This article is an account of the dynamics of interaction across the social sciences and neurosciences. Against an arid rhetoric of ‘interdisciplinarity’, it calls for a more expansive imaginary of what experiment – as practice and ethos – might offer in this space. Arguing that opportunities for collaboration between social scientists and neuroscientists need to be taken seriously, the article situates itself against existing conceptualizations of these dynamics, grouping them under three rubrics: ‘critique’, ‘ebullience’ and ‘interaction’. Despite their differences, each (...) insists on a distinction between sociocultural and neurobiological knowledge, or does not show how a more entangled field might be realized. The article links this absence to the ‘regime of the inter-’, an ethic of interdisciplinarity that guides interaction between disciplines on the understanding of their pre-existing separateness. The argument of the paper is thus twofold: (1) that, contra the ‘regime of the inter-’, it is no longer practicable to maintain a hygienic separation between sociocultural webs and neurobiological architecture; (2) that the cognitive neuroscientific experiment, as a space of epistemological and ontological excess, offers an opportunity to researchers, from all disciplines, to explore and register this realization. (shrink)

I argue that creating interfaces between the humanities and cognitive sciences would be intellectually stimulating for both groups. More specifically for the humanities: they might gain challenging and rewarding avenues of inquiry, attract more funding, and advance their position in the 21st-century universities and among the general public, if they engage in interface projects with cognitive science and other disciplines that seek to improve our understanding of what it means to be human. I discuss a potential research framework of non-linear (...) dynamics for such interfaces, and argue that it alleviates some of the concerns of reductionism and determinism that scholars in the humanities might have in relation to the scientific approach. I also discuss some general examples from the study of human speech of how successful interfaces have been built and might be extended to other areas relevant to the humanities. (shrink)

One of the strikingly iconoclastic features of actor-network theory is its juxtaposition of the claim to be a realist perspective with denials that supposedly natural phenomena existed before scientists “made them up.” This paper explains and criticizes such arguments in the work of Bruno Latour. By combining referent and reference in the concept of assemblages, Latour provides a superficially viable way to reconcile these apparently incompatible claims. This paper will argue, however, that this conflation of referent and reference leads Latour’s (...) ontology into difficulties that can only be resolved by abandoning it in favor of a more conventional—critical—realism. (shrink)

In their respective commentaries to my article “Postphenomenology and the Politics of Sustainable Technology” both Robert Scharff and Michel Puech take issue with my postphenomenological inroad into the politics of technology. In a first step I try to accommodate the suggestions and objections raised by Scharff by making my account of the political more explicit. Consequently, I argue how an antagonistic relational conceptualisation of the political allows me to address head on Puech’s plea to leave politics behind and move towards (...) an ethically informed, post-political approach to sustainability. “But perhaps the question philosophy is confronted with—through the question of the political—might be whether not all reasoning, including a purely theoretical reasoning, can truly only be a political reasoning, resulting in an inevitable, indeed necessary circular structure” (Boehm 2002; author’s translation). In a footnote to my original article ‘Postphenomenology and the Politics of Sustainable Technology’, I wrote that “for the purpose of this paper, it suffices to say that I use the adjective ‘political’ to indicate all aspects of human and non-human agency that are related to ‘shaping the good life’ (Goeminne 2011a).” With hindsight, brought about by the commentaries of Scharff (2011) and Puech (2011), I now see that I could not have been more optimistic. Or should I say naïve? Indeed, although coming from different angles and resulting in very different suggestions, both commentaries precisely target my postphenomenological inroad into the ‘politics’ of technology. In challenging my grounding of the politics of technology in a postphenomenological perspective, Scharff in particular invites me to make my notion of the political more explicit. In what follows, I will therefore first elaborate my take on the political dimension of technology in dialogue with Scharff’s comments and suggestions. Armed with this deepened concept of the political, I will then address Puech’s plea to leave politics behind and move towards an ethically informed, post-political approach to sustainability. Evidently, within the limits of this piece, I can only indicate the broader direction my conceptualisation of the political takes. It suffices perhaps to say that, partly induced by the commentaries of Scharff and Puech, the question of the political has meanwhile taken a much more prominent place in my research as can be seen from a few recent publications [e.g. Goeminne (2012) and Goeminne (forthcoming)]. In saying this, I am also expressing my indebtedness to the commentators for nudging me in this political direction. (shrink)

