Methods as forces of subjectivation: experiments in the remaking of official statistics

ABSTRACT

We develop the concept of methods as ‘forces of subjectivation’ in relation to experiments we have encountered in a study of government methods for generating official population statistics. These experiments problematise the subjects of traditional methods based on paper questionnaires and offer new digital technologies and data sources as possible solutions. We reflect on these experiments in relation to recent work on sociological and digital research methods as inventive and live. What this work identifies in relation to questions of research methods we take up to think about government methods in two ways. One concerns how government method experiments offered as solutions to problematic subjects, once put into action, change initial problem formulations and are inventive of new ones. Secondly, they are also inventive of their subjects who do not pre-exist but come into being through the agential capacities that methods configure. Both aspects of methods, we argue, are the result of the interactions and dynamics between human and technological actors, the outcomes of which cannot be settled in advance.     

The Willingness-to-Pay for the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen as a Public Good

In this paper some of the results of a Contingent Valuation (CV)-Study of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, are presented. The estimated aggregated willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the Royal Theatre through taxes shows that the Danish population wants to pay at least as much as the theatre receives in public subsidies. The visitors comprise only about 7 per cent of the total population, but the non-users' WTP is quite substantial which is the interesting point. It means that the non-users are willing to pay an option price and that the Royal Theatre has non-use value. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

基于城市形态类型学的历史文化街区保护与更新 ——以赣州南市街为例

中国城市发展已步入存量提升阶段,城市保护与更新工作愈发重要.城市形态类型学是一门分析城市物质要素形态特征、总结城市形态发展内在规律的学科,对指导城市保护与更新具有理论与现实意义.通过对城市形态类型学理论的剖析,构建可用于传统城市形态类型分析的8个研究要素:区域、城镇、三维空间、街道网络和街道、街区、地块、公共空间、建筑...     

The Package as an Actor in Organic Shops

This article examines the different and often overlooked roles that packages can perform in specialised organic shops. The paper reports on case studies of three organic shops of different types: a pioneering alternative organic shop, a small shop run by a big cooperative company and a recently started organic shop with a modern style, all located in Sweden. In addition to interviews, the paper draws on material produced through visual analysis and participant observation. Packages were found to take four main roles: the repetitive package, the unobtrusive package, the unfamiliar package and the returnable package. These different roles are approached in terms of agency and as viewing the package as playing a key part in the actor-networks of organic food.     

甲骨文中有关猎首风俗的记载

“人头骨刻辞”是商人把俘获的异族的酋长当作人牲斩首祭祀祖先之后,在其头盖骨上刻上记事的文字,作为战胜的纪念。殷墟出土的商代甲骨文里有一些关于猎首风俗的记载,弥足珍贵。这是研究古代猎首风俗最早的资料,跟古文献、考古和民族学材料可以互相验证。     

Thawing the North: Mostly Martha as a German-Italian Eatopia

Abstract

The establishment of the European Union, reunification of Germany, and Germany's extension of dual citizenship to immigrant minorities provided challenges to the country's understanding of itself as a nation. In negotiating these changes, debates on citizenship frequently centered on definitions of German culture. Using the concept of Leitkultur (guiding culture), conservatives argued that Germany should reject multiculturalism and stem immigration. This essay analyzes discourses on cultural policy in Germany through a contextual and textual analysis of the film Mostly Martha. In its alignment with aesthetic conventions of the art house food film, Mostly Martha participates in the debate on cultural citizenship and embodies changes in the German film industry that have moved German cinema toward increased commercialism. The film's main character, Martha, is transformed through an intercultural relationship and a trip to Italy. We argue that the film's citation of this well-known tradition of traveling south to redeem oneself and its treatment of ethnic “Otherness” engages in the Leitkultur debate and participates in the transition from national German to transnational cinema. Through the utopian treatment of Italian food, the film fetishizes cultural difference and reaffirms fixed constructs of nation and gender, thereby avoiding an explicitly politicized engagement with intercultural citizenship and identity.     

The Competition between High Culture and Popular Culture as Seen in the New York Times

The Sunday “Arts and Leisure” section of the New York Times for selected years is examined to gauge competition between “high” culture and “popular” culture. From 1962 through 1988 high culture consistently outranked popular culture in percentage of articles, but after 1988 popular culture gained steadily, and by 1993 accounted for 49 percent of articles as compared with only 39 percent for high culture. Most of the gain was accounted for by coverage of motion pictures. For two out of four sub-categories a significant correlation was found between editorial content and advertising, so that one cannot reject the hypothesis that advertising affects editorial coverage. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Design as Power: Paul Virilio and the Governmentality of Design Expertise

Abstract

Using sources from popular media, and ethnographic data collected from a university‐based urban design studio, I challenge Paul Virilio’s assertion that the modern human condition is dominated by a process of emotional synchronisation based on fear (the result, according to Virilio, of a collusion of technology and speed), and offer the analogous idea that contemporary consumer capitalism works toward a synchronisation of desire, operating, at least in part, through the ideologies and machinations of the idea of design. To do this, I analyse designerly approaches to problem‐solving as potential disciplining forces, or technologies of governmentality, which help to create order by manufacturing certain subjectivities like consumer, community member, or sense‐of‐place – subjectivities that are amenable to neo‐liberal notions of civil society in consumer‐capitalism. Ultimately, I argue that Virilio’s ‘art criticism of technology’, but also common critiques thereof, both depoliticise aesthetic judgement and work together toward the obfuscation of power within the symbolic economy of neo‐liberal consumer capitalism.