This article offers a systematic reconstruction of the under-examined yet central role of spirituality in Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation. It argues that spirituality functions as the key operator that resolves the disparity between the psychic and the collective, thereby opening the domain of the transindividual. The analysis first revisits Simondon’s ontogenetic process to highlight the role of disparity and signification in the phase-shifts that lead from the pre-individual to the transindividual. It then shows how spirituality – understood as signification – emerges from the pre-individual charge carried by each being, binding the subject to the collective. Crucially, this spirituality is not metaphysical but operational: it constitutes a non-religious ‘eternity’ in which signification is deposited in technical objects and cultural forms for future reactualization. Ultimately, the article contends that spirituality names the transductive convergence of emotion and action, grounding an ethics of disparity in the metastable and open-ended process of collective individuation.
This article examines challenges in conceiving dynamics of conversion in an ecological way. Of key concern are ambiguities between traditional conceptions of conversion and pluralistic ecological perspectivism. These ambiguities are intensified when we juxtapose conversion’s affective phenomenology with the planetary context of ecological polycrisis. To better understand these ambiguities, the article examines how images of holism have been leveraged in both conversion and ecological discourses. This is necessary so ecological conversion can resist capture by imperialistic assumptions of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model while also avoiding ineffectual or complacent relativism. This places pressure on the affective and epistemic dynamics of conversion, which have often functioned through invocation of a single transcendent truth. In response, the article concludes by suggesting an alternative approach towards ecological conversion, not in terms of determinate content or outcome, but in terms of what it calls seeds of practice.
This article examines the significance of maritime imaginaries in the work and life of Walter Benjamin, arguing that the various references to the sea and ships across his writings serve as more than mere metaphorical content. Drawing on Benjamin’s personal experiences of sea travel, the article contends that his conceptual framework, particularly his historical method of rescue ( Rettung ), is intimately tied to the materiality and embodied experience of mobility at sea. The analysis contrasts Benjamin’s position – as one clinging to the mast of a shipwreck – with the classical philosophical tradition of detached spectatorship, asserting that he mobilizes the unstable maritime space as a theatre of crisis and a source of alternative knowledge. It explores how Benjamin saw maritime oral cultures and the sailor’s perspective as providing an essential counter-discourse to bourgeois notions of travel and a key to understanding the decline of storytelling ( Erzählung ) in the modern age.
A major obstacle to an accurate understanding of the influence that the period Norbert Elias spent in West Africa had on his thought has been the fact that his writings on processes of civilization in Africa have remained unpublished, available only for those able to access the Elias archives in Marbach. This obstacle has been removed by the publication of Elias’s Ghanaian essays. In this review essay I examine how Elias’s essays reveal a crucial development in his understanding of civilizing and decivilizing processes, as being driven by the organisation of human social groups as ‘survival units’, in which civilizing processes are in fact always counter-balanced by contradictory tendencies in the opposite direction, towards violence and decivilizing processes. These essays suggest a new reading of Elias’s writings from the 1970s onwards, one that brings to the foreground the tension between relatively advanced intra-state and relatively underdeveloped inter-state civilizing processes.
Responding to anthropogenic climate change requires information from and about the Earth. Astrobiologists who study the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe claim that such planetary intelligence can lead to a 'mature technosphere', a planet capable of regulating its energy inputs and outputs. From this perspective, Earth-observing satellites and solar microgrids are small examples of a self-aware and self-regulating technosphere. However, the industrial development of space and renewable energy infrastructures perpetuate local dispossession and extractivism. Also, ideas like a mature technosphere are normative, totalizing, teleological, and reductive in their focus on a collective planet evolving towards maturity. The local and the planetary, in this critique, are in opposition. Building from a case study of the Centre for Appropriate Technology (CfAT) - a First Nation organization with space and renewable energy assets in Australia - this article offers a different account. Here the local and the planetary are not opposed but complementary. This is argued with Yuk Hui's concept of cosmotechnics, a theory of how technologies mediate the relationship between the local and the planetary.
We are fascinated by the abnormal, transgressive, and irresolvable. Apart from zombies and other horrific tropes, there are also literary figures that are both obscene and enticing. We focus on the Marquis de Sade, whose macabre fictions continue to resonate in contemporary culture. We argue that various reactions to Sade’s texts are marked by an irreducible embeddedness in Christian culture. This tends to lead into a focus on his fictitious excesses and attempts to explain and resolve his aberrance. In contrast, we read Sade theologically to reveal a radical attempt to return to the Hellenistic worldview of fearsome purity and the absolute essences overturned by Christianity. We then evaluate Sade’s thought as an impossible alternative to the tendencies of algorithmic consumer culture that continues to feed off Christianity’s insatiable outward orientation.
Jalal Al-e Ahmad was an Iranian public intellectual and writer, best known for his concise, modern prose and bold critique. One of his works was a famous monograph on what he termed westoxication . This article addresses the question: can this concept be narrowed down to a more specific sociological phenomenon? I argue that it can be used to describe a distinct Southern mode of cultural consumption rooted in a collective disregard for the legacy of colonialism. That is a peculiar form of cultural consumption that mimics Western lifestyles as a means of withdrawing to an imagined Western lifeworld, in response to governance failures in the Southern societies. It entails the creation of a web of collective confabulations, or fabrication of false memories, wherein the colonised imagine themselves as having shared in the colonisers’ privileged position of superiority. The purpose of this article is to situate the new concept of westoxication within the vocabulary of postcolonial social theory.
