Bjørn Schiermer
Biographic Data
| ID | 258476 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bjørn Schiermer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bjørn |
| FAMILY NAME | Schiermer |
| SIGNATURE | SCHIERMER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8643-543X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 59 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The issue and its publics: Latour, Durkheim and object-oriented politics
Drawing loosely upon observations made during the COVID-19 crisis, the paper discusses how democratic publics form and collide around political issues in Western democracies. Inspired by Bruno Latour's political philosophy, I demonstrate the advantages of an object-oriented perspective on democratic practice. Then, I endeavour to show the deficits of this perspective, with support from an unexpected source: Émile Durkheim's late works. Reinterpre…
Affective Turn, or Return: A Critical Overview of Music and Affective Politics
The 'affective turn' suggests that we pay attention to how affects create subjectivities, build communities, and shape new forms of politics in the making. It invites us to move beyond established humanities and social science paradigms and toward richer forms of contextual analysis by studying how bodies - human and otherwise - 'act and are acted upon' (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 1). The 'affective turn' requires sensitive attention to a host of …
Collective and material embeddedness: A critique of subcultural studies and a new perspective
This paper first investigates why the main strands in conventional subcultural and post-subcultural research have neglected the collective and material aspects of subcultural practice. It then investigates more recent attempts to include collectivity and materiality in the analysis and seeks to further develop such perspectives. In this way the paper seeks to demonstrate the need for a new embedded perspective on the material and collective dimen…
Youth Collectivities: Cultures and Objects
Forms of Collective Engagement in Youth Transitions: A Global Perspective
This collection sheds light on diverse forms of collective engagement among young people. Recent developments in youth studies, and the changing global shape of socio-economic conditions for young people, demand new approaches and ideas. Contributors focus on novel processes, practices and routines within youth collectivity in various contexts across the globe, including Indonesia, Spain, Italy, Norway and Poland. The chapters pay particular atte…
Creative affects: Affective phases in creative work processes
The paper investigates the wide spectrum of affects characteristic of creative practice. It is centred on an empirical case study of the different creative phases that characterize the work of a group of professional newspaper cartoonists. The study explores the analytical possibilities of an object-oriented and affect theoretical approach to creative practice. It is loosely inspired by the phenomenology of affect developed by British-Australian …
Arcades Project/Benjamin
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German materialist historian, literary critic, and critical theorist. He counts among the main figures of the (early) Frankfurt School. Benjamin worked on the Arcades Project during the last 13 years of his life. The book, which remained unfinished in Benjamin's lifetime, is considered by many to be his major achievement. It encompasses a vast selection of historical materials centered on nineteenth‐century Paris…
Durkheim on imitation
The chapter demonstrates that the concept of imitation can be used as a prism to make visible a series of conceptual transformations separating the young Durkheim of The Rules of Sociological Method and Suicide from the older Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim wants to secure an exclusive object for the new science of sociology and this leads him to the idea of the social as sui generis and thus to his wish to distance h…
Neo-Tribes and The Subcultural Imagination
Weber's Alternative Theory of Action: Relationalism and Object-Oriented Action in Max Weber's Work
The present paper aims to unearth the rudiments of an alternative theory of action in Weber. Centring on salient descriptions of scientific practice found in Weber, I argue that one finds so-called "relational" impulses in these instances, which are at odds with the Kantian, subject-centred and dualist perspectives pervading much of Weber's thought.The paper consists of two parts. In the first-critical-part, after a short sketch of my relational …
Nostalgia, irony and collectivity in late-modern culture: The ritual watching of The Disney Christmas Show in Scandinavia
The paper seeks to promote a sociological understanding of the current wave of nostalgic expressions haunting late-modern Western culture and to re-evaluate the predominantly negative assessment of nostalgia. Filling two gaps in the existing research on nostalgia, the authors wish (1) to reintegrate into the phenomenon its experiential and collective dimensions and (2) to propose a theoretical sociological framework capable of analysing nostalgic…
The Veil of the Masses: Collectivity and Experience in Walter Benjamin
Fetishes and factishes: Durkheim and Latour
