Ultra-Realists

Category: Ultra-Realism

  • A Multi-Level Ultra-Realist Approach to Understanding Violence Against Women and Girls: The Micro Level

    Paul Alker, Mark Bushell, Emma Armstrong, Max Hart, and Craig Kelly

    At the micro-level, VAWG is often framed as a result of individual actions – abuse jperpetrated by an abusive partner, a violent stranger, or an online harasser. While it is true that acts of violence are carried out by individuals, this perspective alone risks obscuring the broader conditions that shape violent behaviours. In this penultimate post of the series, we explore how individual biographies and the psyche function in light of the points laid out in previous posts, exploring how the three levels of the macro, meso and micro intersect.  

    Research conducted by Ultra-Realist scholars has previously sought to make sense of male violence (see Ellis, 2015; Winlow, 2001), although it has not focused specifically on VAWG. Here, Ellis, Winlow, Hall and others, argue that individual biographies alongside macro, structural conditions can be used to understand subjective violence – physical violence inflicted by one individual upon another (Žižek, 2009), perpetrated by a small minority of men, a line of thinking we will follow in this post. The individuals they encountered sought to navigate and cope with past trauma by adopting a strategy in which they ‘retaliate first’, launching a pre-emptive strike against those who act as a symbolic substitute for past aggressors – violent fathers, bullies or opponents in street fights – in an attempt to prevent the return of the original feeling of humiliation (Winlow and Hall, 2009). Although these empirical explorations are particularly useful for understanding male violence perpetrated against other men, we would still encourage the reader to engage with these texts directly. Here though, we expand upon some of the ideas directly relating to VAWG and offer some original insights from other areas of ultra-realism’s theoretical arsenal and theoretical psychoanalysis.   

    In this the blog series so far, it has been determined that events at the structural cultural and organisational level may create the conditions that give rise to VAWG. To qualify this, it is perhaps instructive here to consider the role of absence (Kotzé and Lloyd, 2022). The present post-crash, post-pandemic world of sustained austerity under successive Labour and Conservative governments has served to exacerbate the already existing systemic violence of neoliberalism, leading to further labour market instability, which alongside the absence of welfare and other support mechanisms has resulted in increased precarity and economic insecurity (Hall and Winlow, 2015; Telford, 2025). Additionally, the withdrawal of funding from important public services in the realm of education and mental health support have served to exacerbate the issue further. 

    The absence of opportunities for ‘success’ and the failure to attain what the neoliberal consumer capitalist system promises the individual if they play the game, often leads to feelings of shame and a lack of opportunity to attain positive recognition from peers and others in society. This can significantly impact the individual’s sense of what Billingham and Irwin-Rogers (2022) refer to as ‘mattering’. For the duo, mattering allows the individual to feel both significant and recognised by others, alongside providing the feeling that they have agency and power to shape their lives and impact the world around them in a positive manner. They highlight the deleterious effects of lacking a sense of mattering, demonstrating how its absence can contribute to violence directed both inwardly towards the self and outwardly towards others. Kotzé and Lloyd (2022) therefore highlight the importance of considering what is absent and how this can have a probabilistic causal tendency, leading to resentment, hate and outbursts of subjective violence – physical violence inflicted by one individual upon another (Žižek, 2009). As Žižek (2009) points out, it is important to consider how all three forms of violence are interrelated. Although systemic violence is largely invisible, we must still take it, alongside symbolic violence, into account when trying to understand what might appear to be irrational irruptions of subjective violence.  

    As Bratich and Banet-Weiser (2019) go on to discuss, the increasing precariousness of neoliberalism following the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic across many parts of the world has led to a renewed sense of instability and insecurity in relation to employment, welfare support or rising costs of living for many individuals, not only men (see also Gerbaudo, 2018). Yet, as we highlighted in the previous post, some men respond to these experiences of pressure, anxiety and hopelessness by following the rhetoric of manosphere figures such as Andrew Tate, who channel feelings of resentment and dissatisfaction towards women and feminism as the purported source of their predicament. It is the psychic process that helps facilitate this process that will be the focus of this post.

    In the Rise of the Right, Winlow et al. (2017) explore the manner in which racism has mutated following the course of neoliberalism. They argue that much of the racism we witness today isn’t an expression of the kind of supremacist thinking that emerged in the shadow of the Western Empire. Rather, the racism we associate with the contemporary right-wing reactionary forces is rooted in a perceived inferiority and the idea that the racial Other has taken something from the white population and continues to pose a threat. Could it be argued that something similar has taken place in the realm of misogyny? Rather than being attributed to the persistence of patriarchy, contemporary misogyny and VAWG could be a consequence of thinking that women and girls are somehow responsible for taking something from men and boys. Or perhaps have access to something that they don’t and therefore they are responsible for the theft of their enjoyment. To explore this, we first need to explain Lacan’s notion of lack and desire.  

    Desire occurs as a result of our inherent feeling of lack or incompleteness. It is an unavoidable fact of the human condition, and as a result it is impossible to cure – we are unable to achieve a feeling of wholeness. Yet, it is this underlying feeling of ‘objectless anxiety’ (see Hall, 2012) and the desire to overcome it, that animates us to act, compelling us to seek satisfaction in a futile attempt to overcome our sense of lack (McGowan, 2015). Therefore, we are constantly in search of what is known as the ‘lost object’ or what Lacan refers to as the object petit a; the thing that will make us feel whole again and lead to satisfaction – the problem is, this satisfaction can never be met (Kotzé and Lloyd, 2022).  

    Todd McGowan (2016) argues that capitalism’s harnessing of subjective desire ties the individual to the economic system and propels them into an endless process of searching for satisfaction. Within our existing Symbolic Order, of which consumer culture is a significant part, we believe we can satisfy that lack through our latest purchases or experiences in commodified leisure spaces. Capitalism has its subjects in a constant state of desire by maintaining ‘the promise’ – the belief that a more complete satisfaction exists just around the corner, embodied in the newest commodity (McGowan, 2016). This is a promise which, as has already been noted, can never be kept there – there is no object that will fill the void and make us feel completely satisfied.  

    Paradoxically, the problem is that as subjects of desire, we don’t want to realise our desire and obtain the lost object. We desire instead to keep thwarting our desire, which in turn keeps us desiring (McGowan, 2015). As McGowan (2016) notes elsewhere, consumer capitalism has been incredibly successful at incorporating this natural disposition – the elementary paradox of human desire – into its functioning. For McGowan, what we find most satisfying is our dissatisfaction. It is the failure to derive satisfaction from what we think we desire that we find most satisfying. Prior to its acquisition, the commodity or the consumer experience holds a sublime status that appears to us as the object of our desire. What often makes an object most desirable is its availability to us – the more out of reach it appears, the more we want it! However, upon the moment of its acquisition, the object begins to lose its appeal. We then continue on in the hope of one day finding the object that can finally satisfy our desire once and for all. In a somewhat perverse manner, we perpetually repeat the cycle of dissatisfaction which drives us to consume only to be dissatisfied once again. And what is more, we know this is the case, yet we disavow such knowledge and cynically continue to act as if we are none the wiser (Žižek, 2009). It is this repeated and renewed dissatisfaction that we ultimately find most satisfying. 

    The fundamental problem with desire, as Lacan (2007) saw it, is that what we desire is always the desire of the Other. He meant this in every conceivable sense. We have desire for the Other, we wish to be desired by the Other and perhaps most importantly we desire what the Other desires. As such, our desire for what the Other desires renders both envy and resentment constitutive components of human desire (Žižek, 2009). For both Derek Hook (2021) and Stephanie Swales (2022), the subject deals with the impossibility of achieving full enjoyment by imagining that the Other – in this case women – serve not only as a barrier to, but also as a thief of, men’s enjoyment, and that women have a capacity to attain a level of enjoyment that remains elusive to men. This causes the male subject to draw the conclusion that it is the female Other who is ultimately responsible for the theft of their enjoyment. Here, the misogynist, whilst avowing their own lack, disavows the lack of the Other, while falsely assuming that women possess the ability to attain complete satisfaction. 

    By imagining women as the barrier to their enjoyment, misogynists convince themselves that their dissatisfaction can be solved by controlling or punishing women rather than confronting the impossibility of ever achieving full satisfaction.  It perpetuates the misogynistic fantasy that returning women to their subordinate position would restore men’s rightful access to full enjoyment (Hook, 2021). As Žižek (2016) argues, such a social constellation in which the Other is perceived to be infinitely enjoying inevitably generates jealousy. In response, the subject imagines a utopian realm of enjoyment to which the Other has privileged access and from which they themselves are excluded. As McGowan (2003) points out, the sense of immense frustration felt by those who believe they have been robbed of their enjoyment can result in outbursts of anger and violence against those perceived to be guilty of such a crime. 

    Envy, particularly when deeply ingrained within a societal structure that reinforces competition, often culminates not in the pursuit of one’s own enjoyment but in the destruction of the enjoyment of the Other. When individuals perceive their own fulfilment as unattainable while the other seemingly thrives, resentment festers, leading to acts of symbolic and physical violence aimed at depriving the Other of their perceived advantage. Žižek (2009) described this as the logic of ressentiment, whereby individual subjects, unable to achieve their own satisfaction, instead seek to sabotage the satisfaction of those they believe achieve unbridled enjoyment. In the context of VAWG, this manifests in attempts to police, control, and diminish women’s autonomy – whether through restrictive policies, online harassment, or physical violence.  

    However, paradoxically, the misogynistic fantasy derives a form of enjoyment from the very dissatisfaction it claims to oppose. As McGowan (2016) argues, subjects often find satisfaction not in overcoming obstacles, but in endlessly reproducing them. The fantasy of stolen enjoyment provides an explanation for feelings of frustration and lack, allowing subjects to continually blame an external Other for their unhappiness. In doing so, resentment itself becomes a source of enjoyment. The misogynist therefore remains attached to the belief that women are responsible for their dissatisfaction because abandoning the fantasy would require confronting a far more unsettling reality: that no amount of control, recognition or success could ever eliminate the constitutive lack at the heart of human subjectivity. The fantasy persists because it transforms dissatisfaction into a meaningful grievance, and in doing so provides its own perverse form of satisfaction or jouissance: a kind of pleasure derived from the pain of suffering (Leader, 2021).

    The contemporary figure of the incel illustrates this dynamic particularly well. While the incel consciously presents himself as seeking intimacy, recognition, romantic fulfilment and ultimately sex, he still remains deeply invested in the fantasy that women – commonly referred to as Stacey’s or Foids – are responsible for denying him all of these things (Nagle, 2017; Johanssen, 2021). This grievance provides a source of meaning, identity and enjoyment, whilst also allowing dissatisfaction to be continually renewed. In this sense, the incel becomes attached not only to the prospect of fulfilment, but also to the very obstacles, namely women or so-called alpha males or Chads, that appear to prevent it. The fantasy of exclusion sustains resentment whilst shielding the subject from confronting the more unsettling possibility that no relationship or sexual encounter could ever provide the complete satisfaction he imagines.

    Framed this way, contemporary misogyny can be understood not as an outdated remnant of patriarchy, but an active, adaptive response to the crises of neoliberal capitalism and their cultural fallout. When economic instability erodes traditional masculine identities, consumer culture intensifies desires it cannot satisfy and digital spaces provide narratives that externalise feelings of lack and failure, VAWG can emerge as a means of alleviating perceived humiliation and impotence.  

    As we have seen with the narcissism that animates special liberty (Hall and Winlow, 2015), neoliberal ideology has redirected the watercourse of our powerful libidinal energy away from prosocial channels of collective action into pools of asocial toxicity. In helping us to understand what these shifts mean for VAWG at the micro level, we can turn to a further psychoanalytic concept – cathexis.  

    Taken from the German verb besetzen and corresponding noun Besetzung, cathexis refers to a desire ‘to occupy’ or take up ‘occupation’. Freud used cathexis to describe a process of investment, where libidinal energy is channelled into a particular person, object or idea (Bettelheim, 1983). Cathexis can operate in benign ways through the emotional attachment to something like a family heirloom or a photograph from which one derives comfort. However, in an elevated state of hyper-cathexis, a surfeit of psychic energy compels the subject to occupy their object of fixation in the same way that an army might lay siege to a city. When this obsessive libidinal investment is directed towards a significant other, its implications for aggressive control over that person become clear.  

    Hyper-cathexis forms part of a host of narcissistic subjectivities that continues to fester under neoliberal cultural conditions but their elusiveness spells significant problems for addressing the issue of VAWG. Such subjectivities simply aren’t always on show, they can seem difficult to predetermine, or they are relativised and explained away under the liberal ‘assumption of harmlessness’ that dominates ethical life across the west (see Raymen, 2023). Like rage, they can sit latent or partially repressed, re-emerging later, individually, or in concert with one another across time and space. This concept is also deeply entangled with the cultural injunction to enjoy, a term developed in Lacanian psychoanalysis and popularised in the work of Žižek (1999) to describe the neoliberal compulsion to pursue pleasure as an imperative, rather than a choice.  

     Within the context of the issues outlined in previous posts, at the Macro and Meso levels, this injunction is filtered through a deeply gendered and transactional lens, where women exist as objects of ornamental consumerism. In this worldview, a woman’s value is derived from her status as a possession – something to be acquired, displayed, and crucially, controlled. Any challenge to this dynamic is not merely seen as defiance but as a violation of libidinal drives. Here, the cultural mandate to consume and enjoy collides with hyper-cathexis, producing a distorted justification for violence. In this logic, objectification itself becomes a form of consumption, and VAWG is reframed as an assertion of male entitlement or a perverse form of pleasure.  

     A further concept worth delineating here is Freud’s (1926) idea of the symptom. This refers to the unconscious formation that emerges as a compromise between repressed desires and the constraints of social reality. Symptoms, in a sense, are expressions of unresolved psychic conflicts, often appearing as repetitive compulsive behaviours that provide temporary relief but never resolve the underlying tension. Put simply, when drives are repressed and cannot find a direct mode of expression, they return as symptoms. Lacan later reworked this idea into the ‘Sinthome’, a term developed in his later seminars (Lacan, 1975-6), which moves beyond the symptom as something to be deciphered and instead suggests that certain formations – especially those related to identity – become structural to the subject. The Sinthome is not simply a sign of repression, but a fundamental mode of being, a unique knotting of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary that holds a subject together.  

    Here, the Sinthome actually directs us towards something much more enduring than Symptoms that provide us with temporary outlets for unresolved psychic tensions. Instead of operating as episodic expressions of conflict, it becomes integrated and woven into the subject’s very mode of being. This distinction is key for understanding VAWG as we may anticipate that misogynistic attitudes and behaviours will disperse, even for a short period of time, once immediate frustrations are resolved if functioning merely as Symptoms. However, Sinthomatically they are part of the psychic structure through which the subject organises their relationship to others, identity, and enjoyment.

    Thus, the macro-level conditions, as a result of neoliberal precarity, alongside the meso-level circulation of misogynistic narratives should not be viewed as mechanically producing violence. Instead, they function as symbolic resources whereby subjects construct Sinthomatic attachments. Here, online influencers, reactionary communities and consumer culture alike offer ready-made explanations for feelings of humiliation, failure and lack. Repeatedly identifying with these narratives can generate incorporation of misogyny into the subject’s psychic economy as a stabilising framework that organises desire and enjoyment.

    Ultimately, in the context of VAWG, the concepts outlined throughout this post help us understand how misogyny operates not just as an ideology but as a consequence of deeply embedded, micro psychic structures and how these interact with the macro level socio-symbolic order and meso level communities. Figures like Tate offer a symptomatic response to a broader crisis of masculine identity under neoliberalism, a system which has failed in its promises to deliver satisfaction. Women, framed as both barriers to male enjoyment and possessors of an elusive satisfaction, become targets of envy and aggression. The hyper-cathexis of women as objects of consumption is not just a cultural byproduct but a Sinthomatic structure – a stabilising psychic formation that knots together experiences of economic insecurity, narcissistic injury, frustrated desire and fantasies of stolen enjoyment. One that ultimately, provides a false sense of stability and coherence for disaffected men and boys. Here, the compulsion to degrade, dominate or inflict serious physical and psychological harm upon women is not simply about power, but maintaining a fragile psychic equilibrium, where violence, in all its forms, serve as ritualised acts temporarily alleviating a deeper underlying crisis.

    References

    Bettelheim, B. (1984) Freud and Man’s Soul: An Important Re-Interpretation of Freudian Theory. London: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

    Billingham, L. and Irwin-Rogers, K. (2022) Against Youth Violence: A Social Harm Perspective. Bristol: Policy Press.

    Bratich, J., and Banet-Weiser, S. (2019) ‘From pick-up artists to incels: Con(fidence) games, networked misogyny, and the failure of neoliberalism.’ International Journal of Communication. 13. Pp. 5003-27.

    Ellis, A. (2015) Men, Masculinities and Violence: An Ethnographic Study. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Freud, S. (1926) ‘Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety.’ In Strachey, J., and Freud, A. (Eds.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: The Hogarth Press.

