From biblical exegesis to crises of european modernity: Reflections on girardian theory and its limitations

Over the last two decades the field of ‘Girard studies’ – the application of René Girard's theories on mimetic desire and sacrificial violence to cultural artifacts – has tended to focus increasingly on Biblical texts and theological implications of Girard's interpretation of Christianity as a ‘theory of man.’ After summarizing Girardian theory in its current form, this essay stresses the applicability of the theory to François Furet's reading of the crisis of bourgeois culture and to Pascal Bruckner's reading of the malaise of the post Cold War world and the ethnic crises associated with the break‐up of the former Yugoslavia. This essay also demonstrates how Girardian theory illuminates the recent historical and judicial crises associated with France's efforts to come to terms with the memory and legacy of the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II. The essay concludes with a brief assessment of the advantages as well as the pitfalls of employing Girardian theory to demystify the crises of modernity.     

The moral economy of face: marketized gift and depoliticized solidarity in South Korea’s fair trade

ABSTRACT

Metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade is frequently described as ‘face-to-face commerce’ and its goal is presented as pursuing ‘global trade with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade relies on the metaphors of face, this article analyzes the political implications and limits of the trope. I first examine the intimate connection between gift-exchange and face based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the gift and I present face as a locus of symbolic recognition and politics. Next, drawing on ethnographic research into Beautiful Coffee, the largest fair trade organization in South Korea, I illuminate fair trade as a hybrid practice of ‘marketized gift-exchange’ in which the various faces of producers and consumers are produced and circulated along with market transactions. In examining the meanings of those faces, I maintain that the prevalent metaphor of face in fair trade betrays the contradictory nature of market-based solidarity that is sought through the activism to redefine the whole economic structure based on moral and ethical practices.     

Space for Ambitions: The Dutch Space Program in Changing European and Transatlantic Contexts

Why would a small country like the Netherlands become active in space? The field was monopolized by large countries with large military establishments, especially in the early years of spaceflight. Nevertheless, the Netherlands established a space program in the late 1960s. In this paper I will analyze the backgrounds of Dutch space policy in international post-war politics, national industrial policy, and science. After the Second World War, European space activities were shaped by the interplay between transatlantic and European cooperation and competition, limited by American Cold War diplomacy. At the national level, the Dutch space program was shaped firstly by two powerful companies, Philips electronics and Fokker Aircraft. As I will demonstrate, these two firms sought to gain crucial management skills as well as technological ones. Meanwhile, the nation’s astronomers were able to capitalize on an advantageous confluence of political, economic and scientific ambitions to forward their own agenda. They succeeded in obtaining two of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built in the Netherlands: the Astronomical Netherlands Satellite (ANS, launched 1974) and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS, 1983). Both were joint Dutch-American missions, but the nature of the cooperation on each was very different, reflecting the changing relationship between America and Western Europe from the 1950s until the 1980s.     

The Empire Writes Back…Back: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Autogenic War

This essay attempts to disclose a uniquely volatile nexus that implicates – and perhaps, reinvigorates – a postcolonial analytics of insurgency. This nexus includes three strands of inquiry: the first is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which really is – albeit in a qualified sense – revolutionary. War is doing new things with time and space through culture, media, and data technology, and in the process is mutating not only what it means to be a part of this or that national group but is also changing what it means to be human. The second strand of inquiry focuses on the legacy of postcolonial studies, particularly the notion of ‘writing back’ which, I contend, is an apposite starting point for writing critically about the RMA. Apposite though it is, there are limits to postcolonial studies in the contemporary war context. This is so because while the divisions of individual difference are shifting, the coherence of the nation state itself is undergoing radical change. Moving outward in scope to a planetary scale, the human being per se is no longer a primary category by and for which war is happening today. Thus the third strand of inquiry is focused on the residual anthropomorphic tendencies within postcolonial studies that too narrowly limit discussions of violence and collective belonging. The concept of the human being per se remains reliant on early models of technology and media (namely, writing and literature, usually novels). Therefore, in the context of an ever-expanding global war machine, ‘writing back’ is a concept that requires fine-tuning and revision.     

