This volume contains a selection of essays presented at the international conference on Cultural Crises in Art and Literature, held in Groningen in November 2002, in a special session on the question of the autonomy of the arts. Do we witness, in western culture, the end of the autonomy of the arts as it has been conceptualized and institutionalized since the eighteenth century? Indeed, developments of quite a different nature seem to have contributed to a blurring of boundaries between art (...) and non-art, art and the market, art and politics or ethics, as well as between the arts themselves, and between 'high' and 'low' art. Although this volume does not pretend to map this complex process in its entirety - partly because it is impossible to step out of one's own history - it is meant as a contribution to the elucidation of the process itself, offering some challenging explanations as to the heat of the current debate. (shrink)
How do conceptions of the literary author change throughout history, and how do they function in specific contexts? The present volume aims to investigate debates on the concept of authorship as a struggle of participants - writers, critics, and scholars - over different conceptions of interpretation. In this struggle all kinds of literary and non-literary norms appear to be at stake. The volume compares the time span around 1900 and 2000, and contrasts the French situation with conditions in other cultures (...) and 'minor literatures'. It addresses the following questions: how did the processes of group-constitution, professionalisation, and (de-)autonomisation of authorship around 1900 and 2000 offer new positionings and roles for writers, and affect conceptions of the author? To what extent can such conceptions of authorship - projected or defended by writers as well as by critics and scholars - be analysed as strategies to claim and legitimise a position in the literary field, respectively in the scholarly field? What light does the analysis of debates about authorship shed on how the social, political or moral relevance of both literature and criticism are defined and defended? (shrink)
Many social situations require a mental model of the knowledge, beliefs, goals, and intentions of others: a Theory of Mind (ToM). If a person can reason about other people’s beliefs about his own beliefs or intentions, he is demonstrating second-order ToM reasoning. A standard task to test second-order ToM reasoning is the second-order false belief task. A different approach to investigating ToM reasoning is through its application in a strategic game. Another task that is believed to involve the application of (...) second-order ToM is the comprehension of sentences that the hearer can only understand by considering the speaker’s alternatives. In this study we tested 40 children between 8 and 10 years old and 27 adult controls on (adaptations of) the three tasks mentioned above: the false belief task, a strategic game, and a sentence comprehension task. The results show interesting differences between adults and children, between the three tasks, and between this study and previous research. (shrink)
The study of complexity in chronic care is an emergent discipline that has not yet developed a consistent theoretical framework. Thinking in the field of complexity encompasses complexity science and complexity theories, which represent a convergence of different types of ideas and theories that focus on the interactions of individual parts that make up a complex system. In this context, an important distinction is to be made between "complex" and "complicated." If a system—despite the fact that it may consist of (...) a huge number of components— can be given a complete description in terms of its individual constituents, such a system is merely complicated. An example could be computers. In a complex system, on the .. (shrink)
Recent scholarship has firmly established the similarities between Arendt and Foucault, in particular with regard to the dangers of late-modern social processes. Yet, few have compared their accounts of resistance. This paper argues that although Foucault offers the more comprehensive account, it omits the encounter with the other as unique and unfathomable, which is central to Arendt’s. This omission is particularly striking given the authors’ shared belief that the danger of ‘the social’ and ‘governmentality’ lies in atomizing individuals and barring (...) the development of a singular style of being, and their allusion to friendship and solidarity as sites of resistance. Drawing on Arendt, I show how Foucault restricts his thematization of solidarity and friendship to a reflexive praxis of the subject on her own limits, and argue instead for the relational dimension of resistance. I start by reconstructing their converging analysis of biological racism. I then continue with a discussion of resistance in Arendt, which she develops in response to the Shoah. More specifically, she provides a concept of solidarity and friendship that I draw on to extend Foucault’s analysis of the transnational solidarity among the governed in fighting for their rights vis-à-vis their governments; and of friendship in the context of his interrogation of the LGBT-movement. (shrink)