    Gerbaudo, P. (2018) ‘Social media and populism: An elective affinity?’ Media, Culture, and Society. 40(5). Pp. 745-53.

    Hall, S. (2012) Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2015) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism. London: Routledge.

    Hook, D. (2021) ‘The object of apartheid desire: A Lacanian approach to racism and ideology.’ In George, S., and Hook D. (Eds). Lacan and Race. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Johanssen, J. (2021) Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/inhibition. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Kotzé, J. and Lloyd, A. (2022) Making Sense of Ultra-Realism: Contemporary Criminological Theory Through the Lens of Popular Culture. Emerald Group Publishing.

    Lacan, J. (1975-6) Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome. Translated by Adrian Price (2016). Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Lacan, J. (2007) Écrits. New York: W.W. Norton.

    Leader, D. (2021) Jouissance: Sexuality, Suffering and Satisfaction. London: Random House.

    McGowan, T. (2003) The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment.New York: State University of New York Press.

    McGowan, T. (2015) Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Rules of the Game. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

    McGowan, T. (2016) Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. Columbia University Press.

    Nagle, A. (2017) Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Winchester: Zero Books.

    Raymen, T. (2023) The Enigma of Social Harm: The Problem of Liberalism. London: Routledge

    Swales, S. (2022) A Lacanian Critique of the Empathy Cure. AWRY: Journal of Critical Psychology, 3(1), pp.27-41.

    Telford, L (2025) Left behind places, neoliberalism and systemic violence in the UK. Frontiers of Sociology. 10. Pp. 1632190.

    Winlow, S. (2001) Badfellas: Crime, Tradition, and New Masculinities. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Winlow, S., and Hall, S. (2009) ‘Retaliate first: Memory, humiliation and male violence.’ Crime, Media, Culture. 5(3). Pp. 285-304.

    Winlow, S., Hall, S. and Treadwell, J. (2017) The Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-Class Politics. Bristol: Policy Press.

    Žižek, S. (1999) The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso.

    Žižek, S. (2009) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. Profile Books.

  • I’ll Sleep when I’m dead: Reflections on leisure, rest and recuperation

    Mark Bushell, Northumbria University

    “When you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep on the margin”

    Former Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings (cited in Hern, 2017).

    Sleep is a vital homeostatic pillar in supporting life and wellbeing.  Without it, we quickly begin to develop a host of problems: hypertension, increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke, raised potential for developing diabetes, neurobehavioral deficits, and ultimately an increased risk of early mortality (Tobaldini et al, 2017). Yet despite its primacy as a fundamental requirement for self-preservation, sleep has long been antithetical to late-capitalist cultures of work that promote the need to remain switched on for most of the time.

    Imagine for a moment that labour relations in the 21st century were structured differently and that employers finally conceded to the long-recognised reality that burnt out workers are less productive and induce significant costs to organisations through time spent off sick (Leitão at al, 2021). Imagine that these employers provided us with more time away from the workplace to recuperate. What would we do with this non-work or ‘leisure’ time? How would we spend it?  It is tempting to think that we would make the most of it by doing less and allowing our bodies and minds to recharge. However, even the most rudimentary reading of contemporary leisure suggests that sleep, rest and recovery might be the last thing on our minds.

    As the words of ex-Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in the opening quote make clear, late-stage capitalism’s co-optation of rest has now expanded from its initial insurgency into 24/7 labour markets (Crary, 2013) and is now eroding our preferences for inactivity in time spent away from work. Binge watching content on autoplay, algorithmic descents down online rabbit holes, endless scrolling on our smartphones, and intensive fitness regimes all tend to share two things in common: first, they are all marketized pursuits that cede to consumer capital’s ever-greater commodification of leisure time, and second, they all hold the potential to swallow up any lingering commitment to sleep and rest.

    In the UK youth population, the average young male (15-17 years) spends 34 hours per week playing video games, surpassing the overall duration spent in school (Uddin, 2025). A burgeoning online market in unregulated supplements targeted towards gamers has emerged in recent years to boost attention levels and extend gaming endurance. Ingredients lists boast combinations of caffeine, nootropics, adaptogens, electrolytes, GABA and many other additives. When gamers finally call time on their mammoth sessions, these sites also offer sleep-inducing products to help send them off. Just as Mark Fisher (2009) described ADHD as a pathology of late capitalism, and that the drugs which ‘treat’ it are sold back to us as part of the commodification of our wellbeing, gamer supplements are marketized to first boost focus and alertness and later to induce sleep in an ‘increasingly bureaucratised and managed world’ (Linneman and  Medley, 2023: 419).

    Another marketized intervention for micromanaging our internal states has arrived in the form of sleep apps.  By algorithmically assessing sleep patterns during the night, smartphone apps such as Sleepscore and Pzizz claim to be able to help users ‘make the right decisions’ to achieve a good night’s rest that will leave us looking better, feeling better and living better (Sikka, 2021: 112). Sleepio is even recommended by the NHS as a CBT-based app that is ‘clinically proven to help address the root causes of poor sleep and insomnia’ (NHS, 2026). The causes of poor sleep are varied and complex, so the claim that the app can help to resolve them with six 20-minute smartphone sessions probably tells us more about the length of NHS mental health waiting lists than the effectiveness of the technology (see Rethink Mental Illness, 2025).

    However, there is a greater issue at stake here. Like the fitbits, mindfulness apps and other wellness tech, these sleep apps are built around the same neoliberal cultural imperatives – individual advancement, performance metrics and competition – that pervade working life. Presented in a moral language that speaks of compassion and kindness to the self, these apps still make clear demands on the user to take personal responsibility for their sleep deprivation, rise to the challenge and compete with the targets set by the algorithm. As with the fitness apps however, if we fail in our efforts to hit the prescribed targets, our super-ego’s response is punitive, guilt-inducing and probably not the best recipe for improving restful sleep.

    Even states of restful contemplation or daydreaming have now become anathema to personal progress, with their adverse effects on academic performance and task related processing all documented in the literature (Moonyham and Schooler, 2013).  Much less discussed is the way that non-focused wakeful states can incubate creativity and self-reflection as they activate the default mode network (DMN) in the brain. The DMN is a neuronal network that comes to life during wakeful disengagement, supporting the development of personal narratives, particularly around how we perceive ourselves and how we relate to others (McMillan el al, 2013; Menon, 2023). Like sleep however, the practice of restful contemplation holds little value as a source of profit and competitive gain, so it is often denigrated as pointless and indulgent.

    Ultra-realism has reflected on the idea that we are now surrounded by examples of deaptation, a concept developed by Adrian Johnston (2008) to refer to the way in which an initially functional strategy can become counterproductive under changing societal conditions (see Hall and Winlow, 2025). Sleep – or more specifically our relationship with it – has become deaptive in contemporary social life because it is now seen as serving little useful purpose; an inconvenient obstacle in an economy super-charged by competition and the fixation with individual advancement. Consumerism’s commands to ditch restful states in favour of its jouissance-inducing offerings can be powerful and persuasive but they are not simply forced upon us. Rather, liberal capitalism is adept at forging cultures of permission (see Raymen, 2023) which provide the subject with ethical consent to pursue potentially harmful consumer lifestyles that relegate the importance of sleep and rest. We come to see these practices not as vital to human wellbeing or goods within themselves but rather as dispensable commodities that can be cast aside or regularly replaced by other activities.

    Perhaps we need to do more, then, to recognise the value of sleep and recuperation as internal goods rather than interchangeable pursuits or as vehicles towards achieving other goals such as greater productivity.  Perhaps we should give rest greater recognition as a key component of our telos or that to which we continually strive to live a good life. This may seem counterintuitive as we are bombarded with ideological messages that implore us to stay focused and remain ready to face off against one another in the next battle for symbolic or material advancement. But unless we act to alter our perceptions around rest and collectively realise its value as a virtue and something that is indispensable in order to live well, we will continue to stare bleary-eyed into a future defined by marketized alertness and all of the ills that follow.

    References

    Crary, J. (2013) 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso

    Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Portland: John Hunt Publishing.

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2025) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Advances in Ultra-Realism. London: Routledge

    Hern, A. (2017) Netflix’s biggest competitor? Sleep. The Guardian. 18th April 2017. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/18/netflix-competitor-sleep-uber-facebook 

    Johnston, A. (2008) Žižek’s Ontology: A transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity. Northwestern University Press.

    Leitão J, Pereira D, Gonçalves Â. (2021) Quality of work life and contribution to productivity: assessing the moderator effects of burnout syndrome. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 18:2425

    Linnemann, T. and Medley, C. (2023) Side affects may vary: Palliative capitalism, punitive capitalism and US consumer culture. In Ayres, T. and Ancrum, C. (eds.) Understanding drug dealing and illicit drug markets pp.416-434. Routledge.

    McMillan, R.L., Kaufman, S.B. and Singer, J.L. (2013) ‘Ode to positive constructive daydreaming’. Front. Psychol. 4:626.

    Menon, V., 2023. 20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis. Neuron, 111(16), pp.2469-2487.

    Mooneyham, B. and Schooler, J. (2013) ‘The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: a review’. Can J Exp Psychol. 2013 Mar;67(1):11-18

    Oschinsky, F.M., Klesel, M., Ressel, N. and Niehaves, B. (2019) Where are your thoughts? On the relationship between technology use and mind wandering.

    Raymen, T. (2023) The Enigma of Social Harm. Routledge.

    Rethink Mental Illness (2025) New analysis of NHS data on mental health waiting times. Available at: https://www.rethink.org/news-and-stories/media-centre/2025/02/new-analysis-of-nhs-data-on-mental-health-waiting-times

    Sikka, T. (2021) ‘The Neoliberalization of sleep: A discursive and materialist analysis of sleep technologies’. Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology, 26, pp.105-121.

    Uddin, S. (2025) The average teen boy now spends 34 hours a week gaming. Independent. 15th September 2025. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/teen-boys-gaming-online-mumsnet-b2826672.html

  • A Multi-Level Ultra-Realist Approach to Understanding Violence Against Women and Girls: The Meso-Level

    Paul Alker, Craig Kelly, Max Hart, Cade Darby, and Emma Armstrong

    Throughout this blog series we aim to show how violence against women and girls (VAWG) must be understood through multiple layers. While macro level structures shape the broader social, economic, political, and cultural conditions that enable VAWG, as we argued in the last post, the focus of this post is to consider the meso level – the institutions and social environments where these dynamics play out more tangibly. Schools, workplaces, communities, and digital spaces all serve as key sites where gendered violence can be reinforced, resisted, or normalised (Ellis and Thiara, 2014). Despite formal progress in gender equality, many of these spaces continue to reproduce patterns of inequality and misogyny, as will be discussed within this post.

    One of the most significant achievements from feminism has been the increased integration of women into the workplace. However, this progress has arguably brought about unintended consequences. While women have entered the labour market in large numbers, they remain disproportionately concentrated in part-time, casual employment which does not provide the economic security required for true emancipation from patriarchal control (Maestripieri, 2023). At the same time, the workplace itself continues to be a major site of VAWG, via harassment and discrimination (Begeny et al., 2023). On paper, formal progress does not equate to lived experiences of sex equality, despite promises of anti-misogyny and ‘inclusion’ as an initiative at an organisational level. This disjuncture is particularly acute in male-dominated institutions such as the military and the police, where hierarchical structures and institutional cultures of silence often normalise and conceal misogynistic behaviours, including sexual and domestic violence (Hendrikx et al., 2023; Riley, 2025). In these settings, the superficial attempts at equality fail to address the causes of this violence.

    While the workplace has been a key battleground for gender equality, neoliberal feminism has often reduced progress to these corporate diversity initiatives and symbolic gestures (Fraser, 2020). Beyond work, and in response to the demands of the neoliberal market, activism – particularly feminist activism – has become a highly commodified practice, (Mcintyre, 2021). Liberal feminism’s cultural turn and adoption of postmodernist perspectives has fallen into the same trap as much contemporary anti-racism. Despite good intentions, they often neglect the structural conditions that give rise to modern forms of racism and misogyny. This is even truer in an era of hyper visibility, in which narcissistic performances of self on platforms such as social media distract from the structural drivers of inequality (Yardley, 2017). By centring representation and performative activism, these movements engage in what Kotzé (2020) terms ‘micro-resistance’ – small-scale, surface-level acts of defiance that create the illusion of progress while leaving the underlying system fundamentally unchallenged. The potential of collectivism and the awareness of common oppressors has been clouded by individualistic identity politics, promising autonomy and uniqueness through consumerism (Winlow and Hall, 2017) and increasingly platformed as short soundbites competing for attention on social media which necessitates a degree of narcissism at its core. Against this backdrop, misogyny thrives (Yardley and Richards, 2023).

    The symbolic violence of the present post-political context has left many feeling that they lack any real political representation. Whilst the culture war rages on, and both sides of the political spectrum remain true to neoliberal orthodoxy and fail to address issues on an economic level, a sense of apathy within the voting population prevails, which has led to a loss of faith in politics and overall disengagement from the mainstream political sphere (Winlow and Hall, 2022). In the absence of meaningful solutions, this has of course resulted in some gravitating towards political figures on the fringes who appeal to their grievances and feelings of dissatisfaction. Therefore, online spaces occupied by manosphere figures provide not only ideological narratives but also affective rewards – recognition, belonging and a sense of purpose – which compensate for the feelings of lack and dislocation generated by contemporary social life.

    In March 2025, Netflix released the series Adolescence, a provocative drama exploring the radicalisation of young men online, whichsparked widespread discussion about how the digital space acts as a vehicle for normalising misogyny and gendered violence, particularly around incel communities (O’Rourke and Haslop, 2023). Ging (2019) discusses the ‘manosphere’, characterised by an adherence to Red Pill ‘philosophy’, which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. Within this context, genuine political thought is absent in exchange for a perpetual pursuit of profit – whether in the form of monetary or social capital – and a pseudo-populism. Andrew Tate is a prime example of this dynamic, serving as a leading beacon of the manosphere for disaffected young men across the globe, a position further cemented by the extensive hatred directed towards him (Haslop et al., 2024). He has garnered a cult like following based upon the objectification, subjugation and degradation of women that is thinly veiled through incoherent aspects of a personal marketed identity. His persona is a myriad of incoherent alignments that aims to capture as wide a following of disaffected young men as possible. He oscillates between disparate and often contradictory identities: claims of religious devotion while engaging in the sex industry; glorifying elite physical conditioning while indulging in the overt use of harmful substances that align with signifiers of wealth, such as Cuban cigars; and launching vague political aspirations (the BRUV party) that are underpinned by notions of anti-immigration, despite ongoing legal proceedings in a country where he is a foreign national.

    This month, Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere premiered on Netflix, offering a close-up view of some of the key figures operating in the online manosphere. What emerges is a world built on hustle culture, where participants promote courses, mentorship schemes, and pathways to wealth that often resemble pyramid-scheme style models, promising success to many while structurally delivering it to very few (Ilan, 2026). Alongside this sits a striking contradiction: while espousing overtly misogynistic views in their content, several figures are shown to be markedly deferential in their personal relationships with women. Our overall impression is less one of anger and more one of sadness. The documentary confirms the hostility embedded within these spaces, but also the fragility and insecurity that underpin them. Perhaps most telling is the repeated invocation of the ‘matrix’, a metaphor used to suggest that mainstream society deceives and supresses men, positioning the manosphere as a form of awakening or resistance. Yet, what is offered in its place is a system that mirrors the very dynamics it claims to oppose: a competitive, exclusionary model of success in which only a small minority can realistically thrive. This very much echoes Kotzé’s (2020) concept of micro-resistance. These observations point to a deeper question: how do these spaces attract individuals and sustain their engagement over time?

    At its fundamental level, the manosphere serves as an isolating social vessel that separates individuals from familial ties to ensure ideological change can take place. This process reflects dynamics observed in other institutional contexts where shifts in the symbolic order are produced through forms of social detachment, including cult formulation (Curtis and Curtis, 1993) and military recruitment strategies (Armstrong, 2025). While the manosphere operates primary online, making physical isolation less central, forms of social and relational isolation remain key to its functioning. Entry into these spaces if often framed through promises of success, wealth, and sexual access (Sugiura, 2021), particularly targeting working-class men who exist within a sense of hopelessness and feel ‘left behind’ from the economically successful populace (Telford, 2025). The promise of wealth can be seen as the driving force that convinces many men to join the movement, but this promise is an illusionary truth behind a much larger symbolic order which these men later assimilate.

    This process of ideological change becomes apparent when looking upon the use of the ‘matrix’ to describe the world, shielding the populace from wealth and power, with those involved in the manosphere as the protagonists for change and enlightenment (Vallerga and Zurbriggen, 2022). This language surrounding existing social ties can isolate the individual, as they are told that the general population are ‘sheep’ and therefore not worth engaging with if one seeks success. The application of isolation within this group works to detach individuals from familial and social ties, drawing them into a community that appears to offer what they feel has been missing from their lives. This makes toxic elements of the red pill, such as the discussions of female inferiority (Vallerga and Zurbriggen, 2022) and normalisation of sexual dominance (Hoebanx, 2025), easier to assimilate, as this is the content individuals are exposed to daily. In this way, individuals are offered little in the way of counterarguments, leaving them effectively enclosed within a narrow ideological environment.  

