Ethical Stakes Research Articles

Accountabilities: Authority, Feminism, West

A major resurgence of feminist thought and action is happening. New energy and fight is showing itself in US public and scholarly life alike. (1) It's political moment, to be sure--a moment of emergency in US accompanied by worldwide feminist mobilization and global Women's Marches of January 2017. A certain doldrums or feminist fatigue has been interrupted--a rude awakening and opening out from accumulated malaise laid on by Western world postfeminist and postracial neoliberalisms of last fifteen years. Clearly, a jostling on this scale does not appear without a history. This special issue of Studies in Novel, set in motion in summer of 2016 before election of Donald Trump, indicates one piece of that history. Edited by Sigrid Anderson Cordell and Carrie Johnston, issue chronicles work of cultural critics and literary scholars as they strategize about research on issues of women, gender, and sexuality, and geopolitical space of US West. An upcoming seminar in March 2018 of C-19, Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, led by Jennifer Turtle and Jean Pfaelzer, will be devoted to Feminist Critical Regionalism and Climate of Western Literary Studies, offering another sign that more focused work is coming. (2) Of course short and longer-end effects of these scholarly efforts, not to mention feminist activisms as they unfold in real time, is question of hour. Reading this special issue, one has sense that working on US from feminist perspectives is something of an extreme sport--you need to be in shape for it. as an imagination, as a material place, as a history, always seems to get upper hand, to take back immediately whatever benefit was gained through rebellion, refusal, or critical intervention. The reason for its particular force field of power, which scholars have written a great deal about, has to do with regional as a double for US nation--the story of settling is story of America. Perhaps major critical intervention of last twenty years in field of western literary studies is to delink region from nation and to reposition as global (Kollin), spectral (Tatum), relationally transnational (Hsu), a system of local/global Wests (Comer 2010), westness (Campbell), or border space (Saldivar). This repositioning has reframed regional analyses in transnational and critical regional directions in order to accomplish various kinds of intrusions on knowledges of empire as well as established radically alternative genealogies and lived geographies. Moreover, critical turn to Wests, to westness as a system and colonial world network, has brought phenomenon of settler colonialism into fore of critical field. The US is an example par excellence of not just Anglo settler logics and history (Wolfe, Veracini) but simultaneous and competing Spanish colonialities and modernities (Aranda). Settler maps, meanings, and place making has been made more textured still for US studies by way of enormous offerings of Indigenous studies. The recent expansion and depth of that field as a field (Allen), what it teaches about ongoing or enduring indigeneity (Kauanui), fact of thoroughly different and incommensurate understandings of place and territory (Byrd) that map over and inhabit so-called West toward indigenous histories and futures (Bernardin)--all of these have reoriented political and ethical stakes, and epistemological contexts, for scholars' work. Notwithstanding any of this activity, however, and not a surprise given imperial origin stories at stake, the of popular discourse--that place of proving and opportunity and settler sovereignty--bounces back in culture and politics with regularity and ease. What also bounces back is masculine whiteness of discourse. Even as field of US study has moved into transnational and global framings, and into a sustained reckoning with competing settler colonialities, there is not yet a simultaneously wholesale critical reckoning with nexus of racialized women, gender, and sexuality across these scales and histories (Comer 2015, 2016). …

