Suchergebnisse

Resumo Neste artigo busco atingir dois objetivos principais: primeiro, examinar e reiterar a teoria de um "novo individualismo" que detalhei em escritos recentes de teoria social. Afirmo que hoje presenciamos as condições e consequências de um novo individualismo que varre o mundo e que se evidencia especialmente na nova economia financista das indústrias de mídia e comunicação. Então pergunto: como a teoria do novo individualismo difere de outros pontos de vista influentes na teoria social recente? Para os propósitos deste artigo, os pontos conceituais de comparação com a teoria do novo individualismo serão (a) a teoria das "tecnologias do eu", conforme elaborada por Michel Foucault e vários neofoucaultianos; e (b) a noção de "individualização reflexiva" delineada por Anthony Giddens. Em segundo lugar, discutirei ramificações sociológicas mais amplas da nova tese sobre o individualismo. O novo individualismo, argumentarei, não se refere meramente a indivíduos ou a suas disposições psicológicas; em vez disso, penetra até o cerne do núcleo da cultura e da vida institucional. Novo individualismo é, portanto, uma espécie de taquigrama para vários processos que moldam, e que são moldados, pelas transformações sociais globais. Os principais condutores institucionais do novo individualismo sobre os quais vou dissertar são (a) reinvenção contínua, (b) mudança instantânea, (c) velocidade e (d) o curto prazo, ou episodicidade. Concluo tecendo considerações sobre as prováveis consequências sociológicas futuras do viver-se a vida na via expressa do novo individualismo.

The broad purpose of this article is to explore the theoretical conditions for understanding the new individualist configurations of imagination and identity in contemporary culture and critical discourse. The article begins with a sketch of recent debates in social theory on identity, individualization and new individualism, focusing on the work of Giddens, Beck, and Bauman, as well as Lemert and Elliott. The second part of the article turns to consider, in some detail, the path breaking contributions of Cornelius Castoriadis on the demise of the social imaginary in conditions of advanced capitalism or what he termed the spread of 'generalized conformism'. Whilst making the argument that the notion of 'generalized conformism' is of key importance in grasping the subjective and cultural dynamics promoted by the global electronic economy, the article also underscores the limitations of Castoriadis's psychoanalytic and political position. The third section of the article offers a pathway beyond such constraint by examining the recent social-theoretical contributions of Julia Kristeva on 'new maladies of the soul'. Like Castoriadis, Kristeva focuses on the atrophy of imagination in contemporary times, but does so from a more complex psychoanalytic prism. The article concludes that the work of both Castoriadis and Kristeva are essential to grasping contemporary shifts in the new individualism.

This article critically examines the power of celebrity culture in relation to the rise of cosmetic surgery. The perspective developed is one that attempts to bridge certain developments in social theory and psychoanalytic studies. By drawing on Horton and Wohl's notion of 'para-social interaction', as well as Thompson's idea of 'intimacy at a distance', a critical cultural approach is developed for the analysis of how celebrity bodies become key sites of identification, imitation and desire. The article also draws from the psychoanalytic notion of identification in order to recast the relationship between fandom and celebrity. My argument is that popular and media cultures today are introducing a wholesale shift away from a focus on personalities to celebrity body-parts and their artificial enhancement. To view the body in the light of celebrity culture means, in effect, to see the self increasingly in terms of possible surgical alterations.

In this article I examine some implications of the extraordinary financial and economic crisis sweeping the globe since 2008 – referred to in what follows as the Great Global Crash – with specific reference to the social theory of the new individualism (Elliott and Lemert, 2006, 2009a, 2009b; Elliott 2008, 2009; Elliott and Urry 2010; Elliott, Katagiri and Sawai 2010).[1] The global shocks to worldwide production, financial, consumption and real estate systems unleashed by the crisis of September 2008 has carried profound consequences for economic and social development, both in terms of extensity and intensity, as well as significant implications for global security and political stability. As an indication of the global scope and depth of the macroeconomic financial crisis of 2008, the United Nations (2009) – in a report titled "World Economic Situation and Prospects 2009" – estimated that governments worldwide have spent in economic stimulus packages in excess of $US18 trillion in order to recapitalize banks and failing financial institutions; it was also estimated by the UN that $US2.6 trillion has been spent worldwide in fiscal stimulus packages, and that worldwide unemployment as a direct result of the financial and economic crisis might reach fifty million jobs (although the report also notes that such a figure could well double).Widely viewed as the worst world recession since the Second World War, the global policy response to the economic and financial crisis of 2008 – centred on monetary, fiscal and financial measures to stabilize financial markets and revive the global electronic economy – has sought to introduce sounder economic management and better policy regulation of the financial sector in order to achieve more sustainable economic goals for the twenty-first century. Some critics have labelled such policy responses as spelling the death of neo-liberalism, or the demise of unfettered, turbo-charged economic globalization. As a consequence, the new individualism – as a construct of identity modes underpinning the global electronic economy of mass consumerism, mass indebtedness and neo-liberalism more generally – has come in for some sustained and probing criticism (see, among others, Smith 2007 and Beasley 2009). However I shall argue in this article that, rather than heralding a new era of austerity or significant cultural reform of the global electronic economy and its associated fast-speed ways of life throughout the expensive, polished cities of the West, that the global financial crisis has ultimately produced a reinforcement and intensification of the ethos of new individualism. The upshot, in sociological terms, has been a lifting of the new individualism to the second power.

This article traces recent developments in European social theory and psychoanalysis on the theory of the human subject. Critically examining the recent psychoanalytic departures of Julia Kristeva and Jean Laplanche on the status of primary repression as a condition for the constitution of subjectivity, an analysis is presented of the state of the subject in its unconscious relational world. The article suggests ways in which the analyses set out by Kristeva and Laplanche can be further refined and developed, partly through a reconsideration of the intertwining of unconscious representation and repression as developed in the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, Thomas Ogden and others. For existing psychoanalytical accounts the article suggests we should substitute the concept of 'rolling identification', the psychical basis of the shift from self-referential representational activity to an elementary form of inter-subjectivity. Rolling identifications are defined as a representational flux that permits human subjects to create a relation to the self-as-object and pre-object relations. Such primal identification, the article suggests, operates through a 'representational wrapping of self and others'. The article concludes with a consideration of the cultural significance of primary repression, and the politicization of identification.