We can probably find an explanation for anything, and we do not always get the chance to test our explanations. To do that, we would have to somehow create a presence. In this chapter, the author describes how Olaf Blanke and colleagues offered a more detailed model for how this process works for presence with the help of a robot. The author concludes that our brains might create a bodily self – but that body has to exist in space. Some spaces will make our bodies grow or shrink, contract or relax. Where we draw the line, where we distinguish ourselves from others, these things will shift with the space we are in. The presences we encounter might be familiar companions, or unsettling doppelgängers, or just neutral entities, but the conditions around us have to be right for them to appear at all.
This chapter looks at sleep as potentially one of the most powerful sources of presence. The presences that come with sleep paralysis are not like most of the presences we have met so far. These visitors are much more likely to be experienced in a negative fashion. The phenomenon of sleep paralysis acts as an important testing ground for many of the key questions around felt presence.
This chapter explores how the women’s liberation movement (WLM) in Sheffield struggled to incorporate issues of sexuality and ‘race’ into its politics. It uses oral history interviews alongside the women’s press to unpick some of the archival silences surrounding lesbianism in the movement. Building on the previous chapter it shows how Sheffield’s WLM gradually developed a more radical feminism as socialist feminists turned their attention towards the Working Women’s Charter Committee (WWCC), and that lesbian and bisexual women increasingly shaped the movement from the early 1980s. Like the national WLM, Sheffield’s WLM and WWCC struggled to include and recognise women of colour in their feminism. Instead, Black and racially minoritised women tended to fight for gender equality within Black community politics and within campaigns against racism. This chapter explores attempts by Sheffield WLM and the WWCC to include women of colour, before tracing the development of two Black women’s groups; Sheffield Black Women’s Group (BWG) and the Black Women’s Resource Centre (BWRC) and their relationship with Sheffield WLM. It will also examine South Asian women’s groups in the city, paying particular attention to the Bengali Women’s Support Group and the role of women in the Asian Youth Movement. The propensity for women of colour and lesbian women to organise separately highlights the problems broader left-wing movements had with incorporating diverse voices and representing difference.
This chapter uses peace and environmentalism, and the anti-apartheid movement and anti-racism, as paired case studies to demonstrate how activists negotiated points of solidarity within new social movements, single-issue and racial politics. Using oral histories and archival sources, it traces the intersections and boundaries of these four movements to show how Sheffield’s politics functioned, and how the local standing of each movement had a significance that went beyond the national organisation. Whilst there was a crossover of personnel, mutual support from differing organisations, and often a shared soundtrack of protest (through the Celebrated Sheffield Street Band and the Sheffield Socialist Choir), each movement, and each organisation within each movement, had its own priorities. Often activists could not see beyond their own demands, and so, at a local level, the fusion of old and new social movements promoted by the new urban left often broke down.
Socialist Republic is a detailed account of left-wing politics in 1980s Britain. The 1980s is considered a time of crisis for left-wing politics but this book demonstrates the persistence of social democracy in localities like Sheffield. Drawing on archival research and oral history interviews it examines how Sheffield City Council developed a left-wing agenda to counter Thatcherism and renew the British left. Stepping back from the Council, it then explores how the city’s wider activism of the labour movement, women’s groups, peace, environmentalism, anti-apartheid, anti-racism, Black community organising, and lesbian and gay politics interacted with the ‘Socialist Republic’, and how these movements were embraced, supported, restricted, or ignored by the local authority. By bringing a wide range of movements together and examining them in the context of a vibrant local government, this book uses the local to offer a methodological challenge to the study of new social movements while providing a road map for how left-wing politics can be studied in other cities. Offering a timely focus on regional politics, it demonstrates how histories of local political cultures can enrich our understanding of political developments on a national and international level.
In the popular imagination, presences often mean spirits or ghosts. This chapter focuses on the notion of the spirit and how it connects to presence. During his research, the author met spiritual practitioners, diviners, psychics and mediums – many, but not all, considered themselves spiritualists. For them, there was no great mystery when it came to presence. It was spirit, pure and simple. The author suggests that felt presence could be shaped by our very own models of what is possible in the mind. We draw the boundaries; we decide who gets in and gets out. We might be the architects of where we stop and the other begins.
Here, the unit of analysis moves to the capitalist state, shaping and being shaped by reproductive unrest. The strategic selectivities of the capitalist state and dominant state projects were embedded in the expropriation of water. In each case, state (in)action allowed expropriation to take place as dominant fractions of transnational capital gained institutional expression. In Australia, the state created the water market, and provided regulatory conditions preferring extractive industries over other users. In Ireland, despite Irish Water remaining, ostensibly, public, it was a commercial entity transferring costs of water provision from state budgets to households. As the political and economic overlapped, a closing-down of formal political opportunities for alternatives co-existed with growing dissent among those rendered disposable to the status quo. In prioritising the reproduction of transnational capital, the institutional legitimacy necessary for capital accumulation was destabilised in each case. By adopting the vantage point of the state, the intrinsic role of the state in the process of expropriation is revealed, and also the way that ecological and social contradictions are mediated through these selectivities. The state response to crisis revealed the internal relation of the economic and political, which subsequently undermined political legitimacy and fed a growing unrest.
Largely theoretical, this chapter develops Moore’s approach to studying social movements within an integrated theory of capitalism. First, it critiques current social movement studies research, to demonstrate the need for a historical materialist approach to studying social struggles. After establishing this, it adopts social reproduction theory (SRT) as a way forward. SRT, although often applied to domestic labour or the household, should be extended to questions of ecology via eco-socialism. By employing an epistemic shift to the background conditions of possibility for both social and societal, crisis tendencies beyond the economic are revealed alongside the constitutive role of social struggle in pushing forward contradictions that mark the present. Crucially, a labour-oriented starting point is revealing for questions of ecology. Where eco-socialist theory allows the extension of SRT into nature relations, SRT recentres political potential, not on an end pre-ordained by the system's structures, but on agency and collective struggle. Building on this, the epistemic shift that reveals these background conditions also lets us withdraw from capital’s given terms, and a form of class coherence emerges. Drawing on emergent class analysis, agency is not just given; the potential for rupture is activated through struggle. This chapter also introduces the incorporated comparison.
This chapter recounts the author’s interviews with people who hear voices that others cannot. This hearing of voices is connected to the central notion of ‘the presence feeling’. The author describes how in feeling that something is there, but not via our normal senses, we are sensing something impossible, ‘going beyond’ the ordinary sensory field. At the same time, these experiences don’t quite seem to fit the sensation of presence we have encountered already. They are beyond what someone could conceivably experience, but they do not pick out the social bit – the sense of someone being there. Presences, then, are not new. They have been there all along, with people trying to describe them but unable to pin them down or grasp why they come, why they are there.
This chapter discusses the feeling of another person’s presence, which is often experienced in extreme weather conditions. The author discusses how, in such spaces, presences may not exactly be commonplace, but they are not unexpected. Mountaineers and climbers make up one community in which stories of presence are well-known and often shared. These presences are usually known under a different name, though: ‘The Third Man’ – the archetypal presence, the providential companion, the silent traveller, aiding those adrift in times of need. It is likely that such experiences have been happening for centuries, materialising out of blizzards, hillsides and glaciers, only to dissolve once more. In cases of climbing, the occurrence of hallucinations is often attributed to the effects of altitude.