Helen Glew, “Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900-1955” (Manchester UP, 2016)

Two Canadian socialist thinkers have published a new book on the successes and failures, the crises, contradictions and conflicts in present-day capitalism. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin trace the evolution of the international capitalist system over the last century. (Panitch is a professor of political science at Toronto’s York University while Gindin holds the Packer Chair in Social Justice at York.) They argue that today’s global capitalism would not have been possible without American leadership especially after the two World Wars and that the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve were more crucial in extending and maintaining American power than the Pentagon or the CIA. The U.S. capitalist empire is an “informal” one, they write, in which Americans set the terms for international trade and investment in partnership with other sovereign, but less powerful states. Panitch and Gindin also disagree with those who contend that China is set to replace the U.S. as the world’s economic superpower. They write that China does not have the institutional capacity to manage the crisis-prone, global capitalist system — a burden that, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be carried by the American empire. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire won the 2013 Deutscher Prize awarded for books which exemplify “the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.” The New Books Network spoke with co-author Leo Panitch during his recent visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

9 Feb 20151h 7min

The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno’s most well known text written with Max Horkheimer, is reassessed in a new book of philosophy by Martin Shuster. Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers how autonomy might exist under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, following the disastrous inhumanity of events in the twentieth century. Shuster explores the nature of autonomy in four ways. The book opens with a re-reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as a means to engage and critique Kant’s notion of autonomy. The text then turns to consider a potential ‘response’ from Kant, in the form of Kant’s conception of a rational theology. It is here where Shuster considers the importance of God to Kantian ethics, most notably the role of God as establishing the value of humanity in the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is juxtaposed with Adorno’s later work, which Shuster argues provides a way to think about autonomy that moves beyond and between the totalizing dialectic of enlightenment and Kant’s rational theology. The book closes with a consideration of Hegel’s relationship to this reading of Adorno, reassessing topics such as the teleology of history in Hegel through to the contemporary work of Stanley Cavell. The conclusion provides a practical call to arms based on the conception of autonomy developed in the book. The chapter on Dialectic of Enlightenment provides a stimulating reassessment of a text central to the critical theory tradition and should attract a general readership looking to add depth to their knowledge of this work. However the book itself will also be of interest to all readers of contemporary philosophy, holocaust studies and those wondering how we should live now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

2 Feb 201547min

Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. While The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) will satisfy even advanced scholars working on “object-oriented ontology” and related issues, it’s also a fantastic introduction for readers who have never heard of “correlationism” or panpsychism, don’t quite understand what all of the recent humanities-wide Whitehead-related fuss is all about, and aren’t sure where to begin. After a helpful introduction that lays out the major terms and stakes of the study, seven chapters each function as stand-alone units (and thus are very assignable in upper-level undergrad or graduate courses) while also progressively building on one another to collectively advance an argument for what Shaviro calls a “speculative aesthetics.”The Universe of Things emphasizes the importance of aesthetics and aesthetic theory to reading and engaging the work of Whitehead, Harman, Meillassoux, Kant, Levinas, Bryant, and others as an ongoing conversation about how we understand, inhabit, and exist as part of a material world. It’s a fabulous (and fabulously clearly written!) work that I will be recommending widely to colleagues and students. During the course of the interview we talked a bit about the opportunities that electronic and web-based media have brought to life and work in academia. On that note, you can find Steve’s blog here: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

16 Jan 20151h 3min

How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) charts the New Labour era of cultural policy, detailing the shift from the optimism of the late 1990s to the eventual crisis of funding and policy currently confronting culture in the UK. The book identifies the faustian pact between government and cultural sector, as increased funding came at the price of delivering economic and social policy agendas and responding to bureaucratic forms of management. The book uses a range of examples to illustrate this problematic bargain, from the disasters of the Millennium Dome and The Public, through an analysis of the 2012 Olympic Games. Alongside the range of cultural policy projects discussed is an exploration of the infrastructure, in particular the government departments and public bodies, which are at the root of the failure of British cultural policy between 1997 and today. These failures, including how policy did little or nothing to broaden the base of consumers for state sponsored cultural institutions, are set against the need to renew the meaning and purpose of culture in government. Written with a sharp wit and full of intriguing commentary on the personalities of the key players, the book is essential reading for anyone keen to understand why Britain continues to struggle with the idea of cultural policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

