Michael Gardiner
Biographic Data
| ID | 134007 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Gardiner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Gardiner |
| SIGNATURE | GARDINER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4727-7181 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The satire of the meritocracy: Foreclosed futures in Michael Young, Raymond Williams, and Muriel Spark
The high summer of the post-war British consensus is often seen as a period of social promise, in which the opportunity for social mobility was made available to all through the technocratic basis of the new welfare state: empirical measurement of work and ability promised a perpetual dynamism of just social organisation. The demand for all relationships to pass through algorithmic validation is by now familiar; but roots of a more recent accepta…
Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's In Praise of Shadows and critical transparency
Mainstream reception of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s literary essay In’ei Raisan/ In Praise of Shadows (1933) has tended to swing between writing it off as a nostalgic nationalist exceptionalism and marketing it as a melancholic hymn to everyday beauty, although recently much more nuanced positions have emerged in terms of the text’s aesthetic ‘authenticity’. There is much more at stake in In’ei Raisan, however, including a perception of the evisceratio…
Independence and Extinction in Scottish Wilderness Writing
Les crises de l’autorité constitutionnelle britannique ont souvent été des crises de la « métaphysique empiriste » au fondement de l’État — une philosophie visant à transformer le monde en un espace standardisé où tout objet soit chiffrable. Les spécialistes des études environnementales ont parfois abordé cette question, mais sans s’intéresser aux liens entre identité britannique, progrès empirique et logique extractive du monde-comme-propriété d…
Independence and Extinction in Scottish Wilderness Writing
Automatic for the People? Cybernetics and Left‐Accelerationism
Cultural Studies: Theorizing Politics, Politicizing Theory
Lithic agency, Scottish modernism, and the politics of nuclear war
This paper argues that entangledness with inorganic agency, particularly that of stone, not only speaks to recent object-oriented and ecocritical thought, but also marks a constitutional division within the UK, since ‘thing power’ implies a scepticism over the organic authority of an uncodified British constitution. The agency of stone undercuts the organicism of an eighteenth century understanding of natural law that can only understand the soci…
Nuclear Deficit: Why Nuclear Weapons Are Natural, but Scotland Doesn’t Need Nature
This article argues that millennial Scottish culture has been animated in large part by a push to overcome a historiographical compulsion built into the modern British state’s understanding of nature. This understanding of nature became the foundational principle of government during the Financial Revolution and British unification in the 1690s–1710, then was made the subject of a universal history by the Scottish Enlightenment of the later eight…
Henri Lefebvre e la sociologia della noia
The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre combined a rigorous critique of modernity with the search for utopian potentialities located in the hidden recesses of the every-day. This article will focus on a topic that is arguably central to his ‘critique of everyday life’ but has been entirely overlooked in the literature thus far: that of boredom. Often dismissed as trivial, boredom can be understood as a touchstone through which wider…
The British Stake in Japanese Modernity: Readings in Liberal Tradition and Native Modernism
This book describes firstly a Japanese modernity which is readable not only as a modernising, but also as a Britishing, and secondly modernist attempts to overhaul this British universalism in some well-known and some less-known Japanese texts. From the mid-nineteenth century, and particularly as hastened by the spectre of China in the First Opium War, Japan’s modernity was bound up with a convergence with British Newtonian cosmology, something u…
An Autonomist Marcuse
This essay examines key Marcusean themes through the lens of Italian (post-)autonomist thinker Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Bifo criticizes Marcuse’s argument that repressed “authentic” human qualities need to be “liberated” to bring about universal human happiness, because what Bifo calls “semiocapitalism”—global capitalism in the age of digital networks, financialization, and computerization—effectively “subsumes” desires and libidinal energies vis-à…
Spark versus Homo economicus
This essay looks at how Spark’s fiction from around the turn of the 1960s (Robinson, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, short stories) deals with the imperative of production in the post-war consensus. It is easy to see in this a parody of the practices of 1950s Time and Motion, but these themes also return us to the Scottish Enlightenment and the eighteenth century negotiation with a consolidating British set…
Bakhtin, Boredom, and the 'Democratization of Skepticism
This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Go…
Critique of Accelerationism
The global financial crisis beginning in 2008 has encouraged the revitalization of a wide spectrum of leftist theorizing, but arguably the most audacious is that of 'accelerationism'. Left-accelerationism sees the intensification of certain tendencies in late capitalist society as a way to escape its gravitational orbit and 'repurpose' the very material infrastructure of capitalism itself, to universally emancipatory ends. The central task here i…
B akhtin, M ikhail
This entry sketches the key ideas and biographical context of Russian cultural and literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975), as well as the work of the so‐called “Bakhtin Circle” that is associated with his name. Central concepts discussed include “alterity,” “dialogism,” “heteroglossia,” “intersubjectivity,” “polyphony,” and “carnival.”
