Theory, Culture and Society

In a 1955 lecture the physicist Richard Feynman reflected on the place of doubt within scientific practice. ‘Permit us to question, to doubt, to not be sure’, proposed Feynman, ‘it is possible to live and not to know’. In our contemporary world, the science of machine learning algorithms appears to transform the relations between science, knowledge and doubt, to make even the most doubtful event amenable to action. What might it mean to ‘leave room for doubt’ or ‘to live and not to know’ in our contemporary culture, where the algorithm plays a major role in the calculability of doubts? I propose a posthuman mode of doubt that decentres the liberal humanist subject. In the science of machine learning algorithms the doubts of human and technological beings nonetheless dwell together, opening onto a future that is never fully reduced to the single output signal, to the optimised target.

Louise Amoore

Theory Culture & Society

Doubt and the Algorithm: On the Partial Accounts of Machine Learning

This paper argues that Michel Foucault’s lectures that form The Birth of Biopolitics owe a considerable debt to the thought of Max Weber, particularly in their analysis of how different socio-legal regimes shape distinctive national forms of capitalist economies, and the role that is played by social and economic institutions in the shaping of individual identities. This is in contrast to a common interpretation of Foucault’s account of neoliberalism, which synthesizes his work into neo-Marxist notions of hegemony and capitalist domination. It also identifies Foucault’s approach to neoliberalism as an exploratory one, which considers insights into how a particular relationship between ideas and institutional practices may help in imagining socialist forms of government practice.

Terry Flew

Foucault, Weber, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Governmentality

World order is once again a matter of broad discussion and has entered influential critical theory with Hardt and Negri and Giorgio Agamben. A key reference has been Carl Schmitt's international thought, particularly his concept of nomos. Rather than address Schmitt's historical jurisprudence of international law, which has been done elsewhere, the present article examines the role of philology and mythology in his international thought. Such an approach reveals the considerable power of the concept of nomos and the intelligibility afforded by his striking account of it in terms of the elements of land, sea and air. Schmitt's jurisprudence proves to be inseparable from his approaches to language and mythology. This mythology also indicates significant ethical as well as intellectual problems in Schmitt's work, not least stemming from his association with Nazism and his anti-Jewish statements during the 1930s. This article argues that mythology and philology are both necessary to the intellectual task of making world order thinkable and map-able, and form conditions of global political action and decisive authority. It recommends, however, an ethos of modesty and plurality that remains aware of the dangers of drawing political consequences from the mythological inscriptions upon the earth.

Mitchell Dean

A Political Mythology of World Order

世界秩序的政治神话

Taking the biomediated body to be a historically specific mode of organization of material forces, invested by capital into being, as well as elaborated through various technoscientific discourses, the article traces these investments and the discursive productions of the biomediated body, linking it to an ongoing reconfiguration of governance and economy.

Patricia T. Clough

Theory, Culture & Society

The Affective Turn

情感转向

This article examines the characteristics of a new form of visibility which has become a pervasive feature of the modern world and which is linked to the development of communication media. With the development of the media, the visibility of individuals, actions and events is severed from the sharing of a common locale: one no longer has to be present in the same spatial-temporal setting in order to see the other or to witness an action or event. The rise of this new form of mediated visibility has transformed the relations between visibility and power. Thanks to mediated visibility, political rulers are able to appear before their subjects in ways and on a scale that never existed previously. Skilful politicians exploit this to their advantage; with the help of their PR consultants and communications advisers, they seek to create and sustain a basis of support by managing their visibility in the mediated arena of modern politics. But mediated visibility is a double-edged sword: it also creates new risks for political leaders, who find themselves exposed to new kinds of dangers. Hence the visibility created by the media becomes the source of a new and distinctive kind of fragility. However much political leaders try to manage their visibility, they cannot completely control it: mediated visibility can slip out of their grasp and can, on occasion, work against them.

