Affairs Of Men Research Articles

The Double Murder in Pil'niak's the Tale of the Unextinguished Moon

If there is a tide in the affairs of men, then for the Soviet writer Boris Pil'niak (1894-1937) such a point was reached with his writing in 1926 of Povest' nepogashennoi luny, which tells about an army commander who is summoned to the Town by the party's number one man.1 The commander, Nikolai Gavrilov, and the number one man or unbending man (Herop6rHiHHcsK ieJIoseK) are very old friends; they both hastened the advent of the Revolution and together fought for its success. Gavrilov has an ulcer, which he tries to ignore, but which, nevertheless, makes him concentrate on things internal to himself rather than on the outside world. The unbending man orders his friend to have the ulcer operated on so that he can devote himself totally to his role in the Revolution. Gavrilov dies as a result of this operation. Whether Pil'niak intended it or not, various readers who came across his story in late 1925 and early 1926 refused to consider it merely as a work of art; rather, they treated it as a real-life account of the death, in October 1925, of the Red Army commander, Mikhail Frunze.2 Pil'niak chose to write an explanatory note in which he denied any possible connection between the real and fictional worlds; however,

Linking Information Services to Business Strategies

Cet article presente une methode pour reinventer les services d'information en creant des liens entre la gestion des services d'information et les strategies d'entreprise, et ceci a tous les niveaux : le marketing, le distribution, la production, l'administration et le financement. Les role professionnel du professionnel de l'information dans cette reorgnisation est souligne

French Lessons: A Memoir

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of leaving home and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French r, attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject made history impossible to ignore: French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the de Man affair -- the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press--and her personal account of theparadoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject. Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.

Deconstruction at Auschwitz: Heidegger, de Man, and the New Revisionism

Deconstruction's viability as a method of criticism has of late suffered from a preponderance of damning circumstantial evidence. This pertains to its relation (or non-relation) to the greatest crime of the modem era, the Holocaust. For in the aftermath of the Heidegger and de Man scandals, its evasions, equivocations, and denials with regard to this theme have caused its standing to plummet-perhaps not so much among true-believers, but among an open-minded public prepared to judge sine ira ac studio, without passion or hatred. The widespread controversies over the repressed pasts of Heidegger and de Man have had the effect of exposing deconstruction to an unprecedented public scrutiny. To be sure, some of this scrutiny has been prejudicially motivated. But some has also been genuine. What has been of positive value about these recent debates is that they have forced deconstruction, as never before, to take a position on matters of great historical importance: on questions of fascism, anti-Semitism, and the repression of sordid biographical pasts. For the esteem in which both Heidegger and de Man were held has fallen insofar as both men proved inauthentic (here, I choose my words carefully) in failing to own up to their far-from-trifling youthful transgressions. As any lawyer knows, circumstantial evidence is not enough to gain a conviction. Moreover, it would be wholly irresponsible to condemn deconstruction on the basis of a type of guilt-by-association: the idea that, because a number of its theoretical forbears or exponents were for a time avowed fascists (Heidegger, de Man, and, to a lesser extent, Maurice Blanchot),' deconstruction, too, would somehow be contaminated. I would like to suggest--quite forcefully-that the attempt to read these recent academic scandals as somehow implicating deconstruction in real historical crimes is patently off-base. Moreover, such attempts serve as a disingenuous mechanism to close off debate prematurely. After all, if a method of criticism can be qualified as fascist or convicted of intellectual collaboration, then it would appear that there is not much more to discuss. Those who believe that there are grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration in France during World War II2 surely have jumped the gun. It is not along this route that the true stakes of the Heidegger and de Man affairs are to be found.

Reading Demanians Reading de Man

Now that the dust has begun to settle after the furor surrounding the discovery after Paul de Man's death in 1983 of his war-time journalism in Nazi-occupied Belgium, it is time to ask what there is to learn from the entire affair aside from the reminder that academics like a good fight as much as everyone else. Certainly, part of what fueled the intensity of the controversy was the sense that the reputation of deconstruction (and, in a sense, literary theory itself) was on the line. So it seems appropriate to ask now what are the consequences of the controversy for deconstruction and, more generally, for literary theory. I am not going to argue for (or against) the proposition that what the young Paul de Man did, said, thought, and wrote between 1940 and 1944 has consequences or implications for deconstruction, as I see no very direct linkbetween the ideas expressed by de Man then and the practice and theory of reading known as deconstruction developed by him, Jacques Derrida, and others twenty to forty years later.' But this does not mean that the controversy over de Man is without consequences for deconstruction or without lessons for literary theorists. On the contrary. What the de Man affair provides is the fullest display we are likely to have of how deconstructive critics actually read texts. In a sense, the de Man affair accomplished what was attempted in the 1979 collection, Deconstruction and Criticism, in which Derrida, de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom all were supposed to read the same poem, Shelley's Triumph of Life. Faced with the discovery of de Man's wartime journalism, these critics, with of course the exception of de Man (and that of Harold Bloom), but now joined by Jonathan Culler, Shoshana Felman, and a host of younger critics, read and interpreted the same texts, de Man's wartime writings, with a focus and intensity not found in the earlier, rather artificial test case. The theoretical interest of the de Man affair is thus that the body of commentary on de Man's wartime journalism gives us an unparalleled occasion to examine the relation between deconstructive interpretive theory and practice. In the 1970s, theorists commonly insisted that practice needed to accord with theory; in keeping with this, phrases of condemna-

