Animal Pedagogy: The Origin of ‘Man’ in Rousseau and Herder

Abstract

Animal metaphors and examples in texts of Rousseau and Herder appear as either ideal or abject ancestors and are thereby assimilated into the history of man. In spite of their differences, for both Rousseau and Herder, men become civilised by eating animals. And, their use of animal metaphors and illustrations belie the very distinction between man and animal that their invocation seeks to establish.     

Revisiting ‘Weinberg’s Choice’: Classic Tensions in the Concept of Scientific Merit

Alvin Weinberg’s classic and much debated two articles in Minerva, “Criteria for Scientific Choice” (1963) and “Criteria for Scientific Choice II – The Two Cultures” (1964), represent two of the first and most important attempts to create a meta-discourse about priority setting in science policy, and many of the points advanced remain relevant. The goal of this paper is to elaborate on the relevance of some of Weinberg’s original arguments to priority setting today. We have singled out four issues for attention: The tension between scientific and institutional choice, the assumptions behind the triad of scientific, technological and social merit, the elusive ‘externality from size’ argument for funding promoted by Weinberg, and finally the problems involved in the idea of basic science as an ‘overhead cost’ for applied science, and applied science as an ‘overhead’ on a sectoral mission. These four issues will be elaborated from a policy perspective and connected to present day challenges for science and technology policy.     

‘Black Is’ and ‘Black Ain’t’: Performative Revisions of Racial ‘Crisis’

Abstract

Race is rigorously policed through, and predicated on, a crisis of maintaining a claim to supposed racial ontology. The language of crisis pervades race; yet crisis is only brought into focus – shows itself – when racial ontology is called into question or threatened as an axiomatic reality. This essay argues, however, that it is crisis, in the form of the imperative regulatory call to race or the intricate operations of racialising discipline that constitutes raced subjects. The crisis is one of belonging or of successfully representing a ‘racial truth’. The objective of this analysis is to demonstrate that it is when race is viewed as performative that crisis becomes evident as the ever‐present condition of racial identity formation. From this vantage point, the concept of crisis as a point of danger can be revised to be seen as a turning point when an important change can take place: then, crisis might be envisaged as a positive means through which to imagine and realise new enactments of racial being.     

‘Excellence’ and Exclusion: The Individual Costs of Institutional Competitiveness

A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom’s ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities’ response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014) calls “neoliberalism’s war on higher education” or more precisely the deleterious consequences of non-participation in the REF. We also discuss the ways with which higher education’s competition fetish, embodied within the REF, affects the instrumentalization of academic research and the diminution of academic freedom, autonomy and criticality.     

Redefining Resistance: Seeking Fanon's Subject Between ‘the Unified’ and ‘the Dispersed’

Abstract

This essay reads two differing conceptions of subjectivity in Frantz Fanon's work as corresponding to a shift in subjective orientation in certain moments of crisis, from what I term a unified individual – the subject of psychoanalysis – to a dispersed subject, the frenzied participant in collective activity. I believe that such a potential duality within the subject is best adopted when analysing Fanon's oeuvre, as well as when examining a subject's behaviour as participant in forms of unstructured collective protest such as rioting. Whereas the unified subject of psychoanalysis best expresses the consciously self-reflective individual in society, the dispersed subject expresses a subjectivity operating in excess of individualism. This dispersed subject acts collectively, as an object moving in tandem with other objects, without individual reflection. I argue that this shift comprises the initial spark of insurrection suggested in Fanon's work, the moment in which he sees the people pitched ‘in a single direction, from which there is no turning back’; and what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the explosive moment of ‘conflagration’. The two subject positions between which the subject shifts exist as two potential sides of every subject and comprise the ‘Manichean’ world in which Fanon's subject is entrenched.     

From the Obligation of Birth to the Obligation of Care: Esposito’s Biophilosophy and Recalcati’s ‘New Symptoms’

This essay addresses the controversial status of subjectivity in Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics and articulates it using Recalcati’s psychoanalytical theory, with the aim of promoting a non-vitalistic affirmative biopolitics. In biopolitical theory in general, and in Esposito’s especially, subjectivity has a problematic status: while life precedes intersubjectivity, it is not clear whether subjectivity is regarded as a consequence or as the precondition of intersubjectivity (and thus of life). Esposito acknowledges such an aporia, the subjectum suppositum, but fails to recognise it in his own reasoning, ultimately envisioning a powerful interpretative and transformative paradigm – affirmative biopolitics – whilst leaving at its core a life-less subject. In this essay, I read Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics through Recalcati’s clinical approach to the ‘new symptoms’, with the aim of envisioning a subjectivity compatible with the ontogenetic primacy of life posited by biopolitical theory. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to suggest that an affirmative biopolitics, grounded on the promotion of neither a pre-subjective bare life, nor of a lifeless subject, but of a fully subjective life, a living subject is possible.     

Money and moneyness: thoughts on the nature and distributional power of the ‘backbone’ of capitalist political economy

This paper contends that political economy may profit from an understanding of money that is both able to account for its systemic importance as well as money’s specific role for the contemporary distribution of wealth. ‘Money-ness’ is a strategic factor in profit-making and capital accumulation. If we accord moneyness to all those instruments that make the repackaging of credit and other financial assets and liabilities and their capitalization possible, we arrive at an understanding of money that underscores the Marxian analysis of the structural importance of the money relation for capital accumulation that is up to speed with current financial innovations. As a social structure and process, moneymaking through capital permeates society. As a public-private deal between the state, rentiers, banks, and taxpayers that has existed since the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, it binds these actors together in shifting relations of dependence. Under financial capitalism today, what counts as money and how far moneyness stretches into the realms of financial innovation has been a core object of struggle in the public-private deal of money creation.     

