TOO-BLUE: COLOUR-PATCH FOR AN EXPANDED EMPIRICISM

This essay is in part a response to the rhetoric of the ‘two cultures’ revived by the ‘science wars’ conducted in recent years through the mass media against humanities disciplines, especially ‘post-modern’ art, cultural studies, and non-analytic philosophy. The essay focuses in greatest detail on the relation between science and philosophy, arguing that they are in fact complementary activities effectively partaking of the same reality. Although knowledge practices in the humanities draw from their partaking radically different orders of result from those of science (and from each other), they have claim to an effective connection to a shared reality. Humanities disciplines, and even ‘informal’ or ‘traditional’ knowledge practices, can be argued to be realist, empirical enterprises generating modes of validity specific to their manner of result – provided that the definition of empirical reality is generously broadened. An ‘expanded’ empiricism is a ‘radical’ empiricism in William James's sense of taking relations to be as real and as fundamentally given to experience as discrete objects or sense-data. Recognizing the reality of relation nudges empiricism in the direction of process philosophy. The essay reviews concepts of cause and discovery, nature and culture, affect and virtuality, truth and constructedness, taking the experience of colour as a prime example. It combines elements of James's radical empiricism with Whitehead's process philosophy with the poststructuralism of Deleuze and Guattari with chaos and complexity theory. The resulting perspective converges with Isabelle Stengers' vision of a non-judgemental political ecology of knowledge. An expansive ethics of relationality, of mutual differential belonging, is the natural correlate of an expanded culture of empiricism.     

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

The debate about the patenting of research is perhaps the most passionate now taking place about science and scientific culture. It is widely maintained that the expansion of patenting since about 1980 betrays a scientific tradition to which norms of universalism and common ownership of knowledge were central. This paper goes back to mid-twentieth century debates about science and intellectual property (IP) to argue that many of the norms we take as so central to science were themselves first articulated to critique patenting practices. In particular, it looks at how an economist (Arnold Plant), a scientist/philosopher (Michael Polanyi), and an information theorist (Norbert Wiener) responded to such practices. It especially focuses on the role of intellectual-property concerns in the making of Polanyi's philosophy of science, which it excavates through a reading of his unpublished papers. This reveals that the modern field of ‘science studies’ is indebted for some of its key concepts to an earlier generation of patent wars – an inheritance that exemplifies some of the strange ways in which the sociopolitical meanings of ideas can change from generation to generation. The point is not that present-day critics of scientific patenting are wrong, but that the very terms of the debate are more deeply-seated in the development of scientific culture than any of us has realized.     

Cultures of care? Animals and science in Britain

It is becoming increasingly common to hear life scientists say that high quality life science research relies upon high quality laboratory animal care. However, the idea that animal care is a crucial part of scientific knowledge production is at odds with previous social science and historical scholarship regarding laboratory animals. How are we to understand this discrepancy? To begin to address this question, this paper seeks to disentangle the values of scientists in identifying animal care as important to the production of high quality scientific research. To do this, we conducted a survey of scientists working in the United Kingdom who use animals in their research. The survey found that being British is associated with thinking that animal care is a crucial part of conducting high quality science. To understand this finding, we draw upon the concept of ‘civic epistemologies’ (Jasanoff 2005; Prainsack 2006) and argue that ‘animals’ and ‘care’ in Britain may converge in taken‐for‐granted assumptions about what constitutes good scientific knowledge. These ideas travel through things like state regulations or the editorial policies of science journals, but do not necessarily carry the embodied civic epistemology of ‘animals’ and ‘science’ from which such modes of regulating laboratory animal welfare comes.     

Social acceleration and the network effect: a defence of social ‘science fiction’ and network determinism