Economists and public policy: Chicago political economy versus conventional views

Both conventional welfare economics and public choice analysis suggest that economists have an important educational role to play in the public policy process — in improving the decision-making process. In sharp contrast, information and incentive problems related to voting rules, the bureaucracy, and the legislature do not arise in CPE because these processes are all perfect agents of interest groups. Consequently, the political process is efficient and there is no scope for beneficial economic analysis as it relates to the sugar program or other public policies. That is, the polity is efficient or it would be reordered by competing interest groups to make it so. But, as Mitchell (1989: 290) stresses, the important unanswered question in CPE remains: if there is no scope for improvement how and why does change occur? The analysis here suggests that the sugar program (and similar policies) may persist not because they are beneficial to the public at large but rather because information and incentive problems in the collective choice process lead to perverse results. Consequently, economic analysts can make a positive contribution to the public policy process by providing information about the responsiveness of alternative institutional arrangements to the values and choices of individual citizens (Wiseman, 1989). The Friedmans' “Tide in the Affairs of Men” view holds that economic analyses are important in changing public opinion, which is an important precursor to changes in public policy. In scores of studies over the past fifty years, economists have shown that the sugar and other argiculture price-support programs are inconsistent with the goal of open markets and provide most of the benefits to people with above-average incomes. Although only modest changes have been made in farm programs, deregulation of agriculture finally is being seriously discussed. For example, in 1987 the Reagan Administration proposed a sweeping initiative under the Uruguay Round of GATT to phase out all trade-distorting agricultural programs by the year 2000. The fact that the elimination of agricultural trade restrictions was seriously discussed under GATT auspices for the first time in forty years reflects the growing recognition that the sugar program and other domestic farm programs are better explained by rent-seeking than by a “what is, is efficient” view of agricultural policies. This change in intellectual climate is consistent with the thesis that ideas have consequ4ences and that economists can play an important role in affecting both the intellectual tide and the course of public policy.

If Politics Matters: Implications for a “New Institutionalism”

From Aristotle and Hobbes through Bentley, Truman, and Riker, many writers have claimed, more or less directly, that they are founding or helping to found a true political science for the first time. Modern scholars have usually expressed this aspiration via criticism of earlier “unscientific” approaches. Thus William Riker in 1962, advocating rational choice theory as the basis of political analysis, dismissed “traditional methods—i. e., his-tory writing, the description of institutions, and legal analysis” as able to produce “only wisdom and neither science nor knowledge. And while wisdom is certainly useful in the affairs ofmen, such a result is a failure to live up to the promise in the name politicalscience ”.lSubsequently, rational choice has indeed become the most prominent pretender to the throne of scientific theory within the discipline.

Of Woodlice and White Cockroaches: The West Indian Girlhood of Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys and her unique heroines still fascinate readers in the 1990s. The typical Rhys woman combines passive sensuality and vulnerability with a distant analytical mind that learns to size up people instantly. She is often a tragic heroine who loves blindly, completely, only to be pensioned off by a disinterested lover. She puts love first and longs for a relationship she can curl up to, as by a fire, comfortably somewhere away from her shabby Bloomsbury bed-sitting-room. At the same time she is obsessed with clothing, good stockings, a fur coat if she can manage it. She knows that clothes are not only an important indicator of social status but a way to attract and hold a man. Rhys's heroine is both innocent and worldly, warm and withdrawn, sexual and cerebral. Hidden in her rather traditional guise or package is an outlook on modern life, especially regarding the affairs of men and women, that is among the starkest and bleakest in twentieth-century literature. Love turns quickly to business arrangements, with women inevitably dependent on men, even in Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Antoinette begins her marriage as an heiress. And as Thomas Staley noted, Rhys recognized very early the conflicting and unstable role of women and how little their natures were understood by men.' While focusing on women's roles in her fiction, Rhys uncovers life behind social masks and poses. Rhys tells us how people truly feel, what they are really thinking. Though many forces must conspire to produce a writer of the caliber of Jean Rhys, the singular circumstances of her own early life prepared her for the role of outsider, of observer. She was born in 1890 on Dominica in the Windward Islands. Her mother was a white, nativeborn Creole, and her father, a Welsh doctor. Though she left the