Theories of new materialism have gained increasing traction in the social and human sciences in recent decades, as thinkers like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett have reinvigorated the philosophical interest in topics such as the agency of nonhuman matter, the relational nature of existence and the limitations of anthropocentric forms of inquiry. However, these theories have faced criticism from post-Marxist critical theorists, who argue that theories of new materialism blunt social and capitalist critique and promote obscurity by flattening (...) the world to a single ontological plane. In this article, I argue that these critiques rely on mischaracterizations of new materialist scholarship and that theories of new materialism can in fact help us re-examine – not reject, as their critics suggest – the role of critique, responsibility and human politics in the context of the Anthropocene and its unfolding ecological crises. (shrink)

The debate about computational literary studies (CLS) is stuck. Forceful arguments are repeatedly made as to why literary studies must now—or could never—involve quantification, statistics, and algorithms (not least in this journal) with little sense of either side convincing the other of their case. Surveying this debate over the past decade, I propose that what seems a complete divergence of opinion obscures a fundamental agreement: that computation is separate from literary phenomena. For the field’s critics, this distinction makes CLS an (...) oxymoron; for its proponents, both ways of knowing can contribute to literary studies, and there is critical potential in working across the divide. Yet the perception of a divide remains, and it prevents either effective critiques of reductive uses of computation (in literary studies and beyond) or productive engagements with computation’s constitutive effects (including for literary textuality and subjectivity). In charting this divide as it characterizes and limits apparently very different arguments, I connect claims about technology and subjectivity made in critiques and defenses of CLS to the separation of matter and meaning commonly referred to as Cartesian dualism. With both sides maintaining this arrangement, the debate about CLS is sealed off from technocultural inquiries in multiple fields (including literary studies) and from much of what matters in and as contemporary literary phenomena. The performative approaches to scientific and literary materiality I use to elucidate problems with the existing debate also help to characterize, explain the need for, and make legible where it already exists, a different—performative—CLS. Attuned to the coconstitution of computational methods and objects, with each other, and with literary subjectivities and textualities, this CLS builds on and extends existing critical paradigms to enable literary studies in the postprint era. (shrink)

According to some authors, Latour’s attention to politics during the last decades is the result of his proposing a different approach to politics that entails, with respect to his overall project, one of two situations. Either his epistemological proposal has suffered a “normative turn”—which necessarily breaks with the previous assumptions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT); or, if ANT’s view on technosciences remains valid, his political proposal becomes not possible as a new normative approach. In this paper, I will focus on the (...) critique voiced by John Law, as well as Graham Harman. I will argue that this is a false dilemma because there has not been a change in Latour’s conceptual basis, nor a lack of coherence within his thought that would undermine the democratic commitment of his Political Epistemology. I will justify this by exposing the fact that Latour’s overall project, as part of Science Studies, has not lately followed a “political” but an “ontological” turn, which has been underling his works since the very beginning of ANT. (shrink)

While Continental thought has no shortage of criticism and diagnosis of social, political, and ethical issues, it tends to avoid offering guidance on what to do about such issues. In Reconsidering the Life of Power, Garrison argues for a radical new alternative for the Continental tradition: it ought to stage an encounter with the Confucian tradition. This is because, he argues, both traditions have at the center of their political thought a focus on the social formation of subjects, that is, (...) the process of subjectivation. While Continental thought often takes this process to empty the subject of all but nominal forms of autonomy, the Confucian tradition sees subjectivation as the very source of real human autonomy. This paper explores one such possible encounter by synthesizing Deleuze’s account of individuation with the constructivist reading of Xunzi’s view that artifice is the source of human autonomy and virtue. Ultimately, I argue that coupling Deleuze’s defense of the possibility of the New with Xunzi’s transformational account of human nature provides an understanding of subjectivation that is optimistic about the shaping of human autonomy as well as practical guidance for how to do so. (shrink)

Modern social orders are legitimized by the ideal of freedom. Most conceptions of this ideal are theorized against the backdrop of nature understood as governed by its own laws beyond the realm of the social. However, such an understanding of nature is now being challenged by the ‘Anthropocene’ hypothesis. This article investigates the consequences of this hypothesis for freedom as an ideal legitimizing social order. We begin by discussing the conception of legitimation, after which we examine three classical notions of (...) freedom (developed by Hobbes, Kant, and Hegel), in light of the Anthropocene. Following our claim that these notions all have severe weaknesses in view of the Anthropocene, we argue that modern social orders are facing a new legitimation crisis. Such a crisis, we suggest, involves a ‘brutalization of social conflicts’, which under the conditions of the Anthropocene assumes the form of geo-social conflict. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Performative activism is a critical label that is applied to instances of shallow or self-serving support for social justice causes. The accusation rests on a distinction between what is said by supposed supporters and what they actually do. One of the challenges of understanding the rhetoricity of the phrase “performative activism” is that its definition seems to place it at odds with the most common scholarly definitions of “performative,” in which there is little or no difference between saying and (...) doing. Nonetheless, making a distinction between what is said and done is rhetorically effective in itself. By understanding the accusation of performative activism as a type of critique, we can begin to see how such critical gestures are better understood as demands rather than condemnations. (shrink)