    Ilan (2026) argues that contemporary Western societies increasingly resemble what he terms a “hustle society”, in which the core tenets of neoliberalism, relentless entrepreneurialism, speculative risk-taking and exploitative opportunity-seeking, are normalised cultural expectations. Within such a context, individuals like Andrew Tate are not aberrations but archetypal figures who serve as exaggerated expressions of dominant cultural values. The hustler identity, combining wealth accumulation, conspicuous consumption and the exploitation of others, maps closely onto the hyper-competitive and individualised subjectivities produced by neoliberal capitalism. Seen in this light, the misogynistic ideology circulating within the manosphere does not simply represent a fringe deviance but an intensified articulation of the same competitive, transactional and extractive logics that increasingly shape mainstream economic and social life. Thus, the manosphere provides misogynistic ideology, but also offers participation in the aspirational logics of the hustle society.

    Therefore, such dynamics do not emerge in a vacuum but are shaped by broader structural conditions. The absence of a genuine political alternative beyond the dominant neoliberal order continues to marginalise ever-growing swathes of the population and has left a vacuum that figures like Tate and others featured in Theroux’s documentary exploit. This has accelerated the rise in disaffected young males, as young as aged ten, who subscribe to his misogynistic overtures and are actively groomed into these online spaces through patterns of consumption, both material and ideological.

    For some working-class men particularly, the erosion of traditional pathways to masculine identity – such as stable employment and the breadwinner role – leaves them seeking alternative ways to assert their masculinity (Ellis, 2015). Many turn to physical pursuits such as the gym (Gibbs et al., 2022) or the military (Armstrong, 2025), as sites where strength, discipline, and control can be visibly demonstrated. However, before these routes become viable options, young boys are exploited in the digital space, where figures like Tate capitalise on their insecurity, frustration, and lack of direction. Here, we see how overtly the Meso level interacts with both the Macro and Micro levels. Even if we wilfully ignore the ongoing accusations of violence against women perpetrated by Tate himself; evidence of his influence within the context of the parameters set out by the Macro have a clear impact on the Micro. Research in the Australian school system offers a stark demonstration of the normalisation of VAWG in young men due to the influence of Tate and the wider manosphere (Wescott et al., 2023).

    As we have already stated, individuals like Tate are most certainly a contributing factor to rising hate and violence toward women and girls, a fact that would be dangerous to ignore. However, it is perhaps problematic also to ignore the fact that Tate, and indeed Donald Trump and other manosphere and far-right figures, are the extreme embodiment of everything the prevailing political economy stands for, rather than being the antithesis of contemporary neoliberal values. Although positioned as non-conformist, they are in fact hyper-conformist (Kotźe, 2020). It is our contention that a purely moral critique of the action of Tate, which account for an overwhelming amount of the overall discourse, not only fails to acknowledge the role of neoliberal ideology in the formation of such harmful subjectivities but also creates the very conditions in which young men are indeed vulnerable to the influence of such rhetoric. Beyond providing endless moral critique of individuals like Tate, who should of course be held accountable for their crimes, focus must also be directed towards critiquing the system that gave rise to him – figures like Tate do not emerge in a vacuum and neither do the young men who follow him. Therefore, it is our contention that focusing solely on individual consumers or online influencers risks obscuring the institutional and structural conditions that make such figures influential in the first place.

    Beyond focusing on the influence of Tate and many facets of the so-called incel ideology, Adolescence shines a light on the contemporary experience of teenagers, both male and female, in the senior school environment and highlights the various challenges they both face on a day-to-day basis, inside and outside this environment. In somewhat stark terms, episode two depicts the modern school as a space in which students effectively run the show, lacking any level of discipline, whilst the teachers in many cases overzealously attempt to ‘police the horde’. Despite the fact that a fellow student has been brutally murdered, very few seem to care. To some, this depiction may verge on the hyperbolic, yet for us, it certainly touches upon aspects of our own secondary school experience and that outlined in academic research.

    As Billingham and Irwin-Rogers (2022) highlight, children and young people’s time spent in school is one of the most significant elements of their childhood and adolescent years. They note that, at its best, it can help children to make sense of the world they inhabit and determine their place within it, whilst simultaneously providing the foundations for them to live happy and healthy lives. Importantly they acknowledge that, of all the institutions that children and young people come into contact with, school is arguably the most consequential, given that it is the only institution in society that every child under the age of 16 is legally obliged to attend and thus holds enormous practical, emotional and relational significance in young people’s lives. They note how schools have the potential to play a vital role in enabling children and young people to flourish by being places which support young people’s sense of mattering, furnishing them with deeply meaningful forms of recognition and respect, whilst helping them to see the difference that their existence makes to the world. Yet, they argue that a number of structural features of the education system are in fact generating harm and ultimately compromising many children and young people’s ability to flourish. As Ging (2025) notes, the school environment depicted within Adolescence constitutes a significant part of the puzzle as to why 13-year-old Jamie went on to kill his classmate Katie. The school setting depicted is far removed from the ideal Billingham and Irwin-Rogers outline above and certainly serves as a startling example of some of the features of the secondary education system currently harming the young people caught up within it. Yet, this is the reality of schooling following a decade and a half of austerity in which ill-equipped teacher battle with students who do not respect them.

    Alongside the structural dynamics already outlined, secondary schools can function as key sites in which experiences of humiliation are produced and internalised. As young people begin to navigate attraction and intimacy, these interactions unfold under conditions of intense visibility from friends and peers. Rejection is rarely private and is often witnessed, shared, and in some cases amplified through social media platforms, transforming routine adolescent experiences into a humiliating spectacle of acute public embarrassment. This is not to suggest that rejection leads directly to violence, but rather that, under certain conditions, repeated experiences of exclusion and perceived inadequacy can sediment into deeper feelings of shame, resentment and anger. Where these affects are not processed or supported, they may be redirected inwards in the form of a variety of self-destructive behaviours or outward in the form of violence manifest in both symbolic and subjective forms. In this sense, violence is not condoned, but understood as symptomatic of something more deeply embedded.

    Ultimately, schools operate as a microcosm of the wider social world, as ideological state apparatuses that aid in the reproduction of its very logic within the subject. It also functions as a space in which the same attributes that confer status outside the school gates, such as appearance, confidence, popularity and forms of social and cultural capital, structure hierarchies within it. In a neoliberal consumer culture, self-worth becomes increasingly tied to notions of desirability and what might be understood as ‘sexual market value’. For those excluded from these hierarchies, rejection can take on a more profound significance, experienced less as a singular event and more as a confirmation of one’s perceived lack of value. In this sense, the school environment not only reflects broader inequalities but reproduces them, creating conditions in which humiliation can become a formative experience, shaped by, and in turn reinforcing, the wider socio-symbolic order. As a result, young men increasingly seek meaning and belonging in digital spaces, opening them up to the influence of figure like Andrew Tate and other manosphere content creators.

    References

    Armstrong, E. (2025) British Army Veterans’ Experiences of the Transition into Civilian Life: An Ultra-Realist Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge.  

    Begeny, C. T., Arshad, H., Cuming, T., Dhariwal, D. K., Fisher, R. A., Franklin, M. D., Jackson, P. C., McLachlan, G. M., Searle, R. H., and Newlands, C. (2023) ‘Sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape by colleagues in the surgical workforce, and how women and men are living different realities: Observational study using NHS population-derived weights.’ British Journal of Surgery. 110(11). Pp. 1518-26.  

    Billingham, L., and Irwin-Rogers, K. (2022) Against Youth Violence: A Social Harm Perspective. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

    Curtis, J.M. and Curtis, M.J. (1993) ‘Factors related to susceptibility and recruitment by cults.’ Psychological Report. 73(2). Pp. 451–60.

    Ellis, A. (2015) Men, Masculinities and Violence: An Ethnographic Study. Abingdon: Routledge.  

    Ellis, J., and Thiara, R. K. (2014) Preventing Violence Against Women and Girls: Education Work with Children and Young People. Bristol: Bristol University Press. 

    Fraser, N. (2020) Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. London: Verso Books.

    Gibbs, N., Salinas, M., and Turnock, L. (2022) ‘Post-industrial masculinities and gym culture: Graft, craft, and fraternity.’ The British Journal of Sociology. 73. Pp. 220-36.  

    Ging, D. (2019) ‘Alphas, betas, and incels: Theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere.’ Men and Masculinities. 22(4). Pp. 638-57.  

    Ging, D. (2025) How fragile we are: Why Netflix drama Adolescence is essential viewing for everyone. Available at: https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/adolescence-netflix-6654519-Mar2025/ [Accessed 23 April 2026].

    Haslop, C., Ringrose, J., Cambazoglu, I., and Milne, B. (2024) ‘Mainstreaming the manosphere’s misogyny through affective homosocial currencies: Exploring how teen boys navigate the Andrew Tate effect.’ Social Media and Society. 10.  

    Hendrikx, L. J., Williamson, V., and Murphy, D. (2023) ‘Adversity during military service: The impact of military sexual trauma, emotional bullying and physical assault on the mental health and well-being of women veterans.’ BMJ Military Health. 169. Pp. 419-24. 

    Hoebanx, P. (2025) ‘Red pill women: Heterosexual fantasies in misogynistic spaces.’ Men and Masculinities. 28(2). Pp. 177–96.   

    Ilan, J., 2026. The hustle society: Mainstream precarity, voracious entrepreneurialism, grift and exploitation in contemporary culture. The British Journal of Criminology, p.azag033.

    Kotzé, J. (2020) ‘The commodification of abstinence.’ In Hall, S., Kuldova, T., and Horsley, M. (Eds). Crime, Harm, and Consumerism. Abingdon: Routledge.  

    Maestripieri, L. (2023) ‘Women’s involuntary part-time employment and household economic security in Europe.’ Feminist Economics. 29(4). Pp. 223-51.  

    McIntyre, M. P. (2021) ‘Commodifying feminism: Economic choice and agency in the context of lifestyle influencers and gender consultants.’ Gender, Work, and Organization. 28(3). Pp. 1059-78.  

    O’Rourke, F., and Haslop, C. (2023) ‘”We’re respectful boys…we’re not misogynistic!”: Analysing defensive, contradictory and changing performances of masculinity within young men’s in-person and digitally mediated homosocial spaces.’ Journal of Gender Studies. 34(6). Pp. 848-65.

    Riley, L. (2025) ‘Fact 16: In the six months leading to March 2022, more than 1,500 police staff in England and Wales were accused of violence against women and girls.’ In Lamb, J. B., Hart, M., Treadwell, J., Lynes, A., and Kelly, C. (Eds.) 50 Facts Everyone Should Know About the Police. Bristol: Policy Press. 

    Sugiura, L. (2021) The Emergence and Development of the Manosphere. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.

    Telford, L. (2025) ‘Left behind places, neoliberalism, and systemic violence in the UK.’ Frontiers in Sociology. 10.

    Vallerga, M. and Zurbriggen, E.L. (2022) ‘Hegemonic masculinities in the ‘Manosphere’: A thematic analysis of beliefs about men and women on The Red Pill and Incel.’ Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy. 22(2). Pp. 602–25.

    Wescott, S., Roberts, S., and Zhao, X. (2023) ‘The problem of anti-feminist “manfluencer” Andrew Tate in Australian schools: Women teachers’ experiences of resurgent male supremacy.’ Gender and Education. 36(2). Pp. 167-82.  

    Winlow, S., and Hall, S. (2017) ‘Criminology and consumerism.’ In Carlen, P., and França, L. A. (Eds). Alternative Criminologies. Abingdon: Routledge.  

    Winlow, S., and Hall, S. (2022) The Death of the Left: Why we Must Begin from the Beginning Again. London: Policy Press.

    Yardley, E. (2017) Social Media Homicide Confessions: Stories of Killers and their Victims. London: Policy Press.  

    Yardley, E., and Richards, L. (2023) ‘The elephant in the room: Toward an integrated, feminist analysis of mass murder.’ Violence Against Women. 29(3-4). Pp. 752-72.

  • Learning and Teaching from Lacan: Dispatches from the neoliberal university

    Professor Dan Briggs

    It’s the second week of term and I’m only in the second semester of my return to undergraduate teaching in the UK university system. Much has changed I think to myself as I approach the seminar room. As I wait outside, I laugh to myself as I recall some amusing experiences from the last time I was teaching undergraduates…

    “I pay your wages”

    I had left the UK in 2013 to work in a private university in Spain where wealthy, disinterested students who were not academically fit for the public university system were sent by mummy and daddy to do the bare minimum to get their degree certificate. Typically, when the semester started in Spain, the first 5 or 6 weeks would see the expected class size of 25 drop to around 10 or 11. By week 7, we were almost into single figures and often concluding classes with no-one attending in last few weeks of the semester.

    The students – of well below average competence and commitment but well above average spending power and generally entitled – had grown up in a cultural environment where everything had been presented to them with little effort. Indeed, many had jobs waiting for them on concluding their degrees, which mummy and daddy had arranged. I developed an alcohol dependency when marking the papers, mainly because few made clear sense, the majority hadn’t really read any of the material and they had looked for short-cuts to do the work. To make matters worse, some couldn’t even get my name right. Some classics were “David Bridges” or “Profe Biggs” or just “Module person” – the latter of which cuts deep with a dehumanising undertone. Sometimes students would just submit their work without even their name on or any title on the essay and even with no content in the email submitting the work. That’s how much they cared.

    “I hope I get a pass” many would say to me when I released the marks. But many failed and had to retake, and retake, and retake again. One such third year student failed his dissertation presentation five times – in three of which he submitted the same plagiarised work he had previously submitted on two prior occasions. On another such occasion, I was publicly challenged by one student who I had failed. She said in front of the class “my work was worth a 4” – the benchmark pass mark – “come on, its worth a pass”. I said “No, it was a 3, you failed, you’ll have to do it again” to which she replied “it was a 4, you have to pass me, I pay your wages”.

    Knowledge, the Master, and the wage-paying student

    This story is, for Lacan, a near-perfect theatre of discourse failure. Two of Lacan’s four discourses – Master and University – describe the structures through which knowledge, desire, and power circulate. In this case, the private Spanish university has catastrophically collapsed the University Discourse (where knowledge mediates between authority and the subject), replacing it with the Master’s Discourse whereby my student, as opposed to me, occupies the position of true Master.

    “I pay your wages” is the sentence that crystallises the socioeconomic relationship. Rather than read this as impulsive frustration and insolence on behalf of the student, Lacan would see it as a structural revelation. The student has correctly identified who holds the position of the Master in the institutional structure. Not the beholder of knowledge (me) but the holder of capital. My objectification is still incomplete – by misnaming or even not even naming me at all I become what Lacan would describe as the objet petit a: a disposable, interchangeable instrument of the Other’s enjoyment. The dehumanisation is not incidental or accidental but a brutal manifestation of how the logic of the system is acted out.

    The plagiarised dissertation, submitted identically on three consecutive occasions, is equally exemplary. Lacan’s work distinguishes knowledge (savoir) from truth but many of these students possessed neither. Perhaps more importantly, they had never been constituted as desiring subjects in the first place because subjects who lack something seek something in its absence. Because everything had been delivered on demand, desire itself had never been properly stimulated and formed. Without lack, there is no desire. Without desire, there is no learning. The credential of the degree is pursued not as a symbol of knowledge but instead as an empty signifier – a piece of paper that unlocks the job mummy and daddy have already arranged, thus masquerading as a vital, hard-earned qualification and representing the ultimate short-circuit of the symbolic order.

    But that was then and this is now. The Spanish private university and the marketised UK university arrive at the same destination by different roads – one through the blunt entitlement of inherited wealth, the other through the slow institutional surrender of academic authority to consumer logic. However, in both cases the University Discourse has collapsed, the Big Other has abdicated, and what remains is a symbolic order held together by the flimsiest of fictions.

    “One thing a week”

    It was only in September 2025 that I returned to the undergraduate lecture hall and the seminar rooms, with a massive amount of ambivalence mainly because the increasing marketisation of UK higher education has recalibrated students as consumers and institutions as competitors. In all truth, league tables, satisfaction surveys, and revenue-driven recruitment now dominate the academic mission. Similarly, much has changed in the lives of the current young generation who, in the intervening period, went through the traumas of the lockdowns and emerged increasingly anti-social and digitally dependent. They also apparently now ‘benefit’ from the prominence of AI-assisted learning in schools and universities. This, among other things, means that in general young people increasingly don’t read, don’t want to read and don’t know how to read, preferring instead the distracting allure of digital apparatus.

    On campus all this is very evident I reason, thinking back to the first lecture I had given the week previously when around 70 students had turned up from a possible 136 who had registered. Arriving individually, 6 of 25 turn up to the seminar as we wait in silence outside the seminar room. They all look at their phones and scroll up and down, left and right while I watch on moved only by the clock ticks which seem to echo down the corridor. I consider myself fairly experienced at breaking the ice and disturbing awkward moments with conversation. The conversation went a little like this:

    Dan: Well, only six of us. Wow. I wasn’t expecting that. Do people normally turn up late to the seminars? I’d hope so, you know.