Conceiving the Text: Nietzschean Inspiration in Musil's Tonka

Robert Musil's novella Tonka (1924) poses a fundamental question of European modernist literature: how is it possible to create artistically and philosophically after Nietzsche? How applicable is the Nietzschean mission of Dionysian self-overcoming to practical life? Nowhere else in Musil's work is the confrontation with Nietzschean inspiration so vividly depicted as in the autobiographical account of an unnamed man's affair with the girl Tonka. This stream-of-consciousness narrative reflects the author's self-conscious positioning as a respondent to Nietzsche's philosophy, in particular regarding the divides of rationality versus creativity, positivism versus mysticism, and the possibility of going beyond such a structure of Socratic dialectics. Faced with Nietzsche's legacy of the world as a play of language, mere metaphors, Musil instigates a tale that records the desperate human struggle for self-creation against the power of these inescapably false discourses. The earliest entries in Musil's diary bear witness to the way in which the Austrian author envisaged the Nietzschean inheritance as a series of hundert neue Moglichkeiten yet to be carried out (Tagebiicher 50). Such new possibilities had been heralded by Nietzsche in his enseits von Gut und Bi6se (1886), when he stated the need to go beyond the search for Truth, absolute certainty in matters philosophical and scientific:

Daily weather mapping from 1781:

An account is given of the preparation of daily weather maps within the historical-instrumental period, with details concerning the detection and location of source material and its subsequent examination, collection and reduction to provide a workable synoptic network of comparable meteorological observations over the eastern North Atlantic-European sector. The application of the Lamb British Isles weather types and Grosswetterlagen for the statistical analysis of circulation patterns derived from these charts is discussed. An objective test was devised whereby the frequency of monthly extremes of nine variables was examined with the following important conclusions: An account is given of the impact of climate on the affairs of man in the 1780s, highlighting some specific historical case studies and discussing agriculture and industry in general.

Wang Yuyang's Natural Thought on Art

Wang Yuyang's entire life took place in a period of initial calm and stability after a torrential storm. This poet, with his extraordinary sensitivity for nature, witnessed the chilling of the birds and the decay of the trees and grasslands on the green hills of the land of old that he recalled. He witnessed the passages of the mountains and the rivers, the joys and melancholies of the affairs of man, the separations and the reunions of people. He was moved by the fading into sad memory of the old courtyard romances in the southern capital of the Ming dynasty. His sensitive soul was often set trembling by all these happenings. And yet, because the regime of the Qing dynasty had come to be stabilized in his time, and Emperor Kangxi did indeed adopt a series of measures that had the effect of bringing about economic recovery and stabilization of the people's lives, a whole set of intricate and complex elements were added to Wang Yuyang's aesthetic feelings about the things and sights of nature. On the one h...

Humanism or Competence in Medicine

The subject of humanism in medicine has received much attention in recent years. Just what is meant by humanism is nebulous. The American Board of Internal Medicine defines the essential characteristics of humanism as integrity, respect and compassion. Respect means a personal commitment to honor patients’ choices and rights regarding themselves and their medical care.’ Engelhardt defines the humanistic doctor as one who acts gently and kindly with sympathy and consideration for the needs of others.’ Although modern usage of the term has had diverse meanings, John Romano writes that, ‘humanism, in essence, applies to any system of thought or action which assigns a predominant interest to the affairs of men as compared to the supernatural or abstract. It could have been applied to Hippocrates when he insisted that epilepsy was not a sacred disease. In western Europe in the late 15th century, the medical humanists participated in a movement of thought that broke through the medieval traditions of scholastic theology and philosophy, and devoted itself to the rediscovery and direct study of the ancient classics. This movement was essentially a revolt against intellectual, and especially ecclesiastical, authority and is a parent to all modern developments, whether intellectual, scientific or ~ocial.~ Charles Aring puts it more succinctly, ‘Any system or mode of thought or action in which human interests, values and dignity pred~minate’.~ I, like Romano, believe the term humanism is also applicable to a movement, in which some of us participated, that began in the late thirties, and intensified following the end of World War 11. This was a movement in American medicine to provide each medical student with sufficient opportunity to obtain the information and the personal experience that would enable him to grow not only in knowledge of biology, but also in human and social issues. It was closely connected to the field known as psychosomatic medicine. The factors responsible for the renewed interest in humanism are well known and need only be mentioned. They are intrinsic and extrinsic to medicine: technology, specialization, changes in delivery of medical services, rising costs, industrialization of medicine and malpractice suits. These factors have led to the rising power of consumer groups and conversely to a loss of power and authority of medicine and its practitioners. All this has undermined the classical doctor-patient relationship, leading to anxiety, hostility and fear on both sides and at times converting the doctor-patient relationship into an adversarial,

