiences’ affective investments in the images of identity that it produces. The empirical import of these ideas is offered in an analysis of the construction of American attraction in the war on terror.

İdeoloji kavramı, ortaya çıktığı 18. Yüzyılın sonlarından günümüze
kadar çok farklı hatta birbirine zıt anlamlarda kullanılmış ve üzerinde açık
bir mutabakata varılamamış bir kavramdır. Sosyal bilimler literatürünün
genelinde ve özel olarak medya çalışmalarının ekseriyetinde ideoloji kavramı, Marksist dünya görüşünün benimsediği şekilde kullanılmaktadır. Marksist dünya görüşüne göre pejoratif bir anlam taşıyan ideoloji, siyasal iktidarların egemenliklerini sürdürmek amacıyla kullandıkları bir araç olarak kabul edilir.
Medya ve ideoloji ilişkisini ele alan çalışmalar daha ziyade, siyasal iktidarların medyayı bir ideoloji empoze etme aracı olarak kullandığı ve aynı zamanda ideolojinin kitleleri uyuşturmak için bir yanılsama olduğu varsayımlarından hareket etmektedirler. Ancak bu yaklaşım sosyal kontrolü açıklıyor olsa da toplumsal değişim imkanını ıskalaması açısından sorunlu gözükmektedir. Zira kitle kültürü ürünlerinin siyasal iktidarlar tarafından sürekli olarak ideoloji pompalaması ve halkın bu ideolojiyi içselleştirerek egemenliği devam ettirmesi toplumsal düzende meydana gelen değişimleri açıklama noktasında eksik kalmaktadır. Dolayısıyla hem sosyal kontolün hem de toplumsal değişimin, özellikle kitle kültürü ürünleri üzerinden bakıldığında nasıl mümkün olduğu, çalışmanın temel sorunsalını teşkil etmektedir.
Genel olarak bilgi sosyolojisi özel olarak ise Mannheim’in “ideoloji ve
ütopya” kavramları ile bilgi sosyolojisine yaptığı katkı göz önüne alındığında teorik anlamda sosyal kontrol ve toplumsal değişim imkanı daha sarih şekilde ortaya çıkmaktadır. Bu sebeple bu çalışmada ideoloji kavramı bilgi sosyolojisi bağlamında ele alınmıştır. Buna göre ideoloji, yanlı düşünce veya egemenlerin topluma kendi bilinçlerini pompalaması olarak değil, bir toplumsal varoluştaki bilgi örüntüsü olarak tanımlanır. Ütopya ise bireysel veya küçük grupların zihinlerindeki öznel toplumsal düzen tasavvurlarıdır. Toplumdaki genel bilgi örüntüsü ile öznel tasarımların birbirlerine temas etmedikleri düşünülemez. Dolayısıyla kitle kültürü ürünlerinde de ideolojik unsurlar ile ütopik unsurlar bir arada bulunurlar. Ütopyalar asla ideolojilerin yerine geçemedikleri
gibi ideolojiler de ütopyaları yok edemezler. Bununla birlikte ütopik
tasarımlar ideolojiyi belli oranda dönüşüme uğratır. Ütopik ve ideolojik
unsurların bu mücadelesi hem toplumsal dönüşümü meydana getirmekte hem de sosyal kontrolü sağlamaktadır. Bu mücadele kitle kültürü ürünlerinin içinde, yani metinde, gömülü olarak mevcuttur.

Throughout U.S. history, the two major political parties have switched positions many times on a variety of issues, including whether the United States should intervene more or less in foreign affairs. Are these changes simply the product of historical contingency, or are there structural factors at work that can help explain these developments? To improve our understanding of American party ideologies, this paper applies a historical institutional approach to the question of party ideology development, and shows how party control of government institutions influences the evolution of party ideologies. Specifically, this paper finds that changes in party control of the presidency can help explain changes in party ideologies with respect to foreign policy.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o uso da arte pelo partido nazista durante o Terceiro ​ Reich a fim de realizar e fomentar sua propaganda ideológica, assim como a influência exercida pela arte nos ideais nazistas de estética. Valendo-se principalmente do conceito gramsciano de hegemonia para analisar a influência da ideologia dominante na sociedade alemã, caracterizações de totalitarismo moderno por Hannah Arendt e escritos acerca da história da arte referente a época.

Palavras-chave: ​ Ideologia, estética, arte, Terceiro ​ Reich​ , hegemonia.

The present article aims to analyze the use of art by the nazi party during the Third ​ Reich as a tool of spreading their propaganda, as long as the influence of art itself on the nazi aesthetic. Using the theoretical references of hegemony by Antonio Gramsci and modern forms of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt complemented with writings about the history of art at that particular period.

