Various forms of interregional cooperation are of increasing strategic importance in the contemporary global political context. To conceptualize them, IR scholars often employ the theory of interregionalism. While possessing significant epistemological potential, it is characterized by pronounced Eurocentrism. Its conceptual core and empirical foundation are based on the analysis of the interactions of the European Union or European countries with other regional organizations/groups of states. This naturally raises the following question: to what extent are the principles and implications of this theory relevant for studying the policies of non-Western actors? To answer this question, the author applies the theory of interregionalism to an analysis of the 25-year history of China’s economic cooperation with Central Asian (CA) countries. First, the author traces the development of theoretical research on the interregionalism phenomenon, identifying its key types and functional aspects. Building on this, the author examines the evolution of Sino-Central Asian economic cooperation since the early 21st century and distinguishes three stages in its development. The first stage (2001–2012) saw China attempt to form institutionalized interregional economic relations based on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, involving not only CA countries but also Russia. In other words, for this stage, it is more accurate to speak of Sino-Eurasian quasi-interregional interaction rather than strictly Sino-Central Asian. The second stage (2013–2022) was characterized by China’s efforts to elevate Sino-Central Asian economic cooperation to a transregional level, primarily through the active involvement of CA countries in the implementation of the Silk Road Economic Belt initiative. The third stage (2022–present) is associated with the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, which prompted China to return to the principles of quasi-interregionalism in its policy toward CA countries, though now without Moscow’s participation, in order to mitigate political and economic risks. Thus, this study not only demonstrates the applicability of the interregionalism theory to the study of non-Western actors but also provides a fresh perspective on a specific case of such interregional interaction — Sino-Central Asian economic cooperation. At the same time, there is a clear need to further refine the methodology of interregional research to better adapt it to various non-Western contexts.
This article examines how power and inequality are reproduced and contested in ecotourism governance from the perspective of local communities in the Ciletuh–Palabuhanratu UNESCO Global Geopark (CPUGG), Indonesia. Using a qualitative ethnographic approach that combines participatory observation, indepth interviews, and document analysis, the study explores how local actors experience exclusion in decision-making, benefit distribution, and cultural representation. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality and Stuart Hall’s theory of representation, the research demonstrates that governance operates not only through formal institutions but also through symbolic and everyday practices that shape inclusion and control. Furthermore, by integrating Arturo Escobar’s post-development critique and James C. Scott’s notion of everyday resistance, the analysis reveals how communities mobilize social capital, kinship, and cultural values to negotiate power and reclaim agency within global tourism structures. The findings show that while state authorities and private investors dominate ecotourism planning and benefits, local communities respond through micro-level self-organization, such as cooperative homestay networks, boat-sharing systems, and cultural performance groups, that embody governmentality from below. This study contributes to the political anthropology of tourism by showing how everyday resistance redefines local agency in the context of global ecotourism governance. It advances an understanding of ecotourism governance not merely as policy management but as a field of struggle over meaning, identity, and justice, highlighting the need for inclusive deliberation, recognition of local knowledge, and equitable distribution of benefits in sustainable tourism governance.
Public hazards, threats, and risks are studied by the general theory of national security. Russian scientists differentiate between the concepts of challenge, hazard, and threat. The authors used such interdisciplinary, dialectical, and socio-ecological approaches and methods as political science analysis and inclusive observation to describe the essential characteristics of these terms and develop their own definitions. A hazard has a non-targeted nature, i.e., it has neither intention to cause damage nor targeted resource provision. It differs from challenge and threat in that it is deprived of directions, goals, and resources. The current global hazards to basic public interests include nuclear and chemical terrorism, artificial intelligence, media, uncontrolled technological development, genetic or biological weapons, and man-made or natural environmental processes. By identifying the range of direct and indirect hazards, the government chooses national priorities, as well as opportunities for engaging non-governmental, public, and resource potential. Most modern hazards are inherent with civilizational progress and human interaction with nature that does not rely on co-evolution. As the ongoing technological development leads to an information-oriented type of society, new natural and public hazards are bound to occur.
