‘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.     

‘Just-in-Time’ Disease

Disease and profits make for interesting bedfellows in modern factory farming, especially where poultry is concerned. Profitable, cheap factory-farmed chicken is dependent on large-scale, industrial throughput, yet those very same intensive conditions pose real risks for disease outbreaks. Campylobacter in poultry is now the main reported cause of food poisoning in the UK, responsible for more than 100 deaths a year. In this paper, drawing upon fieldwork from across the poultry supply chain, we argue that the intersection of just-in-time pressures, commercial and regulatory, with particular practices of biosecurity on farms and in processing factories, provides prime conditions for the amplification and spread of Campylobacter. We go on to argue that such ecologies of poultry production are best understood as part of a relational economy of disease, and that the very control exercised over the lives of farmed birds risks reversal into ever greater insecurity.     

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.     

The Making of a ‘Good Deal’

Economic rationality and reciprocal help are values that are often posed as contradictory within exchanges. However, there are instances when these values work in tandem, such as when justifying informal purchases of work, svart arbete, in contemporary Sweden. Svart arbete are omnipresent exchanges in Swedish society, and there are many reasons for performing them. On the one hand, a good deal is part of everyday social life when people help each other. On the other hand, a good deal also reinforces views that economic rationalities are values that do not exclusively adhere to formal markets. This article focuses on the values that construct the ‘good deal’ when getting your car fixed informally. These overlapping and somewhat contradictory values in theory, but commonplace in practice, illustrate how notions of reciprocity and economic calculations interweave and are difficult to entangle one from the other. The ‘good deal’ thus concerns how illegal, yet licit purchases of services are made acceptable when posing them as cheap and simple transactions that simultaneously invoke a realm of closer relations.     

关于‘文化重演律’的思考

西方的及东方的各文明民族的近代史一再召示:民族传统的反思和人类当代意识的追寻(或曰世界新声的摄取),是建设现代文化的两大依据,是新文化成长的两个相反而又相成的必要条件。而且,在一定意义上,当代意识的追寻有赖于传统的反思;新文化的建构遵循着”文化重演律”得以运行。     

Chinese Science and the ‘Nobel Prize Complex’

China's scientists have so far failed to win a Nobel Prize. Political interference, certain aspects of cultural heritage, and a problematic value system have arguably been major contributing factors. This essay examines the ways in which these factors have operated, and discusses why there is a growing Nobel Prize mania in China today.     

The ‘Negotiated Space’ of University Researchers’ Pursuit of a Research Agenda

The paper introduces a concept of a ‘negotiated space’ to describe university researchers’ attempts to balance pragmatically, continually and dynamically over time, their own agency and autonomy in the selection of research topics and pursuit of scientific research to filter out the explicit steering and tacit signals of external research funding agencies and university strategies and policies. We develop this concept to explore the degree of autonomy researchers in fact have in this process and draw on semi-structured interview material with research group leaders in Finland and the UK, in the former in seven research fields, in the latter in two fields. First, the analysis reveals that topic selection is strongly filtered by the intra-scientific factors. In topic selection researchers have more leeway, a broader negotiated space than in research content, that is, in the ways in which they pursue their research, which are more affected by funding opportunities and other contextual matters. Second, the ways which affect researchers’ agency include individual- and more aggregate-level acts and factors: at the individual level, researchers resort to different strategies to create a negotiated space, but at the more aggregate level field-specific factors play a role. In fields with multiple funding opportunities, which we call ‘shopping mall’ fields, researchers can have a broader negotiated space than in fields where funding is more based on ‘lottery’. In the latter, the researchers’ negotiated space is narrow and contingent on the outcome of the funders’ decisions.     

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.     

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.     

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.