Bruno Latour is one of the founding figures in social network theory and a broadly influential systems thinker. Although his work has always been relational, little scholarship has engaged the relational morality, ontology, and epistemology of feminist care ethics with Latour’s actor–network theory. This article is intended as a translation and a prompt to spur further interactions. Latour’s recent publications, in particular, have focused on the new climate regime of the Anthropocene. Care theorists are just beginning to address posthuman approaches (...) to care. The argument here is that Latourian analysis is helpful for such explorations, given that caring for the earth and its inhabitants is the dire moral challenge of our time. The aim here is not to characterize Latour as a care theorist but rather as a provocative scholar who has much to say that is significant to care thinking. We begin with a brief introduction to Latour’s scholarship and lexicon, followed by a discussion of care theorist Puig de la Bellacasa’s work on Latour. We then explore recent work on care and the environment consistent with a Latourian approach. The conclusion reinforces the notion that valuing relationality across humans and non-human matter is essential to confronting the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 2, Page 255-272, Summer 2022.

Across the globe, radical conservative political forces and ideas are influencing and even transforming the landscape of international politics. Yet IR is remarkably ill-equipped to understand and engage these new challenges. Unlike political theory or domestic political analyses, conservatism has no distinctive place in the fields’ defining alternatives of realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism. This paper seeks to provide a point of entry for such engagement by bringing together what may seem the most unlikely of partners: critical theory and the (...) New Right. Important parts of today’s New Right represent self-conscious appropriations of Critical themes and thinkers—turning them to self-declared “reactionary” ends. Developing outside the confines of the academy, these forms of thought have woven insights from across Critical theory into new and mobilizing forms of conservative ideology, seeking to link that ideology to social forces that play increasingly active roles in global politics. Our intention here is not to somehow blame Critical perspectives for the ideas of the New Right, either directly or by association. Rather, we seek to show how an engagement with Critical theory helps us understand the New Right, while also demonstrating some of the direct challenges the New Right poses for critical perspectives. (shrink)

I’m grateful for the opportunity to give the 2019 AJTP Lecture and for the leeway since then allowed me in developing ideas first presented there; it is indulgent of this journal to publish the overlong result in two parts, of which this is the first.1 The philosophical tradition epitomized by William James and Charles S. Peirce figured importantly in my early philosophical formation, but I am not a scholar of their work; nevertheless, Mike Hogue—at the time the editor of AJTP (...) and once a doctoral student at the University of Chicago Divinity School at the same time as me—approached me about the AJTP Lecture after learning that I had taught a class in the University of Chicago Divinity School called “American... (shrink)

ABSTRACTHayek’s social theory is resolutely anti-conspiratorial: He consistently rejects conceiving complex orders as though they were designed or planned. His account of democratic politics, by contrast, treats it as conducive to conspiracy, organized deception, and ultimately totalitarianism. His epistemology of spontaneous order and his radical suspicion of democratic politics are connected: The decay of democracy is itself a complex consequence of popular misunderstandings of social order. However, since Hayek is unable to account for self-correction within democratic structures, his argument has (...) the unanticipated consequence of leading him to an implicitly authoritarian position. (shrink)

This essay explores the ways that the specter of deconstruction has been haunting history over the past thirty years, in particular this specter's effects on the revision of intellectual and cultural history. The essay uses the terms "specter" and "haunting" to express the fact that while deconstruction is repeatedly targeted in attacks against the dangers of postmodernism, poststructuralism, or the linguistic turn, very few historians actively use deconstruction as a historical methodology; in this regard the target has always been a (...) phantom. However, some historians have employed the methods of deconstruction, and by examining their work as well as the attacks on it the essay attempts to explain the historiographical reasons behind these attacks. The goal of the essay is ultimately to indicate some of the ways that deconstruction is useful for the historian, as evidenced in the project of historical revision. (shrink)

