The cultural public sphere

Media research that uses the concept of a public sphere in order to measure distortion against its ideal standard of dialogic democracy tends to concentrate upon the cognitive aspects of news and either ignores or disdains affective communications. Jurgen Habermas's original formulation distinguished between the literary and the political public spheres. While everyday news was a feature of the political public sphere, the literary public sphere was not so constrained journalistically by current events and provided an arena for deeper reflection. This article updates the notion of a literary public sphere into an expanded concept of the cultural public sphere, including the whole range of media and popular culture. This concept refers to the articulation of politics, public and personal, as a contested terrain through affective (aesthetic and emotional) modes of communication. Three typical political stances in relation to the cultural public sphere are identified and evaluated: uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention

Towards a Critical Understanding of Music, Emotion and Self-Identity

The article begins by outlining a dominant conception of these relations in sociologically informed analysis of music, which sees music primarily as a positive resource for active self-making. My argument is that this conception rests on a problematic notion of the self and also on an overly optimistic understanding of music, which implicitly sees music as highly independent of negative social and historical processes. I then attempt to construct a) a more adequately critical conception of personal identity in modern societies; and b) a more balanced appraisal of music-society relations. I suggest two ways in which relations between self, music and society may not always be quite so positive or as healthy as the dominant conception suggests: 1) Music is now bound up with the incorporation of authenticity and creativity into capitalism, and with intensified consumption habits. 2) Emotional self-realisation through music is now linked to status competition. Interviews are analysed

Whole-genome sequencing reveals host factors underlying critical COVID-19

Critical COVID-19 is caused by immune-mediated inflammatory lung injury. Host genetic variation influences the development of illness requiring critical care1 or hospitalization2–4 after infection with SARS-CoV-2. The GenOMICC (Genetics of Mortality in Critical Care) study enables the comparison of genomes from individuals who are critically ill with those of population controls to find underlying disease mechanisms. Here we use whole-genome sequencing in 7,491 critically ill individuals compared with 48,400 controls to discover and replicate 23 independent variants that significantly predispose to critical COVID-19. We identify 16 new independent associations, including variants within genes that are involved in interferon signalling (IL10RB and PLSCR1), leucocyte differentiation (BCL11A) and blood-type antigen secretor status (FUT2). Using transcriptome-wide association and colocalization to infer the effect of gene expression on disease severity, we find evidence that implicates multiple genes—including reduced expression of a membrane flippase (ATP11A), and increased expression of a mucin (MUC1)—in critical disease. Mendelian randomization provides evidence in support of causal roles for myeloid cell adhesion molecules (SELE, ICAM5 and CD209) and the coagulation factor F8, all of which are potentially druggable targets. Our results are broadly consistent with a multi-component model of COVID-19 pathophysiology, in which at least two distinct mechanisms can predispose to life-threatening disease: failure to control viral replication; or an enhanced tendency towards pulmonary inflammation and intravascular coagulation. We show that comparison between cases of critical illness and population controls is highly efficient for the detection of therapeutically relevant mechanisms of disease

The Coolness of Capitalism Today

This paper is about the reconciliation of cultural analysis with political economy in Marxist-inspired research on communications. It traces how these two traditions became separated with the development of a one-dimensional and consumerist cultural studies, on the one-hand, and a more classically Marxist political economy of communications, on the other hand, that was accused of holding a simplistic and erroneous concept of ideology. The paper defends a conception of ideology as distorted communication motivated by unequal power relations and sketches a multidimensional mode of cultural analysis that takes account of the moments of production, consumption and textual meaning in the circulation of communications and culture. In accordance with this framework of analysis, the cool-capitalism thesis is outlined and illustrated with reference to Apple, the ‘cool’ corporation. And, the all-purpose mobile communication device is selected as a key and urgent focus of attention for research on commodity fetishism and labour exploitation on a global scale today