This paper discusses the empirical, Application Programming Interface -based analysis of very large Facebook Pages. Looking in detail at the technical characteristics, conventions, and peculiarities of Facebook’s architecture and data interface, we argue that such technical fieldwork is essential to data-driven research, both as a crucial form of data critique and as a way to identify analytical opportunities. Using the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook Page, which hosted the activities of nearly 1.9 million users during the Egyptian Revolution and (...) beyond, as empirical example, we show how Facebook’s API raises important questions about data detail, completeness, consistency over time, and architectural complexity. We then outline an exploratory approach and a number of analytical techniques that take the API and its idiosyncrasies as a starting point for the concrete investigation of a large dataset. Our goal is to close the gap between Big Data research and research about Big Data by showing that the critical investigation of technicity is essential for empirical research and that attention to the particularities of empirical work can provide a deeper understanding of the various issues Big Data research is entangled with. (shrink)
In der niederländischen Kultur werden komplexe moralische Probleme oftmals mit einem pragmatischen und prozeduralen Verfahren statt mit einem prinzipiellen Zugang angegangen. Die Debatte um Entscheidungen am Lebensende, die dem Sterbehilfegesetz von 2002 vorausging, ist ein Beispiel für diese Praxis. Auch die Befassung der Niederlande mit der „terminalen Sedierung“, die als neue Phase in der Diskussion um Entscheidungen am Lebensende betrachtet werden kann, folgt den Prinzipien des „Poldermodells“. Gesellschaftliche und politische Gruppierungen kooperieren, um eine gemeinsame Lösung zu finden angesichts der Tatsache, (...) dass terminale Sedierung unterschiedliche Praktiken und entsprechend unterschiedliche moralische Implikationen beinhaltet. (shrink)
For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make explicit (...) another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private and the public sphere. This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future, world and earth, and the private and public sphere. This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority. (shrink)
This essay aims to correct the widely-held view that Arendt is hostile to the body due to its physical needs. By focusing on two modes of corporeality that are distinguished by the production of bodily substances—the digestive body and the crying body—I argue that Arendt deployed various notions of corporeality that thematize, in different ways, the uncontrollability our bodies; and argues for the affirmation of this unmasterablity because it corresponds to the conditioned nature of human existence. Firstly, Arendt criticized the (...) Greek, narcissistic aspiration toward physical beauty, exemplified in the figure of Achilles, for its attempt to subjugate the digestive body to a preconceived end—a criticism that equally applies to Connolly’s plea for strategically altering our affects. Secondly, Arendt’s appreciation of Homer’s description of a crying Odysseus shows that the acknowledgment of events constitutive of one’s life consists in a publicly visible somatic reaction. (shrink)
Der vorliegende Band enthält den Text der vierstündigen Vorlesung, die Husserl im Wintersemester 1908/09 unter dem Titel "Alte und neue Logik" in Göttingen gehalten hat. Es handelt sich bei dieser Vorlesung zum einen um eine Umarbeitung und Neugestaltung seiner Logikvorlesung von 1902/03, die im Band 2 der Materialien veröffentlicht wurde, zum anderen um eine Vorstufe der in Band XXX der Gesammelten Werke unter dem späteren Titel "Logik und Allgemeine Wissenschaftslehre" veröffentlichten Vorlesung "Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie" von 1910/11.