Reading ‘the Whole of World History’: An Investigation into Benjamin and Colportage

This essay charts the evolution of colportage in Walter Benjamin's body of writing. Originally referring to a form of popular literature peddled by travelling salesmen, Benjamin morphed the term into the ‘colportage phenomenon of space’, where he endowed it with a more abstract connotation referring to a form of embodied perception that could bridge distinctions between near and far and past and present, giving one access to ‘the whole of world history’. By holding a magnifying glass to this term, this essay elucidates the relevance of colportage in its historical context and unpacks its manifestations in Benjamin's essays, with iterations that often confuse boundaries between the material and the phenomenological. This essay further clarifies how Benjamin's handling of colportage exists alongside his studies of surrealism and his explorations into experience in modernity.     

The Idea of ‘Basic Research’ in Language and Practice

Today, there is increasing concern about the health of basic research, yet considerable disagreement about its definition. This paper examines the way in which the term is used in everyday practice. Drawing upon interviews with British and American scientists and policy-makers, we identify six different definitions currently in use. Given the utility and flexibility of the concept, it is useful to ask what function it serves, and whether we should develop new terminology.     

The ‘Economy of Memory’: Publications, Citations, and the Paradox of Effective Research Governance

More recent advancements in digital technologies have significantly alleviated the dissemination of new scientific ideas as well as the storing, searching and retrieval of large amounts of published research findings. While not denying the benefits of this novel ‘economy of memory,’ this paper endeavors to shed light on the ways in which the use of digital technologies may be linked to a distortion of the system of formal publications that facilitates the effective dissemination and collaborative building of scientific knowledge. Through combining three different strands of discussion that are often left separate – those pertaining to the cognitive effects of new technological memory systems, those pertaining to citation and publishing practices, and those regarding the effects of formalizing modes of research governance – it is also shown that this distortion is not merely a consequence of technological developments alone. Rather, such a distortion is inseparable from and potentially aggravated by the spreading of increasingly dysfunctional, formalizing research governance mechanisms. It is argued that these mechanisms run the risk of fostering the proliferation of knowledge practices that are characterized by an increasing degree of superficiality as well as the strategic publication of research that is of a decreasing degree of originality. If left unaddressed, this may pose a serious threat to the efficiency and effectiveness of the formal record of scientific knowledge as a tool for the dissemination of original research. By extension, this may in the long run seriously undermine the capacity of the publicly funded research system more generally.     

Survey of decay of tezone ‘105’: methodology for acquisition of data

Within the multidisciplinary study concerning one of the covered dockyards (called tezone 105) erected in the Arsenal of Venice, carried out by the ‘Target Venezia’ CNR Project, it will be presented here a preliminary work concerning the survey of decay¹. This analysis is strictly connected with the other works carried out by the Operative Units of the ‘Target Venezia’, especially with the stratigraphical survey² and the chemical and microstructural characterisation of mortars³ and bricks⁴. First, the survey of decay has been based on the stratigraphical investigations of the tezone structure, which has allowed the classification of the different building phases over a long period (from the XVI until the first half of the XX century). Second, a computer aided methodology has been applied in order to make the research easier and to allow multiple queries either to know which kind of decay are present in every point of the surfaces and the global extension of each typology of degradation⁵.     

‘More than a feeling’: Classic Rock Fantasies and the Musical Imagination of Neoliberalism

Abstract

This essay demonstrates how Classic Rock is a master signifier for the fantasy of the neoliberal autonomy of individualism. The argument presented is that Classic Rock is conducive with the seven cornerstones of Lacanian fantasy as postulated by Slavoj ?i?ek (schema of wholeness, occlusion of antagonism, intersubjectivity, immersion in Law, gaze of the Other, inherent transgression, and the empty gesture), as coordinated by a select multitude of its subgenres that stand in as objects of desire for the Master Signifier of ‘Classic Rock’: soft rock, hard rock, glam rock, art rock, and punk rock. By analysing Classic Rock through the trope of the Master Signifier, the ideological coordinates of neoliberal fantasy could potentially weaken the transparency of free trade, realising a possibility of radical autonomy that denies the injunction to desire. This essay thus contributes to our understanding of the political significance of Classic Rock.     

The Incidence of and Returns to ‘Overeducation’: PIAAC Evidence on the G7

Minerva - PIAAC data are used to evaluate the extent of overeducation in G7 countries. Incidence of overeducation is seen to vary systematically with a number of demographic characteristics. The...     

Perverse Tactics: ‘Terrorism’ and National Identity in France

This essay focuses on the French legal concept of denaturalisation (déchéance de la nationalité), paying particular attention to the link between denaturalisation and the notion of ‘terrorism’ in French law. Critically reviewing and assessing relevant parliamentary debates and reports from the 1980s and 1990s, the essay discusses the extent to which the legal definition of terrorism is caught in and fuels an affective economy at the basis of denaturalisation practices. Accordingly, the essay argues that while ‘terrorism’ operates as the unknown and unknowable threat, the term follows a narrative of uncertainty and crisis that goes in two directions. On the one hand, it shapes a surface of power by aligning those being labelled as terrorists against the community. On the other, the ambiguous semantic content of the term allows those in power to constantly review the boundaries of their own categories.