    [They look at each other hoping that one of them will respond so the others don’t have to engage in social interaction]

    Student 1: Nah, it’s like this.

    Dan: Right, but I mean it’s only week 2. I guess I would expect this to be a turnout for say week 8 or 9.

    Student 1: Mostly, it is like this.

    [Ten seconds pass and just before they start to revert back to the phones, I ask]

    Dan: But aren’t there any consequences for poor attendance or non-attendance?

    Student 1: Normally if you attend one thing a week, they don’t write to you.

    [Clock ticks over silence resumes as I knock on the door to call time on other class]

    ‘One thing a week’, I think to myself, how is it that they don’t have the intellectual capacity or at least the momentary thought space to muster up an accurate description for what they are actually attending.

    The corridor of silence: Drive, scroll, repeat

    My ambivalence could be seen by Lacan as the condition of a subject caught between two incompatible symbolic positions. To some degree, and even though I was educated at a time when universities had already taken their first steps along the corporate pathway, I know what the university once meant. Over the years, have seen what it has become. In the Lacanian sense, I have become a split subject or – the barred subject – divided between an idealised Big Other (the university as site of genuine intellectual desire) and the deflated real of what it is now and how I now inhabit it.

    The scenario I encountered outside the seminar room is extraordinarily revealing. Six students, each locked into their phone, performing the compulsive circuit Lacan would associate with drive rather than desire. Drive does not seek an object – it circles one endlessly. The scroll is not a search for anything in particular; it is the loop itself that satisfies, or rather, that substitutes for satisfaction. The students are not bored in the classical sense because boredom requires an absence of stimulus, which might generate desire. They are instead over-stimulated into passivity and their nervous systems are colonised by what Žižek, extending Lacan, would call the superego injunction to enjoy.

    The exchange that follows is a compressed masterclass in what Lacan called the failure of intersubjective recognition. It is within this that I attempt to prise open a symbolic space – conversation, curiosity, and a general shared uncertainty about why so few chose to attend. But the students have already foreclosed that space. Student 1’s response, “Nah, it’s like this” and “Mostly, it is like this” – are not dismissive but bluntly descriptive of realitry. They are reporting, with flat accuracy, the real conditions of their symbolic world. They are not alienated from the institution but have taken it to its word.

    But perhaps the most illuminating line was when I was told “if you attend one thing a week, they don’t write to you” because this is the story’s pivotal Lacanian moment. It reveals that the Big Other – or the university as symbolic authority – has already abdicated. The institution has quietly communicated that attendance is optional, that knowledge can be deferred, that the bare minimum is sufficient. The students have not undermined the symbolic order because the institution had already dismantled it.

    The clock ticks. The silence resumes. In both cases the institution itself dismantled the symbolic conditions under which genuine desire for knowledge could form. The students have not failed the university. The university has failed the students, then handed them a satisfaction survey and asked how it was doing (although they’ll be lucky if too many the students actually complete it). Lacan reminds us that the subject is always constituted by and through the Other. When the Big Other and its institutional order – the university, the curriculum, the seminar – quietly signals that knowledge is optional, negotiable, and subordinate to revenue, it should not surprise us when students simply, and quite rationally, take it at its word.

  • Intimacy for Sale: An Ultra-Realist Analysis of the Commodification of Valentine’s Day

    By Poppy-Anne Turner, Teesside University

    Saint Valentine is an enigmatic figure theologically, with his title as a saint being deliberated amongst Christians, Catholics, historians and academics alike. There is significant ambiguity surrounding who Saint Valentine was, with some accounts advocating that there may have been two figures named Valentine, both believed to have died as martyrs for the Christian faith on the 14th of February (Baker, 1905; Morgan, 2016). Despite this religious uncertainty, the contemporary celebration of Valentine’s Day owes little to Saint Valentine himself, instead emerging through literary and cultural developments, most notably Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, where Valentine’s Day was associated with romantic coupling (Hales, 1882; Schmidt, 1993). It is this cultural reinterpretation, rather than religious tradition, that paved the way for Valentine’s Day as it is recognised today.

    Valentine’s Day is a cultural phenomenon built on the predicate of love and appreciation for others. It is comprised of gift giving, and overt expressions of gratefulness for our peers, whether that be our romantic partners, our friends or our family members. Yet public attitudes to this phenomenon are deeply polarised, with its social and cultural consequences widely disputed. On the one hand, some view this holiday to have some beneficial impacts and consequently conform to the conventions associated with this cultural phenomenon. On the other, critics argue that it promotes a marketized version of romance, fostering expectations that love should be expressed through monetary exchange (Shanini, 2024).  Individuals who express such concerns are often dismissed as ‘buzzkills’, positioned in opposition to the dominant framing of Valentine’s Day as a celebration of love.  Afterall, how harmful can a holiday be if its stated aim is to promote love?  Adopting ultra-realist theoretical contributions, and harm as a central point of focus, this blog post intends to dissect this debate. To situate this theory into the context of valentine’s day, this blog seeks to interrogate this assumption.

    It is interesting to note that the shift towards Valentine’s Day as a materialistic and marketised holiday began in the West during the 18th century, when the holiday became commercialised through the introduction of Valentine’s Day cards (Holloway, 2020). At this time in England, such cards functioned as a form of social control, used to maintain social order through comedic commentary on behaviours which were deemed undesirable, aiming to create a form of self-governance and moral policing (see Pollen, 2014). Such expectations of self-governance were linked to undesirable characteristics such as poor hygiene practices and drunkenness. This motif can arguably be seen in modern society, with cards being designed to outline socially desirable characteristics such as beauty, romance, and emotional availability. But, more broadly, cards in modern society use this to express appreciation for another person and, in most cases, to either strengthen a current relationship or form a new one. This use of material goods to represent coupling has caused an argument that Valentine’s Day is very much consumer oriented, causing much opposition and debate surrounding the materialistic nature of this holiday (see Shani and Shankar, 2006).

    As Valentine’s Day became increasingly consumer-oriented, this marketisation has produced a range of interconnected social, psychological, and environmental harms. Research on the ‘Valentine’s Day blues’ demonstrates that individuals who do not receive gifts or participate in dominant romantic rituals are more likely to experience anxiety, loneliness, and depressive symptoms in the period surrounding the holiday, with these effects disproportionately affecting women and younger adults who are more exposed to normative romantic expectations (Lange et al., 2022). Alongside these affective harms, Donohoe (2008) demonstrates that many of the commodities most closely associated with Valentine’s Day, such as cut flowers, gold jewellery, and diamonds, are produced through industries linked to environmental degradation, serious health risks for workers, forced and precarious labour, and, in the case of diamonds and gold, the financing of violent conflict. 

    This materialism is promoted institutionally, with corporations advertising about the holiday through electronic communications and product displays, with many customers being aware of their attempts to encourage consumption (see Close and Zinkhan, 2004). Despite this awareness, the majority still turn to corporations and the material goods they offer to overtly display their feelings for another person. This can be understood through fetishistic disavowal (see Black, 2025). Fetishistic disavowal is a process by which we dispel knowledge which makes us uncomfortable so that we can continue our lives in ignorance of social reality (Kotzé and Lloyd, 2022; Winlow, 2019). In the context of Valentine’s Day this is made explicitly as many consumers ignore the social reality of the fact that corporations are exploiting their wish to provide material goods for their loved ones in favour of increasing capital accumulation. This allows a process of naturalisation to occur, whereby consumption is normalised even as its associated harms are simultaneously recognised and disavowed.

    From a Lacanian perspective, Valentine’s Day can be understood through a superegoic command to enjoy, where subjects are invited to express love, but also compelled to demonstrate enjoyment in recognisable and publicly legible ways. Žižek (2008) extends this insight by arguing that late capitalism intensifies the command to enjoy, transforming enjoyment into a moral obligation that individuals must continually perform, often through consumption. Valentine’s Day exemplifies this process by positioning romantic happiness as something that must be actively displayed through gifts and experiences, rendering failure to enjoy as a form of personal inadequacy. However, the pressures generated by Valentine’s Day do not simply divide subjects into those who successfully participate and those who are excluded. Drawing on Winlow and Hall’s (2013) critique of social exclusion, exclusion here is better understood not as a position outside the system, but as a differentiated form of participation within it, shaped by the same desires, aspirations, and symbolic reference points as those deemed included. Individuals who are single, financially constrained, or disenchanted with the holiday are therefore not removed from its socio-symbolic logic. Rather than exiting the socio-symbolic order, those positioned as ‘excluded’ often seek alternative routes back into it.

    Abstaining from Valentine’s Day has become quite popular over the past few years, particularly since the introduction of ‘Galentine’s Day.’ Galentine’s Day was introduced to celebrate friendships between women, with gifts and cards often being exchanged (Griffiths, 2025). Sound familiar? That’s because it is. This product of abstinence demonstrates how attempting to withdraw from social conventions can be ineffective, and how abstinence can create desire which can be temporarily fulfilled by the commodities which intend to replace the abstained object (Kotzé, 2020). However, there is a sense of irony created by this attempt to withdraw from such social conventions by using Galentine’s Day as a conduit, an irony which is embedded within the capitalist system which runs society. As Lloyd (2017) has outlined, the durability of capitalism is derived from its ability to create the space for forms of resistance to occur within its confines. Galentine’s Day arguably demonstrates this as it is comprised by similar features to that of valentine’s day: the provision of presents; the distribution of material goods; consumerism; and capital accumulation for corporations. This demonstrates capitalism’s malleability and capacity to accommodate resistance to work in the systems favour (see McGowan, 2016), which in this case is through the sociosymbolic environment it fosters. There is an argument to be made that, as a result of the sociosymbolic environment created by capitalism, even individuals who intend to abstain from consumer-based holidays end up participating in different forms (Kotzé, 2020), as evidenced by Galentine’s Day.

    Combined together, both Valentine’s Day and Galentine’s Day illustrate how late-stage capitalist culture organises intimacy through consumption. What appears as choice, resistance, or abstention is repeatedly folded back into the same socio-symbolic framework that ties love and recognition to market participation. By mobilising ultra-realist insights drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis and theories of social harm, this post has demonstrated how Valentine’s Day operates as a mechanism that structures desire, compels enjoyment, and reproduces environmental, emotional, and human harms while sustaining the illusion of meaningful agency.

    Reference List

    Baker, V. (1905) ‘For St. Valentine’s Day’, The Journal of Education, 61(5), p.120-121.

    Black, J. (2025) ‘Examining the mechanism of disavowal and its two forms: cynical disavowal and fetishistic disavowal’, Theory & Psychology, 35(1), p.117-135.

    Close, A. & Zinkhan, G.M. (2004) ‘A Holiday Loved and Loathed: A Consumer Perspective of Valentine’s Day’, Advances in Consumer Research, 33(3), p.1-10.

    Donohoe, M. (2008) ‘Flowers, diamonds, and gold: The destructive public health, human rights, and environmental consequences of symbols of love’, Human Rights Quarterly, 30(1), p. 164-82.

    Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. 1st edn. United Kingdom: Zero Books.

    Griffiths, E. (2025) What is Galentine’s Day and who celebrates it?. Available at: Galentine’s Day: What is the Parks and Rec Valentine’s alternative? – BBC News (Accessed:29/01/2026).

    Hales, J.W. (1882) ‘St. Valentine’s Day’, The Antiquary, 5(1), p.41-50.

    Hall, S. & Winlow, S. (2015) Revitalising Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism. 1ST edn. London: Routledge.

    Holloway, S. (2020) ‘Love, Custom & Consumption: Valentine’s Day in England c.1660-1830’, Cultural and Social History: The Journal of the Social History Society, 17(3), p.195-314.

    Kotzé, J. (2020) ‘The Commodification of Abstinence’ in Crime, Harm and Consumerism. 1st edn. London: Routledge.

    Kotzé, J. & Lloyd, A. (2022) Making Sense of Ultra-Realism: Contemporary Criminological Theory Through the Lens of Popular Culture. 1st edn. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.

    Lange, R., Jerabek, I., and Dagnall, N. (2022) ‘Do the “Valentine’s Day Blues” Exist? A legacy report on a purported psychological phenomenon’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 36(1), p. 49-68.

    Lloyd, A. (2017) ‘Ideology at Work: Reconsidering Ideology, the Labour Process and Workplace Resistance’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 37 (5/6), p. 266-279.

    McGowan, T. (2016) Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. 1st edn. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Morgan, G. (2016) Saints: A History of Sainthood from Ancient Times to the Modern Day. 1st edn. Herts: Oldcastle Books Ltd.

    Pollen, A. (2014) ‘‘The Valentine has fallen upon evil days’: Mocking Victorian valentines and the ambivalent laughter of the carnivalesque’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 12(2), p.127-173.

    Raymen, T.  & Kuldova, T.O. (2020) ‘Clarifying ultra-realism: A response to Wood et al.’, Continental Thought & Theory, 3(2), p.249.

    Sahni, R. & Shankar, K. (2006) ‘Romancing Material Culture in Urban Public Spaces: The Case of Valentine’s Day in Pune’, Economic and Political Weekly, 41(7), p.649-654.

    Schmidt, L. E. (1993) ‘The Fashioning of a Modern Holiday: St. Valentine’s Day’, Winterthur Portfolio, 28(4), p.209-245.

    Shahini, S. (2024) Valentine’s Day is difficult for everyone – let it be!. Available at:Opinion | Valentine’s day is different for everyone – let it be! (Accessed: 02/02/2026). 

    Winlow, S. (2017) ‘The Uses of Catastrophism’ in Building Better Societies: Promoting Social Justice in a World Falling Apart. 1st edn. Bristol: Policy Press.

    Winlow S., and Hall, S. (2013) Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social? 1st edn. Abingdon: Sage Publications.

    Yar, M. (2001) ‘Recognition and the Politics of Human(e) Desire’, Theory, Culture & Society, 18(2-3), p.57-76.

  • New Year, New Me: Why Personal Change Keeps Failing

    By Emma Armstrong and Paul Alker

    As January arrives, a cultural ritual takes hold. The clock has officially restarted on Spotify Wrapped, and many of us quietly promise that next year’s version of ourselves will be better, cooler, with less evidence of that one song we played on repeat during a minor emotional crisis in March. Alongside this come the familiar pledges: this is the year we finally become morning people, lower our screen time, lose weight, drink more water, read more, clean more, and develop a personality that suggests we have our lives broadly under control. Of course, these promises do not emerge from nowhere, but they are rooted in reflection on the year just passed. December invites a collective stock-take, encouraging us to look back and ask whether we moved forward in the right ways. What did we achieve? Did we grow? Are we better than before? These moments of reflection rely on normative trajectories of health, stability, emotional maturity, and economic productivity. Framed by metrics and milestones, such reflection often functions as a reckoning, exposing gaps between who we are and who we think we should be – the discrepancy between the ideal ego and the ego ideal. As Coeckelbergh (2022) notes, the fixation on self-improvement can lead to serious harm. In this framing, dissatisfaction becomes inevitable.

    New Year’s resolutions emerge as a response to this affective rupture. They promise movement, repair, and transformation, offering symbolic closure on the perceived failures of the past and the opportunity to undergo a process of becoming a better version of ourselves. However, the violence of this positively oriented desire is that the ultimate form of satisfaction that it promises – of becoming an optimised version of ourselves – is for the most part, a fantasy that cannot in fact be achieved.  As Byung-Chul Han (2015) argues, this is the violence of the ‘achievement society’, that inevitably leads to burnout and disappointment and provides a kind of ‘cruel optimism’, in which we internalise this society’s goals, aspirations and sense of what it looks like to succeed, whilst the capacity to achieve such goals remains for many, out of reach (Berlant, 2011). Utilising elements of Lacanian theoretical psychoanalysis and Badiou’s notion of ‘the event’, this blog post argues that New Year’s resolutions function as simulations of change that offer the feeling of rupture without true risk or genuine renewal, absent of any real transformation at both an individual and broader social level. Ultimately, we argue that both individual and social renewal are necessary if we wish to genuinely transform our lives.

    New Year’s reflections are often framed as a healthy pause, a moment of clarity before the year ahead begins. In practice, they tend to function more like an audit. End-of-year prompts encourage people to assess themselves against a set of largely unspoken benchmarks. We are not arguing that self-improvement and making changes to one’s life are inherently bad, but rather that the changes we often wish to make are determined by the prevailing neoliberal symbolic order. As sociologists of late modernity have long noted, contemporary subjects are increasingly expected to narrate their lives as projects, continuously monitored and adjusted in pursuit of improvement (Giddens, 1991). Within this framework, survival or simply going through the motions and existing, register as inadequate outcomes. This process is shaped by assumptions about what a successful life should look like and how it should progress over time. Late-capitalist cultures privilege linear narratives of growth, in which periods of stagnation, uncertainty, or regression are treated as personal failings rather than structural realities  – they are the result of personal failings, rather than external factors outside of our control. This logic even extends to negative or painful experiences, which are increasingly reframed as opportunities for growth, lessons to be learned, or evidence of resilience, ignoring the fact that suffering is in fact an unavoidable and constitutive part of human existence (Reshe, 2023). As Illouz (2007) argues, emotional life itself has become subject to evaluative regimes, where feelings are expected to be managed and made productive.

