Genealogy Of Concept Research Articles

Narrative, History, Critique

In Chapter 8 ofThe Language Animal, Charles Taylor claims that narratives are unsubstitutable for an appropriate understanding of social life and ‘human affairs’ in general. In order to identify open questions in his argumentation as well as unwanted consequences of his outlook, I proceed in three consecutive steps. I first problematize Taylor’s distinction between laws and stories, then go on to address his intentional blurring of stories and histories, and finally suggest that the concept of genealogy might be a promising candidate for describing Taylor’s approach, concluding that he implicitly forms the equation: narrative equals history equals critique.

Prefigurative Politics between Ethical Practice and Absent Promise

‘Prefigurative politics’ has become a popular term for social movements’ ethos of unity between means and ends, but its conceptual genealogy has escaped attention. This article disentangles two components: (a) an ethical revolutionary practice, chiefly indebted to the anarchist tradition, which fights domination while directly constructing alternatives and (b) prefiguration as a recursive temporal framing, unknowingly drawn from Christianity, in which a future radiates backwards on its past. Tracing prefiguration from the Church Fathers to politicised resurfacings in the Diggers and the New Left, I associate it with Koselleck’s ‘process of reassurance’ in a pre-ordained historical path. Contrasted to recursive prefiguration are the generative temporal framings couching defences of means-ends unity in the anarchist tradition. These emphasised the path dependency of revolutionary social transformation and the ethical underpinnings of anti-authoritarian politics. Misplaced recursive terminology, I argue, today conveniently distracts from the generative framing of means-ends unity, as the promise of revolution is replaced by that of environmental and industrial collapse. Instead of prefiguration, I suggest conceiving of means-ends unity in terms of Bloch’s ‘concrete utopia’, and associating it with ‘anxious’ and ‘catastrophic’ forms of hope.

Foucault’s Darwinian Genealogy

This paper outlines Darwin’s theory of descent with modification in order to show that it is genealogical in a narrow sense, and that from this point of view, it can be understood as one of the basic models and sources—also indirectly via Nietzsche—of Foucault’s conception of genealogy. Therefore, this essay aims to overcome the impression of a strong opposition to Darwin that arises from Foucault’s critique of the “evolutionistic” research of “origin”—understood as Ursprung and not as Entstehung. By highlighting Darwin’s interpretation of the principles of extinction, divergence of character, and of the many complex contingencies and slight modifications in the becoming of species, this essay shows how his genealogical framework demonstrates an affinity, even if only partially, with Foucault’s genealogy.

Nietzsche’s pragmatic genealogy of justice

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the connection between Nietzsche’s early employment of the genealogical method and contemporary neo-pragmatism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by viewing Nietzsche’s writings in the light of neo-pragmatist ideas and reconstructing his approach to justice as a pragmatic genealogy, it seeks to bring out an under-appreciated aspect of his genealogical method which illustrates how genealogy can be used to vindicate rather than to subvert, and accounts for Nietzsche’s lack of historical references. On the other hand, by highlighting what Nietzsche has to offer neo-pragmatism, it seeks to contribute to neo-pragmatism’s conception of genealogy. The paper argues that Nietzsche and the neo-pragmatists share a naturalistic concern and a pragmatist strategy in responding to it. The paper then shows that Nietzsche avoids a reductive form of functionalism by introducing a temporal axis, but that this axis should be understood as a developmental model rather than as historical time. This explains Nietzsche’s failure to engage with history. The paper concludes that pragmatic genealogy can claim a genuinely Nietzschean pedigree.

Denial strategy in Australian strategic thought

ABSTRACTAlthough denial has been at the centre of Australian strategic thought for decades, it has frequently been used as a broad catch-all term. This article shows, however, that there are two distinct denial traditions in Australian strategic thought: anti-access denial and area denial. Despite the different denial strategies having significantly different implications for defence budgets, procurement and force structure, official strategic guidance and defence scholars themselves have rarely specified which variant they are referring to. This article first maps the conceptual genealogy of anti-access denial and area denial within Australian strategic thought, before showing why acknowledging the specific type of denial is critical for policy and operational considerations. In addition to the two traditional approaches to denial, this article introduces a third approach—‘dissuasion by denial’—which, notwithstanding its growing influence in deterrence research and high relevance to twenty-first-century Asia-Pacific security dynamics, has yet to be introduced into Australian denial debates. The article finally addresses the conditions under which each denial strategy would be the most appropriate for Australia.

