Critical Tradition Research Articles

The influence of artificial intelligence within health-related risk work: a critical framework and lines of empirical inquiry

In this editorial we highlight the need for empirical studies into the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in healthcare and social work settings, especially studies which are theoretically informed by critical social science studies of risk and uncertainty. In setting out the importance of interpretative and critical traditions for research into such AI-oriented forms of risk work, we propose three important conceptual lines of inquiry which empirical studies might follow. First, we sketch ways in which the enactment of AI in healthcare work may be changing how risk is handled amid professional decision-making, and creating new categories of patient/service-user. Patients may be evaluated as being at lower or higher risk depending, respectively, upon their engagement or non-engagement with AI-technologies. These questions of (non-)engagement lead us to consider, second, the trust and distrust dynamics around AI-technologies, exploring the potential inequalities that can emerge as a result of (non) engagement. We then consider drivers of this technological embrace in terms of hope and magical thinking in technological-imaginaries, connecting these cultural tendencies to broader structures of ideology and political-economic interests. We conclude this editorial with a plea to social scientists to be cautious to avoid both techno-optimistic narratives and alarmist warnings regarding the implications of artificial intelligence (AI). Instead, we argue that our focus should be a theoretically informed and detailed examining of how expectations (pertaining to risk, trust, and hope) materialise in practice, particularly in the daily experiences of those who develop and enact AI technologies in care settings.

ANALYZING COLLAGE AS A COMMUNICATION ACT IN THE DIGITAL AGE BASED ON THE DADAISM RENEWAL MOVEMENT'S SPIRIT

Collage combines the semiotic tradition of Roland Barthes, the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl, the critical tradition of Karl Marx, and the point of view of Jurgen Habermas in visual communication. The collage technique creates trans-aesthetic elements and double codes, a Dadaist method of encoding signs. Building on previous research, this study explores collage art as a communication act and its process in the digital era. Digital photography technology and computer software facilitate quicker and easier creation of collage art, emphasizing the fundamental concept of "paste." This pasting-sticking process mirrors the communication process of art and design in the digital era, illustrating cyclical communication capable of transcending space and time. The research has several conclusions. (1) By enhancing visual communication strategies and efficiency based on the spirit of the Dadaism renewal movement, unique collages can be created as a personal sign of message(s). (2) Collages as communication act in the digital era represent dialogue in trans-aesthetics code. (3) On the other hand, with the spirit of Dadaism that contains a free mind, open creation, and emphasis on social-cultural issues, collages as a communication process are also possible to frame messages and create fallacy.

Swift's Alberti? The Geometrical Comedy of Gulliver's Travels

This article propounds that Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels develops a geometrical comedy in the Albertinian fashion. Starting with a specific reference to Momus in Puppet-Show, it will be maintained that Swift refers to an earlier tradition of criticism and transfers it to his prose writing. To explore this point, the article will draw on the Italian Renaissance humanist, satirist, and architect Leon Battista Alberti’s Momus and De Pictura. It will be suggested that there is a corollary between the exilic vision of the picaresque anti-hero and the definitive quality of the centric ray which establishes the centre of meaning in painting in Alberti. In accordance, it will be maintained that Swift adapts Alberti’s critical rendition of the Momus story as a geometrical metaphor for linear perspective. Although Momus does not directly appear as part of the dramatis personae in Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver emerges as an eighteenth-century successor to Alberti’s geometrical designs since Swift adapts the Renaissance humanist’s method of geometrical optics which reveres ocularcentrism. By these standards, it will be propounded that this method informs the comedic programme of Gulliver’s Travels. In accordance, the conclusion draws on the point that Swiftian comedy owes a considerable debt to the mimetic concerns of Renaissance humanism which signals at the birth of a post-humanist comedy through a re-mapping of Albertinian perspectivism.

Feeling Our Way Through the Spectrum of Videographic Criticism

Critical argument can be generative in much the same way as art can be, inspiring different “correct” interpretations and new arguments. Academic filmmaking enhances this property by incorporating affective tools and texts, such as vivid footage or popular music, that move us emotionally at the same time as they form part of a critical argument—and, indeed, those emotional reactions form part of the argument. In this piece, I present a spectrum of approaches that academic filmmaking takes in the videographic criticism tradition: straightforwardly explanatory on one end and enigmatically poetic on the other. I argue that this scholarly methodology is simultaneously deeply personal and affective and, to at least the same degree, imbricated with technological infrastructures.

Love and duty (1931): Chinese melodrama and the “contradictions of modernity”

In 1930s Shanghai Love and Duty (Bu Wancang, Lianhua Co., 1931) resonated with Chinese viewers, launching the career of actress Ruan Lingyu. Today, in contemporary film venue screenings, this epic continues to move international viewers. Here I ask how this silent picture has effected its profound affective alignments as it crosses cultures and periods of time. Approaching Love and Duty as moving picture melodrama engages the critical tradition of film melodrama theory such as to see formal convention melded with the affective charge of Chinese society in tumultuous transition. Melodrama, with its revolutionary associations, meets the historical conditions of Chinese society undergoing massive upheaval at the time of the film’s release, coincident with the New Culture Movement in the years following the 1911 Republican Revolution. The politics informing the Neo-Marxist European tradition of mass culture analysis meets the leftist political legacy associated with Shanghai’s emergent film industry.

