Valuing the Past: The Constitution of the Antiques Market in Russia

Valuation and assessment of antiques are in the focus of the thesis: the symbolic and narrative character of these objects of the past makes them a special case among other singular goods. Their value developed over time into a number of orders of worth (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006) where antiques are conceptualized as historical, cultural, aesthetic, sentimental, and financial assets. As objects of art, antiques are not standardized: in some cases they were produced as unique and single objects, in other cases the process for becoming a valued antique varied. Moreover, many antique objects have their own histories relaying evidence of the unique circumstances under which they produced, exchanged, possessed, lost and found again. As a result there are almost no antiques that can be assessed using one given set of criteria. In market terms such characteristics translate into high uncertainty of quality for these goods. In light of this, the central question of the thesis is: How are antiques valued given the uncertainty of product quality and the context of unstable macro-structures in Russia? The main goal is to find market devices that help to solve this problem. An inquiry into the possible devices is presented in the empirical study of the antiques market in Russia as well as in research on the history and nature of unstable macro-structures that influence valuation. The process of valuing antiques that involves appraisal and attribution is an ambiguous one: market actors need specialized knowledge in the field of decorative art and art history in order to make the correct judgments. Discontinuities in historical records mean that this specialized knowledge is often open to debate. What is more, specialized knowledge may be inaccessible to some market actors, or be too difficult for them to grasp in order to be able to make proper use of it. The past has to be taken into account, but it is also inherently uncertain. Thus actors in the antiques market have to cope with more than the traditional problem of uncertainty regarding the future: the discoveries of new artifacts, or just historical facts, can significantly influence the valuation of objects

Ecocene Politics

Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life. Dismantling the use of the term ‘Anthropocene’ as a descriptor for our current ecological and political paradigm, this bold and resolutely original contribution proposes a restorative ethics of mutualism. An emancipatory theory intended to re-invigorate human agency in the face of contemporary ecological challenges, it posits an effective means to combat the environmental destruction engendered by modernity. Using ecology alongside European moral and Māori philosophies to re-conceptualise the ecological remit of politics, this book’s granular approach questions the role played by contemporary political ontologies in the separation of humans and environments, offering an in-depth view of their renewed interrelation under mutualism. Ecocene Politics will be essential to researchers and students in the fields of politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and geography. It will be of further interest to those working in the fields of political ecology, environmental humanities, and Anthropocene studies, as well as to general readers seeking a theoretical approach to the political issues posed by current ecological crises

Making Feminism Matter Again

"Making Feminism Matter Again" analyzes new shifts in gender and their social representations in feminist theory. I take as my point of departure the "crisis" of feminism and the loss of its explanatory and transformative effectivity in the wake of the cultural turn, which, I argue, was a class development in feminism brought on by the economic crisis of profit in capitalism in the late 20th century. I question its main assumptions of gender, articulated in texts by Derrida, Foucault, Negri, Fraser, Butler, Gibson-Graham, Sandoval, Probyn, Wiegman, Felski and others, for the way they culturally rewrite materialist concepts such as "class," "division of labor," "ideology," and "history" and represent cultural shifts in gender as "constitutive" of material change—and ultimately as progress—for women within capitalism. "Making Feminism Matter Again" re-examines the historical significance of cultural shifts, including shifts in feminist theory as well as new gendered forms of work ("caring" and "service labor"), family, consumption, diet, clothing, sexuality, and love. In analyzing gender now, I demonstrate that culturalism analytically dissolves gender into autonomous differences and "ethics," and uses cultural values to obscure over the crisis of transnational capitalism's class relations and deepening economic exploitation of women. As a result, cultural feminisms are not an intervention but an affirmation of the way things are. I argue for a historical materialist theory of gender in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai, Eleanor Leacock, and such contemporary critics as Angela Davis, Delia Aguilar, Elizabeth Armstrong, and Teresa Ebert, which shows that permutations in gender are not new because the wage-labor/capital relations that exploit women have not changed. Instead the changes are an updating of gender to adjust women to changes in the division of labor under which surplus-value is extracted. In the intersection of labor theory and cultural theory, "Making Feminism Matter Again" maps the material relations of gender now. This map is also a materialist re-mapping of feminist theory and the development of a new model for a materialist analytics of gender as a way to contribute to restoring the explanatory and transformative effectivity of feminism now

Sustainability Transitions in Tourism in the Margaret River Region (Western Australia, Australia)

Sustainability Transitions Research (STR) investigates shifts in sociotechnical systems towards sustainability. Despite tourism's socioenvironmental impact, it has been neglected in STR. This thesis addresses this gap by applying multi-level perspective and path-dependence theory to analyse the move towards sustainable tourism in the Margaret River region (WA). This thesis identifies a historical transition (1950s-1990s) followed by a sustainability transition (early 2000s-present) as well as complex factors influencing the ongoing sustainability transition in this wine-tourism destination