This essay is a response to Judy Wajcman's essay ‘Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time’ (2008: 59–77). In that article Wajcman argued that recent developments in the sociology of temporal change had been marked by a tendency in social theory towards a form of ‘science fiction’– a sociological theorizing, she maintains, that bears no real relation to actual, empirically provable developments in the field and should therefore be viewed as not contributing to ‘a richer analysis of the relationship between technology and time’ (2008: 61). This reply argues that as Wajcman suggests in her essay, there is indeed an ‘urgent need for increased dialogue to connect social theory with detailed empirical studies’ (2008: 59) but that the most fruitful way to proceed would not be through a constraining of ‘science fiction’ social theorizing but, rather, through its expansion – and more, that ‘science fiction’ should take the lead in the process. This essay suggests that the connection between social theory and empirical studies would be strengthened by a wider understanding of the function of knowledge and research in the context of what is termed ‘true originality’ and ‘routine originality’. The former is the domain of social theory and the latter resides within traditional sociological disciplines. It is argued that both need each other to advance our understanding of society, especially in the context of the fast‐changing processes of technological development. The example of ‘technological determinism’ is discussed as illustrative of how ‘routine originality’ can harden into dogma without the application of ‘true originality’ to continually question (sometimes through ideas that may appear to border on ‘science fiction’) comfortable assumptions that may have become ‘routine’ and shorn of their initial ‘originality’.     

Constructing a Teacher of Qualitative Methods: A Reflection

This paper reflects on and theorizes strategies to design and teach an introductory qualitative research class to US doctoral students. My orientation towards learning theory as an educational psychologist shapes my analysis in fundamental ways. The course blends elements of philosophy, method, skill‐building and reflection to explore both ‘why’ and ‘how to’ elements of qualitative research. Four process components are examined: (1) the construction of my own beliefs about research, (2) the evolution of course readings and skill‐building activities, (3) an analysis of quotations from students’ work, and (4) implications for teaching research methods courses. Class members unearthed moral and ethical dilemmas in every aspect of the research process, and we worked to excavate ways to do quality work in respectful ways. My reflection concludes with two personal insights: (1) social science graduate students in the US need more opportunities to think theoretically and write interpretively and (2) self‐knowledge is integrally connected to issues of openness, voice, and seeing the world with new eyes through the research process.     

Trust and technology: the social foundations of aviation regulation

This paper looks at the dilemmas posed by ‘expertise’ in high‐technology regulation by examining the US Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) ‘type‐certification’ process, through which they evaluate new designs of civil aircraft. It observes that the FAA delegate a large amount of this work to the manufacturers themselves, and discusses why they do this by invoking arguments from the sociology of science and technology. It suggests that – contrary to popular portrayal – regulators of high technologies face an inevitable epistemic barrier when making technological assessments, which forces them to delegate technical questions to people with more tacit knowledge, and hence to ‘regulate’ at a distance by evaluating ‘trust’ rather than ‘technology’. It then unravels some of the implications of this and its relation to our theories of regulation and ‘regulatory capture’.     

If we practice posthumanist research,do we need ‘gender’ any longer?

This article offers a reflection around the question of ‘do we need ‘gender’ any longer?’ In taking up this problem and inspired by the way in which postqualitative inquiry has opened a conversation with Deleuzian philosophy and formulated a ‘concept as/instead of method’ line of thought, I wonder whether new images of thought might give the concept of gender ‘the forces it needs to return to life’ or the forces to abandon it. I propose four different images that might provoke the desire to experiment with a new image of thought in relation to the problem: a vegetal mode of thought, a musical mode, a fleshy mode as labiaplasty, a nonliving mode. This choice is connected to the dualities they target: the human/vegetal living world, the rational/artistic production of knowledge, the dis‐embodied/corporeal being in the world, the life/nonlife hierarchization. Each way of thinking of ‘gender’ stages, enacts, performs a different material reality of the concept that shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices. Hence, if gender has become a dominant discourse, it may be that positive repetition of this discourse might become a way of opening a new site inside it, by de‐territorializing it and re‐territorializing it otherwise.     

Framing the neoliberal canon: resisting the market myth via literary enquiry

ABSTRACT

There is widespread recognition that neoliberal rhetoric about ‘free markets’ stands in considerable tension with ‘really existing’ neoliberalizing processes. However, the oft-utilized analytical distinction between ‘pure’ economic and political theory and ‘messy’ empirical developments takes for granted that neoliberalism, at its core, valorizes free markets. In contrast, the paper explores whether neoliberal intellectuals ever made such an argument. Using Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman as exemplars, our reading of canonical neoliberal texts focuses on author framing gestures, particular understandings of the term ‘science’, techniques of characterization, and constructions of epistemological legitimacy. This enables us to avoid the trap of assuming that these texts are about free markets and instead enquires into their constitution as literary artefacts. As such, we argue that the remaking of states and households rather than the promotion of free markets is at the core of neoliberalism. Our analysis has significant implications. For example, it means that authoritarian neoliberalism is not a departure from but actually more in line with the ‘pure’ neoliberal canon than in the past. Therefore, neoliberalism ought to be critiqued not for its rhetorical promotion of free markets but instead for seeking to reorganize societies in coercive, non-democratic and unequal ways. This also enables us to acknowledge that households are central to resistance to neoliberalism as well as to the neoliberal worldview itself.     

