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It is widely known that by the end of the 1970s, Foucault had begun to refer to 'experience' to account for his intellectual trajectory and to redirect the work on The History of Sexuality. However, the interest in experience also decisively shaped Foucault's analysis of the 'critical attitude' that he explicitly started to address at about the same time. The article argues that Foucault's notion of critique is informed by a specific reading and understanding of 'experience'. Experience is conceived of as dominant structure and transformative force, as existing background of practices and transcending event, as the object of theoretical inquiry and the objective of moving beyond historical limits. Foucault defines experience as a dynamic interplay between games of truth, forms of power and relations to the self. Accordingly, the Foucauldian account of critique is characterized by three aspects: the activity of problematization, the art of voluntary insubordination, and the audacity to expose one's own status as a subject. While the first section of the article briefly reconstructs the trajectory of 'experience' in Foucault's work from the 1960s to the 1980s, the main part discusses the dimensions and implications of this 'experimental' critique.

High-profile political scandals are symptomatic of a profound transformation of the relations between public and private life that has accompanied and helped to shape the development of modern societies. While the distinction between public and private life is not unique to modern societies, the emergence of new media of communication, from print to radio, television and the internet, has altered the very nature of the public, the private and the relations between them. Both the public and the private have been reconstituted as spheres of information and symbolic content that are largely detached from physical locales and increasingly interwoven with evolving technologies of communication, creating a very fluid situation in which the boundaries between public and private are blurred, porous, contestable and subject to constant negotiation and struggle. The shifting boundaries between public and private life have become a new battleground in modern societies, a contested terrain where individuals and organizations wage a new kind of information war, a terrain where established relations of power can be challenged and disrupted, lives damaged and reputations sometimes lost.

British cultural studies, represented perhaps chiefly by the so-called Birmingham School, is much marked by its strong orientation towards the application of grounded theory in the analysis of concrete cases, rather than the development of abstract Theory with a Capital T (in Stuart Hall's words). As a leading figure of the Birmingham School and a key representative of the active audience model in television studies, or broadly, media studies, David Morley stands at a point where this trend was set, as is evidenced in this interview. Questioned by Huimin Jin, Morley puts his audience studies into the contexts of British cultural studies, postmodernism, Marxism, social movements, and so on; and in doing so, he shows the ambiguity, and subtlety of his concepts of how to best theorize the active audience. Only by this method, Jin believes, could Morley launch his version of audience studies, which aims not to invent a general theory of media effects, but to use an interdisciplinary range of theories to explore how people actually respond to a TV programme; and only by this approach to audience studies, furthermore, could Morley develop a theory of the audience's activity, which is embedded in the course of their everyday life and that cannot be thoroughly colonized by discourses. Cultural studies, wherever it is conducted, therefore, Morley suggests, has to construct modes of analysis that are relevant to its own conditions of production in a particular place, at a particular time. This is the tradition, as we know it, but also the future, as Morley envisages, of cultural studies.

The article analyses the common notion that the consumer society is a reflection of those principles in the market that also provide the ideas of democracy and liberal constitutionalism with legitimacy in the political realm. The inalienable right to self-development and self-determination makes the individual the starting and ending point of life, rendering all spheres of market and society a 'republic of choice'. But if consumer society shares the essentials of liberal constitutionalism and the rational, processual nature of democratic representation, then its ontology needs to be investigated for the same reason and in the same manner as legal and political philosophy dissects the legitimacy and validity of the parliamentary institutions of modern democracy. Just as in the political philosophy of the constitutional structure of the democratic state, the question of who is sovereign is key to understanding the ontology of consumer society. But rather than simply placing sovereignty into the hands of the independent, self-determined consumer, the earliest ontologists of the consumer society took recourse to medieval political theology and presented the consumer market as a new corpus mysticum. Thus, it is medieval political theology, not modern liberal thought, which provided for an ontologization of the consumer. This, in turn, directly pertains to the questions of the legitimacy of consumer society per se, of consumer decisions in particular and of their sources of legitimacy.

