Magical urbanism:Walter Benjamin and utopian realism in the film Ratcatcher

Deploys Walter Benjamin to discuss fantastical representations of childhood and class in the film Ratcatcher

Propaganda

The symbolic power of the state centrally depends on managing the relationship between media and politics. At the centre of this process is the operation of propaganda. Propaganda aims to shift public perceptions of or obscure the relations of ruling. By focussing on sociological processes, myths can be dispelled about propaganda as a smoothly-oiled machine that functions through carefully calibrated ends-means deliberations. Instead, propaganda is socially shaped by informal as well as formal relations of individuals and institutions

'The callous credit nexus':ideology and compulsion in the crisis of Neoliberalism

Many accounts of the rise and decline of neoliberalism forefront its ideological nature and capacity for hegemonic leadership. In contrast, I argue that outside of elite groups neoliberalism did not become hegemonic in Gramsci's sense of a 'national-popular' force. Neoliberalism is a convenient term to describe a two-stage process of 'purifying' the coercive nature of the capital relation through what Gramsci broadly called 'a war of movement' in the 1970s and 1980s and 'a war of position' in the 1990s and 2000s. This double-movement compelled credit-worthy individuals to routinely market, sell, purchase and perform for money-wages. New techniques of the self were perfected in the marketised war of position to service the credit-led financialisation of everyday life. Social positionings dependent on financialisation are now subject to a 'crisis of authority'

Playing with tension:national charisma and disgrace at Euro 2012

By the time of Euro 2012, deepening tensions of nationalism and internal social struggles were developing across Europe in worsening conditions of systemic crisis. The official football ideology of UEFA conceives Euro 2012 as a civilizing platform for mutual respect and brotherhood between competing nations. In contrast, what I call Hyper-Critical Theory conceives of football competitions like Euro 2012 as part of a de-civilising ‘sports mode of production’ that necessarily produces crisis conditions, alienation and violence on a mass scale, fostering nationalism, militarism and racism. Between these polar perspectives, the figurational sociology of sport associated with Norbert Elias proposes that major international football competitions like Euro 2012 creates and dissipates contingent tensions of ‘group charisma’ and ‘group disgrace’. Study of Euronews ‘post-national’ coverage of Euro 2012 allows their explanatory adequacy to be compared. In a competition structure like the Euros no social group – players, officials, media or fans – is able to disregard entirely the field capabilities of the ‘best minority of 11’ in the serious game of exemplifying the group charisma of nations

The ghost of Patrick Geddes:civics as applied sociology

In 1904 and 1905 Patrick Geddes (1905, 1906) read his famed, but today little-read, two-part paper, 'Civics: as Applied Sociology', to the first meetings of the British Sociological Society. Geddes is often thought of as a 'pioneer of sociology' (Mairet, 1957;Meller, 1990) and for some (egDevine, 1999: 296) as 'a seminal influence on sociology'. However, little of substance has been written to critically assess Geddes's intellectual legacy as a sociologist. His work is largely forgotten by sociologists in Britain (Abrams, 1968;Halliday, 1968;Evans, 1986). Few have been prepared to follow Geddes's ambition to bridge the chasm between nature and culture, environment and society, geography, biology and sociology. His conception of 'sociology', oriented towards social action from a standpoint explicitly informed by evolutionary theory. A re-appraisal of the contemporary relevance of Geddes's thinking on civics as applied sociology has to venture into the knotted problem of evolutionary sociology. It also requires giving some cogency to Geddes's often fragmentary and inconsistent mode of address. Although part of a post-positivist, 'larger modernism' Geddes remained mired in nineteenth century evolutionary thought and fought shy of dealing with larger issues of social class or the breakthrough work of early twentieth century sociology of Simmel, Weber and Durkheim. His apolitical notion of 'civics' limits its relevance to academic sociology today

Mediating the Scottish independence debate

In the six months leading up to the referendum vote on 18 September 2014 Scotland experienced a period of exceptionally heightened political discourse, a widespread form of political participation unusual in western liberal-democracies. For almost two years fundamental questions about nation, state and society that are routinely taken for granted were exposed to widespread public discussion and debate involving millions of individuals normally silenced by the political fetish. Instead, these became the subject of open, often heated, discussion and debate by wide layers of society. This process of self-representation meant that political discourse was forced to shift from the logic of political self-marketing as the neutral, technical preserve of small circles of networked state managers and media interlocutors, what Pierre Bourdieu (1991) referred to as ‘political fetishism’. This widened public discourse began to break the stranglehold of the political fetish in Scotland, most obviously in the political vertigo experienced by the representatives of the Unionist parties and what might be called ‘media Unionism’. A mass grassroots movement in support of Independence benefited from a changed and, in some ways, reinvigorated media field. Where television once threatened the authority of newspapers, social media now challenges the dominance of television and the press

The trouble with sectarianism

This chapter attempts to situate the moral panic around sectarianism in Scotland in wider relations of social power. Sectarianism valorizes symbolic distinction and separation as prohibitions against social and ideological promiscuity and contamination between established and outsider groups (Weber, 1946). Sectarianism in this sense has been eroded by widening circles of identification in Scotland. Sectarianism today takes the form of a civilising offensive mobilised by the legitimate sources of symbolic nomination to regulate and discipline outsiders defined by a chronic maladaptation to the civilising canopy of the national habitus in Scotland