Recursive, Restorative, Respite

Recursive, Restorative, Respite Lynne Huffer (bio) Recursive What a joy it has been to engage these reflections on my work. Reading the commentaries in this dossier feels like returning to old friends, picking up dropped threads and recommitting to the thing we are making together. I am deeply grateful to Meridith Kruse and David Rubin for curating these commentaries, to Feminist Formations for publishing them in its pages, and to all my interlocutors for their careful, fervent, and inventive engagements. I cannot do justice to the detail of these responses, but I hope the reverberation of my thought with theirs will be apparent to those who read this. Importantly, I want to place this recursive movement under the sign of ethics, as an ethical practice of writing and thinking. The practice is ethical because, in my view, the postmoral excavation of our age—our ethos—requires this kind of Nietzschean recoiling movement: a genealogical spiral, a retraversal of a present-day land of morality that Foucault called catastrophic. The historical sediment we call the archive is crucial to that recursivity. The threads of thoughts articulated, dropped, and picked up again are a crucial part of that archive. In my own writing, I try to practice this recoiling movement. Mad for Foucault (2010) is recursive: the book returns to Foucault's first major book, History of Madness ([1961] 2006), to rethink the foundations of queer theory. Like Nietzschean genealogy, this return takes the form of a spiral. One of queer theory's oft-noted beginnings is Foucault's later text, History of Sexuality Volume One ([1976] 1990). Mad for Foucault begins there, but doubles back to History of Madness for a different perspective on the history of sexuality than the one we find in queer theory's Foucauldian Ur-text. I track queer theory as a Freudo-Foucauldian de-historicization of the history of the sexual psyche History of Madness tells. Spiraling back to its own beginning in Foucauldian queer theory, Mad for Foucault returns there, with Madness, carrying something new: a Foucauldian ethics of eros. [End Page 198] These spiraling returns in Mad for Foucault are doubled again in Are the Lips a Grave? (2013), a book I stage as a post-Foucauldian return to Irigaray. Having written about Irigaray in an earlier book, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures (1998), I thought I had exhausted what I had to say about her. But my immersion in Foucault's History of Madness produced something generative and unexpected: a return to Irigaray. With that return came a fractured convergence between Foucault's and Irigaray's genealogical methods. The return was generative because it enhanced the ethical stakes of the disciplinary separation that drove the book: the queer-feminist rift that gave us feminism, gender, and strong ethical claims, on the one hand, and, on the other, the queer, sexuality, and a suspicion of ethics. Bringing Foucault and Irigaray together under the rubric of an erotic ethics allowed me to rework that rift in ways that went beyond my own autobiographical identifications, producing a queer feminist that, as Angela Willey puts it, is "something more than an amalgamation." In this counterdisciplinary Foucault-Irigaray convergence, I found another surprise: a queer theory doubling back to feminism in an erotic restoration of rifts. That recoiling movement is "lipkinky," as Kyoo Lee poetically puts it. Its structure is lamella-like, David Rubin suggests, rendering ambiguous, like a Moebius strip, the inside/outside divisions of the psyche-driven self. The nonlinear, spiraling structure I have just described also characterizes my own "liplinking" (Lee) writing process. The "earlier" book, Mad for Foucault, emerged out of Are the Lips a Grave? (2013), a book that came "later." I began writing Lips in the late 1990s. Over years of writing, I increasingly found myself turning to Foucault as a resource for thinking about sexual ethics. "A brief chapter on Foucault, just here, will do nicely," I thought. That brief chapter became monstrous, an excess I could not fully control. As my ethical thinking increasingly drew on Madness, the chapter I had imagined continued to grow far beyond the proportions I had originally given it. Thus the "brief chapter" in Are the...

Securing with algorithms: Knowledge, decision, sovereignty

Amid the deployment of algorithmic techniques for security – from the gathering of intelligence data to the proliferation of smart borders and predictive policing – what are the political and ethical stakes involved in securing with algorithms? Taking seriously the generative and world-making capacities of contemporary algorithms, this special issue draws attention to the embodied actions of algorithms as they extend cognition, agency and responsibility beyond the conventional sites of the human, the state and sovereignty. Though focusing on different modes of algorithmic security, each of the contributions to the special issue shares a concern with what it means to claim security on the terrain of incalculable and uncertain futures. To secure with algorithms is to reorient the embodied relation to uncertainty, so that human and non-human cognitive beings experimentally generate and learn what to bring to the surface of attention for a security action.