This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour's conceptualization of the 'common world'. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a 'cosmopolitics' in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, and seek to innovate appropriate procedures for governing such systems and composing a more peaceful common world. However, feminist and postcolonialist science studies scholars have argued that Latour's project fails to apprehend the experiences of subjects marginalized by scientific and political structures of representation. Thus, science studies scholars seem to be faced with a problem; to avoid ontological dissonance and contradiction in integrating Latour's program with feminist and postcolonialist critiques we must defer his claims that the cosmopolitical program entirely supersedes contemporary social movements and oppositional politics. I offer an alternative. Namely, I argue that Latour's formulations of cosmopolitics' procedures and the common world's boundaries actually require an incipient model of the limits of democratic representation. I modify Latour's proposed system of representation by reading it against Dipesh Chakrabarty's concept of 'subaltern pasts', which are unassimilable to academic historical narratives (in their attribution of agency to nonhuman gods, for example). This reading emphasizes how Latour does not adequately theorize and politicize the partially autonomous reality of those excluded from the common world and thus fails to attend to how this externalization replicates the violence of modernist representational institutions.

In the 1970s and 1980s a strong opposition and anxiety towards biological and naturalizing knowledges was the norm in feminist discourse. In the past decades the certainties of that 'anti-biologism' have been challenged, in part because of a new recognition of the role of contingency in both biological determination and biological science. What seems to have survived the shift is a set of normative assumptions concerning the role of determinacy and contingency (or being-born and becoming) in the political implications of ontological claims: an assumed political valorization of contingency. This article challenges those assumptions. It draws attention to the embrace of contingency and processuality on the part of supremacist biopolitical discourse, and suggests the need to think again about the politics of contingency and becoming (in constructivist as well as biologistic discourses). Focusing on the issue of racism and supremacist-specification, the article takes a genealogical look at 'second-wave' feminist anti-biologism. Monique Wittig's materialist feminist attack on naturalizing ideology and 'the myth of woman' provides the (ideal-typical) historical example. The article draws attention to curious absences in Wittig's (and Rosalind Rosenberg's) anti-biologistic statements concerning early 20th-century biologistic feminism: the absence of a critique of eugenics, racism and supremacism. Arguably the condemnation of biology as a conservative 'ideology of the status quo' created masks for biopolitical ontology, obscuring the progressive, dynamic, processual character of biologism and of modern racism. While dislodging some powers of biologistic discourse, feminist anti-biologism might also have played a part in facilitating the revitalization of biopolitical racism within the constructivist culturalist rubric. The aim of the article is not to critique 'second-wave' feminism from the perspective of contemporary scholarship, but to help generate new ways of thinking and feeling about the role of ontology, contingency and temporality in the present politics of classification.

This article explores the work of the influential poststructuralist and postcolonial anthropologist Saba Mahmood (UC Berkeley, USA). Mahmood's work in anthropology adopts an Asadian and Butlerian approach, particularly in the seminal Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. In this work, Mahmood critically interpellates the categories of 'Western' secular feminism through an exploration of the lives of pious Muslim women of Salafi orientations in Cairo in Egypt. Mahmood's work constitutes an important intervention at a point in time when secular feminist discourses are increasingly instrumentalized across the political spectrum in anti-Muslim discourses in the 'Western' world and in Europe. I argue, however, that in wanting to use the understandings and practices of pious Muslim women in Egypt in order to critique Western secular feminism, Mahmood fails to pose critical questions about the historicity of these practices and understandings, and lends her analysis to a form of cultural relativism which offers few prospects for a way forward for feminism.

The 85th birthday of Zygmunt Bauman in November 2010 presented the occasion for TCS to publish a special section of commissioned commentary pieces on a number of central themes in his work. The section, edited and introduced by editorial board member Roy Boyne, featured articles by Martin Jay, John Milbank and Julia Hell, and concentrated respectively upon the themes of modernity, the role of the intellectual, and the gaze of/at the other, highlighting the dependence on metaphor and the significance of 'looking' in his writing. This interview takes that special section as its starting point, and asks Bauman to respond to some of the claims and suggestions made in those articles. In doing so, he argues for the continuing salience of the 'liquid modernity' concept for understanding the 'purpose behind the effort', and explains in detail his view of the intellectual (and, specifically, the sociologist) and the role such an intellectual should play in the context of liquid modernity.