Gavin Walker
Biographic Data
| ID | 3786910 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gavin Walker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gavin |
| FAMILY NAME | Walker |
| SIGNATURE | WALKER G |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8948-4790 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1932 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Truck drivers and automation: A methodology for identifying and supporting workforce transition in the Australian road freight sector
The transition to autonomous trucks (ATs) is coming, and although it is expected to be gradual, it will create both challenges and opportunities for the existing driver workforce. This paper presents a novel integrated methodology for identifying viable occupational transitions for truck drivers as transport automation advances. Unlike traditional workforce transition analyses that focus primarily on skill similarity, wages, and employment demand…
Singular Unverifiability
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline powerfully linked the social-institutional conditions of literary reflection to the category of the geopolitical, in the hopes of a renewal of Comparative Literature, whose earlier aims at their best had been to shelter the international possibility of humanistic thought beyond the border. Yet, this discipline has often remained trapped by the only partial universality of its function, substituti…
Psyche, Science and Society: Essays on Jung and Sociology
The Will to Strategy
We can detect two great or overarching thematics in Foucault's work: through the publication of the first volume of the History of Sexuality a general interest in the modes of discipline according to which individuals are formed in accordance with the social order; and from 1980 onwards, a newly practical-political orientation tasked with an interventionist mandate-the practice of 'truth-telling', 'political spirituality', and an ethics of the 'c…
The Accumulation of Difference and the Logic of Area
Today, in a world characterized by the dispersion of the concentration of the productive forces, an increasingly multinational composition of global finance capital and its specialized class of handlers, it is relatively common to hear that the problems of “area studies” and its critique are no longer relevant. This argument tends to be made as follows. Area studies depended on a world characterized by the classic mid-twentieth century structures…
Nietzsche in Contemporary Biopolitics
When politics subsumes life, we must consider the question of what precisely this “life” indicates. What form does life take at the moment when it is touched by politics? In the “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin calls it “bare life,” a life reduced to itself, divested of adornments and form. The object of biopolitics is precisely life in this sense. It goes without saying that today the thinker developing the most profound theorization of “bare li…
The End of Area
A Genealogy
Politics and Translation
Since the dawn of modernity, there have been two competing “models” to think and represent politics: war (and more generally conflict, or struggle, as in Machiavelli) and commerce (in the broad sense this term had in the classical age, for example in Kant and Montesquieu). These two terms are obviously not entirely independent but rather compete or even interfere with each other. With the political, social, and cultural transformations linked to …
Forces and Forms
Global capitalism seems to have swept away all spatial limits to its expansion, making a simple definition of terms such as inside and outside problematic, to say the least. One of the fundamental problems we face today is that critical thought needs to forge concepts that are able to grasp the emergence of the world as a completely material dimension in which increasingly the most local of our experiences are themselves located. As a large part …
The Schema of the West and the Apparatus of Capture: Variations on Deleuze and Guattari
Deleuze and Guattari's work opens theoretical and political possibilities for us by demonstrating that the boundary between ‘the West’ and the ‘non-West’ is itself a historically unstable epistemological inscription on the surface of the earth, but one that nevertheless retraces itself over and over again. They show us that our political possibilities exist precisely in the ‘non-West’, so long as we understand this term not in the sense of an exi…
Tanigawa Gan and the Poetics of the Origin
The work of the poet, theoretician, and political activist Tanigawa Gan (1923–95) played a decisive role in postwar Japanese intellectual and political life, deeply influencing the politics of 1968. By interrupting the prevailing discourses of democratic reconstruction, high economic growth, and the cosmopolitan Marxism of urban life, Tanigawa (along with the other members of his commune) practiced a rigorous subtraction from the dominant ideolog…
The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan
In The Sublime Perversion of Capital Gavin Walker examines the Japanese debate about capitalism between the 1920s and 1950s, using it as a prehistory to consider current discussions of uneven development and contemporary topics in Marxist theory and historiography. Walker locates the debate's culmination in the work of Uno Kozo, whose investigations into the development of capitalism and the commodification of labor power are essential for rethin…
Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan
The Politics of Colonial Translation: On the Narrative of the Ainu as a 'Vanishing Ethnicity
Japanese imperial authorities sought to justify their imperial project in Hokkaido by racializing the Ainu, whom they displaced in 1869. At the time, the Ainu, with their Caucasian features and beards, were considered racially and culturally distinct from the Japanese (wajin), explaining why some western anthropologists marveled at the feat of a yellow race colonizing a white race. Therefore, the Japanese racialization of the Ainu as a culturally…
Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader
Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) was one of modern Japan's most unique and important critics of capitalism, the emperor system, imperialism, and everyday life in wartime Japan. This collection of translations contains some of Tosaka's most important essays and original articles on Tosaka
The Reinvention of Communism: Politics, History, Globality
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the term communism has returned to the theoretical and historical agenda with a striking force and a surprising novelty. In a wide range of fields of knowledge, the questions of the actuality and the history of the world communist movement, the theoretical tendencies of communist thought, and the current political possibilities of new developments of communism have been revisited and addressed anew. We …
The Absent Body of Labour Power: Uno Kōzō’s Logic of Capital
The debate around labour power, and particularly regarding its status as the ‘most peculiar’ of commodities, has been widely revisited in contemporary Marxist thought and critical theory. This concept, which has often resurfaced in works by Negri, Spivak, Virno and numerous other contemporary thinkers, has a long prehistory in the work of Marx and subsequent Marxist theorists, perhaps most importantly in the work of Uno Kōzō, arguably the most in…
Victims of Japanese Imperial Discourse: Korean Literature Under Colonial Rule
In contrast to the previous article, in which Hirano upholds Ainu Chiri Yukie as an example of a colonized subject who established an ethnic pride in her Ainu identity, Park's article examines the other side of the colonial coin by focusing on the notion of self-assimilation in "pro-Japanese literature" (shin'nichi bungaku in Japanese, chin'il munhak in Korean). Such writing was written in either the Korean or Japanese language by Koreans who por…
Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar
The work of Étienne Balibar has long emphasized the link between the juridico-political forms of citizenship and subjectivity implied by the transition to a world order of "bourgeois universalism," while also linking the emergence of the nation-form and accompanying regime of "anthropological difference" to the specific concerns of the Marxian critique of political economy. Taking a series of clues from the entire range of Balibar's work, this es…
On Marxism’s Field of Operation: Badiou and the Critique of Political Economy
Alain Badiou’s theoretical work maintains an ambiguous relation to Marx’s critique of political economy. In seemingly refusing the Marxian analytical strategy of displacement and referral across the fields of politics and economy, Badiou is frequently seen to be lacking a rigorous theoretical grasp of capitalism itself. In turn, this is often seen as a consequence of his understanding of political subjectivity. But the origins of this ‘lack’ of a…
Sociological theory and Jungian psychology
[[disenchantmentCarl JungpsychoanalysissociologyMax Weber ] In this article I seek to relate the psychology of Carl Jung to sociological theory, specifically Weber. I first present an outline of Jungian psychology. I then seek to relate this as psychology to Weber’s interpretivism. I point to basic methodological compatibilities within a Kantian frame, from which emerge central concerns with the factors limiting rationality. These generate the co…
Postcoloniality and the National Question in Marxist Historiography: Elements of the Debate on Japanese Capitalism
In examining the relation between Marxist historiography and the theoretical trajectories of postcolonial studies, the problem posed in Marxist theory under the name of ‘the national question’ remains decisive. This question is always emerging around the tensions generated between the logic of capital, the purified circuit-process of capital's self-unfolding, and the local conditions of its deployment, typically the modern form of the nation-stat…
Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt
What Marx referred to as the “so-called primitive accumulation” has been frequently revisited in contemporary theoretical writing, but has often been read simply as a unilateral process of destruction of the supposedly holistic community that preceded it. More broadly, this illogical or irrational moment of beginning, the origin of the historical presuppositions for capital's development, is a general problem of power, the problem of how an order…