Reproducibility and transparency in biomedical sciences

The biomedical research sciences are currently facing a challenge highlighted in several recent publications: concerns about the rigor and reproducibility of studies published in the scientific literature.Research progress is strongly dependent on published work. Basic science researchers build on their own prior work and the published findings of other researchers. This work becomes the foundation for preclinical and clinical research aimed at developing innovative new diagnostic tools and disease therapies. At each of the stages of research, scientific rigor and reproducibility are critical, and the financial and ethical stakes rise as drug development research moves through these stages. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Imitation (In)Security: Cultivating Mimetic Theory to Critique the Media/Security Nexus

Contemporary media culture frequently associates security with imitation. This essay theorizes critique of related textuality within the contemporary “media/security nexus.” It advocates for enhanced usage of mimetic theory to critique media representation of security, as that condition is pursued through cultural practices of adaptation, disguise, and simulation. Two competing traditions of mimetic theory are reviewed, along with their appropriations in the fields of media studies and security studies. Four benefits are proposed for mimetic critique of “media/security.” The essay concludes by considering the ethical and political stakes of this critique.

Posthuman Ecologies and the More-than-Human World

Posthuman Ecologies and the More-than-Human World

The ethical stakes in monetary valuation methods for conservation purposes

The involvement of economic approaches is increasingly pervasive in conservation practices, from environmental policies to procedures determining the choice of conservation projects. The literature on the ethical weaknesses of economic approaches suggests to question the self-evidence of these interactions. However, economics encompasses a variety of approaches and methods, with unclear ethical underpinnings. This article contributes to these debates through a focused clarification of the ethical presuppositions of monetary valuations methods. This choice reflects that monetary valuation studies are expanding and provide numerous opportunities of interactions with conservation biologists. Identifying and understanding their ethical presuppositions is therefore pivotal for conservation biologists. For that purpose, we provide a glossary of the ethical concepts underpinning the current monetary valuation methods. We show that using a given monetary valuation method commits to endorse specific ethical stances. We then develop a practical case study: the conservation of a population of the endangered plant Leucanthemum burnatii Briq. & Cav. in a semi-natural site in the French Alps. We describe the steps that a conservation biologist could follow to decide whether she should seize opportunities to work with economists implementing monetary valuations in this setting. These stepping stones structure the approach that conservation biologists can deploy to identify the ethical stakes of conservation/economics interactions. This approach can also prove useful for conservation biologists to reflexively clarify their own ethical motivations. By appropriating this approach, conservation biologists can equip themselves to enter public debates to legitimize the usage of scientific results to improve collective decision-making on conservation issues.

Politics of Vulnerability and Responsibility for Ordinary Others

The ethics of care has contributed to modifying a dominant conception of ethics and changed the way we conceive vulnerability. It has introduced ethical stakes into politics, weakening, through its critique of theories of justice, the seemingly obvious link between an ethics of justice and political liberalism. However, care corresponds to a quite ordinary reality: the fact that people look after one another, take care of one another and thus are responsible. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethics of care to the idea of the vulnerability of the human as it is developed in the moral philosophy inspired by Wittgenstein (and explored by Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and Veena Das).

Witnessing Capital Punishment: Vigny's Ambivalent Bystander

In his historical novels, Alfred de Vigny links questions of free will and political agency to spectacles of public execution. His fiction places witnesses of death in predicaments where time seems to slow as they experience the longing to take action alongside the constraint of being caught up in the course of events, history, and normative behaviour. Despite the near impossibility of saving the condemned, executions tempt Vigny's protagonists to interfere. When they fail to take timely action, they experience the helplessness of vicarious death. Vigny's scenes of capital punishment highlight contradictions in the author's philosophy of political disengagement while creating thought experiments that address the ethical and epistemological stakes of watching others die. I argue that Vigny reshaped arguments against the death penalty by interrogating human capacity for free will, knowledge, and action.