    Reflection becomes about identifying deficits, scanning for evidence of underperformance. New year-in-review recaps translate uneven, contradictory lives into tidy summaries, reinforcing the idea that existence can and should be measured. In her book on the ‘quantified self’, Lupton (2016) identifies how our obsession with self-tracking metrics encourages comparison, not only with others but with a fantasised, better version of oneself. Given that neoliberalism promotes the individual as their own marketplace and therefore as capable of maximising their effectiveness by self-improvement (Triantafillou, 2017), the quantified self allows the individual to identify where to direct that cultivation (Catlaw and Marshall, 2018). What can be counted becomes meaningful, while experiences that resist quantification risk being forgotten or devalued. The affective outcome of this reflective regime is largely predictable. When life is framed as a project to be managed and measured, dissatisfaction becomes a near-inevitable consequence. Few lives unfold with the coherence and momentum these narratives imply. Instead, reflection tends to amplify the gap between lived experience and the idealised self that was supposed to be emerging all along. The ego ideal reminds us exactly where we are falling short. It is precisely this gap that resolutions respond to. January arrives as an answer to a carefully cultivated sense that something has gone wrong and now requires correction.

    The awareness that something has gone wrong creates fertile ground for renewal narratives, and the New Year offers a culturally sanctioned moment in which dissatisfaction can be contained and redirected. Within this temporal frame, the past year is quietly sealed off, allowing its perceived failures to be treated as finished business. Psychoanalytic theory, in particular the ideas of Lacan can help illuminate why this moment carries such affective weight. Both Lacan and Baudrillard (1993) distinguish between biological and symbolic death. While the former refers to the death of the body in the Real, symbolic death concerns the collapse of a subject’s position within the symbolic order. To suffer a symbolic death is to lose social intelligibility, recognition, or coherence in the eyes of the Other. The subject remains alive, yet their symbolic coordinates falter. Žižek (1989) describes this condition as a form of death that can precede, accompany, or even substitute for biological death, carrying profound psychic charge. Alongside this, the death drive urges the subject towards moments where meaning collapses, and existing identifications loosen (Kuldova et al., 2024). Symbolic death therefore carries a paradoxical attraction. It promises release from a version of the self that is experienced as burdensome, inadequate, or exhausted.

    The end-of-year reflection intensifies this pull, and as dissatisfaction accumulates, the desire to shed an old symbolic identity gathers force. Within Lacanian theory, this desire is structured around lack, with the imagined future self, functioning as a fantasy figure that promises coherence, fulfilment, and relief from dissatisfaction (Kotzé and Lloyd, 2022). Freud’s (1920) account of repetition compulsion offers a way of understanding why the same patterns return despite conscious intentions to change and continued dissatisfaction. The death drive circulates through this repetition, finding expression in the continual disavowal of an unwanted self, followed by its partial return, as the fantasised ‘better’ self remains perpetually out of reach, which in turn sustains desire (Kuldova et al., 2024). Each January offers another opportunity to negate what came before, while leaving the underlying symbolic coordinates intact. 

    Resolutions provide a structured way of engaging with dissatisfaction while keeping its disruptive potential within acceptable limits. As Bell (1997) suggests, rituals function by managing uncertainty and stabilising meaning during moments of transition. Resolution-making offers a culturally recognisable script through which the subject can acknowledge failure, name what no longer works, and gesture towards its abandonment. Their significance lies in the act of declaration itself. As Durkheim (1912) observed, ritual practices reaffirm collective values and moral commitments, even in secular contexts. Declaring an intention to improve restores symbolic coherence by signalling continued alignment with norms of discipline and self-regulation. The subject remains intelligible to the Other by demonstrating awareness of their own insufficiencies and a willingness to address them. What remains unresolved is whether this encounter with change ever allows for anything genuinely new to emerge, or whether it merely stabilises dissatisfaction in ways that preclude the kind of rupture that Alain Badiou would describe as an ‘event’.

    For Badiou (2011), an event is a rupture that cannot be predicted or scheduled. It emerges from within a situation but exceeds its existing coordinates of meaning, rendering established ways of understanding the world temporarily inadequate. An event interrupts existing coordinates of meaning, producing a break that demands reorientation. Crucially, events are not recognised immediately as such. Events only take on their transformative force through what Badiou terms fidelity: a sustained commitment to working through the consequences of a rupture without knowing in advance where it will lead. This process involves risk, uncertainty, and the possibility of losing one’s place within existing symbolic arrangements. Events therefore place the subject in a precarious position, and it is through this exposure that the subject is transformed. The timing of New Year’s resolutions, their predictability, and their emphasis on personal correction ensure that change remains contained within recognisable symbolic coordinates. The subject is encouraged to remain continuous with themselves, even as they disavow an unwanted version of who they were. Badiou’s event demands a willingness to remain with disruption rather than resolve it prematurely. In this sense, New Year’s resolutions stage the appearance of change while bypassing the rupture required for true transformation.

    The failure of New Year’s resolutions is often treated as a minor disappointment, an expected wobble in the pursuit of self-betterment. Individuals are encouraged to remain reflexive and open to correction regardless of the conditions shaping their dissatisfaction. Exhaustion or stagnation are rendered intelligible primarily as failures of self-management. As Han (2015) argues, contemporary power increasingly operates through self-exploitation rather than external coercion, with individuals internalising responsibility for outcomes they do not control. Similarly, Fisher (2009) argues that contemporary culture is marked by an inability to imagine alternatives beyond existing capitalist arrangements. Resolutions allow the subject to feel that something has shifted, while the conditions that produced dissatisfaction remain firmly in place. Read in this way, New Year’s resolutions stabilise dissatisfaction, keeping subjects attached to forms of life that continually exhaust them. What is foreclosed in the rush to begin again is the possibility that dissatisfaction might point beyond the self, towards the kinds of rupture or reorientation required for something genuinely different to emerge.

    What is required is an alternative to this yearly pseudo-event – an event proper, that will facilitate a truly radical shift, not merely at the level of the individual, but also at the level of the social.

    Here we can perhaps take the idea of symbolic death one step further, as the first step in the process of a truly radical transformation. What is required is a kind of psychic break from the prevailing ideological system. Here, we can draw upon Lacan’s notion of subjective destitution to highlight how such a psychic rupture might be achieved. For Lacan, subjective destitution marks the point at which the subject, at the end of analysis, is able to traverse the fantasy and step out of the realm of the imaginary, allowing for a moment of radical transformation. The subject effectively comes to occupy the position of the analyst and no longer identifies with the fantasies, signifiers, and symbolic guarantees that once structured their desire and identity. Ultimately, the subject no longer relies upon fantasy to cover their lack.

    Looking back at the aforementioned notion of symbolic death, what subjective destitution represents is a dialectical notion of self-extinction, in which the subject experiences its own symbolic death as an essential part of a creative process of rebirth (Ware, 2024). What we experience is a kind of personal apocalypse. But, such an apocalypse doesn’t simply signal an end, but also an opportunity for a new beginning. The subject can effectively break free from the fantasy that sustains the prevailing neoliberal-capitalist ideological system – the promise of overcoming one’s lack and achieving complete satisfaction (McGowan, 2016). Of course, this must be accompanied by a process of social renewal at the macro level of the socio-symbolic order. As Cadell Last (2025) notes, this is essential in order for the subject to weather the storm of subjective destitution and prevent an encounter with the Real. Once we have traversed the fantasy that sustains the existing symbolic order, it is essential that we have a new set of symbolic coordinates that allow for the structuring of reality and a psychic foundation for our social world. This should be the fundamental aim of politics, a politics that can bring into existence a more equitable and egalitarian society, that will allow for human flourishing (Whitehead, 2018).

    This must be accompanied by a radical form of acceptance  – an acceptance of lack, the nothing that binds us (Rollins, 2024) – and the fact that no social system will ever provide complete satisfaction. This is a fact that we must all contend with and cease to believe in any symbolic or fantasmatic guarantee that our wants and desires can ever be met. Yet, it is imperative that the new socio-symbolic system can serve to provide some measure of ontological security and the conditions in which each and every subject has the capacity to flourish. So perhaps as we enter this New Year, we might want to shift the focus from personal growth and renewal to something much broader, at the level of the social. As prophetic as this might sound, the level of subjective and societal transformation outlined above is essential if we wish to create a more equitable society and address the myriad harms many experience on a day-to-day basis.

    References

    Badiou, A. (2011) Being and Event. London: Continuum.

    Baudrillard, J. (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage Publications.

    Bell, C. (1997) Ritual: Perspective and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Berlant, L. (2020) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Catlaw, T. J., and Marshall, G. S. (2018) ‘Enjoy your work! The fantasy of the neoliberal workplace and its consequences for the entrepreneurial subject.’ Administrative Theory and Praxis. 40(2). Pp. 99-118.

    Coeckelbergh, M. (2022) Self-Improvement: Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Durkheim, E. (1912) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: George Allen and Unwin Limited.

    Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books.

    Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Bantam Books.

    Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. London: Polity Press.

    Han, B. C. (2015) The Burnout Society. California: Stanford University Press.

    Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. London: Polity Press.

    Kotzé, J., and Lloyd, A. (2022) Making Sense of Ultra-Realism. London: Emerald Publishing Limited.

    Kuldova, T. Ø., Østbø, J., and Raymen, T. (2024) Luxury and Corruption: Challenging the Anti-Corruption Consensus. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

    Last, C. (2025) Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis. London: Philosophy Portal Books.

    Lupton, D. (2016) The Quantified Self. London: Polity Press.

    McGowan, T. (2016) Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Reshe, J. (2023) Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead. Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Rollins, P. (2024) The Profane Temple. Manchester: Everyday Analysis.

    Triantafillou, P. (2017) Neoliberal Power and Public Management Reforms. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    Ware, B. (2024) On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End. London: Verso Books.

    Whitehead, P. (2018) Demonising the other: the criminalisation of morality. Bristol: Policy Press.

    Žižek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso Books.

  • A Multi-Level Ultra-Realist Approach to Understanding Violence Against Women and Girls: The Macro-Level

    Paul Alker, Liam Miles and Emma Armstrong

    As outlined in the first post of this series, the overarching aim of these theoretical interventions is to shed light on the key determinants of the rising levels of violence against women and girls (VAWG) in its myriad forms. It is our belief that a multi-level critical analysis of the issue is essential if we wish to fully comprehend the various causes of this violence on a symbolic and subjective level – violence that women and girls are experiencing with greater frequency and severity. In this post, as a precursor to further investigations of the meso and micro levels, we will focus on some of the main macro-level factors, which are the large-scale social systems and structures that contextualise the cultural forms involved in this violence.  

    As Lynes et al. (2021) illustrate, adopting an initial macro approach to understanding violence enables us to explore the issue of VAWG from a novel and often overlooked vantage point, affording us the opportunity to emphasise the broader social forces that create the conditions in which such violence takes place. From this position, a key debate in contemporary discussions of VAWG concerns the role of patriarchal power in late-capitalist societies. Some question whether patriarchy remains as dominant and influential as it once was or whether it has been displaced by other power structures (Lynes et al., 2021). Yet, Yardley (2020) argues that patriarchy does indeed still exist but it has undergone a mutation under neoliberalism to become what she terms ‘neoliberal patriarchy’.

    This iteration of patriarchal power operates through the celebrated neoliberal principles of hyper-individualism, instant gratification, hostile competitiveness, hedonism, narcissism, and success premised upon the failure of others. These zero-sum values are clear in the behaviour of many who perpetrate violence and harm against women and girls. Exhibiting a sense of what Hall (2012) calls special liberty, in which sovereign individuals follow the libertine drive to satisfy their own self-interest, regardless of the harm it may cause to others, for both expressive and instrumental purposes (Kotzé, 2024). This is a concept we will explore further in a forthcoming post on micro-level factors. 

    Alongside the neoliberal shift towards competitive individualism, identity-based divisions, such as race and gender, have increasingly replaced class as the fundamental structures of inequality (Žižek, 2002). In the absence of the traditional class struggle, this shift has fostered ‘culture wars’ in which men and women are positioned as adversaries, with identity politics weaponised to fuel antagonism rather than solidarity. Hall and Winlow (2014) refer to this as the construction of a ‘society of enemies’, in which both individuals and various identitarian groups are encouraged to view one another as pseudo-pacified competitors rather than allies. In the context of a society of enemies, the concept of neoliberal patriarchy enables us to appreciate the ways in which misogyny is effectively sewn into the fabric of late-stage capitalism (Yardley and Richards, 2023). Rather than being a deviation from contemporary social values, perpetrators of VAWG can be seen as extreme embodiments of the neoliberal ethos. In the forthcoming micro-level post, we argue this leads some men to believe that women are responsible for ‘stealing’ something that is rightly theirs, resulting in violence that manifests in both symbolic and subjective forms.  

    The intersection of politics, economics and violence in relation to VAWG is indeed a global phenomenon. A striking example of this is found in Mexico, where Rodriguez’s (2012) research explores the manner in which the anarchic confluence of global capitalism, alongside Mexico’s corrupt national politics, has displaced transient populations of people seeking work. Narco-warfare has enabled the emergence of The Femicide Machine: an apparatus that did not only create the conditions in which dozens of women and young girls could be murdered, but also developed the institutions that would guarantee impunity for those who perpetrated such crimes. Žižek (2016) frames this as a form of macho reaction to an emerging class of independent working women. Sayek Valencia (2019) further highlights the prevalence of this issue by presenting the staggering statistic that, at the time of writing, every four hours in Mexico a young girl or adult woman is killed.

    There are two common threads present across these authors’ assessments of the violence being perpetrated against women and girls. One, that it is extremely brutal in nature, and two, that it is inextricably linked to the social, cultural, political and economic context in which it takes place. Valencia (2018) argues elsewhere that this culture of extreme violence in Mexico would not exist were it not for the economic crisis the country suffered in the 1980s; the breakdown of the nation-state which led to an unholy alliance between politicians and the cartels, and the catastrophic shortcoming of NAFTA in the 1990s.  

    There are of course a number of contextual differences between the causes of violence against women and young girls being perpetrated in Mexico and the UK. Yet, we should not understate the role of the social and economic changes within the UK over the past four decades alongside some of the positive cultural changes that have occurred in the realm of women’s rights. What the examples of VAWG in Mexico illustrate is the importance of considering the macro context in which violence is taking place and the subsequent need for significant interventions at the macro socio-political and cultural levels.  

     Turning to the UK context, the Cost-of-Living Crisis (COLC) as a mediated and political term, can be utilised as a timely example of how risks in late-modern society permeate the fabric of everyday life and its social practices to produce and heighten the experience of ontological insecurity (Giddens, 1991). These insecurities can be traced through the rise of food poverty (Francis-Devine et al., 2024), the housing crisis, in which many, particularly young people, struggle to access affordable housing (Atkinson and Jacobs, 2020) and insecurity in the labour markets, following a flexible and increasingly precarious turn (Lloyd, 2018). It can be argued that through neoliberal politics, the social emphasis on raising aspirations through centring the individual’s life journey, or what Beck (1992) denoted as reflexive modernisation, has been exposed as a lie, as in the contemporary moment, the opportunities to attain symbols of success are few and far between. Moreover, as Sanz (2017) suggests, the socialisation practices for men and women have seldom changed and largely retained the binary dichotomy of gender.  

    According to Ellis (2015), for many men living in post-industrial Britain, the norms around displaying masculinity remain. The male body has lost much of its value in the labour force. The attributes of physical strength and toughness have become redundant, replaced by a greater emphasis on cognitive abilities and communication skills, but a vestigial visceral habitus continues to be reproduced in some locales (Hall, 1997; Hall et al., 2005). This has created a situation in which many men are faced with the terrifying abyss of their own insignificance, in the absence of opportunities to gain any positive form of recognition from others (Ellis, 2015; Gibbs et al., 2022).

    As they struggle to accept this situation, articulate their growing frustrations and channel their libidinal energies in a positive or productive direction, a cacophony of negative emotions are allowed to develop – feelings of anger, shame, envy – the end result of which is often either implosion or explosion. Alcohol and substance misuse, depression and suicide characterise the former, whilst street-level and domestic violence against partners and children become the explosive chosen outlet for this pent-up energy and ill feeling (Dorling, 2010; Berardi, 2015; Power, 2022). Similarly, DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2005) theorise how economic integration may contribute to VAWG, as it may prompt some men to reassert traditional patriarchal roles in response to perceived threats to their dominance. At this point of bringing forth the idea of visceral habitus, it is timely to return to Beck’s idea of ‘risk’, of which contemporary examples include the Covid-19 pandemic and the COLC, to make sense of how violence against women and girls is increasing. 

