Autonomous Subject Research Articles

El control de convencionalidad y el diálogo judicial frente al medio ambiente como sujeto de protección y reparación

El presente artículo tiene por objeto el control de convencionalidad y su ejercicio por los jueces administrativos, pretendiendo en este caso efectuar un análisis del control de convencionalidad y la doctrina conocida como diálogo interjurisdiccional que propenda por una concepción de mayor garantía del medio ambiente como sujeto de protección y reparación. Para ello, se utilizó un marco metodológico de carácter cualitativo con la técnica de análisis de discurso —de carácter jurisprudencial— sobre múltiples providencias de altas cortes colombianas y la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, así como de reconocidos doctrinarios, que permitan fortalecer la propuesta, concluyendo que este diálogo sea activo con una modificación de la dirección en que se efectúe y que podrían ser las altas cortes nacionales las que fijen precedentes que la Corte Interamericana pueda tomar como criterio hermenéutico relevante que tengan por fin la conformación de un ius commune interamericano en favor del medio ambiente como sujeto autónomo de protección y reparación.

The Footprint as Object in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s

The paper looks at the significance of the footprint in Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly. Both texts feature a footprint (or set of footprints) made by a daughter who is forced to carry the hopes and social/imperial ambitions of her father. In both cases the empty footprint is a signifier of the presence and absence of the person who made it. Where Melbury seeks to preserve Grace’s footprint by placing a slate or flat stone over it, Almayer carefully and methodically seeks to erase the prints left by the departing Nina, not by brushing them but by burying each of them in its own small tomb of sand. We could also read Melbury’s attempts to preserve Grace’s footprint as a form of entombment, in which case the footprint can be read as signifying the death of the daughter as autonomous subject and her preservation as signifier and carrier of fatherly ambition. Linking these texts to the most famous footprint of all, that left by Man Friday on Robinson Crusoe’s “desert” island, the paper reads both texts in the light of theories of Empire and Imperialism. Both Melbury and Almayer seek to cultivate, and trade their daughters on the marriage market, in order to secure social (and trade) advantages for themselves. In The Woodlanders this may be set against the colonisation and cultivation of Hintock Wood and the labour of the woodlanders themselves. In Almayer’s Folly, the attempted trading of the mixed-race Nina takes place against the background of her father’s failed trading enterprises in the Borneo Jungle.

National Regeneration Through Childhood in Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet

This article is concerned with Edith Nesbit’s literary representation of national regeneration through a very early stage of life, childhood, in The Story of the Amulet (1906). For the purpose of scrutinizing how children’s literature imagines regeneration in Edwardian England, I discuss the cult of nostalgia and childhood in Edwardian texts and take a closer look at how Nesbit’s Amulet, the first children’s text to use time travel, highlights the ways in which children create a nonlinear temporality that connects past, present, and future. The novel uses childhood as a counterbalance to the adult’s world because its child time travelers reinvent the history of the British Empire and look in on the future in such a way as to question the ideal of linear progress, which has long governed England. I ultimately argue that Nesbit’s child characters, as autonomous subjects of their time travel, establish their own perspective on the history of the British Empire, which differs from the older generation’s.

Narratives of Global Capital and the Spirits of Anti-colonial Resistance in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I consider how the inheritances of secular modernity condition and constrain forms of cosmopolitan and Marxist critique. I analyse Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) as a text which theorises anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance by materialising spiritual resurgence. Almanac blurs the boundaries between materiality and spirituality and reveals the limits of the language of globalisation for reading the text's anti-colonial gesture. I argue that Silko contests frameworks of secular modernity in two central ways: first, by disrupting accounts of linear time, and second by de-centring the role of human agency in revolution. Drawing on original archival research from the Leslie Marmon Silko Papers, I show how Almanac is a genre-defying text in active conversation with late Cold War imperialist conflicts in South America and Marxist theories of revolution. The political force of Silko's novel, however, lies not only in its representation of late capital in the settler colonial nation-state, but in its capacity to imagine other worlds beyond the strictures of colonial modernity. Challenging conceptions of the autonomous subject of agency, and disrupting the progressive temporality of resistance movements, Silko's novel proposes new critical imaginaries for thinking dissent in communion with the sacred.