This paper defends the concept of 'fetishism' as an explanatory parameter in sociological theorizing on Durkheimian grounds, while at the same time paying due attention to important insights regarding the role of objects in social life, originating from Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It critically assesses the current critique of the concept of fetishism propagated by ANT protagonist Bruno Latour.Latour and suggests a compromise between these two 's…
The (in)actuality of Walter Benjamin: On the relation between the temporal and the social in Benjamin's work
This paper addresses the relation between the social and the temporal. Its goal is to investigate the ways in which collective embeddedness interferes with the experience of time. To address this relation, I engage the concept of actuality in the work of Walter Benjamin. On the one hand, Benjamin's work offers a wealth of inspiring, intriguing, and elaborated reflections on the relation between actuality and temporality; on the other hand, as I w…
Weber's listening: Non-purposive figures in Weber
The article attempts to uncover non-intentional impulses in Weber's sociology that are at odds with his 'official' theory of action and with textbook understandings of 'interpretative' Weberian sociology. In the first part of the article, I critically sketch what I take to be central dogmas in Weberian thought and in the literature blocking for new or different interpretations of his work and his concept of calling. In the second part of the arti…
On the Ageing of Objects in Modern Culture: Ornament and Crime
The article seeks to develop a new conceptual framework suitable for analysing the ageing processes of objects in modern culture. The basic intuition is that object experience cannot be analysed separately from collective participation. The article focuses on the question of the 'timeless' nature of modernist design and seeks to understand why modernist objects age more slowly than other objects. First, inspired by the late Durkheim's account of …
Fænomenologi og postfænomenologi: Et manifestalt review-essay
Late-Modern Symbolism: Continuity and Discontinuity Between the Modern and the Pre-Modern in Durkheim’s Work
Through analysis of key texts, I seek to demonstrate the explanative potential of Durkheim’s sociology of religion in the present context. I critically readdress the idea, found in his early work, that modernity is characterized by a rupture with pre-modern forms of solidarity. First, I investigate the ways in which Durkheim sets up a stark distinction between the pre-modern and the modern in his early work, and how this distinction is further ce…
Durkheim's Concept of Mechanical Solidarity – Where Did It Go
Late-modern hipsters: New tendencies in popular culture
The article deals with the cultural significance of a new figure in late-modern Western culture: the hipster. The current hipster culture, so I argue, can be used as a magnifying glass that makes impending changes to our conception of culture and of cultural development visible. It ushers in broader cultural and social changes: different relations among generations, new ways of relating to technology and media, new ways of being together, and new…
La raison sensible et ses limites: Le Bon Goût, Le Mauvais Goût Et Le Sans Goût
Le goût est souvent considéré comme un ensemble de préférences plus ou moins immuables guidant les choix et traduisant une prédilection pour certains genres ou caractéristiques esthétiques des êtres et des choses. Cet article propose une compréhension plus dynamique de la notion de goût : le goût en tant que forme de sensibilité nous permettant de réagir de façon spontanée et appropriée par rapport à des contextes ou des situations complexes. Une…
Aura, cult value, and the postmodern crowd: A Durkheimian reading of Walter Benjamin's artwork essay
This paper presents a reading of Walter Benjamin's much-read essay 'The artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction'. Drawing on a Durkheimian conception of the relationship between the cult and its cult objects, I seek to differentiate (better than Benjamin himself) the notions of 'aura' and of 'cult value'. Thereby, I hope to contour a theoretical model for dealing with mediated sociality suitable for a postmodern reality. In this reality, de…
Quasi-objects, Cult Objects and Fashion Objects: On Two Kinds of Fetishism on Display in Modern Culture
This article attempts to rehabilitate the concept of fetishism and to contribute to the debate on the social role of objects as well as to fashion theory. Extrapolating from Michel Serres' theory of the quasi-objects, I distinguish two phenomenologies possessing almost opposite characteristics. These two phenomenologies are, so I argue, essential to quasi-object theory, yet largely ignored by Serres' sociological interpreters. They correspond wit…
Mode, Bewusstsein und Kommunikation
Dieser Artikel handelt vom Begriff der Mode aus systemtheoretischer Sicht. Er ist von der Idee getragen, dass das Verhältnis zwischen Mode und Bewusstsein einen Schlüssel anbietet sowohl für ein Verständnis des Phänomens der Mode als auch für die Relation zwischen Mode und Kommunikation. Er thematisiert den imitationellen Pol der Mode als ein latentes soziales Ritual, das sich hinter den aufgeladenen Modeobjekten verbirgt. Vor diesem Hintergrund …
Fashion Victims: On the Individualizing and De-individualizing Powers of Fashion
