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The program of Marx’s social critique of law is to reveal the social logic of law, the structural nexus between its normative content and the basic forms of social domination. In this chapter, Menke sketches a critique of the social critique of law. He argues that the fundamental premises of Marx’s legal theory lead him to reduce bourgeois law to private law, neglecting the separate and equiprimordial formation of social law. His alternative proposal is a conception according to which the tension between private and social law is constitutive of the bourgeois legal formation. This conception allows us to understand the law in bourgeois society as not only the “different form” of social domination but also the object, medium, and scene of a struggle of antagonistic relations of power.

The message contained in reggae music is above all a message of denunciation: the point is to show what is really happening, based on the fundamental distinction made by Rastafari between Good and Evil, between Zion and Babylon. Within a world viewed as a permanent struggle, reggae music develops a social critique and a denunciation of oppression. Reggae is therefore a music of resistance, based on a rhetoric of oppression that defines the terms which govern a worldview, and is rooted in the daily reality of the lives of poor people in Jamaica. Reggae music argues that poverty is neither a shameful condition nor in the order of things, but rather is only the consequence of the corruption of an elite that maintains a society based on exploitation, which therefore could be changed. Rastafari can be considered as a strong critique of consumer society and, more generally, capitalism. The rhetoric of oppression developed by reggae music articulates a fundamental opposition between the oppressors and the oppressed (based on the essential distinction of Babylon/Evil and Zion/Good), and the notion of hope.

In the call and response tradition of African American churches, the concluding chapter reflects on ways in which this book responds to calls for serious scholarship in religious ethnography. As part of that response, it highlights several new perspectives and directions for future research suggested by the current findings: (1) the creative ways in which gender and age may be configured in grass roots institution-building; (2) the position of Sanctified churches, not as bastions of anti-intellectualism but as venues of communal intellectual activity where academic achievement is valued and promoted; (3) the twin dimensions of charismatic leadership that also demonstrates bureaucratic acumen; and (4) the workings of a spirit-grounded “Hermeneutics of Suspicion” that promotes social critique and activism.

Chapter 2 examines what I call the moralistic turn in French letters and social thought, and especially the inversions between victims and perpetrators that I attribute to the rise of radical social critique. French literary modernity extolled evil and anti-morality, and revered transgression and rebellion. By blurring the lines between victims and perpetrators, they awkwardly yet genuinely acknowledged our common inhumanity. By contrast, I argue that our own time has reinjected moralism into literature and social thought. French letters rehabilitate the transgressor in the name of a moralistic sociology that hides its fascination with evil behind a discourse of social justice and victimization. Recent years have seen the development of an ideology of outrage (or “indignation”). I argue that this ideology functions as a psychic shield meant to dispel the return of the repressed—namely, the human inclination to dehumanize the other, the herd mentality exemplified by the Nazi episode. Doomed to fail because it rests on a psychic structure of repetition instead of working through, the ideology of outrage not only hinders any analysis of current antisemitism; it has actually reignited that fading hatred.

The disciplinary status of ethnomethodology is uncertain. It has been presented as a radical internal reform movement, aimed at re-specifying the focus of sociology; as an ‘alternate’ or supplement to it; as a discipline in its own right; or as a source of hybrid studies that complement various forms of practice. The cogency of each of these positions is considered. It is argued that ethnomethodology’s critique of social science, while salutary, seems to imply abolition rather than reform; and the proposal of its complementary relationship to conventional social science leaves open the question of why such a supplement is required. As regards ethnomethodology as a discipline, there are strong grounds for claiming that conversation analysis has provided a significant cumulative development of knowledge, but there are questions about whether its ethnomethodological character was essential to, or even compatible with, this. The ethnomethodological tradition of ‘studies of work’ has been less successful in this respect, and while it has made a practical contribution to some fields, once again it is not clear that this stems from the ethnomethodological character of the investigations. In conclusion, I suggest that the ambiguous status of ethnomethodology is built into its very nature.

This chapter examines the ‘British poetry revival’ that Sinclair was engaged in when he wrote and published Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. It considers the importance of William Blake to Suicide Bridge, and examines the factors that were used to define the poetic practice of the British poetry revival poets. It then shows how Sinclair adopted Michael Faraday's conception of the field for the purposes of cultural and social critique, and how Sinclair included the fourth dimension—namely time—in the Suicide Bridge. Finally, it shows how Nicholas Hawksmoor helped Sinclair reimagine London and its myths, and discusses Sinclair's troubling and conflicted understanding of the workings of myth and the scientific metaphors he used in his works.

Reconstructions and restorations at intentional community sites, such as Shaker and Moravian villages, are popular tourist destinations and valuable resources for public education. How do these sites present past groups' ideals within a modern societal context that largely contradicts many of their fundamental principles? How can visitors seek inspiration from intentional communities' unique efforts to enact or embody societal change when modern reconstructions often focus on quaint agrarian lifestyles that celebrate nostalgia for a shared, uncontested past, or highlight small innovations and inventions that align with our American ideals of individualism and entrepreneurial spirit? This chapter seeks to open a broad conversation among archaeologists about our role in interpreting and presenting community pasts as acts of social critique. Moving forward, we must acknowledge the modern social and political assumptions and motivations behind our interpretations of past communities, whether they are picturesque visions of an imagined simpler time, critical reflections on the discriminatory beliefs entwined with many group's histories, or calls to rekindle a movement or spirit from which we can learn today.