Adopting the document study methodology and using Bernstein’s theory of pedagogy as an analytical framework, the study investigated policy responses to education provision in displacement contexts, the pedagogic models generated from such policies, and the implications for promoting learning. The findings revealed that providing education in displacement contexts involves navigating tensions between the contextual appropriateness of pedagogic models, their inherent power and structural consequences, and the ethical and political trade-offs involved in using such models. The study recommends mixed/eclectic pedagogies founded on mixed pedagogic structures.
This study explores the memory of the Soviet period in Moldova, focusing on how social trauma and contemporary politics influence perceptions of the past. Utilizing oral history methods, over 60 interviews were conducted in Moldova during the latter half of 2023, encompassing a diverse range of respondents aged from their 20s to 90s. The research spans various regions including northern Moldova, Chisinau, Gagauzia, and Transnistria. The findings reveal that memories of the Soviet era are often characterized by nostalgia, shaped significantly by the abrupt collapse of the USSR and the subsequent social and economic turmoil. This nostalgia is interpreted through the lens of cultural trauma theory, as proposed by Jeffrey Alexander and Piotr Sztompka, highlighting the profound societal changes that followed the Soviet disintegration. The study shows that the rhetoric of the USSR, playing a significant role in Moldovan politics and being instrumentalized by both proponents and opponents of Eurointegration, also greatly influences the image of the Soviet era among the Moldovan population. The ongoing economic and social crises, coupled with recent geopolitical tensions, have further intensified the nostalgic sentiments towards the Soviet era. In conclusion, the enduring social trauma and the continuous political invocation of Soviet rhetoric have a profound impact on the collective memory of the USSR in Moldova.
У цій статті проаналізовано застосування системи холістичного маркетингу при побудові позитивного іміджу бренду. Актуальність написання роботи визначена змінами на ринку, які будують нові правила ведення бізнесу. Розглянуті основні думки науковців стосовно поняття іміджу та його видів, застосування концепції холістичного маркетингу та її складових. Окрім цього, описана технологія побудови позитивного іміджу бренду, що складається із шести пунктів (визначення цільової аудиторії, її потреб, формування ціннісної пропозиції та ідентифікаційні риси для неї, планування маркетингової кампанії та подальша послідовність у діях). Окрім цього, визначено, що перетин складових холістичного маркетингу утворює власне імідж. Детально розглянуто застосування складових концепції холістичного маркетингу (маркетинг відносин, соціально-етичний маркетинг, інтегрований маркетинг та внутрішній маркетинг) на прикладі українських підприємств молокопереробної галузі. Після визначення всіх теоретичних аспектів відбувся перехід до обʼєкта дослідження, а саме ТМ «Доообра Ферма». Автори дослідили основну інформацію про бренд, внутрішні та зовнішні складові діяльності, які безпосередньо впливають на його розвиток. Визначено, що ТМ «Доообра Ферма» вміло застосовує складові системи холістичного маркетингу для підсилення своєї конкурентоспроможності та побудови позитивного бренду.
Education (General), Theory and practice of education
U.S. voters’ affect toward such minority groups as blacks, Muslims, and transgender people has become warmer in recent years. Warming affect toward minority groups is a surprise for the influential theory of affective polarization. In arguing that voters’ partisan allegiances fuel dislike of groups associated with the opposing political party, this theory predicts that it is primarily Democratic identifiers whose affect has become warmer, as affect is assumed to reflect partisanship and little more. Yet this is not what the authors find, analyzing high-quality data from the 2012–2020 American National Election Studies. Not only have Republicans (like Democrats) become warmer toward minority groups, but this influenced voter choice and contributed heavily to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Voters’ affect toward social groups may matter independently of the powerful force of partisanship. The authors discuss study limitations, alongside implications for affective polarization theory, research on Trumpism, and classical sociological scholarship on liberalization.
