Critical Tradition Research Articles

Freed, S. (2019). AI and Human Thought and Emotion. CRC Press.

Sam Freed’s AI and Human Thought and Emotion is a pioneering venture into the possibility of programming an anthropic model of artificial intelligence grounded on the author’s philosophical reflection on the accuracy-oriented and optimisation-driven making of AI. In critique of the rationalist tradition of AI development and expurgation of introspection from cognitive science, this book draws heavily upon phenomenology to argue for the necessity of incorporating human non-linear thinking processes into the technical design of AI. Freed’s conceptual revolution enters a substantive dialogue with Hubert Dreyfus’s What Computers Can’t Do to offer an answer to the impossibility of formalising human introspection, which is conventionally deemed unprogrammable under the ostracism of human subjectivity from the science discipline and anti-scientism that pervades the intellectual circle of the humanities.

Inventing the natural contract

ABSTRACT The aim of this essay is to discuss one particular aspect concerning the methodological and linguistic dimensions of Michel Serres’ notion of the ‘natural contract’. The essay focuses on the way in which his call for a radical shift in the relation of nature and the human leads him to reject the critical tradition in philosophy most often identified with Kant and to turn instead to invention as a form of philosophical language that is both legitimate and necessary. By examining the reasons and implications for this shift towards the synthetic, non-chronological and polyvocal, I argue that Serres’s use of invention raises questions of how the language of the natural contract must incorporate a ‘natural’ or nonhuman element into a contractual relation. My essay seeks to shed further light on this, the very possibility of communication. The essay concludes with a discussion of the question as to whether Serres’s notion marks a new and problematic version of a grand narrative that is susceptible to the diagnosis of the postmodern condition made by Lyotard as an incredulity towards metanarratives.

The Boundaries of an Organism: Purposefulness and Autonomy


 
 
 In this article I want to argue that the organic metaphor— most commonly associated with the Romantic notion of an artwork being analogous to a living being—served throughout the last two centuries as a means of conceptualising autonomy, remaining in a dialectical relation to the latter concept: the structure of the metaphor posited within different critical traditions influenced the theorists’, critics’ and artists’ ideas of what it meant for an artwork to be autonomous, while itself being shaped and modelled by their expectations and beliefs regarding the ontology of the artwork and the possibility of the latter’s autonomy. Over this time the metaphor has undergone substantial modifications, supporting both art’s claim for autonomy, and an attempted denial of the latter. In order to illustrate these shifts, I will discuss three theoretical and critical moments in the history of the organic metaphor: Romantic organicism, centred on the concept of the principle of life, New Critical formalist organicism, which turns out to shadow forth what Michael Fried called literalism, and postmodern organicism, as exhibited by the environmental humanities and ecocritical discourses. The brief outline of the recent history of the organic metaphor is intended to offer an aid to understanding the origins of contemporary organicism, and to show that its reluctance towards the idea of aesthetic autonomy stems from the characteristically postmodern notion of organic form. Finally, I propose to show how the concept of organic form can be fruitfully reinterpreted in light of Kant’s considerations on teleological judgement and Anscombe’s views on intention.
 
 

Bringing energy futures to life: Anticipatory household storylines as possible energy futures

This article introduces a new methodology developed through the Digital Energy Futures project, which created scenarios of relevance to Australia’s energy sector for the years 2030 and 2050 that are informed by in-depth qualitative research with households. The article focuses on the method for developing narrative household storylines within energy scenarios and their role illustrating the social consequences of imagined futures. In particular, the household narratives reveal often overlooked social dynamics of energy and technology use such as inequalities in access to technologies, everyday values and priorities, as well as their desires to stay in control of household technologies and preferences for particular limits to automation. The household storylines encourage the energy sector to take critical social dynamics into account in their forecasting and planning and to recognise the diverse implications of envisioned energy futures across households. In the vein of an engaged and interventional futures anthropology, this article goes beyond traditional critiques of quantitative forecasting by offering a method to take forward and demonstrating how social science can provide interventions into the unfolding of better social futures with technology.

Grandeur de l’homme, selon Pascal

A long tradition of criticism, which has its roots in the Romantic era, admires Pascal as a dark, a tortured writer, an incomparable representative of human misery, of the anguish of existence, of the abysses that threaten us all. It is commonly understood that he is a magnificently sinister writer. This perspective, well established today in most minds, in the honest man as well as in the student or teacher, reduces Pascal’s work to a poor apologetic manoeuvre and transforms his anthropology into a one-sided indictment, impressive by its very excesses, which we savour with a shudder. The present study aims: 1) to sketch a genealogy of this error of perspective, 2) to examine its dangers and measure its damage, to indicate why it is not acceptable, and 3) to propose some reflections on the place of the greatness of man in Pascalian anthropology. Three patterns of greatness can be identified in the Pensées: logical, paradoxical and phenomenological.

Disputed expertise and chaotic disinformation: COVID-19 and denialist physicians in Brazil.

This article aims to show how incorrect ideas about COVID-19 were promoted by physicians in Brazil, contributing to a catastrophic response at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, and to examine the implications of this episode for the social studies of science, technology and medicine. The literature on the relationship between science and society takes two broad approaches, which are sometimes at odds with each other: (i) there is a traditional critique of science that points to unsupported claims of certainty and thus undue interference in general human affairs; (ii) there are many examples of attempts to undermine reasonable scientific claims, when they clash with economic and/or political interests of certain groups. Navigating those extremes is particularly critical in situations in which accurate knowledge is necessary for intervening in people's lives, as is the case in health-related issues. Determining who has actual epistemic expertise is a key factor in solving this conundrum. This became painfully clear during the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlighted the uncertainties of science in guiding decisions being made in real time, and provided opportunities for many forms of disinformation and conspiracy theories that hampered public health measures and promoted useless or even dangerous "treatments". This article discusses an instructive example of such developments in the chaotic response to the pandemic challenge in Brazil, which saw, among other unfortunate situations, physicians aligned with the denialist federal government advocating for unproven - or proven as ineffective - treatments and disseminating unfounded doubts about vaccines. Presumed expertise on the basis of professional training clearly did not translate into actual expertise in the necessary domains to ascertain the validity of such claims and scientific advice was overridden by ideology.

Первое издание «Малахитовой шкатулки» П. Бажова в оценке столичной и областной критики

The article, dedicated to the first edition of the book “The Malachite Box”, for the first time collects and analyses all identified reviews on it. They help to understand and trace how the public consciousness gradually formed and established the attitude towards the writer P.P. Bazhov as a collector of folklore. Particular attention is given to a review by the writer Andrei Platonov, who approached Bazhov’s tales from an unexpected angle, departing from the traditions of Soviet criticism. Reactions to “The Malachite Box” in the metropolitan magazines and newspapers differed from those appearing in the regional press. The central and regional press bodies had their own goals and objectives, and their views on Bazhov did not coincide. In addition, the general political situation in the Soviet Union had an impact, when national roots were remembered as necessary for the patriotic education of young people, and the country began to cultivate folk art, support storytellers, collect and publish songs, legends, fairy tales. The article briefly reveals this temporal context. It also shows the significance of Bazhov’s tales for his contemporaries in comparison with the tales of S. Pisakhov, published just before “The Malachite Box” and discussed along with it.

"There is a presence in anger"

The article examines a traditional pattern of criticism of racial protests involving what I will call anti-racist rage. These critiques revolve around two basic points: they characterize angry racial protests as gratuitous displays of aggression and emotional lack of control that illustrate irrational, authoritarian, and violent political activism, and as unproductive political strategies. Against this approach, I argue, first, that there are normative reasons for anti-racist anger and that the traditional critique is wrong to ignore these reasons. Second, in light of the objections of irrationality and unproductiveness of the expression of anger, and following Amia Srinivasan's approach, I argue that even if it does not lead to desired outcomes, even if it is unproductive, the anger present in anti-racist protests is morally justified, and delegitimizing it on instrumental grounds implies acceptance of a kind of affective injustice.

News Sources in the Sociology of the Media: A Critical Re-Examination

Sourcing practices are among the central research topics within the sociology of the media. Empirical studies have analysed what and who are the major journalistic sources, demonstrating that the selections journalists make not only depend on their subjective choices, but are connected to the norms and routines established in the profession. While invaluable, these studies are primarily media-centric and focused on small-scale investigations, meaning they regularly ignore the social totality in which sourcing is inevitably embedded. Such studies hence also pay too little attention to the external actors that provide ‘information subsidies’ to journalists. By employing the framework of the public sphere, we show that news sources should be viewed as a topic of central social relevance that touches on wider power relations within society. Sociological approaches should thus be complemented with other critical traditions, for instance the political economy of communication. The latter approach’s value is revealed in brief sketches that point to the possibilities of achieving deeper understanding of the topic.

The Bologna-Barcelona axis between Criminal Law Dogmatics and Critical Sociology of punitive control. Hidden Continuities and Apparent Overcomings

This article aims to highlight the importance of the link between Bologna and Barcelona, consisting of an epistemic and methodological convergence in the approach to the criminal question and, in particular, to the problem of penal selectivity.  If on the one hand this link cannot be eliminated, on the other it is exposed to a series of attempts at obfuscation by the dominant legal and criminological ideology, which is even reflected in autobiographical contingencies that add an anecdotal dimension to the discussion. At the same time, the recovery of this link imposes a reflection on the contemporary criminological debate, since the distinctive features of Italian-Iberophone critical criminology clash with some premises of the most recent and advanced trends in terms of critical potential, in particular the zemiological approach. One example is the role that criminal dogmatics plays within the sociological analysis of the penal system following Franco Bricola’s lesson, and the meaning of this methodological choice in terms of transdisciplinarity and political radicalism.  Our conclusion is that a better coordination between critical traditions is needed: one that aims at overcoming linguistic barriers and starts with a systematic review of the existing critical arsenal before any headlong rush

Totally Administered Heteronomy: Adorno on Work, Leisure, and Politics in the Age of Digital Capitalism

AbstractThis paper aims to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Adorno’s thought for business ethicists working in the critical tradition by showing how his critique of modern social life anticipated, and offers continuing illumination of, recent technological transformations of capitalism. It develops and extrapolates Adorno’s thought regarding three central spheres of modern society, which have seen radical changes in light of recent technological developments: work, in which employee monitoring has become ever more sophisticated and intrusive; leisure consumption, in which the algorithmic developments of the culture industry have paved the way for entertainment products to dominate us; and political discourse, in which social media has exacerbated the anti-democratic tendencies Adorno warned of in the mid-twentieth century. We conclude by presenting, as a rejoinder to these developments, the contours of an Adornian ethics of resistance to the reification and dehumanisation of such developments.

Old “New Media” and Literary Studies before 1960

Abstract New media played an important but largely understudied role in the formation of literary studies as a discipline. The dominant tradition of literary criticism has implied that literature was superior to and fully distinct from competing media and that the methods and concepts of literary scholarship were untouched by the emergence of new technological media. This introduction surveys some of the ways in which modern literary scholarship was in fact entangled with new media: from the revolutionary effect of the photostat on textual studies, to the rise of the concept of “orality” in tandem with new techniques for transcribing sound, to twentieth-century literary scholars’ extensive experiments with film and video as novel pedagogical aids. Along with the contributions to this special issue, this introduction shows that revisiting the false starts and dead ends of media-attuned literary scholarship during this formative period can help us defamiliarize our own convictions and open up alternative visions for the place of literary studies in a media-saturated world.

The Feeling of Believing

The last half-century of religious studies scholarship has seen the diminishing importance of belief as a concept of analysis. The putative inaccessibility of beliefs and the concept’s Western Christian provenance has led many scholars of religion to reject the concept. Recent years have seen attempts to rehabilitate the concept of belief, including Kevin Schilbrack’s 2014 Philosophy and the Study of Religions. Schilbrack proposes that by engaging with contemporary philosophical reflection on belief—specifically dispositionalist and interpretationist theories—the traditional critiques of belief can be overcome. The purpose of this paper is to further develop this approach by proposing an additional, currently overlooked, element of belief—its affectivity. This approach builds on current research from enactivist cognitive science and avoids the objections traditionally levelled at belief, while enabling a more sophisticated analysis of power dynamics in religion

Populismo y democracia: Un análisis de los resultados del populismo

An influential strand of literature has consolidated the idea that populism can also benefit democracy. However, even highly inclusionary experiences in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela suggest that the relationship with liberal institutions may not be populism’s main democratic problem, and that the quality of populism-induced inclusion is inherently incompatible with populism’s ultimate goal of realizing popular will. Unlike more vulnerable, traditional critiques based on liberal priorities, this, in turn, questions the recently accepted positive effects of populism, suggests that populism may, paradoxically, suffer from some of the same limitations of liberal institutions, and corroborates, from a more effective perspective, the idea that populism is inherently unlikely to favor democracy, be it liberal or not. Through the analysis of these problems, this article contributes to a critical reassessment of dominant understandings of the relationship between populism and democracy.

Varieties of Anti‐Globalism: The Italian Government’s Evolving Stance on the EU’s Investment Screening Mechanism

In 2017, Italy, France, and Germany jointly supported the setting up of an EU-wide investment screening mechanism to strengthen the EU’s capacity to screen and eventually block foreign investments. In a few months, however, the Italian government changed position dramatically, shifting from leading supporter to staunchest opposer of this pol-icy initiative. Such a change of positioning was decisive in both watering down the initial proposal and moving for-ward with the idea of a looser mechanism coordinating national investment screening activities. This article develops an explanation of the Italian government’s changing negotiating stance. We develop an argument that stresses how two factors combined to produce this puzzling outcome. First, we stress the role of political parties as drivers of governments’ foreign economic policy choices. More specifically, we show that the preferences of the parties form-ing the Italian government after the 2018 general elections (the Lega Nord and the Five Star Movement) were crucial in shaping Italy’s evolving stance on this important issue. Second, we highlight the implications of the tension that exists between two different “varieties” of anti-globalism. While “self-proclaimed” anti-globalist political parties usu-ally combine a traditional critique of globalization and opposition to further political integration in the EU, they may be forced to prioritize one over the other when they prove incompatible. In this context, we show how Italian anti-globalist parties’ choice to prioritize anti-Europeanism over anti-globalism led them to prefer strengthening domes-tic-level institutions to screen FDIs rather than allowing the EU to acquire new powers.

Romantic Survival: Disaster Beyond Repair in Lyrical Ballads

ABSTRACT This article explores representations of disaster and survival in the 1798 edition of the Lyrical Ballads. It starts with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” a poem exemplary of the survival narrative, a poetic articulation of disaster fraught with fragmentation, repetition, and stagnation, in form and content. The article then reads the survival narrative in William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and “The Last of the Flock,” arguing that, in Wordsworth’s poems, what has been affected by disaster can exist beyond repair. I focus on disastrous thinking, considering it another aspect of disaster that penetrates thought. Disastrous thinking appears in Wordsworth’s poems but also in our critical tradition, from New Criticism to more recent post-critical readings. It attempts to ameliorate catastrophe even when disaster has eliminated the historical and philosophical causes that make it comprehensible. The article finally re-turns to Coleridge’s poem to highlight the presence of active passivity, a mode of being that resists productivity and marketability while it emphasizes political thought over thoughtless action. Active passivity constitutes a form of arresting resistance that bears the potential for radical world change through the practice of patience, another name for constant laboring without quantifiable results.

Dissolute Libertine or Venerable Confucian?

