Rearguard Action Research Articles

Analysis, Philosophy and the Challenge of Critical Theory: Michael Spitzer’s <i>Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style</i>

Michael Spitzer’s Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style (Indiana University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-253-34724-6) pursues multiple lines of scholarly enquiry. As a musicological study, the book advances an historicist agenda, which grounds the understanding of Beethoven’s music in an extension of its contemporaneous philosophical context. As a music-analytical study, it proposes an approach based on fluid philosophical and style-historical categories, and so opposes the quasi-scientific, theory-heavy strategies that increasingly dominate transatlantic music analysis. As a template for current scholarly practice, Music as Philosophy fights a rearguard action against the postmodern opprobrium that Adorno and his descendents have recently endured. This review article evaluates Spitzer’s study against the background of recent critical engagements with Adorno’s legacy, especially that advanced by Richard Taruskin, estimating the analytical efficacy of Spitzer’s Adornian apparatus, and appraising the defence of critical theory it mounts, in view of the postmodern hostility such modes of thought have of late provoked.

Patent crunch pending

Drug makers are fighting a rear-guard action against patent laws that are before the US Congress. Meredith Wadman reports.

Regulating enterprise IT [IT security

This article discusses the explosions of regulations in IT security. Injustice through information manipulation is big business. This has been a response to the growing ability of criminals and unscrupulous corporations to take advantage of electronic data. While legislators and governing bodies are fighting a rearguard action against impropriety and illegality, information professionals occupy the very point where the buck stops. They are guardians of corporate information through storage, communications and continuity plans, and they are also facilitators for automated processes, data collection and governance. But it's not just legislation; there is also a selection of standards, guidelines and best practices to consider.

Front Porch

Front Porch Harry L. Watson Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. In "Kure Beach to Asheville: Snapshots from North Carolina's I-40 Corridor," Gyoung-Youl Jeong photographs some of the state's sights along its longest highway. Southerners, unite. It's time we put a stop to pernicious innovations. Even nostalgia is not what it used to be. In the good old days, I'll have you know, "nostalgia" was just a fancy term for homesickness. Nowadays, in an unforgivable neologism, linguistic barbarians define it as sentimental longing for times past. How dare they tamper with nostalgia? If you don't believe me, check the Oxford English Dictionary. O tempora! O mores! While we fight that rearguard action, however, we might as well admit that nostalgia by either definition has long been a standard option on southern sensibilities. Before the "late unpleasantness," for example, popular romances portrayed the plantation as a fond anachronism that was sadly doomed to fade against the pressure of modernity. Decades ago, critic William Taylor aptly pegged these images [End Page 1] as efforts to soothe the sting of booming northern capitalism by contrasting it with a kinder, gentler South. Nostalgia of place and time also suffused the nineteenth-century minstrel show, especially in famous tunes like "Carry Me Back to Ol' Virginny," "Old Folks at Home," and "My Old Kentucky Home." And we all remember that pensive line from the most famous minstrel tune of all: "Old times there are not forgotten." Fed by sentiments like these, some people could ignore the plantation's real brutality and start feeling nostalgic for the Old South before it was even old. Both as homesickness and as longing for the good old days, nostalgia is still a powerful force in southern culture. The minstrel show is gone, but southern singers still "wanta go home," as Flatt and Scruggs put it. For while southerners are famously attached to place, migration and dispersal have been central to their modern experience, from the African American Great Migration to the lesser known journeys that took whites to outposts like Bakersfield, California. The resulting regrets transcend the usual racial barriers—compare the passenger on the "Midnight Train to Georgia," who is "goin' back to find the simpler place and time," to "The Man of Constant Sorrow," whose troubles started when he "bid farewell to old Kentucky, the place where [he] was born and raised." Nostalgia isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some of it's just plain inevitable, as when parents try to pass along memories to baffled children. Bland Simpson starts this issue off with a beautiful example of that kind of nostalgia, as he tells the story of Machelhe Island, located in the Pasquotank River near Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Simpson grew up on that river, and in this excerpt from his latest book, he reflects on his memories of the place and the many barriers between those memories and the perceptions of his son. Simpson's admiration for times past is palpable but realistic, as he reviews the human procession of Indians, slaves, boatmen, and industrialists who have passed along the Pasquotank for centuries. He does not seem to want to return to past time so much as to honor the people who struggled then by holding them in memory. Simpson struggles with the difficulty of conveying all these fading memories to his boy, but I think he will succeed. After all, Simpson learned these stories from others before him, and with his help, we and his son can do the same. Nostalgia has an innate affinity for the natural world. Beloved memories always seem to lean toward times when things were cleaner, greener, and purer than they are in the world of industry and pollution. But industry has now been around the South for a pretty long time, and if you look at Bland Simpson's memories closely, the Pasquotank's industrial past seems more prominent than its older wildness. Whether it's the exhausted oyster beds or the bankrupt lumber mill or the vanished boat traffic, Simpson keeps evoking the people who tried to get rich off his river, some succeeding for a time...