Towards a political ontology of state power: a comment on Colin Hay's article

This article offers some critical realist, strategic‐relational comments on Colin Hay's proposal to treat the state as an ‘as‐if‐real’ concept. The critique first develops an alternative account of ontology, which is more suited to analyses of the state and state power; it then distinguishes the ‘intransitive’ properties of the real world as an object of investigation from the ‘transitive’ features of its scientific investigation and thereby provides a clearer understanding of what is at stake in ‘as‐if‐realism’; and it ends with the suggestion that a concern with the modalities of state power rather than with the state per se offers a more fruitful approach to the genuine issues raised in Hay's article and in his earlier strategic‐relational contributions to political analysis.     

Public sphere as assemblage: the cultural politics of roadside memorialization

This paper investigates contemporary academic accounts of the public sphere. In particular, it takes stock of post‐Habermasian public sphere scholarship, and acknowledges a lively and variegated debate concerning the multiple ways in which individuals engage in contemporary political affairs. A critical eye is cast over a range of key insights which have come to establish the parameters of what ‘counts’ as a/the public sphere, who can be involved, and where and how communicative networks are established. This opens up the conceptual space for re‐imagining a/the public sphere as an assemblage. Making use of recent developments in Deleuzian‐inspired assemblage theory – most especially drawn from DeLanda's (2006) ‘new philosophy of society’ – the paper sets out an alternative perspective on the notion of the public sphere, and regards it as a space of connectivity brought into being through a contingent and heterogeneous assemblage of discursive, visual and performative practices. This is mapped out with reference to the cultural politics of roadside memorialization. However, a/the public sphere as an assemblage is not simply a ‘social construction’ brought into being through a logic of connectivity, but is an emergent and ephemeral space which reflexively nurtures and assembles the cultural politics (and political cultures) of which it is an integral part. The discussion concludes, then, with a consideration of the contribution of assemblage theory to public sphere studies. (Also see Campbell 2009a)     

Laughing otherwise: comic-critical approaches in alternative comedy

Abstract

The origins of ‘alternative comedy’ are difficult to pinpoint, though it coincided with the rise of Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979 – that year saw the appearance of something called ‘alternative cabaret’, a term usually associated with Tony Allen, who combined activism and comedy. The acts this article will focus on are those which took a critical approach to comedy and/or politics – ‘alternative’ comedy (or altcom), therefore, as seeming to promise change through critical awareness. This paper will discuss parody as a means of critical (dis)engagement and transformation, in relation to context, and to influences such as punk. Altcom demonstrates an apparent eschewal of approaches which rely on irony and ambiguity, in favour of more ‘direct’ political engagement. It will be argued however that such ‘direct’ approach does not cancel out critical distance, but rather seeks alternative routes to establish it – namely comic and parodic overstatement, and the problematisation of ‘trust’. This entails the key questions of whether parody may take up critical distance without irony, as well as of the political implications of an approach which seeks to eliminate ambiguity. This more ‘direct’ approach however still depends on a balance of engagement and disengagement, requiring distancing from pre-established codes.     

Starting somewhere different: methodological cosmopolitanism and the study of world politics

In this article, I contribute to the debate on Ulrich Beck's idea of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ from a political science perspective. How fruitful is Beck's idea for the study of world politics? How can a political science perspective turn ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ into a more transdisciplinary subject of debate? Guided by these questions, I speak to two audiences. First, I offer political scientists a distinct strategy for empirical ‘cosmopolitan political science’ research. At the heart of this strategy is a novel object of research, the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, understood as a discourse that breaks with the ‘national outlook’ to open possibilities for a world beyond ‘reflexive modernization’. With that, I shift the perspective from structure to discourse and broaden the normative grounds on which to assess cosmopolitan reality. Rather than just considering the emergence of normative cosmopolitan ideals, I build into cosmopolitan research the normative, empirical question of whether we see an emergence of a world beyond reflexive modernization. Second, I address scholars outside the field of political science who are interested in methodological cosmopolitanism by offering the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ as a novel object of study that could also be explored from other disciplinary perspectives and by proposing they put the question of the purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism centre stage. This question can, I argue, constitute grounds for substantial debates on methodological cosmopolitanism not already precluded through disciplinary premises and concerns. Contributing to such a transdisciplinary debate, I distinguish between the long‐term and immediate purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism, the former being about the development of a cosmopolitan language and grammar and the latter about empirical explorations of the reality of the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, eventually and in a collective and transdisciplinary endeavour building up to contribute to the former.     