Going on about the war without mentioning the war: the other histories of the Paul de Man affair

Going on about the war without mentioning the war: the other histories of the Paul de Man affair

A tide in the affairs of men…

A tide in the affairs of men…

INTEGRATED DIGITAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

AbstractThe paper reviews technological developments since the Second World War and their impact as catalysts in developing the concept of digital information systems. The case for, and progress towards, the establishment of a Geographic Information System for Northern Ireland is discussed together with consideration of the possible implications elsewhere based on the experience gained in Northern Ireland.“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”Brutus in Julius Caesar, Act IV Scene iii (William Shakespeare)

Bioburst: The Impact of Modern Biology on the Affairs of Man. Richard Noel Re

<i>Bioburst: The Impact of Modern Biology on the Affairs of Man</i>. Richard Noel Re

Four Contemporary Novelists by Kerry McSweeney

Kerry McSweeney, Four Contemporary Novelists (Montreal: McGillQueen ’s University Press, 1983). 217. $24.95 Kerry McSweeney’s study proceeds from his conviction that Wilson, Moore, Fowles, and Naipaul are major writers — each has published a substantial body of fiction by which he may be judged, each is still writing and three may be said to be in their prime. Moreover, each has commented on his purpose as a writer and has had his work submitted to much public and critical commentary. For McSweeney, Wilson, Moore, Fowles, and Naipaul have remained, despite “ the contemporary crise de roman, committed to the representational, communicative and instructive functions of the novel.” They are a small band of brothers; not many of their generation can be added to their ranks. The Indian novelist, R. K . Narayan (who is men­ tioned twice in this book) is one, and the Australian novelist and Nobel Prize Winner, Patrick White (who is not mentioned) is perhaps another. Although “in subject matter, themes, schemata, style and sensibility each novelist is distinctly different from the others,” it is nevertheless possible to discuss them together in terms of “dominant themes, controlling techniques and informing sensibility.” The book, through its four chapters and 190 pages of careful exegesis, tellingly displays the convictions of each of the writers about the “place in serious contemporary fiction for a self-aware realism that combines in instructive and enriching ways the inevitable selfconsciousness of the present day with the representational and communi­ cative strengths of the traditional novel.” McSweeney’s subjects acknowledge the modernist forces which have altered the form and force of post-World War I fiction and their indebtedness to some of these impulses. But, in Wilson’s words, each is trying “to convince the reader that he was seeing society as a whole” or “ taking into account authorial point of view, indi­ viduals as in and of the whole.” Wilson, himself, departs only once in the expressionist novel, The Old Men at the Zoo, from the traditional form of the novel. His career reaches its apogee in No Laughing Matter where he finds his full strophe as social historian and moralist, and where he reveals his full command of craft in “narration, powers of characterisation, stylistic fluency and range, and impressionistic mimicry.” Wilson is fundamentally concerned with evil and its seemingly gratuitous effect in the affairs of men; with liberal humanism, its dilemmas and shortcomings; with “distrust of the moral universe” ; with the exercise of authority; with the relations between reason and intuition, thought and feeling, duty and pleasure; with the social and psychological conundrums of individual existence; and with the intricacies of class rela­ tionships.” For McSweeney, then, Wilson, for all his variety of invention in his eight novels, is a social realist, a novelist of manners and morals and “prober of the ethical life, in particular of the dilemmas of liberal humanists forced to confront reality of evil without and within.” Brian Moore is not of the stature of Wilson, Fowles, or Naipaul — he is not as well known nor as widely acclaimed as they are, nor does he grapple with “big themes of contemporary concern.” Put another way: “ Moore remains content to lick familiar wounds and to play over and over again his personal record of failure, loneliness, exile and meaninglessness.” Neverthe­ less, there are now twelve published novels and there is “need for critical mediation between novelist and reader if the essential distinction and cumu­ lative richness of Moore’s work is to be appreciated.” Moore, more than the other writers under review here, has plied his own course, deliberately unaffected by “ the wind of the crise de roman which has blown around him.” Moore is quoted as saying in “The Novel House is Empty” that “its tenants have wandered out witlessly into Barthian byways, through Borgesian mazes to squat, disconsolate, at Beckett’s crossroads, waiting for some faceless God.” So what Moore’s writing reveals, and what recommends him to us, is his capacity to reveal the drama of “the moment in a person’s life, the few crucial weeks or months when one suddenly con­ fronts the reality or unreality of one’s illusions.” Moore’s commitment is...