     It can be argued that there are two levels through which one can understand the COLC. The first, is at a surface level and arguably an objective standpoint. Indeed, the cost of living has increased. This can be observed in the ever-increasing cost of the weekly food shop, alongside rising fuel, energy and utility costs which can be attributed to geopolitical events including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which has led to a disruption of global supply chains, thus increasing the costs for imports, and the production of essential goods. These accounts are clearly pin-pointed by the British Government as constituting the causes for the rising cost of living in Britain (See Francis-Devine et al., 2024). The second layer of understanding the COLC is as a systematic process, caused by the entrenchment of neoliberal politics, austerity, and wider anti-statist ideology. It is argued by Dorling (2010) that the system of neoliberal capitalism is designed to produce and reproduce inequalities, across communities and households, which manifests in the form of a ‘society of enemies’ (Hall and Winlow, 2014) and ‘neoliberal patriarchy’ (Yardley and Richards, 2023). Thus, we contend that rising levels of violence against women and girls can, at least in part and at the broadest level, be viewed as symptomatic of the present social and economic situation. 

     Whilst the surface level reasonings for the COLC are not to be dismissed, particularly as geopolitical insecurity and wider global restructuring has led to the rise of economic insecurity and heightened competition in the labour markets, it is further argued that the very nature of the system itself needs to be examined. This is to map the complexities of the COLC, but also to recognise that the system of neoliberal capitalism has engineered social and economic life, to sustain and manufacture inequalities and harm, to allow the system to sustain and reproduce itself.   

    Rising rates of VAWG, largely at the hands of men can be linked to COLC, plays a significant role as a layer of risk in a risk society. This is not to position the COLC as the sole contributor to this rise of violence, but to recognise that violence at the interpersonal levels is sustained and reproduced through objective, symbolic and systemic modes of violence (Žižek, 2008) that exist in everyday life. This poisonous mix of a rising cost of living and austerity politics has arguably led to a rise of men who feel increasingly marginalised and powerless. The enaction of what could be termed ‘residual power’ can be seen at the domestic and interpersonal levels and is arguably fuelled by the intensification of economic alienation, exemplified by the relentless struggle against the COLC. Here, the notion of ontological insecurity can be refined and understood more precisely as ‘objectless anxiety’, and foregrounded against the backdrop of the deaptative socialisation of young men and the cultural reproduction of the socially and economically redundant visceral habitus (Hall, 2012). 

     Whilst highlighting the importance of broader social and economic factors in contextualising and contributing to the rising tide of violence against women and girls. Of course, as we briefly mentioned above, some violent men are relatively successful, therefore it is also important that this macro socioeconomic context is considered alongside the meso- and micro-levels in which we find the differentiation to be discussed in forthcoming publications. We cannot truly understand the key determinants of this violence and develop meaningful strategies to address the issue by exploring each level in isolation. It is imperative that as social scientists, we seek to develop a robust understanding of VAWG in all its complexity so that we can understand the level of intervention required to meaningfully address the problem and reverse the tide of violence we are witnessing with growing frequency against women and girls. Only when we adopt such a robust approach to understanding the issue will we have the capacity to truly address it. 

    References

    Atkinson, R., and Jacobs, K. (2020) What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Housing? London: Sage Publications.  

    Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications.  

    Berardi, F. (2015) Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso.

    DeKeseredy, W. S., and Schwartz, M. D. (2005) ‘Masculinities and interpersonal violence.’ In Kimmel, M. S., Hearn, J., and Connell, R. W. (Eds.) Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities. California: Sage Publications.  

    Dorling, D. (2010) Injustice: Why social inequality still persists. Policy Press.

    Ellis, A. (2015) Men, masculinities and violence: An ethnographic study. Routledge.

    Francis-Devine, B., Malik, X., and Roberts, N. (2024) ‘Food poverty: Households, food banks and free school meals.’ House of Commons Library Research Briefing. [online]. Available at: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9209/CBP-9209.pdf. (Accessed on: 19/03/2025).

    Gibbs, N., Salinas, M., and Turnock, L. (2022) ‘Post-industrial masculinities and gym culture: Graft, craft, and fraternity.’ The British Journal of Sociology. 73. Pp. 220-36.  

    Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. New York: Polity Press.

    Hall, S. (1997) ‘Visceral Cultures and Criminal Practices’, Theoretical Criminology, 1(4): 453-478.

    Hall, S. (2012) Theorizing Crime & Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage Publications.

    Hall, S., and Winlow, S. (2014) ‘The English riots of 2011: Misreading the signs on the road to the society of enemies.’ In Pritchard, D., and Pakes, F. (Eds). Riots, Unrest, and Protest on the Global Stage. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 

    Hall, S., Winlow, S., and Ancrum, C. (2005) ‘Radgies, ganstas, and mugs: Imaginary criminal identities in the twilight of the pseudo-pacification process.’ Social Justice. 32. Pp. 100-12.  

    Kotzé, J. (2020) ‘The commodification of abstinence.’ In Hall, S., Kuldova, T., and Horsley, M. (Eds). Crime, Harm, and Consumerism. Abingdon: Routledge.  

    Kotzé, J. (2024) ‘On special liberty and the motivation to harm.’ The British Journal of Criminology. 65(2). Pp. 314-27.

    Lynes, A., Yardley, E. and Danos, L. (2021) Making sense of homicide: A student textbook. Waterside Press.

    Lloyd, A. (2018) Harms of Work: An Ultra-Realist Account of the Service Economy. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

    Power, N. (2022) What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and its Discontents. Penguin. 

    Rodríguez, S.G. (2012) The Femicide Machine. MIT Press.

    Sanz, V. (2017) ‘No way out of the binary: A critical history of the scientific production of sex.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 43. Pp. 1-27.  

    Valencia, S. (2018) Gore Capitalism. MIT Press.

    Valencia, S. (2019) Necropolitics, postmortem/transmortem politics, and transfeminisms in the sexual economies of death. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 6(2), Pp.180-193.

    Yardley, E. (2020) ‘Technology-facilitated domestic abuse in political economy: A new theoretical framework.’ Violence Against Women. 27(10). Pp. 1479-98.  

    Yardley, E., and Richards, L. (2023) ‘The elephant in the room: Toward an integrated, feminist analysis of mass murder.’ Violence Against Women. 29(3-4). Pp. 752-72.  

    Žižek, S. (2002) For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso. 

     Žižek, S. (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books. 

     Žižek, S. (2016) Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours. Penguin.

  • TikTok Made Me Buy It: The Harms of Consumer Capitalism

    Poppy-Anne Turner

    On TikTok, a platform once associated with memes and dance trends, shopping has become inseparable from leisure. The rise of TikTok shop, driven by AI-powered algorithms, demonstrates how capitalism has colonised our downtime. After all, we live in a world where capitalist markets reach into almost every part of our lives. In the digital age, AI, and the algorithms that power it, shape what we see, what we buy, and even how we think about ourselves.

    In many of ways, this can cause algorithms to almost act as an omnipresence within neoliberal societies. AI and algorithmic curation are popular topics in discourse, yet their actual operation often remains unclear. Put simply, AI in our everyday lives works through algorithms – coded systems embedded in search engines, apps, and online platforms. Companies harness this technology to rank, analyse, and interpret user data, ultimately with the goal of increasing sales and maximising profit. Because of this role, algorithms are often described as ‘sociotechnological systems’ that are technological in design, but social in impact. They influence what we see, what we choose, and how we think about consumption, acting as ‘non-human mediators that actively shape consumer culture’ (Airoldi & Rokka, 2022, p.412). Nowhere is this clearer than TikTok, where algorithms predict, manipulate, and monetise desire. The platform’s AI-driven recommendation system turns attention into data, and data into sales, blurring the line between content and commerce.

    From a philosophical perspective, consumer culture can be understood as epiphenomenal to capitalism, meaning it exists because capitalism shapes and sustains it (Arnould et al., 2021), but this blog will question that claim. TikTok shop exemplifies how consumer culture becomes an unquestioned norm. The phrase ‘TikTok made me buy it’ encapsulates this epiphenomenal process: consumption is not only normalised but celebrated and absorbed into social life as a shared digital ritual. Once an idea is reinforced by enough people, it becomes accepted as shared knowledge within a given social system (Rostek, 2024). Perhaps the most relatable example of this in neoliberal societies would be experiences of debt, as borrowing money is not only normal, but actively encouraged because it fuels economic growth (Horsley, 2016; Vetta and Muriel, 2024). Over time, this normalisation makes debt feel like an inevitable part of life, rather than something to be questioned. This is where harm comes in.

    Shared cultural norms like this feed into the Symbolic Order, the system of meanings and values that capitalism maintains (Hall and Winlow, 2018). To ensure their survival within this order and promote feelings of inclusion and non-suffering, people feel pressure to display certain signs of success, style, or belonging, often through what they consume (Hall and Winlow, 2025). For many, consumption offers a fleeting sense of safety or relief from the discomfort of life under neoliberal capitalism (Winlow and Hall, 2013). In this way, the cultural norms surrounding consumerism are not just harmless habits as they are often presented, they are mechanisms that keep us tethered to, and dependent on, the very systems that cause harm. Influencers on TikTok function as conduits of this Symbolic Order, modelling the signs of success and desirability that followers internalise. Their curated performances of happiness and consumption promise relief from the insecurities of neoliberal life, a digital illusion of non-suffering.

    This dynamic can be understood by mobilising the Lacan’s concepts of lack and desire. As Mieli (2025) explains, objects of desire are often imagined as what subjects feel they are missing, an attempt to fill an existential void or achieve a sense of satisfaction. This feeling of lack is something many experience daily, and it is precisely this emotional absence that consumer culture seeks to exploit. Within the login of late capitalism, consumptions offers a temporary resolution to this lack, a fantasy of wholeness that is always destined to fail. McGowan (2016) in Capitalism and Desire, argues that consumerism is structured around this paradox as it continually produces dissatisfaction so that the subject remains caught in a cycle of desire, pursuing fleeting satisfaction through consumptions. Thus, the act of ‘retail therapy’ becomes a socially sanctioned ritual through which individuals attempt to soothe the discontent generated by the very system that profits from it.  

    Capitalism has never been static. It takes many different forms, and as Fisher (2022) argues, it adapts to social change to survive. In the digital age, this adaptability is most visibly in the way capitalism has reshaped itself around new technologies. The rise of AI and its algorithms show how the system evolves to protect its power and ensure that capital accumulation continues. Algorithms now play a central role in shaping consumer culture and influencing patterns of consumption (Airoldi and Rokka, 2022), creating instrumental power for their capacity to impact social processes (Beer, 2017).

    Companies such as TikTok exploit their awareness of the power they have over patterns of consumption by designing algorithms that analyse consumer data, using the insights they gain to draw people back into cycles of consumption (Laapotti and Raapana, 2022), by ranking and sorting through data sets provided by the user to generate personalised recommendations, which are presented to the consumer as though they are tailored to their best interests (Hayes et al, 2021). Yet, these recommendations are not neutral, they are designed to maximise profit through the targeted advertisements they facilitate. The now familiar phrase, ‘TikTok made me buy it!’ captures how the algorithms in apps like TikTok are able to make choices for us, acting as an omnipresence in our everyday lives (Tang, 2021). As they become increasingly dependent upon technological devices, neoliberalism’s consumer subjects find this presence difficult to escape.  

    This issue is perhaps further exacerbated by the fact that smartphones are increasingly acting as ‘portable markets’ of sorts, wherein targeted advertising has become a constant feature of the apps present on the device. TikTok targets younger consumers, particularly those from Gen Z and the Millennials (Amin and Scorita, 2025). As a company led platform, it has generated ‘$23 billion annual revenue’ (Tafradzhiyski, 2025) and is indisputably one of the most popular leisure activities in neoliberal societies, boasting ‘24.8 million active users’ in the United Kingdom alone (The Global Statistics, 2025). There is a plethora of ways by which this platform makes money from consumers. For example, it profits from advertisements facilitated by its platform and commissions for sales which occur within its confines. Yet this is often overlooked by consumers of the app, who scroll through content, unintentionally furthering TikTok’s business model. The algorithms within the platform are designed to analyse the behaviours and patterns of user consumption, to ensure that appropriate recommendations are provided to them, either by targeted advertisements in posts or by providing video recommendations tailored to users’ likes to ensure they keep consuming content off the platform (Larsen, 2024). TikTok dissolves the boundary between consuming media and consuming products. The same gesture – a swipe – serves both leisure and labour, pleasure and purchase. The user becomes an active participant in their own commodification.

    By providing tailored content to the consumer, a plethora of harms can occur. For example, the tailored content can boost the user’s wish to consume, creating potential for binge-scrolling. Binge-scrolling is something all of us can relate to – it’s essentially scrolling through content on a given platform as a pass time, or as a mode of procrastination. It is for this reason that binge-scrolling is often considered to be a socially acceptable leisure activity despite the harms it connotes, outlined in Smith and Raymen’s (2018) research into deviant leisure. Ironically, there is often an awareness surrounding the harms of this leisure activity, but they are often disavowed and dismissed as being the norm. But this pattern of activity can cause a series of harms depending on the subjective experiences of the individual consuming content on the app. For example, as previously mentioned, TikTok primarily targets younger audiences, most of whom will be either in education or in early stages of their careers. Thus, binge-scrolling promoted by algorithmically tailored content can promote a plethora of harms, such as hindering their capacity to further their grades should they be in education, or their careers should they be in occupational fields, creating pressure on younger generations.

    To further this point, if you consider the fact that binge-scrolling results in prolonged exposure to TikTok’s tailored content, there is potential for psychological harm to occur, particularly when you consider the role of Electronic-Word-of-Mouth (EWOM) and the idea of Fear-of-Missing-Out (FOMO). Globally, consumer culture is highly influenced by E-WoM, as it promotes materialism and expression based on branding (Taylor et al., 2025). The idea of ‘brand evangelism’ considers how customer enthusiasm can create brand loyalty, which causes a chain reaction wherein positive views can be shared online via EWOM, allowing positive brand imagery to be created, allowing for the company’s consumer base to expand (Iyadi, 2024).

    Coinciding with the positive impacts for the companies is the presence for psychological harm to be inflicted on the consumer, as E-WOM often creates pathways for purchased items to be displayed – causing a relationship between E-WoM and the need for social status (Pangarkar et al, 2023). This can create feeling such as Fear-of-Missing-Out (FoMO), wherein anxious feelings permeate the subject when a purchasing event occurs which holds items which may be able to boost their social status (Durusm et al, 2023). This fear is often used as a marketing strategy by companies to increase brand desirability amongst targeted consumers (Hewer, 2024), causing FOMO to become important for the development and expansion of consumer markets across various platforms, including TikTok. This demonstrates the ultimate psychological harm associated with striving for social status by participating in consumer culture, which is created when the identification of a subject becomes inherently construed in their patterns of consumption.

    Moving beyond the harms of tailored content and binge-scrolling, many academics argue that the targeted advertisements used by companies are highly manipulative (see Mager, 2012). Fenwick (2022) has highlighted that this has caused ethical concerns to be raised regarding the use of algorithms by companies. These have been labelled ‘normative concerns’, which are outputs from algorithms deemed to be unfair to consumers. Increasingly, neoliberal subjects identify themselves with the products they consume (Sharlmanov and Kostovska, 2025), thus further demonstrating how targeted advertisements increase pressure on younger generations. This is emphasised in research conducted by Deustch and Theodorou (2010), who found that items used as an exhibition of the subjects consumption are used to gain status within social systems. This alludes to the needs of the ideal ego, wherein the subject will strive to reach their image of perfection to further their intention of being perceived positively by the other. In essence, items become consumed by the subject to achieve what ultra-realists refer to as ‘non-suffering’ (Hall and Winlow, 2025), a position of security driven by the need for social acceptance – the desire to be socially accepted by other social actors within a given system (Wolsnik, 2018). Thus, consumption can be used as a mechanism by the subject to provide an illusory sense of safety (Gornik-Durose, 2020), as it fills the emotional gaps in the subject’s life, enhancing the emotional experience of non-suffering.

    Paradoxically, however, this pursuit of non-suffering through consumption often generates new forms of suffering. As individuals attempt to soothe emotional discomfort through purchasing, they may find their finances increasingly strained, drawing them into what Apraido et al. (2025, p.89) describe as the ‘digital financial ecosystem’. On TikTok, this ecosystem manifests through features such as ‘buy now, pay later’ options via Klarna or PayPal, integrated seamlessly in the TikTok shop. These financial tools encourage impulsive spending, particularly among Gen Z consumers, and normalise borrowing as a routine part of everyday consumption (Hidayah et al., 2025). In doing so, TikTok demonstrates how easily digital platforms can foster patterns of overconsumption and debt, making financial harm a standard by-product of algorithmic capitalism.

    Targeted advertisements provided by TikTok are also enhanced as the platform has become an expansive base for celebrities and influencers. Although catered content based upon consumers’ influencer preferences do not necessarily equate to the provision of targeted advertisements, the influencers the consumer watches may collaborate with a brand by advertising the company’s products – a dynamic often referred to as ‘celebrity endorsement’, wherein the influencer or celebrity endorses and recommends a product to their audiences. This arguably promotes harm as younger generations are more likely to seek influencers as role models as they navigate through the digital age and more likely to purchase items recommended by those they find.