19 Dec 201454min

To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) a new book by Steven Fielding, Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. The book explores how British politics has been represented in fiction from the late Victorian era through to the present. The book identifies a fascinating set of core themes, including how the political class has been defended and attacked, how the idea of populism has developed over time, along with the changing role of women in British political fiction. A State of Play does not over-claim, stressing that although an understanding of fiction is essential to understanding politics, we still don’t know the exact relationship between people’s political participation and political fiction. However, it does make a convincing case that any understanding of the British political system will be insufficient without understanding how it has been imagined and depicted. Indeed, as later chapters show, the mode of depiction itself has become an important territory for explaining British political culture. The book contains a huge range of examples, from the more well known television series, such as Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, through to obscure and perhaps forgotten books such asThe Mistress of Downing Street. Overall it will be of interest to academics and the public alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

12 Dec 20141h 2min

It is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), Beth Driscoll, from University of Melbourne, extends and critiques the work of Pierre Bourdieu to account for modern literary tastes and the literary field in which those tastes are embedded. The book attempts to explore and defend the idea of the middlebrow in literature. ‘Middlebrow’ is defined by eight characteristics, whereby it is middle class, it has reverence to elite cultures, and it is entrepreneurial, mediated, feminized, emotional, recreational and earnest. In the main it is situated within the tension between the aesthetic and the commercial. The book uses four case studies to explore how this tension, along with the idea of the middlebrow, plays out. In the first case study the role of Oprah Winfrey as a tastemaker and cultural intermediary is explored as part of an analysis of book clubs. The analysis shows how Oprah’s book club was important in establishing markets for books as well as being a site for the struggle over what is, and what is not, legitimate taste. This legitimacy is tied to elements of the middlebrow aesthetic, which has earnestness and self improvement as an important component. This component is both the source of struggle with more elite elements of the literary field and a source of changing reading practices, for example in the way Harry Potter is used in schools. The final two case studies, of book prizes and literary festivals, add to the defence of the middlebrow as a vital form of aesthetic production and cultural consumption for both understanding the future of reading and the future of the market for literature in the era of social media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

3 Dec 201441min

What is funny? What makes you laugh? We think of laughter as being universal idea that applies to everyone, no matter their age, ethnicity, gender or social class. In Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour (Routledge, 2014), Sam Friedman tries to overturn our assumptions about comedy. The book draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to show how comedy is deeply related to social position, both in terms of what sorts of comedy people watch and listen to and also in terms of their sense of humour. Comedy is the basis for a form of distinction, as social groups differentiate themselves from others by their tastes. This applies not only to the upper and working class groups in society, but has implications for socially mobile individuals too. Moreover, the book shows how the assumption of good taste in comedy, which is related to having omnivorous cultural interests, is often bound up with symbolic violence from high social status groups towards the rest of society. Alongside the book’s detailed consideration of cultural consumption, the text offers an insight into both the history and the business of comedy, illustrating how the tastemakers of comedy scouting and criticism reinforce the social divisions found in comedy consumption. In exploring both the production and consumption of comedy Friedman develops the idea of cultural capital in comedy, a theoretical idea that will be useful for anyone thinking about the sociology of culture. For the more general reader the book shows how important comedy is to modern society, as opposed to those who would see it as a lowbrow cultural form. By the end of the text the reader will understand that comedy is no laughing matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

21 Nov 201447min

What can possibly be wrong with the process of understanding in psychoanalytic treatment? Everything, according to Bruce Fink. In Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key (Routledge, 2014), he argues that since understanding is part of the Lacanian imaginary, it often leads to fixed assumptions and projections on the part of both analyst and analysand, inhibiting change, or the curative in psychoanalysis. Many of us probably have heard ourselves and others say that understanding why we do something hurtful or destructive does not seem to stop us from doing it; again and again and again. In the clinical vignettes, case studies, and theoretical papers compiled in this volume Fink suggests that rather than understanding, clinicians ought to strive to bring the unconscious to speech – to help analysands communicate knowledge once residing in the unconscious. Such knowledge is generated not through narrative, insight, or meaning making but parapraxes, slurred speech, and mixed metaphors – the non-sense produced by the subject of the unconscious. Speaking that which was previously unsymbolizable shakes the ego at its foundation and enables therapeutic change. A section of Against Understanding is devoted to interviews conducted with the author about his translations of Lacan and the work of translation generally. We touch on issues of translation in our interview as well, highlighting the creativity, pleasures, frustrations, and compromises involved in the process. Bruce Fink and I have only begun to explore his theoretical and clinical writings. Please stay tuned for the next installment in a few months, when we will discuss volume 2of this incisive and thought-provoking collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

17 Nov 20141h 2min