WIKIPEDIA

The decentralized participatory architecture of the Internet challenges traditional knowledge authorities and hierarchies. Questions arise about whether lay inclusion helps to ‘democratize’ knowledge formation or if existing hierarchies are re-enacted online. This article focuses on Wikipedia, a much-celebrated example which gives an in-depth picture of the process of knowledge production in an open environment. Drawing on insights from the sociology of knowledge, Wikipedia's talk pages are conceptualized as an arena where reality is socially constructed. Using grounded theory, this article examines the entry for the September 11 attacks and its related talk pages in the German Wikipedia. Numerous alternative interpretations (labeled as ‘conspiracy theories’) that fundamentally contradict the account of established knowledge authorities regarding this event have emerged. On the talk pages, these views collide, thereby serving as a useful case study to examine the role of experts and lay participants in the process of knowledge construction on Wikipedia. The study asks how the parties negotiate ‘what actually happened’ and which knowledges should be represented in the Wikipedia entry. The conflicting points of view overload the discursive capacity of the contributors. The community reacts by marginalizing opposing knowledge and protecting or immunizing the article against these disparate views. This is achieved by rigorously excluding knowledge which is not verified by external expert authorities. Therefore, in this case, lay participation did not lead to a ‘democratization’ of knowledge production, but rather re-enacted established hierarchies.     

‘Knowledge’ or Knowledgeable Banks? International Financial Institutions' Generation of Knowledge in Times of Crisis

The food‐price crisis is testing the capacity of so‐called ‘knowledge institutions’ to generate relevant knowledge with which to serve their clients better. This article analyses the voluminous knowledge generated by such banks and other international institutions in the context of the food‐price crisis: in particular, its technical features; the depth and merits of the subsequent policy discussion; and the connection between the knowledge generated and specific policy advocacy. It also provides an explanation for the inability of these institutions to anticipate the dire consequences of the crisis, other than the widely accepted ‘perfect storm’ storyline.     

Translating deconstruction

Abstract

This paper argues that insofar as the ‘translation’ of deconstruction in America has become a discourse on the sacred, it mis‐recognizes what Derrida calls the trace, and identifies it as the radical outside to thought, or as ‘God’. The ‘trace’ on Derrida's account is indeed unknowable, but it is not the radical outside of thought. Rather, it is a disruptive force that is internal to thought. Reconstructive analyses investigate (among other things) the way that thought is breached, and necessarily so, by what thought cannot think. This breach, this unsignifiable opening, is intolerable to philosophical undertakings because philosophy must totalize; this is what philosophy does. Following Walter Benjamin, I argue that translation is possible, precisely because of this breach. Thus, just because this breach or opening is intolerable to thought or to philosophy does not prevent it from happening. On Jacques Derrida's analysis, this opening has a name: it is deconstruction. To this extent, those variants of ‘deconstruction in America’ which misrecognize the trace as God, miss the very political force of deconstruction in the first place, which is to say, a philosophical undertaking which thematizes the intolerability of refusing what philosophy does and must do.

The breach in thought (or language) is precisely what Walter Benjamin suggests is untranslatable. It cannot be communicated by any sign. Notwithstanding the great difference between Benjamin and Hegel's political commitments, comparing Benjamin's work on the untranslatability of language's ‘languageness’ to Hegel's semiological theory (which requires that we forget’ this very uncommunicableness at the heart of language) is instructive. It establishes that both thinkers argue that the practice of language should be the practice of learning each word as though it were a proper name. Each argues in their own way that the practice of language should erase the trace. It is precisely this erasure — the identification of the trace as radically exterior to thought ‐ that covers over what is at stake, not simply philosophically, in an investigation into the breach of language, but what is at stake politically. What is at stake politically is what Derrida calls the ‘risk of absolute surprise’ which is nothing less than the risk of a political philosophy with no guarantee.     