Crisis jargon has become endemic in modernity. Whether in radical or in affirmative versions, the idea that ‘crisis’ offers ‘opportunity’, in accordance with the meaning of crisis as ‘decision’, is widespread. This paper questions the relationship between modernity and crisis, first by highlighting the ways in which modernity itself has been cast as ‘crisis’: first as crisis of tradition, then as crisis of modernity itself. The main part of this paper then consists of a reading of modernity-as-crisis inspired by Walter (...) Benjamin, most notably by his Passagen-Werk. It consists of an attempt to consider ‘crisis’ as what Benjamin calls a ‘wish image’, an image that contains hidden utopian ideals. In invoking ‘crisis’, I argue, a conception of modernity as shock, raised to the level of the collective, becomes apparent. Crisis jargon thereby remains wedded to what Benjamin calls a mythical conception of history. The paper ends with a discussion of the political consequences that follow from this that are grounded in the relation between messianism and profane politics in Benjamin. (shrink)

I argue that naturalizing normativity—articulating norms that are appropriate given what we know about ourselves and the world—can be framed in terms of sustainability, calling for norms that underwrite practices of inquiry that make it more rather than less likely that others, especially those who are variously marginalized and subordinated, will be able to acquire knowledge in the future. The case for a sustainable epistemology, with a commitment to attending especially to those in positions of vulnerability, can be made, I (...) argue, as much on epistemic grounds as on grounds of social justice. (shrink)

This article constitutes a review of the concept of resistance in critical human rights education (CHRE) and its relevance for democratic education (DE). Our conceptual analysis draws on resistance studies, the emerging study of CHRE, and its implications for DE, which we suggest are interconnected. Although resistance is tied to the history of human rights, there is a lack of conceptual analysis, which we aim to remedy in this article. We argue that resistance is a core element of CHRE for (...) promoting democracy and teaching ethically complex topics on injustices. Our approach transcends the problematic forms of HRE which can limit the discourse, produce blind spots, and empty the critical and ethical content of education. We illustrate some of the complexities of resistance through failures to resist human rights violations in democracies, but also the potential of resistance in CHRE to challenge global injustices and promote democracy. (shrink)

The paper deals with the quandary of the neutrality and transparency of technologies. First, I show how this problem is connected with the image of the opening of 'black boxes' that is pivotal to much of science and technology studies. Second, methodological and socio-political dimensions of the 'black box' metaphor are discussed. Third, I analyze three typical solutions to the problem of the neutrality of technologies outside and inside constructivist technology studies. It is demonstrated that despite their apparent differences, these (...) solutions are similar in their logic of conceptualizing technology as a neutral intermediary. Forth, I look for an alternative to this logic in the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. Here technologies are conceived in terms of an eventful association of heterogeneous entities irreducible to its conditions of possibility. The construction of technologies is understood as mediation, or as a 'making-do' process where creators are surprised by their creations and vice versa. In Latour's actor-network, technologies are interpreted as opaque and non-neutral entities. Finally, I turn to some object-lessons from smart technologies powered by neural networks to demonstrate that these are empirical vindications of Latour's conception of technical mediation. Particular attention is paid to the opacity and (non)interpretability of machine learning algorithms. (shrink)

At a time when agri-food biotechnologies are receiving a surge of investment, innovation, and public interest in the United States, it is common to hear both supporters and critics call for open and inclusive dialogue on the topic. Social scientists have a potentially important role to play in these discursive engagements, but the legacy of the intractable genetically modified (GM) food debate calls for some reflection regarding the best ways to shape the norms of that conversation. This commentary argues that (...) agri-food scholars interested in promoting a more constructive agri-food biotechnology discussion could do so by blending key insights, as well as guarding against key shortcomings, from the fields of science communication and science and technology studies (STS). Science communication’s collaborative and translational approach to the public understanding of science has proven pragmatically valuable to scientists in academia, government, and private industry, but it has too often remained wedded to deficit model approaches and struggled to explore deeper questions of public values and corporate power. STS’s critical approach has highlighted the need for multi-stakeholder power-sharing and the integration of diverse knowledge systems into public engagement, but it has done little to grapple with the prevalence of misinformation in movements against GM foods and other agri-food biotechnologies. Ultimately, a better agri-food biotechnology conversation will require a strong foundation in scientific literacy as well as conceptual grounding in the social studies of science. The paper concludes by describing how, with attention to the structure, content, and style of public engagement in the agri-food biotechnology debates, social scientists can play a productive conversational role across a variety of academic, institutional, community-level, and mediated contexts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The welcome expansion of kairos beyond its traditional locus in public debate to a broad range of discourse forms and persuasive actions has not been matched by a reevaluation of the temporal logic of kairos, which is still seen as located in teleologic time. This article suggests that Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time could refigure kairos as a nonteleological relationship among past, present, and future. Benjamin provides a theoretical rationale for kairotic action that is distributed in time and space (...) and accounts for kairos of objects, places, technologies, and works of art. These temporal affordances, usually developed separately in contemporary theory, are deeply connected in Benjamin’s writing; his understanding of time therefore integrates currently unconnected lines of research and supports a fluid but coherent understanding of kairotic agency. (shrink)

