This volume aims to develop a philosophical diagnostic of the present, focussing on contemporary technoscience. psychoanalysis submits contemporary technoscientific discourse to a symptomatic reading, analysing it with evenly-poised attention and from an oblique perspective. Psychoanalysis is not primarily interested in protons, genes or galaxies, but rather in the ways in which they are disclosed and discussed, focussing on the symptomatic terms, the metaphors and paradoxes at work in technoscientific discourse. This monograph presents a psychoanalytical assessment of technoscience. The first four (...) chapters provide a short introduction into the psychoanalysis of technoscience, its basic concepts and methods, as developed Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Gaston Bachelard and Jacques Lacan. In subsequent chapters, this approach is fleshed out with the help of case histories (palaeoanthropology, classical conditioning and virology). Psychoanalysis reveals that, rather than by disinterested curiosity, technoscience is driven by desire, resistance and the will to control. Moreover, the focus is on primal scenes, such as Dubois’ quixotic quest for the missing link and Pavlov’s discovery of the conditioned reflex. In addition, psychoanalysis opts for triangulation: understanding technoscientific research by comparing it to “different scenes”: to genres of the imagination, notably novels, so that, in this volume, the discovery of a Homo erectus skull by Dubois is compared to missing link novels by Jules Verne and Jack London (dating from the same period), Pavlov’s discovery of the conditioned reflex is compared with B.F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two and virology as a research field is considered through the lens of viral fiction. (shrink)

In this article, the author examines different theories and approaches to mass movements in the historical process and their impact on the condition of Western culture. In the short introduction, the main historical, cultural and philosophical origins of the mass movements from antiquity to present time are described. This paper examines the question why the social and cultural influence of the man of mass is difficult to predict. To answer this question, the author demonstrates the continuing transition from the psychology (...) of the crowd to the structure of mass instinct and collective interaction. The first part exposes general psychological characteristics of the mob according to the ideas of Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon describes masses as emotional, irresponsible, uncritical and conservative, although marks heroism and sacrifice as their positive manifestations. In the second part, the author reflects upon the perspective of Gabriel Tard on this problem. Tard’s term “public opinion” deals with the representatives who – while living in separation – participate in the mass communication. In the third part, attestations of the mass such as humility, conformism and obsession are investigated based on the ideas of Sigmund Freud. The next point of the article is devoted to Jose Ortega y Gasset’s concept of the revolt of masses. Ortega captures the ambivalence of masses who express the power ambition and indifference to culture. From the point of view of Hannah Arendt, masses become terrible, self-satisfied, atomized, unstructured and anonymous. However, Elias Canetti defines masses as compressed and scattered, closed and open, fast and slow. Yet different parameters of the masses one can find in Siegfried Kracauer’s writing – namely aesthetics, technicism, ritual. Finally, in the last part, the author appeals to Jean Baudrillard’s approach to the problem who declares that masses became silent and indistinct. (shrink)

Dieser Aufsatz liest das während des Ersten Weltkriegs begonnene Lustspiel-Fragment Timon der Redner als einen Versuch Hofmannsthals, ausgehend von der Geldthematik und Figurentypik bei Shakespeare zu einer kritischen Inszenierung des modernen Massenstaates und dessen Sozialdynamiken zu gelangen. Hierbei stützte er sich auf sozialpsychologische Studien Sigmund Freuds und Gustave Le Bons sowie auf Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie. Als Wirkungsabsicht hinter dieser Ironisierung des allegorisierten Masse-Führermodells zeichnet sich die Re-Etablierung von legitimen Autoritätsstrukturen im Faszinosum der Dichtung ab, welche das Politische authentisch gestaltet.

The paper discusses the problem of the possible relation between psychoanalytic concepts and social critique in the perspective of Adorno's social thought. The title refers to Adorno's idea that psyche as individual spontaneity has now lost the weight it used to have in the liberal era. As a brief introductory remark, I clarify the status of theory for Adorno, i.e., the circularity between interpretation and description as grounded by the nature of the social object itself. Then I analyse his core (...) idea of “social objectivity” as an impersonal mechanism which is at the same time produced by men and reified, heteronomous for them, and I argue that, for Adorno, the discontinuity existing between individual and society prevents an immediate shift of psychoanalytic concepts to the social world: the example of fascism clearly proves that the determining social forces today, while instrumentally exploiting deep psychical materials, are not themselves psychological. In the final part, I show how, for Adorno, psychology and sociology nevertheless need to be mediated with each other, while avoiding the superficial synthesis the so-called “revised psychoanalysis” aims to, and I point out some similarities between psychoanalytic practice and social critique as conceived by him. (shrink)