This article discusses the popular notion of the “fashion victim.” It conceives of the notion of fashion victimization as an integral part of existence in modern individualized society. 1) Through analyzing different accounts of fashion victimization, I aim to distil a common phenomenological core extant in these experiences. As we will see, these experiences tell us a great deal about the individualizing and de-individualizing dynamics of fashio…
Late-modern hipsters: New tendencies in popular culture
The article deals with the cultural significance of a new figure in late-modern Western culture: the hipster. The current hipster culture, so I argue, can be used as a magnifying glass that makes impending changes to our conception of culture and of cultural development visible. It ushers in broader cultural and social changes: different relations among generations, new ways of relating to technology and media, new ways of being together, and new…
Durkheim's Concept of Mechanical Solidarity – Where Did It Go
Quasi-objects, Cult Objects and Fashion Objects: On Two Kinds of Fetishism on Display in Modern Culture
This article attempts to rehabilitate the concept of fetishism and to contribute to the debate on the social role of objects as well as to fashion theory. Extrapolating from Michel Serres' theory of the quasi-objects, I distinguish two phenomenologies possessing almost opposite characteristics. These two phenomenologies are, so I argue, essential to quasi-object theory, yet largely ignored by Serres' sociological interpreters. They correspond wit…
Weber's Alternative Theory of Action: Relationalism and Object-Oriented Action in Max Weber's Work
The present paper aims to unearth the rudiments of an alternative theory of action in Weber. Centring on salient descriptions of scientific practice found in Weber, I argue that one finds so-called "relational" impulses in these instances, which are at odds with the Kantian, subject-centred and dualist perspectives pervading much of Weber's thought.The paper consists of two parts. In the first-critical-part, after a short sketch of my relational …
Fetishes and factishes: Durkheim and Latour
This paper defends the concept of 'fetishism' as an explanatory parameter in sociological theorizing on Durkheimian grounds, while at the same time paying due attention to important insights regarding the role of objects in social life, originating from Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It critically assesses the current critique of the concept of fetishism propagated by ANT protagonist Bruno Latour.Latour and suggests a compromise between these two 's…
Fashion Victims: On the Individualizing and De-individualizing Powers of Fashion
This article discusses the popular notion of the “fashion victim.” It conceives of the notion of fashion victimization as an integral part of existence in modern individualized society. 1) Through analyzing different accounts of fashion victimization, I aim to distil a common phenomenological core extant in these experiences. As we will see, these experiences tell us a great deal about the individualizing and de-individualizing dynamics of fashio…
Collective and material embeddedness: A critique of subcultural studies and a new perspective
This paper first investigates why the main strands in conventional subcultural and post-subcultural research have neglected the collective and material aspects of subcultural practice. It then investigates more recent attempts to include collectivity and materiality in the analysis and seeks to further develop such perspectives. In this way the paper seeks to demonstrate the need for a new embedded perspective on the material and collective dimen…
Creative affects: Affective phases in creative work processes
The paper investigates the wide spectrum of affects characteristic of creative practice. It is centred on an empirical case study of the different creative phases that characterize the work of a group of professional newspaper cartoonists. The study explores the analytical possibilities of an object-oriented and affect theoretical approach to creative practice. It is loosely inspired by the phenomenology of affect developed by British-Australian …
Weber's listening: Non-purposive figures in Weber
The article attempts to uncover non-intentional impulses in Weber's sociology that are at odds with his 'official' theory of action and with textbook understandings of 'interpretative' Weberian sociology. In the first part of the article, I critically sketch what I take to be central dogmas in Weberian thought and in the literature blocking for new or different interpretations of his work and his concept of calling. In the second part of the arti…
On the Ageing of Objects in Modern Culture: Ornament and Crime
The article seeks to develop a new conceptual framework suitable for analysing the ageing processes of objects in modern culture. The basic intuition is that object experience cannot be analysed separately from collective participation. The article focuses on the question of the 'timeless' nature of modernist design and seeks to understand why modernist objects age more slowly than other objects. First, inspired by the late Durkheim's account of …
Late-Modern Symbolism: Continuity and Discontinuity Between the Modern and the Pre-Modern in Durkheim’s Work
