M Featherstone
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 12292 |
|---|---|
| NOME | M Featherstone |
| PRENOMES | M |
| SOBRENOME | Featherstone |
| ASSINATURA | FEATHERSTONE M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Keele University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8939-5779 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 26 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 45 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 26 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1996 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Lex Ruinae
My objective in this piece is to use the Roman legal fiction of Lex Ruinae, which, simultaneously refers to the law of ruins and ruinous law, to try to understand the relationship between law and what we might call the contemporary poly- / perma-crisis. In this regard, the overall thesis of the piece is that we might understand the legal dimensions of the crisis that seems to be spatially expansive, in the sense that it takes on planetary scale, …
Imagining the negentropic university
In this piece I outline the history of the university in terms of a shift from a place concerned with the contemplation of the unknowable and the infinite to a machine focused on instrumental rationality, calculation, and computation. Reading this history through Lyotard's work on the post-modern condition and the emergence of the knowledge economy, I consider the rise of the computational university and artificial intelligence in terms of the ab…
The tragedy of utopia in the age of the Anthropocene
My key objective in this article is to explore the history of the concept of utopia and its application in really existing social, political, economic and cultural forms. Starting with a consideration of what I call the economy of utopia, I theorise the desire for the ideal society in terms of a deeply human drive to seek to overcome vulnerability, limitation and finitude that is set upon failure and the fall towards dystopia by virtue of the fac…
Beyond the disenchanted university
In the teeth of the coronavirus crisis the British HE system has been thrown into chaos and the severe limitations of the market model have been cruelly exposed. After thirty years of expansion and increasing neoliberalization, the contradictions of the marketized system have been realized by the virus, pushing the entire sector to the edge of bankruptcy. On this basis it is easy to see why the British HE system is haunted by the spectres of comm…
Žižek's Pandemic
In the first part of this article on Žižek's recent book Pandemic! I show how he develops a political theology of the spirit through a discussion of social distancing. In this argument Žižek connects the idea of physical distance to the biblical story of the resurrection, in which Jesus says to Mary Magdalene “noli me tangere” (“touch me not”), in order to imagine the emergence of a community of spirit from the social, political, and economic rui…
Viral Culture
Simmel's (non-human) humanism
Given the recent non-human turn in sociology and the social sciences, the popularity of theories of entanglement, and contemporary concern with the concept of the anthropocene, it is easy to forget that classical sociology was always-already aware of the relationship between humanity and non-humanity. Although Daniel Chernilo focuses upon the debate between Sartre and Heidegger in his recent Debating Humanity, and contrasts Sartre's Humanism with…
The Utopianism of Luxury
Book Review| July 01 2020 The Utopianism of Luxury A Philosophy of Luxury, by Wiesing, Lambert, translated by Roth, Nancy Ann, London: Routledge, 2019, 172 pages, $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780367138417 Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone is senior lecturer in sociology at Keele University. He is author of Tocqueville’s Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Theory (2007) and Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, a…
On Existence, Poetic Revealing, and the Work of Art
Research Article| November 01 2020 On Existence, Poetic Revealing, and the Work of Art: Interview with Mehdi Saadeti Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone is senior lecturer in sociology at Keele University in the United Kingdom. His research focuses on the history of utopias and dystopias in philosophy, culture, and art. He is currently working on a book on the relationship between the Western idea of utopia, Asian thought, and a…
Stiegler’s university
In this article I propose to explore Bernard Stiegler’s work through the lens of a politics of education and in particular the idea of the university, which becomes a pharmacological space of on th
Cultural Politics Now
Although neither a cultural philosophy nor a political theory, the concept of cultural politics emerged, as we conceive it, decades ago in a time when it was often argued that the study of culture and the academic discipline of cultural studies were unavoidably political because of questions of value, ideology, and power this study entails. This article by the editors of the journal Cultural Politics provides a short survey of the field, its emer…
