Browsing by Subject "post-structuralism"

Enlargement is the most important foreign policy tool of the European Union. Beyond changing the geographical borders of the Union, enlargement also concerns EU’s self-other relations, bringing to the fore the definitions of “European” space, values and norms. Recent, critical approaches to European and EU studies have called scholars to pay attention to the colonial roots of the EU, arguing that EU as an agent in the global arena and its neighbourhood cannot be understood outside or separate from colonial discourses. Drawing from this perspective as well as from the rich literature on the Europe’s historical relation to East and the current accession states in the Balkans, this thesis asks (how) is the EU’s enlargement policy postcolonial. To explore, understand and critically assess the normative assumptions that are embedded in enlargement policies, this thesis uses post-structuralist discourse theory (PDT) and the logics approach by Jason Glynos and David Howarth (2007) that offers a more specific application of the PDT in empirical analysis. The analysis approaches four most recent EU enlargement policy papers from three angles: what is taken as granted (social logic), what is challenged or institutionalized (political logic) and how the policies are argued for (fantasmatic logic). The analysis in this thesis brings the postcolonial theoretical concepts into the context of enlargement policies and demonstrates the diversity of the forms in which colonialist assumptions in enlargement policy can play out in practice. Enlargement and the EU’s relation to the Balkans emerges from the material as paradoxical and contradictory, producing ambivalence on the Western Balkan’s standing in relation to Europe through a discursive double move of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion.

The camera recognises the face, the bank card connects to the payment terminal, and the database aggregates the consumer profile. Digital and cybernetic machines change society, but they also change the production premises. For a code to connect with another code, the unclear must become clear and the indefinite definable. The trend, however, is not recent: for instance, a bureaucrat has demanded to fill out forms for a long time. Likewise, language has always required syntax. Such productions demand a component, and it increasingly determines the terms of the overall production. I examine the social, affective, and ecological effects of such production premises (definability, reliability, predictability), and I assert that their unifying factor is a crisis of creativity. My essay examines the possibility of creativity in a society produced under componential logic. I address this issue by applying Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi's dichotomy of connective and conjunctive concatenations. Connection refers to the definable, repeatable, and predictable (i.e., componential) production. Conjunction, in turn, refers to the production of unrepeatable, ambiguous and open-ended qualities. I assert that the crisis of creativity unwraps when the poetic openness gets closed, contradictions resolved, and the undefinables defined. In other words, when connection overtakes conjunction. In the increasingly connective society, general production turns repeatable and predictable, and poetic flights and qualitative mutations become rare. Interestingly enough, qualitative mutations are a prerequisite for capitalism, as capitalism must constantly expand on new territories. It needs to establish new markets, as Rosa Luxembourg has theorised, and to capture decoded desire, an argument known from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Therefore, a paradox determines the social system: on the one hand, capitalism demands qualitative mutations for its expansion, but on the other hand, the componentised production slows the creative production down. I argue that by examining this contradiction, we can understand some of the most central pathologies of modern capitalism, such as burning out, depression and concentration disorders. Namely, modern capitalist culture has produced the spectacle to substitute qualitative mutations with a large amount of quickly consumable ephemeral production.