The legitimacy is one of the key resources of stability for all political regimes but its importance growing still much in regimes under transformation. The general legitimacy theory exposes why and how the dominant political class disposes the trust of society to stay in power by using available symbolic, moral and legal resources of self-legitimization. In contemporary law-based state the ground of the legitimacy is normally associated with the national constitution – its fundamental values, principles and norms as well as with general public agreement on mode of their application by government institutions and officials. Thus, each important constitutional revision means both the challenge to the established legitimacy and an attempt to reconstruct it in new forms. The author analyses the impact of Russian 2020 constitutional reform in the transformation of the Russian political regime legitimacy. He exposes the reciprocal interconnections between legitimacy and constitutionalism, regarding such items as positive and negative law-making impulses; substantive and instrumental aspects of reform; national, regional and local dimensions; constitutional and meta-constitutional parameters of the legitimization process as well as declared and undeclared reasons, motives, arguments and political technologies of amending process. According his conclusion, the main result of the Russian constitutional reform consists in the reconstructed legitimacy formula as a legal ground for consolidation of power under transition process and a fresh start for the new form of constitutional authoritarianism.
As two neighboring countries, China and India not only have “emerging” economies, but also have a very important position and role in international political life. In addition to the trend of cooperation, China-India relations also take place in fierce competition in many fields, including energy security. From the early years of the twenty-first century, the need to exploit energy sources to serve the economic development of these two powers has become even more acute. This article focuses on some outstanding cooperation achievements as well as the fierce competition in the field of energy security between China and India in the first decade of the twenty-first century. At the same time, we also give some remarks on the relationship of China – India competition and cooperation on energy security in the aforementioned period.
Political science (General), Economics as a science
Галина Азаренкова, Катерина Свередюк, Денис Омеляненко
Розкрито сутність антикризового управління як складової загального менеджменту підприємства і цілісної системи, яка складається з принципів, методів розроблення і реалізації комплексу спеціальних управлінських рішень. Виокремлено мету антикризового управління, завдання, які допоможуть її досягти, і принципи, які лежать в основі здійснення антикризових заходів. Виділено такі принципи: принцип постійної превентивності дії та готовності до реагування, терміновості та адекватності реагування, комплексності рішень, альтернативності дій та адаптивності управління, пріоритетності використання внутрішніх ресурсів, оптимізації зовнішньої санації та принцип ефективності. Досліджено проблематику підприємств, що перебувають у кризовому стані, періодично або постійно неспроможні продовжувати нормальну виробничо-господарську діяльність і сплачувати свої рахунки. Пояснено причину виникнення в українській економіці потреби в нових інструментах управління підприємствами в умовах кризи, які дозволяють виявити і знешкодити докорінні причини кризових процесів. На прикладі Публічного акціонерного товариства «Харківський плитковий завод» досліджено фінансовий аналіз підприємства і вказано основні засади антикризового менеджменту. Представлено авторський погляд на механізм антикризового управління, визначено його суть і складові, описано послідовність етапів здійснення антикризового управління на цьому підприємстві. Зроблено висновок, що найважливішим завданням антикризової політики підприємства стає стратегічне управління нововведеннями, виконання якого багато в чому залежить від якості ухвалення інноваційних рішень, можливості знаходити рішення, які організаційно й економічно зможуть забезпечити досягнення поставленої мети.
Education (General), Theory and practice of education
The purpose of the paper is to describe the transformation of the Slovak residential care system over the last two to three decades. The goal is to analyse the benefits and costs of the most important changes in light of the political, theoretical and ideological shifts. The residential care system for children in Slovakia has improved significantly in many respects. Children's homes have been transformed from large facilities into smaller units; and children under the age of six can only be placed in foster families or family care. Children's rights have been implemented through care policies, and there has been gradual recognition of the need to address the difficulties faced by birth families. Many decisions in policy and practice have been underpinned by a pro-family orientation and concepts such as attachment theory. Nonetheless, the process of pursuing better quality care and of building a system that meets international quality criteria has been followed by collateral shifts. Re-education, diagnostic and specialist facilities have not been the primary focus. The labelling of children in care as problematic and a derogatory discourse about Roma children has persisted to a significant extent. With the facilities no longer being under the direct control of the state administration and the education and health ministries, some of their psychological and pedagogical experience and knowledge has been lost.
Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
In contemporary renderings of modernity, it is patented to the West and assumed to include gender equality; a commitment to gender equality then risks becoming overlaid with hierarchies of country and culture. One way of contesting this, associated with alternative modernities, takes issue with the presumed Western origins of modernity. Another, associated with feminism, subjects the claim the modern societies deliver gender equality to more critical scrutiny. But the first is vulnerable to the charge of describing different routes to the same ideals, and the second to the response that evidence of shortcomings only shows that modernity has not yet fully arrived. The contribution of the West to the birth of modernity is not, in my argument, the important issue. The problem, rather, is the mistaken attribution of a “logic” to modernity, as if it contains nested within it egalitarian principles that will eventually unfold. Something did indeed happen at a particular moment in history that provided new ways of imagining equality, but the conditions of its birth were associated from the start with the spread of colonial despotisms and the naturalisation of both gender and racial difference. There was no logic driving this towards more radical versions. It is in the politics of equality that new social imaginaries are forged, not in the unfolding of an inherently “modern” ideal.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze some tendencies in the interpretation of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude of Étienne de La Boétie with a critical approach, taking into consideration a recent publication of the discourse. The paper focuses on the recovery of the full organic theory of La Boétie and of some of the text’s key-concepts, such as “human nature” and “habit”. It opposes the idea of a concrete political militancy of the text, arguing that the work of La Boétie is, as Montaigne indicates, an intellectual exercise on human nature and liberty.
In accordance with the Copenhagen Criteria EU membership requires the candidate country
to achieve a certain level in minority protection, but up until now there has been no definite
answer as to what actually constitutes this rule in practice. For the first time, Serbia was
expected to adopt a specific framework document, the so-called Action Plan for the Exercise
of the Rights of National Minorities in order to open negotiations on Chapter 23 of its EU
integration negotiations. Whether or not this precondition, determined by the EU means
that successful accession is conditioned by respect for national minority rights in candidate
member states in the future. In the case of Macedonia constant pre-accession monitoring
has been carried out and reported in the country’s progress reports. Although Serbia and
Macedonia occupy different stages in the EU integration process, both contain in their national
minority policy sensitive issues that are very similar in their nature. The paper provides a
short overview of the (non)-existing EU standards in national minority protection in general,
and analyses the most relevant aspects of this issue from the perspective of Serbia and
Macedonia.
In past decade, Middle east people insurrections underlined safety, political and economic variations more than any change and event in that region. By happening the variations and lapsing some years since commencement of insurrections and its inappropriate consequences in Arabian countries, many studies were performed on discussion shaping indicators of the insurrection and its frustration factors in societies and research centers which their results are pertinent to analysis of different insights in terms of effectiveness of a special indicator or variable. In regard to studies, it was tried to answer important question that what were the most important shaping indicators and frustration factors for middle east Arabian insurrection? The documentary response is offered in terms of constructivism theory. The findings proved that shaping and forming indicators for Middle East Arabian insurrections are derived from procedure affair in terms of effectiveness of semantic and material indicators for cultural, political and economic dimensions like cultural dissatisfaction, tribal conflicts, distrust to government systems and inefficient economic structure. In fact, not a unified indicator but collection of indicators underlies people insurrection in Arabian countries of Middle East and in relation with frustration factors in order to obtain suitable aims, one sees effectiveness of different cultural, political and economic factors including extension tribal conflicts, extend cultural absolutism, integrity for political processes and to lose economic opportunities in the country.<br /> Keywords: Middle East People Insurrection, Tribal Conflicts, Cultural Absolutism, Constructivism
Bruce Bimber, Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Lauren Bryant
Processes of disagreement are important to public deliberation, but research has not examined the dynamics of disagreement in deliberation of political topics with respect to effects of the channel of interaction. This study analyzes the discussions generated via an experiment in which discussants were randomly assigned either to deliberate online via synchronous chat or face-to-face. The study compares the initiation of disagreement, its qualities, and how long it is sustained in the two environments. Discourse analysis suggests that in the online environment initial expressions of disagreement were less frequent, less bold, and were not sustained as compared with the face-to-face discussions. Reasons include the lack of coherence in synchronous chat, which may challenge interlocutors and prevent them from pursuing a disagreement over multiple turns. Implications of these findings for scholars and practitioners are discussed.