Language Ecologies: Ethics, Community, and Digital Affect

The global linguasphere is in a state of ecological and humanitarian crisis. In a powerful meditation in pmla, simon gikandi notes that the loss of any language (and of a culture sustained by it) is worthy of mourning and that language death around the globe is a matter of urgent collective concern. Relating great emotion when the “UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger confronted me with the bleak reality of language endangerment measured in maps, graphs, and data sets,” he ponders the ethical and political stakes of widespread language loss (9). He ends by quoting (and translating) a poem by the anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla “captur[ing] what happens when a language dies” (13), and he builds to a stark closing dictum: “Letting a language die is an injustice, a denial of will to those who speak it” (14). In this forceful essay, metaphorical discourse of language death gives way to a poignant elegy that registers a strong affective and political investment in the sustainment of languages.

Ebola contacts' surveillance: social impact and ethical issues in Senegal

RésuméLa surveillance des sujets contacts de personnes contaminées par le virus Ébola a pour objectif de contrôler les chaînes de transmission. Cette mesure soulève des questions d’éthique qui imposent de documenter ses modalités d’application et ses effets sociaux. L’étude a été menée au Sénégal sur la base d’entretiens approfondis auprès de 43 sujets contacts du cas survenu à Dakar d’une personne venue de Guinée contaminée par le virus Ébola, complétés par des observations. La surveillance avec confinement à domicile a été appliquée différemment aux co-résidents du malade et aux agents de santé. Les aides matérielles furent indispensables, la dimension relationnelle et la protection contre la stigmatisation étaient appréciées. Mais l’information a été insuffisante pour lever l’angoisse d’être contaminé ou de contaminer des proches, et certains ont éprouvé une souffrancemorale, la perte de leurs revenus et/ou de leur emploi. Les modalités de surveillance des sujets contacts devraient être plus acceptables et adaptées. Le rapport entre inconvénients et bénéfices reste à évaluer d’un point de vue de santé publique.

The Spectral Return of Cinema: Globalization and Cinephilia in Contemporary Chinese Film

The article traces the responses of Chinese directors, industry policy makers, and critics to film’s globalization and digitization. The debate in China foregrounds how the endorsement and repudiation of the CGI-rich blockbuster are based not only on aesthetic taste and concern about film’s indexicality but also on an ethical engagement with the ideological consequences of globalization. Supporters of the blockbuster model have invoked the urgency to catch up with Hollywood. Those seeking an alternative have relied on cinephiliac sentiments, insisting on the specificity of cinematic traditions. Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew (2010) in particular calls for a reassessment of the relationship between the profilmic event and its cinematic record, underlining the ethical stakes in contemporary debates on visual memory.

Alain Badiou's anabasis: rereading Paul Celan against Heidegger

The essay examines Alain Badiou's concept of ‘anabasis’ and its disclosure in the poetry of Paul Celan. As a conceptualisation of the process of subject formation, anabasis is read as a rejoinder to that of ‘homecoming’, found in Martin Heidegger's appropriation of Friedrich Hölderlin's poems. Following an excursus on the philosophical and the ethical stakes at the heart of these movements, the essay close-reads two of Celan's poems in order to reveal poetry's own attempts to think through trajectories of emergent subjectivities in the wake of twentieth-century violence, as well as the as yet understated centrality of Celan's poetry to Badiou's wider philosophical project.

Time for a new act

Pearce tackles two recent climate change interventions. The pope's encyclical on climate change on Jun 18 didn't say anything new scientifically. But it used a different language. It raised the ethical stakes, and challenged the often-conservative religious world to step up as stewards of the planet. A week later, a court in the Netherlands broke new ground by ordering the Dutch government to do more to fight climate change--rising seas pose a particular threat to this low-lying country. Courts in other countries will hear similar class actions from those whose lives are blighted by climate change.

