On the limits of a realist conception of knowledge: a pragmatist critique of Archerian realism

In her book Being Human (2000), Margaret Archer presents intriguing pragmatist emphases on practice, embodiment and non‐linguistic knowing‐how, as regards to understanding humanity. However, as Archer attempts to conjoin these ideas with the morphogenetic realism she has been working on for the last few decades, she ends up holding on to a subject–object dualism, which makes things complicated. The authors’ alternative pragmatist account defended in the article flows from Deweyan pragmatist and Rortian antirepresentationalist insights. The main issues in the article concern Archer’s complicated tripartite concept of knowledge, which is contrasted with a (Deweyan–Rylean) distinction between linguistic knowledge‐that and embodied knowing‐how. It is argued that knowledge is a natural, sophisticated tool that human organisms use when coping with their environment; it is always acquired on the strength of embodied knowing‐how, from some actor’s point of view, but the term ‘knowledge’ itself should be reserved for the propositional, linguistic knowledge‐that.     

Knowledge work and practices of seeing: Epistemologies of the eye,gaze, and professional vision

Much practice within organizations is to some extent embodied in and centered on the visual capacities of the agent, the acting subject. Distinguishing between ‘epistemologies of the eye’, i.e. theories of how knowledge is acquired through visual practices, and ‘practices of seeing’, i.e. theories and studies of how vision and visuality are actually used in everyday working life, the paper points to the need to understand vision and visuality in organizational practice. Using the case of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it is suggested that professional vision, i.e. practices of seeing that are shared within epistemic communities, is firstly technologically mediated and, secondly, based on the ability to combine vision, speech, gesture, and other embodied and cognitive resources in order to make sense of the images produced by fMRI technology. The paper concludes that organization theory should examine practices of seeing in greater detail and as part of the project in order to understand how knowledge is constituted and used as a collectively constituted resource within organizations.     

Knowing and Governing: The Mapping of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector as Statecraft

Recent debate in Voluntas and elsewhere has paid a great deal of attention to the subject of mapping the nonprofit sector. However, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which the practice of mapping is a political mode of knowing and the ways in which knowing is governing. In this essay, we turn to critical theory and political anthropology in order to demonstrate how mapping as it is currently practiced is a mode of knowledge inquiry that facilitates statecraft. In light of these interdisciplinary perspectives, we wrestle with the implications of knowing—and thereby governing—voluntary collective organization in this manner. We conclude that this approach potentially disciplines the qualitative dimensions of democratic associational life and misrepresents the possibilities of social change.     

Playing the Interrogation Game: Rapport,Coercion, and Confessions in Police Interrogations

The United States is having an “interrogation moment,” where increasing attention is being paid to what happens when suspects are questioned by the police. The manner in which confessions are secured can go directly to a society's sense of justice and fairness, as nowhere are positions of power and vulnerability so pronounced as in the interrogation room. This paper contributes to our understanding of police interrogation through discussing what we refer to as playing the interrogation game. We explore how rapport‐building helps to create a sense of collaboration between suspect and police. However, once a suspect agrees to answer questions and waives Miranda rights, the game changes. The new game can be more adversarial, aiming for the suspect to give a confession usable toward prosecution. We discuss how police, by knowing and shaping the rules of the interrogation game, have an advantage in the game which makes it very difficult for the suspect to win. Finally, we propose a number of recommendations that could foster a better balance in playing the game. A video abstract is available at https://tinyurl.com/ycqvp94k     

What Behaviors Do Young Heterosexual Australians See in Pornography? A Cross-Sectional Study