After Bauman
The coincidence of the passing of the great European sociologist Zygmunt Bauman with the British decision on Brexit, the American election to president of Donald Trump, the rise of fake news, and the normalization of what would have previously been extremist political views raises profound ethical questions and political challenges for not only Bauman's home discipline, sociology, but also the wider humanities and social sciences.Although Bauman …
Critical Luxury Studies
The cover of John Armitage and Joanne Roberts’ new book Critical Luxury Studies, which shows New York artist Tom Sachs’ 1996 piece Chanel Chainsaw, perfectly captures the spirit of their project th
Luxus
In this article, I seek to explore the psychopolitical significance of the contemporary idea of luxury through reference to the Roman concept of luxus, which means excess, extravagance, indulgence, and debauchery. In the first section of the article, I examine the politics of the idea of luxus in the Roman context through a discussion of the relationship between the emperor Nero, who pushed luxury toward its psychopathic limits, and the Stoic phi…
The Negative Abyss
This article explores what one might call the dystopia of contemporary screen-based culture through a discussion of the work of Paul Virilio and Bernard Stiegler. Centrally, it explains that the screen might be seen as a negative abyss, where absolute surface creates the effect of infinite depth and a sense of absolute freedom obscures the truth of solipsistic self-reflection and enclosure. It explores this idea through reference to Virilio’s con…
Utopias
Space colonisation and subterranean dwelling have been staples of speculative fiction since at least the nineteenth century, but the invention of nuclear weapons and the prospect of global environmental collapse have, certainly since the Cold War, made proposals offering vertical escape from the surface of the planet a matter worthy of serious consideration among engineers, planners, military strategists, and countercultural futurologists. The sh…
Chinese Bulimia
In this article, I explore the significance of Chan Koonchung’s recent dystopia, The Fat Years, in the context of contemporary Chinese capitalism. In the first section of the article, I outline the plot of Chan’s novel before situating it in relation to classic Western dystopias such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Here, I compare and contrast notions of narcotization, state control, and freedo…
After Austerity
Costas Douzinas is a key figure in the contemporary European left who rose to prominence through his work at the Birkbeck Law School. He is now in debate with Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, David Graeber, Franco Berardi, and others concerning the future of capitalism in the wake of the economic crash of 2007–8. In this, his most recent work, Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis, Douzinas addresses the politics of the economic crisis in Greece, di…
Being-in-Hull, Being-on-Bransholme
The objective of this paper is to investigate the sociological and existential situation of the inhabitants of Bransholme, a peri-urban council estate on the northern edge of Hull, in the context of the current economic downturn and contemporary regeneration discourses. In ‘reading’ life on the estate against economic decline and regeneration practices, I aim to show why the latter cannot really succeed because they are premised on (a) a failure …
Hoodie Horror”
And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing o
Even the Rats Don't Come Here
In this article I explore the situation of the Eastern European, and specifically Romanian, Roma in contemporary Paris. Building upon ethnographic work in the suburbs of the city, I consider the sociospatial marginalization of the Romanian Roma and the ways the French state sought to other the new immigrants from Eastern Europe because of their inability to conform to the norms of the neoliberal capitalist utopia advanced by Nicolas Sarkozy in th…
Against the Fake Empire
In this review essay I explore three of Baudrillard's late works, Why Hasn't everything Already disappeared?, The Agony of Power, and Carnival and Cannibal, and explain how they represent his final word on the notion of integral reality and the intelligence of evil. Expanding upon the theory developed in The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, I begin with Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? and show how Baudrillard explains the eme…
Discourses of the War on Terror
It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large part in reshaping global imaginings about contemporary acts of terrorism and their Islamic perpetrators. Given this transformation in the understanding of terrorism and terrorists, our objective in this article is threefold. First we want to present a discussion of the roots of the kind of neo-liberal politics that has grown up alongside acts of terroris…
