You might say that's not very surprising. And it wouldn't be...except for the fact that, out of the vast sea of academic titles, pretty much the only one I've read for pleasure in the last few years is this very journal!
And recently, too. Within the last year, I'm pretty sure, I spent several evenings trawling through its archives.
It gave me less pleasure than I hoped. As I've mentioned on innumerable occasions, the concept of atmosphere fascinates me. Not the gases in the air, but the thing you encounter when you walk into a party, a sports stadium, or a funeral home. Amazingly little has been written about this from an academic perspective, or even a journalistic perspective.
Sadly, the contributors to Emotion, Space and Society insist on dragging their left-wing politics into the subject, in a very obtrusive way. (Articles in the May 2026 issue include
"Affective climate injustice and infrastructural Apathy: Rethinking public pedagogies for climate engagement" and "Migrants as homo affectus: How emotion shapes return migration among Iranians". This is typical.)Nonetheless, there were a few interesting articles, where no particular hobby-horse was involved.
I've even contemplated submitting an article to this journal! Having an article published in an academic journal is an intermittent fantasy of mine. However, it would be a lot of work.
But isn't this whole experience strange? The internet tells me that there's about forty thousand academic journals published in English. Yes, the fact that I'm interested in the subject matter lowers the odds, but still...
This is my second blog post in a row about Ballymun. I grew up in Ballymun and lived there for most of my life. It was the only high-rise estate in Ireland (it's no longer high-rise). This means it was utterly distinctive. When Ballymun came on television, you recognized it instantly. It was also fairly notorious, so it was distinctive for that reason too.
"Distinctive". The funny thing is, my whole life seems to have been about this word. I'm obsessed with distinctiveness and the perceived loss of distinctiveness in modern life, as longtime readers of this blog will know. A craving for special times and special places has been my lifelong preoccupation.
Does this preoccupation come from the distinctiveness of my own life? My name is distinctive (almost unique). I came from a distinctive suburb. I went to an Irish-language school, which was already quite distinctive in itself, but was even more distinctive for being in a working class area. And I grew up in what I can only describe as the working class intelligentsia.
Of course, everybody's life and upbringing is distinctive in some way. Still, this theory occurs to me when I wonder why I'm so fixated on distinctiveness. (Not that I'm alone in this. I think more and more people are worrying about it as our world becomes more globalized and standardized.)
"dragging their left-wing politics into the subject, in a very obtrusive way"
ReplyDeleteIndeed. That is the way with sociology-type academia. They can take even the most romantic subject, and guarantee to miss the point - and in the most horrible kind of bureaucratic prose.
Like the concept of "hauntology" - which is a very interesting theme; but if you try to read Mark Fisher, the chap who academically popularized (although he did not originate) the theme - then it is just dead. He writes *about* the subject, does not do it.
Mark Fisher was an explicit Marxist - and Marxism is just the most unromantic, reductionist, un-human, anti--spiritual POV ever to become popular. So when academic leftists (and more than 99% of academic social scientists are leftists) write on something romantic, aiming at an academic-type audience of their kind, they just kill it.
Even when, as with Mark Fisher, the author as an individual clearly experiences a romantic attraction to a subject, and feels it deeply!
A rather horrible process.
wrt Distinctive. It is interesting indeed. I am sure that we are all spontaneously distinctive - although some more so than other - but most people expend most of their lives trying not to be. Only those with an inner drive to be true to their own nature (so far as they can discern it, beneath all the distractions!) seem to survive this self-imposed social conformity.
I don't think You have anything to worry about!
"Mark Fisher was an explicit Marxist - and Marxism is just the most unromantic, reductionist, un-human, anti--spiritual POV ever to become popular. "
DeleteI completely agree! I'm baffled that Marxism ever appealed, or ever appeals, to artists, dreamers, poets, free spirits, etc. Even people like the Frankfurt School who write about the grinding uniformity and soullessness of capitalism. As though anything in their worldview could give rise to anything more!
I want to be personally distinctive but I also crave distinctiveness in general...whenever I hear of a distinctive piece of local slang or a unique college tradition or something like that, I feel happy. I once met an elderly woman who had the mild eccentricity of writing up fictional TV schedules in a copy-book. There was nothing else notably unusual about her, although she had a room full of cowboy memorabilia, which I suppose is a bit unusual. Anyway, this made me very happy!
The problem with leftist sociologists is that the answer to EVERY question they ask has to be: capitalism, racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc.
DeleteBy neat synchronicity, after writing the above - I was reading Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper:
ReplyDelete"I often think of Alice, and how she was glad she was not Mabel, and how for one dreadful moment she thought she was going to be Mabel. But that is just one thing we don't have to worry about. In our calm and reasonable moments we don't have to worry about that. There are hazards enough in life and death, but Alice can never be Mabel."
Stevie Smith, one of the surprising number of Hull poets!
DeleteI visited Hull for five days in 2005! I was being a bit contrarian, I wanted to go somewhere totally unglamorous!
Well, Stevie left Hull as an infant. She's really a Palmer's Green, London N13 poet!
ReplyDeleteI didn't know that!
DeleteI went to two Sociology conferences in Ireland around twenty years ago. They were both basically Applied Marxism events.
ReplyDeleteIn the first one I sat through a panel where the use of financial examples as arithmetic exercises in Maths books was condemned as ideological brainwashing. They discussed how to alter this to serve Socialist ideals. I would normally never speak up at such events, but I was so irritated by this that I asked what the moral difference was between subtle so-called indoctrination and their open version. They were shocked by the question and resorted to scorn.
The head of the whole thing was a Catholicism-hating Marxist who owned a holiday home in France. The guest speaker was the socialist multi-property owning rentier Michael D Higgins who received a prolonged standing ovation.
The following year out of a childish vanity I regret now I gave a paper which was conservative leaning. The only person who came up to me after with some kind words and appreciation was a Catholic priest who had bravely entered the lion’s den:)
That story doesn't surprise me at all but I'm very glad you asked the million dollar question, or the forty thousand dollar question, or whatever it is today linked to inflation. I constantly want to grab leftists and Marxists by the shoulders, shake them, and shout: "YOU ARE THE HEGEMONY YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!!"
DeleteI was recently at an event about artificial intelligence where a lady, pretty much the keynote speaker, was talking about the dangers of artificial intelligence reflecting popular norms and how to fight this. I asked her: "If AI doesn't reflect popular norms, which norms should it reflect? An academic elite? A corporate elite?". We had a short back and forth which ended with her playing the race and sex card. But I'm glad I said something, even if it made no impression on anybody.
Congrats on speaking up! These people need challenging however futile it is. They really are off in their elite privileged bubble world.
DeleteThanks!
Delete'working class intelligentsia'....seems quite an Irish or Dublin phenomena.
ReplyDeleteI wonder who are the foremost names of this intelligentsia in the past. Most of the Irish Catholics for example were at the most two generations away from the working class or rural smallholders. But who were actually still working class (not counting the smallholders) and intelligentsia and were well known? Are they all socialists? Who are the greats I wonder?
Probably James Connolly and Jim Larkin, who were certainly intelligentsia and certainly working class. Sean O'Casey might be another. None of the people in my own upbringing would have been considered great, although I consider my father great-- and not just out of filial piety.
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