The surge of post-truth calls for a reassessment of psychoanalytic and ideology critique-approaches in the social sciences. Both traditions are dismissed by the principal antagonists in the post-truth debate, the “positivist” defenders of science and the “post-modern” critics of science. The antagonists share a predisposition towards anti-humanism, refusal to distinguish between the latent and the manifest, and adherence to descriptive methods. In order to substantiate these claims, the article investigates commonalities between B.F. Skinner and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The (...) article concludes that the allegedly “pseudo-scientific” or “metaphysical” concepts of Subject and Truth, pivotal to both psychoanalysis and ideology critique-approaches, need to be rehabilitated in response to the challenge of post-truth. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses the current debates in philosophy of science that focus on the concept of values. In these debates, it is often assumed that all relevant non-epistemic influences on scientific research can be described as values and, consequently, that science carries social legitimacy if the correct values play their proper role in research. I argue that values are _not_ the only relevant non-epistemic influences on research: not unless our definition of values is so broad that it becomes unmanageable. (...) Other factors also affect the authority and social legitimacy of science. I employ political theorist Iris Marion Young’s concepts of social perspectives, opinions and interests to attempt a differentiation of contextual influences relevant to scientific research. While problems arising from these influences may overlap, they often differ in important ways too. As a consequence, I argue that contextual influences cannot be managed jointly but require distinct and complementary strategies. (shrink)

Climate change and fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies are massively shifting the material and social conditions of existence on Earth and contribute to a state of indeterminacy and increased political experimentation. While various models for what might become the ‘next iteration of governance’ are currently emerging, this essay turns to specific contemporary political experiments which claim to democratize power, distribute and/or share sovereignty, function as peer-to-peer or actor-to-actor, and move beyond criticism—be it to the moon or to soil. More precisely, (...) I look at extropist experiments in competitive crypto-governance and at (post)critical laboratories closer to the conceptual frame of international law, which both, in different ways, rely on a specific practice of determination characterized by binary relations and existential negation. In favor of an alternative approach, I argue for an ethics of legal thought capable of attending to indeterminacy and the relationalities it enables differently. (shrink)

This essay investigates the differences and points of contact between Walter Benjamin's concept of ‘constellation’ and the notion of ‘assemblage’ as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Both concepts address the entanglement of discourse and matter, bodies and devices, and raise questions regarding the historicity and temporality of different kinds of multiplicity. Presently, the term ‘assemblage’ figures prominently in the context of the new materialism, a theoretical movement which calls for a renewal of materialist ideas, proposing a break with (...) the historical materialism of the past. Against this backdrop, the essay has a twofold purpose: first, by focusing on the notions of constellation and assemblage, it seeks to highlight the differences and analogies between the materialisms of Benjamin, on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other. Second, by examining the new materialism's appropriation of Deleuzian ‘assemblage theory’, it will not only analyse what is ‘new’ about the new materialism, but also underline its conceptual errors and political problems. Eventually, what the essay argues is that our contemporary understanding of assemblages might indeed benefit from a more thorough engagement with the historical materialism of an author like Benjamin. (shrink)

. Taking vaccine regret and hesitancy seriously. The role of truth, conspiracy theories, gender relations and trust in the HPV immunisation programmes in Ireland. Journal for Cultural Research: Vol. 25, What should academics do about conspiracy theories? Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth., pp. 69-87.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In this essay, I first analyze the extension of hermeneutical interpretation in the Heideggerian sense to products of contemporary technology which are components of our “lifeworld”. Products of technology, such as airplanes, laptops, cellular phones, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners might be compared with what Heidegger calls the “Ready-to-hand” (das Zuhandene) with regard to utilitarian objects such as a hammer, planer, needle and door handle in Being and Time. Our life with our equipment, which represents the “Ready-to-hand” in Heidegger's sense (...) of the word, is determined by temporalization (Zeitigung) which cannot be separated and isolated from the wholeness of things in the world. In the second part of my paper, I explore the positive achievement of material hermeneutics (Don Ihde) with regard to its extension to technoscience and the discussion of how such hermeneutics can contribute to the preservation of our threatened lifeworld, but also to explore the possibilities of how technical inventions, medical innovations could improve our way of life. (shrink)