Through analysis of key texts, I seek to demonstrate the explanative potential of Durkheim’s sociology of religion in the present context. I critically readdress the idea, found in his early work, that modernity is characterized by a rupture with pre-modern forms of solidarity. First, I investigate the ways in which Durkheim sets up a stark distinction between the pre-modern and the modern in his early work, and how this distinction is further ce…
Ironiens kultur og kulturens ironi. En undersøgelse af senmoderne sensibiliteter
Artiklen ønsker at undersøge, hvorledes kulturelle dynamikker udgør en faktor bag humorens historiske forandringer. Dens ambition er at levere en kulturdiagnostisk undersøgelse af nye populære sensibilitets- og socialitetsformer. Artiklen forsøger at gøre indsigter fra humorens filosofi hos S. Kierkegaard, J. P. Sartre og H. Bergson tilgængelige for sociologien ved at placere dem i en simmelsk kulturteoretisk ramme. Nutidens ironiske sensibilitet…
Til forsvar for kritikken - til sociologikonference i Aarhus
af Bjørn Schiermer Til forsvar for kritikken Jeg havde en sjov fornemmelse i maven flere gange under den just forløbne sociologikonference i Aarhus.Det kulminerede under Bülent Dikens forelaesning, hvor det naermest udviklede sig til en form for mavepine.Eller måske er det bare spaendinger.I hvert fald er det ikke altid udelukkende ubehageligt.Måske udvikler man en form for resistens, en form
Durkheimian Heritage - Bernard Valade (coord.), Durkheim – L'institution de la sociologie (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2008)
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Fashion Objects: Breaking Up the Durkheimian Cult
This article attempts to create a framework for understanding modern fashion phenomena on the basis of Durkheim's sociology of religion. It focuses on Durkheim's conception of the relation between the cult and the sacred object, on his notion of ‘exteri-orisation’, and on his theory of the social symbol in an attempt to describe the peculiar attraction of the fashion object and its social constitution. However, Durkheim's notions of cult and ritu…
Imitation et individualité: Sur la notion de fashion victim
Cet article traite des dangers sociaux de la mode. Il se concentre sur la notion populaire de fashion victim . À travers quelques témoignages de cas de « victimes de la mode », nous essayons de dégager un noyau commun de ces expériences. Nous verrons alors que celles-ci nous serviront comme clé de compréhension de la dynamique individualisante/désindividualisante de la mode. Ensuite, nous tentons de montrer comment cette analyse peut être utilisé…
Mode, Bewusstsein und Kommunikation
Dieser Artikel handelt vom Begriff der Mode aus systemtheoretischer Sicht. Er ist von der Idee getragen, dass das Verhältnis zwischen Mode und Bewusstsein einen Schlüssel anbietet sowohl für ein Verständnis des Phänomens der Mode als auch für die Relation zwischen Mode und Kommunikation. Er thematisiert den imitationellen Pol der Mode als ein latentes soziales Ritual, das sich hinter den aufgeladenen Modeobjekten verbirgt. Vor diesem Hintergrund …
Fashion Victims: On the Individualizing and De-individualizing Powers of Fashion
This article discusses the popular notion of the “fashion victim.” It conceives of the notion of fashion victimization as an integral part of existence in modern individualized society. 1) Through analyzing different accounts of fashion victimization, I aim to distil a common phenomenological core extant in these experiences. As we will see, these experiences tell us a great deal about the individualizing and de-individualizing dynamics of fashio…
Quasi-objects, Cult Objects and Fashion Objects: On Two Kinds of Fetishism on Display in Modern Culture
This article attempts to rehabilitate the concept of fetishism and to contribute to the debate on the social role of objects as well as to fashion theory. Extrapolating from Michel Serres' theory of the quasi-objects, I distinguish two phenomenologies possessing almost opposite characteristics. These two phenomenologies are, so I argue, essential to quasi-object theory, yet largely ignored by Serres' sociological interpreters. They correspond wit…
Aura, cult value, and the postmodern crowd: A Durkheimian reading of Walter Benjamin's artwork essay
This paper presents a reading of Walter Benjamin's much-read essay 'The artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction'. Drawing on a Durkheimian conception of the relationship between the cult and its cult objects, I seek to differentiate (better than Benjamin himself) the notions of 'aura' and of 'cult value'. Thereby, I hope to contour a theoretical model for dealing with mediated sociality suitable for a postmodern reality. In this reality, de…
La raison sensible et ses limites: Le Bon Goût, Le Mauvais Goût Et Le Sans Goût
Le goût est souvent considéré comme un ensemble de préférences plus ou moins immuables guidant les choix et traduisant une prédilection pour certains genres ou caractéristiques esthétiques des êtres et des choses. Cet article propose une compréhension plus dynamique de la notion de goût : le goût en tant que forme de sensibilité nous permettant de réagir de façon spontanée et appropriée par rapport à des contextes ou des situations complexes. Une…
Late-modern hipsters: New tendencies in popular culture