On August 18, 1986, seventy-two Nobel laureates, seventeen state academies of science, and seven other scientific organizations submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court of the United States in which they defined and agreed upon the nature and scope of science. The brief was submitted in response to the Louisiana Balanced TreatmentAct for creation science and evolution science that had been struck down in the Federal Court of Louisiana in 1985 and was being appealed to the Supreme Court. (...) The Louisiana trial in general and the amicus curiae brief in particular have historical significance for the history of science, being unique in the collective mobilization of scientists both in defense of and in defining science. This article describes the origin and significance of the brief. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to open a dialogue between research in social sciences concerning collective emotion and historical investigation concerning a religious and political movement of the...

This is the second article in a series of two on the topic of “action” and “reflection”. The first article appeared last year in the fall issue of this journal, 140–171). This second article is divided into two sections. The first section deals with reflection, mainly in the form of reflexivity, a central notion in contemporary sociology and an attitude characteristic of the modern secular mind. The second section discusses second-order agency, subdivided intospiritsandpowers. Most instances of spirits fall under an (...) “as if” category: all these cases are about certain communalities expressing themselves in such a strong way that itseemsas if a supra-personal agent is at work.Zeitgeisterare a point in case. The only incidence of asoag-kind may be that ofmobs. Powers fit our model better than spirits and for that reason most of the second part of this essay is dedicated to that topic. The foremost distinction that will be made is that between incomplete and full powers. The thesis presented in the final section is that powers can only come to completion by taking a “religious turn”. The notion of “assent” as a basic ingredient of human action is what connects the first to the second part of the essay. (shrink)

In the literature investigating the long history of appeals to ‘nature’, in its multiple meanings, for rules of conduct or justification of social order, little attention has been paid to a long-standing tradition in which medical and physiological arguments merged into moral and social ones. A host of medical authors, biologists, social writers and philosophers assumed that nature spoke its moral language not only in its general economy, but also within and through the body. This is why, for instance, many (...) critics of Malthus argued that physiological self-regulating mechanisms ensured a spontaneous adaptation of fertility to the circumstances. Beliefs in a beneficent economy of nature persisted when Providence was replaced by evolution. To some, they provided reasons for hope even when others worried about ‘unfit’ members of society increasing at a quicker rate than ‘fit’ ones. The nerves gradually replaced food and blood as moral mediators between society and the body. When faith in bio-social progress was shaken by degeneration theories, and fin de siècle anxiety concerned underpopulation rather than overpopulation, not an insignificant proportion of those who emphasised the bad effects of modern civilisation resorted to ideas and arguments based on a view of the body in which physiology and morality worked together. A common language and common assumptions linked the Kulturpessimisten to their optimistic eighteenth-century colleagues, in spite of their different forecasts. The present paper traces continuities and discontinuities in the operation of a persistent set of interrelated ideas and assumptions on the coalescence of the physiological and the moral across disciplines and contexts. (shrink)

According to a recent and prominent view, a ‘we-perspective’ arises out of a dyadic I-you relation involving a special form of reciprocity in which I relate to another as a you – as somebody who is also attending and addressing me. As important as this argument might be, one obvious limitation lies in that it typically applies to dyadic forms of ‘we’ which are bound to the here and now of face-to-face interactions between ‘ad hoc pairs of individuals’. Drawing inspiration (...) from Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, I will argue that in order to trace a way out of this impasse, one needs to shift the theoretical focus from dyadic face-to-face (immediate) relations of reciprocity between I and You, self and other to ternary relations of ‘mediated reciprocity’ involving the figure and the functions of a third party (le tiers). (shrink)

Of the plural dimensions of collective identity, this paper explores identity as a rhetorical device. The identity tag is a case in point of pragmatic effectiveness. To account for such a power a hypothetical model of identity categories is presented. Its constituent modules shape four basic dimensions: position, deindividuation, exclusion and cognitive shielding. Such delineated narrative identity becomes equivalent to an informal ideology . As constitutive rhetoric , the narrative construction of identities converts self-referential tautology into strategies of discrimination, purification (...) and extermination of exponents of otherness. Last century mass destruction – totalitarianism, colonialism, ethno-nationalism – has been tributary to the identity paradigm. (shrink)