Between the state and global civil society: non‐official experts and their network in the Asia‐Pacific, 1925–45

This article stresses the need for a more rigorous scrutiny of the power structure in which an expert network produces its ‘expert knowledge’. It defines a pioneering multinational expert network in the Asia‐Pacific region in the interwar years as a prototype of an epistemic community, and examines how far it challenged the state‐centred and North Atlantic‐centred dominant structure of international politics, and became ‘global’. In this article I argue that this particular network largely reinforced the dominant structure. This meant that it remained inter‐national and colonial, and served the interests of the state/empire, neither becoming global nor advancing a universalist cause for the global civil society. The failure owes a lot to historical circumstances. Yet this case study also demonstrates that the structure in which the expert network produced specific knowledge is still dominant and that a constant scrutiny of the role of an expert network remains critical.     

The strategic leadership of complex practice: opportunities and challenges

This paper addresses the issue of how strategic‐level partnerships, such as Local Safeguarding Children Boards, know about and learn from practice. The death of Baby Peter in Haringey exposed the dangers of reliance on numerical performance data alone to inform leaders about the true state of practice. The drivers for, and impact of, regulatory, media and political pressures on front‐line practice and partnership behaviour are discussed with reference to the rise of organisational risk management and ‘rule‐based’ responses (Munro, 2009 ). These are exacerbated by an overload of negative data about child protection systems which results in contagious ‘attention cascades’ which lead to over‐simplification of complex issues and the rush to quick‐fix solutions. This results in compliance‐based responses designed to avoid ‘blame’, based on individualistic analyses of complex situations. Under these conditions, ‘learning’, such as from serious case reviews, can become regressive (how to avoid future culpability) rather than progressive (how to improve knowledge skills and practice). It is argued that understanding and improving practice require strategic partnerships to have engaged with front‐line staff in order to access practice narratives as well as performance numbers, and to achieve an accurate and systemic analysis of the state of practice and how it can be improved. This calls for collective forms of knowing and reflecting and the paper concludes by describing examples. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sexualizing the Organization,Lesbianizing the Women: Gender,Sexuality and ‘Flat’ Organizations

This article draws upon research with men and women workers in ‘flat’ organizations, namely mixed-sex and all-women's worker co-operatives and collectives in the voluntary sector. It argues that the denial of sales, contracts and grants to women's co-operatives and collectives in particular, can be connected to discourses of sexuality generally and to the assumptions surrounding lesbianism and separatism in particular. Such discourses are often used to marginalize women workers and their co-operatives and collectives, irrespective of whether the women in such organizations are lesbians or not. It is argued that when women workers organize in ways which challenge male-dominated hierarchy, their marginalization necessarily takes a sexualized form because organizations, whether hierarchical or less/non-hierarchical, are not only gendered but are also sexualized. This analysis thus offers an important additional dimension to the view that the marginalization of co-operatives and collectives is due to their small size, lack of capital, location in certain sectors of the economy, or assumptions concerning the ‘alternative’ or ‘fringe’ nature of employment in such settings. This article also argues that sexuality can attach at the level of the organization, and not simply at the level of individual bodies or life-styles, an argument often unacknowledged both in the literature on lesbians in the workplace, and in the literature on co-operative businesses and less or non-hierarchical voluntary sector organizations generally.     

Reactive transnationalism: homeland involvement in the face of discrimination

In this article we examine whether migrants' perceived discrimination in the country of settlement leads to an increase of their transnational involvement. So far, this so‐called ‘reactive transnationalism’ has not been studied extensively. Based on literature on discrimination and transnationalism, reactive transnationalism is expected to be most prominent among socioeconomically successful migrants, particularly among males and those who consider themselves Muslims. Our research among middle‐class migrants in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, indeed shows that the more respondents experienced discrimination, the more transnationally involved they are, both regarding transnational identifications and transnational activities. While no gender difference was found regarding reactive transnational activities, for women perceived discrimination proves to lead to stronger instead of weaker transnational identifications than for men. The fact that no difference was found between Muslim and non‐Muslim respondents regarding reactive transnationalism suggests that, despite heated public debates about ‘Islam’, in the Netherlands, ethnic divides – being considered as ‘Dutch’ or ‘non‐Dutch’ – are even more prominent than religious ones.