The Dignity of Communism: Badiou's Communist Hypothesis
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2010). Since the late 1990s, the work of Alain Badiou has found a widespread readership in
Postcoloniality in translation: Historicities of the Present
Sandro Mezzadra La condizione postcoloniale: Storia e politica nel presente globale Verona: Ombre Corte, 2008 171 pp ISBN 889 5366 093 €16.00 This text devoted to the contemporary ‘postcolonial con
Sociological theory and the natural environment
In this article, I criticize environmental sociology’s conventional diagnosis of its methodological situation and overly narrow definition of its field. I argue for a greater engagement with the natural science base and consideration of anthropological approaches. I start with conceptual analysis, identifying the human-environment relationship as a pro-active two-way interaction. I then present an outline of global environmental dynamics, highlig…
Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt
What Marx referred to as the “so-called primitive accumulation” has been frequently revisited in contemporary theoretical writing, but has often been read simply as a unilateral process of destruction of the supposedly holistic community that preceded it. More broadly, this illogical or irrational moment of beginning, the origin of the historical presuppositions for capital's development, is a general problem of power, the problem of how an order…
The End of Area
A Genealogy
On Marxism’s Field of Operation: Badiou and the Critique of Political Economy
Alain Badiou’s theoretical work maintains an ambiguous relation to Marx’s critique of political economy. In seemingly refusing the Marxian analytical strategy of displacement and referral across the fields of politics and economy, Badiou is frequently seen to be lacking a rigorous theoretical grasp of capitalism itself. In turn, this is often seen as a consequence of his understanding of political subjectivity. But the origins of this ‘lack’ of a…
Society and culture in sociological and anthropological tradition
In this article I consider the uses of the concepts ‘society’ and ‘culture’ in various sociological and anthropological traditions, arguing that sociology needs to learn from the division between social anthropology and cultural anthropology. First I distinguish the social and the cultural sciences: the former use ‘society’ as leading concept and ‘culture’ as a subordinate concept; the latter do the contrary. I discuss the origins of the terms so…
Sociological theory and Jungian psychology
[[disenchantmentCarl JungpsychoanalysissociologyMax Weber ] In this article I seek to relate the psychology of Carl Jung to sociological theory, specifically Weber. I first present an outline of Jungian psychology. I then seek to relate this as psychology to Weber’s interpretivism. I point to basic methodological compatibilities within a Kantian frame, from which emerge central concerns with the factors limiting rationality. These generate the co…
The Dignity of Communism: Badiou's Communist Hypothesis
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2010). Since the late 1990s, the work of Alain Badiou has found a widespread readership in
Forces and Forms
Global capitalism seems to have swept away all spatial limits to its expansion, making a simple definition of terms such as inside and outside problematic, to say the least. One of the fundamental problems we face today is that critical thought needs to forge concepts that are able to grasp the emergence of the world as a completely material dimension in which increasingly the most local of our experiences are themselves located. As a large part …
The Reinvention of Communism: Politics, History, Globality
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the term communism has returned to the theoretical and historical agenda with a striking force and a surprising novelty. In a wide range of fields of knowledge, the questions of the actuality and the history of the world communist movement, the theoretical tendencies of communist thought, and the current political possibilities of new developments of communism have been revisited and addressed anew. We …
The Absent Body of Labour Power: Uno Kōzō’s Logic of Capital
The debate around labour power, and particularly regarding its status as the ‘most peculiar’ of commodities, has been widely revisited in contemporary Marxist thought and critical theory. This concept, which has often resurfaced in works by Negri, Spivak, Virno and numerous other contemporary thinkers, has a long prehistory in the work of Marx and subsequent Marxist theorists, perhaps most importantly in the work of Uno Kōzō, arguably the most in…
The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the Autofictional Machine
As an author, a figure, and as an author who relied on figurations of himself as a primary device, Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) has existed in a complex relationship to criticism and literary history. Criticism of Mishima's work and life has often taken for granted the network of configurations, referrals, and affective structures set up by Mishima himself, and thus more often than not participates in the continuation and concretization of the Mishi…