Deconstruction and Genealogy of Latin American Good Living (Buen Vivir). The (Triune) Good Living and its Diverse Intellectual Wellsprings

The purpose of this chapter is to identify the different meanings of Latin American Good Living (buen vivir) and its diverse intellectual wellsprings, with a focus on the political economy of development. The authors try to answer the following questions: What different types of Good Living lie behind the overall concept? What intellectual wellsprings have the authors drunk from? The authors use the methodological strategies of deconstruction and conceptual genealogy, based on a broad bibliographic review. They conclude that three different types of Latin American Good Living exist: ‘indigenist’ and ‘pachamamist’, socialist and statist, and ‘ecologist’ and ‘post-developmentalist’. Moreover, they argue that synthesised notions of the concept exist. These versions are associated with different intellectual influences, such as sumak kawsay, suma qamaña and allin kawsay; the Andean world view; development with identity; the theory of reciprocity; post-development; liberation theology; dependency theory; the theory of ‘coloniality’; sustainable development; world-system theory; human development; endogenous development; eco-socialism; twenty-first century socialism; social justice; the economics of happiness; eudaemony; the economic theory of relational goods; the social and solidarity economy; intercultural feminism; the feminism of care; eco-feminism; the self-sufficient economy; community economy; barefoot economics and human scale development theory; the Buddhist economy; ‘post-extractivism’; ‘de-growth’; deep ecology and the theory of conviviality.

Dismembering Tennessee Williams: The Global Context of Lee Breuer's A Streetcar Named Desire

Dismembering Tennessee WilliamsThe Global Context of Lee Breuer's A Streetcar Named Desire Daniel Ciba (bio) Over the past sixty years, Tennessee Williams has become one of the most widely produced playwrights worldwide; his works have been translated into many languages, and he is considered by some to be the American Shakespeare.1 As new productions reinterpret the meanings of A Streetcar Named Desire, directors, actors, critics, and audiences attempt to answer questions about the global significance of Williams's most canonical text. Contemporary critics' resistance to and dismissal of Ivo van Hove's Streetcar (1999), deconstructed around a bathtub, confirms a culturally constructed "true" interpretation, generally agreed on by American critics, which firmly locates the text as realistic, performed by realistic characters, and set in a realistic New Orleans.2 Lee Breuer's production of Streetcar, performed at the Comédie Française in Paris in 2011, serves as an example of the complicated politics underlying productions of Streetcar that eschew the realism now associated with the original production and the subsequent film, both directed by Elia Kazan. Reading Breuer's production as an example of cross-cultural dialogue on the global stage, I intend to adapt the concept of "counter-memories" as theorized by Michel Foucault to accentuate the distance between Breuer's nonrealistic global contextualization of the play from memories of Kazan's "realistic" American contexts. In an essay investigating the concept of genealogy via the philosophies of Nietzsche, Foucault develops the term "counter-memory" as a means of discussing the differences between history and reality. To Foucault, counter-memory illustrates an opposition to the monolithic construct of history, which supports the institutionalization of discourse surrounding an author. Foucault claims that the vast difference between constructed history and its counter-memory is a historiographical issue: "We want [End Page 64] historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or point of reference."3 According to Foucault, when considering the sum of an author's work, there exists a dominant history that is assumed to be true, but there also exists a counter-memory that runs counter to that dominant history. Foucault notes that these oppositions "imply a use of history that severs its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a counter-memory—a transformation of history into a totally different form of time."4 By transforming the temporality of history, Foucault seeks to recover Nietzsche's ideas from cultural inscription. Counter-memory, as Foucault describes it, offers an opportunity for historians and critics to escape ideologies that only communicate dominant hegemony. In this analysis, I define counter-memories as disruptions to the culturally inscribed hegemonic reading of a production history. Because Streetcar has entered the American canon as an example of the now globally transmitted institution of American realism, Williams has achieved the status that Foucault attributes to Nietzsche. Williams's works function not only as individual texts that can be interpreted in numerous ways and performed in numerous styles, but also, collectively, as an ideological discourse. In order to adapt Foucault's discursive concept into a practical method for this production history, I assume that much of what has been written about Kazan's production conveys the ideological flaw that Foucault identifies with history. I read moments from Breuer's production as counter-memories to dismember the hegemonic cultural memories surrounding Kazan's production and more thoroughly analyze the global elements beyond a simple comparison to Kazan's. Dismemberment, in relation to the global conversation inherent in Breuer's production, means more than a metaphorical ripping apart of the normative memories surrounding Williams's corpus, especially as they are remembered as sites of institutionalized American realism. I use the verb "dismember" to represent terms employed in my examination of Breuer's production that emphasize the process of remembering beyond the normative concepts typically evoked by production histories. Thus "dismember" becomes an umbrella term for all of the processes derived from my reconsideration of these counter-memories. Although I do not always use the verb dismember, mainly for the sake...