This article explores the lessons for antiracism provided by & Eacute;douard Glissant's philosophy of language. The late Martinican scholar (1928-2011) writes extensively about language in correspondence to core concepts in his thought, in particular Relation, opacity and the Whole-World. Through a reading of his essays, poems and novels, I argue that Glissant's writing poses an ontological question about language which allows us to rethink our relationships to each other and, as consequence, the dispositions necessary for collective struggle. The move towards the Whole-World, in his later work, speaks to wider debates on planetary interdependence and relies on a multilingual reimagination of the common places where we are all implicated in the task of resisting oppression.
This article focuses on the politics of use and pollution (due to both light and debris) of the night sky as an environmental commons and discusses the fraught postcolonial dynamics of accessing and occupying orbits. It establishes a dialogue between the political ecology of space assets and the interdisciplinary critical tradition, unearthing the colonial legacies that structure environmental, sociolegal and political relations. This dialogue unveils that the idea of property is at the centre of the colonial matrix underpinning the cosmic expansion of capitalism. This territorial appropriation takes place through the interconnected actions of owning and discarding space objects. Space debris emerge as postcolonial remains, because the unequally distributed property of space objects and their pollution make up the present lives of colonialism in space.
This article proposes that institutional racism may be productively understood as an atmospheric phenomenon. It develops, from a dialogue between the work of actor-director Michael Chekhov and that of Frantz Fanon, a theoretical account of atmosphere as the material and affective medium of relation, which is directly responsive to structurally racialized conditions. It argues that recent public and critical discourse on institutional racism has been dominated by attitudinal accounts that have worked to foreclose structural change and proposes, instead, an atmospheric approach to analysing racialized conditions of institutional encounter. These it terms ‘toxic whiteness’, not in contradistinction to a putatively non-toxic whiteness, but to emphasize that, while being conducive to the collective thriving of white people, whiteness is toxic to those who are racially minoritized. Finally, the essay argues that atmospheric analysis provides a basis for effective opposition to the racialized interests that underpin the toxic atmospheres of institutional racism.
Couze Venn has been a key influence on commoning theory, and greatly enhanced understanding of the role of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation in the destruction of the commons. In tribute to his work, I here focus on the affluent consumerism propelled by that exploitation, reflect on its power, but also consider how emerging forms of disaffection with its negative aspects might foster support for commoning in wealthy societies. Though presented as a model of the ‘good life’ for less developed communities, consumer culture is better seen, I contend, for what it has largely become: an engine for the enrichment of a corporate elite at the expense of the health of the planet and the well-being of most of its inhabitants. The article concludes by reflecting on the form an ‘alternative hedonist’ politics of prosperity might take and the ways it could hook up with more explicit and militant commoning initiatives.
Despite decades of feminist critique, historical realism retains a powerful hold on historiography, sustained not only by disciplinary convention but by the imaginative investments that realist norms simultaneously require and disavow. This article argues that feminist historiography cannot escape this impasse by critique alone: it must embrace imagination as a necessary condition of its own practice - not as an embellishment but as the instituting power through which genuinely new historical meanings come into being. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation and Cornelius Castoriadis's radical imagination and social instituting imaginary, it challenges evidentiary norms that render certain lives illegible and redefines historical rigor as an ethical responsibility to configure traces, silences, and possibilities into politically accountable narratives. Critical feminist historiography becomes, on this account, both an exposure of archival violence and a world-making endeavor that institutes new social imaginaries to animate action and judgment in the present.
The notion of the digital commons emerged in the late 1990s and has been elaborated in the service of divergent political commitments in the following years. These have ranged from a renewal of liberal market capitalism, to a development of institutions for self-governing, to an articulation of post-capitalism. Across many internal differences, these approaches have shared expectations that the digital commons, due to their character as advanced knowledge goods and potentially global scale, would significantly contribute to social transformations, expanding market and non-market participation, strengthening community, and generally improving social justice. During the second decade of the 21st century, however, the political ambiguity of the concept allowed for its (incomplete) subsumption under digital capitalism. Everyday practices of digital commoning, though, continued. Today, however, amidst the current techno-political upheavals, driven by the commercial rollout of ‘artificial intelligence’, many of the everyday practices of digital commoning are also threatened.
More-than-human metabolic processes increasingly constitute the locus of contemporary biopower, often responding to industrially-altered biogeochemical cycles. We conceptualise 'metabolo-politics' to examine the targeting of bodies and populations via interventions in the biochemical surroundings and ecologies that shape them; and simultaneously, the administration and modulation of materials in the environment via interventions in the bodies and populations that ingest, digest, and excrete them. Focusing on the governance of environmental crises related to carbon and nitrogen pollution, particularly in livestock sectors in the Global North, we offer three analytics for theorising metabolo-politics as a form of governance oscillating between bio-politics and anatomo-politics. They are: the dispositive, which grapples with the relations of matter and discourse that shape emergent problematisations of metabolism; the milieu, which is the more-than-human scene of intervention; and technologies, which are the diverse means through which power is operationalised metabolically and through which bodies, populations, and environments are governed.