Macbeth's Thick Night and the Political Ecology of a Dark Scotland

This article complicates scholarship on Macbeth that understands political attachment in terms of an autonomous subject and attributes Macbeth’s demise to an over-susceptibility to natural or supernatural forces. By putting early modern accounts of the humoral constitution of the night air in conversation with modern theories of apostrophe, I argue that the Macbeths’ experiences of night theorise political action as inseparable from the nonhuman forces in the play. Shakespeare reworks his source material to explore the borders of the human, imagining a more complex relationship between treasonous violence and the darkness that enshrouds Scotland.

The 18th-century elocution movement and Facebook: reading emotion before and after the subject

The rise of social media has recently inspired a renewed debate about the decentering of the subject. Some scholars have responded to Facebook’s seemingly intrusive influence over people’s emotions by reviving humanistic notions of the autonomous subject, while others have continued to insist on the subject’s constructedness. This article provides a historical perspective on this issue by revisiting another moment that, in some ways, parallels contemporary anxieties about social media. In the mid-18th century, critics worried that the increasing popularity of reading was producing unruly emotions and extreme opinions. These concerns inspired a number of attempts to reassert the primacy of spoken language, including programs of elocution instruction that trained people in reading out loud. Focusing on James Burgh’s 1761 book The Art of Speaking, this article argues that the elocution movement employed a different conception of selfhood from the modern notion of subjectivity: rather than treating the subject as the ultimate source of emotion, the elocutionists judged emotional reactions to texts based on a normative notion of the general good. I argue that this ethically grounded view of the self could provide a useful framework for understanding the stakes of the present anxiety about the emotional effects of media.

The dialectic of democracy: modernization, emancipation and the great regression

ABSTRACTIn some of the most established and supposedly immutable liberal democracies, diverse social groups are losing confidence not only in established democratic institutions, but in the idea of liberal representative democracy itself. Meanwhile, an illiberal and anti-egalitarian transformation of democracy evolves at an apparently unstoppable pace. This democratic fatigue syndrome, the present article suggests, is qualitatively different from the crises of democracy which have been debated for some considerable time. Focusing on mature democracies underpinned by the ideational tradition of European Enlightenment, the article theorizes this syndrome and the striking transformation of democracy in terms of a dialectic process in which the very norm that once gave birth to the democratic project – the modernist idea of the autonomous subject – metamorphoses into its gravedigger, or at least into the driver of its radical reformulation. The article further develops aspects of my existing work on second-order emancipation and simulative democracy. Taking a theoretical rather than empirical approach, it aims to provide a conceptual framework for more empirically oriented analyses of changing forms of political articulation and participation.

ИНТЕГРИРОВАННЫЙ ПОДХОД К ФОРМИРОВАНИЮ ГЕОМЕТРИЧЕСКИХ ПРЕДСТАВЛЕНИЙ У МЛАДШИХ ШКОЛЬНИКОВ

The article reveals the possibility of primary schoolchildren’s geometric conceptions forming on the basis of the integrated approach that helps pupils to see and realize that geometric phenomena take place not only in mathematics but also in nature and visual arts. It is shown that modern school focuses on the study of autonomous subjects, which without interdisciplinary connections do not allow teaching and educating primary schoolchildren in a versatile way. That is why the ability to transfer knowledge from one subject area to another is an indicator of a pupil’s intellectual development, it forms a holistic view of nature and society. The integrated approach to teaching primary schoolchildren is presented by the example of a fragment of a Fine Art lesson at primary school (grade 2).