In a 2006 interview, Bruno Latour, distancing himself from the French philosopher Alain Badiou, casually remarks, “I’m the only French pragmatist, so it winds up that I have absolutely no contact with the French”. Latour’s remark is curious insofar as the work performed by the coupling reveals his own dissociation of French philosophy with pragmatism. If Latour is French, he cannot possibly be a pragmatist, but if he is a pragmatist, he cannot possibly be French, so better to refer to (...) himself by this new hybrid, “French pragmatist.”Perhaps it is not so peculiar for Latour to describe himself as a “pragmatist,” since references to classical pragmatist figures like William James and John... (shrink)

This essay narrates from a collective of social scientists giving up on the phantasy of ‘being in,’ or ‘having’ epistemic control, not – however – on the ‘dream of epistemic democracy’. This commun...

In this article, we argue that it is possible to approach teaching from a fully affirmative perspective: as an educational practice that has its own internal logic and intrinsic value. By analysing a fragment from one of the Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts presented in this article as a teaching event, we show that when starting from an empirical example of teaching it is possible to distinguish principles and gestures that testify to an ontological dimension of teaching. This is possible, (...) however, only when a particular reading of this empirical material is applied. We call this an immanent reading, as opposed to a transcendent (in this case critical) reading. It should be clear that this kind of inquiry we briefly demonstrate here is exactly a post-critical attempt to re-establish our affirmative relation with one of the most devalued, repressed, and neglected educational practice, namely teaching. (shrink)

The concept of practice is thematically central to modern conservative thought, as evident in Edmund Burke’s writings on the aesthetic and his diatribe against the French Revolution. It is also the main organizing thread in the framework in the human sciences known as practice theory, which extends back at least to Karl Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. This article historicizes ‘practice’ in conservative thought and practice theory, accounts for the family resemblance between the two, and takes apart that family resemblance to (...) reveal differences. The ingredients of practice theory (historical inheritance, embodiment, cognitive limits, loose coupling between conscious thought and action) are in many cases also distinctive traits of conservative thought. But the similarity is deceptive. Practice theory and conservative thought constitute two distinct interpretations of practice, two disparate endeavours for connecting human science with political strategy, and two different formulas for opposing theory and practice. The present study will argue that this is primarily a political opposition for conservative thought, while it is a human-scientific opposition for practice theory. Conservative thought is initially political and then human-scientific; practice theory is initially human-scientific and then political. This article advocates for practice theory against conservative thought as differently amended versions of a politics that recognizes human finitude. (shrink)

This article presents an archaeological inquiry into the early histories of Quality of Life (QoL) measures, and takes this as an occasion to rethink the concept of the ‘medical model of disability’. Focusing on three instruments that set the ground for the emergence of QoL measures, namely, the Karnofsky Performance Scale (KPS, 1948), and the classification of functional capacity as a diagnostic criterion for heart diseases (Bainton, 1928) and as a supplementary aid to therapeutic criteria in rheumatoid arthritis ( Steinbrocker, (...) Traeger, and Batterman, 1949 ) – I discuss how medicine, throughout the emergence of QoL, began to expand its gaze beyond the confines of the body to what that body does in daily life. Building upon Armstrong et al.’s notion of ‘distal symptoms’ (2007) and Wahlberg’s idea of ‘knowledge of living’ (2018), I propose the notion of disabilitization to encapsulate this expansion of the clinical gaze, through which medicine has come to articulate diseases and their treatments in new ways, and in so doing, has inadvertently created disability as a new kind of knowledge category in itself – a category that is defined not through its reduction to mere pathology, but through its dispersal into everyday life. I present this concept not as a periodization, but as a provocative discontinuity with the totalizing history assumed within the medical model of disability, and in so doing, ask what, in fact, holds ‘the medical model’ together, and whether there might be other ways of understanding medicine’s complex relationship to disability than what the concept of the medical model allows us to envisage. (shrink)