The article deals with the cultural significance of a new figure in late-modern Western culture: the hipster. The current hipster culture, so I argue, can be used as a magnifying glass that makes impending changes to our conception of culture and of cultural development visible. It ushers in broader cultural and social changes: different relations among generations, new ways of relating to technology and media, new ways of being together, and new…
Fænomenologi og postfænomenologi: Et manifestalt review-essay
Late-Modern Symbolism: Continuity and Discontinuity Between the Modern and the Pre-Modern in Durkheim’s Work
Through analysis of key texts, I seek to demonstrate the explanative potential of Durkheim’s sociology of religion in the present context. I critically readdress the idea, found in his early work, that modernity is characterized by a rupture with pre-modern forms of solidarity. First, I investigate the ways in which Durkheim sets up a stark distinction between the pre-modern and the modern in his early work, and how this distinction is further ce…
Durkheim's Concept of Mechanical Solidarity – Where Did It Go
The Veil of the Masses: Collectivity and Experience in Walter Benjamin
Fetishes and factishes: Durkheim and Latour
This paper defends the concept of 'fetishism' as an explanatory parameter in sociological theorizing on Durkheimian grounds, while at the same time paying due attention to important insights regarding the role of objects in social life, originating from Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It critically assesses the current critique of the concept of fetishism propagated by ANT protagonist Bruno Latour.Latour and suggests a compromise between these two 's…
The (in)actuality of Walter Benjamin: On the relation between the temporal and the social in Benjamin's work
This paper addresses the relation between the social and the temporal. Its goal is to investigate the ways in which collective embeddedness interferes with the experience of time. To address this relation, I engage the concept of actuality in the work of Walter Benjamin. On the one hand, Benjamin's work offers a wealth of inspiring, intriguing, and elaborated reflections on the relation between actuality and temporality; on the other hand, as I w…
Weber's listening: Non-purposive figures in Weber
The article attempts to uncover non-intentional impulses in Weber's sociology that are at odds with his 'official' theory of action and with textbook understandings of 'interpretative' Weberian sociology. In the first part of the article, I critically sketch what I take to be central dogmas in Weberian thought and in the literature blocking for new or different interpretations of his work and his concept of calling. In the second part of the arti…
On the Ageing of Objects in Modern Culture: Ornament and Crime
The article seeks to develop a new conceptual framework suitable for analysing the ageing processes of objects in modern culture. The basic intuition is that object experience cannot be analysed separately from collective participation. The article focuses on the question of the 'timeless' nature of modernist design and seeks to understand why modernist objects age more slowly than other objects. First, inspired by the late Durkheim's account of …
Nostalgia, irony and collectivity in late-modern culture: The ritual watching of The Disney Christmas Show in Scandinavia
The paper seeks to promote a sociological understanding of the current wave of nostalgic expressions haunting late-modern Western culture and to re-evaluate the predominantly negative assessment of nostalgia. Filling two gaps in the existing research on nostalgia, the authors wish (1) to reintegrate into the phenomenon its experiential and collective dimensions and (2) to propose a theoretical sociological framework capable of analysing nostalgic…
Arcades Project/Benjamin
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German materialist historian, literary critic, and critical theorist. He counts among the main figures of the (early) Frankfurt School. Benjamin worked on the Arcades Project during the last 13 years of his life. The book, which remained unfinished in Benjamin's lifetime, is considered by many to be his major achievement. It encompasses a vast selection of historical materials centered on nineteenth‐century Paris…
Durkheim on imitation
The chapter demonstrates that the concept of imitation can be used as a prism to make visible a series of conceptual transformations separating the young Durkheim of The Rules of Sociological Method and Suicide from the older Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim wants to secure an exclusive object for the new science of sociology and this leads him to the idea of the social as sui generis and thus to his wish to distance h…
Neo-Tribes and The Subcultural Imagination
Weber's Alternative Theory of Action: Relationalism and Object-Oriented Action in Max Weber's Work
The present paper aims to unearth the rudiments of an alternative theory of action in Weber. Centring on salient descriptions of scientific practice found in Weber, I argue that one finds so-called "relational" impulses in these instances, which are at odds with the Kantian, subject-centred and dualist perspectives pervading much of Weber's thought.The paper consists of two parts. In the first-critical-part, after a short sketch of my relational …
Youth Collectivities: Cultures and Objects
Philosophy (23 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Linguistics (8 works)