This study investigated how frequently a group of young heterosexual Australians (ages 15 to 29) saw a range of behaviors represented in pornography over the previous 12 months. Participants were recruited to an anonymous online survey. Those who reported having viewed pornography in the past 12 months (n = 517) indicated how frequently they saw each of a list of 17 behaviors when they watched pornography in the past 12 months. Men’s pleasure (83%) was seen frequently by the highest proportion of young people surveyed, followed by a man being portrayed as dominant (70%). Women were more likely to report frequently seeing violence toward a woman (p < 0.01). Men were more likely to report frequently seeing heterosexual anal sex (p < 0.01), ejaculation onto a woman’s face (p < 0.01), women portrayed as dominant (p < 0.01), a man being called names or slurs (p < 0.01), and violence toward a man that appears consensual (p < 0.01). Younger age was significantly associated with frequently seeing women’s pleasure (p < 0.05), violence toward women which appeared consensual, and all types of violence (p < 0.01). Older age was associated with frequently seeing men’s pleasure (p < 0.01) and heterosexual anal sex (p < 0.05). Our findings draw attention to the gendered ways that behaviors in pornography are seen and identified by young heterosexual audiences.     

THE SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST “I” AS IRONIST: TOWARD ALTERNATIVE WORLDS*

Symbolic Interactionist Irony (SII) has as its aspiration, possibility, and achievement the creation of alternative worlds of seeing and doing. The constituent features of irony as detached from and skeptical of all available perspectives elevate its status to that as transcendental of extant reality. The internal logic-of-discovery and reflexive mood of SII conclude that all knowledge have an inseparable personal and autonomous basis. Hence, there are alternative ways but no final way of knowing. Knowledge without final truth value is–and can only be–an alternative world of seeing and doing. Nonetheless, an ironic alternative world is seen as an emergent that has its own integrity from the interaction of facts against analytic perspectives. The works of Erving Goffman and Joseph R. Gusfield, and their roots in the writings of Kenneth Burke, are read as having conceptual resonance for SII as an intellectual style. An ironic reading is thus offered of how SII practice is possible and how this practice refocuses the worlds of seeing and doing.     

Bingo Regulation and the Feminist Political Economy of Everyday Gambling: In Search of the Anti-Heroic

Abstract

This paper uses bingo—a lottery-style game particularly popular with older working-class women—to take forward feminist political economy debates about the everyday. It highlights consumption and regulation as key to research on everyday political economy, and aims to contribute to studies of gambling as a marker of the everyday within critical political economy. Rather than seeing gambling primarily in terms of vernacular risk-taking, however, it argues that gambling is also a pathway into exploring other, more self-effacing political economies—of entertainment, fundraising, sharing, and ‘having a laugh’. Focusing on three key areas of regulatory dispute (over how to win bingo; who can participate; and what defines the game), the research suggests that players and workers are (re)enabling the diverse, plural nature of bingo as a political economic formulation—involving winning; entertainment; fundraising; care; flirting; and playful speculation—in the face of technological and legal processes aiming to standardize the game’s meaning as commercial gambling.     

The Primal Scene: The Enigma of Knowing

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways in which the privileging of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis has signaled a forgetting of the primal scene. Through a close reading of Bion’s Cogitations (1992) and Pasolini’s film Oedipus Rex (1967), this article examines the Oedipus myth in relation to the primal scene as represented by Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx, hence establishing the Oedipus myth as the ultimate story about the acquisition of knowledge. Drawing on Bion, Laplanche, Faimberg, and others, this article grapples with the paradoxes involved in the process of “getting to know something,” querying the limits of knowing and not knowing, and the nature of such knowledge.     

Schizocapital and the branding of American psychosis

Abstract

This essay reads Deleuze and Guattari's Anti‐Oedipus, somewhat perversely, as a radical Lacanian means of conceptualizing hypermodern capitalism. If, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is psychoanalysis that rediscovers and retraces the death instinct in classical, nineteenth‐century capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis better exemplifies the ways in which the deterritorializing flows of twenty‐frrst‐century global capitalism have overcoded and overwritten that classical, nineteenth‐century order of things. Taking Bret Easton Ellis's novel, American Psycho as its symptomatic text, this essay discusses the implications, raised hysterically in the novel, of an unrestricted economy in which the ‘subject’ is no longer held in place by a governing (master or paternal) signifier in relation to a traditional symbolic order. The essay shows how Lacan's notion of ‘the Other’ has been reconfigured, in relation to consumer capitalism, such that it takes the form of a purely machinic imperative that turns the subject into an economically dividuated producing/product. The subject has become a little machine hooked up to the big machine that maintains it in debt in a continual process of consumption‐production of commodities, brands and identities.     