PSYCHOSOCIAL PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN ADOLESCENT, YOUTH AND ADULT AGE

The article presents the results of the comparison of the variability of the psychosocial development of the personality in the adolescent, youth and adult age. At the first stage of the empirical study, the types of development in adolescence and youth age. Personality (motivation, value orientations, focus, communicative features), subject (autonomy, self-regulation, locus of control), as well as social and behavioural (distinctive features of social functioning) characteristics were used as typing criteria. The types of the psychosocial development of adolescents and youths are interpreted as constructive, non-constructive and destructive models of coming of age. At the second stage of the study the theoretical generalization of the types of personality existing in psychology and strategies of personality functioning during the period of adult age. The analysis is based on the theories of A. Adler, K. Horney, D. Marsh, E. Desci and R. Rayen, E. Fromm et al. The types of the psychosocial development of adolescents and youths was compared with variants (types, patterns) of the development in adulthood. The dynamics and continuity of the types of the psychosocial development and strategies for functioning adolescents, youths and adults were determined. It was revealed that the main features of continuity can be found along the lines of constructive or non-constructive development, focus on oneself or other people, self-sufficiency or dependence on the milieu and circumstances. The process of typing of the psychosocial development is the result of the integration of traits of the personality and the way it functions (behaves), which is inherent to it. The factors of that process were identified: regulation by the personality of his/her behavior and activities and his/her position in the system of relationships. The type of the psychosocial development is a complex structural and functional unity. The crystallization of that type from the adolescent age to adulthood is a targeted and logical process associated with the emergence of the self-concept, the ability to self-determination and self-regulation mechanisms in the adolescent age. The article emphasizes the importance of prevention and correction of the preconditions of non-constructive development models.

Developing Psychologically Compelling Understanding of the Involvement of Humans in Research

Research conducted on humans has a long history of ethical protections, with the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 triggering stronger protection across most jurisdictions. While there have been many reorientations and corrections in the emphasis of codes protecting human research participants, all have implicitly assumed a conception of human decision-making and the person that are psychologically not feasible. In this paper, we examine two problematic assumptions dominant in many research ethics guidelines: (1) implicit reliance on a model of classical rationality in conceptualizing the process whereby individuals make a decision of whether to give consent to participate in a study and (2) the assumption of autonomous subjects in the bioethical principle of autonomy and in operationalizing informed consent processes. For both of these problems, we outline theoretical psychological work that provides more compelling accounts of (1) human decision-making and rationality as bounded and ecological and (2) of personhood and agency as relational and emergent. We conclude by considering approaches to bioethics that are compatible with such conceptions of personhood and therefore provide a more satisfactory framework for a relational ethics.

Grace within the Limits of Theatricality Alone

The body in the work of the performance companies Goat Island and Every house has a door is often described with reference to the quality of a certain puppetry: reactive, other-directed, devoid of individual agency and not quite in possession of itself. What other-directs and virtually augments this body is the trace of an archival source material that it enacts without ever fully interiorizing. Exposing an inextricable dependency on the constitutive heterogeneity of external memory supports, this body differs starkly from its modern Western conception as the self-contained container of an autonomous subject. Hanging by the threads of the archive, it becomes a stage upon which forces that come from elsewhere - both past and future - play themselves out. Read through the prism of the work of Samuel Weber, its puppet-like comportment demonstrably bears the dislocating effects of theatricality as prosthetic dis-containment. Following an ethico-political stance that more broadly informs this body of work, the passivity of its appropriative restraint with regards to memory prostheses doubles up as an active response to the trace of the other. With reference to another discourse on puppets – Helen Cixous’s ‘Grace and Innocence’ – the article develops an outline of this comportment as the infinite approach of grace within the limits of theatricality alone. For unlike puppets, its aspiration for a graceful touch irreducible to taking place or possession is forever limited by a necessary minimum of narcissism. Impossible to strictly develop a relation with something so strange that it remains so, the puppet-like body must give in to a necessary if necessarily compromised desire to appropriate, left to exploring the limits of attention, obscurity and bewilderment against the habitual recognition of identity.

Entre temps collectif et temps individuel, les espaces de la pêche à la ligne

With a comparison of several amateur angling techniques, this contribution shows that fishing activities are not limited to solitary practice or small groups. Moreover, fishermen’s conceptions of time and space do not solely consist of reclaiming for oneself a time and a space freed from constraints. Interviews and observations carried out in different places and with enthusiasts practicing various fishing techniques show that this leisure activity links collective and public activities with more private individual activities. Dedicated to the transmission of knowledge based on methods used by trade guilds as well as the setting up of community links, the collective activities take place in constricted and wintry spaces, and then in spring spaces with the start of the fishing season. As the fishing trips are individual in nature and situated in mobile or fixed spaces, they allow the fishermen the opportunity for introspection while fostering an intimate relationship with the animal, based on domination and comfort. The fishing trips also offer the fishermen the possibility to construct themselves as an autonomous subject. If the institutionalization and the intensity of the collective and individual fishing activities depend on the complexity of the techniques applied, their coordination allows the fishermen to constitute themselves as members of a community and as autonomous subjects.