Researchers misunderstand their role in creating ethical problems when they allow dogmas to purportedly divorce scientists and scientific practices from the values that they embody. Cortina, Edwards, and Powell help us clarify and further develop our position by responding to our critique of, and alternatives to, this misleading separation. In this rebuttal, we explore how the desire to achieve the separation of facts and values is unscientific on the very terms endorsed by its advocates—this separation is refuted by empirical observation. (...) We show that positivists like Cortina and Edwards offer no rigorous theoretical or empirical justifications to substantiate their claims, let alone critique ours. Following Powell, we point to how classical pragmatism understands ‘purpose’ in scientific pursuits while also providing an alternative to the dogmas of positivism and related philosophical positions. In place of dogmatic, unscientific cries about an abstract and therefore always-unobservable ‘reality,’ we invite all organizational scholars to join us in shifting the discussion about quantitative research towards empirically grounded scientific inquiry. This makes the ethics of actual people and their practices central to quantitative research, including the thoughts, discourses, and behaviors of researchers who are always in particular places doing particular things. We propose that quantitative researchers can thus start to think about their research practices as a kind of work, rather than having the status of a kind of dogma. We conclude with some implications that this has for future research and education, including the relevance of research and research methods. (shrink)

Lisa Sideris's Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (2017) proposes that the call by some science advocates for a new moral framework based on scientific wonder is flawed. Sideris develops a typology of “wonder” with two separate affective axes: “true wonder” that is the prerogative of a sort of dwelling with the overwhelming mystery of life, and “curiosity” that presses to resolve puzzles and break through into a space of total clarity. The former, Sideris writes, is an ethical (...) resource that, by placing the human self against the backdrop of the unknowable cosmic expanse, prompts humility and genuine admiration for nature. The latter is the theater of “mere science.” This essay follows suit with Sideris's line of questioning, but also pushes back on the correlation of wonder with ethical attentiveness and proposes ways that science in its puzzle‐solving mode can be brought back into the ethical conversation. (shrink)

In Survivance des lucioles, Georges Didi-Huberman cites sections from a letter in which Pier Paolo Pasolini describes an encounter with a swarm of fireflies. The sight of the fireflies triggers reflections on various topics on the part of Pasolini. However, at the end of his life, Pasolini lamented the fact that fireflies had disappeared in modern society, serving as a metaphor for the fact that he had lost all hope in the consumerist society in which he was living. Pasolini’s reflections (...) on fireflies illustrate Georges Didi-Huberman’s theories on the current state and politics of images in contemporary society. In this article, several key features of the politics of images, according to Didi-Huberman, are clarified, in particular, the role of pathos and imagination. It is on the role of pathos and imagination that Didi-Huberman’s views will diverge from the theories of other prominent theorists of images, such as Jacques Rancière, Roland Barthes, W.J.T. Mitchell and Bruno Latour. By clarifying these diverging views, the theories of Didi-Huberman can be formulated more precisely. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhile conspiracies have always been with us, conspiracy theories are more recent arrivals. The framing of conspiracy theories as rooted in erroneous or delusional belief in conspiracies is characteristic of “positive” approaches to the topic, which focus on identifying the causes and cures of conspiracy theories. “Critical” approaches, by contrast, focus on the historical and cultural construction of the concept of conspiracy theory itself. This issue presents a range of essays that cut across these two broad approaches, and reflect on (...) the problematic relationship between conspiracy theory and democratic politics. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point the observation that neoliberalism is a concept that is ‘oft-invoked but ill-defined’. It provides a taxonomy of uses of the term neoliberalism to include: (1) an all-purpose denunciatory category; (2) ‘the way things are’; (3) an institutional framework characterizing particular forms of national capitalism, most notably the Anglo-American ones; (4) a dominant ideology of global capitalism; (5) a form of governmentality and hegemony; and (6) a variant within the broad framework of liberalism as (...) both theory and policy discourse. It is argued that this sprawling set of definitions are not mutually compatible, and that uses of the term need to be dramatically narrowed from its current association with anything and everything that a particular author may find objectionable. In particular, it is argued that the uses of the term by Michel Foucault in his 1978–9 lectures, found in The Birth of Biopolitics, are not particularly compatible with its more recent status as a variant of dominant ideology or hegemony theories. It instead proposes understanding neoliberalism in terms of historical institutionalism, with Foucault’s account of historical change complementing Max Weber’s work identifying the distinctive economic sociology of national capitalisms. (shrink)