Bakhtin and the ‘general intellect’
One of the key concepts in autonomist Marxism is the ‘general intellect’. As capitalism develops, labour and its products become increasingly ‘immaterial’, inasmuch as the physical side of production is taken over by automated systems. The result is that all aspects of the collective worker's affective, desiring and cognitive capabilities are now brought to bear on production itself. This problematises capitalistic notions of proprietary control,…
Bakhtin in the fullness of time: Bakhtinian theory and the process of social education
This special issue takes the works of Mikhail Bakhtin as its inspiration in the contemplation of the potential of dialogic scholarship for philosophy of education. Although a handful of recent EPAT
The Multitude Strikes Back? Boredom in an Age of Semiocapitalism
One of the most compelling arguments put forward by the so-called ‘autonomist’ tradition of Marxist thought is that the very affective and emotional registers of our lives are shaped fundamentally by transformations in the productive process now unfolding in the technologically-advanced societies of the global North. As such, the formation of subjectivity itself has become the privileged terrain of class struggle. Of special significance in this …
Chromatopes of Noh: An Analysis of Timbral Progressions in the Introductions to Three Plays
能楽で演奏される楽器や声において、音色が欠かせない表現方法であることは広く知 られているが、音色のデザインが、音楽形式に与える影響についての精緻な研究は少な い。本稿は、音響スペクトラムの詳細な分析を可能にする分光イメージングのソフトを 用いて、能楽における音色と音楽形式の関係を明らかにするものである。このような音 色デザインをクロマ(色)とトポス(空間的なモチーフまたは道)を合成して「クロマトプ ス」と名付けることにする
Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism
Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature
Some of the most incisive writers on the subject rethink the relationship between Britain, England and English literary culture. It is premised on the importance of devolution, the uncertainty of the
The Handbook of Visual Culture
Visual culture has become one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship, a reflection of how the study of human culture increasingly requires distinctively visual ways of thinking and methods of analysis. Bringing together leading international scholars to assess all aspects of visual culture, the Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the subject. The Handbook embraces the extraordinary range of disciplines which …
Post-Romantic irony in Bakhtin and Lefebvre
Although several writers have noted significant complementary features in the respective projects of Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and the French social thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), to date there has not been a systematic comparison of them. This article seeks to redress this oversight, by exploring some of the more intriguing of these conceptual dovetailings: first, their relationship to the intellect…
Henri Lefebvre and the 'Sociology of Boredom
The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed an account of modernity that combined rigorous critique, a rejection of nostalgia, left pessimism or transcendental appeals, and the search for utopian potentialities in the hidden recesses of the everyday. This article will focus on a topic that is arguably central to his 'critique of everyday life' but has been entirely overlooked in the literature thus far: that of boredom. Althou…
Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives
Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Everyday Life and the Public Sphere
Alterity and Ethics: A Dialogical Perspective
Henri Lefebvre and the 'Sociology of Boredom
The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed an account of modernity that combined rigorous critique, a rejection of nostalgia, left pessimism or transcendental appeals, and the search for utopian potentialities in the hidden recesses of the everyday. This article will focus on a topic that is arguably central to his 'critique of everyday life' but has been entirely overlooked in the literature thus far: that of boredom. Althou…
Everyday utopianism: Lefebvre and his critics
The strategy of sociocultural critique through the ‘problematization’ or ‘defamiliarization’ of the habitualized character of everyday life is one that is well-established in the literature, especially for adherents of various neo-Marxisms. However, in recent years, several prominent critics have taken issue with the concept of defamiliarization, arguing that the habit-bound, ‘distracted’ and routinized character of the everyday cannot be easily …
Rethinking everyday life: And then nothing turns itself inside out
The contingencies and permeabilities and rhythms of everyday life make it notoriously difficult to pin down in any determinant way. Hence, everyday life places unique demands upon critical practice and conceptualization. In following one potential angle of approach, this essay looks at the influence that philosopher Gottfried Leibniz played in the thinking of sociologist and everyday life philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre's theory of moments a…