Decentralized political institutions increasingly play a substantial role in the lives of people, implementing services deriving from influential (elected) bodies of governance, and influencing the relative degree of civil society access to policy-making. The following paper challenges pluralist and social capitalist claims of how decentralized institutions arise and differ in their ability to function. Robert Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaela Nanetti’s (1993) book Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy will provide the base from which this paper departs, utilizing comparative historical analysis to argue instead that subnational or otherwise regional and local governments entail dialectical relations within and between different levels of state institutions. Overall, this paper argues that the struggles over decentralization ultimately depend on ideological opponents and the balance of power in the struggle for political change, simultaneously affecting both political institutions and civil society participation. This paper briefly unfolds Putnam et al.’s arguments regarding the relationship between democratic institutions and civil society, followed by two case studies – France and Brazil – explaining several macrofactors influencing the processes, outcomes, and implications of decentralization. Thirdly, decentralization and multi-level governance is tied to civil society participation. Lastly, decentralization in relation to partisan objectives is discussed with reference to participatory budgeting.
Revolt — its face distorted by amorous ecstasy — tears from God his naive mask, and thus oppression collapses in the crash of time. Catastrophe is that by which a nocturnal horizon is set ablaze — it is time released from all bonds. (Bataille, 1985, p.134)
Transgression... is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation its harrowing and poised singularity. (Foucault, 1998, p.28)
To transgress, according to Michel Foucault's reflections on Georges Bataille and sexuality from his 1963 essay 'A Preface to Transgression,' is to cross a border, a line, a limit, or a boundary. Alternatively, and in a more extended and possibly occult sense, and pace some of Foucault's intellectual contemporaries, it is to reconfigure what might otherwise be an aporia, whether sensual, erotic, textual, intellectual, emotional, ethical, political, material, metaphysical or aesthetic, and open it up for what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would later describe, in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as deterritorialization. As is well known, deterritorialization for these thinkers, as both process and emergence, is invariably paired with the notion of reterritorialization, and this is particularly so in what has come to be known after Frederic Jameson as late capitalism and its (possibly) now outdated cultural corollary in postmodernism.
Importantly, the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that the word 'transgression' in this context could be argued as evoking, and whether in critical theory, philosophy, art or popular culture, is not merely about breaking rules or defying conventions as has sometimes and somewhat romantically and reductively been assumed. Such assumptions do, of course, have their reference points and justifications. Some of these reference points are well known: for instance, the broadly Franco-centric and generally male legacy of D.A.F. Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dada and Surrealism, Antonin Artaud, Bataille, Jean Genet, the Lettrists and Situationists and Foucault himself.1culture. Other reference points include the charismatic influence of various distaff Anglophone figures such as Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, Andy Warhol, Kathy Acker and William Burroughs, or the Viennese actionists, performance art globally, and the mid twentieth century emergence from African-American music of certain rock and roll stars with all their brazen sonic populism, intricate allusion, multiple epigones and self-consciously decadent analogues in hip hop, electronica, metal, or industrial and gothic music and culture (Blake, 2009, pp.76-90). These are, at least, some of the main coordinates for transgression as concept and performance. However, if transgression is based at least in part upon breaking rules, it is of course necessary for there to be rules to break, boundaries to be crossed, lines to be redrawn, opposing forces or sensations without which it would be meaningless as both act and idea. Transgression does not happen in a void, nor does it emerge ex nihilo from some flow of metaphysical desire or quasi-virtuality. In that sense every transgression is also a conflict or agon emerging from a facticity, from a body or bodies, from a space of confinement or containment, as Foucault and before him Bataille were acutely aware. It is a conflict that may, moreover, under the right circumstances, and if pursued in the right spirit, generate a spark of novelty and thus provide a flash of vivid illumination against a canvas of darkness where before there was only a listless grey conformity of action and reaction, of habit, of convention, of dialectic and binarism, of a yes and a no.
