Ian Angus
Biographic Data
| ID | 958460 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian Angus |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | Angus |
| SIGNATURE | ANGUS I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9784-1775 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Has the Anthropocene Been Canceled
Ian Angus illuminates the politics behind the decision by the International Union of Geological Sciences not to recognize the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch. In recounting the debate, Angus explores how the organization undermined the conclusions of top scientists to oppose the establishment of the Anthropocene, and its implications for the public debate about the planetary crisis
An Ecological Civilization Will Have to Be Socialist
In this interview with Claudia Antunes of Brazilian magazine Sumaúma, Ian Angus takes stock of our current planetary crisis, from its origins in Marx's ecological thought and the present debate over its designation to the future of human civilization as we know it. "The key question is," he concludes, "Are we going to see large number of people moving for change
Response to Andrew Feenberg
The Fishing Revolution and the Origins of Capitalism
The Fishing Revolution is a rarely explored, yet critical, event in the evolution of capitalism. Ian Angus elaborates on this revolution in the global marketplace and its role as a cornerstone of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
The Meaning of 'So-Called Primitive Accumulation
What did Marx mean in his discussion of "so-called primitive accumulation" in Capital? Here, Ian Angus argues that the term is widely misunderstood—but its illumination reveals great insight to the conditions of exploitation and expropriation
Circumscribing Postmodern Culture
This chapter circumscribes the phenomenon of postmodern culture in the complementary figures of simulated identity and the enemy — the self as other and the other as threat. Industrial homogenization of culture reduces the transcendent experiences of traditional art within a totalizing framework that traps the audience into a “repetition” of experiences and thereby blocks their assimilation and criticism. The system of internal differences in ind…
Cultural Politics in Contemporary America
Marx and Engels and Russia's Peasant Communes
In the past and in his own time, Marx has been portrayed as endorsing the enclosure of the commons as a necessary historical stage on the path to socialism. However, a more accurate account, one that is critical of the enclosure movement, can be found in his response to the destruction of commons-based peasant communities in Russia—while it was actually happening
Cultural Politics in Contemporary America
Knowledge, Spirit, Reason: An Essay in Comparative Philosophy
One of the ways in which a philosophy may exhibit its national character is to take up an acknowledged national theme or project and address it philosophically. This is the approach that I will take. This article establishes, through reference to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2008–2015) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), that the relationship between Indigenous knowledge and Western…
Extended body … extended mind: The risk of thought
Communication may be understood through its manifest meaning or through the medium in which it is expressed. The latter approach begins from the material social relations and technologies that constitute the medium of communication. This approach has a certain similarity with affect theory understood as a pre-cognitive focus on bodies and technologies. An affective network sets up the manifest subject–object, or human–machine, relations with a su…
Facing the Anthropocene: An Update
Scientific knowledge and debates in Anthropoene science have developed over the years, particularly in the two main fields involved: geology, which has mainly been concerned with formally defining the new epoch; and Earth System science, which studies the global biological, chemical, and physical changes that are reshaping the conditions of life on this planet
Logic of Subsumption, Logic of Invention, and Workplace Democracy: Marx, Marcuse, and Simondon
Superbugs in the Anthropocene
The promise of a world without disease has been replaced by warnings of evermore virulent pathogens, created by the very drugs that were supposed to save us. Scarcely a day passes without more news of people contracting infections or infectious diseases that cannot be cured by the strongest medicines available. Antimicrobial Resistance is a global health crisis driven by two major factors: the spectacular ability of bacteria to adapt to threats, …
The Trial of Thomas Hardy
November 5, 2019, is the 225th anniversary of the acquittal of Thomas Hardy on charges of High Treason. Hardy is nearly forgotten today, but for decades workers and democrats in England celebrated November 5 as the anniversary of a major victory, a triumph over a powerful state that had deployed immense resources to crush working-class organizations and suppress popular demands for democratic rights