Genealogy and Critical Historicism: Two Models of Enlightenment in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Writings

This article argues that two distinct concepts of Enlightenment coexist uneasily in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. According to the first, genealogical concept, Enlightenment is a bewildered form of self-preservation that has existed since the dawn of Western civilization. The second, critical historicist concept views Enlightenment as the critical and anti-authoritarian ideals articulated—most radically in eighteenth-century France—during the uneven development of modern bourgeois society. After examining the origins of these two concepts in Adorno and Horkheimer’s early writings, the article demonstrates why the former became dominant in Dialectic of Enlightenment, while at the same time pointing to significant traces of the latter that remained. The article contends that a reconsideration of the latter concept reveals of a model of early Critical Theory that can still provide a compelling alternative not only to Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also to more recent attempts to place Critical Theory on normative foundations.

Inventing Drugs: A Genealogy of a Regulatory Concept

The trade in, and consumption of, illicit drugs is perhaps the archetypal ‘wicked problem’ of our time – complex, globalized, and seemingly intractable – and presents us with one of the very hardest legal and policy challenges of the twenty‐first century. The central concept of a ‘drug’ remains under‐theorized and largely neglected by critical socio‐legal and criminological scholars. Drawing on a range of primary archival material and secondary sources, this article sets out a genealogy of the concept, assembled a little over a century ago out of diverse lines of development. It is argued that the drug label is an invented legal‐regulatory construct closely bound up with the global drug prohibition system. Many contemporary features of the ‘war on drugs’ bear traces of this genealogy, notably how drug law enforcement often contributes to racial and social injustice. To move beyond prohibition, radical law and policy reform may require us to abandon the drug concept entirely.

La edición como instrumento de pedagogía feminista en los procesos de traducción intergeneracional

La autora explica los proyectos en los que ha trabajado en el terreno políti-co-cultural desde hace cuarenta y cinco años: la lucha antifranquista de la primera mitad de los años setenta en relación a un panorama cultural que no fue tan gris como se suele pintar. El conocimiento adquirido gracias a la llamada “generación de mayo del 68”, que podemos situar dentro de una genealogía de activismo político, intelectual, cultural y subcultural. La segunda ola de feminismo en el estado español desde 1975. El impacto del punk y el postpunk en la movida de finales de los años setenta y principios de los años 80 ligada a la Transición a la democracia. La relación con la “generación” siguiente de activistas y artistas visuales vascos y anda- luces a principios de los 90. La intervención del feminismo crítico y la teoría, política y arte queer a mitad y a finales de la década de los 90. Diferentes colaboraciones y proyectos in- dividuales en diversas Jornadas Feministas Estatales en la primera década del presente siglo. Proyectos de traducción y edición en di- ferentes formatos desde los años 90 hasta la actualidad.