Fidel Castro developed an idea of democracy as a legitimate alternative to american democracy. at the dawn of the Cuban revolution Castro was careful enough to avoid marxist concepts in his speeches, but after the bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 Castro embraced socialism as the ideology of the revolution. then the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat became the core of Castro's idea of democracy. In this context, the opposition between democracy and dictatorship disappeared. the dictatorship of the proletariat became working class democracy. thus, according to Castro, the political participation of Cuban masses in the revolutionary process gave the Cuban project an inescapable democratic character. In 1976 the revolutionary government reinforced the socialist character of the Cuban state through the promulgation of a new constitution. through this constitution the Cuban state embraced formal elections. Paradoxically, after embracing formal elections in 1976, the revolution lost popular power from below and actually became less democratic.

Building «the People»: Ernesto Laclau’s Theoretical Contribution
and the Perspectives of Contemporary Populisms
Populism is a relevant topic in current political debates and analysis. The global
financial and social crisis is fostering a reshaping of representative and liberal democracies.
Particularly in Europe, as a result of this crisis of democratic politics, various
authoritarian, xenophobic, radical and potentially violent movements, parties and
leaders, generally labelled as «populist», are springing up in several countries. Populism
is a complex and protean political phenomenon. Thus, using the label «populist
» just for authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies does not allow us to grasp
all the various expressions of populism in contemporary politics, as well as the ambivalent
relationship between democracy and populism, grounded on the re-definition
of some key concepts for the democratic politics, like «people» and «popular sovereignty
». The authors of the article quest for the development of a non-evaluative
theoretical toolkit, in order to take into account all the different nuances, varieties
and ambivalences of the populist phenomenon emerging in the European political
landscapes. In this effort, Ernesto Laclau’s approach to populism is considered as a
substantial starting point. The article provides a critical assessment of Laclau’s approach,
synthetically describing its main features and arguments, and assessing them
with some of the main critics that, mainly within the post-Marxist field, have been
engaged in a fruitful debate with Laclau. Lately, the article provides a first sample of
the potential of the use of a laclausian approach to populism for the analysis of three
cases of social and political movements that have been emerging in Italy during the
last years, in order to outline a possible research agenda for the future: the «Five Star
Movement»; the movement against the high speed train in Val Susa, in the Piedmont
region; the movement in defence of water resources as «commons».

This thesis offers a psychoanalytic critique of ideology in order to understand the Swedish society’s reactions to the presence of begging EU citizens during the period 2014 – 2016. The so-called ‘EU migrants’ are impoverished people, often from Romania, and commonly identified as Roma. The analysis is based upon empirical material consisting of media articles, interviews, social media, and auto-ethnography. The theoretical approach blends Lacanian psychoanalysis with historical-material dialectics and is inspired by the critique of ideology as formulated by Slavoj Žižek.

The presence causes a multilayered crisis in Swedish society along political, juridical, moral, social, and psychic lines. This because it is a symptom of the Lacanian Real and capitalism’s contradictions. This is manifested in the contradiction embodied in the Swedish authorities’ denial of social help to ‘EU migrants’ on the one hand, while seeking on the other hand to reproduce the image of Sweden as promoting welfare and equality, solidarity, and anti-racism. The contradiction’s material base is the political deadlock between left and right regarding the labor and housing markets. Providing ‘EU migrants’ (being neither citizens nor refugees) access to welfare would risk disrupting the societal moral economy, causing political turmoil. The solution to this dilemma is to expunge ‘EU migrants’ while framing this as an act of poverty-reduction.

Meanwhile, the unresolved occurrence of begging and ‘rough sleeping’ creates anxiety and provokes aggression among Swedish subjects, resulting in hate crimes and everyday racism. Poor people without shelter are forced to use public rooms as their private space, disturbing aesthetic and normative orders, which in turn is unconsciously registered as existential transgressions risking the destruction of the psychic investments of Swedes in their material surroundings.

A main focus of the analysis is the anxiety triggered by the confrontation with a begging individual on the sidewalk. Due to our human empathic transitivity, the visible suffering of the ‘beggar’ becomes involuntarily experienced as suffering within the observer. Furthermore, when the subject is forced to choose whether or not to help, s/he unconsciously experiences how the Other’s desire threatens to dissolve the subject. These anxieties are typically transformed into sympathy, antipathy or apathy.

This article discusses the functions of classical references in contemporary political culture. It focuses on the various ways in which the Belgian politician and Flemish nationalist Bart De Wever makes use of Latin oneliners and historical parallels with ancient Rome in op-eds, speeches and interviews, and how they are received by the press and in political discussions. The use of classical references here is examined from the perspective of recent concepts from Classical Reception Studies, such as 'banal reception' and 'reflex'. It is argued that the references, how trivial they may seem at first sight, are a vital part of De Wever's overall tactics to frame political communication and spread a conservative political message: his alleged wish to safeguard what is called, after Edmund Burke, 'the costly fabric of society'. Rather than stressing the Flemish nationalist agenda of his party, De Wever promotes himself by means of the classical reference and its connotations as the rebellious caretaker of a long-established Euro-pean humanist tradition and as the embodiment of a neoconservative art of living , both of which are said to be threatened by left-wing cultural politics.