Fighting for the Other's Rights First: Levinasian Perspectives on Occupy Gezi's Standing Protest

This essay re-explores the tie between ethics and politics in the thought of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas and is specifically concerned with the political consequences that might be drawn from his unique account of ethics. In response to Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani's recent reading of Levinasian politics as ethicoliberatory praxis, this essay attempts to exemplify such politics in relation to the silent standing protest that occurred throughout Occupy Gezi. As will be illustrated, this particular form of protest was symbolic of a struggle that was not tied to a classical notion of autonomous agency, but partially arose from ‘radical passivity’. It will be suggested that the protester's tacit participation in a shared endeavour to create responsive idioms for the Other can exemplify Levinasian ‘response-ability’ as a concrete praxis. Relying on Levinasian terminology, I suggest that Occupy Gezi's forms of silent protest created an ‘un-said Saying’ that disturbed the realm of politics from an ethical stance. Alongside a Levinasian reading, the protester's performed standstill will be explored in relation to what Butler and Athanasiou term ‘two senses of dispossession’ together with the concept implied by the Greek στα´σι? [stasis]. As I contend, stasis manages to escape from the principle of non-contradiction in Being through integrating Being's Other in implicating both movement and stillness, activity and passivity. Hereby, stasis potentially points to an-other peace before politics, thereby offering a prolific alternative to the classic Hobbesian account of a dichotomy between war and peace.     

Communities of Ruin: Humanitarian Violence and the Amazon's Uncontacted Tribes

This essay investigates portrayals of ‘uncontacted tribes’ of the Amazon by the humanitarian organisations and the popular texts that aim to study and save them. These portrayals rely upon a convergence of figures of racial, gender and sexual deviance recuperated from the age of high imperialism, with newer configurations of the human which emerged in the wake of the Second World War. How might we account for the fact that these objects of preservation are presented – save for a few crucial exceptions – as degraded, almost dead or simply not there? By way of addressing this question, I offer the production of the ‘uncontacted’ as one site for examining the imbrication of humanitarianism and violence.     

Air power and governmental support for scientific research: The approach to the Second World War

Conclusion The development of radar, jet propulsion, ballistic missiles and the atomic bomb during the Second World War established and made visible to an unprecedented degree governmentally supported and directed research and development. National survival was now seen to depend on the mobilisation of a country's talents and resources in science and technology for military purposes.Prior to the Second World War, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had established its own role in research. It also established the legitimacy of governmental patronage for scientific research far beyond aeronautics. It was during that period that American politicians and the organs of public opinion became convinced and persuaded the electorate to think that science was indispensable for national security and well-being. A very great deal has been accomplished since then, but the credit for a pioneering role in the conduct of research with the financial support of the federal government must be given to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.     

Mind the (tax) gap: an ethnography of a number

This article looks carefully at the making of the tax gap as a calculative practice at the Swedish Tax Agency. It points to the challenges with assessing tax gap numbers and reveals examples of its careless usage by various stakeholders in Swedish society in order to impact the discourse on tax compliance. Based on an ethnographic study of documents, it is an example of a number that performs a dual function: on the one hand mobilizing people’s morals and subsequent commitments and on the other hand measuring such commitments. On a more general level, the tax gap is an example of how a number that describes a complicated reality is calculated with many caveats attached to it, yet used with certainty in society. I thus challenge the metaphor of the ubiquitous ‘black box’. The Swedish tax gap number is a calculated device and can be unpacked as a specific number. But if we think about what a tax gap ought to contain, we have to think outside the box and beyond: what was not included in the published tax gap number and why there was no room for it.     