The Redemption of the Real
In this paper I consider Walter Benjamin's final essay, “On the Concept of History,” and Slavoj Žižek's recent essay on political messianism, The Puppet and the Dwarf, in order to emphasize the import of revolutionary politics to both writers. I critique Žižek's implicit condemnation of Benjamin's futuristic messianism by showing how the author of “On the Concept of History” was already materialistic prior to the Slovene's psychoanalytic correcti…
Cosmopolis
Cosmopolis
Discourses of the War on Terror
It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large part in reshaping global imaginings about contemporary acts of terrorism and their Islamic perpetrators. Given this transformation in the understanding of terrorism and terrorists, our objective in this article is threefold. First we want to present a discussion of the roots of the kind of neo-liberal politics that has grown up alongside acts of terroris…
Luxus
In this article, I seek to explore the psychopolitical significance of the contemporary idea of luxury through reference to the Roman concept of luxus, which means excess, extravagance, indulgence, and debauchery. In the first section of the article, I examine the politics of the idea of luxus in the Roman context through a discussion of the relationship between the emperor Nero, who pushed luxury toward its psychopathic limits, and the Stoic phi…
Being-in-Hull, Being-on-Bransholme
The objective of this paper is to investigate the sociological and existential situation of the inhabitants of Bransholme, a peri-urban council estate on the northern edge of Hull, in the context of the current economic downturn and contemporary regeneration discourses. In ‘reading’ life on the estate against economic decline and regeneration practices, I aim to show why the latter cannot really succeed because they are premised on (a) a failure …
Žižek's Pandemic
In the first part of this article on Žižek's recent book Pandemic! I show how he develops a political theology of the spirit through a discussion of social distancing. In this argument Žižek connects the idea of physical distance to the biblical story of the resurrection, in which Jesus says to Mary Magdalene “noli me tangere” (“touch me not”), in order to imagine the emergence of a community of spirit from the social, political, and economic rui…
The tragedy of utopia in the age of the Anthropocene
My key objective in this article is to explore the history of the concept of utopia and its application in really existing social, political, economic and cultural forms. Starting with a consideration of what I call the economy of utopia, I theorise the desire for the ideal society in terms of a deeply human drive to seek to overcome vulnerability, limitation and finitude that is set upon failure and the fall towards dystopia by virtue of the fac…
The Negative Abyss
This article explores what one might call the dystopia of contemporary screen-based culture through a discussion of the work of Paul Virilio and Bernard Stiegler. Centrally, it explains that the screen might be seen as a negative abyss, where absolute surface creates the effect of infinite depth and a sense of absolute freedom obscures the truth of solipsistic self-reflection and enclosure. It explores this idea through reference to Virilio’s con…
Simmel's (non-human) humanism
Given the recent non-human turn in sociology and the social sciences, the popularity of theories of entanglement, and contemporary concern with the concept of the anthropocene, it is easy to forget that classical sociology was always-already aware of the relationship between humanity and non-humanity. Although Daniel Chernilo focuses upon the debate between Sartre and Heidegger in his recent Debating Humanity, and contrasts Sartre's Humanism with…
Stiegler’s university
In this article I propose to explore Bernard Stiegler’s work through the lens of a politics of education and in particular the idea of the university, which becomes a pharmacological space of on th
Against the Fake Empire
In this review essay I explore three of Baudrillard's late works, Why Hasn't everything Already disappeared?, The Agony of Power, and Carnival and Cannibal, and explain how they represent his final word on the notion of integral reality and the intelligence of evil. Expanding upon the theory developed in The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, I begin with Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? and show how Baudrillard explains the eme…
Beyond the disenchanted university
In the teeth of the coronavirus crisis the British HE system has been thrown into chaos and the severe limitations of the market model have been cruelly exposed. After thirty years of expansion and increasing neoliberalization, the contradictions of the marketized system have been realized by the virus, pushing the entire sector to the edge of bankruptcy. On this basis it is easy to see why the British HE system is haunted by the spectres of comm…