John B. Thompson

The New Visibility

新可见性

The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1976 and has been republished in multiple printings, editions and translations. The original English text has been continuously in print, unmodified from its first publication. This essay suggests that The Tourist can be read today as an account of baseline socio-cultural and economic conditions at the moment just before tourism began its rapid growth to become the world’s largest industry. Several enduring and unique qualities of the tourist commodity and tourist consumption are posited as reasons for the unconstrained growth of the industry. The essay further argues that new cultural models and psychoanalytic frameworks are needed for the analysis of capitalism’s shift from alienated labor to alienated leisure as its primary engine of profitability.

Dean MacCannell

Alienated Leisure: Reflections on <i>The Tourist</i>

异化的休闲：对《游客》的反思

This is a review of a lecture series by Gillian Rose on Frankfurt School critical theory, which was delivered at the University of Sussex in 1979 and is now published under the title Marxist Modernism, edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott.

Nicholas Gane

Gillian Rose, <i>Marxist Modernism</i>

吉莉安·罗斯，《马克思主义现代主义》

Although this article examines the problems facing modern universities such as their loss of independence and shortage of funding, similar problems faced universities throughout the 20th century. The focus is on the post-war generation, the creation of new universities and the political and economic changes that were brought about by Thatcherism. In the growth period between 1945 and the 1970s, many working-class children gained social mobility through the expansion of the university sector. This period also attracted large numbers of exiles from Europe. The contemporary demographic challenge to universities in terms of the shrinkage of the population of eligible students is critical. Universities have responded by recruiting primarily Chinese and Indian students. This challenge joins other modern problems: bureaucracy, managerialism, rising costs, the loss of academic independence, stagnant wages, declining opportunities and the threat of AI. Can we imagine and build the post-university? Is the cafe as a meeting place a possible model of a global online intellectual hub?

Bryan S. Turner

Does the University Have a Future?

大学还有未来吗？

This essay examines the role of voice-centred media practices in promoting public engagement and enhancing academic research in a media environment dominated by platform capitalism. It argues that developing academic researchers’ media literacy is essential to their understanding of how communication spaces are created and managed. Through the ‘Let’s Read the “Terms of Service” Out Loud!’ workshop, participants explored the often-overlooked implications of digital media and platform use. This activity raises awareness of the personal data exchange inherent in platform capitalism. The essay also introduces the telephonoscope, an experimental medium that combines digital apps with classic black dial phones, enabling participants to engage in personal storytelling. These media practices offer alternative methods for engaging with media platforms, fostering reflection on their societal impact. Integrating media theory into research and embracing voice-based storytelling practices can bridge the gap between academic researchers and the public, creating more profound insights into digital media.

Shin Mizukoshi

Activating Academic Voice: Explorations of the Media Landscape

激活学术声音：媒体景观的探索

Writings on counterpublics, publicness and the public realm present a theoretical and empirical dialectic of a public sphere in the singular and multiple counterpublics. We update and relocate this interplay by situating our paper in present-day Russia and the protests against the invasion of Ukraine. Through exemplary scenes of counterpublicness, and drawing upon Russian and Western scholarship, we develop a notion of counterpublics as a minimal condition of organization understood as the collective capacity to act. If the public sphere designates a controlled theatre for the organization of social experience, then the self-organized and dispersed struggle to enable moments of publicness keeps alive and rehearses political organizing under dire conditions.

短名	Theory. Cult. Soc.
Journal Impact	2.77
国际分区	CULTURAL STUDIES(Q1)
期刊索引	SCI Q1中科院 2 区

ISSN	0263-2764, 1460-3616
h-index	129
国内分区	社会学(2区)社会学文化研究(1区)
Top 期刊	是

涉及主题	哲学社会学政治学法学认识论计算机科学艺术历史政治心理学地理经济生物语言学美学考古物理
出版信息	出版商: SAGE Publications Ltd，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 否
基本数据	创刊年份: 1982，原创研究文献占比: 95.92%，自引率:3.70%， Gold OA占比: 32.29%

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