LANGUAGE AND THE COMMUNICABILITY OF RECEIVED WISDOMS: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES BRIGGS

Charles Briggs was interviewed in his visit to Brazil, where he taught in the School of Advanced Studies on Language and Society: Mobility, Multilingualism, and Globalization. The interview revolves around the ways he approaches transdisciplinary problems while also attempting to trace a genealogy of concepts like entextualization and communicability. Crafted by him in decades of intellectual and political engagement with indigenous communities and the academia, these concepts are widely spread in anthropology, language studies and public health. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

A genealogy of hacking

Hacking is now a widely discussed and known phenomenon, but remains difficult to define and empirically identify because it has come to refer to many different, sometimes incompatible, material practices. This article proposes genealogy as a framework for understanding hacking by briefly revisiting Foucault’s concept of genealogy and interpreting its perspectival stance through the feminist materialist concept of the situated observer. Using genealogy as a theoretical frame, a history of hacking will be proposed in four phases. The first phase is the ‘prehistory’ of hacking in which four core practices were developed. The second phase is the ‘golden age of cracking’ in which hacking becomes a self-conscious identity and community and is for many identified with breaking into computers, even while non-cracking practices such as free software mature. The third phase sees hacking divide into a number of new practices even while old practices continue, including the rise of serious cybercrime, hacktivism, the division of Open Source and Free Software and hacking as an ethic of business and work. The final phase sees broad consciousness of state-sponsored hacking, the re-rise of hardware hacking in maker labs and hack spaces and the diffusion of hacking into a broad ‘clever’ practice. In conclusion, it will be argued that hacking consists across all the practices surveyed of an interrogation of the rationality of information technocultures enacted by each hacker practice situating itself within a particular technoculture and then using that technoculture to change itself, both in changing potential actions that can be taken and changing the nature of the technoculture itself.

Coda: Around and against historicism

An investigation of strategic abuses of genealogy in historiographical critique, the Coda deconstructs animosity latent in historicist criticism, within the context of Medieval Studies, here conceived as a sub-discipline of cultural history. Departing from cultural history’s foundational relationship with the Renaissance as conceived and celebrated as a transition away from the cultural stasis characteristic of the Middle Ages, this essay takes an interest in how the concept of genealogy has been abused in the defense of the health of history’s sustainable continuation as a shared academic enterprise; this complex problem is furthermore evaluated as a mitigating factor in assessments of the relation of Medieval Studies to contemporary sociopolitical concerns, as well as to the continuing evolution of the humanities.

Introduction

Introduction Brian Connolly and Dawn Peterson What does it mean to think about the conjunction of race and kinship in early America? What does it mean to presume that there is a conjunction at all?1 The five articles herein explore this conundrum, revealing that the archives of the early Americas are littered with such intersections. Indeed, their work makes apparent that race, so frequently framed as a genealogical concept preoccupied with heritability, was instrumental in defining kinship—or who could or could not be considered related in blood, bond, or diplomacy—in law, fiction, religion, empire, and the construction of the self. The intersection of race and kinship yields definitions and strategies for governance, settlement and colonization, domination and regulation and simultaneously becomes a site of potential resistance, survival, and endurance in the eras of European and U.S. colonialism. In lieu of an attempt at a comprehensive statement on the state of race and kinship in early American studies, these articles gesture toward numerous locations wherein beliefs and practices about identity and affiliation converge and collide, shaping national boundaries, international relations, intimacy, and self-identity in the process. The intersection of kinship and race has long sat at the nexus of settler colonial imaginaries. To take but two evocative examples that might serve as imperfect bookends to settler visions as they structured early American [End Page 617] colonial and imperial projects, we can consider Henry Neville’s utopian pamphlet Isle of Pines (1668) and Lewis Henry Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family (1871). Henry Neville, a republican politician and satirist, chronicled the stranding of five survivors of an English shipwreck on an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean in 1569. The survivors, who were on their way to establish a trading factory in the East Indies, are the factory bookkeeper George Pine and four women—the factory master’s daughter, Sarah English; two servants, Mary Sparkes and Elizabeth Trevor; and an enslaved woman, Philippa. If the pamphlet served as an imaginative account of the constitution of social relations, it did so in the context of English imperialism, and it privileged concerns with sex, kinship, and race in the constitution of social relations. In Neville’s telling, once the possibility of survival is secured, Pine, as the patriarch of the island, gratifies his sexual desire and then establishes exogamy, both of which are rent by racial (dis)order. Pine first has sex in private, and then, “custome taking away shame,” begins to have sex in public, first with the white servants, then with his master’s daughter, and finally with the enslaved woman, Philippa.2 In accordance with the emerging racial order that deemed women of African descent as at once beautiful and monstrous, Pine claims this last act to be against his will and as a result of a conspiracy among the women.3 In short order, all the women are pregnant, and the populating of the “Isle of Pines” begins in earnest. Depicting a scene that nineteenth-century ethnographers would call “promiscuous intercourse,” the children and the parents engage in endogamous sex out of necessity, until, at some point, George Pine establishes rules of exogamy. When Pine reaches the age of sixty, having increased the population of the island from the original 5 to 565 people, all his children and grandchildren, he establishes rules of exogamy and thus, in establishing rules of kinship, creates modern sociality and nationhood on the island. “I took the Males of one Family, and married them to the females of another, not letting any to marry their sisters, as we did formerly out of necessity.”4 This practice results in four nations descended from the original four women on the island—George Pine remains the patriarch who transcends exogamic, national division. This institution of kinship, which created social order and rules of sexuality, consigns “promiscuous intercourse” to the past and is the basis of social [End Page 618] harmony that persists on the island until the death of George Pine. In the aftermath of his death, the “Phils”—the group descended from Pine and the enslaved Philippa—are the source of growing disorder and all-out war...

