Sandra Harding is working on the reconstruction of scientific objectivity. Lorraine Daston argues that objectivity is a concept that has historically evolved. Her account of the development of "aperspectival objectivity" provides an opportunity to see Harding's "strong objectivity" project as a stage in this evolution, to locate it in the history of migration of ideals from moral philosophy to natural science, and to support Harding's desire to retain something of the ontological significance of objectivity.
Abstract Schlick quite clearly maintains that the shift from classical physics to the theories of relativity is not necessitated by experience, but motivated by the pragmatic payoff of simplifying space-time ontology. However, there is in his work another, heretofore unrecognized argument for the revolutionary shift from classical to relativistic physics. According to this conceptual line of argument, the principles that define simultaneity and motion in classical physics fail to establish a univocal correspondence to physical quantities, and therefore must be revised, (...) along with the notions of absolute space and time that they underpin. Though these insights appear only intermittently in Schlick’s work, I will seek to elaborate on them in an effort to clarify his views on conventions within physics and the nature of revolutionary science, and to suggest that these views are invulnerable to the criticisms of pragmatic empiricists such as Quine. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s12136-011-0131-3 Authors Steven Bland, Department of Philosophy, Huron University College, 1349 Western Rd, London, Ontario, Canada N6G 1H3 Journal Acta Analytica Online ISSN 1874-6349 Print ISSN 0353-5150. (shrink)
The paper highlights the contemporary discussions on the concept of objectivity in feminist epistemology, in which it is taken in its historical development. Following the works of S. Harding, L. Code, D. Haraway, L. Daston. J. Tannoch-Bland and others the author focuses mainly on one of the topics in feminist epistemology, namely the problematic of the so called "situated knowledge" as related to the objectivity of knowledge. The paper also gives a brief outline of the transformation of "aperspective objectivity" (...) and its becoming a "perspective objectivity", which is closely related to the conception of a situated knowledge as the basis of the feminist standpoint theory. Attention is paid also to the concept of "strong objectivity", in which the ontological importance of the objectivity is stressed and the empirical-realistic core of the standpoint epistemology preserved. (shrink)
In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. DISTURBING THE WEDNESDAY-ISH BUSINESS-AS-USUAL OF THE UNIVERSITY STUDIUM: A WAYZGOOSE MANIFEST Eileen A. Joy This time it is not I who seek it out . . . it is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument . . . This element which will disturb the studium I . . . call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida What enables us to risk change is the feeling that we are understood and (therefore) accompanied. —L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer” Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions. —motto of the Bruce High Quality Foundation In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education , “Ditch the Monograph,” Jennifer Howard surveys some recent experiments by university presses to cultivate and produce shorter-form e-books (i.e., Princeton Shorts and Stanford Briefs), 1 and wonders if these books might not “pull in new readers for serious scholarship,” and at a time, moreover, when “academic libraries have ever-smaller amounts of money and space to lavish on [longer] books, which often have more pages than they have readers.” 2 Paul Harvey, the new director of Stanford University Press, explains that these books will be “accessible but not simplified, and should be digestible in one or two sessions—bite-sized—and not require a month of reading.” 3 At the same time, we are witnessing the launching of new academic publishing initiatives, such as Anvil Academic, a platform for “born-digital” and “born-again-digital” “post-monograph” (non-book) research that is pinning its hopes for the future of academic publishing on networked and “digital-only” environments that would “free scholarly argument from the limitations of the printed monograph and allow authors to bring the full force of technology to the presentation of their work.” 4 It appears important to the academic collective at Anvil to continue to maintain and ensure certain protocols of peer review, but in ways that are “better suited to network environments.” Conversely, Zer0 Books (an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, Ltd.), one of the more radical and exciting academic imprints out there today, is offering shorter-form books that are very much still books in print as well as available in e-book formats. In their mission statement, Zer0 inveighs (in somewhat hysterical tones) that a “cretinous anti-intellectualism presides” over a contemporary culture, “cheerled by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations,” and thus the time is ripe for a different set of discourses—“intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist”—and while Zer0 Books, indeed, offers a particularly electric and eclectic list of reasonably-priced, shorter-form books ( Slime Dynamics , Nuclear Futurism , and Levitate the Primate are just a few samples of their bracing titles), they do not offer any of their publications in open-access form. Thus, their desire for a reinvigorated and non-bland, non-consensual sphere of public intellectual debate is still somewhat in the shadow of the multinational corporations (such as Amazon.com, to which all of their book pages link) that their mission statement scorns. 