READING THE DEAD WITH W.G. SEBALD

Subject to the ruthless accountancy of the neoliberal university, the humanities are under increasing pressure to make a case for why they count. This article focuses on how the field of literary criticism can advance a form of reading that destabilises neoliberalism’s bedrock: the autonomous subject. This form of reading requires closely scrutinising modes of literary interpretation that implicitly privilege the neoliberal account of ethics, which reduces responsibility to a matter of autonomous individuals calculating their culpability. In turn, this form of reading carefully attends to texts that invoke a model of Levinasian ethical responsibility which is constituted through our relations with others. Using W.G. Sebald’s work The Emigrants as a case study, I show how encounters with the deaths of others can invoke the relational indebtedness that is both inherent to the subject’s constitution and the basis of its responsibility for others. Through affirming a model of ethics founded on relationality and offering a mode of reading that can attend to such an ethics, literary criticism provides us with the opportunity to engage with our world anew. In the place of autonomous subjects, we discover creatures of relationality who emerge as indebted to, attuned to, and responsible for the living.

Chinese moving image arts, 2015–2017: Observations and reflections

Since 2000, moving image art (yingxiang yishu) has gradually become a common term in the field of Chinese contemporary art. “Moving image art” remains an unstable category instructive of the tension and paradox between different forms and content in discursive practices. Mapping key conferences, publications, institutions and exhibitions, this article examines how the idea of “moving image art” arose, circulated, and acquired legitimacy in different Chinese-speaking areas. Rather than conjuring up moving image arts as yet another autonomous subject of art history, this article understands moving image art as a phenomenon resulted from complex processes of negotiation between the local, the trans-regional and the global, as well as conscious social, technological and cultural realities. From 2015 to 2017, there has been a surge of historical survey exhibition on moving image art in major museums in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, albeit with very different agendas. Rather than providing a linear story of the development of moving image arts, this article takes as its departure point important conferences, exhibitions, institutions that appeared from 2015 to 2017, with the aim to unravel complementing and sometimes competing historiographic attempts.

En/Gendering Trouble with J. J. Abrams’s Rey in The Force Awakens: Re-Subjecting the Subject to a Performative Subjectivity

Episode VII: The Force Awakens follows a trend in disrupting the privileging of the heroic protagonist as male, refusing to frame women by enforcing a particularly male self-projected binary for popular consumption. Yet this article argues in the first place that this turn is less transgressive of hegemonic gendered norms than might appear to be the case to the inattentive viewer of the saga. An important reason for this, and second in the logic of the argument of the article, the construal of the very form of Rey’s subjectivity involves an ontological intensification of the Cartesian subject rather than its reconfiguration. In other words, it demands an active or autonomous subject rather than a dialectically historical process of subjectivation. The third claim is that Rey is caught up in being subject to the movie’s political conservatism, and this involves the assumption of a binary code at a particularly crucial point, reinforcing the concerns about the determinative subjectivity.

Estilos de liderança de alunos do ensino médio numa escola pública da educação básica brasileira

Os temas que envolvem líder e liderança são recorrentes na área de Administração, no entanto, esse assunto pode ser estudado em outros ambientes, como por exemplo, na escola. Nesse sentido, esta pesquisa foi realizada na Escola Estadual Francisco de Sá Cavalcante, na cidade de Paulista-PB, com alunos do 3º ano “A”, turno manhã. O objetivo deste artigo foi de investigar os estilos de liderança dos alunos do terceiro ano e a contribuição destes perfis na formação de sujeitos autônomos. A pesquisa se deu de forma qualitativa, pois priorizou, além de materiais bibliográficos sobre os conceitos de Líder, Liderança, Estilos de Liderança e aspectos pedagógicos, o comportamento dos alunos na sala de aula e a aplicação de um questionário, com perguntas fechadas, no qual o aluno apresentou uma percepção de si sobre suas ações na escola. Chegou-se à conclusão que a escola tem buscado tornar os alunos autônomos, auxiliando com propostas pedagógicas no desenvolvimento de líderes. A partir das percepções dos alunos sobre si e dos estímulos dessa escola, foram encontrados os estilos apresentados neste artigo.

