Jul 2026· İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyoloji Dergisi / İstanbul University Journal of Sociology· Vol 46, pp. 131-153· 0 citations· 13 references
TL;DR
This paper reconstructs the internal grammar of a corpus of 252 English-language critical texts, indicating that the deeper the challenge to the imaginary's conditions, the less it registers within the vocabulary the imaginary itself recognizes as valid.
Abstract
As so-called artificial intelligence diffuses throughout society, a growing body of critical texts contests its dominant sociotechnical imaginaries. To understand how these critiques are organized, this paper reconstructs the internal grammar of a corpus of 252 English-language critical texts. Each text is assigned a node, the domain its critique is rooted in (society, capital, technology, or the nation-state), and a critique mode, the strategy it argues through (immanent, reframing, or structural). What each mode can and cannot contest is then examined. Across the four nodes, these texts contest the dominant AI imaginary as a self-justifying financial trajectory (capital), an autonomous cognitive trajectory (technology), an irreversible social force (society), and a governable geopolitical technology (state). The findings also indicate strong correlations across the texts examined here. Capital-focused texts lean overwhelmingly toward structural critique, technology-focused texts tend toward immanent critique, state-focused texts favor reframing, and society-focused texts split between reframing and structural approaches. The analysis points toward an asymmetry, indicating that the deeper the challenge to the imaginary's conditions, the less it registers within the vocabulary the imaginary itself recognizes as valid. State institutions sustain this asymmetry by keeping structural claims out of policy, and market culture by recasting them as matters of preference.
Abstract This article examines how audiences use serialized science fiction as a shared framework for reasoning about contemporary politics. We focus on the Star Wars series Andor (2022–2025), which depicts empire as a bureaucratic process rather than an archetypal battle, supplying transferable institutional mechanisms to reason with instead of a simple moral binary. Analyzing 728,624 comments from the show’s primary Reddit community (2022–2026), we conceptualize this interpretive practice as fictional scaffolding, defined as the deployment of a narrative’s relational structure – its configuration of actors, dynamics, and institutions – to make sense of parallel real-world events. Text analysis reveals that discussion within the forum grew more than tenfold and peaked after the series concluded. Crucially, this reasoning is structured rather than purely projective, as distinct narrative elements afford specific, stable concrete referents. We argue that complex serialized fiction can serve as an allegorical public sphere, demonstrating how popular culture can anchor and structure collective political cognition at a productive remove from entrenched partisan reflexes.
The twenty-first century has produced ruptures technological, ecological, epistemic that have fundamentally destabilised inherited notions of human identity. Digital proliferation, artificial intelligence, and ecological breakdown are not separate crises; they converge into a single, unsettling question: what exactly constitutes the human now? Against this backdrop, posthumanism has gained considerable theoretical traction as a framework that challenges anthropocentric assumptions and redefines the relationship between humans, technology, and the natural world. As Rosi Braidotti argues, the posthuman condition signals the collapse of the opposition between the human and the non-human. Contemporary fiction is among the most honest registers of this collapse. Novels that center around artificial intelligence, cybernetic embodiment, surveillance capitalism, ecological catastrophe, and fractured selfhood do not merely describe cultural anxiety; they generate it, work through it, give it shape. This paper examines the representation of posthumanism and cultural anxiety in twenty-first-century fiction. It focuses on how selected literary texts encode collective fears about technological dependency, the erosion of individuality, ethical incoherence, and environmental fragility. Drawing on the theoretical positions of Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, and Cary Wolfe, the study analyses three primary texts Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake, and The Circle. The paper argues that posthuman fiction constitutes a sustained critique of technological modernity. More than that, it maps the existential disorientation of living in a world that is becoming increasingly digital and ecologically precarious. The cross-disciplinary relevance of posthumanist frameworks to literary and cultural studies is also addressed, along with emerging directions for further inquiry.