This chapter shows that narratives of self-improvement and religious transformation have largely replaced narratives of political transformation in women's prisons. This reflects a broader cultural shift from the politicized climate of collective activism and social critique during the early 1970s to the self-help climate of the 1980s and beyond. Self-help discourse has a Christian inflection in the women's prisons where the author conducted research; the majority of available self-help books are written by Christian authors and geared toward a Christian audience. In prisons throughout the country, the decrease in state and federal funding for rehabilitative programming has been matched by an increase in the presence of Christian volunteers, reading materials, and educational programs. As a 2007 federal appeals court decision underscored, this influx has meant that some opportunities, privileges, and reading materials are available only to prisoners who are willing to embrace a Christian perspective.

The coda compares narrative strategies in Lee Daniels’s 2009 film Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire with those in the 1996 source work in order to show that abstractionist disruption is most critically effective in verbal versus nonverbal narrative modes, precisely because the latter are not subject to grammatical regulation. It finally reviews plays by Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks to argue that, while abstractionism can be effective in theater, restrictions on public access to theatrical performance still make it less effective than print prose in engendering social critique.

This chapter is the first of two in-depth explorations into the history and cultural background of a single women’s traditions in which the performance context can be understood to shield women from the criticism their actions might otherwise attract. This chapter examines the poetic performances of Berber girls in Riffian communities in rural Morocco detailing the ways in which their performances offer individual girls the opportunity to speak their minds on issues and concerns that matter deeply to them and about which they cannot speak in any other context. In the process, the polemics of musical performance in Islamic contexts and feminist interpretations of some Islamic constructions of gender are explored. The ethnographic material for this chapter is drawn from the fieldwork of Terri Joseph Brint, Katherine Hoffman, and Jane Goodman.

This chapter examines “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927) in the light of commodity culture and the woman artist. It argues that, although the essay is structured around four transactions, Woolf's “shopper” is actually a participant in an economy at odds with capitalism—that is the gift economy. While the essay makes clear the pleasures of window-shopping, it voices a scathing criticism of the ruthlessness of capitalism, as the narrator moves towards participation in increasingly generous exchanges. Woolf's essay also demonstrates how a focus on generosity and gift-giving practices can “throw light upon our morality and help to direct our ideals” and can offer a different perspective on social structures and the organization of Western culture. In this way, ideas about the gift economy can help to illuminate the dynamic interconnection of the social, economic, and aesthetic in Woolf's fiction, as it can also throw new light on the social critique her work offers.

“Explorations” gives an account of a slightly different perspective, that of the aerial voyage, as it reveals the impact of Galileo’s oeuvre on the writers who chose this narrative device. The section “The social critique in the universe of glass” reviews the novel that most comprehensively contributed to this dialogue, Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El diablo cojuelo (The limping devil, 1641), which provides the first direct mention in Spanish of the famous astronomer. “Dream/vigil: Moons, moles, and lunatics in the poetry of the Baroque” traverses the literary skies with Juan Enríquez de Zúñiga (ca. 1580–1642) and Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera in their particular conflation between the Ptolemaic and the Copernican, mixing the old and the new in a bitter denunciation of contemporary mores.

This chapter juxtaposes the film criticism of Béla Balázs with the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner in order to carve out their approaches to gesture. It gives particular attention to Plessner’s “Grenzen der Gemeinschaft: Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus” (“The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism”) and Balázs’s “Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films” (“Visible Man or the Culture of Film”). Both authors have a pronounced interest in the potential of social gesture to inform public life, yet they articulate it in different ways: where Balázs bemoans too little gestural embodiment, Plessner sees too much of it. Balázs emphatically conjures up the promise of a gestural cure that he detects in the heightened corporeal expressivity of silent film; Plessner considers such expressivity as symptom not only of gestural, but also aesthetic, social and political ills.

This chapter examines Grindhouse as a text that deploys cutting-edge digital technologies to (re)produce a viewing experience with which only a fraction of the film’s vast audience can directly relate. Using Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s contribution to Grindhouse, as a case study, it suggests that structural (i.e., visual, aural, narratological) logics informing Rodriguez’s and Tarantino’s mammoth cinematic venture exist to produce rather than stimulate nostalgia.

This chapter presents a column published on May 25, 1908, which reads like a philosophical treatise on the existence of good and evil in the world. We enjoy happy moments in life because we know there can also be sad moments. Without darkness, light would be meaningless. Without bitterness, we cannot appreciate sweetness. On closer inspection, it is a social democratic critique of religious thought, a secular analysis of economic and social injustice in Iranian society. One man has all the comforts of life, while another suffers from cold, hunger, and poverty. One family lives in total security, while another is devastated by the revenge of anticonstitutionalists. In the end there is no justice in this world.

The conclusion recapitulates the limitations of ambient media as a form of social critique, but ends on a positive note by noting how ambient media allow for an affirmation of the weak and environmentally vulnerable self, and point to the potential for more inclusive forms of atmospheric attunement.

This chapter analyzes the Japanese social critique of overconsumption by way of addressing how the issue of food waste was linked to broader concerns, such as environmental degradation and the low rate of national food self-sufficiency. It describes how bureaucrats, citizens, corporations, and social critics are mobilized to dissuade the consuming public from their tastes for convenience and disposability. Using examples from didactic materials, such as the conservationist cartoons of High Moon and children's books, the chapter reveals national anxieties around food issues and the recourse to nostalgia as a solution for contemporary waste. Critics sought to imbue consumers with the spirit of earlier times, when consumers respected whole foods, produced through the sweat of farmers and prepared with motherly love, rather than relying on processed convenience foods.