Seminar on the Dual Unity and the Phantom

Seminar on the Dual Unity and the Phantom Nicolas Abraham (bio) Translated by Tom Goodwin [End Page 14] What use is the dual unity? My response: anasemia, which is to ask, how is this analytical concept structured and what specific analytical problem is being addressed? The answer here is that it transforms the symbol into metaphor. This additional step is metapsychological in that it concerns a system of concepts that has no status in language other than as the foundation—the condition of possibility and ultimate recourse—of everything we consider to be human. No logical or ontological status can be granted to this construction, and yet it is not arbitrary.1 It is necessitated by clinical requirement, to transform what appears as symbol into analogy, into metaphor. Analytical listening begins the moment when we hear symbols, in place of what the patient says. But what then is the symbol? It is the result of an operation that remains hidden. What appears for example in dream symbolism is in reality a series of enigmas that allude to something different from their manifest meaning. However, every symbol is originally a metaphor. It is only by a forced forgetting, through the repression of its metaphoric origin, that it becomes a symbol, which, of course, implies a mechanism of repression. When the two "parts" come together, the symbol ceases to be a symbol. But where does the metaphor come from? It comes from the incorporation of the original detachment that is overcome. Having lost one of its parts, the metaphor becomes a symbol; the metaphor realizes this cut (coupure) metaphorically. The symbol, therefore, is in its very being the analogue of this cut (because of what it lacks) which may, however, be grasped in the resemblance of its complement to what is lacking in the subject. So when the missing part is returned, the original metaphor is restored. The symbol is therefore a double metaphor, symbolizing that which is cut and the cut itself. When we listen to our patients and take their words as symbolic, we have made up our mind to restore what is cut with the moment of cutting (introjection of the repressed) and to create, at the level of the word, a new totality. The transformation of the symbol into a metaphor, however, seldom succeeds by means of the metapsychological "witch," particularly in cases where the unconscious contains a phantom (the presence of a foreign body in the unconscious) or when there is a crypt in the ego.2 Ultimately the great discovery of psychoanalysis was this possibility of transformation. Psychoanalytic theory is fundamentally a theory of this initial experience, which is subsequently enriched by others and requires the continual reworking and readjustment of the psychical apparatus. This establishes psychoanalysis as a science capable of evolution; an exact science like theoretical physics. It was with regard to the Wolf Man, for example, that Freud began to reformulate the "witch" in 1914 over concerns with melancholic identification. Even if this reformulation began too late as he sketched out his second topography, the fact remains that his notion of the superego took an important step toward the idea that filial relationships produce psychical topography in the individual. Admittedly though, this filial relationship is restricted to the superego and does not yet extend to unconscious desire. It is necessary to introduce the dual unity into metapsychology as the exemplary genealogical concept to successfully transform the symbol into metaphor in cases where metapsychology has been hidden or distorted by the presence in the subject of what we [End Page 15] call the phantom in the unconscious. It is the same for certain cases of cryptophoria or in other cases where the subject has been entirely decentered by the phantom of an object or a phantom object. The dual unity is thus the witch's broom that allows metapsychology to take flight and land in a more suitable place. >> The Concept of the One as a Separate-Unseparated, The Parable of the "Society of My Right Hand" The notion of a unity can only be defined in terms of its separation from a context...