Exploring Poetry as Philosophy of Communication

This article shows that philosophy of communication offers a constructive lens, and an open, invitational structure, for analyzing poetic texts as “philosophical pictures” that give expression to the depths of human reality beyond rational thought. I first offer a brief discussion on poetic knowledge as an intimate way of knowing that is prerational and prescientific. Next, I present a discussion on poetry and existential attentiveness through an examination of Rainer Maria Rilke’s prose poem “For the Sake of a Single Poem” that further illustrates the discussion on poetic knowledge. This discussion is textured through Jean Luc-Nancy’s writing about poetry and sense, and a poetic “dawning of sense” from his essay “Making Poetry.” Before the final section that analyzes a specific poem highlighting two philosophical themes (“Learning to See” and “Exposed Heart”), there is a discussion of “philosophical pictures.” Finally, I examine Rilke’s poem “Turning Point” and present a philosophical reading of the poem that guides us in our collective communicative existence, offering ways of seeing (seeing others as an object or through “being-with”) and ways of being-in-the-world (relation of self/other), as well as opening up possibilities of relating with “tact” and “love.”     

Engaging with Listening,Silence and Noise: Peering‐into the Analytical/Continental Divide

In this paper I offer, by way of a circuitous route, a journey examining ‘how we know we know’. This examination is significant as it again rehearses the division between ‘Analytical’ and ‘Continental’ knowing. A division in valuing knowing that, when tested in the circumstances of a performance of John Cage's ‘4 minutes and 33 seconds’ and an engagement with Diego Velázquez's painting Las Meninas, exposes the role of the audience in their engagement with any object or event.     

The architect's gaze: The maintenance of collective professional vision in the work of the architect

Knowledge is something which is essentially embodied and present in the collective practices of seeing, in the professional vision of specific communities of knowledge workers. Architects represent a form of professional and knowledge-intensive work that includes both abstract categories such as style and design (‘form’) and material categories (‘matter’). Thus, professional vision is midway between, but also capable of integrating and co-aligning, abstract/intangible and concrete/material knowledge. Exploring how architects draw on vision and know-how in their day-to-day work, as well as in their engagement with a variety of media at a major Swedish firm of architects, the study suggests that the professional vision of the practicing architect is never fully integrated or coherent but must be subject to constant modifications and joint adjustments.     

BOURDIEU'S CONCEPT OF REFLEXIVITY AS METALITERACY

For Bourdieu, the extent to which agents can attain knowledge of, and negotiate, various cultural fields is dependent upon, and explicable in terms of, two epistemological types. The first is a practical sense (the ‘logic of practice’), while the second involves a sort of conscious comprehension that he names ‘reflexivity’. Bourdieu defines reflexivity as an interrogation of the three types of limitations (of social position, of field and of the scholastic point of view) that are constitutive of knowledge itself. But the reflexive relation to the habitus, the demands and influences exerted by cultural fields, and one's own practices within those fields, cannot be understood simply as something that is obtained by the subject; rather, any reflexive relation to the doxa and illusio of the field must be a constitutive part of that field. This paper identifies a number of principles taken from Bourdieu's work that clarify how, where and why the reflexive ‘surpassing’ of literacy might occur. But we also suggest, contra Bourdieu, that only fields that are informed or characterized by the scholastic point of view are likely to be characterized by the set of conditions constitutive of reflexive knowledge; and that the scholastic point of view is therefore, simultaneously, both a potential impediment to, and a condition (almost necessary) of the production of reflexive knowledge.     