Collective Disindividuation and/or Barbarism: Technics and Proletarianization

This essay serves as an overview of Bernard Stiegler’s project by offering a critical examination of “(de)proletarianization” and the pharmakon as refracted through his writings on technics (tekhnē), and his commitment to associations such as Ars Industrialis. I argue that in approaching the relation between society and the technical system as the very question of the pharmakon (that which is both poisonous and curative), Stiegler’s work allows ethical questions to eschew sites of transcendental judgment as well as ethical absolutes in order to instead become questions of art—of ars and of tekhnē. I then proceed with the assertion that Stiegler recognizes in our postglobal society what he calls a state of generalized proletarianization, a state in which there is a loss of knowledge on the part of individuals and collectives in terms of both savoir-faire (know-how) and savoir-vivre (knowing how to live). I then establish that his work gestures toward a “system of care” intended to cultivate new modes of individual and collective existence through what he calls “nootechnologies,” or technologies of the spirit and mind. These technologies, however, bear within them the question of the pharmakon insofar as they are made manifest through hypomnemata, or pharmacological artificial memory supports. In order to better situate the political and ethical stakes of Stiegler’s thought of (de)proletarianization, the remainder of the essay reads several of Stiegler’s models (individuation, citizenship, memory, disorientation) alongside the work of his interlocuters including Derrida, Plato, Marx, Heidegger, and Blanchot.

Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German idealism, and modernity

Ever since Kant and Hegel, the notion of autonomy - the idea that we are beholden to no law except one we impose upon ourselves - has been considered the truest philosophical expression of human freedom. But could our commitment to autonomy, as Theodor Adorno asked, be responsible for the extreme evils that we have witnessed in modernity? In Autonomy After Auschwitz, Martin Shuster explores this difficult question with astonishing theoretical acumen, examining the precise ways autonomy can lead us down a path of evil and how it might be prevented from doing so. Shuster uncovers dangers in the notion of autonomy as it was originally conceived by Kant. Putting Adorno into dialogue with a range of European philosophers, notably Kant, Hegel, Horkheimer, and Habermas - as well as with a variety of contemporary Anglo-American thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, and Robert Pippin - he illuminates Adorno's important revisions to this fraught concept and how his different understanding of autonomous agency, fully articulated, might open up new and positive social and political possibilities. Altogether, Autonomy After Auschwitz is a meditation on modern evil and human agency, one that demonstrates the tremendous ethical stakes at the heart of philosophy.

Sub-Abstract Bodies: The Epistemic and Ethical Role of the Body-Mind Relationship in Adorno’s Philosophy

The aim of this paper is threefold. In the first place, I should like to show that Adorno’s philosophy is dependent, to a degree perhaps not always directly recognized in the literature, on a deeply contentious view on the relationship between the mind and the body. In order to show this, I explore and bring out the epistemic and ethical stakes for Adorno’s theory of the relationship between mind and body. Secondly, I move to better articulate precisely what Adorno’s view on the nature of this relationship is. I hold that his position revolves around positing a porous boundary between the domains of the somatic and the cognitive. In closing, I show that Adorno’s account relies on this domain boundary being unidirectionally porous, in that determination of somatic impulses by cognitive content does not seem a live option for Adorno. I go on to note that this smuggles in a dubious position which does a lot of unearned work. The stakes which his implicit account of the body and mind relationship served to secure thereby come once more to look highly vulnerable.

Rotting Bodies

Any community supposedly identified with a “single” kind of Christianity is likely to contain conflicts and divisions due to the different logics and temporalities associated, respectively, with ecclesiastical institutions, popular practices, and scriptural texts. These conflicts may extend even to basic ontological assumptions. This article looks at clashes concerning popular practices surrounding relics and icons in Eastern Orthodoxy. It asks what are the ethical stakes when people insist on the powers of material things even in the face of withering criticism and contempt from inside and outside their church. That criticism, which can have both theological and atheistic bases, often focuses on the allegedly instrumental reasoning and selfish motives of people who expect to receive divine intervention from objects such as relics and icons. I argue that popular practices that focus on the agency of objects may above all be responding to material properties as ethical affordances. These affordances provide ways of treating the world as ethically saturated. In the Eastern Orthodox context, this may be one way for ordinary villagers to take lofty theological claims about the divine nature of humans in concrete terms.