Ramya Kallur· Knowledgeable Research A Mul...· 0 citations
This study interrogates the epistemological status of geopolitical narratives generated by large language models such as ChatGPT, challenging the prevalent assumption that artificial intelligence constitutes a neutral or objective source of truth. Rather than producing experiential knowledge, these systems operate as probabilistic language models that recombine and reproduce linguistic structures derived from human-generated corpora including books, news media, websites, and social platforms. The paper examines the operation of cultural memory and discursive power within AI-generated texts addressing geopolitical themes, specifically terrorism, border conflict, and religious extremism. Through a qualitative analysis of selected ChatGPT narratives, the study employs a combined methodological framework of Post-Humanist Discourse Analysis (PHD) and Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This framework facilitates examination at three interrelated levels: (1) the micro-linguistic features of the generated texts; (2) the interdiscursive relationships between AI outputs and established media and political discourses; and (3) the macro-social significance of ideology and cultural memory in shaping geopolitical representation. The findings indicate that AI systems do not generate original geopolitical meaning but instead statistically reproduce the most dominant and recurrent patterns present in their training data. In doing so, these models function as conduits of cultural memory and as discursive apparatuses embedded within broader systems of power. The paper concludes by arguing for the cultivation of critical literacy in AI engagement, particularly in contexts concerning geopolitics, identity, and collective memory.
Umar Mahdi, Zulqarnain Amin, Shaukat Ali· Journal of Arts and Linguist...· 0 citations
The ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) regime has consolidated as the principal normative architecture of corporate activity in Europe. Academic critique of the phenomenon has been predominantly technical—divergence among rating agencies, agency problems, and empirical ineffectiveness—ethical critique remains pending. This article advances such a critique from the convergence of three traditions: the libertarian ethics of natural law in its Rothbardian formulation; Hayekian spontaneous order theory and its economic correlate in the Austrian theories of dynamic efficiency and synergasia (Ravier); and Catholic Social Doctrine, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate. The principal conceptual contribution consists in coining the analytical category of soft collectivism to name how the ESG regime operates: it subjects the firm through conditioning rather than command, hollowing out the content of rights without altering their juridical form. The mechanics of this subjection operate through soft law, institutional isomorphism, the spiral of silence, and the bootleggers-and-baptists coalition within a state culture that Bagus's counterfactual criterion identifies as indirect coercion. The convergence between Catholic subsidiarity and Hayekian spontaneous order—two formulations of the same formal structure—yields a unanimous verdict against the ESG regime. Against the bureaucratic simulacrum of social responsibility, the article posits genuine entrepreneurial responsibility—voluntary, prudential, subsidiary, and oriented to real service—as the only coherent alternative within the converging ethical demands established by the analysis.
The paper proposes that conflict over territory and matter is increasingly also conflict over the informational conditions through which societies learn what is happening to them, and closes by considering, and questioning the structural feasibility of, pedagogical and civic responses oriented toward epistemic resilience.
Abstract This essay argues that democracy should be understood not simply as a constitutional order or a political regime but as a narrative mode of collective self-understanding. As a cultural form, democracy organises historical experience, articulates political temporality and renders plurality meaningful. Because democratic societies continually narrate themselves, these practices gradually stabilise into recognisable genres through which political imagination is historically mediated. The inquiry begins from a paradox: contemporary democratic life appears inseparable from an enduring discourse of crisis. Rather than focusing on the causes of democratic instability, the article investigates why democratic societies consistently interpret their political experience through the language of crisis and whether this recurrence discloses a deeper affinity between the two concepts. The argument develops along three interconnected lines. First, it reconstructs the shared genealogy of democracy and crisis, by tracing both concepts to the vocabulary of the Greek polis and examining their parallel secularisation in modernity. Second, it explains how the disappearance of embodied sovereignty establishes narrative as the principal mode of democratic mediation. Third, it contends that constitutional cultures inhabit historical time according to distinct temporal logics, which generate different genres through which democratic uncertainty and crisis become intelligible. The essay concludes that the contemporary crisis of democracy cannot be reduced to institutional dysfunction or constitutional decline. At a deeper level, it concerns the erosion of the narrative genres through which democratic societies have historically interpreted themselves and imagined their political futures.
Cristina Costantini· Polemos· 0 citations
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