Geoengineering is defined as the ‘deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climatic system with the aim of reducing global warming’. The technological proposals for doing this are highly speculative. Research is at an early stage, but there is a strong consensus that technologies would, if realisable, have profound and surprising ramifications. Geoengineering would seem to be an archetype of technology as social experiment, blurring lines that separate research from deployment and scientific knowledge from technological artefacts. Looking into the experimental (...) systems of geoengineering, we can see the negotiation of what is known and unknown. The paper argues that, in renegotiating such systems, we can approach a new mode of governance—collective experimentation. This has important ramifications not just for how we imagine future geoengineering technologies, but also for how we govern geoengineering experiments currently under discussion. (shrink)

A central question in philosophical and sociological accounts of technology is how the agency of technologies should be conceived, that is, how to understand their constitutive roles in the actions performed by assemblages of humans and artifacts. To address this question, I build on the suggestion that a helpful perspective can be gained by amalgamating “actor-network theory” and “postphenomenological” accounts. The idea is that only a combined account can confront both the nuances of human experiential relationships with technology on which (...) postphenomenology specializes, and also the chains of interactions between numerous technologies and humans that actor-network theory can address. To perform this amalgamation, however, several technical adjustments to these theories are required. The central change I develop here is to the postphenomenological notion of “multistability,” i.e., the claim that a technology can be used for multiple purposes through different contexts. I expand the postphenomenological framework through the development of a method called “variational cross-examination,” which involves critically contrasting the various stabilities of a multistable technology for the purpose of exploring how a particular stability has come to dominate. As a guiding example, I explore the case of the everyday public bench. The agency of this “mundane artifact,” as actor-network theorist Bruno Latour would call it, cannot be accounted for by either postphenomenology or actor-network theory alone. (shrink)

One of the most influential contemporary authors of the new materialist turn in the social sciences is Karen Barad. Barad’s work in agential realism, based on her interpretations of quantum physics, has been widely cited within a growing body of new materialist publications. However, in translating Barad’s assertions into social domains, there has been increasing critical appraisal of the physics underlying her work and its relationship with non-quantum domains. In this paper, we contribute to this discussion by exploring aspects of (...) agential realism through quantum decoherence and quantum Darwinism. We explore implications for Barad’s metaphysics and the relationship of the social with the rest of the material world. (shrink)

Drawing on a historical ethnography of how Brazil’s post-dictatorial psychiatric reforms have shaped young people’s lives, this paper builds on Eve Sedgwick’s analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion to show that narrow applications of Foucault’s biopower concept nurture forms of resistance to bio-reductionism centred primarily on epistemic deconstruction. To unsettle this hermeneutic, I put young people’s theories of power into conversation with Georges Canguilhem’s concept of the milieu and with feminist scholars’ work on prefigurative politics. I introduce the concepts of (...) threading and unthreading to consider how one subject of biopower, the child-like biobehavioural figure, was continuously being threaded within a specific milieu and in relation to another key figure: the elite angst-ridden ‘storm-and-stress’ adolescent. Young people’s subsequent unthreading and reweaving politics, flourishing in co-construction with what I call the politicizing clinic, illustrate how decolonial pedagogies can incrementally change the patterning of social life. (shrink)

There has been much concern with the abundance of misinformation in public discourse. Although misinformation has always played a role in political debate, its character has shifted from support fo...

It has been much debated whether epistemic relativism in academia, for instance in the form of social constructivism, the strong programme, deconstructionism, and postmodernism, has paved the way for the recent upsurge in science denial, in particular climate science denial. In order to provide an empirical basis for this discussion, an extensive search of the social science literature was performed. It showed that in the 1990s, climate science was a popular target among academic epistemic relativists. In particular, many STS scholars (...) used it as an allegedly clear example of claims by natural scientists that should be treated as mere social constructions, rather than as reports on the actual state of the natural world. A few connections between social constructivists and corporate science denialism were also uncovered, but the extent of such connections could not be determined. With few exceptions, the stream of criticism of climate science from academic relativists has dwindled since the 1990s. One reason for this seems to be that the contrarian position lost its attraction when it became associated with corporate and right-wing propagandists. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that only practical reasons are normative reasons for belief. This requires viewing beliefs as the predictable results of our actions. I will show how this fits with our intuitions about mental autonomy. The remainder of the paper consists in a defense against a series of objections that may be expected against this position. The paper concludes with a metaphilosophical explanation about our conflicting intuitions regarding the normativity of rationality.