Character and organization

In recent years, questions of ‘character’ have become increasingly prominent in a range of policy contexts, from education to social welfare and from business to healthcare. What unites these various contemporary paens is an assumption that building ‘character’ is a crucial component of ethics and that it holds the key to establishing and maintaining virtuous conduct; moreover, that the cultivation of ‘character’ is at best under-valued and at worst actively undermined and denigrated in any number of contemporary economic and organizational practices. In this paper, we seek to interrogate key aspects of this upsurge of interest in ‘character’ as it has been articulated in particular recent and on-going debates about the reform of organizational life. We argue that this ‘turn’ suffers precisely from an abstraction and lack of contextual specificity – not simply in relation to questions of ‘character formation,’ but also in regard to matters of organization, and indeed the relationship of the one to the other – that severely curtails both its ethical reach and explanatory power.     

Organization (Theory) As A Way Of Life

To the extent that ‘classical organization theory’ is seen to possess any enduring interest it is mainly as a historic artefact. The idea that the principles, axioms, adages and devices elaborated by its proponents any longer possess traction in the present is rarely countenanced. In contrast to this customary view, the present article seeks to indicate the continuing significance of classical organization theory, for both analysing and intervening in organizational life. This necessitates a reconstruction of the conventional understanding of this received term, one in which classical organization theory is viewed less as ‘theory’ in the conventional sense, but rather as a geographically dispersed, institutionally disconnected and historically discontinuous ‘stance’, characterized, inter alia, by a pragmatist call to experience, an antithetical attitude to ‘high’ or transcendental theorizing, and, not least, an ethical focus on organizational effectiveness born of a close connection to ‘the work itself’ or ‘the situation at hand’. Deploying the term ‘classic organization theory’ in this way, to refer to a stance, attitude or comportment, and an associated persona that bears it, we are able to highlight the significant differences between this comportment and the increasingly ‘metaphysical’ attitude characterizing many contemporary approaches to organization and organizing, not simply in organization studies, but also more widely in sociology and cultural economy.     

Trans-Rational Cash: Ghost-Money,Hong Kong and Nonmodern Networks

In this essay, I examine through Bruno Latour's concept of nonmodern networks the intersections of the hyper-modernity of Hong Kong's ‘real’ money economy with that of an economy of ghost-money that, through the act of burning, serves as an offering to the dead and the divine. The essay reconfigures Latour's ‘modern constitution’ as it relates to philosophy, myth and modernity as they are organised around the values of a currency that trespass all boundaries.     

Constructing a Landscape for Postwar Science: Roger Revelle,the Scripps Institution and the University of California,San Diego

This paper explores Roger Revelle's activities in oceanography and institution-building during and after the Second World War. In particular, it explores his shift from a wartime acceptance of science serving mission-oriented objectives, to a defence ofthe distinction between basic and applied science. For Revelle, the Federal government, and especially the military, became theguarantor of basic research in oceanography. This understanding led him to privilege military sponsorship over contract research,and the physical over the biological sciences. He drew upon that understanding to construct a unique institutional geography for science in southern California.     

At the Heart of Feminist Transnational Organizing: Exploring Postcolonial Reflexivity in Organizational Practice at World Pulse

This article extends research on transnational feminist networks (TFNs), organizations that bring women together across national borders for collective action. A case study of World Pulse, a TFN with online community members from 190 countries that aims to amplify women's voices globally, reveals the nonprofit organization engages in ongoing reflexive practices to negotiate tensions related to voice. Using the analytical lens of postcolonial reflexivity, two themes of reflexive practices were identified: speaking from within (direct and formal inclusion of members’ voices) and speaking for (staff displaying ethical consciousness around members’ voices). Questions TFNs can ask to promote reflexivity are proposed.     

Paul Abraham: A Forgotten Scholar of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Paul Abraham, one of the Berlin Academys most experienced researchers, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. The fate of this Jewish scholar reveals much about the inner life of the Academy, and its treatment of Jewish staff, during the World War II. This paper describes his life, against a backdrop of war, revolution, and dictatorship, and in the context of one of the Academys most prestigious projects.     

Expansion policy and the role of agricultural research in Nazi Germany

Agricultural science played a prominent role in Nazi research policy. During the Second World War, German science commandeered research results and materials from occupied Europe. This process advanced individual careers. It also had a decided influence on research practice and problem choice, both during and after the war. This essay explores the significance of wartime developments for an understanding of Nazi policy and the history of agricultural research.     