British Railways in Boom and Depression
Society and culture in sociological and anthropological tradition
In this article I consider the uses of the concepts ‘society’ and ‘culture’ in various sociological and anthropological traditions, arguing that sociology needs to learn from the division between social anthropology and cultural anthropology. First I distinguish the social and the cultural sciences: the former use ‘society’ as leading concept and ‘culture’ as a subordinate concept; the latter do the contrary. I discuss the origins of the terms so…
Sociological theory and the natural environment
In this article, I criticize environmental sociology’s conventional diagnosis of its methodological situation and overly narrow definition of its field. I argue for a greater engagement with the natural science base and consideration of anthropological approaches. I start with conceptual analysis, identifying the human-environment relationship as a pro-active two-way interaction. I then present an outline of global environmental dynamics, highlig…
The Filmic Time of Coloniality: On Shinkai Makoto’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days
The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the Autofictional Machine
As an author, a figure, and as an author who relied on figurations of himself as a primary device, Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) has existed in a complex relationship to criticism and literary history. Criticism of Mishima's work and life has often taken for granted the network of configurations, referrals, and affective structures set up by Mishima himself, and thus more often than not participates in the continuation and concretization of the Mishi…
Postcoloniality and the National Question in Marxist Historiography: Elements of the Debate on Japanese Capitalism
In examining the relation between Marxist historiography and the theoretical trajectories of postcolonial studies, the problem posed in Marxist theory under the name of ‘the national question’ remains decisive. This question is always emerging around the tensions generated between the logic of capital, the purified circuit-process of capital's self-unfolding, and the local conditions of its deployment, typically the modern form of the nation-stat…
Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt
What Marx referred to as the “so-called primitive accumulation” has been frequently revisited in contemporary theoretical writing, but has often been read simply as a unilateral process of destruction of the supposedly holistic community that preceded it. More broadly, this illogical or irrational moment of beginning, the origin of the historical presuppositions for capital's development, is a general problem of power, the problem of how an order…
The Dignity of Communism: Badiou's Communist Hypothesis
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2010). Since the late 1990s, the work of Alain Badiou has found a widespread readership in
Postcoloniality in translation: Historicities of the Present
Sandro Mezzadra La condizione postcoloniale: Storia e politica nel presente globale Verona: Ombre Corte, 2008 171 pp ISBN 889 5366 093 €16.00 This text devoted to the contemporary ‘postcolonial con
Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar
The work of Étienne Balibar has long emphasized the link between the juridico-political forms of citizenship and subjectivity implied by the transition to a world order of "bourgeois universalism," while also linking the emergence of the nation-form and accompanying regime of "anthropological difference" to the specific concerns of the Marxian critique of political economy. Taking a series of clues from the entire range of Balibar's work, this es…
On Marxism’s Field of Operation: Badiou and the Critique of Political Economy
Alain Badiou’s theoretical work maintains an ambiguous relation to Marx’s critique of political economy. In seemingly refusing the Marxian analytical strategy of displacement and referral across the fields of politics and economy, Badiou is frequently seen to be lacking a rigorous theoretical grasp of capitalism itself. In turn, this is often seen as a consequence of his understanding of political subjectivity. But the origins of this ‘lack’ of a…
Sociological theory and Jungian psychology
[[disenchantmentCarl JungpsychoanalysissociologyMax Weber ] In this article I seek to relate the psychology of Carl Jung to sociological theory, specifically Weber. I first present an outline of Jungian psychology. I then seek to relate this as psychology to Weber’s interpretivism. I point to basic methodological compatibilities within a Kantian frame, from which emerge central concerns with the factors limiting rationality. These generate the co…
The Absent Body of Labour Power: Uno Kōzō’s Logic of Capital
The debate around labour power, and particularly regarding its status as the ‘most peculiar’ of commodities, has been widely revisited in contemporary Marxist thought and critical theory. This concept, which has often resurfaced in works by Negri, Spivak, Virno and numerous other contemporary thinkers, has a long prehistory in the work of Marx and subsequent Marxist theorists, perhaps most importantly in the work of Uno Kōzō, arguably the most in…