Towards a sociology of the mobile phone

Use of the mobile phone is an immensely significant social and cultural phenomenon. However, market hype and utopian dreams greatly exaggerate its importance. The fundamental issue for sociology is the process of change. Bound up with contemporary issues of change, the mobile phone is a prime object for sociological attention both at the macro and micro levels of analysis. This article considers the strengths and weaknesses of four methods for studying the sociality of the mobile phone (social demography; political economy; conversation, discourse and text analysis; and ethnography), the different kinds of knowledge they produce, and the interests they represent. Recent ethnographic research on the mobile phone, particularly motivated by issues around the uncertain transition from 2G to the 3G technology, has examined the actual experience of routine use. Interpretative research is now supplementing purely instrumental research, thereby giving a much more nuanced understanding of mobile communications. Critical research on the mobile phone, of which there is little, is beginning to ask skeptical questions that should be pursued further

Do Populismo Cultural ao Capitalismo Legal / From cultural populism to cool capitalism

Durante a década de 1980, os Estudos Culturais na Grã-Bretanha – e em todos os lugares – tomaram uma reviravolta populista sem critérios. O campo de estudos tinha até aqui se focado, com uma orientação claramente opositora, em relação às artes, à cultura popular e de massa como lugares de contestação ideológica. Até o momento, o crescente interesse para a definição, e, mesmo a celebração dos processos de consumo cultural – a audiência ativa, a resistência através de rituais etc – perdeu de vista a luta econômica e política sobre a circulação da cultura na sociedade. Essa tendência cultural populista se tornou menos preocupada com o questionamento do status quo e, involuntariamente, apoiou o desenvolvimento neoliberal nos últimos trinta anos. Estudos culturais em evidência, assim, pararam de ser uma forma crítica de análise da condição cultural presente e, ao invés disso, trataram de identificar-se com ela. Isso foi possível porque a cultura predominante estava incorporando muitos tipos de discordância que os Estudos Culturais, como campo de pesquisa e educação, procurou apoiar e promover. A cultura predominante hoje é caracterizada neste artigo como capitalismo ‘legal’. Traçando a mudança histórica do significado de ‘legal’, o artigo apresenta o conceito de capitalismo legal – a incorporação do desafeto no capitalismo em si – e examina suas origens na cultura afro-americana, e sua absorção e neutralização através dos tempos, em ordem de caracterizar os aspectos mais marcantes da cultura predominante ao redor do mundo, atualmente. Em síntese, o artigo clama por uma renovação da crítica no interesse público que aplique análises multidimensionais para uma gama maior de questões. O objetivo analítico é prestar contas adequadamente para a complexidade lógica da circulação cultural em vários contextos simbólicos, econômicos, políticos e ecológicos por baixo do capitalismo neoliberal. A este respeito, a discussão visa a esclarecer o objeto de contestação em prol da intervenção cultural crítica na esfera públic

The Work of Raymond Williams

This podcast is a recording of Jim McGuigan's talk "The Work of Raymond Williams" that he presented in the CAMRI Research Seminar at the University of Westminster on October 15, 2014. In the talk, Jim McGuigan surveys Williams’s work and its enduring relevance to media and cultural analysis and why Williams’ 1983 book was mistakenly entitled 'Towards 2000', since it is as fresh and relevant to understanding the world now as it was when originally published. Jim has recently edited a collection of writings for Sage selected from the whole of Raymond Williams’s career, 'Raymond Williams on Culture and Society'. He has also edited and added to Williams’s 'Towards 2000', originally published in 1983, to be republished this year with the new title, 'A Short Counter-Revolution – Towards 2000 Revisited', also by Sage. Jim has also written several critical appreciations of Williams’s work, some of which have appeared in recent issues of 'Keywords', the journal of the Raymond Williams Society, and 'The Sociological Review'. His previous book publications include 'Cultural Populism' (1992), 'Culture and the Public Sphere' (1996), 'Modernity and Postmodern Culture' (1999, 2006), 'Rethinking Cultural Policy' (2004), 'Cool Capitalism' (2009) and 'Cultural Analysis' (2010). He is currently writing a book for Palgrave Macmillan to be entitled, 'Neoliberal Culture'. Until recently, Jim sold his labour power to Loughborough University. He is now a freelance scholar, writer and artist. McGuigan, Jim, ed. 2014. Raymond Williams: A Short Counter-Revolution. London: Sage. http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book242744?siteId=sage-uk&prodTypes=any&q=mcguigan&fs=1 McGuigan, Jim, ed. 2014. Raymond Williams on Culture and Society. London: Sage. http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book234838?siteId=sage-uk&prodTypes=any&q=mcguigan&fs=