    By examining the various elements of consumer culture facilitated algorithmically on TikTok, this post has endeavoured to demonstrate how consumer culture as a feature of capitalism perpetuates harm on multiple levels, perhaps to an extent where we should consider it to be generative rather than epiphenomenal (Hall et al. 2013). TikTok represents capitalism’s latest evolutionary form: an interactive marketplace where consumption is gamified and algorithmically personalised. The platform does not merely respond to consumer demand – it creates it, folding shopping into the architecture of sociality itself. This total integration of consumption, leisure, and identity production signals a new phase of algorithmic capitalism. Yet, within this system, enjoyment becomes part of the mechanism linking desire with control. Users derive pleasure from participating in their own commodification, from the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction of purchase, or the illusion of connection. This enjoyment is not incidental, it is essential, binding subjects affectively to the very structures that exploit that. We know TikTok manipulates our desires, yet we keep scrolling, liking, and buying. This is ultra-realism’s central paradox: the subject’s submission to the very system that harms them. In this sense, TikTok is an external mirror of neoliberal subjectivity itself.

    References

    Airoldi, M. & Rokka, J. (2022) ‘Algorithmic consumer culture’, Consumption Markets & Culture, 25(5), p.411-412.

    Amin, A. & Scorita, K.B. (2025) ‘Digital Marketing Strategy For Millenials And Gen Z: A Literature Review’, International Journal of Financial Economics (IJEFE), 2(6), p.620-627.

    Apraidi, D., Adelin, D., Mutumanikam, P.R. & Lanjarsih, L. (2025) ‘Personal Finance Transformation in the Digital Era: The Impact of Financial Technology on People’s Economic Behavior’, Journal of Management Economics and Accounting, 2(3), p.89.

    Arnould, E., Soila, T., Hietanen, J., Huotari, I. & Pantzar, M. (2021) ‘Special section – The moral legitimisation of money and debt in consumer society’, Marketing Theory, 24(2), p.193-203.

    Beer, D. (2017) ‘The social power of algorithms’, Information, Communication & Society, 20(1), p.1-2.  

    Deutsch, N.L. & Theodorou, E. (2010) ‘Aspiring, Consuming, Becoming: Youth Identity in a Culture of Consumption’, Youth & Society, 42(2), p.230-231.  

    Dursum, M.T., Argan, M., Argan, M.T. & Dinc, H. (2023) ‘Sensation seeking and conspicuous consumption in event-based activities: the mediation role of fear of missing out (FoMO)’, International Journal of Event and Festival Management, 14(4), p.490.  

    Fenwick, N. (2022) ‘The Ethics of Consumerism’, Think Summer, 61(21), p.73.  

    Fisher, M. (2022) Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?. 2nd edn. Hampshire: Zero Books. 

    Gornik-Durose, M.E. (2020) ‘Materialism and Well-Being Revisited: The Impact of Personality’, Journal of Happiness Studies, 21(1), p.322.

    Hall, S., Winlow, S. and Ancrum, C. (2013[2008]) Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture. London: Routledge.

    Hall, S. & Winlow, S. (2018) ‘Big Trouble or Little Evils: The ideological struggle over the concept of harm’ in Zemiology: Reconnecting crime and social harm. 1st edn. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2025) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Advances in Ultra-Realism. (2nd ed). Abingdon: Routledge.

    Hayes, J.L., Britt, B.C., Evans, W., Rush, S.W., Towery, N.A. & Adamson, A.C. (2021) ‘Can Social Media Listening Platform’s Artificial Intelligence Be Trusted? Examining the Accuracy of Crimson Hexagon’s (Now Brandwatch Consumer Research’s) AI-Driven Analyses’, Journal of Advertising, 50(1), p.81.  

    Hewer, P. (2024) ‘Reflections on a reimagined future for consumer research’, Journal of Marketing Management, 40(7-8), p.625.

    Hidayah, N., Daulay, A.N. & Kusmilawaty, K. (2025) ‘FOMO and Digital Loans Drive Impulsive Purchases Among Gen Z’, Business and Economics, 10(2), p.9.

    Horsley, M. (2015) The Dark Side of Prosperity. London: Routledge

    Iyadi, R.C. (2024) ‘Evangelism marketing and consumer purchase behaviour of selected products: A focus on fashion industry’, International Journal of Intellectual Discourse, 7(4), p.202-203.

    Laapotti, T. & Raappana, M. (2022) ‘Algorithms and Organizing’, Human Communication Research, 48(1), p.491.  

    Larsen, R. (2024) Demystifying TikTok’s Business and Revenue Model: An In-depth Explanation. Available at: Demystifying TikTok’s Business and Revenue Model: An In-depth Explanation | Untaylored (Accessed: 21/10/2024). 

    Mager, A. (2012) ‘Algorithmic Ideology’, Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), p.769.  

    McGowan, T. (2016) Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. 1st edn. New York: Columbia University Press. 

    Mieli, P. (2025) ‘The frame in analysis: On Lacan’s perspective’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 106(2), p.431-438.

    Pangarkar, A., Patel, J. & Kumar, S.K. (2023) ‘Drivers of eWOM engagement on social media for luxury consumers: Analysis, implications, and future research directions’, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 74(1), p.1.

    Rostek, J. (2024) ‘Epiphenomenalism and Epistemic Argument’, Acta Analytica, 39(1), p.359.

    Sharlamanov, K. & Kostovska, M. (2025) ‘Liquid Self’ in The Modern Construction and Postmodern Deconstruction of Self. 1st edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Smith, O. & Raymen, T. (2018) ‘Deviant leisure: A criminological perspective’, Theoretical Criminology, 22(1), p. 63-82.

    Tafradzhiyski, N. (2025) TikTok Revenue and Usage Statistics (2025). Available at: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/ (Accessed: 21/10/2025). 

    Tang, Q. (2021) ‘Consumerism in the Digital Age’, World Automation Congress, 17(1), p.91.    

    Taylor, C.R., Rajabi, M., Rathee, S. & Zamani, S. (2025) ‘The impact of self-identification with global consumer culture on eWOM generation: a test of global consumer culture theory’, Journal of Marketing Communications, 31(2), p.204.  

    The Global Statistics (2025) UK Tiktok Statistics 2025: TikTok Active Users. Available at: https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/uk-tiktok-user-statistics/ (Accessed: 21/10/2025).

    Vetta, T. & Muriel, I.S. (2024) ‘People without history in financial capitalism: A Wolfian approach to recent debates in the anthropology of debt’, Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 100(1), p.25.  

    Winlow, S. & Hall, S. (2013) Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social?. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

    Wolsnik, M. (2018) ‘Social acceptance revisited: gaps, questionable trends, and auspicious perspective’, Energy Research & Social Science, 46(1), p.288.  

  • From Tragedy to Spectacle: Kirk, Zarutska, and the Digital Afterlife of Violence.

    Craig Kelly

    Max Hart

    When Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was fatally stabbed on a North Carolina train, CCTV images of her last moments were not only shared but reframed to become the backdrop to further cultural and political debate (Wolfe, 2025). Similarly, when Charlie Kirk was shot in Utah during his latest of a series of campus events, footage circulated online within hours (Scruton et al. 2025). Clips of the chaos became partisan talking points, recycled endlessly in memes, Tik Toks, miscaptioned videos and other viral content formats. It was not long before they were gamified, sparking public outrage when platform moderators discovered users had built parody scenarios inside Roblox – a popular gaming platform with predominantly younger audiences (Feiner, 2025).

    Both events offer another daily reminder that violence in the twenty-first century does not remain confined to the terrestrial space in which it was inflicted. Instead, it is rapidly captured, clipped, circulated in online spaces, and consumed. These spectacles tell us less about the crimes themselves than they do about the cultural and economic system in which they are digested. To make sense of this transformation, we draw from Kelly et al.’s (2023) graze culture, the Deviant Leisure perspective (Raymen and Smith, 2019), and Hall and Winlow’s (2025) analyses of pseudo-pacification, special liberty, and lack. Ultimately, they show that today’s violent spectacles are not aberrations of digital media but symptoms of a much longer historical relationship between violence, entertainment, and consumption harnessed by capitalist desire.

     
    A Long History of Consuming Violence

    Public fascination with violence is not new. From gladiatorial combat in Rome to public hangings in London, societies have long witnessed collective rituals of suffering (Kelly et al. 2023). As Hall (2012) argues, violence was monopolised, pseudo-pacified, and though such public brutality may have declined, the underlying appetites were never extinguished. What disappeared from physical reality has historically emerged in the marketplace, in mediated forms such as penny dreadfuls, crime reports, horror movies, news reports, music, and later, social media and video games. Violence was sanitised, repackaged, but always a present commodity (Kelly et al. 2023).

    This duality sits at the core of late consumer culture. As societies officially condemn violence, we simultaneously aestheticize and commodify it. In this sense, the spectacle of Kirk’s assassination or Zarutska’s egregious murder should not be viewed as a rupture within a pacified society, but rather a logical continuation. Where once stood a scaffold for the public to experience suffering and death, now prevails a device cradled in our palms feeding us brutal violent content at the swipe of a screen. Often with algorithms pushing this content whether individuals have searched for content of that nature or not. Indeed, the cultural function, the circulation of violent images as both fear and fascination, remains intact and increasingly automated.

    Grazing Death

    Kelly et al.’s (2023) concept of graze culture captures how late technological capitalism reshapes this consumption. Instead of sustained critical engagement, audiences “graze” across short, affectively intense fragments. The murder clip, such as that of Kirk and Zarutska, is ideal grazing material – an eight-second shock that is replayable, memeable, and stripped of the messy context that might otherwise awaken us to the harmful structural realities of late consumer capitalism. Importantly, Graze culture is not simply passive scrolling, it is structured by algorithms that reward shareable intensity. Hence the CCTV stills and phone footage that dominate our understandings of these events. They are not just evidence; they are commodities whose value lies in their repeatability and capacity to hold attention in a crowded digital landscape. The tragedy is extracted into consumable fragments that can circulate independent of, and often in disregard to, the victims’ lives, or of justice itself.

    Leisure, Play, and the Commodification of Trauma

    The deviant leisure perspective (see Raymen and Smith, 2019) helps us further understand, and see the outcomes of, what happens when violence is not just viewed but turned into entertainment. The Roblox murder experiences based on Kirk’s death for example illustrate how late-capitalist leisure cultures merge trauma into the circuits of play. This is not a subcultural transgression, it is a predictable outcome of a cultural and political economy in which every shocking event, especially those demonstrating extreme forms of subjective violence, becomes content to be remixed, mocked, or monetised.

    Whilst this violence may be consumed reluctantly by unknowingly netizens as they scroll through their timelines, it is also specifically sought out and enjoyed by many others. The killings are re-enacted in ludic spaces believed to be void of real formal sanction or judgement (Atkinson and Rodgers, 2016) – shared on TikTok with ironic captions or turned into memes to become vital in-group marking points. This is not only deviant because it is (for the most part) socially tolerated, market-driven, and platform enabled. It is also because it further distracts us from deeper rooted social violence that we remain oblivious to (Kelly et al. 2023). Ultimately, leisure under late capitalism thrives on commodifying harm (Raymen and Smith, 2019).

    Pseudo-Pacification, Special Liberty, and Lack

    As stated, any violent drives have been repressed and channelled whereby such appetites are fulfilled by brutality in its commodified form. Watching Zarutska’s CCTV clip or Kirk’s phone footage becomes a more socially acceptable proxy for transgressive desire. To further this understanding, we can explore the concept of special liberty (Hall and Winlow, 2025). This describes the way neoliberal subjects experience their freedom to transgress. Sharing clips and stills of Kirk’s and Zarutska’s deaths, whether that be under the guise of dark humour through memes, as political irony, or just content for contents sake may initially feel like rebellion against taste and morality. In reality it is what platforms encourage – a shallow freedom that masks deeper conformity to capitalist logic. This brings us to the concept of Lack, the psychoanalytic engine that drives this consumption. Subjects in late capitalism experience a void, an endless yearning that can never be satisfied (Hall and Winlow, 2025). Spectacular violence offers an intense but temporary release. Each shocking clip fills this lack for a fleeting moment – only to reactivate desire for the next spectacle. Indeed, whilst we may see these deaths become the result of further political and ideological debate, it should not be surprising when such clips fade into the background to be replaced by the next. It is disposable capitalism (Hart et al. 2025 forthcoming) in an attention economy.

    When combined with graze culture, these concepts reveal a cycle. Society pacifies real violence, consumers experience lack, platforms offer pseudo-transgressive spectacles of death, and audiences graze across them in search of fleeting satisfaction. The murders are real, and so is the grief experienced by the victim’s loved ones, but their mediated afterlife is shaped less by this grief than by this structural compulsion.

    Celebrity Commentators, Instrumental Influencers, and the Culture Industry

    Whenever we see tragedy such as the Kirk and Zarutska’s murders, celebrity commentators and influencer prosumers become natural intermediaries. Indeed, figures with large online followings rapidly convert violent events into cultural, and in some cases, literal currency. In Kirk’s case, for example, partisan influencers rushed to define what the footage meant, framing it as evidence of broader conspiracies or political decline (Abels et al. 2025; Riccardi and Boak, 2025; Goldin, 2025; Ingram, 2025). In Zarutska’s case, commentators seized on her identity as a refugee, instrumentalising her death in debates on immigration and national security (Cunningham and Sandman, 2025; Hagstrom, 2025; Salsameda, 2025; Sandman, 2025). Furthermore, we see public figures such as Elon Musk and Andrew Tate offer donations for memorial paintings of Zarutska (AOL News, 2025). This act, however, risks being less about genuine commemoration and more about accruing cultural currency and stoking discontent through the culture wars. Such performances are a pseudo-commemoration. Less an act of mourning than a superficial display of empathy that reinforces their visibility in the attention economy rather than addressing the structural conditions that produced the violence. Similarly, celebrities take to social media to offer their condolences, support, and call for solidarity. Whilst these may be positive intentions, in the context of late capitalism’s attention economy, even condolence becomes a kind of spectacular currency within a grief economy. Such appearances of care are ultimately converted into visibility, reach, and soft power.

    These commentaries exemplify what Adorno and Horkheimer (1997) refer to as the culture industry. This being the process whereby the complex realities of society are reduced into commodified, superficial soundbites. In late capitalism, celebrity voices do not deepen our understanding, they amplify grazing, feeding audiences the quickest, most emotionally charged interpretations. This dynamic is not accidental. Influencers monetize outrage, platforms reward engagement, and audiences, driven by lack, seek out further transgressional release.

    Harm and the Market for Death

    Such processes are not harmless. Indeed, families are re-traumatised by the endless replay of their loved ones’ final moments. Likewise, are online populations who, without any consent or warning, are suddenly consuming violent content in the form of real tragedy and death. In this space misinformation spreads faster than facts, distorting justice, and public memory, fuelling existing political and cultural tension. Additionally, not all deaths are equally spectacularised. Some murders capture public imagination, amplified by celebrity voices, whilst others remain invisible. Indeed, just moments after Kirk’s murder a school shooting took place in Colorado though received little media or social media attention (Banner, 2025). Such instances reflect the deep inequalities of the hierarchy of late-capitalist media culture. A culture that further pushes structural violence, and the deep-rooted harm it generates, to the background whilst turning individual violent moments into digital spectacles.

    Conclusion

    The Colorado school shooting coinciding with the assassination of Kirk functioned as one of the catalysts for politically left leaning social media users to mock his death. Pulling upon previous comments he had made in which he had stated firearm related deaths were “unfortunately” worth it to keep the second amendment, memes flooded the internet inferring the proverbial chickens had come home to roost. In reaction to this, a portion of the right quickly began to store screenshots and forwarded them to the employers and educational institutions of those who had posted. As this blog was being written, a searchable index of 30,000 social media posts was being compiled and is due to be released, offering a searchable index of the doxed posters.

    Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets on London, rallying around Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka. Tommy Robinson) to take part in the Unite the Kingdom, anti-immigration protests. In the online space, the murder of Zarutska was quickly conflated with the ongoing discontent around immigration in the UK, spurned on with the appearance on Musk being broadcast to those marching and demanding the dissolution of parliament (Ahmed, 2025).

    Here we see starkly the conflation of separate social and political landscapes brought forth by globalisation and online spaces. So too, we see a clear demonstration of a dearth of realpolitik in contemporary life (Winlow et al., 2017; Telford, 2022; Winlow and Hall, 2022; Winlow, 2025). On one side, the right who have decried cancel culture over the last decade stymie free speech (admittedly in poor taste) and justify it as consequence culture. Meanwhile the left continues to fail to recognise that the grievances that have led to the death of Kirk and the upsurge in the sale of flags in the United Kingdom stem from decades of some portions of the population being ignored and dismissed as racist and xenophobic.