This article introduces 'prompt culture' as an emergent ecosystem at the intersection of artificial intelligence, language, market economy, and visual culture. Drawing on Vil & eacute;m Flusser's hybrid scholarship, this study seeks to make a theoretical contribution to the field of AI critical studies by positioning prompt culture between textual sequences and visual simultaneity. While Flusser observed that lines (text) historically emerged to interpret surfaces (images), prompt culture represents an unprecedented inversion, allowing texts to generate images through 'technical images': visual outputs that signify concepts rather than phenomena. The article maps prompt culture's multidimensional ecosystem across four interconnected domains: divergent professional practices among prompt engineers and artistic creators; markets and industries evolving around prompts; linguistic and rhetorical dimensions of prompting as an inverted ekphrasis; and creation of 'hyper-technical images', technical images of technical images. This article establishes a theoretical foundation for understanding how AI image generation technologies reshape relationships between textual and visual meaning-making.
This article proposes survival epistemologies to name fragile, situated, and improvisational ways of knowing that take shape under repression. Centring Hong Kong as a site of ongoing crisis, I argue that when abstraction loses traction, theory emerges through constrained practices that provincialise generalisability and reorient method toward situated relations. Treating Hong Kong as an epistemic site rather than an object, I trace four scenes in independent publishing - rupture (zines), duration (indie bookshops), depth (hyperlocal writing), and reweaving (diasporic publishing) - to show how knowledge is kept alive through provisional infrastructures of care, refusal, and endurance. Survival epistemologies circulate not by scale but by resonance: they travel across contexts through recognition and method rather than universality. In this frame, authorship becomes encounter-making - amplifying situated practices and rendering their unfinished possibilities legible. The article contributes to postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist debates by offering a vocabulary for how theory persists and moves amid censorship, precarity, and fragmentation.
Racist regionalism and the disparagement of migrants compounded with gender and minor status related to age to articulate 'negro girl' as a category included parasitically within Philadelphia's post-Second World War infrastructures. Shoehorned into tedious home economics courses at school and expected to augment family reproductive labor as daughters until they married and/or found work as domestics, their lifetimes were set by others for a combination of uncompensated reproductive labor and servitude. Those confined by racialized gender, age, and class, however, articulated discordant arrangements of time, space, and life course. I gather these acts in their dynamic relationship to surveillance, violence, and carcerality toward the conceptualization of sabotage and toward a corollary concept, the black girl commons. Taken together, the subjects at the center of this work reappropriated or expropriated time outside the routinized, habitual, and normalizing regimen associated with nascent constructions of teenage life course that delimited their activities to confining education, reproductive labor, or sanctioned extracurricular activity.
This study explores how Muslim women in Malaysia's punk scene use dress as a means of negotiating identity at the intersection of gender, religion, and subculture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, it examines how these women rework punk aesthetics to local cultural and moral frameworks. Their sartorial practices emerge through careful negotiation rather than outright resistance, blending personal agency with religious and social expectations. By reinterpreting elements of both punk and Islamic style, participants reshape conventional norms of modesty, femininity, and subcultural belonging. These creative expressions generate hybrid cultural capital, an alternative form of value that bridges subcultural authenticity and religious respectability. This research challenges binary portrays of Muslim women as either compliant or rebellious, offering a more nuanced understanding of agency and cultural expression. Ultimately, the study positions subcultures as dynamic, intersectional spaces shaped by broader social and cultural forces.
This interview with Philippe Descola, conducted on two occasions separated by the Covid pandemic, delves into his evolving theoretical framework concerning the anthropology of images. Descola reflects on his transition from written discourse in Beyond Nature and Culture to visual representation in Les Formes du visible. The discussion explores the intersection of structuralism, phenomenology, and iconology, highlighting Descola's engagement with Aby Warburg's theories and the works of Hans Belting and Horst Bredekamp. Reference is made to Descola's four ontologies - animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism - and their corresponding modes of identification and figuration. Through these lenses, Descola elucidates how different cultures conceptualize and depict their worlds, emphasizing the intentional autonomy of images and their role as efficacious agents.
This article examines a utopian impulse in popular culture and activism through a reading of cultural objects disseminated from East Asia. It terms this impulse 'small-store utopianism', seeing it as a cultural imagination that anchors hope in small-scale retail spaces, and explores its emergence, characteristics, and potentiality. The article argues that: (1) this impulse emerges in response to various contexts shaped by intersecting forms of power and precarity that are entangled with forces such as neoliberalism and neostatism; (2) such a utopianism mythologizes small stores as having a capacity to deviate from their capitalist 'storeness' to shelter vulnerable bodies, memories, and experiments; and (3) such deviated storeness is enabled by storekeeping and storytelling - cultural practices which may foster infrastructures of hope in everyday life, grounding and disseminating other utopian visions such as convivialism and commoning.