Looking for Identity in a Multicultural World: the Case of Spanglish in the United States

ope

Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 3

"In The Block of Fame, Edmund Bergler, like the thirteenth fairy in the “Sleeping Beauty,“ uninvited because there wasn’t an extra place setting, crashes the psychoanalytic poetics of daydreaming with a curse. He charges that the overview, according to which art making rarefies daydreaming and delivers omnipotence, overlooks the underlying defense contract. We are hooked to creativity, because it offers the best defense against acknowledging the ultimate and untenable masochistic wish to be refused. Bergler’s bleak view, which Gilles Deleuze alone acknowledged in his study of Sacher-Masoch, doesn’t make any overall contribution to the aesthetics of fantasying that this critique addresses. However, it is a good fit with the centerpiece of the final volume: the wish for fame or, rather, the recoil of the wish in the wreckage that success brings. Following the opening season of mourning and the experience of phantoms, there is the second death, which is murder. In addition to the deadening end that can only be postponed – the killing off of the dead until dead dead – there is another second death that concludes the wish for fame with a ritual stripping of badges and insignia. Not only are the medals thrown to the ground and the sword broken, but a life’s work passes review. At the close of his career, Freud returned to the environs of the wish, the cornerstone of his science. While his disciples Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs carried out his 1907 insights regarding the poetics of daydreaming to illuminate, respectively, the mythic origin of the hero and the evolution of art out of the mutual daydream, Freud battened down for the end of his world by revisiting the so-called primal fantasy, the myth of the primal father, in Moses and Monotheism. The animal setting that was a given of its premier articulation in Totem and Taboo was a wrap this time around with Freud’s translation of Marie Bonaparte’s transference gift, a memoir recounting her premature mourning for her sick chow and the dog’s recovery from cancer of the jaw. In Bergler’s unconscious system, plagiarism is the conscious variation on the block basic to authorship. Theodor Adorno interpreted the ascendancy of the culture industry leading to and through the Third Reich in terms of the theft of modernism’s critical strategies for promoting the transformation of wish fantasy into the social relation of art. In the course of writing his essay “Notes on Kafka” between 1942 and 1952, Adorno was able to reclaim for aesthetic theory after Auschwitz the “constellation” that he and Benjamin had originally developed to outlast the culture industry’s depravation of the hopefulness of wishing. Adorno gives the sense or direction of the constellation’s recovery when he argues that Kafka’s work stages the final round of the contest between fantasy and science fiction by extrapolating doubling and déjà vu as the portals to a collective future. The wish for fame or to be refused it and the wish to steal this book or undo the delinquency demarcate the final movement of the third volume, which follows out, beginning with Susan Sontag and Gidget, a veritable Bildungsroman of the post-war era’s star, the teenager. Fantasying to make it big time means to be in training for big ideas and big feelings. The romance of fantasying was also reconfigured out of a station break. The Nazi elevation of youth to superego in the Heimat of the Teen Age neutralized adolescent innovation by forgoing the Hamletian stage of metabolization of the death wish. Switching to the other patient, the other teenager at heart, no longer the German but now the American or Californian, this study enters the termination phase of the analysis in the environs of a reach for the stars that is legend. It is the legend to the final volume’s mapping of our second nature as daydreamer believers.

Privileged Resistance: Prisoners of Conscience in the United States, 1980-2013

This dissertation tells the story of modern anti-war prisoners of conscience in the United States-people who are incarcerated for six months or more as a result of nonviolent resistance. It explores how they intentionally use and learn about their own privilege in solidarity actions that land them in the belly of the imperial beast; the prison. It traces the lives of forty three such prisoners of conscience, from discernment of action through release, to show how who they are (in terms of their visible identities and private senses of self) impacts their experiences, the ways they are understood, and their own interpretations of their actions. The story that emerges is about what it feels like to resist the state with your body, how whose body matters in the shaping, interpretation, and efficacy of resistance, and what white, financially stable, well educated, Christian U.S. citizens learn about their own positionality through living for months and years in America\u27s jails and prisons. What they learn and how they are changed by their experiences is significantly impacted by their racialized gender identities, and the focused story of these individuals works to tell a larger story about patriarchy, neoliberalism, foreign policy, and the contemporary prison industrial complex. The study also provides a model of solidarity activism that takes account of political location, privilege, and speaking for. It challenges nonviolence theory and practice to better understand and articulate its strategy of prison witness, and is also an important intervention into the politics and actual doings of border crossing solidarity activism that is attentive to personal and global relations of power