This book examines literary representations of human and non-human animality in British Romanticism, a period in which scientific, political, and industrial revolutions radically transformed the status of the human and redefined the concept of species. Its novel approach lies in its focus on the role that aesthetic taste played in the Romantic understanding of the animal. Concentrating on the discourses of the sublime, the beautiful, and the ugly, Heymans argues that the Romantics’ aesthetic views of animality influenced and were influenced by their moral, scientific, political, and theological judgment. He shows how feelings of environmental alienation and disgust played a positive moral role in animal rights poetry, why ugliness presented such a major problem for Romantic-period scientists and theologians, and how in political writings the violent yet awe-inspiring power of exotic species came to symbolize the beauty and terror of the French Revolution. Linking the works of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys, Erasmus Darwin, and William Paley to the theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, this book reveals the importance of animality in the Romantic imagination as well as the crucial role of the aesthetic in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of species. Its wide-ranging investigation of the problematic relationship between beauty, truth, morality, and biology brings an original and fascinating perspective to the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and literature and science studies.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415507301/


CONTENTS


Introduction: The Aesthetics of Species


Part 1

1. The Environmental Ethics of Alienation: The Ecological Sublime
2. Green Masochism: Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
3. Hunting for Pleasure: Wordsworth’s Ecofeminism


Part 2

4. Humans and Other Moving Things: Wordsworth Visits London (with Deleuze and Guattari)
5. The Cute and the Cruel: Taste, Animality and Sexual Violence in Burke and Blake
6. A Problem of Waste Management: Frankenstein and the Visual Order of Things


Part 3

7. Revelation, Reason, Ridicule: The Scientific Sublime
8. A Taste of God: Natural Theology and the Aesthetics of Intelligent Design
9. Beauty with a Past: Evolutionary Aesthetics in Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature""

This article explores four Spanish translations of Seven Jewish Children —a short play written by the English playwright Caryl Churchill in 2009—, based on models of textual analysis designed for drama translation, and with special emphasis on the shifts between implicitation and explicitation.  In the application of these models, we will draw on concepts such as heteroglossia and polyphony; performability, and public or personal narratives, as well as on a three-pronged approach to texts based on semiotic, pragmatic and communicational layers.
We intend to explore the hypothesis that ideology may act as a triggering and catalyzing element in the explicitation process —which could be posited as a probable universal in translation, and has several drives other than ideology—, using contrastive analysis to observe how shifts in transitiveness and explicitation, in the context of translation strategies, can be permeated by the translator’s ideological position, skopos and personal narratives, and how the interaction between the ideological contents in the playtext and the ideological positioning of the translator lead to create different theatrical potentialities in the texts.

ABSTRACT
This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of
Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and
interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the
author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental
text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that
incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private
thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s
themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and
explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which
D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.

This paper focuses on the urban graffiti painted with a political message by different
movements of the Italian political radicalism in the cities of Rome, Florence, Massa,
Carrara, Verona and Udine. For the purpose of this article, during the period from June
2011 to June 2012, a total of 165 graffiti have been photographed, of which 83 painted by
neo-fascist groups, 72 by extreme left groups and 10 by anarchist groups. These three
macro communities, made of different subgroups, emerged as the most active in expressing
their antagonism towards the parliamentary parties with their graffiti that combine semantic
(words) and semiotic (images) elements. An analysis of the collected graffiti’s language
form, meaning and context allows for the identification of the variety of styles of
communication adopted by the different political antagonisms and the different contents of
their communication through graffiti as well as the key elements of their political identities.
Key words: political radicalism, graffiti, linguistics

Globalisasi dengan pesatnya teknologi informasi menjadikan dunia tidak lebih sleebar daun kelor. Berbagai produk kebudayaan, gaya hidup, perilaku sosial, dari berbagai negara melalui teknologi informasi begitu mudah masuk dalam ruang-ruang kehidupan kita. Tata nilai kehidupan lambat mulai bergeser. Apa yang selama ini kita rawat sebagai keluhuran kebudayaan lambat laun dipertanyakan kembali. Orientasi hidup manusia tiba-tiba saja berubah. Dari komunalisme menjadi individualisme, dari menghargai proses berubah menjadi serba pragmatis dan instan. Perlu ada strategi kebudayaan agar perubahan tata nilai tidak bersifat fundamental, yang mengubah falsafah kehidupan kita. Itulah sebabnya, Pancasila menjaid filter terbaik dalam menjadikan setiap nilai yang baru terseleksi secara baik.