Everyday Knowledge
Ecology and carnival: Traces of a ?green? social theory in the writings of M. M. Bakhtin
Marxism and the convergence of utopia and the everyday
The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its th…
Critique of Accelerationism
The global financial crisis beginning in 2008 has encouraged the revitalization of a wide spectrum of leftist theorizing, but arguably the most audacious is that of 'accelerationism'. Left-accelerationism sees the intensification of certain tendencies in late capitalist society as a way to escape its gravitational orbit and 'repurpose' the very material infrastructure of capitalism itself, to universally emancipatory ends. The central task here i…
Bakhtin in the fullness of time: Bakhtinian theory and the process of social education
This special issue takes the works of Mikhail Bakhtin as its inspiration in the contemplation of the potential of dialogic scholarship for philosophy of education. Although a handful of recent EPAT
Foucault, ethics and dialogue
Automatic for the People? Cybernetics and Left‐Accelerationism
Technology Time and the Conversations of Modernity
Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity takes as its impetus the idea that technology is an embodiment of our uneasiness with finitude. Lorenzo Simpson argues that technology has succeeded in granting our wish to domesticate time. He shows how this attitude affects our understanding of the meaning of action and our ability to discern meaning in our lives
An Autonomist Marcuse
This essay examines key Marcusean themes through the lens of Italian (post-)autonomist thinker Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Bifo criticizes Marcuse’s argument that repressed “authentic” human qualities need to be “liberated” to bring about universal human happiness, because what Bifo calls “semiocapitalism”—global capitalism in the age of digital networks, financialization, and computerization—effectively “subsumes” desires and libidinal energies vis-à…
Bakhtin, Boredom, and the 'Democratization of Skepticism
This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Go…
Bakhtin and the ‘general intellect’
One of the key concepts in autonomist Marxism is the ‘general intellect’. As capitalism develops, labour and its products become increasingly ‘immaterial’, inasmuch as the physical side of production is taken over by automated systems. The result is that all aspects of the collective worker's affective, desiring and cognitive capabilities are now brought to bear on production itself. This problematises capitalistic notions of proprietary control,…
A light to the world: British devolution and colonial vision
This essay explores the centrality of vision to colonial knowledge, and particularly the importance of a consolidated Britishness to this form of knowledge. It stresses that, in the case of anglophone imperialism, visual metaphors were created by those most keen to get involved in the empire – as in the assumptions of Edinburgh Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith and Hume. So far, those disciplines which have been concerned with Britain’s break-…
Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world
The Dialogics of Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology
In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. This book, refusing to adopt this approach, instead details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. It argues that desire and anxiety constitute the erotic in Shakespearean drama - circulating throughout the dramatic texts, traversing masculine and feminine sit…
Bakhtinian revels
Ecology and carnival: Traces of a ?green? social theory in the writings of M. M. Bakhtin
Foucault, ethics and dialogue
Alterity and Ethics: A Dialogical Perspective
Technology Time and the Conversations of Modernity
Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity takes as its impetus the idea that technology is an embodiment of our uneasiness with finitude. Lorenzo Simpson argues that technology has succeeded in granting our wish to domesticate time. He shows how this attitude affects our understanding of the meaning of action and our ability to discern meaning in our lives
The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society
Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words
Critiques of Everyday Life: An Introduction
Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in the study of everyday life within the social sciences and humanities. In Critiques of Everyday Life Michael Gardiner proposes that there exists a counter-tradition within everyday life theorising. This counter-tradition has sought not merely to describe lived experience, but to transform it by elevating our understanding of the everyday to the status of a critical knowledge.In his analysis Gard…
Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue, Everyday Life and the Public Sphere
