Preface: Hauntographies of Ordinary Shipwrecks

To preface the five chapters and postface to come, the role of shipwrecks in the modern imaginary is explored before examining the common ground between art and archaeology. The term hauntography is defined as a creative process that combines the methods of Bogost’s alien phenomenology— ontography, metaphorism, and carpentry—to attempt comprehension and communication of an object that is absent and present, bygone and enduring. To encounter a shipwreck underwater is a brush with the uncanny, the eerie, and the weird, but also the sublime and wondrous. Hauntography works to edge closer toward an ontological recognition of an inscrutable entity. Beginning with a personal apologia of sorts, the preface concludes by summarizing the arguments and evidence to follow.

The antinomies of the modern imaginary and the double dialectic of control

Cornelius Castoriadis made a significant and distinctive contribution to the development of the notion of the dialectic of control. In the first instance, Castoriadis formulated an important reconceptualization and restatement of the Marxist conception of the central contradiction of capitalism. He argued that capitalism depended on the creativity of workers while excluding them from effective control. Similarly, Castoriadis sought to extend the Marxist analysis of those tendencies present within the structuration of the labour process that may prefigure a socialist reorganization of production. Castoriadis’s analyses of capitalism during the phase of his involvement with Socialism or Barbarism are likewise informed by his assessment of state socialist regimes. In particular, this assessment provided important insights into the modalities of control in modern society and the complications of transcending forms of institutional domination in modernity. It will be argued that some of the distinctive intentions of Castoriadis’s later elucidation of the social imaginary can be traced to his interpretation of bureaucratic capitalism and that this is evident in his subsequent accounts of the capitalist imaginary. In his later theory, Castoriadis interprets the problem of the dialectic of control in terms of the relationship between instituting and instituted society. Castoriadis’s analysis of capitalism during the period of Socialism or Barbarism will be situated in the wider debates over capitalism at that time. Similarly, Castoriadis’s departure from some of the philosophical sources that influenced the development of the notion of the dialectic of control will be explored.

Exploring the Potential for Just Urban Transformations in Light of Eco-Modernist Imaginaries of Sustainability

This article approaches urban ethics through critically examining the production and reproduction of an eco-modern socio-technical imaginary of sustainable urban development in Sweden, and the conditions and obstacles this poses for a just transformation. We see that notions of ecological modernization re-present problems of urban sustainability in ways that do not challenge the predominant regime, but rather uphold unjust power relations. More particularly, through an approach inspired by critical discourse analysis, we uncover what these problem representations entail, deconstructing what we find as three cornerstones of an eco-modern imaginary that obstruct the emergence of a more ethically-engaged understanding of urban sustainability. The first concerns which scales and system boundaries are constructed as relevant, and how this results in some modes and places of production and consumption being constructed as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. The second cornerstone has to do with what resources and ways of using them (including mediating technologies) are foregrounded and constructed as more important in relation to sustainability than others. The third cornerstone concerns the construction of subjectivities, through which some types of people and practices are put forth as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. Utilizing a critical speculative design approach, we explore a selection of alternative problem representations, and finally discuss these in relation to the possibility of affording a more ethical urban design and planning practice.

The Core of Resistance: Recognising Intersectional Struggle in the Kurdish Women’s Movement

The paper addresses the women’s movement in the Northern Syrian region known by Kurds as Rojava, a movement whose central role in building an autonomous political project has its roots in the Kurdish nationalist struggle, specifically that organised by the Kurdish Worker’s Party, also known as the PKK, in Turkey. This study brings to the fore reflections on the power relations that cross the struggle carried out by these women, who, for their part, are crossed by the intersection of gender, ethnicity and class, which feeds and composes the critical praxis of this organised struggle. The Kurdish women’s political path is approached through the contradictions and ambiguities they encounter when they face the challenge of becoming aware of their own place in a political project, which at first had a nationalist character and is now beginning to gain new contours. The presence of the female figure in a political context of armed conflict endows these women with the role of challenging the boundaries on which the foundational elements of international politics rely, namely, the boundary between public and private spheres and gender roles played socially and politically. The Kurdish women’s movement in Rojava disturbs the foundational boundaries of the modern nation-state alongside the hegemonic constructions of masculinity and femininity, and the militarised character of politics, which are constitutive of the modern imaginary of political community.

Uncanny Beauty

This essay reflects on the paradox that invests common perceptions of prison interiors by presenting a formal investigation of the nineteenth century prison of Buoncammino in Italy. While we unanimously refuse as abominable the pre-modern dark dungeon, we are also very ambivalent towards the (unrealised) promises of the carefully designed enlightened and ‘enlightening’ spaces of the modern prison, which in principle we consider superior but that, ultimately, we end up perceiving in a not too dissimilar way from the pre-modern imaginary of darkness. Is this survival of darkness inside modern institutions, born in the age of the Enlightenment, a sign of failure for the hopes embedded in the modern prison? Or does it derive from the imperfect implementation of the model modern prison in reality? Or, alternatively, was darkness already embedded in modernity itself? The apparently irresolvable paradox of the coexistence of ‘dark space’ in ‘light space’ relates to the dichotomic nature of contemporary debates on penal institutions: whether to humanise or abolish them.

Unlearning modernity: A realist method for critical international relations?

Recent re-readings of classical realism in International Relations have demonstrated that in their critique of modernity, mid-twentieth century realists put their focus on the development of a (self)critical and sceptical epistemology, a focus that often has been of little concern to other International Relations theories. So far, however, this debate on classical realism has not further elaborated realist methodologies, although this has the potential to make the current theoretical debate more accessible for empirical investigations. To this end, this article argues that mid-twentieth century realists pursued a method of unlearning. Unlearning is being understood as the critique and moving beyond the modern imaginary which preconditions everyday knowledge and intellectual thought in a dehumanizing way through a learning process based upon the study of classical texts. Examining the work of Hans Morgenthau, and the evocative if generally under-appreciated writings of the Japanese thinker Maruyama Masao, the article argues that unlearning is an important part of critical realist thinking.