In this understanding of transgression as Chris Jenks has so vividly outlined, where there is a clash of two opposed elements or forces, whether contraries or contradictions, there is no longer any moment of sublation, no aufhebung as in Hegelian or post-Hegelian thought, no representation as such. Instead, and as a result of a differential between velocities or modes of expression there is an explosion of force itself: a detonating flower of force and multiplicity that opens up its petals and tendrils and blossoms instantly into new networks of communication and expansion, new forms of libidinal economy and encounter, new patterns of semiosis and dissipation. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the image of the lightning flash so often recurs in illustrations of transgression and its variants in both critical thought and popular culture, and is invariably, in the former domain anyway, implicitly attached to related images of disturbances in time and space, in difference and identity, in continuity and discontinuity. The lightning flash is an image, moreover, and importantly, of rupture, penetration, fissure or charge — of a coupling and uncoupling of intensities — rather than as a measure of causality, consistency or linkage per se. Thus, for instance, in Deleuze's seminal pre-Guattari study of difference and repetition from 1968, we encounter the curiously gothic figure of the 'dark precursor' who, like the strange attractors of chaos theory, both presages and configures becomings by reading the trajectory of thought backwards, not merely as inversion or reversal, but as multiplicity. Here, then, we discover in a discussion of the role of difference in repetition for itself that the illumination is about communication:
...what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated. (Deleuze, 1994, p.119)
As with Bataille (whom Deleuze, interestingly, barely mentions here or elsewhere), the moment of transgression is also the moment of difference. But where Deleuze will take difference into the realms of virtuality, creation, experimentation and the event as transformation within a univocal realm of multiplicity, for Bataille, difference is bound up with the primal forces of eroticism and death, absolute expenditure and sacrifice, and in this he reveals his debt to Sade as much as to Nietzsche, (the Sade, of course, whose own Justine, notably, meets her death in a lightning strike not once, but twice). Bearing this image of the zig zag flash of transgression in mind (which, in the case of Deleuze and Guattari, might be more accurately rendered as transversality, or as Deleuze puts it in relation to Spinoza, the 'witch's path,' in that transgression per se is not central to their project), (Deleuze, 1988, p.1) it might also be fair to claim, as Nick Land has suggested, that the retrospective notion of Bataille as a 'philosopher of transgression' has little or no justification considering the sparse use of the term itself in his work (Land, 1992, p. 63). However, as Benjamin Noys has also argued in response to Land's observation, a strong and reasonable claim can be made, nonetheless, that transgression, whether named or not, is consistently operative as a technique of openingthroughout Bataille's writings (Noys, 2000, p. 9), whether critical and fictional, and it is in this sense, as well as in its sense of charge or fissure or communication, that the concept of transgression has travelled via figures such Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and others into the broader cultural conversation of late capitalism.
For Bataille, the essence of transgression is that it is in a perpetual conflict with taboo, in that without taboo there could be no transgression. There is no pure transgressive force in Bataille: transgression is always in tension with prohibition in one way or another, or as Foucault puts it:
Transgression is an action which involves limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line that it crosses.(Foucault, 1998, p.27)
This spatialized compression of transgression and taboo into a 'harrowing' singularity raises a number of questions about the durational aspect of this 'flash' that remain as central to the transgressive moment as the deliberate challenge such moments supposedly make to the norms and conventions of the culture in which they are enacted. On this point, some of the examples of transgression that Bataille indicates in his Eroticism are not entirely what one might expect in terms of transgressive convention. Transgression here as elsewhere is, of course, intimately related to other Bataillian themes such as laughter, intoxication, cruelty, sacrifice, blood, vomit and other bodily fluids, the sacred, the impossible, anguish and death, but in terms of eroticism itself, we find that, perhaps surprisingly, marital sex is considered as transgressive. The argument here indicates something central to Bataille's notion of transgression, in that for him marriage becomes a site in which the taboo against non reproductive erotic experience is given a stage, and is in this sense a violation in spite of the formal conventions observed, as human sacrifice or killing an opponent in a war might operate in a society which ostensibly objects to the killing of human beings.(Bataille, 1991, pp 123-128). Thus while on a personal level for Bataille, an erotic act with both its excess of joiussance and its undertow of post-coital anguish sensitizes the participants to the fundamental duality between continuity (through reproduction, say) and discontinuity (death or la petit mort), what this also signals is the cultural or societal tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity as this related tension plays out not only in rituals of sacrifice and exclusion or expulsion or scapegoating as these specify the limits of the profane and the excess of the sacred, but also in the mechanized and industrial cruelties of, for example, fascism and by extension more contemporary and politically driven atrocity and mass murder.(Bataille, 1983, pp. 137-160). This further indicates Bataille's broader political trajectory, initially built upon by Foucault and subsequently dematerialized by Jacques Derrida, (Derrida, 1978, pp. 251-277), in which a general economy, a solar economy of absolute excess and expenditure and transgression is opposed to the restricted economy of modern capitalism. It is here that Bataille's analysis becomes both contemporary and contentious, for as a number of commentators have noted, the form of late capitalism that characterizes the early twenty first century is very much based on notions of pointless expenditure and excess as it is on reckless accumulation, on extravagant waste as much as on order or regulation, on relentless and deliberate 'transgressive' hedonism as much as on the sober morality that might once have been associated with the capitalist system. Thus, as Noys has summarised, there are critics such as Joseph Goux who claim that Bataille's analysis and transgressive strategy is no longer applicable, whilst others such as Baudrillard argue that capitalism has effectively become Bataillian in its solar extravagance. (Noys, 2000, p.122).
