Soft Totalities: Conjunctural Analysis and/as Assemblage Analysis
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2024 Number 113
Soft Totalities: Conjunctural Analysis and/as Assemblage Analysis
Florian Cord pages 51‑70
DOI: 10.3898/NewF:113.03.2024
Abstract
This paper returns to the vexed question of the social totality and the apparent tension regarding this issue, between Cultural Studies (and other ‘critical’ formations) on the one hand and intellectual formations such as actor network theory on the other. The main concern of the article is to argue for a more nuanced relationship between the concepts of totality, conjuncture and assemblage. It maintains that a cross-fertilisation or ‘diffraction’ of conjunctural analysis and assemblage theory, of Cultural Studies and currents associated with the ‘nonhuman turn’, such as actor network theory, new materialism or speculative realism, holds significant analytical potential with regard to the complex messiness of the present, promising to update conjunctural analysis vis-à-vis the analytical demands and challenges of the Capitalocene. What thus emerges are the contours of a posthumanist conjunctural analysis, which, the paper argues, could be an exceedingly useful tool for contemporary Cultural Studies.
SORRY - you are not registered as being permitted online access to the full text of this article
You have the following options:
- If you are viewing this via an institution or academic library you can ask that your institution takes out a Subscription to this journal.
- If you already have a Personal Subscription please login below
Forgotten your username / password? Click here to locate
- Purchase an annual Personal Subscription
PRINT + DIGITAL personal subscription (£45 / year)
DIGITAL personal subscription (£30 / year)
A Personal Subscription provides immediate access not only to the single article you are seeking, but also to all past and future articles in this journal up to the expiry of your annual (calendar year) subscription. - Purchase immediate access to this single article (UK£7.00) - Buy article Coming Soon
To cite this article
Florian Cord (2024) Soft Totalities: Conjunctural Analysis and/as Assemblage Analysis, New Formations, 2024(113), 51-70 . https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:113.03.2024