5 While watching the fat of our wayzgoose congeal in the wood-grains of the table in our communal vagabond printer’s workshop, and while bathed in the autumnal light of the raining Gutenberg-era photons to which Issac Linder has called our attention, 6 I share this admittedly woefully brief and selective overview of current trends in academic publishing initiatives simply to highlight their austerity of (or, perhaps, their overly pragmatic) imagination as well as their “heavy” managerial structures. 7 For even while I applaud the initiative of these initiatives (and I plan to support them with my voice and wallet, being a pluralist, after all), I also despair a little at the ways in which they are each, in their own way, also locked into institutional structures (whether corporate, academic, or even ideological) that determine in advance what is and isn’t (supposedly) possible and what is (supposedly) necessary now —such that, for example, the monograph is now “out” and shorter books (or serialized e-extracts from longer works) are “in,” e-texts are more desirable (and supposedly cheaper to produce and disseminate) than traditional print media, it is necessary to shift (and even dispense with) certain publishing modes to meet the demands of currently popular text-delivery technologies (such as iPads, Kindles, and smart-phones), expert and specialist peer review is still necessary for “legitimacy,” multiple layers of hierarchical and bureaucratic academic-managerial oversight still obtain while at the same time certain layers of important editorial care and curatorship drop away (due to lack of time, money, readers’ attention spans, space, etc.), the material archive (the dream of Borges’s Babelasian library or even Richard Fenyman’s 24 million library volumes etched on the head of a pin 8 ) should simply be abandoned, and so on. Being among friends in the glow of the para-academic Outside, I will dispense with the posture of academic politesse, and attempt to say what I really feel: if a radically innovative and public cultural-intellectual milieu is to flourish, and if we are to imagine and hope for future Walter Benjamins who will still attempt to cross borders with manuscripts in briefcases that are more important to them than their very own persons, 9 then what we need now is more (more papers, briefcases, Kindles, iPads, filing cabinets, shelves, teletype machines, Linux code, microchips, mimeographs, lithium batteries, candles, pens, javascripts, and so on) and not less of everything (we need print books as well as e-texts, yellow legal pads as well as the mystic writing pads of our Evernote apps, baroquely lengthy multi-volume works as well as broadsides and post-it note scholarship, close and loving and even co-dependent editorial curatorship of others’ work, and so on), and we also need the courage (or foolishness) to depart to extra-territories not bathed in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the academy “proper.” The university will continue to be an important site for keeping open the question of thought 10 and for fostering various modes of dissemination, but I also think it’s time for a subter-fugitive, vagabond, gypsy para-humanities, especially at a time when so many of us are barely hanging on to the university by the skin of our teeth (or hands or minds). 11 Let’s “get lost” now, taking the humanities with us like so many suitcases, portable libraries, and sacks of contraband diamonds. Let’s figure out inventive ways to radicalize (and thus sustain) the humanities by absconding with them to the streets, alleys, market squares, ateliers, lounges, coffee shops, bookstores, sofas, wine bars, clubs, kitchens, bedrooms, galleries, dive bars, park benches, garages, living rooms, deserted urban zones, and crumbling basements. 12 In short, let’s re-boot, let’s situate ourselves, like Diogenes on the outskirts of Athens, on the edges of our cities and towns, never losing sight of the places (and institutions) we care about, while also saying, fuck this . Let’s embrace a radical, polyglot cosmopolitanism that enunciates a “shaggy heart,” where we will have “no fixed abode” and be “nowhere a foreigner.” 13 Like practitioners of Hakim Bey’s amour fou , we should strive to be “illegal” now, “saturating” ourselves with our own aesthetic, engaging in publishing ventures that would fill themselves “to the borders” with “the trajectories of [their] own gestures,” running “on angels’ clocks,” our only goal the “ingestion of the Galaxy,” and never tilting at fates fit only for “commissars & shopkeepers.” 14 One of the things we have lost sight of in the university, and especially in our publishing practices, is the importance of play —now is the time, again cadging from Hakim Bey, to “share the mischievous destiny” of runaways, “to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinner table while adults gibber from behind their masks.” 15 Without non-utilitarian play, and without the right to flail, flounder, and fail while playing, we risk the frigid stasis of the status quo, of always being trapped in what has already been said, what has already been played out . How did we get here? How did the creative arts get so thoroughly de-cathected from the “liberal” arts? How will we give birth to heretic-misfit love-child thoughts without unbridled play? 16 So much for ontologically anarchic poetics and Bey’s wild children and crazy love: what about practicalities? Fuck practicality; this ain’t practical. For me, the most exciting publishing and dissemination ventures going are those such as continent. , Speculations , Itineration , Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies , the Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) and its publication PELT , Uitgeverij Press, eth press: postmedieval poetries, the Hollow Earth Society, the Bruce High Quality Foundation, the Confraternity of Neoflagellants, and so on 17 —journals, presses, and alternative research-cultural organizations entirely run and managed by graduate students and post-graduates (and some faculty collaborator) with no financial support to speak of and only tenuous footholds in the university (our academic precariat) and who are publishing or fostering some of the most exciting work in the humanities and arts right now, work that eschews and also troubles the waters of disciplinary genre, “review,” privilege, and status. 