Participatory Fruits: Spiritual Inquiry

This contribution to the cartography of spiritual inquiry explores its grounding in three interdepedent kinds of inquiry – personal, collaborative and cultural – and makes a brief evaluation of the relevance of the perennial philosophy. It then outlines a dipolar theology of the divine as the manifest and the spiritual, the manifest in terms of the phenomenal and the subtle, and the spiritual in terms of its three modes the situational, the immanent and the transcendent. It considers the validity of spiritual insights, the nature of human mediation between the divine poles, explores the nature of spiritual inquiry as a form of collaborative action research – the divine-human process of co-creative inquiry here in this place where we are. It culminates in describing a broad range of practices of engagement, enlivenment and enlightenment which inquire, respectively, into spirit as situational, immanent and transcendent. It concludes with an overview of the presuppositions of spiritual inquiry. The participatory fruits of spiritual inquiry explored in this paper are an enacted set of working principles and practices, grounded in three kinds of inquiry which are interdependent and mutually involved in each other. First, they are co-created in a personal participatory relation with being, a relation which is rooted in the human capacity for feeling the presence of what there is. This radical capacity I explore in depth in Feeling and Personhood (Heron, 1992). Ferrer gives a related account of participatory knowing as presential, enactive and transformative (Ferrer, 2002: 122-3). Second, they are generated in a context of a variety of collaborative spiritual inquiries, including an ongoing relationship inquiry (Langton and Heron, 2003), a current long-term co-operative inquiry now (2006) into its twelfth year (Heron and Lahood, forthcoming), and over twenty short-term co-operative inquiries since 1978 several of which are reported in Sacred Science (Heron, 1998). Third, they are influenced by acquaintance with, reflection on, and discussions within, the wider personal, cultural and historical context, including the great legacy of religious beliefs and experiential data from spiritual schools ancient and modern, western and eastern. These three kinds of inquiry provide a qualified warrant for my text. On the one hand it present ideas that are clarified and critically refined in personal and interpersonal enactions of what there is, and are thus one modestly valid perspective on, and revelation of, the mystery of being. On the other hand Participatory Fruits of Spiritual Inquiry 2 they are relative to the cultural and historical contexts within which they are framed, and thus are fallible and non-perennial, an invitation to dialogue and further inquiry. To say that a theological vision is co-created in a personal and an interpersonal participative relation with being, and in the qualifying contexts stated, means neither that it is universally absolute, nor that it is an entirely relativistic construction. It means that it is one relative perspective brought forth with what is universal, and calls for other diverse perspectives, grounded in inquiry, to honour the fullness of the mystery. I will make a few points here about the role of past spiritual traditions in making contemporary spiritual distinctions. They have an important secondary and contributory role, via their massive heritage of spiritual lore. This lore is the indispensable loam which nourishes present growth. However, the primary role is for the contemporary voice of innovative divine becoming, surfacing now through the constraints of what is today outmoded in this great inheritance from the aspirations of our forbears. The idea that there is a perennial (lasting-forever) philosophy which can be extracted from past religions and which lays down the basic structure of spiritual practice far off into the distant future, seems to me as fanciful as the idea of a perennial natural science. To restrict postmodern spirituality by principles derived from premodern spirituality is like constraining the future of chemistry by the precepts of alchemy. Perennial philosophy prescriptions strike me as a rearguard action to defend established centres of spiritual authority from having to deal with radical change. See Sacred Science (Heron, 1998: 43-46). Past belief-systems and practices reflect past contexts. Current contexts call both for respect for past traditions and for a radical revisionary overhaul of some of their most fundamental beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.

Revenge of the Crouch End Vampires: The AFA, the FA and English Football's ‘Great Split’, 1907–14

When the Football Association legalized professionalism in 1885 it unleashed commercial forces that progressively eroded the influence of gentleman amateurs on the English game. Self-appointed custodians of amateurism fought a long rearguard action against these developments. This culminated in a crisis in the FA's affairs and the secession in 1907 of a large number of amateur clubs, mainly based in London and the south-east. These clubs played under the aegis of the Amateur Football Association for the next seven seasons. This essay explores the origins of this association, its brief history as an independent governing body, and the reasons for its re-integration with the Football Association in 1914.

The Empire of the Spectacle

The Empire of the Spectacle

Volatile emission by contest losers revealed by real-time chemical analysis

Animal interactions often involve chemical exchange but simultaneous evaluation of chemistry and behaviour has been problematical. Here we report findings from a novel method, atmospheric pressure chemical ionization-mass spectrometry (APCI-MS) coupled with manipulation of molecular-mass achieved by rearing organisms on deuterium-enhanced nutrients. This allows real-time monitoring of the occurrence and quantity of volatile chemicals released by each of two interacting individuals, in tandem with behavioural observations. We apply these methods to female-female contests in the parasitoid wasp Goniozus legneri. We show that this species emits the spiroacetal 2-methyl-1,7-dioxaspiro[5.5]undecane. Chemical release is most common in more behaviourally aggressive contests, which occur when prior resource owners successfully resist take-over by similar-sized intruder females. Volatiles released during contests are always emitted by the loser. Aggression in contests is reduced after spiroacetal release. We suggest that the spiroacetal functions as a weapon of rearguard action. We anticipate that APCI-MS, which is rapid, non-intrusive and relatively inexpensive to operate, will be widely applied in studies linking chemistry and behaviour.

Variations on a Hebrew theme: The politics of art music in Israel

No culture, no society, remains static but changes imperceptibly day by day. The struggle waged by western art music in Israel for survival is eerily suggestive of how Israeli society in general has changed since the early Zionists set the course for the creation of a Jewish nation-state. Once regarded as the civilized face and civilizing influence of the Jewish national endeavour in Palestine/Israel, its advocates claim ever more desperately that western art music in Israel is in a state of rapid decline. Yet public opinion surveys reveal that the Israeli public backs state support for arts and culture whether or not people participate in cultural activities. Despite this, the internal ethnic struggle for domination of the arts and culture world and the rearguard action by culture administrators are both in danger of being overtaken by the country's exposure to global popular culture.

Undercurrents on the Nile: the life of Dr John B Christopherson (1868–1955)

In the early 1900s, Dr J B Christopherson was one of a small number of British physicians who found their way to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. The city had been laid waste by the battles of the legendary Mahdi and the armies of the British. Sudan was now considered part of an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. Christopherson became, partly by force of circumstance, a specialist in tropical medicine. His principal claim to fame, briefly contested for priority, was the treatment of bilharzia (schistosomiasis) by injections of antimonium tartaratum (tartar emetic). The paper sketches Christopherson's turbulent life in Africa and identifies some important events in the life of this man whose energies were directed not only to treating patients and building a medical department in the desert, but also to fighting a rearguard action to preserve his reputation.

Nursing leaders fight for right to self-regulation of misconduct trials

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) is to fight a rearguard action to protect the right of nurses accused of misconduct to be tried by their peers.

Editor's Note

Editor’s Note One trend captivating the historical profession has been the study of collective memory as a force in contemporary issues. History—or at least a certain interpretation of events—has been used in many ways: to find comfort and a sense of belonging, to validate particular behavior or beliefs, or to justify regimes and their attendant political and social orders. Scholars of the Civil War have been especially receptive to how a population uses the past to achieve goals in the present. How Americans remembered the key events of their Civil War played a central role in the reconstruction of the nation. A selective memory of the past was used to promote reconciliation between white Northerners and Southerners. Similarly, eliminating from collective memory the contributions of African Americans to that same war—and the central role of slavery in the coming of the conflict—allowed white Americans to ignore the more troublesome causes that made the war less romantic and less appealing. The articles in this special issue contribute to our understanding of the role of memory in rebuilding the nation. Funerals of key figures often become ceremonies that not only honor an important figure, but also offer occasions for declaring allegiances to a nation-state and defining the character of a country. Michael A. Ross shows how members of the Conservative party in New Orleans seized upon the death of Robert E. Lee to announce a political position that would help them maintain white supremacy and home rule. Next, Joan Waugh resurrects the importance of the funeral of Ulysses S. Grant to former Confederates who tried to promote reconciliation between the sections. The final two articles examine aspects of racial solidarity and racism. Andre Fleche argues that there was more solidarity between black and white veterans than current scholarship admits. While they had racial differences, the two groups shared a common view of what the war had achieved. W. Scott Poole examines how abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson tried to hold onto the emancipationist vision of the war in the face of growing cynicism about the federal government in the early twentieth century. Taken as a whole, the articles in this issue both reaffirm the value in considering how people use the past and complicate the categories by which we have understood this phenomenon. Some Southerners wanted reconciliation as part of a political gain, especially if it meant fortifying their positions as the rulers or their section. Some Northerners fought a rearguard action to [End Page 133] preserve the centrality of emancipation to the Civil War, even if they increasingly became voices shouting into the wind. Yet it is significant that these voices existed. And we owe a debt to these authors for helping the positions to be heard once again. Copyright © 2005 The Kent State University Press

L'arbitre de griefs, instrument efficace de contrôle des abus de pouvoirs de l'employeur ?

In theory, recourse to the grievance arbitration would appear to be an efficient means of controlling the abuse of powers (i.e. violations of the collective agreement) by the employer. Indeed, experience has borne out the truth of this affirmation. Mainly due to the management rights principle however, there still remain several important lacunae in this regard. On the one hand, by invoking the so-called management rights principle as a favorite means for circumscribing the arbitrator's jurisdiction, the Supreme Court of Canada has greatly diminished the efficacy of the arbitration process. This has occured primarily through the quashing of arbitration decisions either on the basis of error of law or else by limiting the arbitrator's discretion in disciplinary cases. On the other hand, it would be just as harmful to the efficiency of the arbitration process if arbitrators themselves were to abuse the management rights principle in interpreting and applying collective agreements. In general, arbitrators have proved to be highly conscious of this problem. By the same token, arbitrators have been faced with the problem of whether or not to discipline acts of insubordination even though employees may have been provoked by an abuse of authority on the part of the employer. All in all, arbitrators, by their attitude, appear to manifest a desire of ensuring the efficient functioning of the arbitration process, without acting to the detriment of management rights. In this regard, the Supreme Court of Canada, with the notable exception of Chief Justice Laskin, would seem to be fighting a rear-guard action by continually emphasizing management rights.

Reply to Rajagopalan

We have been asked to respond to Kanavillil Rajagopalan’s paper “Linguistic Pragmatics: a Discipline Bedevilled by its own History?—Implications for Intercultural Studies.” Since Relevance Theory seems to be one of Rajagopalan’s main targets, we felt we should. But what aspect of his paper should we respond to? Rajagopalan says little about the contents of Relevance Theory (or indeed of any other pragmatic theory). The polemical tone which leads him, for example, to describe our work imaginatively as a “rearguard action” of a type “carefully designed to undo progress achieved in making pragmatics sensitive to actual language use”, is best ignored. 1 Since Rajagopalan is adopting a historical perspective, we thought it most appropriate to respond to his comments on the history of the field.

The OECD and offshore financial centres: rearguard action against globalisation?

With publication of Harmful Tax Competition: An Emerging Global Issue the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) initiated a campaign to eliminate income tax competition. The OECD characterised income tax rate competition between states as ‘harmful’. The advancement of communication technologies has broadened and deepened opportunities for citizens to utilise this gap within international relations to avoid taxes. Using technological features of globalisation to avoid tax, it is suggested these citizens are engaged in civil disobedience against income redistribution. Thus the action of the OECD is as much an action against globalisation as are street protests against World Trade Organisation (WTO) meetings. The argument here introduces the concept of harmful tax competition and describes the nature of the offshore financial centre. This is followed by a discussion exploring the interplay of taxation, technology, and the myriad small ways citizens avoid paying tax. The conclusion finds that the OECD is attempting to interdict opportunities to avoid taxation that are offered by the globalisation of financial services.

Patrizia Palumbo, ed. A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 332 pp. Photographs. Bibliographies. Index. $24.85. Paper.

Patrizia Palumbo, ed. A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 332 pp. Photographs. Bibliographies. Index. $24.85. Paper. This intelligent and praiseworthy anthology addresses historical, literary, and cinematic aspects of the Italian colonial experience in Africa. In addition to lucid and thoughtful discussions, the volume offers both Italian texts and effective, accurate translations of important passages. One may hope that the numerous conceptual doors skillfully opened here will inspire others to enter the neglected realm of the Italian experience in Africa. first four contributions are grouped into unit titled The Shaping of Colonial History. Despite the editor's commitment to the postmodernist shibboleth that recent areas of scholarly interest . . . have all cast doubt on the validity, relevance, and accessibility of historical facts (5), the bulk of this volume's discussion lies nevertheless within the bounds of rational discourse; although prominent Italian historians of Northeast Africa such as Irma Taddia and Alessandro Triulzi are not included, they are at least allowed to appear in the footnotes. senior scholar Angelo Del Boca eloquently summarizes the role of Italy in the experiences of her former colonies since their independence. It has been an age of missed opportunities, as politically embedded former imperial interests fought resilient rearguard action to complicate diplomatic relations between metropole and former dependencies and to inhibit constructive research through the sequestering of archival sources and other obstructionist tactics. Nicola Labanca emphasizes the unique qualities of the Italian imperial venture. Labanca calls for reassessment of the issue of periodization and laments the misuse of archival sources by an ossified official historiography. Diplomatic context is seen as decisive; other causalities less so. Barbara Sorgoni revisits the conceptual terrain of nineteenth-century anthropology, examining both academic professionals and amateur observers of northeast Africa. She makes the predictable discovery that late nineteenthcentury Italians do not measure up to the critical standards of late twentieth-century French intellectuals, but offers the patronizing concession that Alberto Pollera was perhaps capable of a sort of proto-relativistic comprehension of otherness (75). Guilia Barrera addresses the issue of interracial relations in colonial Eritrea. She dismantles received tradition, claiming for Italy uniquely positive experience in this regard, and outlines persuasively and with precision the colonial structures that governed the creation and maintenance of racial hierarchy. …

Rearguard action

Web applications give the public and remote staff access to central systems and data – creating potentially highly damaging security risks to companies. Peter Wood FBCS highlights the issues and how to secure the central systems

Multidisciplinarity or Encroachment

Multidisciplinarity or Encroachment

The Scopes Trial and Southern Fundamentalism in Black and White: Race, Region, and Religion

THE ANTI-EVOLUTION MOVEMENT OF THE 1920s DEMONSTRATED THAT SOME aspects of Protestant fundamentalism flourished with particular vigor in the American South. Although fundamentalism, like the anti-evolution movement itself, originated in the North and Midwest, some southern states provided significant popular and legislative support, particularly in the area of scientific education, including Tennessee's infamous Butler Act proscribing the teaching of evolution, a 1928 referendum in Arkansas that also banished the topic from public schools, and similar limitations imposed by countless local school boards. Not by mere coincidence did William Jennings Bryan frequently cultivate anti-evolution sentiments in the fertile soil of the Bible Belt. Southern Protestantism and fundamentalism shared many social and theological foundations. Yet this common picture of fundamentalism leaves out one major group of southern Protestants: African Americans. Despite the African American exodus from white-dominated denominations in the decades after emancipation, black and white southerners shared a common religious heritage marked by revivalism, conservative biblical beliefs, and often a sense of premillennial pessimism about the state of the world. It would have seemed natural for African Americans to be just as interested in the fundamentalist message as some of their white coreligionists were. However, the Scopes trial of 1925 demonstrated that black and white Protestants in the South differed in significant ways. Some conservative white evangelicals shifted to support fundamentalist Protestantism, leaving their black brethren upholding once-shared beliefs but rejecting the white fundamentalists' emphasis on aggressive cultural battles. (1) Despite conservative interpretations of the Bible among most African Americans and the best efforts of a handful of self-proclaimed black fundamentalists, few African American Christians traveled the path that led from conservative theology to militant righteousness. Ironically, the same southern heritage that predisposed black southerners to conservative biblical belief also prevented them from following some of their white brethren into a fundamentalist crusade to purge the churches and society of impurity. The determination of whether black and white southerners became fundamentalists depends in part on the definition of fundamentalism. The formal movement commenced with the founding of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA) in 1919 under the leadership of white Minnesota minister William Bell Riley, but fundamentalism's organizational genesis says little about its content and character. Historians have generally moved beyond the early view--put forth by scholars for whom the anti-evolution controversy was still a live issue--that fundamentalism was a rearguard action by dispossessed rural Americans uncomfortable with education and scientific progress. Instead, scholars in the last three decades have examined the tenets of fundamentalist theology, the movement's roots in the nineteenth century, and the social and structural contexts in which fundamentalism thrived. (2) At a basic level, fundamentalists were united by their adherence to a conservative theology. In the 1910s an emerging fundamentalist theology categorized as true Christians only those who believed five or six central doctrines. An overarching belief in the inerrancy of Scripture sheltered all the other fundamental tenets, including the virgin birth of Jesus, his sacrifice to atone for human sin, his bodily resurrection, and either the authenticity of biblical miracles or the inevitability of Jesus's return to earth to usher in a millennium of peace. These beliefs increasingly marked adherents as fundamentalists after the turn of the twentieth century, as science seemed to call into question most biblical miracles and so-called liberals and modernists in the churches began to call for a less literal interpretation of the Bible. …

The heart of the precautionary principle in democracy.

© 2002 Association of Schools of Public Health The cornerstones of the precautionary principle—transparency and inclusiveness of decision-making, action in the face of uncertainty, and accountability— are fundamental, not only to the practice and science of public health, but also to the success and maintenance of democracy. Both public health and democracy flourish when information is broadly disseminated and understood, when principles, benefits, and costs are publicly debated, when decision-making is shared by those affected by the policies, and when public interest is seen as more valuable than private gain. Both are diminished when information is withheld and data twisted, when the terms of the argument predict its outcome, when actions to protect and advance the health of the public are defeated by small private interest groups, and when government gives equal weight to corporate interests as to public well being. In the case of the public health debate, the danger is increased with the deification of a skewed view of science. The precautionary principle, which says that action should be taken when there is evidence that not to do so would cause harm, is being used increasingly to shape policy in Europe and elsewhere. Decades—sometimes centuries— before the understanding of germs, bacteria, viruses, infection, and immunology, leaders in public health improved health by implementing policies that were later supported and explained by an advanced understanding of basic science. The precautionary principle is based in science, in the two branches of science central to public health: epidemiology and bio-statistics. It is no coincidence that so many contributors to this special topic issue of Public Health Reports have cited the model and experience of John Snow. The branch of science that he established has laid the foundation for the greatest improvements in health in mankind’s history. Now, instead of developing policy to improve health and protect the public based on these proven scientific methodologies, proponents of an activist public health are fighting a rear-guard action to protect the cornerstones of public health. Where opponents of an activist public health agenda, which includes the implementation of the precautionary principle, have succeeded is in having health science narrowly defined in terms of laboratory science, physiology, and biochemistry. This limited definition ignores the breakthroughs in occupational safety, environmental science, maternal and childcare, infection control, sanitation, and behavioral The Heart of the Precautionary Principle in Democracy