Nature as Animating: The Soul in the Human Sciences

NATURE AS ANIMATING: THE SOUL IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES HIS ESSAY ADDRESSES the problem of the fragmentation of knowledge on the contemporary scene, nd proposes that the rediscovery of the Aristotelian concept of nature can go far toward providing a solution.1 Well known is the situation in academe, where specialization is the price of advancement and tenure, and where few professors are capable of ranging outside their fields to assess truth claims or attain a comprehensive overview. No less serious is the compartmentalization of knowledge at research institutes and "think-tanks," where competent scholars are engaged in detailed analyses of problems in economics, political science, and international security, but where it has proven difficult to generate studies that direct prudent action by government leaders. Here the basic problem is the perennial gap that intrudes itself between knowledge and action, between what Aristotle identified centuries ago as theoria and praxis, which we may label, following him, as that between the theoretical and practical disciplines. The direction of sensible action in the sphere of human affairs, in Aristotle's view, pertained to ethics and politics, which he regarded as practical sciences-concerned not merely with knowing but with knowing as ordered to doing. The practical orientation of scholar1 The article is an expanded version of a colloquium paper read at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., on November 8, 1984, with the title "The Idea of Nature: Its Contemporary Relevance for Ethics and Politics." .An earlier draft was read in the Seminar on Problems of .Authority and Participation at the same Center on .August 13, 1984, with the title "The Modeling of Nature: Can the Soul Be Put Back Into the Human Sciences? " The author wishes to thank Edmund Pellegrino and Otto Bird for their helpful commentaries on the colloquium paper, and James Billington, Prosser Gifford, and .Ann Sheffield for providing the stimulating ambience in which it could be written and presented. 61~ THE SOUL IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES 613 ship-the ideal embodied in " knowing as ordered to doing "is a concern that goes far beyond the needs of academe and research institutes. Its neglect on the contemporary scene is but an instance of the more pervasive fragmentation of knowledge that characterizes our culture. The theme of this essay is that the concept of nature, particularly as animating and instantiated in the human soul, can be fruitful in overcoming such fragmentation in a basic way: by reuniting the physical and the human sciences and showing how action or doing can be related to both.2 By the physical sciences we mean the speculative or theoretical sciences concerned with nature, the phusis of the Greeks, whence the term "nature " in our title. Among such sciences one might include physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, psychology in its more theoretical aspects, and so on. The human sciences we take to embrace those concerned with man's affairs: the social and political sciences, ethics and politics, economics, the behavioral sciences in their more clinical aspects, etc. They less obviously are concerned with nature, and yet they are but manifestations of human nature in action, as will be shown in the sequel. Thus nature as seen in the world of nature and as embodied in human nature as part of that world is the concept around which we propose our integration. The regulative idea is simple: nature is an intrinsic principle of perfective activity, and the better we understand a nature or a natural kind the more we can appreciate how it should act. Thus we would bridge the " is " and the " ought " by rooting the norm for action in an objective standard: a nature that is not completely refractory to understanding. Here it is important to observe that there is a vast difference between knowing all there is to know about a nature and having no knowledge of it at all. By the somewhat elliptical expression, " a nature that is not completely refractory to understanding," 2 For an exposition of the concept of nature and the intellectual context in which the following development should be situated, see W. A. Wallace, "The Intelligibility of Nature: A Neo-Aristotelian View," Review of Metaphysics...

Geophysics and the affairs of man

<i>Geophysics and the affairs of man</i>

Geophysics in the Affairs of Man: A Personalized History of Exploration Geophysics and Its Allied Sciences of Seismology and Oceanography

This book traces the developments of the applications of the geophysical sciences to a variety of societal needs from misty beginnings to now, with emphasis on the “golden age,” the early 1920s through the 1960s. The phrase “applied geophysics” is so often taken as synonymous with “geophysical exploration” that the broader viewpoint of this work is especially welcome. The authors certainly devoted much of their treatment to exploration geophysics, as is appropriate in view of the large commitment of human and financial resources to this endeavor and the practical importance of the results. However, they have also included interesting sketches of military applications of geophysical techniques and the important technological advances that have come from these, as well as much material on ocean science. Atmospheric and space science receives less detailed coverage.