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#socialtheory

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On systems medicine, planetary #health and #biopolitics

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Health is inherently political and #queer which calls for systems thinking, and thinking at the interstices.

To achieve healthcare based on systems medicine, and to recognize the complexity, liminality, biopolitics and queerness of health and illness, engineering and biotechnology are useful but largely insufficient.

Biopolitics
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopol

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault

🧵 1/5
A few weeks ago, I picked up Theodor Adorno's "Minima Moralia", started it, but was then distracted, and so put it aside.

Being distracted from Adorno is easily explicable, as I don't think even his admirers would describe him as an easy read.

Nevertheless, I have struggled through some Adorno before, so I went back to "Minima Moralia" more recently and read the collected essays and aphorisms from cover to cover.

I am aware, of course, that were Adorno to be alive today, he would point to my beliefs and preoccupations as evidence of the "damaged life" he describes and deplores. For critical theorists, my reformist social democracy, my belief in the possibility of a science of society, and the joy I take in Richard Strauss, Jean Sibelius, and Kpop are all signs of a pitiful enslavement to a naive positivism and the kitsch culture of capitalism.

Nevertheless, I found "Minima Moralia" rewarding, if at times frustrating, reading. I read the Verso edition; I have heard criticisms of older translations of Adorno, of which this is one, it having been first published in 1974 by New Left Books. In this thread, I'm going to link to a newer translation by Dennis Redmond.

Overall, Adorno puts forward a number of arguments about culture, intellectuals, and commodification under capitalism. For many years from the mid seventies onwards, he was regarded a grouchy elitist whose high modernist cultural critique could, in the light of Birmingham School cultural studies, be seen as at best guilty of a simplistic, uninformed by Gramsci, and demobilisingly moralistic approach to popular culture and at worst of a marxisant high toryism.

These criticisms are not without foundation. Reading "Minima Moralia" can be at times the trying experience of being subjected to page upon page of western marxist curmudgeonry.

Yet some of thoughts on the culture of capitalism struck me as meriting my renewed consideration, even though....

versobooks.com/products/1035-m

www.versobooks.comMinima Moralia

"Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it
are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation."

#baudrillard #criticaltheory #pessimism #sociology #philosophy #culturaltheory #socialtheory

youtube.com/watch?v=WwbEsdwhG3I

Micro Oped: Nested hegemonies or matryoshka hegemonies

Inclusion without equality is a contemporary [sociological] technology of co-option in the 21st century and has been hollowing out critical thought and liberatory struggles.

Consciously choosing to be outside the circles of uncritical thought, objecting to inclusion without equality and power redistribution, is a liberatory praxis.

#nestedhegemonies #matryoshkahegemonies #socialtheory #democracy #criticalpolicy #sociology

full text ⬇

Continued thread

Temporality 2/2

Temporality is often overlooked in #science, #health, #socialtheory and #futures work

“Wildflower” is the 5th track from the new album by #BillieEilish released on May 17, 2024 (Darkroom & Interscope Records). The album is understated and subtle in the bold and effervescent world of pop, melodies flow beautifully and tell stories on temporality - recursive possibilities, materialities and subjectivities of time where the past is reproduced in a long now but never the same way.

Wir freuen uns auf den Vortrag morgen von Gundula Ludwig aufmerksam zu machen!

Das Forschungszentrum Social Theory @uniinnsbruck möchte den Wandel in Bildungsverständnissen kritisch beleuchten, und die aktuelle Lage des Wissens zwischen Auto­no­mie und Abhängigkeit interdisziplinär diskutieren.

Weitere Infos zur Veranstaltung morgen und zur Veranstaltungsreihe insgesamt findet ihr hier:
uibk.ac.at/de/socialtheory/030