18 It is one of the aims of punctum books to assist these and other new (extra- but also para-institutional) publishing initiatives with various forms of regular and longer-term support (economic, editorial, aesthetic, technical, promotional, etc.), but who is paying for this? No one; at least, no one “official.” We’ve simply scraped together what we have; we’re running on the heady steam of an international all-volunteer staff and gift-share economies, also martinis, WD-40, ramen, loose change, old Talking Heads albums, matches, a glitter ball, and chewing gum. And yet, we actually believe that an open-access and print-on-demand model (in which all of our publications are both free and available for purchase) may actually lead to something like financial solvency and even jobs, but we’re not making that a condition of our future plans. We aim to grow through a vast network of talented persons (some situated in universities and cultural institutions with paying jobs, some not) dedicated to a radically independent publishing ventureshumanities that would not be beholden to any specific university or commercial academic interest, and to fostering the broadest possible range of open-access print- and e-based platforms for the sustenance of what we are calling a “whimsical para-humanities assemblage”—an assemblage, moreover, that refuses to relinquish any possible form of public-ation (the making of cultural-intellectual stealth “publics” that would seep in and out of institutional and non-institutional spaces, hopefully blurring the boundaries between “inside” and “outside”), and we are also intent on resuscitating what we are calling postmedieval and pastmodern forms of publication (from breviary and commentary and florilegium to telegram and liner notes and inter-office memo, from the Book of Hours to the cassette mixtape). The term “para-academic” was devised by Nicola Masciandaro, one of punctum’s founders, to capture the multivalent sense of something that fulfills and/or frustrates the academic from a position of intimate exteriority. Para-academia is that which is beside academia, a place whose logic encompasses many reasons and no reason at all ( para -, “alongside, beyond, altered, contrary,” from Greek para -, “beside, near, from, against, contrary to,” cognate with Sanskrit para -, “beyond”). The para is the domain of: shadow, paradigm, daemon, parasite, supplement, amateur, elite. The para-academic embodies an unofficial excess or extension of the academic that helps, threatens, supports, mocks (par-ody), perfects and/or calls it into question simply by existing next to it. 19 This accords well, I think, with some of the sentiments expressed by the editors of continent. and Speculations during an online conversation they conducted with each other on the “aesthetics of (para)academic practice,” where Michael Austin wanted to distinguish between academia and the university—“I take academia to be the culture of knowledge-communication, while the university happens to be the most notable site of such communication in present society. There is no necessary connection between the two, nor should we assume academia requires the university in order to exist”—and Paul Boshears added this important exemplification of Austin’s comments: “Both Academia and the University are imagined communities, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s phrase. However, the University is an institution that accredits, controls, and stamps the passports of those that would enter its territory. It is a striated space as opposed to Academia’s [more] fluid space.” 20 It is punctum’s aim to occupy this more fluid space but to also de-territorialize the University itself, disturbing and disrupting the Wednesday-ish, business-as-usual protocols of both the generic university studium and its individual cells and holding tanks, while also extending the very important work of the University into new and often untended spaces. Because our press was founded and is directed by premodernists (medievalists and early modernists), 21 we have some serious love of the book as a material art object and we also embrace the idea of the itinerant and also the cloistered scholar. We also can imagine that printed matter might be of some use during and after our own pre- and post-apocalyptic “Age(s) of Simplification,” while we are also intent on making use of whatever “generators of electrical essences” we can get our hands on. 22 We want it all, and we’re not inclined to ask for permission to “pretty, please” let us publish whatever it is we want to publish. In this sense, we are also impatiently presentist: we want things now, as opposed to later and if we make mistakes, if we speak (or publish) too soon, too hastily, we’ll depend on what Kathleen Fitzpatrick has termed post-publication review 23 to sort that out. What we need now is more, and not less, thought, with more words, ruly and unruly, jostling with each other across the pages and liquid retina displays of our dispersed yet still ex/intimate “commons.” This is not to say that punctum books does not care about the quality of the work it publishes (we wouldn’t publish just anything but we would certainly publish almost anything if it were interesting enough and well-written and if it appears to take seriously what we say we are looking to “pimp”: “writing as risk, adventure, a going-forth without ‘papers’ or guarantees: falling through the hole/ punctum , a falling down, free-fall. . . . quixotic, sagely mad engagements that generate and satisfy noetic-erotic need, textual thought-bodies that give pleasures only to be possessed in their presence”). Nor is this to say that we do not lavish close and creative attention upon the editing, formatting, and creative design of our publications (indeed, we want to distinguish ourselves in this manner from university and commercial academic presses that increasingly either outsource this work or defer upon authors the responsibility for editing and proofing and sometimes even formatting the layout of their own manuscripts). We are not interested in the maintenance of specific genres or disciplines (is it literary theory? poetry? philosophy? art history? memoir? sociology? cybernetics? speculative fiction? who can tell?), and thus we take seriously Derrida’s belief in a university “without condition” which has the task, especially by way of the humanities, of ensuring “the principal right to say everything, whether it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it.” 24 We want a radical Open of thought. This is thus also about freedom, something in very short supply in the university these days, and which also has something to do with well-being, with eudaimonia , or flourishing. But we do not scorn the University-at-large, or even specific institutions (Harvard, University of Chicago, Brooklyn College, Eastern Carolina University, Berkeley, whatever), which is to note (again) that para - is also the space of the “beside” and the “near,” and more than wanting to go against or beyond the university, we seek a more supplementary (even inter- or co-dependent) relationship, 25 if also an occasionally antagonistic one. And I am not sure I would draw the same distinctions that some of the editors of continent. and Speculations might want to draw between “academia” and the “university/University.” For me, the university (similar to how both Michael and Paul described academia/Academia) is everywhere and anywhere I am at any given moment, and this also extends to all who think and write alongside me, in whatever “location,” virtual, material, or otherwise. The university is not just the buildings and lawns demarcated by specific geographical coordinates (42° 22′ 25″ N, 71° 6′ 38″ W: Harvard), but anywhere we gather to disseminate : I define this as a practice of, quite literally (following the Oxford English Dictionary ), “scattering [knowledge] abroad” and “sowing” things and “spreading [knowledge] here and there,” and “dispersing (things) so as to deposit them in all parts.” Obviously, in some cases, specific locations matter a great deal, and the very hard work of the faculty and student activists to preserve the formerly free system of public higher education in California or to maintain the disciplines of philosophy or paleography at certain universities in the UK are extremely worthwhile and important political-pedagogical causes that we should all support however we can. Wherever persons gather to pro-fess and learn, there is something of value worth protecting, while at the same time, the university proper is increasingly becoming less “liveable” for increasing numbers of teaching faculty and actual and potential learners, and we need to pay attention to that. 26 While some people fight the good fight on the inside of specific campuses and even across specific campuses, some of us will have to be willing to create and foster new domains of thinking-together (which is not the same as thinking alike). This will require risk, and a willingness to fall and tumble into holes. Speaking of holes: punctum , in the idioms of the Middle Ages and Roland Barthes (refer to my first epigraph above), is simultaneously the moment (Augustine’s punctum ; writing as always momentary ), the pricks and punctures and perforations made by awls punching holes in vellum (what makes writing, but even more so, books , possible, opening-to-writing/writing-as-opening), and also the “pointed instrument” that disturbs the studium , the sting , the speck , and the cut , into and out of which anything might fall or emerge, and by which we feel ourselves pierced (writing as shock to the system—ours, our minds, our bodies, but also systems more largely). punctum is also the cast of the dice: we’re taking chances out here. It’s a form of play, but it’s also work, perhaps the best precarious job at present in the humanities-at-large. NOTES See Princeton Shorts: Short Takes, Big Ideas , and “‘ Bite-sized’ Reading from SUP ,” Stanford University: The Dish , May 17, 2012. There is something delightfully silly in how the titles of both these book series conjure up images of men’s underwear, and it also reminds me that not many university presses are run by women. Palgrave Macmillan also recently announced a shorter-form e-book series, Palgrave Pivot . Jennifer Howard, “ Ditch the Monograph ,” The Chronicle of Higher Education , October 14, 2012. “‘Bite-sized’ Reading from SUP.” “ About Anvil Academic ,” Anvil Academic . See also Adeline Koh’s interview with the head editor of Anvil, Fred Moody: “ A Digital Solution to Academic Publishing? Introducing Anvil Academic ,” ProfHacker [ Chronicle of Higher Education weblog], September 24, 2012. I will note here that Anvil was conceptualized and is managed by a consortium of institutions (such as the Council on Library and Information Resources [CLIR], the National Institute for Technology in Library Education [NITLE], and University of Michigan Library’s MPublishing office, which is also partnered with Open Humanities Press), university scholars, and academic librarians, and is partly funded by various universities with an intensive interest in the digital humanities (such as the University of Virginia, Washington University in Saint Louis, and Stanford University, among others). Anvil appears to not have fully made up its mind whether or not it would offer services to those who might want to publish monographs (whether longer or shorter), edited collections, and journals in digital form (at times, in their various statements, they seem to be saying analog-style digital publishing is passé and not their focus, and at others, that they would welcome helping academics with digital platforms for e-versions of academic monographs, etc.). What does appear clear is that one of their chief motivating impetuses and concerns seems to be ensuring the maintenance of traditional forms of expert peer review, albeit within newly innovative digital publishing environments, and yet, at the same time, what is not clear from their website or published pieces on their project is exactly how (or what ) they plan to offer in the way of technical infrastructures, platforms, and ongoing support for those new (and increasingly networked) environments. “ About Us ,” Zer0 Books . Zer0 Books is a subsidiary of John Hunt Publishing, Ltd., a trade publisher based in the UK, known especially for the books it has published in the genres of spirituality or “New Age” studies (through its O-Books, Dodona, Mantra Books, Moon Books, Soul Rocks, and Circle Books imprints) and also in the genres of parapsychology, esoteric and mystic knowledges, holistic health, juvenile fiction, and erotica, among other subjects. While Zer0 Books is a welcome imprint in the multiverse of what might be called “radicalized” para-academic publishing, it appears to offer practically no editorial support to its authors and also offers multiple levels of “contracts,” some of which essentially amount to self-publishing. Why I bother to mention this at all will be more apparent as my little wayzgoose diatribe here gathers more steam. Let it be said, however, that I have regularly purchased titles from this imprint because they are publishing authors whose work I admire (Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood, Mark Fisher, Graham Harman, Steve Shaviro, Eugene Thacker, Ben Woodard, to name some but not all), even while I find Zer0’s editorial oversight, such as it is, appallingly uneven. In his opening remarks to the “All in a Jurnal’s Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose” session (2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, Boston, MA, 20-22 September 2012), from which my remarks here are culled and expanded upon, Isaac shared with us that, “as we proceed into the autumn with our printing projects always ahead of us and to be done, we will tonight literally be bathed not only by the artificial candlelight of our screens, but as well, in part bathed by photons raining down on us at 186,282 miles per second,” and also that “these photons that are raining down on us, will rain down on us all winter, [and] have been raining down on us all year . . . had their origin in the combustion cores at a center of 9 cyg, 572 years ago, in 1440, the year which we point to today as the common year in which, as we all know, Gutenberg is said to have brought the movable type press to the western world, inaugurating an era that stretches farther into the past and future than [Marshall] McLuhan could justify.” I would note here that I am in deep admiration of the work of Open Humanities Press , and am especially keen on their experimental writing + publishing modes as evidenced in their Living Books About Life series and Liquid Books imprint, edited by Clare Birchall and Gary Hall, as well as in some of their journals, such as Vectors . From my vantage point, OHP has been consistent in thinking “outside the box” of traditional university and commercial academic publishing and they have published some of the most radical new thinking in the humanities (albeit somewhat slowly ), but they cannot be viewed as completely “independent” of the university milieu from which all of their Editorial and Open-Access Board members, as well as the members of their Steering Group and Partners, hail. I simply seek a more radical, even anti-peer departure out of the academy for so-called “academic” publishing, while at the same time I support the idea of the university as one place among others where more radical publishing modes might be cultivated (as is the case with Anvil, OHP, Stanford Shorts, etc.), more on which below. See Richard Fenyman, “ There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom ,” Engineering and Science 23.5 (February 1960): 22–36. See Julian Yates, “ The Briefcase of Walter Benjamin/Benjamin Walter’s Briefcase: An Invent/ Story ,” rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010. Here, as always, I defer to Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). An important, more recent companion to Readings’ book is Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). I’m thinking here especially of all the post-grads with no, or contingent, jobs, the adjunct teaching staff, but also those who, for various reasons (including economic constraints), have been cut off or distanced from university life, who hope that they can play a role in intellectual “life,” but who feel increasingly unable to participate. And here I would also pause to praise para-academic educational initiatives and organizations, such as The Public School New York , The Saxifrage School , The Vancouver Institute for Social Research , The Art School in The Art School , and The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research , to name just a few, no matter how long- or short-lived, that take advantage of non-traditional, non-institutional, and anti-hierarchical spaces in which to craft new teaching and learning environments that still value embodied social-pedagogical practices. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves , trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 140. Hakim Bey, “Amour Fou,” in Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991). Bey, “Wild Children,” in T.A.Z. 16. On the importance of artful play to the humanities as well as to well-being, see L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 41–64, where she writes that, “Playing and pretending are crucial to the becomings of living creatures, to adaptation and behavioral flexibility; . . . it is transformative and transforming. We can neither thrive nor survive without it” (57). See also Aranye Fradenburg, “Frontline: The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 39.4 (Winter 2011): 589–609. See Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism , Itineration: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Rhetoric, Media, and Culture , Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies , Organism for Poetic Research and PELT , Uitgeverij Press , eth press: postmedieval poetries , Hollow Earth Society , Bruce High Quality Foundation , and the Confraternity of Neoflagellants . Or as Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei put it during our BABEL Waygoose session, “Fuck peer review.” And as Vincent also puts it in one of the five maxims for his press, Uitgeverij (meaning simply, “Publisher”), “Only experiment can present the present. We only care about the new, whether past, present, or future. We enjoy publishing anything that’s between categories, obscure, or witnessing the edges of language. For us, all audience is potential” (see footnote 17 for Uitgeverij’s website address, where you will find all five maxims in a variety of different languages). Nicola Masciandaro, quoted in Eileen Joy, “ PARTY! Or is it a Panel Discussion on Para-Academic Publishing, or BOTH? ” punctum books [weblog], February 20, 2012. Jamie Allen et alia, “ Discussions Before an Encounter ,” continent. 2.2 (2012): 136–147. But is it important to note here that punctum books aims to publish books and other types of texts across a wide range of fields and disciplines, and our Advisory Board is made up of scholars and artists who work on diverse subjects, from political science to architecture to feminist philosophy to metal theory to new media studies to art history and beyond. References to Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1959). See Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Peer Review,” in Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 15–49. Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession or the University without Condition (thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ what could take place tomorrow),” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader , ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 26 [24–57]. On the important possibilities of newly imagined co-dependent co-disciplinarities and radically open confraternities as one way of moving the work of the para-“University” forward, see Jonathan Hsy, “ Let’s FAIL Together, yeah yeah YEAH! ” In The Middle , October 5, 2012. As Thomas Gokey, one of Speculation ’s editors, has put it, “In the United States at least, universities have been turned into shell corporations for Sallie Mae. That might sound overly dramatic or overly cynical but I think it is the most accurate way to think about our current situation. Right now the community of questioning, learning, researching and teaching has been captured by a system whose primary function is to extract as much value out of academics as possible. The main thing that universities produce is precarious, indebted, docile workers. Universities are one of the primary tools used to produce and maintain class difference. For the most part the poorest get excluded outright, the richest pass “Go” and collect $200, everyone else gets buried in decades worth of crushing debt for the privilege of receiving an education that will be recognized. An academic is a battery that gets plugged into this dying machine” (Allen et alia, “Discussions Before an Encounter”). (shrink)
Philosophers of language have long recognized that in opaque contexts, such as those involving propositional attitude reports, substitution of co-referring names may not preserve truth value. For example, the name ‘Clark Kent’ cannot be substituted for ‘Superman’ in a context like:1. Lois believes that Superman can flywithout a change in truth value. In an earlier paper , Jennifer Saul demonstrated that substitution failure could also occur in ‘simple sentences’ where none of the ordinary opacity-producing conditions existed, such as:2. Superman (...) leaps more tall buildings than Clark Kent does.Accounts focusing on opacity were unable to explain our ‘anti-substitution intuitions’ in such cases.In Simple Sentences, Substitution, and Intuitions, Saul extends her earlier work. She provides a comprehensive presentation and criticism of recent accounts of simple sentence substitution failure, and proposes a new approach drawing on psychological evidence about cognitive processing. Saul's purpose is not merely to solve the substitution puzzle cases, but to make …. (shrink)
Intuitions play an important role in contemporary epistemology. Over the last decade, however, experimental philosophers have published a number of studies suggesting that epistemic intuitions may vary in ways that challenge the widespread reliance on intuitions in epistemology. In a recent paper, Jennifer Nagel offers a pair of arguments aimed at showing that epistemic intuitions do not, in fact, vary in problematic ways. One of these arguments relies on a number of claims defended by appeal to the psychological literature (...) on intuitive judgment and on mental state attribution (also known as “theory of mind”, “mindreading” and “folk psychology”). I call this the "theoretical argument". The other argument relies on recent experimental work carried out by Nagel and her collaborators. It is my contention that in setting out her theoretical argument, Nagel offers an account of the relevant scientific literature that is, in crucial respects, flawed and misleading. My main goal in this paper is to rectify these errors and to make it clear that, once this is done, Nagel’s theoretical argument collapses. Since Nagel’s experimental work has not yet been published, and available details are very sketchy, I do not discuss this work in detail. However, in the final section of the paper I offer some critical observations about Nagel’s strategy for dealing with empirical data that does not support her view – both other people’s and her own. (shrink)
Jennifer Hornsby’s 1997 paper, ‘Truth: The Identity Theory’, has been highly influential in making the identity theory of truth a viable option in contemporary philosophy. In this introduction and commentary I focus on what distinguishes her theory and its methodology from the correspondence theory and the ‘substantivist’ methodology, and on other issues that have not been widely discussed in earlier commentaries yet are central to the current debate on truth.
This paper responds to criticism presented by Steven Bland of my naturalistic approach to epistemic relativism. In my view, the central argument for epistemic relativism derives from the Pyrrhonian problem of the criterion. This opens relativism to an anti-sceptical response. I combine Roderick Chisholm’s particularist response to the problem of the criterion with a reliabilist conception of epistemic warrant. A distinction is made between epistemic norms which provide genuine warrant and those which do not. On the basis of this distinction, (...) we may reject the relativist claim that all epistemic norms have equal standing. I consider three points made by Bland against my position. These relate to epistemic pluralism, the relevance of evolution to epistemic pluralism, and empirical evidence as a basic source of knowledge. (shrink)
Becoming Human by Jennifer Greenwood is one of the most thought-provoking books on emotion and its expression I have read. At its core, it attempts to provide an account of the development of full human emotionality and in so doing argues the emotions are “transcranial.” Emotions are radically realized outside our nervous systems and beyond our skin. As children, we are functionally integrated affectively with our mothers; so much so that in a sense our emotions are not ours alone. (...) Regardless of whether one agrees with her radical claims, it is a must-read for those interested in emotion and expression. In order to appreciate the significance of this book, let me sketch its contents and raise a few criticisms.Many... (shrink)
In this important book, Jennifer Scuro's lived experience presents a challenge to common ideas and assumptions about motherhood, femininity, and anti-abortion politics, as well as to the familiar content and form of philosophy. It is centered on an intensely personal, 176-page graphic novel that details the vivid aspects of Scuro's own miscarriage. Her experience serves as a philosophical allegory, challenging neoliberal and ableist assumptions that presume normalcy, expect results, and promise the false freedom of choice. Initially fitting the script (...) of "normal" motherhood and femininity, Scuro's experience brought her to the "razor's edge" of her cisgender, white privilege. The cutting truth of her story is that... (shrink)
Desire satisfaction theorists and attitudinal-happiness theorists of well-being are committed to correcting the psychological attitudes upon which their theories are built. However, it is not often recognized that some of the attitudes in need of correction are evaluative attitudes. Moreover, it is hard to know how to correct for poor evaluative attitudes in ways that respect the traditional commitment to the authority of the individual subject's evaluative perspective. L. W. Sumner has proposed an autonomy-as-authenticity requirement to perform this task, but (...) this article argues that it cannot do the job. Sumner's proposal focuses on the social origins of our values and overlooks the deep psychological roots of other evaluative attitudes that are just as problematic for welfare. If subjective theories of welfare are to be at all plausible they may need to abandon or modify their traditional commitment to the authority of the individual subject. (shrink)
Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor’s Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions represents not only a significant contribution in utopian studies; it is also a major intervention in contemporary literary studies and global cultural studies more generally. Each of the book’s chapters is structured around a specific set of formal and generic questions, exploring in great detail and with a tremendous amount of insight recent feminist revisionings of older genres, including the bildungsroman, the novel of art, nonlinear histories, American historical novels, and finally, in (...) an extraordinary turn, the works of contemporary Arab feminist writers, which, Wagner-Lawlor shows, “directly address the nature of the work left to do, as.. (shrink)
In their excellent new volume, Asian and Feminist Philosophies in Dialogue: Liberating Traditions, editors Jennifer McWeeny and Ashby Butnor offer a vision for philosophy that begins with the insight that philosophy is an activity: it is something that we do rather than simply learn about. As an activity—or even, at times, a performance—philosophy both shapes and is shaped by the social world, a world of power hierarchies, economic realities, and political strategies. Conceiving of philosophy as a socially situated activity (...) highlights its liberatory potential. The activity of philosophy can liberate or constrain; it can empower a person or diminish her. This volume seizes on this insight by employing what Butnor... (shrink)