A scheme of analysis for separatism is proposed. Its purpose is twofold: to indicate the essential factors in a separatist process, and to explain the waves of active and « dead » separatist activity.The central idea is the distinction between three dimensions in the separatist process : conflict, mobilization and collective action. Both dimension on its own is determined by certain factors. Conflict depends on contradictions of identity and interest structure between people and nation. Mobilization is primarily a function of (...) the social, economic and political opportunities of the people as against the nation. Collective action is the result of the presence, strength and behaviour of the elite and social movement in people and nation.Evolution from one dimension to the next one depends upon the factors of the dimensions involved and on a) the policy of the nation and b) the societal changes caused by the modernization process.Finally one can explain inactive and active periods by verifying the presence or absence of these nine factors. It seems then that there are false and real « dead » periods, and that some separatist activity has a sound basis white other has not. (shrink)
Despite major institutional and political changes in the Belgian political system in the last 25 years, the electoral organization has been very stable.The adaptations of the electoral organization have even been less in the province of Brabant, although the politica! developments have caused there additional problems. Brabant's electoral constituencies contain a rather strange mixture of heterogeneous electorates : a constituency, which consists of the bilingual capital Brussels as welt as several Flemish communes, a unilingual Walloon constituency, a unilingual Flemish constituency. (...) The proposed solutions for Brabant's complex situation can be summarized into six alternative systems of electoral organization, concentrating either on the functioning of the system of provincial allotment, or on a radical redrawing of the boundaries of the electoral constituencies.The impact of the six alternatives on the seats distribution among the political parties is rather restricted. The shifts of seats inside the parties are more striking than between the parties. Alternatives IV and VI cause the largest reallocation of seats between the parties, whereas alternatives II, III and V result in only minor changes. (shrink)
Resistance and Rights. Comparing Arendt, Foucault, and YoungThe question if rights can be used in addressing gender-based oppression is at the center of recent debates in feminist theory. On the one hand, post-structuralist critiques have argued that differentiated rights, aimed at redressing injustices, reify the identity of oppressed groups. On the other hand, proponents of differentiated rights have argued that these should be understood social-phenomenologically, as enabling social agents to counteract their oppression. This paper argues in favor for the latter (...) position while taking seriously the concern with regard to social identity articulated by the former. I do so by comparing Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on the relation between resistance and rights. Starting from the observation that Arendt and Foucault agree on the need for a new law that can curtail the destructive dynamics of late-modernity, I argue that their account of resistance ascribes great importance to rights. Discussing the two authors in turn, I focus on two parallel themes. Firstly, confronted with the fight against anti-Semitic persecution and the struggle against governmental techniques, they invoke rights against the near-total domination by late-modern states. Secondly, reflecting on how freedom practices require relationships with others in which one can develop one’s individual uniqueness, they hint towards rights that consolidate these relationships, of which friendship is the paradigmatic example. In conclusion, I return to the feminist debate on differential rights to show how Young’s model of communicative democracy is influenced by and is an instance of the relational rights that can be found in Arendt and Foucault. (shrink)
Both love and politics name relations, according to Arendt, in which a subject is constituted as a unique person. Following up on this suggestion, I explore how love gives rise to a conception of personhood that temporarily suspends the public judgments and social prejudices that reduce the other to their actions or to their social identity. I do so by tracing a similar movement in the various tropes of Arendt’s phenomenology of love: the retreat away from the collective world into (...) the intimacy of love, followed by the necessary return to the world and the end of love. This exploration casts a new—and surprisingly positive—light on some key notions in Arendt’s thought, such as the body, the will, and life. However, Arendt disregards that love, as De Beauvoir argued, requires a constant effort in restraining our tendency to reduce the lover to their social identity. (shrink)
Neither traditional philosophy nor current applied ethics seem able to cope adequately with the highly dynamic character of our modern technological culture. This is because they have insufficient insight into the moral significance of technological artifacts and systems. Here, much can be learned from recent science and technology studies. They have opened up the black box of technological developments and have revealed the intimate intertwinement of technology and society in minute detail. However, while applied ethics is characterized by a certain (...) “technology blindness,” the most influential approaches within STS show a “normative deficit” and display an agnostic or even antagonistic attitude toward ethics. To repair the blind spots of both applied ethics and STS,the authors sketch the contours of a pragmatist approach. They will explore the tasks and tools of a pragmatist ethics and pay special attention to the exploration of future worlds disclosed and shaped by technology and the management of deep value conflicts inherent to a pluralist society. (shrink)
There is by now broad consensus in the critical literature that neoliberalism and social conservatism have frequently coexisted in practice. Yet the alt-right fits none of the previously identified alliances: this is not the neoliberal neoconservatism of the Reagan and Bush years, nor the neoliberal communitarianism of the Third Way, nor even a form of neoliberal authoritarianism. Instead, the alt-right claims intellectual descent from economic libertarianism, on the one hand, and paleo- conservatism on the other. This paper traces the contours (...) of this ‘paleolibertarian’ alliance, first by following the volatile political trajectory of Murray Rothbard, the foremost philosopher of American libertarianism, and, second, by uncovering precedents in the longer history of the American far right. It will be argued that paleoconservatism makes for a uniquely powerful ally because it offers a workable response to libertarianism’s intrinsic contradictions. (shrink)
ABSTRACT The influence by Walter Benjamin on Arendt’s notion of narrativity has been firmly established, but little research has been done to contextualize his influence. This paper fill this lacunae by showing how, like Benjamin, Arendt was concerned to deploy a form of writing history that ensures the individuality of its agents, but that as she articulated her notion of the public space, the redemptive, messianic elements in his historiography were replaced with a secular and political mode of remembrance. The (...) notion of the public space and the accompanying secularization of Benjamin’s redemptive history should not be understood as the result of a linear development, but rather as responses to contemporary political events, of which I focus on three: her early writings on totalitarianism, in which she tries to come to terms with the Shoah; her reflections on the Greek city state, in which she criticizes the instrumentalization of politics in post-war democracies such as West-Germany; and finally, the court room as a space for storytelling and the contestation over the history of anti-Semitism during the Eichmann trial. (shrink)
Biesta distinguishes three functions of education: qualification, socialization and subjectification. We focus on subjectification. When first addressing this concept, Biesta referred to action as defined by Arendt, thereby stressing the importance of ‘the question of freedom’. More recently, the question of freedom is replaced by ‘the question of responsibility’. For Levinas responsibility is related to irreplaceability. While the concept of responsibility is valuable, we question the call upon irreplaceability in education. Actively taking responsibility where irreplaceability might not be either present (...) or felt should be central to education. Unlike the morally clear examples invoked by Biesta, complex societal issues like the climate and refugee crisis are not accessible as an immediate appeal to a specific subject. Therefore, we propose a return to Arendt and her concept of action. Action allows and requires students to create the world anew, to take a position without pretending that the outcome can be controlled. Biesta refers to this as the impossibility of education. However, rather than repeating the theme of impossibility, we focus on the possibilities of education: there are several ways to create the world anew. (shrink)
A complete reconstruction of Lehmer’s ENIAC set-up for computing the exponents of p modulo two is given. This program served as an early test program for the ENIAC (1946). The reconstruction illustrates the difficulties of early programmers to find a way between a man operated and a machine operated computation. These difficulties concern both the content level (the algorithm) and the formal level (the logic of sequencing operations).
In a world of glossy corporate social responsibility reports, the shallowness of the actual CSR results may well be its counterpart. We claim that the possible gaps between aspirations and implementations are due to the company's overrating abilities to deal with the irrational and complex moral world of business. Many academic approaches aim to lift business ethics up to a higher level by enhancing competences but will fail because they are too rationalistic and generalistic to match the pluralistic and situational (...) practice constituted by the mosaic of values and set of constraints. This is demonstrated by describing and analyzing the CSR development of the multinational caterer Sodexo and in particular its Dutch branch. We explain what they do and why they are not successful. We present a new tool named Ethical Room for Maneuver that centers experiences and concrete situations in a playground of inquiry and experiment to enhance abilities to operate in themoral world and to meliorate business and society with more effectiveness. (shrink)
Die Bezeichnung „alt“ hat sich zu einem Wertbegriff negativer Konnotation gewandelt, so dass er synonym für alle möglichen Defizienzen bzw. als Chiffre für Defizienz schlechthin steht. Alt zu sein ist nun nicht länger eine Sache der Jahre, sondern von Qualitäten. Positiv ist daran, dass möglich ist, negativ ist, dass gerade deshalb auch wieder alles ermöglicht werden muss. Denn der Alte ist selber schuld und will er es nicht bleiben, muss er etwas daran ändern. Die Krankschreibung des Alters ruft seine Behandlung (...) hervor, was nichts anders bedeutet als dass das Alter, das als Krankheit begriffen wird, kuriert werden muss, wobei die Kur nicht in seiner Heilung, sondern in seiner Überwindung, d.h. seiner Abschaffung besteht. Das Anti-Aging verfolgt eine radikale Abkehr vom Menschen, wie wir ihn kennen. Gerade am Alter lässt sich aber zeigen, dass der Mensch mit Mängeln leben kann, häufig trotz seiner Mängel glücklich wird und mit ihnen sogar seinen Frieden macht. (shrink)
In this paper, I argue that the Alt-Right needs to be taken seriously by the liberal establishment, the general public, and leftist cultural elites for five main reasons: 1) its ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ borrows from the French New Right and the French and pan-European Identitarian movement. This means that it is engaged in the continuation of a larger Euro-American metapolitical struggle to change hearts and minds on issues related to white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racialism; 2) it is indebted to the metapolitical (...) evolution of sectors of the violent neo-Nazi and earlier white nationalist movements in the USA; 3) this metapolitical orientation uses the mass media, the internet, and social media in general to reach and influence the masses of Americans; 4) the ‘cultural war’ means that the Alt-Right’s spokesman Richard Spencer, French ND leader Alain de Benoist, and other intellectuals see themselves as a type of Leninist vanguard on the radical right, which borrows from left-wing authors such as Antonio Gramsci and their positions in order to win the metapolitical struggle against ‘dominant’ liberal and left-wing political and cultural elites; and 5) this ‘cultural war’ is intellectually and philosophically sophisticated because it understands the crucial role of culture in destabilizing liberal society and makes use of important philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola and others in order to give credence to its revolutionary, racialist, and anti-liberal ideals. (shrink)
The absence of appropriate information about imperceptible and ethical food characteristics limits the opportunities for concerned consumer/citizens to take ethical issues into account during their inescapable food consumption. It also fuels trust crises between producers and consumers, hinders the optimal embedment of innovative technologies, “punishes” in the market ethical producers, and limits the opportunities for politically liberal democratic governance. This paper outlines a framework for the ethical characterization and subsequent optimization of foods (ECHO). The framework applies to “imperceptible,” “pragmatic,” and (...) “reasonable” food characteristics about which consumers/citizens maintain concerns. A political perspective is assumed in that valid information is taken to serve the politically liberal and democratic functions of the market by allowing concerned citizens to make informed choices in their role as food consumers. Information is aggregated by multi-attribute modeling. It takes the form of “maximized” (“utilitarian”) to “most balanced” (MINMAX) non-binary aggregate comparative rankings of perceptibly substitutable food products. The model requires the description of characteristics by means of criteria and weights (structural input), and technical input on the performance of food for these criteria (product input). Structural input is grounded on relevantly concerned citizen/consumers’ perceptions. It is culture and times dependent. Availability of product input is assumed. Uses for the amelioration of the aforementioned limitations are discussed. So long as, and to the extent that, certain ethical concerns are not addressed by public policy, the ECHO framework may facilitate offering members of society a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for regulating the ethical aspects of food production in self-regulated markets as consumers, when they are constrained to do so through their government as citizens. In doing that, the framework may contribute to the development of the ethical dimension of food production and may bring rewards for food supply actors that take reasonable concerns of citizen/consumers into account. (shrink)
La présente contribution propose une étude de la périphérie gauche au sein d’un corpus oral multigenres, représentant douze activités de communication orale, annoté syntaxiquement et prosodiquement. La segmentation discursive du corpus en unités de base du discours (BDU) résulte d’une coïncidence entre unités syntaxiques et prosodiques, correspondant à des encodages linguistiques distincts mais complémentaires. Partant du postulat selon lequel ces unités discursives remplissent une fonction cognitive dans la planification et l’interprétation du discours, nous nous intéressons à l’étude de leur périphérie (...) gauche. Ce lieu, qui constitue le point d’ancrage du message, joue en effet un rôle important dans la négociation de la structure discursive. Dans l’objectif d’étudier les stratégies discursives à l’œuvre dans les différents genres du corpus, nous faisons l’inventaire des types formels observés et étudions finalement les fonctions discursives que ces éléments périphériques peuvent revêtir. (shrink)
A key argument of Dixon et al. in the target article is that prejudice reduction through intergroup contact and collective action work in opposite ways. We argue for a complementary approach focusing on extreme emotions to understand why people turn to non-normative collective action and to understand when and under what conditions extreme emotions may influence positive effects of contact on reconciliation.