Abstract This work aims to explore the moral conflict that many Northern Song (960–1127) scholar-officials (shidaifu 士大夫) experienced as a result of their involvement in the ci 詞 song lyric, by focusing on Ouyang Xiu’s 歐陽修 (1007–1072) collection. The song lyric was held in low regard by many exponents of high culture for several reasons, but primarily due to the fact that it exposed the literati’s relationships with courtesans. A lyricist who belonged to the Confucian elite thus found himself in a complicated position: he had to publicly advocate a moral system that was particularly conservative on matters such as sex, when he in fact privately wrote songs that would be seen as “lascivious” (yin 淫) by the very moral standards that he preached. Firstly, I will approach the problem by exploring the conflict between the Confucian ideal of sexual moderation and the diverging tendencies to sexual freedom that emerged from the practice and the poetics of the eleventh-century song lyric. I will then discuss the long critical tradition aimed at denying Ouyang Xiu’s authorship of the erotic songs attributed to him by some sources. My goal is to try to understand why so many critics espoused this view, regardless of the fact that other literati were also known to have composed rather explicit lyrics. In doing so, I shall seek to demonstrate that the attempts to dissociate Ouyang Xiu from the authorship of the “contested” erotic songs in his collection were mainly motivated by a moralistic need to preserve his reputation as a great master of the literati culture.

Mentoring for social inclusion: a call for social work to engage with an emerging model of social intervention

ABSTRACT A new form of volunteer-based intervention is mushrooming across Europe: social mentoring. Such programmes turn ‘ordinary’ citizens into mentors for individuals from disadvantaged groups. Related initiatives are becoming more institutionalised and social mentoring has gained popularity as a social policy measure, especially in the face of crises. However, the social work discussion has taken little notice of this burgeoning phenomenon adjoining our professional field. There is a lack of concepts and data that could fuel a debate at the intersection of mentoring for social inclusion, human services, and welfare policies. This paper presents a first attempt to outline what social mentoring means, why social work should engage with it and how we can research into it. It offers theoretical reflection on ongoing developments in the EU, based on observation of the literature and field. To expand the available knowledge, it is suggested that research should pay equal attention to all three constituent elements of the topic: personal relationships, programmes, and policies. In line with critical traditions, this paper suggests a holistic, multi-scalar perspective that is sensitive to social inequalities and power imbalances, while also embracing innovative and transformative aspects of social mentoring as a ‘popular’ form of social problems work.

Kill your ancestors

AbstractThis essay explains why debates about the decolonization of anthropology tend to become reactive and confrontational, and outlines a model for why productive critique is central to intellectual progress. In a small, young discipline that values subjectivity and the questioning of ethnocentrism, the decolonial critique of tradition is more likely to be felt as a personalized war on one's professional community and sense of self. Further, the tendency toward factionalism in anthropology is driven by an emphasis on charismatic and individualistic intellectual work. The essay argues that decolonization should not be conceived as a discrete generational war that can be definitively won. Rather, it should be understood as an ongoing collective transformation that expresses the logics of social progress and is consistent with the ethnographic imperative.

Fast vergessen: Die Nachwirkungen von Kierkegaards Kulturkritik im Krisendiskurs der dänischen Nachkriegszeit

Abstract The article examines the explicit and implicit role that Kierkegaard played in the cultural criticism developed in the literary circle of the Danish journal Heretica (1948 – 1954). The cultural criticism of Kierkegaard and eminent Danish post-war authors (Martin A. Hansen, Vilhem Grønbech, Bjørn Poulsen, Tage Skou-Hansen and Ole Wivel) is contextualized in the tradition of Western cultural criticism. An analysis of central concepts such as crisis, rationality, spirit and reflection as well as alienation, individuality and community, demonstrates the original contributions these authors make to the modern understanding of culture. Furthermore, the article addresses the reservations that some of the Heretica- authors had towards Kierkegaard. The accusation of solipsism, however, turns out to be unwarranted. Rather, it becomes clear that Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the individual, like the post-war authors’ critique of fascism, is directed against the power of the masses and the increasing bureaucratization of life. Finally, Kierkegaard as well as the 20th century authors depict neighbor love as decisive for a post-restitutive, forward-oriented way out of a severe cultural crisis.