scholarly journals Why Is New Materialism Not the Answer? Approaching Hyper-Matter, Reinventing the Sense of Critique Beyond ‘Theory’

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 73-105
Author(s):  
Michał Krzykawski
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
21St Century ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Philosophical Critique ◽  
Final Cause ◽  
Critical Response

The article offers a new model of materialist philosophical critique (general technocritique or digital critique) as a critical response to new materialism(s). Drawing on the reinterpretation of the legacy of European philosophies and works by Bernard Stiegler, the article strives to elaborate authentically new theoretical account of matter, notably in relation to the techno-logical mode of its organisation. The critique of new materialism(s) is positioned within the unprecedented crisis of the theoretical model of knowledge. What it is possible to discover by the end of the second decade of the 21st century is that humanities scholars have not managed to confront the central issue for their viable future: the whole theoretical and methodological model, which has so far provided fuel for the contemporary humanities and shaped our social class, postcolonial, gender, queer and other sensibilities, is plunging into a deep epistemological crisis, for having lost its efficient and final cause. In a nutshell, the modelof “doing theory,” is no longer valid, inasmuch as “theory” strangely misrecognized the revolutionary developments in cybernetics, which occurred in the 1950s and radically changed the very nature of knowledge. Therefore, a new epistēmē has to be formed in this new digital condition. However, the formation of this new epistēmē requires for us to radically transform what is referred to as “theory” or “critical theory” and to take into account the developments in the sciences and technology (not necessarily in the methodological framework offered by what is defined as STS) in order to lay the foundations under a new critique of political economy in the hyper-material era.

Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie im 21. Jahrhundert.

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (188) ◽  
pp. 453-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Peter Büttner
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
New World ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Price Theory ◽  
Transformation Problem ◽  
Iron Cage ◽  
Analytical Tools

While the majority of the scientific community holds Marxian Value and Price Theory to be internally inconsistent because of the so-called “transformation problem”, these claims can be sufficiently refuted. The key to the solution of the “transformation problem” is quite simple, so this contribution, because it requires the rejection of simultanism and physicalism, which represent the genuine method of neoclassical economics, a method that is completely incompatible with Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Outside of the iron cage of neoclassical equilibrium economics, Marxian ‘Capital’ can be reconstructed without neoclassical “pathologies” and offers us a whole new world of analytical tools for a critical theory of capitalist societies and its dynamics.

The Science of Modified Forms: Yesterday and Today

2003 ◽  
pp. 111-118
Author(s):  
A. Oleinik
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Modified Forms

Reply to the article: Buzgalin A. Heuristic Potential of Political Economy of Socialism in the 21st Century (Voprosy Ekonomiki, 2003, No 3).

THE DYNAMICS OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL DECOLONISATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY: TOWARDS EPISTEMIC FREEDOM

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Academic Freedom ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Global South ◽  
Epistemic Virtue ◽  
Epistemic Dependence ◽  
Knowledge Domain ◽  
Normative Foundation ◽  
Conceptual Study

The problem of the 21st century in the knowledge domain is best rendered as the ‘epistemic line’. It cascades directly from William E B Dubois’s ‘colour line’ which haunted the 20th century and provoked epic struggles for political decolonisation. The connection between the ‘colour line’ and the ‘epistemic line’ is in the racist denial of the humanity of those who became targets of enslavement and colonisation. The denial of humanity automatically disqualified one from epistemic virtue. This conceptual study, therefore explores in an overview format, how Africa in particular and the rest of the Global South in general became victims of genocides, epistemicides, linguicides, and culturecides. It delves deeper into the perennial problems of ontological exiling of the colonised from their languages, cultures, names, and even from themselves while at the same time highlighting how the colonised refused to succumb to the ‘silences’ and fought for epistemic freedom. The article introduces such useful analytical concepts as ‘epistemic freedom’ as opposed to ‘academic freedom’; ‘provincialisation’; ‘deprovincialisation’; ‘epistemological decolonisation’; ‘intellectual extroversion’; and ‘epistemic dependence’. It ends with an outline of five-ways-forward in the African struggles for epistemic freedom predicated on (i) return to the base/locus of enunciation; (ii) shifting the geo-and bio-of knowledge/moving the centre; (iii) decolonising the normative foundation of critical theory; (iv) rethinking thinking itself; and finally (v) learning to unlearn in order to relearn.

scholarly journals American Public Policy and Full Employment: The Imperative of Martin Luther King’s Political Economy in the 21st Century

SAGE Open ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824401880267
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Sommers ◽  
Rachel Hegland ◽  
Patrick Delices
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Martin Luther

The Absent Body of Labour Power: Uno Kōzō’s Logic of Capital

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 201-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Walker
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Entire Range ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
The Core ◽  
Theoretical Inquiry ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Modern Japan ◽  
Labour Power

AbstractThe debate around labour power, and particularly regarding its status as the ‘most peculiar’ of commodities, has been widely revisited in contemporary Marxist thought and critical theory. This concept, which has often resurfaced in works by Negri, Spivak, Virno and numerous other contemporary thinkers, has a long prehistory in the work of Marx and subsequent Marxist theorists, perhaps most importantly in the work of Uno Kōzō, arguably the most influential and widely known Marxist thinker in modern Japan. Uno’s work, and particularly his major theoretical works of the 1950s, developed an entirelogicalanalysis of the peculiar position of the labour-power commodity within capital’s drive, noting that this site marks the place wherein capital’slogical interiorand itshistorical exteriorinterpenetrate each other, generating a volatile force of excess at the core of capital’s supposedly smooth and pure circuit-process. By developing around this point an extensive theoretical discussion of its dynamics ofimpossibilityorirrationality, centred on a term –muri– that he raises to the level of a concept, Uno formulates a series of original theses in methodology, on the concept of population, and particularly around the figures of thelogicaland thehistoricalin the critical analysis of capitalism. Focusing in particular on this ‘impossibility’ ormurithat is nevertheless constantly ‘passing through’ the capital-relation, this essay investigates the entire range of Uno’s analysis, revealing not only a crucial thread of theoretical inquiry that remains contemporary for us today, but also another set of possibilities linking the critique of political economy to the renewal of revolutionary politics.

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