Estrutura formal e semântica do argumento autogenealógico em Nietzsche

O objetivo do texto é analisar a estrutura formal e semântica daquilo que denomino de argumento autogenealógico em Nietzsche, culminando com um breve esboço das suas formas de comunicabilidade. Do ponto de vista formal, trata-se de compreender o conceito de genealogia em seu registro crítico, em estreita conexão com uma práxis interrogativa fomentadora de um distanciamento metódico; do ponto de vista semântico, trata-se de compreender que aquilo que era elaborado por Nietzsche até 1887 em Para genealogia da moral com vistas à cultura, realiza-se nos textos de 1888 com vistas a si mesmo. Finalizo com um breve e plausível sentido de autoencenação, na medida em que Nietzsche transforma a si mesmo em figura de pensamento, especialmente em Ecce homo.

Musik als Brennglas

Abstract This essay examines, with reference to the defense function of collective traumas, two examples of pieces composed after the two world wars of the 20th century. The starting point is a genealogical concept of collective violence in which individuals and societies are seen as products of simultaneous individuation and socialisation processes. Abductive conclusions drawn from a first analysis of musical structures and contexts of origin suggest that a simple defense character or unilateral identification with the trauma-compensating pattern is unlikely. Systematic reception research on the effect and evaluation of the listener, which could throw further light on these issues, has yet to be undertaken.

Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the Orlando Furioso by Eleonora Stoppino (review)