Cesspools, Sewage, and Social Murder
The accumulation of human excrement in nineteenth-century cities, particularly London, precipitated a historic environmental crisis—an aspect of the metabolic rift mostly overlooked in ecosocialist analysis. The solution that was finally adopted only shifted the problem out of sight, setting the stage for even greater crises in our time
Crisis, Biology, Ecology: A New Starting-Point for Phenomenology
The crisis of European sciences in Husserl’s late work diagnoses Galilean science as specifically and necessarily losing touch with the intuitive evidence that would legitimate it due to its reliance on a formal-mathematical conceptual apparatus. While the vast majority of Husserl’s late work was focussed on a critique of the formal-mathematical paradigm of the physical science of nature, at several points the possibility of biology as the exempl…
Marx and Engels and the 'Red Chemist: The Forgotten Legacy of Carl Schorlemmer
Most accounts of Marx and Engels's lives, if they mention Carl Schorlemmer (1834–92) at all, refer to the renowned chemist only as a friend, without acknowledging his influence on their studies of the natural sciences. It is time to restore this neglected figure to his rightful place in the Marxian—and Engelsian—tradition.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Comprendre l'Anthropocène
Cet entretien a été initialement publié dans le magazine anglais Socialist Review . Nous en publions ici notre traduction française. Ian Angus y analyse l'émergence de l'Anthropocène comme une conséquence directe du capitalisme fossile qui mine nos sociétés, et à travers son analyse, il esquisse les pistes de ce que pourrait être notre combat collectif pour y faire face
When Did the Anthropocene Begin…and Why Does It Matter
The word Anthropocene, unknown twenty years ago, now appears in the titles of three academic journals, dozens of books, and hundreds of academic papers, not to mention innumerable articles in newspapers, magazines, websites, and blogs. There are exhibitions about art in the Anthropocene, conferences about the humanities in the Anthropocene, and novels about love in the Anthropocene. There is even a heavy metal album called The Anthropocene Extinc…
Recovery of Meaning?: A Critique of Charles Taylor’s Account of Modernity ian angus
Identity and Deference: A Border Within 15 Years On
This lecture is a reconsideration of the arguments of A Border Within (1997) in the light of the “Harper Era” that emerged after its publication. The hypothesis was that English-Canadian culture contained the possibility of addressing the philosophical issue of identity and difference in a distinct fashion. It proceeded bottom-up by taking the discourses of national identity, multiculturalism, and environmentalism on their own terms. My critics i…
Plastic Plague
Charles Moore with Cassandra Phillips, Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain's Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans (New York: Penguin Group, 2011), 358 pages, $16, paperback.Four decades ago, when most greens were blaming pollution on population growth and personal consumption, socialist-environmentalist Barry Commoner showed that neither could account for the radical increase in pollutants since the end of the Second World…
Une planète trop peuplée: Le Mythe Populationniste, l'Immigration Et La Crise Écologique
La population mondiale devrait dépasser les neuf milliards d'individus en 2050, soit trois fois plus qu'en 1950, et certains voient dans cet accroissement démographique l'une des causes principales de la destruction environnementale. Mais y a-t-il véritablement trop de monde sur Terre ? La crise écologique actuelle est-elle effectivement attribuable à une surpopulation ? Que se cache-t-il derrière cette idée malthusienne qui divise le mouvement é…
The Undiscovered Country: Essays in Canadian Intellectual Culture
In this sequence of essays, Ian Angus engages with themes of identity, power, and the nation as they emerge in contemporary English Canadian philosophical thought, seeking to prepare the groundwork for a critical theory of neoliberal globalization. The essays are organized into three parts. The opening part offers a nuanced critique of the Hegelian confidence and progressivism that has come to dominate Canadian intellectual life. Through an analy…
Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada
Dependency/space/policy: An introduction to a dialogue with Harold Innis
(1993). Dependency/space/policy: An introduction to a dialogue with Harold Innis. Continuum: Vol. 7, Dependency/Space/Policy, pp. 5-15
The Myth of ‘Environmental Catastrophism’
