Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons^™

I Believe, Rusudan Dushuashvili

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how products become believable and desirable through the stories that surround them, and how design enables the continuous cycle of desire that defines consumption. Drawing on  the underlying structures of myth-making, identity, and belonging that allow consumer culture to function, it argues that consumer culture operates through the same instruments older systems of belief have always used — narrative, ritual, sacred objects, and shared language — and that design is what makes the story stick to the object.

“I Believe” is an archive of objects collected from contemporary consumer culture. Half are products found in the marketplace; …

Thinking Blue / Writing Red: Marxism And The (Post)Human, Stephen C. Tumino

Publications and Research

Thinking Blue/Writing Red interrogates contemporary culture across a range of texts, from the pandemic (‘Covid’ and ‘Trump Speak’) to high theory (Melville's narratives) and popular culture (Beyoncé's ‘Formation’ and Super Bowl performance, Twin Peaks , metamodern ‘cli-fi’ films). Inspired by Derrida’s idea of the secret, Tumino examines the significance of social movements (Black Lives Matter, Occupy, alter-globalization) and naïve art (Darger, Ryden) to argue that these texts speak of the secrets that capitalism cannot speak. Contending that the cultural surfaces narrate only the ‘nonsecret,’ that to see the social logic of the culture one must dig into what Bruno Latour …

At Noon: (Post)Nihilistic Temporalities In The Age Of Machine-Learning Algorithms That Speak, Talha Issevenler

Publications and Research

This article recapitulates and develops the attempts in the Nietzschean traditions to address and overcome the proliferation of nihilism that Nietzsche predicted to unfold in the next 200 years (WP 2). Nietzsche approached nihilism not merely as a psychology but as a labyrinthic and pervasive historical process whereby the highest values of culture and founding assumptions of philosophical thought prevented the further flourishing of life. Therefore, he thought nihilism had to be encountered and experienced on many, often opposing, fronts to be fully consumed and left behind. Thus, just as Nietzsche captured the subtle reinventions of nihilism in new forms …

Anxiety In The Capitalism Of Late Modernity, Toyo Kawabata

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

The logic of capitalism affects both individuals and society. Alienation augments existential anxiety in the current precarity capitalism, which keeps urging competition among individuals to survive in capitalism and grow more. Excessive individualism, materialism, and consumerism in capitalism may weaken social ties and lower self-recognition, augmenting the existential anxiety of individuals. Losers in capitalism aggravate their anxiety whereas even winners may keep being anxious in the never-ending competition in capitalism. As long as people are kept engaged in capitalism, the pressure of the competition leads to a vicious cycle that keeps inducing anxiety, which signifies the precarity of capitalism. Existential …

The Social Current Of Capitalist Dictatorship? Neoclassical Economic And Non-Marxist Sociological Conceptualization, Milan Z. Zafirovski

Journal of Ideology

The paper introduces the concept and social current of capitalist dictatorship to the broader sociological audience, aside from Marxist sociology. It conceptualizes, specifies and exemplifies capitalist dictatorship in the form of a mostly neoclassical economic and non-Marxist sociological conceptualization. Generally, it advances a conceptualization in terms of dictatorial rule of capital over non-capital, which it derives from neoclassical economic and non-Marxist sociological frameworks rather than the Marxist framework. Particularly, the paper conceptualizes capitalist dictatorship in terms of autocracy, oligarchy and plutocracy and kleptocracy within capitalism in accordance with neoclassical and non-Marxist frameworks. Also, it briefly outlines additional neoclassical economic and …

Critical Reflections On America’S Green New Deal: Capital, Labor, And The Dynamics Of Contemporary Social Change, Alex Stoner

Journal Articles

The increasing urgency of the current climate crisis has been accompanied by a growing desire for constructive answers on how to confront the situation effectively and meaningfully. Yet, the pace of global climate change (GCC) continues to accelerate more rapidly than societal, institutional, and individual responses can be formed. The gap between increasingly sophisticated knowledge of objective biophysical threat, on the one hand, and our ability to transform society in accordance with this awareness, on the other hand, highlights the importance of ideology. Ideological barriers have become a major stumbling block for climate change activists and researchers. Focusing on the …

Global Movements In The Capitalist World System: Occupy Wall Street And The World Social Forum, Loren M. Collins

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Over the past forty years, the information revolution, a neoliberal agenda and globalizing financial markets have led to a quantitative increase in accumulation, widening inequalities throughout the globe. This widening inequality has cast doubt on the legitimacy of a world system governed primarily by the invisible hand of the free market. Economic power has taken priority over political power in determining the nature of social relations and our institutions. This imbalance has opened the door for resistance movements to challenge a system that fails to represent the interests of the vast majority of the world’s population while it benefits a …

Critique And Transformation: On The Hypothetical Nature Of Ecosystem Service Value And Its Neo-Marxist, Liberal And Pragmatist Criticisms, Andony P. Melathopoulos, Alex Stoner

Journal Articles

Ecosystem service valuation (ESV) attempts to transform the opposition of human economic necessity and ecological conservation by valuing the latter in terms of the services rendered by the former. However, despite a number of ESV-inspired sustainability initiatives since the 1990s, global ecological degradation continues to accelerate. This suggests that ESV has fallen far short of its goals of sustainable social transformation—a failure which has generated considerable criticism. This paper reviews three prominent lines of ESV criticism: 1) the neo-Marxist criticism, which emphasizes the “fictitious” character of ecosystem commodities; 2) the liberal criticism through Friedrich Hayek's concept “scientistic objectivism”; and 3) …