Russia’s Legal Transitions: Marxist Theory, Neoclassical Economics and the Rule of Law

We review the role of economic theory in shaping the process of legal change in Russia during the two transitions it experienced during the course of the twentieth century: the transition to a socialist economy organised along the lines of state ownership of the means of production in the 1920s, and the transition to a market economy which occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Despite differences in methodology and in policy implications, Marxist theory, dominant in the 1920s, and neoclassical economics, dominant in the 1990s, offered a similarly reductive account of law as subservient to wider economic forces. In both cases, the subordinate place accorded to law undermined the transition process. Although path dependence and history are frequently invoked to explain the limited development of the rule of law in Russia during the 1990s, policy choices driven by a deterministic conception of law and economics also played a role.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40803-015-0012-

Ways of seeing: 40th anniversary issue

The Journal of Visual Culture marks the 40th anniversary of John Berger’s 'Ways of Seeing', the 1972 BBC television mini-series and adapted book with a special issue edited by Raiford Guins, Juliette Kristensen, and Susan Pui San Lok. Berger's book, now part of the Penguin on Design series which includes Sontag’s 'On Photography' and McLuhan’s 'The Medium is the Message', has been a monumental influence on the fields of art history, cultural studies, design, visual communication, and, of course, visual culture studies. With an editorial by Guins, the issue includes contributions from Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Lisa Cartwright, Jill Casid, Laurie Beth Clark, Clive Dilnot, Jennifer Gonzalez, Martin Jay, Guy Julier, Louis Kaplan, Peter Lunenfeld, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Vanessa Schwartz, and Marita Sturken. It features an interview by Juliette Kristensen with the programmes’ and book’s producers Mike Dibb and Richard Hollis, as well as a photo essay by Susan pui san Lok, that draws on Dibb’s personal archive to highlight the televisual project’s collaborative production and material traces. As the Journal’s Events editor, Lok also commissioned five photo-essays that take up some of the book’s enduring themes: Julian Stallabrass continues the circuitous critique of looking, desiring, and selling, into the realm of subvertising; Sonia Boyce plays on the relay and duplication of eyes and lenses, rotating around and with their at least doubled subjects; Ming Wong shifts centres and perspectives, transposing the intermingled dreams of advertising and movie industries from 1950s Hollywood to 1950s Singapore, and so-called West to East; John Timberlake alludes to the politics and disavowal of climate change, hinting at pollutant incursions upon an urban picturesque; while Broomberg and Chanarin, in the face of saturated, mediatised and televised violence and death, implicate the viewer in ways of seeing and the politics of looking, then and now

Theses on the philosophy of history: the work of research in the age of digital searchability and distributability

What is it to conduct research in the second decade of the 21st century? What is the nature (or what are the modalities) of the work that we as researchers do? What is research as a praxis? And how have recent shifts in paradigms of knowledge generation and distribution ? especially around the archive and the Internet, and the Internet as archival ? transformed profoundly what we as researchers do, how we do it, and in fact even our very capacity to do it? In this article, I begin from the idea of research as a praxis, and from the figure of the researcher as a locus for the discovery of knowledges by way of acts of searching and gathering. In 15 theses I engage critically with challenges raised recently for the idea of ?history? as a form of knowledge by our own épistémè of re-search; one whose conditions and conditions of possibility are delineated by the emergence of our late capitalist global algorithmic knowledge economy, and the Internet with its distinct operations of searchability and distributability. Because this is our present moment?s épistémè of re-search, I argue that our being in thrall of the archive has dangerous future consequences: in fact it is perilous for the very idea of the future itself as a category of historical time. Concerned by this situation and thus responding forcefully to it, in offering a few grains of dissent I will ?look with care? at how we might navigate our way fractiously and thus productively through such a predicament