Viral Culture
Consuming Places
Cosmopolis
The Redemption of the Real
In this paper I consider Walter Benjamin's final essay, “On the Concept of History,” and Slavoj Žižek's recent essay on political messianism, The Puppet and the Dwarf, in order to emphasize the import of revolutionary politics to both writers. I critique Žižek's implicit condemnation of Benjamin's futuristic messianism by showing how the author of “On the Concept of History” was already materialistic prior to the Slovene's psychoanalytic correcti…
Discourses of the War on Terror
It is widely agreed that the events which took place on 11 September 2001 have played a large part in reshaping global imaginings about contemporary acts of terrorism and their Islamic perpetrators. Given this transformation in the understanding of terrorism and terrorists, our objective in this article is threefold. First we want to present a discussion of the roots of the kind of neo-liberal politics that has grown up alongside acts of terroris…
Against the Fake Empire
In this review essay I explore three of Baudrillard's late works, Why Hasn't everything Already disappeared?, The Agony of Power, and Carnival and Cannibal, and explain how they represent his final word on the notion of integral reality and the intelligence of evil. Expanding upon the theory developed in The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, I begin with Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? and show how Baudrillard explains the eme…
Being-in-Hull, Being-on-Bransholme
The objective of this paper is to investigate the sociological and existential situation of the inhabitants of Bransholme, a peri-urban council estate on the northern edge of Hull, in the context of the current economic downturn and contemporary regeneration discourses. In ‘reading’ life on the estate against economic decline and regeneration practices, I aim to show why the latter cannot really succeed because they are premised on (a) a failure …
Hoodie Horror”
And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing o
Even the Rats Don't Come Here
In this article I explore the situation of the Eastern European, and specifically Romanian, Roma in contemporary Paris. Building upon ethnographic work in the suburbs of the city, I consider the sociospatial marginalization of the Romanian Roma and the ways the French state sought to other the new immigrants from Eastern Europe because of their inability to conform to the norms of the neoliberal capitalist utopia advanced by Nicolas Sarkozy in th…
Utopias
Space colonisation and subterranean dwelling have been staples of speculative fiction since at least the nineteenth century, but the invention of nuclear weapons and the prospect of global environmental collapse have, certainly since the Cold War, made proposals offering vertical escape from the surface of the planet a matter worthy of serious consideration among engineers, planners, military strategists, and countercultural futurologists. The sh…
Chinese Bulimia
In this article, I explore the significance of Chan Koonchung’s recent dystopia, The Fat Years, in the context of contemporary Chinese capitalism. In the first section of the article, I outline the plot of Chan’s novel before situating it in relation to classic Western dystopias such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Here, I compare and contrast notions of narcotization, state control, and freedo…
After Austerity
Costas Douzinas is a key figure in the contemporary European left who rose to prominence through his work at the Birkbeck Law School. He is now in debate with Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, David Graeber, Franco Berardi, and others concerning the future of capitalism in the wake of the economic crash of 2007–8. In this, his most recent work, Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis, Douzinas addresses the politics of the economic crisis in Greece, di…
The Negative Abyss
This article explores what one might call the dystopia of contemporary screen-based culture through a discussion of the work of Paul Virilio and Bernard Stiegler. Centrally, it explains that the screen might be seen as a negative abyss, where absolute surface creates the effect of infinite depth and a sense of absolute freedom obscures the truth of solipsistic self-reflection and enclosure. It explores this idea through reference to Virilio’s con…
Critical Luxury Studies
The cover of John Armitage and Joanne Roberts’ new book Critical Luxury Studies, which shows New York artist Tom Sachs’ 1996 piece Chanel Chainsaw, perfectly captures the spirit of their project th
Luxus