E. T. A. Hoffmann is one of the most famous representatives of early German horror literature. He has been both, inspired by its predecessors, as well as having influenced the work of many of his successors, and hence the development of the whole genre. The present article examines a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Vampirismus” from the collection of short stories “Serapions Brüder”. Emphases are, on the one hand, on the mechanisms that cause readers’ fear and uncertainty and, on (...) the other hand, the peculiarity of the vampire or Nachzehrer figure and their function in the story. Firstly, it will be shown that the vampire depicted in the work is not actually a vampire. We find here a ghoul; that is a demon from Arab culture. However, the ghoul has more to do with the monster outlined by Antoine Galland in his translation of the “One Thousand and One Nights” than with traditional folk beliefs. Secondly, the author comes to the conclusion that Hoffmann has functionalized the Horrible. This element does not work by itself, but serves the author as the background of the action. And he is using this background to let the characters reveal all their weaknesses and dark sides. The violation of the order ruling in the world as it is represented engages the reader and at the same time raises his fear. The resulting excited feelings and general alienation are further reinforced for the figure of the Nachzehrer that occurs instead of a formerly innocent, graceful girl. The emergence of the supernatural – the final confirmation of the breach of order – is responsible for the effect just described. (shrink)
The article discuss the interpretation of modernity in Bruno Latours 'The end of modernity'. On the one hand, it argues that the notion of modernity should be modified as nobody can be only modern. On the other hand, it argues that the notion of modernity changes over the ages and that we are in the middle of a process best understood as a new modernization of modernity.
ZusammenfassungSeit einigen Jahren erscheinen in deutschsprachigen Medien Beiträge, die einen neuen Trend in der Versorgung von langzeitpflegebedürftigen Menschen beschreiben: die Migration in ausländische Pflegeheime, insbesondere nach Thailand oder Ost-Europa. Diese Art der Migration wird kontrovers aufgenommen. Einige Medienbeiträge beschreiben diese Praxis u. a. als „Greisen-Export“, „gerontologischen Kolonialismus“ oder „inhumane Deportation“. Die Begriffe weisen darauf hin, dass diese Migration aus sogenannten High Income Countries in Low and Middle Income Countries aus ethischer Sicht problematisch sein könnte. Allerdings gibt es bislang keine wahrnehmbare (...) wissenschaftliche ethische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Phänomen. In diesem Beitrag diagnostizieren wir, dass es sich bei der Migration Langzeit-Pflegebedürftiger tatsächlich um ein ethisch relevantes Problem handelt, und wir ordnen die von uns identifizierten ethisch relevanten Bereiche unterschiedlichen Ebenen zu: einer individual-, einer gesellschafts-, und einer global-ethischen Ebene. Auf der individualethischen Ebene diskutieren wir Fragen der Autonomie, der Verwandtschaftsbeziehungen, der Rolle von Kultur und Traditionen und der „guten Pflege“. Auf der gesellschaftsethischen Ebene diskutieren wir strukturelle Herausforderungen der Langzeitpflege und Fragen der sozialen Gerechtigkeit. Auf der globalethischen Ebene verbinden wir unser Thema mit der ethischen Diskussion des Medizintourismus und des Brain Drains und mit Fragen globaler Gerechtigkeit. Um eine weiterführende normative Analyse vornehmen zu können, sind weitere empirische Daten zu dem Phänomen notwendig. (shrink)