During this period, when disciples were growing in number, a grievance arose on the part of those who spoke Greek, against those who spoke the language of the Jews; they complained that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution. When Americans think of ethnic conflict, conflict between blacks and whites comes to mind most immediately. Yet ethnic conflict is pervasive around the world. Azerbijanis and Turks in the Soviet Union; Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; Arabs and Jews (...) in the Middle East; Maoris and English settlers in New Zealand; Muslims and Hindus in India and Pakistan; French and English speakers in Quebec; Africans, Afrikaaners, and mixed-race people in South Africa, in addition to the tribal warfare among the Africans themselves: these are just a few of the more obvious conflicts currently in the news. We observe an even more dizzying array of ethnic conflicts if we look back just a few years. Japanese and Koreans; Mongols and Chinese; Serbs and Croats; Christians and Buddhists in Viet Nam: these ancient antagonisms are not immediately in the news, but they could erupt at any time. And the history of the early Christian Church recounted in the Acts of the Apostles reminds us that suspicion among ethnic groups is not a modern phenomenon; rather, it is ancient. The present paper seeks to address the problem of ethnic conflict in modern western democracies. How can our tools and traditions of participatory governments, relatively free markets, and the common law contribute to some resolution of the ancient problems that we find within our midst? In particular, I want to focus here on the question of ethnic integration. (shrink)
En dépit de sa date de parution un peu ancienne, il semble important de signaler cet ouvrage aux lecteurs de ce numéro de Clio. Les évaluations péjoratives de la conversation féminine sont, comme on sait, un des lieux communs les plus anciens et les plus ancrés ; « bavardage », « caquetage », « ragots »... sont quelques-uns des termes métaphoriques qui stigmatisent une façon d'échanger et un style de contenu situés au plus loin de la parole sûre et pondérée (...) des hommes. Jennifer Coates .. (shrink)
In this response paper I defend an alternative position to both Jennifer McMahon’s neo-Kantian view on the aesthetics of perceptual experience, and the sense-data theory that she rightly repudiates. McMahon argues that sense perception is informed by concepts “all the way out,” and that the empiricist notion of unmediated sensuous access to entities in the world is untenable. She further claims that art is demanding inasmuch as it compels one to engage in an open-ended, cognitive interpretive process with sensuous (...) phenomena, and that it is this very process that opens up a space for critique of the entrenched representational concepts by which we navigate the world. In contrast, I argue that the sensuous itself is a source of demand. Perceptual objects, in virtue of their material constitution, are inexhaustible plexuses of meaning that demand a kind of sensuous, interpretive response on the part of our bodily posture and orientation. Works of art offer opportunities for critique insofar as they reveal dimensions of sensuous reality hitherto covered over by status quo conceptual distributions. McMahon is right that sensuous objects are never simply given. But, I claim, she is wrong to suggest that it is only by way of conceptual mediation that we make contact with the world. On the contrary, the sensuous self-presentation of things is always at the same time a demand on our sensory apparatus that resists encapsulation by concepts. (shrink)
In 'What Luck Is Not', Lackey presents counterexamples to the two most prominent accounts of luck: the absence of control account and the modal account. I offer an account of luck that conjoins absence of control to a modal condition. I then show that Lackey's counterexamples mislocate the luck: the agents in her cases are lucky, but the luck precedes the event upon which Lackey focuses, and that event is itself only fortunate, not lucky. Finally I offer an account of (...) fortune. Fortune is luck-involving, and therefore easily confused with luck, but it is not itself lucky. (shrink)
ABSTRACTThe latest draft of UNESCO's proposed Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights is a major disappointment. The committee of government ‘experts’ that produced it made sure that it would not introduce any new obligations for States, and so the document simply restates existing agreements and lists desirable goals without specifying how they can be achieved. This article focuses on the shortcomings of the document as it would apply to health care. These shortcomings are evident in the document's scope, aims (...) and principles. The conclusion is that if UNESCO still thinks that such a declaration is needed, it should produce either an ethical document addressed to individuals and groups, which would be primarily educational in nature, or a legal document addressed to States, which should not have the word ‘ethics’ in its title. (shrink)