    The tragic murders of Zarutska and Kirk demonstrate both the deep political turmoil faced by western democracies and spurned on by unregulated online spaces. So too, they demonstrate clearly how consumer culture plays a significant role in the pseudo pacification of contemporary life. Spectacular forms of violence, such as these two tragic losses of life, served to offer not only pseudo-transgressive spectacles for those who are politically alienated to graze upon, but offered those who hold power the opportunity to further entrench and normalise ideological and moral stances into political life and move ever further from a realpolitik. Rather than being viewed as a rupture of a pacified society, these appalling acts of violence, commodified and consumed, served as the logical continuation of late capitalism.

    References

    Abels, G., Briceno, M. and Tuquero, L. (2025) Fact-checking claims about sniper’s identity in Charlie Kirk shooting. Al Jazeera, 12 September. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/12/fact-checking-claims-about-snipers-identity-in-charlie-kirk-shooting (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Ahmed, A. (2025) Elon Musk calls for dissolution of parliament at far-right rally in London. The Guardian. 13 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/13/elon-musk-calls-for-dissolution-of-parliament-at-far-right-rally-in-london (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Banner, A. (2025) 5 things to know for Sept 11: Charlie Kirk, 9/11, Colorado school shooting, Georgia ICE raid, gas truck explosion. CNN, 11 September. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/11/us/5-things-to-know-for-sept-11-charlie-kirk-9-11-colorado-school-shooting-georgia-ice-raid-gas-truck-explosion (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Adorno, T. W. and Horkheimer, M. (1997) The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In: G. S. Nörr, ed. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso, pp. 120-167.

    AOL News, 2025. Elon Musk and Andrew Tate pour millions into Iryna Zarutska murals across U.S. Available at: https://www.aol.com/news/elon-musk-andrew-tate-pour-165211008.html (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Cunningham, T. and Sandman, G. (2025) North Carolina Republicans blame Democrats for ‘woke’ policies they say contributed to Charlotte light-rail stabbing. ABC News. Available at: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/north-carolina-republicans-blame-democrats-woke-policies-contributed/story?id=125480126 ([Accessed 14 September 2025).

    Feiner, L. (2025) Roblox says it will remove posts re-enacting Charlie Kirk’s killing. The Verge, 12 September. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/policy/777628/roblox-says-it-will-remove-posts-re-enacting-charlie-kirks-killing (Accessed: 14th September 2025).

    Goldin, M. (2025) ‘Fact Focus: Assassination of Charlie Kirk prompts flood of false and misleading claims online’. NBC10 Philadelphia, 12 September. Available at: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/politics/fact-focus-assassination-of-charlie-kirk-prompts-flood-of-false-and-misleading-claims-online/4268659 (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Hagstrom, A. (2025) ‘NC Republicans lay into Dems over Charlotte murder, crime policies: ‘She died because of our complacency’’. Fox News, 11 September. Available at: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nc-republicans-lay-dems-over-charlotte-murder-crime-policies-she-died-because-our-complacency (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Hall, S. (2012). Theorising Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage.

    Hall, S. & Winlow, S. (2025). Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Advances in Ultra-Realism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Hart, M., Bavin, K. and Lynes, A. (2025 – forthcoming) Artificial Intelligence, Capitalism, and the Logic of Harm: Toward a Critical Criminology of AI. Critical Criminology.

    Ingram, D. (2025) ‘Toxic rhetoric, including calls for ‘civil war’ and retribution, surges after Charlie Kirk killing’. NBC News, 12 September. Available at: https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/charlie-kirk-shooting-online-calls-civil-war-retribution-rhetoric/4268391 (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Kelly, C., Lynes, A. & Hart, M., 2023. ‘Graze Culture’ and serial murder: Brushing up against ‘familiar monsters’ in the wake of 9/11. In: S.E. Fanning & C. O’Callaghan, eds. Serial Killing on Screen: Adaptation, True Crime and Popular Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 295–321. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17812-2 [Accessed 26 August 2025].

    Raymen, T. and Smith, O. (eds.) (2019) Deviant Leisure: Criminological Perspectives on Leisure and Harm. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan

    Riccardi, N. and Boak, J. (2025) Utah governor says the motive is not yet certain but the suspect was on the left. AP News, 12 September. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/aef9fe8dc82d218a36d078536717d95d (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Sandman, G. (2025) ‘Media uses ‘Republicans pounce’ spin in Charlotte stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska’. Fox News, 12 September. Available at: https://www.foxnews.com/media/liberal-media-fuels-republicans-pounce-narrative-charlotte-stabbing-ukrainian-refugee-sparks-outcry (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Salsameda, C. (2025) ‘N.C. Republicans blame Democrats, say light rail killing ‘100% preventable’’’. Spectrum Local News, 12 September. Available at: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/charlotte/news/2025/09/11/north-carolina-republicans-charlotte-stabbing (Accessed: 14 September 2025).

    Scruton, P., Watson, C., Boulinier, L. and Olorenshaw, A. (2025) How the Charlie Kirk shooting unfolded – in maps, videos and images. The Guardian, 11 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-shooting-maps-videos-images (Accessed: 14th September 2025).

    Telford, L. (2022) English Nationalism and its Ghost Towns. London: Routledge

    Wolfe, E. (2025) Charlotte train stabbing: Ukrainian victim. CNN, 9 September. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/09/us/charlotte-train-stabbing-ukrainian-victim (Accessed 14th September 2025).

    Winlow, S. (2025) The Politics of Nostalgia: Class, Rootlessness and Decline. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.

    Winlow, S., Hall, S., and Treadwell, J. (2017) The Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the transformation of working-class politics. Bristol: Policy Press.

    Winlow, S., and Hall, S. (2022) The Death of the Left: Why we Must Begin from the Beginning Again. Bristol: Policy Press.

  • The Disunion Jack: National Flags and the Fragile Balance of Orderly Disorder

    Emma Armstrong

    Steve Hall

    One year and one month after the summer riots of 2024, here we are again. The same tensions are bubbling to the surface. Across towns and cities in England, the St George’s flag has been painted on roundabouts, draped from lampposts, and flown proudly from windows and car bonnets. Some councils have begun to remove them, arguing that it’s a matter of health and safety – in our region, a local hospital requested their removal because they posed a risk to air ambulances (O’Leary, 2025) – while others insist they will leave them untouched (ITV, 2025). But for protestors, these removals are not bureaucratic housekeeping, they are a direct attack on free speech and national pride.

    The St George’s Cross has long carried contested meanings in England, and today’s disputes are part of that longer story. In the 1990s and 2000s, the flag was heavily associated with far-right groups, but at the same time, for many football fans major sporting events such as the World Cup normalised its display. During the World Cup in 2014, Labour MP Emily Thornberry caused a furore and was forced to resign from the Shadow Cabinet after she had posted an inferential photo of a football fan displaying a St George’s flag in his window with his white van parked underneath it. This dual history means that the St George’s Cross continues to sit uneasily between patriotism and xenophobia, between an apparently benign symbol of national identity and a banner that can evoke fear and exclusion (Brown et al., 2012).

    The current disputes, then, are not a new phenomenon but the latest manifestation of a long-running symbolic struggle over who the flag belongs to, and what kind of nation it represents. From an ultra-realist perspective, we argue that these disputes are not really about flags or even about free speech. They represent the deeper insecurities and fractures of the West’s late-capitalist, post-industrial, post-imperial societies. The national flag is a convenient symbol onto which people can project numerous feelings ranging from pride and belonging to exclusion, resentment and xenophobia.

    We use the concept of pseudo-pacification to explain how these symbolic battles are the way conflict is staged and managed in Western societies. Over a period of 700 years, the overt physical violence that was once a primary internal social structuring and managerial force has largely been repressed and institutionalised (at least for now). However, underlying resentments and insecurities have in many ways increased in intensity. During flashpoints associated with economic decline, political failure and social unrest they have to go somewhere.

    Hall (2012) argues that modern societies have not eliminated or even ‘stored’ physical violence as Elias (1939) suggested, but have essentially re-routed and repurposed it. Through what Hall (2007) calls the pseudo-pacification process, everyday physical violence is suppressed by the state in order to allow markets and commerce to flourish and property to be protected. But the aggressive impulses that once played out in direct confrontation have not simply disappeared and indeed were never discouraged. Instead, they were encouraged, sublimated and bound by evolving norms and laws to fuel the sociosymbolic competition essential to consumer culture’s crucial role in boosting aggregate demand (Hall and Winlow, 2025).

    In other words, the arena of physical conflict has been relocated from the battlefield or the street to the cultural sphere, where people fight over meaning, recognition, and legitimacy. This is what we see in the disputes around flags. In a pseudo-pacified society, the West’s national flags have become a gesture representing deeper frustrations, a major signifier in the symbolic site where struggles over identity and belonging can be staged. To remove them is an act many experience as silencing, erasure, or disrespect. For others, flying them is an attempt to reestablish atavistic sentiments of imperial supremacy that should be consigned permanently to a history we should all be glad to leave behind.

    But why now? Ultra-realism’s historical research suggests that capitalism cannot survive in conditions of either pure pacification or pure disorder. Energetic markets rely on sublimated competition in the spheres of production and consumption and therefore simply cannot function in cultures of normalised altruism or violence. Too much violent chaos disrupts trade, property, and everyday life. Too much altruism, peace and stability, however, would sap the competitive energy and resentment that consumer capitalism relies on. What we live in, then, is a managed middle ground, what Horsley et al. (2015) call ‘orderly disorder’, where people are simultaneously stimulated and pacified.

    In situations where market systems veer rapidly towards plutocracy and fail to deliver social justice and economic opportunities or rewards for increasingly precarious workers, political protests and riots are common responses. Where brutal repression has been imposed in the past, today’s neoliberal authorities do not aim to eliminate unrest but to manage it within tolerable boundaries, a process Horsley et al. (2015) describe as essential to the maintenance of legitimacy. Subjects must be given the opportunity to feel as though their protests are resonating amongst the political class at the same time as their activism is quickly absorbed back into the system to become yet again neutralised, mythologised and, where possible, commodified as a historical memory (Kotzé, 2020). “Yes, we showed ‘em what’s what on that day!”

    So, briefly, what are the principal ways in which the subjects we see today spray-painting roundabouts stimulated and pacified? We can see populist rhetoric positioning the white working class as betrayed or left behind (Telford, 2025) in a context where the death of the left and absence of effective political representation (Winlow and Hall, 2022) creates a desolate empty space in which resentment echoes and reverberates to a crescendo. Some white working-class citizens in precarious economic situations (Lloyd 2018) perceive immigrants and minority groups as ‘the others’ able to enjoy sympathy, freedoms and cultural expression supposedly denied to them.

    This ‘theft of enjoyment’ (Žižek, 2005), once derived from a sense of cultural belonging spiced by an old imperialist ideology of false superiority, has been lowered by the liberal political elite into a dark abyss of inferiority and displacement (Winlow 2025). From this perspective, the removal of St George’s flags is not a neutral bureaucratic act, but another example of stolen enjoyment experienced in stark contrast to the ‘celebration of the other’, typical of a treacherous political elite populated by figures such as ‘two-tier Kier’ currently haunting the Palace of Westminster and our other mainstream institutions.

    To these insecure people it seems quite unequivocal that consumer capitalism’s broken promises of success and the ability and right to display all its symbols have stoked feelings of inadequacy (Ellis et al., 2018). Flags are perfect vehicles for this nostalgia as they condense the memory of a simpler, more secure identity, which, for a brief period after WWII, was celebrated as heroic, functional and deserving of all the rewards under the sun (Winlow, 2025). Those who were imaginary heroes of the British Imperium and workers in the temporary industrial economy of rising wages have experienced the reality of a great fall.

    This sense of loss after a rapid fall has jeopardised the efficiency of the pseudo-pacification process. Where subjective violence has been largely suppressed through criminalisation and anger has been assuaged by the consumer pleasures of streaming services, sport, alcohol, fast food and so on, there are times when the sense of loss, humiliation and betrayal intensifies and erupts through these always fragile layers. Here the shameless display of nationalistic symbols acts as a perverse duality, a personally risky yet structurally safe challenge to the distant political elite – a spectacular micro-resistance that allow subjects to feel as though they are resisting and being punished while at the same time showing their loyalty and commitment to the system.

    Misrecognition of immigrants as their principal enemy permanently distracts these theatrical white nationalists from effective political engagement with opposition to the neoliberal system that has pulled the rug from under their feet. When the anger subsides and the streets are cleared, nostalgia returns as the great pacifier, redirecting emotional energy backwards to a mythical past rather than a future that would be susceptible to real change should substantive politics return (Winlow and Hall, 2022). Anger is thus trapped in this imagined history, fuelling a yearning for a past that can’t be restored and succeeding only in reproducing sentiments that belong to it, an emotional spectrum that ranges from mutual love and solidarity to overt racism.

    However, when the balance of stimulation and pacification is disturbed the pseudo-pacification process breaks down (Winlow et al., 2015) and we see acts permitted by special liberty, the subject’s sense of entitlement to enact harm and violence with impunity (Kotzé, 2024). When the balance tipped in the UK in July 2024, the consequences were volatile, enabled by the rioter’s momentary belief that they had the ethical case and the social permission to act. The physical violence that marked last year’s riots was repressed and remains so for now, but the underlying energy of the unsymbolised Real trapped in the misrecognitions of the Imaginary continues to fuel battles over representation.

    The disputes around flags are not isolated eruptions of cultural grievance. They are symptoms of a social order dependent on a managed tension between stimulation and pacification. Symbolic battles such as the fight over the St George’s Cross absorb the frustrations of those who feel excluded, channelling aggression into disputes over cultural meaning and recognition that risk bouts of outright violence and revanchist racism – a risk the dominant neoliberal order is willing to take rather than confront coordinated political action. Councils remove flags, protestors re-erect them, media coverage amplifies the outrage, and the cycle continues. Neoliberalism’s underlying insecurities remain unresolved, but the conflict is contained, managed, and endlessly recycled. It is also quickly and easily commodified. Parsley (2025) reported that ‘sales of Union Flags and St George’s flags have risen by around 20 per cent and flagpole purchases have doubled in recent weeks’. What appears to be an act of cultural defiance is also a profitable consumer trend, with neoliberal capitalism once again the only winner.

    References

    Brown, L., Richards, S., and Jones, I. (2012) ‘Sojourner perceptions of the St George Cross flag during the FIFA 2010 World Cup: A symbol of carnival or menace?’ International Review for the Sociology of Sport. 49. Pp. 102-20.

    Elias, N. (1939) The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Ellis, A., Winlow, S., Briggs, D. J. S., Esquinas, A. S., Verdugo, R. C., and Suárez, J. R. P. (2018) ‘Liberalism, lack and “living the dream”: Reconsidering the attractions of alcohol-based leisure for young tourists in Magaluf, Majorca.’ Journal of Extreme Anthropology. 2(2). Pp. 1-19.

    Hall, S. (2007) ‘The emergence and breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process.’ In Watson, K. (Ed.) Assaulting the Past: Placing Violence in Historical Context. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.  

    Hall, S. (2012) Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage Publications.

    Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2025) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Advances in Ultra-Realism. (2nd ed). Abingdon: Routledge.

    Horsley, M., Kotzé, J., and Hall, S. (2015) ‘The maintenance of orderly disorder: Modernity, markets, and the pseudo-pacification process.’ Journal of European History of Law. 6. Pp. 18-29.

    ITV. (2025) ‘Lincolnshire County Council won’t paint over England flag graffiti.’ [online]. Available at: https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2025-08-28/council-says-it-wont-paint-over-england-flag-graffiti. (Accessed on: 29/08/2025).

    Kotzé, J. (2020) ‘The commodification of abstinence.’ In Hall, S., Kuldova, T., and Horsley, M. (Eds.) Crime, Harm and Consumerism. Milton: Routledge. 

    Kotzé, J. (2024) ‘On special liberty and the motivation to harm’. The British Journal of Criminology. 65(2). Pp. 314-27.

    Lloyd, A. (2018) The Harms of Work: An Ultra-Realist Account of the Service Economy. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

    O’Leary, A. (2025) ‘Flag removed near James Cook Hospital over risks to air ambulance.’ The Northern Echo. [online]. Available at: https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/25447662.flag-removed-near-james-cook-hospital-risk-air-ambulance/.

    Parsley, D. (2025) ‘Flag wars fuelling Union Jack and St George’s Cross sales.’ The I Paper. [online]. Available at: https://inews.co.uk/news/flag-wars-fuelling-union-jack-st-georges-cross-3885185?srsltid=AfmBOoqfIt69989PWGY61lHe0yjymuA5BZmconDwmzHL5jlm0UG7fkca.

    Telford, L. (2025) ‘Left behind places, neoliberalism and systemic violence in the UK.’ Frontiers in Sociology. 10. Pp. 1632190. 

    Winlow, S. (2025) The Politics of Nostalgia: Class, Rootlessness and Decline. London: Emerald Publishing Limited.

    Winlow, S., and Hall, S. (2022) The Death of the Left: Why we Must Begin from the Beginning Again. London: Policy Press. 

    Žižek, S. (2005) The Metastases of Enjoyment. London: Verso.