Reviewed by: Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the Orlando Furioso by Eleonora Stoppino Deanna Shemek Eleonora Stoppino, Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Dynastic Imagination in the Orlando Furioso New York: Fordham University Press, 2012, 226 pp. + 42. Genealogies of Fiction is an elegantly argued and meticulously researched study. Enabling its many insights are two features of the author’s orientation: as a scholar of both medieval and Renaissance literature, she recognizes neither period as superior to the other; and she ardently embraces the richness of popular culture, both medieval and early modern. These attitudes fuel a fresh and insightful reading of the book’s primary focus, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532). Illustrating how tightly chivalric culture, the early modern dynastic system, and gender relations were intertwined in the court of Ariosto’s patrons, the Este of Ferrara, Genealogies revises both literary and dynastic histories, employing the concept of genealogy as “an interpretive tool, a dimension of history, and a defining feature of cultural production” (2). The Furioso’s classicism is well known, but it constitutes only a fraction of the poem’s literary heritage. Genealogies addresses what has been missed in the critical emphasis on Ariosto’s humanism and the disavowal of his enormous debt to medieval, often popular and anonymous sources. Chapter one establishes the book’s methodology by surveying a range of earlier texts that, like Ariosto’s, feature a woman warrior who will marry only a man who can defeat her in a duel. Stoppino observes that this figure recurs in dozens of medieval chivalric tales that were unquestionably familiar to Ariosto’s contemporaries. Comparing their exploits, she identifies these characters as generic sites of anxiety about exogamic marriage. Marriage outside the local group was a practical necessity in medieval societies but also a risk. The fact that, in Bradamante, Ariosto posits one of these dueling women as not only an ancestor but the conscious and chosen founder of his patrons’ dynasty is one of the most intriguing features of the Furioso and a topic of Stoppino’s sustained attention. Chapter two relates the chivalric women warriors to the classical Amazons, arguing that the revival of Amazonian imagery in Ercole d’Este’s Ferrara marked a society obsessed with fears of illegitimacy (59). As single-sex communities where men served only instrumentally, the Amazons asserted total control over reproduction [End Page 400] and patent disregard for paternal lineage. Stoppino argues that in dynastic families like the Este, female warrior characters were objects of a fascination fed by both fear and hope, for just as the Este were moving to expunge illegitimate offspring from the hereditary axis (4), they were also affording greater power and prestige to foreign wives who could guarantee (or threaten) the legitimate familial line. Chapter three, on the “paradox of Helen,” examines moments in epic texts when women are torn between loyalty to homeland and to their new communities. Here Stoppino considers Ariosto’s Lidia (OF XXXIV), who is damned to hell for ingratitude to a prospective husband. Only by referring to his medieval sources, she argues, may we see how through Lidia’s story Ariosto questions the possibility of female agency in the contemporary political system. Acknowledging Dante, Boccaccio, and Ovid as influences, Stoppino explores another close relation, the Cantare di Febus, which revolves around apprehensions regarding the actions of a foreign bride. She then loops back to connect Lidia to Vergil’s Lavinia, stressing the “superimposed memories of [these] different textual models” (106). Lidia thus stands as an especially complex literary creation: the product of Ariosto’s “‘medieval’ reading” of classical sources (89) and an argument for “horizontal” genealogies rather than vertical lines of textual descent for the Orlando furioso itself (90). Chapter four turns to four episodes in the Furioso where Bradamante receives prophetic revelations about her progeny and sees the Estes’ future depicted in frescoes and tapestries. This knowledge is delivered in the first two instances not by the magician Merlin but by his associate, the sorceress Melissa; in the fourth case it comes via Melissa from the ancient Cassandra, speaker of prophecies no one believes. Thus for the first time in...

Population, race and gender: on the genealogy of the modern politics of reproduction

In this article I explore the genealogy of the modern politics of reproduction. My claim is that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a political-epistemic regime emerged that came to function as a kind of matrix for subsequent projects of regulating and intervening in processes of reproduction. In particular, I show how this regime was constituted through the three interrelated biopolitical problematics of ‘population’, ‘race', and ‘gender’. In the first part, I reconstruct articulations of the concept of reproduction with regard to ideas about the contingency and regularity of reproductive processes that played an important role for the formation of strategies of ‘improving’ the population. The next section shows that the notion of reproduction was constitutive for the formulation of the genealogical concept of race, and that it was closely intertwined with the political regulation of global reproductive relations. Third, I analyse how the concept of reproduction from the late eighteenth century on was enmeshed with ideas of sexual complementarity. Sexual reproduction, I argue, was one of the main reference points on which cultural and social assumptions about the modern order of the family, based on the parental heterosexual couple, relied. In the final part of the article I argue that rethinking biopolitics from the perspective of the politics of reproduction is crucial for understanding synchronic and diachronic entanglements of contemporary politics of reproduction that otherwise often remain unnoticed.

The importance of iteration in creative conceptual combination

Theories of creative conceptual combination hypothesize that, to generate highly creative concepts, one should attempt to combine source concepts that are very different from each other. While lab studies show a robust link between far combinations and increased novelty of concepts, empirical evidence that far combinations lead to more creative concepts (i.e., both more novel and of higher quality) is mixed. Drawing on models of the creative process, we frame conceptual combination as a divergent process, and hypothesize that iteration is necessary to convert far combinations into creative concepts. We trace conceptual genealogies of many hundreds of concepts proposed for a dozen different problems on a large-scale Web-based innovation platform, and model the effects of combination distance on creative outcomes of concepts. The results are consistent with our predictions: (1) direct effects of far combinations have a mean zero effect, and (2) indirect effects of far combinations (i.e., building on concepts that themselves build on far combinations) have more consistently positive effects. This pattern of effects is robust across problems on the platform. These findings lend clarity to theories of creative conceptual combination, and highlight the importance of iteration for generating creative concepts.