Between October 2010 and April 2012, over 250,000 people, including 133,000 children under five, died of hunger caused by drought in Somalia. Millions more survived only because they received food aid. Scientists at the UK Met Centre have shown that human-induced climate change made this catastrophe much worse than it would otherwise have been.... This is only the beginning: the United Nations' 2013 Human Development Report says that without coor…
Subsistence as a Social Right: A Political Ideal for Socialism
The internal collapse of most Communist regimes in 1989 has hastened the urgency for democratic socialists to not just state or assume their difference from state socialism, but to re-form their critique of capitalism so that it does not, even implicitly, suggest that state centralism might be a viable alternative to the anarchy of the capitalist market. Also, with the rise of neo-liberal critiques of social welfare in capitalist states, social d…
Mediation and New Social Movements
Journal Article Mediation and New Social Movements Get access Ian Angus Ian Angus 1Associate professor in the Department of Communication. University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Machmer Hall, Amherst, MA 01003. This essay is a revised version of a lecture given in a graduate course called “Media, Technology, and Culture”. The author would like to thank all the students who have attended the various versions of this course for the lively discussi…
The Tragedy of Enlightenment
Facing the Anthropocene: An Update
Scientific knowledge and debates in Anthropoene science have developed over the years, particularly in the two main fields involved: geology, which has mainly been concerned with formally defining the new epoch; and Earth System science, which studies the global biological, chemical, and physical changes that are reshaping the conditions of life on this planet
Orality in the twilight of humanism: A critique of the communication theory of Harold Innis
(1993). Orality in the twilight of humanism: A critique of the communication theory of Harold Innis. Continuum: Vol. 7, Dependency/Space/Policy, pp. 16-42
Disenchantment and modernity: The mirror of technique
Toward a phenomenology of rational action: A study of Alfred Schutz' social theory in the light of Edmund Husserl's late philosophy
Toward a phenomenology of rational action: A study of Alfred Schutz' social theory in the light of Edmund Husserl's late philosophy
Livres reçus
On Macpherson's Developmental Liberalism
The work of C. B. Macpherson is extremely significant for those seeking to understand the cul-de-sac which liberal political theory and institutions have entered. Considering the experience of socialist societies in this century, the necessity for a nonmarket political theory to retain a positive connection to Western liberal values should be beyond dispute. Any postmarket society requires, not pious reassurances, but institutional support for in…
Disenchantment and modernity: The mirror of technique
Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada
The Tragedy of Enlightenment
Questioning the Institutional Boundaries of U.S. Communication Research: An Epistemological Inquiry
Interpreting three levels of assumptions—the ideal case, the object-domain, and the method of inquiry—for each of the three subdisciplines of communication—rhetoric, interpersonal and mass—provides a foundation for assessing an appropriate and comprehensive definition of the domain of communication study
Outside the Boundary: A Critique of Communication as Representation
John W. Lannamann, Ian Angus; Outside the Boundary: A Critique of Communication as Representation, Journal of Communication, Volume 39, Issue 4, 1 December
The Politics of Common Sense: Articulation Theory and Critical Communication Studies
This essay centers on the concept of articulation, beginning from the work of its major contemporary theorists—Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Stuart Hall. Articulation theory conceptualizes the specific communication act as internally generative, but also situates it within an external context that is itself understood as communicatively constituted. It develops a conception of power that is not limited to the disjunction or consensus (conve…
Mediation and New Social Movements
Journal Article Mediation and New Social Movements Get access Ian Angus Ian Angus 1Associate professor in the Department of Communication. University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Machmer Hall, Amherst, MA 01003. This essay is a revised version of a lecture given in a graduate course called “Media, Technology, and Culture”. The author would like to thank all the students who have attended the various versions of this course for the lively discussi…
Dependency/space/policy: An introduction to a dialogue with Harold Innis
(1993). Dependency/space/policy: An introduction to a dialogue with Harold Innis. Continuum: Vol. 7, Dependency/Space/Policy, pp. 5-15
Orality in the twilight of humanism: A critique of the communication theory of Harold Innis
(1993). Orality in the twilight of humanism: A critique of the communication theory of Harold Innis. Continuum: Vol. 7, Dependency/Space/Policy, pp. 16-42
A blank sheet of paper: The phenomenological foundation of comparative media theory
A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness
A Border Within addresses the question of English Canadian identity by exploring whether a plurality of discourses can lead to other than a fragmented society. Ian Angus examines the relationship between globalizing social movements and the particularities of identity politics by extending the theories on identity of Harold Innis and George Grant, two seminal figures in Canadian political philosophy, to develop a philosophy applicable to the cont…
A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality and Wilderness
The border is the governing metaphor of the book. Angus argues that English Canadian identity revolves around maintaining a border between Canada and the United States, and suggests that the border between countries can also be seen as a border between self and Other, between humanity and nature. Multiculturalism and the ecology movement's rethinking of the relation between humanity and nature suggest that English Canadian social and political ph…
The Materiality of Expression: Harold Innis’ Communication Theory and the Discursive Turn in the Human Sciences
This essay proposes that Harold Innis’ theory of communication can make a crucial contribution to the tendency in philosophy of the human sciences that has been referred to as “discourse theory.” Discourse theory takes language use as the characteristic phenomenon of human activity. Innis’ focus on the sensuous materiality of media of communication analyzes media as the institution of social relations rather than as the representation of events. …
Constitutive paradox: The subject in cultural criticism
(1998). Constitutive paradox: The subject in cultural criticism. Continuum: Vol. 12, Philosophy and cultural studies, pp. 147-156
Held Up at the Border: Comment on Papers by García Canclini and Zaslove
This critical commentary on the essays of Garcia Canclini and Zaslove argues that neither paper adequately theorizes the border as the site of a contemporary politics that can propose an alternative to neoliberalism. Both analyze the border as necessarily and exclusively repressive. Based on the Canadian experience, this critique argues that the border can also be a liberating limitation where new phenomena emerge
Subsistence as a Social Right: A Political Ideal for Socialism
The internal collapse of most Communist regimes in 1989 has hastened the urgency for democratic socialists to not just state or assume their difference from state socialism, but to re-form their critique of capitalism so that it does not, even implicitly, suggest that state centralism might be a viable alternative to the anarchy of the capitalist market. Also, with the rise of neo-liberal critiques of social welfare in capitalist states, social d…
Empire, Borders, Place: A Critique of Hardt and Negri's Concept of Empire
Empire, Borders, Place: A Critique of Hardt and Negri’s Concept of Empire Ian Angus (bio) It is now almost a commonplace to note that after the Seattle 1999 protests against the neo-liberal market-oriented version of globalization a new coalition against global market hegemony is struggling to emerge. While this emergence may seem to have been derailed by the more recent U.S. and British intervention in Iraq, it is more likely that it has entered…
Law, Rhetoric and Irony in the Formation of Canadian Civil Culture
Media, expression and a new politics: Eight theses
The study of communication begins with the separation between philosophy and rhetoric, that is, between the content of a message and its persuasive effect. Prior to the separation between a truth-content and a persuasive effect, an expression is an event that both establishes a truth and provokes an effect. In such a condition there is no concept of a medium of communication but only a meaningful and effective world constructed through events. Th…
Walking on Two Legs: On The Very Possibility of a Heideggerian Marxism
Socrates and the critique of metaphysics
Contemporary appropriations of the “end of philosophy” and “end of metaphysics” usually draw no distinction between these two terms. Neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger distinguished between Socrates and Plato with respect to the origin of philosophy and metaphysics. My argument leans on Gregory Vlastos to draw a sharp distinction between Socrates and Plato based upon his account of “the Socratic elenchus.” In the first place, I argue that the critiq…
Identity and Justice
In this provocative study of the task of English-Canadian philosophy, Ian Angus contends that English Canada harbours a secret and unofficial dream of self-rule that is revealed through critiques of empire.
Sociology (36 works) · Political science (33 works) · Philosophy (30 works) · Law (27 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · Politics (23 works) · History (17 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Law (12 works)