Victims of Japanese Imperial Discourse: Korean Literature Under Colonial Rule
In contrast to the previous article, in which Hirano upholds Ainu Chiri Yukie as an example of a colonized subject who established an ethnic pride in her Ainu identity, Park's article examines the other side of the colonial coin by focusing on the notion of self-assimilation in "pro-Japanese literature" (shin'nichi bungaku in Japanese, chin'il munhak in Korean). Such writing was written in either the Korean or Japanese language by Koreans who por…
Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader
Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) was one of modern Japan's most unique and important critics of capitalism, the emperor system, imperialism, and everyday life in wartime Japan. This collection of translations contains some of Tosaka's most important essays and original articles on Tosaka
The Reinvention of Communism: Politics, History, Globality
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the term communism has returned to the theoretical and historical agenda with a striking force and a surprising novelty. In a wide range of fields of knowledge, the questions of the actuality and the history of the world communist movement, the theoretical tendencies of communist thought, and the current political possibilities of new developments of communism have been revisited and addressed anew. We …
The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan
In The Sublime Perversion of Capital Gavin Walker examines the Japanese debate about capitalism between the 1920s and 1950s, using it as a prehistory to consider current discussions of uneven development and contemporary topics in Marxist theory and historiography. Walker locates the debate's culmination in the work of Uno Kozo, whose investigations into the development of capitalism and the commodification of labor power are essential for rethin…
Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan
The Politics of Colonial Translation: On the Narrative of the Ainu as a 'Vanishing Ethnicity
Japanese imperial authorities sought to justify their imperial project in Hokkaido by racializing the Ainu, whom they displaced in 1869. At the time, the Ainu, with their Caucasian features and beards, were considered racially and culturally distinct from the Japanese (wajin), explaining why some western anthropologists marveled at the feat of a yellow race colonizing a white race. Therefore, the Japanese racialization of the Ainu as a culturally…
Tanigawa Gan and the Poetics of the Origin
The work of the poet, theoretician, and political activist Tanigawa Gan (1923–95) played a decisive role in postwar Japanese intellectual and political life, deeply influencing the politics of 1968. By interrupting the prevailing discourses of democratic reconstruction, high economic growth, and the cosmopolitan Marxism of urban life, Tanigawa (along with the other members of his commune) practiced a rigorous subtraction from the dominant ideolog…
The Schema of the West and the Apparatus of Capture: Variations on Deleuze and Guattari
Deleuze and Guattari's work opens theoretical and political possibilities for us by demonstrating that the boundary between ‘the West’ and the ‘non-West’ is itself a historically unstable epistemological inscription on the surface of the earth, but one that nevertheless retraces itself over and over again. They show us that our political possibilities exist precisely in the ‘non-West’, so long as we understand this term not in the sense of an exi…
The Accumulation of Difference and the Logic of Area
Today, in a world characterized by the dispersion of the concentration of the productive forces, an increasingly multinational composition of global finance capital and its specialized class of handlers, it is relatively common to hear that the problems of “area studies” and its critique are no longer relevant. This argument tends to be made as follows. Area studies depended on a world characterized by the classic mid-twentieth century structures…
Nietzsche in Contemporary Biopolitics
When politics subsumes life, we must consider the question of what precisely this “life” indicates. What form does life take at the moment when it is touched by politics? In the “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin calls it “bare life,” a life reduced to itself, divested of adornments and form. The object of biopolitics is precisely life in this sense. It goes without saying that today the thinker developing the most profound theorization of “bare li…
The End of Area
A Genealogy
Politics and Translation
Since the dawn of modernity, there have been two competing “models” to think and represent politics: war (and more generally conflict, or struggle, as in Machiavelli) and commerce (in the broad sense this term had in the classical age, for example in Kant and Montesquieu). These two terms are obviously not entirely independent but rather compete or even interfere with each other. With the political, social, and cultural transformations linked to …
Sociology (21 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · History (14 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Art (9 works) · Law (9 works)