In this article, I seek to explore the psychopolitical significance of the contemporary idea of luxury through reference to the Roman concept of luxus, which means excess, extravagance, indulgence, and debauchery. In the first section of the article, I examine the politics of the idea of luxus in the Roman context through a discussion of the relationship between the emperor Nero, who pushed luxury toward its psychopathic limits, and the Stoic phi…
Stiegler’s university
In this article I propose to explore Bernard Stiegler’s work through the lens of a politics of education and in particular the idea of the university, which becomes a pharmacological space of on th
Cultural Politics Now
Although neither a cultural philosophy nor a political theory, the concept of cultural politics emerged, as we conceive it, decades ago in a time when it was often argued that the study of culture and the academic discipline of cultural studies were unavoidably political because of questions of value, ideology, and power this study entails. This article by the editors of the journal Cultural Politics provides a short survey of the field, its emer…
After Bauman
The coincidence of the passing of the great European sociologist Zygmunt Bauman with the British decision on Brexit, the American election to president of Donald Trump, the rise of fake news, and the normalization of what would have previously been extremist political views raises profound ethical questions and political challenges for not only Bauman's home discipline, sociology, but also the wider humanities and social sciences.Although Bauman …
The Utopianism of Luxury
Book Review| July 01 2020 The Utopianism of Luxury A Philosophy of Luxury, by Wiesing, Lambert, translated by Roth, Nancy Ann, London: Routledge, 2019, 172 pages, $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780367138417 Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone is senior lecturer in sociology at Keele University. He is author of Tocqueville’s Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Theory (2007) and Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, a…
On Existence, Poetic Revealing, and the Work of Art
Research Article| November 01 2020 On Existence, Poetic Revealing, and the Work of Art: Interview with Mehdi Saadeti Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone Mark Featherstone is senior lecturer in sociology at Keele University in the United Kingdom. His research focuses on the history of utopias and dystopias in philosophy, culture, and art. He is currently working on a book on the relationship between the Western idea of utopia, Asian thought, and a…
Beyond the disenchanted university
In the teeth of the coronavirus crisis the British HE system has been thrown into chaos and the severe limitations of the market model have been cruelly exposed. After thirty years of expansion and increasing neoliberalization, the contradictions of the marketized system have been realized by the virus, pushing the entire sector to the edge of bankruptcy. On this basis it is easy to see why the British HE system is haunted by the spectres of comm…
Žižek's Pandemic
In the first part of this article on Žižek's recent book Pandemic! I show how he develops a political theology of the spirit through a discussion of social distancing. In this argument Žižek connects the idea of physical distance to the biblical story of the resurrection, in which Jesus says to Mary Magdalene “noli me tangere” (“touch me not”), in order to imagine the emergence of a community of spirit from the social, political, and economic rui…
Viral Culture
Simmel's (non-human) humanism
Given the recent non-human turn in sociology and the social sciences, the popularity of theories of entanglement, and contemporary concern with the concept of the anthropocene, it is easy to forget that classical sociology was always-already aware of the relationship between humanity and non-humanity. Although Daniel Chernilo focuses upon the debate between Sartre and Heidegger in his recent Debating Humanity, and contrasts Sartre's Humanism with…
Imagining the negentropic university
In this piece I outline the history of the university in terms of a shift from a place concerned with the contemplation of the unknowable and the infinite to a machine focused on instrumental rationality, calculation, and computation. Reading this history through Lyotard's work on the post-modern condition and the emergence of the knowledge economy, I consider the rise of the computational university and artificial intelligence in terms of the ab…
The tragedy of utopia in the age of the Anthropocene
My key objective in this article is to explore the history of the concept of utopia and its application in really existing social, political, economic and cultural forms. Starting with a consideration of what I call the economy of utopia, I theorise the desire for the ideal society in terms of a deeply human drive to seek to overcome vulnerability, limitation and finitude that is set upon failure and the fall towards dystopia by virtue of the fac…
Sociology (15 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Politics (11 obras) · Aesthetics (10 obras) · Art (9 obras) · Epistemology (8 obras)