From this perspective, the transition between an economy based on production as in Fordism or Five Year Plans to one based on consumption has parallels with the idea of a transition between the disciplinary societies anatomized by Foucault and the control society as mapped out so persuasively in relation to Foucault by Deleuze in his seminal essay, "Postscript on Control Societies" from 1990. In this later model, as Mark Fisher has so eloquently elaborated in his polemical study, Capitalist Realism: Is there an Alternative? the anti-capitalist movement(s) are always already formulated by a radically decentred and strategically absent capitalist Other to the extent that the notion of there even being an 'alternative,' a form of transgression that can actually transgress, has been turned into a kind of spin on the notion of rebellion and revolution as fashion accessories or as video game distractions rather than acts of ethical or political engagement. Thus Fisher writes of the tragic figure of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana as marking an end point to the possibility of transgression in its more classical sense as follows:
In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliché.(Fisher, 2011, p.9)
If Cobain's death marks, as Simon Reynolds and other have suggested, the final moment in which the zeit had or could have any kind of geist, then it might well be argued that we have reached a stage of post-transgression or transgression fatigue in a culture of twenty first century exhaustion equivalent to the decadence ushered in by Nietzsche's typically untimely image of the last man. Indeed, such imprisonment and paralysis in the eternal now of late capitalism in which shock has become a deliquescent commodity and the extreme a form of nothing more challenging than entertainment and diversion poses significant challenges to the idea of transgression as it has been historically configured. Accordingly, as the essays in this volume indicate, as much attention needs currently to be given to theuse of transgression in a variety of contexts, as to its broader significance within a theoretical framework and the contradictions inherent in its evolving legacy. Bearing these complexities as they circle around the notion of transgression and the post-transgressive in mind, it is worth noting briefly some of the characteristics that Bataille in particular associated with transgression as it is discussed in this collection. Centrally for Bataille, the act of transgression implies both a taboo that the subject is aware of and an act that is intentional in some sense. Secondly, the act of transgression opens the subject out to the continuity and discontinuity that become so acute in moments of erotic intensity or extreme violence, and this requires on some level an opening out to death as the determining affect and effect of desire, expression and personal ontology. Thirdly, the act of transgression requires a loss of self and a shattered delirium of personal identity in which a multiplicity of selves can emerge and reconfigure. Fourthly, whilst it is clearly connected with the 'ordinary' sense of transgression, as in the transgression of laws, mores, moral strictures and structures and so forth, the term also connotes an immanence that hints mockingly at the powerlessness of what it positions as a transcendent 'fiction' of authority, whether that transcendent is considered to be masquerading as God, truth or morality — or under late capitalism, aesthetic convention.
Finally, then, and as an instrument of transformation and adaptation, and however playful or nihilistic it's expression, transgression poses an existential challenge to the notion of the human as a bounded, productive, rational and instrumental creature in a homogenous culture, replacing that notion with one of consumption, waste and fundamental dissipation and in doing so, tracing out a line between the human, the inhuman and the spiritual, sexual and material 'catastrophe' of the atheological divine, degraded and transfigured, endlessly and immanently, by the ecstasy of annihilation.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities