Theory,Culture & Society

Jacob Taubes’s book Occidental Eschatology (1947) offers a unique framework for examining cultural patterns across the line often construed as separating ‘the religious’ from the ‘non-religious’. This article highlights the implications of the application of this framework for our understanding of modernity: With Taubes, the ‘modern’ conception of history, totality and sovereignty can be traced to the emphatic distinction between ‘world’ and ‘God’ in the Hebrew Bible. In this perspective, ‘the modern’ appears as a cultural element that is analytically dissociated from any particular later historical period and from any cultural or geographical context, such as ‘the West’. Messianic thinking appears integral to the modern rather than as a source of fundamentally opposing insights. Competing appeals to reject the world are a source of instability and violence in modernity. Further research can address how the modern is linked with other cultural elements and with institutional arrangements in different contexts.

More-than-human metabolic processes increasingly constitute the locus of contemporary biopower, often responding to industrially-altered biogeochemical cycles. We conceptualise ‘metabolo-politics’ to examine the targeting of bodies and populations via interventions in the biochemical surroundings and ecologies that shape them; and simultaneously, the administration and modulation of materials in the environment via interventions in the bodies and populations that ingest, digest, and excrete them. Focusing on the governance of environmental crises related to carbon and nitrogen pollution, particularly in livestock sectors in the Global North, we offer three analytics for theorising metabolo-politics as a form of governance oscillating between bio-politics and anatomo-politics. They are: the dispositive, which grapples with the relations of matter and discourse that shape emergent problematisations of metabolism; the milieu, which is the more-than-human scene of intervention; and technologies, which are the diverse means through which power is operationalised metabolically and through which bodies, populations, and environments are governed.

This article examines the institutional, technical, and ontological consequences of plagiarism detection platforms on contemporary academic writing. It argues that services like Turnitin and Grammarly do not simply detect plagiarism but actively reconfigure what counts as authorship, originality, and intellectual integrity. Drawing on historical and media-theoretical perspectives, the article traces plagiarism’s emergence as a culturally contingent offense, showing how its definition has shifted from oral cultures all the way to algorithmically processed patterns. In this transformation, plagiarism detection becomes less a neutral evaluative tool than a form of infrastructural governance that translates interpretive judgment into machinic legibility. Drawing on theorists such as Foucault, Chun, Kittler, Flusser, and Byung-Chul Han, the article situates plagiarism detection within a broader shift from expressive authorship to operational formatting. The article argues that plagiarism detection tools function as psychopolitical instruments, reshaping academic labor through anticipatory compliance and rendering originality as machinic compatibility.

This article develops a theory of ‘ambient extremism’. Where extremist digital forms and styles once circulated on fringe subcultures before entering the mainstream, the distinction between the extreme and the mainstream has collapsed, suffusing political and affective atmospheres with extremism. I show how reactionary performances of pre-emption, or the anticipatory naming of emergent but pervasive threats, settle into ideological formations, nurturing an affect of indignation and precipitating a rhetoric of defiance. Drawing on a case study of an anonymous X account that adopted anti-Islamic racism as a successful engagement strategy during the 2024 UK far-right riots, often by relying on AI-generated imagery, I argue that ideological performances accumulate in a ‘reactionary reservoir’ that absorbs viral trends alongside timeworn tropes, offering both the novel and the historical up as timely interventions against ostensible liberal overreach. Ambient extremism displaces deliberation over meaning with affective attunements to resonant performances structured by platform architectures.

This article critically examines the ongoing debate about whether the British Empire was a force for good, exemplified by the recent exchange between Robert Tombs and Alan Lester, as well as Nigel Biggar’s defence in Imperial Reckoning. It highlights how defenders of imperialism use historical narratives to justify colonial atrocities and resist critique. It argues that imperialism’s legacy persists through three main forms. (1) Structural power and domination: the colonial project established entrenched systems of political, military, and economic control, justified by narratives that portrayed the West as morally superior. (2) Historiography and glorification: imperial defenders construct dominant histories that glorify empire, marginalize dissent, and present their perspective as objective truth and, in the process, silence alternative voices. (3) Contemporary cultural reconfigurations: modern imperialism manifests in culture wars – attack on wokeism, targeted hostility towards LGBTQ+ communities, migrants, and other marginalized groups. In making its argument regarding imperial continuity, the article applies Foucault’s concept of the ‘tyranny of discourse’ to show how imperial narratives shape knowledge, attitudes, power structures and contemporary politics.

This conceptual-speculative article examines political polarization as a deliberate strategy of affective governance in an age defined by mass dispossession and ecological collapse. We argue that polarization should not be treated as a temporary crisis to be resolved but as a governing technology that organizes fragmentation, consolidates elite power, and deflects attention away from demands for structural transformation. To theorize this dynamic, we introduce the concept of affective eugenics, describing how affective governance legitimizes privatized futures for the few while rendering the many surplus through a sentimentalist and biopolitical sorting of affective capacity. Within education, this affective sorting materializes as a triage of feeling: elite institutions cultivate planetary crisis managers, middle-class students are conditioned for resilient compliance, and underfunded schools are left to manage disposability. We conclude by outlining the educational implications of affective eugenics and calling for praxes of affective de-settlement, refusal, and opacity that unsettle these hierarchies.