When sociology must comprehend the incomprehensible: interpretation of Weber and Durkheim in the sociology of Theodor W. Adorno

In this article, we will delve into Theodor W. Adorno’s sociology. The general aim is to study Adorno’s theory of society and its relation to sociological interpretation. What primarily distinguishes Adorno from other sociologists (of his time and today) is that he considers society to be the fundamental concept of the discipline. Theorising on the post-liberal capitalism of his time, Adorno proposes the concept of the exchange society, which is understood as an antagonistic totality that reproduces itself through the suffering it inflicts on socialised individuals. Within texts dating back to the 1960s, such as ‘Society’, Adorno engages in an exploration of comprehensive sociology and the sociology of social facts, reciprocally examining them. He confronts one with the other in a proposal of an interpretative model of the comprehensibility or incomprehensibility of society. This intellectual confrontation, while avoiding synthesis, leads Adorno to two main outcomes. First, it yields a diagnostic perspective on social theory, portraying capitalist society as simultaneously rational and irrational, comprehensible and incomprehensible. Second, it hints at a sociological interpretation of specific phenomena. In addition to exploring this central theme in Adorno’s sociology, we will also shed light on his distinctive approach to classic texts and concepts. Specifically, Adorno links to the received terminologies but incorporates them into constellations that imbue them with eloquence by revealing the underlying objective moments they encapsulate. The theoretical significance of this article lies in the aim to demonstrate that Adorno’s contributions to sociology are not merely borrowed from philosophical contemplations. Instead, they arise from an immanent critique of the sociological tradition.

Philosophie de l’hétérogénéité : échoïsation des langues dans la création littéraire

Philosophy of Heterogeneity: Echoization of languages in literary creation This article aims to analyse, from a poetic and philosophical perspective, heterolingual practices, or even the intersection of several semiological systems in the same text. In her book entitled Heidegger questions, stimmung, translation, poetry (2010), Éliane Escoubas shows that from 1935, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger began a study on the poetic work of Hölderlin which led him to conceive the act of translation from a broad perspective, not only the internal movement of thought but also that of the development and creation of languages and texts. A new path is then inaugurated in the history of thought as translation. This is highlighted in order to show the originality of the work of “translating” by designing language, shaping speech and forming the body of languages or even writing itself. To better understand this phenomenon, we rely on some reflections and practices that relate to the Maghrebi cultural field. From this perspective, it quickly becomes apparent that the translation paradigm should necessarily figure at the heart of any somewhat coherent critical reflection on the “Text”. In the context of literary creation, the act of translation does not concern questions linked to the comparison between the original and its translation(s). On the other hand, it will be a question of accounting for the writing when it is a translation, not having an original work of reference. This is, obviously, an approach which attempts to radically break with a certain tradition of Algerian criticism which often persists in considering the issues of poetic activity in the Maghrebi literary fields from an essentially (socio)linguistic angle. To reduce a text to its geographical or socio-cultural origin is to refuse to consider the deep complexity of linguistic processes and their historical development, but above all, it is to constantly force the writer into a monolingualism which now seems a conception which denies the interaction of different semiological systems within the same language.

Environmental Literature and Ecocriticism - A Study

The paper aims at studying the significance of Environmental Literature and Eco criticism from a humanitarian perspective. The study is based on the critical analysis of the secondary data, collected through sources such as books, Magazines, review of related articles from Newspapers, Journals, Internet and Govt. Websites. While narrating the tradition of Environmental literature and Eco criticism the paper examines with illustrations how the concern and care for our environment has been expressed in the select literary texts (both fiction and nonfiction) and genres of different periods of time. Further the paper makes an attempt to throw light upon what reformative influence it had upon the society in general. The paper concludes with the reflections upon the emerging trends in the approaches towards Environmental Literature and Eco- criticism.

“Quickening Life”

Joseph Phelan, “‘Quickening Life’: Motherhood and the ‘Unborn Child’ in Aurora Leigh and The Ring and the Book” (pp. 1–31) Both Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69) have at their centers women who become mothers as the result of acts of sexual violence, but who are nevertheless moved to feats of self-sacrifice and even heroism in defense of what the Pope, in The Ring and the Book, calls the “unborn child.” This article examines the representation of attitudes towards the “unborn child” in these poems in the context of changing legal, medical, and social attitudes to abortion and infanticide in the mid-nineteenth century, and argues that their emphasis on the importance of motherhood and what Pompilia in The Ring and the Book refers to as the child’s “right of life” should not, as the dominant critical tradition suggests, be read as an endorsement of patriarchal ideology but as the product of an essentialist view of gender identity that represents gestation and motherhood as radical challenges to the prevailing social order rather than acts of acquiescence in it.

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.

Generations of the Frankfurt School: The Genesis of Critical Theory and Its Modernity

The article presents a retrospective of the formation of the Frankfurt School. Such a view of the school has not yet been formed in Russian-language literature. In it (literature), as a rule, attention is focused on individual figures of the school, without representing their place in the logic of generations. In the 1950s, representatives of the first generation of the Frankfurt School (first of all, M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno) in their criticism of the fascist and totalitarian regimes built the foundation of critical theory, which they used later in the social analysis of Capitalist society. M. Horkheimer identified the key setting of the school as the emancipation of workers from the framework of the economic regime, liberation of the consciousness of the working class from the boundaries set by capitalism. In the 1970s, J. Habermas, within the framework of the theory of communicative action, continued the tradition of social criticism in two semantic directions: in the Leftist one — focusing on social injustices, and in the Kantian one — in the search for grounds for social criticism as such. Later, in the 1990s, A. Honneth focused on the so-called negative intersubjectivity, which is expressed in the struggle of social groups for recognition. In this struggle, he found a truly social dimension of life, which is built on the principles of normativity. In 2018, A. Honneth handed over the post of Director of the Institute of Social Research to S. Lessenich. Despite the fact that today it is difficult to predict what the course of S. Lessenich will be, it remains obvious that through the generations the Frankfurt School has retained the methodological basis for the critical analysis of Capitalist society, starting criticism under totalitarianism and continuing it in the digital age.

"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