Re-situer la précarité en temps de crise

Ce texte, traduit pour ce dossier, inscrit la précarité au cœur d’une réflexion sur la faillite de l’autonomie présumée du sujet néolibéral. À travers l’expérience de la crise économique de l’Espagne après 2008, l’auteure décrit l’ébranlement de l’idéologie des classes moyennes, fondées sur un mirage de liberté, sur une autonomie fictive vis-à-vis des structures sociales. Elle défend le développement d’interdépendances et de codépendances, modes de vie bien connus des populations subalternes, et montre que le déclassement violent produit par la crise de 2008 aura peut-être eu l’intérêt d’affaiblir un mythe qui voit l’indépendance comme la norme et la dépendance comme l’exception. L’auteure défend ainsi une compréhension de la précarité en termes de reproduction sociale plutôt que de proposition dans les seuls rapports de production à laquelle l’ont en partie cantonnée certaines approches.

The individual’s invention: for a study of cultural sociology of self

This paper aims to frame a few ideas and concerns about the way western societies in general during modernity times, have been handled through multicultural theories and public policies, the issue of cultural diversity, and especially those ones dealing with the interaction among different cultural groups. We assume that the different forms in which public policies are back up in a theoretical level, by then built and applied to different cultural communities (materialistic level) represent and reflect an ontological conception of culture (symbolic level) based in the belief of the existence of an autonomous, conscientious and rational individual moral subject. We argue that today, these policies are the last political crystallization of this “cult of the individual” that has been shaping over the last two centuries a system of beliefs about the human social being and group relations. This is a soteriological logic of the projection whose origins are of dramatic character (morality of good or bad). This has to do with what here is called the sociology of Self, which means analyse the implications of a system of beliefs based on the cult of the individual on scientific reasoning and forms of political organization of society, and how the interaction structures result as the meaning of action and experience for people and human group: in other words, it is about the production of social meaning. I used the metaphor of Tribal awareness as the main notion of this approach. It is a vitalism of tragic existential origin, which is the nodal point of philosophy in Nietzsche. From a cultural sociological approach of imaginary this would mean investigating the collective effects of a system of beliefs that sacralised the human being as individualistic entity, and considering the effects of collective meanings when the individual becomes a cultural icon with a historical global scope.Palavras-chave: Consciência tribal. Culto do indivíduo. Individualismo icônico. Intersubjetividade. Políticas culturaisLink: https://revistas.ufg.br/ci/article/view/54622/26532

RECLAIMING AGENCY AND APPRECIATING LIMITS IN TEACHER EDUCATION: EXISTENTIAL, ETHICAL, AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL READINGS

A basic premise of teacher education is the value of teacher agency, that is, the teacher’s capacity to take responsibility for one’s knowledge, beliefs, judgements, and relationships. How can teacher educators sustain a commitment to agency in light of critiques of western modernity, specifically in relation to the existence of a rational autonomous subject, the erasure of history, and the opacity of language? Drawing on existentialism, ethics, and psychoanalysis, we discuss three practicum vignettes to illustrate what we are calling “the chiastic complexity” of agency within the field of teacher education. We argue that admission of the limits of teacher agency may be the source of ethical insight, educational opportunity, and political resistance for student teachers and teacher educators.

The Human Is Dead – Long Live the Algorithm! Human-Algorithmic Ensembles and Liberal Subjectivity

The article analyzes the relation of humans and technology concerning so called ‘intelligent’ or ‘autonomous’ algorithms that are applied in everyday contexts but are far removed from any form of substantial artificial intelligence. In particular, the use of algorithms in surveillance and in architecture is discussed. These examples are structured by a particular combination of continuity and difference between humans and technology. The article provides a detailed analysis of boundary practices that establish continuity and oppositions between humans and information technology, referring to their exemplary depiction in movies. Both strands of boundary practices have the potential to challenge as well as sustain the position of the human as liberal, autonomous subject. Finally, it is shown how the particular combination of continuity and difference that structures the use of algorithms maintains the power of liberal, autonomous subject positions, while the shift of decisions to the algorithms seems to decenter the human.