An Educational Imperative: The Role of Ethical Codes and Normative Prohibitions in CBW-applicable Research

This paper examines the role of ethics in research with potentialapplicability to chemical and biological warfare. It focuses uponbiological warfare research, and examines the ethical dilemmas faced bythose working with dual-use potential technologies. It discusses thenormative, legal and ethical prohibitions against participation inchemical and biological warfare programmes from a Western perspective.It examines the motivations of individuals participating in CBW researchand concludes with recommendations for increasing awareness aboutethical and normative prohibitions. An appendix lists the results of asurvey of ethical codes in relevant scientific disciplines conducted viathe Internet.     

FINANCIAL ENGINEERING,NOT ECONOMIC PHOTOGRAPHY

In recent years, significant studies of finance have explored, on the one hand, the ways in which a specific financial theory might act as a ‘performative utterance’ which through its use makes itself true and, on the other hand, the ways in which discourses and practices of finance might act as continuous performatives that constitute key categories of finance and the financial subject. On first glance, the idea of self-actualising financial theory might seem closer to J. L. Austin's original conception of the performative utterance. However, in this article, I argue for the need to reclaim the Austinian heritage for the broader and more generic understanding of performative finance as well. In this sense, I suggest, a return to Austin reveals the importance of maintaining a focus not only on the potential performance of financial theory, but also those discourses and practices of finance that make up the deeper layers of performativity. I use questions about the role of financial engineering in the sub-prime crisis to illustrate that it is only through a conception of performative finance as self-actualising theories and as discourses and practices that the often obscured layers of financial engineering in society can be fully understood.     

Of `Small Men', Big Science and Bigger Business: The Second World War and Biomedical Research in the United States

The Second World War is commonly said to have ushered in theera of `big science' in the United States. However, at least inpractically-oriented biomedical research, the American governmentadopted modes of sponsorship that were commonplace between scientistsand industry before the war. Furthermore, many life scientistsleading wartime projects were already familiar with industrialcollaboration. This essay argues that the new federal regimes introduced in the late 1940s and 1950s were more important than wartime experience in shaping the character of biomedical `big science' in the United States during the second half of thetwentieth century.     

Reputational capital in ‘the PR University’: public relations and market rationalities

Drawing on empirical data, this article identifies the emergence of the ‘PR University’ as an assemblage. Using a case study of university press officers’ work, I analyse how this form of media relations PR stages competition between UK universities through the media. A key form of this competition centres on the accumulation and circulation of what I term ‘reputational capital’. I focus on one core element of reputational capital – media stories about HE research and the circulation of research metrics. I argue that the assemblage of the public relations (PR) University pulls the HE sector into dialogue with PR principles and practices in the context of recent shifts towards market rationalities. But this relationship is not a simple cause and effect model in which increasing HE ‘marketisation’ creates a boom in universities’ PR practices, or intensifying investment in PR by universities merely amplifies or legitimises existing market tendencies in the sector. I argue that the PR University as assemblage starts generating its own logics around which actors in the field must orient themselves. More broadly, the PR University operates not only to promote an individual university’s market position, but also acts upon public debates about the social role, legitimacy and financing of UK Higher Education.     

Posthuman Ethics and the Becoming Animal of Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

This essay considers Levinas' face-to-face ethical relation together with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of ‘becoming animal’ as a response to the radical dehumanisation involved in biopolitics. Framing his analysis in terms of an archaic law banning wrongdoers as wolves, Giorgio Agamben shows that biopolitics strips humans of subjectivity and exposes them to political power. Levinas' answer to radical dehumanisation is an ethical humanism of the other, but his ethical program is barred from politics. Moreover, he writes that in his own experience of dehumanisation, the only ethical being he encountered was Bobby, the camp dog. It seems biopolitics calls for an ethical politics that we might possess as bare life, outside of the autonomous, individualising conditions of the humanist subject. To this aim, I apply Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming animal as a devise to transport Levinas' ethics of alterity to the political realm.