Freudian modalities of disbelief

This article can be characterized as a ‘rediscovery’ of a notion of psychoanalysis that had disappeared or had been confused by later operations. The authors explore a Freudian notion that has been unjustly misunderstood, especially because of the multiple ways in which ‘Unglaube’ – disbelief – has been translated. We shall establish the archaeology of this term in Freud by extracting its three significant modes. Firstly, paranoiac disbelief designates an unconscious process of the rejection of belief in the subject's first encounter with a sexual reality that is always traumatic. Secondly, the obsessional neurotic's disbelief, which we shall call ‘incredulity’, is a secondary, less radical refusal of belief, one that is different from its paranoiac counterpart. Finally, we shall envision a third – dialectical – type of disbelief, which Freud called ‘act of disbelief’ and which will enable us to approach the fundamental epistemic and ethical stakes for psychoanalysis.

Transcranial stimulation of the developing brain: a plea for extreme caution.

Transcranial stimulation can be used to modulate the activity of the brain. Recent developments in our understanding of technologies such as transcranial magnetic or electrical stimulation have afforded reasonable grounds for optimism that techniques such as TMS or tDCS might be effective treatments for neurally-mediated disorders. Researchers have demonstrated encouraging benefits of TMS and tDCS in treating conditions such as tinnitus (Burger et al., 2011), depression (Arul-Anandam and Loo, 2009), and stroke (Nowak et al., 2010). Collectively these techniques are often referred to as “non-invasive brain stimulation” (NIBS), although I would argue that this term is not appropriate since in all cases energy is being transferred across the skull (Davis and van Koningsbruggen, 2013), and the use of this term may be misleading to the general public who are not aware of the documented risks associated with these procedures. More recently it has been suggested that brain stimulation be used to treat neurological disorders in pediatric cases. A recent review by Vicario and Nitsche (2013a) identified a number of opportunities and challenges for the use of brain stimulation in children. Here I offer a plea for calm and for caution. The ethical stakes in clinical and research procedures with children are high enough that a conservative approach is warranted. Many of the ethical issues, relevant both to adult and child participants, have been touched on by other authors (e.g., Cohen Kadosh et al., 2012; Krause and Cohen Kadosh, 2013); however this paper will focus on the gaps in our knowledge that affect our ability to assess risk in translating brain stimulation procedures to pediatric cases. There are a number of known risks associated with brain stimulation. Mild side-effects may include scalp tenderness, headache or dizziness, which are typically associated with the mechanism of delivery or with being immobilized in a chair or frame, and which may be under-reported (Brunoni et al., 2011). More serious effects may include seizure, mood changes or induction of hyper- or hypo-mania. However, the risk of seizure is low, at around 0.1% of adult cases and around 0.2% of pediatric reports, although these figures may not reflect unreported off-label use of the techniques (Rossi et al., 2009). These more serious symptoms are largely associated with people who already possess a degree of susceptibility, such as people with a history of epilepsy (Davis et al., 2013). Adult brain stimulation is thought be reasonably safe when used within defined limits (see below), however here I wish to focus on a number of factors that complicate the translation of TMS and tDCS protocols to pediatric cases. I will focus on the key unknowns in brain stimulation research: 1. The unknown effects of stimulation; 2. The unknown side-effects of stimulation; 3. The lack of clear dosing guidelines; 4. The lack of translational studies from adults to children. I will set out these “known unknowns” in translating our knowledge about TMS and tDCS effects to clinical pediatric applications, and touch on the practical and ethical barriers to their widespread usage.