A light to the world: British devolution and colonial vision
This essay explores the centrality of vision to colonial knowledge, and particularly the importance of a consolidated Britishness to this form of knowledge. It stresses that, in the case of anglophone imperialism, visual metaphors were created by those most keen to get involved in the empire – as in the assumptions of Edinburgh Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith and Hume. So far, those disciplines which have been concerned with Britain’s break-…
Everyday utopianism: Lefebvre and his critics
The strategy of sociocultural critique through the ‘problematization’ or ‘defamiliarization’ of the habitualized character of everyday life is one that is well-established in the literature, especially for adherents of various neo-Marxisms. However, in recent years, several prominent critics have taken issue with the concept of defamiliarization, arguing that the habit-bound, ‘distracted’ and routinized character of the everyday cannot be easily …
Rethinking everyday life: And then nothing turns itself inside out
The contingencies and permeabilities and rhythms of everyday life make it notoriously difficult to pin down in any determinant way. Hence, everyday life places unique demands upon critical practice and conceptualization. In following one potential angle of approach, this essay looks at the influence that philosopher Gottfried Leibniz played in the thinking of sociologist and everyday life philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre's theory of moments a…
From Trocchi to TrainspottingScottish Critical Theory Since 1960
This book charts the course of Scottish Critical Theory since the 1960s. It provocatively argues that ‘French’ critical-theoretical ideas have developed in tandem with Scottish writing during this period. Its themes can be read as a breakdown in Scottish Enlightenment thinking after empire — precisely the process which permitted the rise of ‘theory’. The book places within a wider theoretical context writers such as Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Ia…
Vladislavić meets his Boshoff: Ivan Encounters Willem's Constructs
Marxism and the convergence of utopia and the everyday
The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its th…
Everyday Knowledge
Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal
Book Review| January 01 2010 Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal. Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal . London: Pluto Press, 2008. xvii + 236 pp. Paperback, 24.95.White, Damian F. Michael E. Gardiner Michael E. Gardiner University of Western Ontario Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Utopian Studies (2010) 21 (1): 191–197. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.21.1.0191 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Sit…
Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives
The Handbook of Visual Culture
Visual culture has become one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship, a reflection of how the study of human culture increasingly requires distinctively visual ways of thinking and methods of analysis. Bringing together leading international scholars to assess all aspects of visual culture, the Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the subject. The Handbook embraces the extraordinary range of disciplines which …
Post-Romantic irony in Bakhtin and Lefebvre
Although several writers have noted significant complementary features in the respective projects of Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and the French social thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), to date there has not been a systematic comparison of them. This article seeks to redress this oversight, by exploring some of the more intriguing of these conceptual dovetailings: first, their relationship to the intellect…
Henri Lefebvre and the 'Sociology of Boredom
The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed an account of modernity that combined rigorous critique, a rejection of nostalgia, left pessimism or transcendental appeals, and the search for utopian potentialities in the hidden recesses of the everyday. This article will focus on a topic that is arguably central to his 'critique of everyday life' but has been entirely overlooked in the literature thus far: that of boredom. Althou…
Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism
Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature
Some of the most incisive writers on the subject rethink the relationship between Britain, England and English literary culture. It is premised on the importance of devolution, the uncertainty of the
Sociology (33 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Aesthetics (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Art (17 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Literature (11 works) · History (10 works)