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.     

Business schools,the anxiety of finance,and the order of the ‘middle tier’

Financial imagination plays a fundamental, yet ambivalent role in the establishment of hierarchies within and between business schools, and in business life at large. This study examines this process in the ‘middle tier’ of business education: that is, in the social space in which students and instructors understand themselves to occupy a ‘mid-range’ position within an order of excellence and success. Largely articulated through business school rankings, this order strongly relies on the centrality of the financial curriculum, proficiency in which is understood as both a proxy for smartness and a sign of moneymaking capacity. In the ‘middle tier’, this order manifests in the form of an anxiety: an order that, though legitimate, is thought not to be attained, or hardly attainable. The study draws from ethnographic investigation in a ‘middle tier’ business school with attention to how finance is made sense of in relation to an alternative curriculum, and in connection with the aim of ‘making it to the top’. A comparison with a ‘top tier’ business school allows furthering understanding of how the order of business schools relies on the anxiety of finance in order to reproduce an acquiescence to dominant financial imagination.     

Mortars,pigments and binding media of wall paintings in the ‘Carrera del Darro’ in Granada,Spain

The Carrera del Darro is a street within the city of Granada, Spain, which is emblematic owing to the architectural value of its buildings, to its significance for the urban structure of the city and to the implications it has for the surroundings of the Alhambra. Our study concerns the chemical analysis of the mural paintings on four façades, corresponding to numbers 23, 25, 27 and 29 of the Carrera del Darro. From the analysis of the mortar, it may be concluded that the composition is very similar, though not identical, in the four paintings studied: a limestone mortar. Ochre, white, black and red were used for the decoration of the four façades; green pigment was also observed in the second decoration of no. 29. The results of the morphological examination and EDX microanalysis of the paint samples are shown. By means of the thermogravimetric analysis we established the existence of an organically derived compound. After the existence of an oleaginous binder had been discounted by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analysis, we continued with the extraction and determination of proteins by spectrophotometry analysis, detecting low levels of proteins in the paint on the four façades analysed. The study was completed by evaluating the influence on the deterioration of the paintings by the possible surface presence of salts (such as nitrates or chlorides) and organic compounds.     

‘The current gold coin of the New Jerusalem’: perception,symbolization, and money in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

ABSTRACT

As an external visual marker of what is supposed by other characters in the novel as its wearer’s ‘internal,’ spiritual state, Hester Prynne’s Scarlet ‘A’ is, among other things, an emblem of a powerful American anxiety regarding the gulf between appearance and reality, symbol and meaning. The desperate and dangerous need for fixed signs and self-evident identities that obsesses Hawthorne’s Puritan-era characters is directly related to the gold-paper money debates that dominated the politics of Hawthorne’s own time, with their concern for issues of ‘character’ and value and what we might now call the gap between the symbolic and the real, or face value and material value.     

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.     

Street Papers,Work and Begging: ‘Experimenting’ at the Margins of Economic Legitimacy

Street papers are publications produced specifically for sale by the homeless and other vulnerable people in many countries around the world. Their social status is, however, often conspicuously unstable: ‘Get a job!’ has been reported as a common insult addressed to vendors, and street paper organisations have responded with their own rhetoric and strategies that aim at disrupting any analogy with begging. The present analysis frames these rhetorical confrontations as a struggle over economic legitimacy, highlighting some of the ways in which social actors build and sever the normatively loaded associations that position them and others in social space, and how the ‘experimental’ combination of business and social responsibilities tests social actors' abilities to adapt to this practice.     

‘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.     

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.     

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.     

Structural investigations and analyses for the conservation of the ‘Arsenale’ of Venice

Systematic interventions are being planned and progressively designed on most buildings of the Arsenale of Venice, the Venetian republic’s shipyard, a very large complex of docks and sheds of peculiar construction characteristics. These renovation interventions are required in view of new uses for the revitalizing of that area, which is currently almost completely neglected. In the paper, after a general presentation of the main properties and of the most relevant deterioration phenomena of the principal parts of the monumental area, the methodology that is being used for the structural diagnosis, for the implementation of guidelines for the future interventions and for the maintenance of the restored conditions are presented. Some preliminary results, given by experimental tests performed both in situ and in laboratory on materials and structural elements, and by FE simulations, are discussed.