’Tis Beauty Kills the Beast: Aesthetic and Sensory Transformations of Encapsulated States

The author examines a particular form of addictive exploitation of sensory experience to extend Meltzer’s concept of claustrum states. She elaborates how bodily experience—both the patient’s and the analyst’s—is key to emergence from these states. Following the distinction between holding and containing made by Bion and Cartwright, the author traces the reciprocity of meaning making through the analyst’s seeing/sensing of beauty in the patient, noted by the analyst’s erotic response to a coming-alive self, allowing for aesthetic reciprocity and transformation.     

Discourses of multicultural coexistence (Tabunka Kyōsei) and the ‘old-comer’ Korean residents of Japan

This paper explores the discourses of ‘old-comer’ Korean communities (zainichi) in Japan in relation to the recent advent of notions of coexistence (kyōsei) and multiculturalism (tabunka). I adopt an analytical framework that has been used to critically examine Australian multiculturalism, recognising that although the Australian context is different, this analytical framework is useful for the examination in hand. I argue that although the discursive recognition of Japan as multicultural is an important step away from ubiquitous notions of monoculturality, this relatively new direction needs to be balanced with critical interrogation of how it is being represented. The results of this research clarify the positions adopted by the Korean diaspora in Japan and offer a possible alternative perspective on the way forward.     

Bosanquet's social theory of the state

Bosanquet's political philosophy was a social theory of the function of the State as ‘hinderer of hindrances to the best life’, where individual development was supported by relationships within a community. This was worked out in the context of considerable knowledge of conditions among the London poor at the turn of the century, and reinforced by his wife's practical work and research. He sympathized with Durkheim's pioneering sociology, and was in contact with him through the Sociological Society. His ‘New Liberal’approach, seeing problems of poverty as to be met by informed charitable activity, was restricted by insufficient recognition of the structural aspects of social problems and conflicts. The bearing of his Idealist Metaphysics is critically considered, and it is claimed that, although a good deal of this may not be acceptable, it gave a background to a kind of social thinking which is of interest to those looking for a communitarian type of political philosophy.     

Spivak’s Fantasy of Silence: A Secular Look at Suicide

Gayatri Spivak’s response to the attack of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011, the event otherwise known as 9/11, was one of many responses that denote the event’s traumatic impact. In psychoanalytic terms, the psychic condition of trauma, identified by Lacan as the encounter with the real, is a shock which the subject initially misses; as such, the subject is compelled to make intelligible what was missed through what Lacan calls ‘fantasy.’ According to Zizek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, the cinematic quality of the planes crashing into the towers, iterating the fantasies of Hollywood disaster films (16), pointed to a haunting in America of some historical trauma that returned in the real of 9/11 (17). Zizek’s reflection on 9/11 as a haunting in cinematic terms, pointing to a confluence of his scholarship and the event, sets a precedent for this paper’s focus on seeing in Spivak’s response to the suicide acts of 9/11 a haunting of the suicide rite of Sati in her earlier scholarship. This paper reviews Spivak’s representation of suicide in “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988) and “Terror: A Speech After 9/11” (2004), noting the non-coincidental echoes between these projects with respect to secularism and silence, affirming this paper’s proposal that in Spivak’s work, a trauma shared by western secular society is evident as a fantasy of silence.     

‘Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro,Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight

The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.     

Limiting relationships through sousveillance video based digital advocacy: multi-modal analysis of The Nervous CPS Worker

ABSTRACT

Digital media technology and Internet-based/social media sharing are shifting the contexts and processes of social work, including the relationships emerging in practice. The Nervous CPS Worker, a digital video shared via YouTube, provides a concrete practice-based example of the use of social media self-advocacy by professional foster parents. This case-study demonstrates the fragmented and shifting power-relations brought to bear within contemporary social work. Multi-modal analysis facilitates the development of a layered qualitative understanding of this video, shaped by the researcher’s inter-textual relationship with the material. Supplemental online texts are applied to the Nervous CPS Worker and relevant scholarship, including discipline specific knowledge, reveals the layered and convergent meaning making processes present in this video through the use of auditory communication, visual representations and genre. Analysis demonstrates how contemporary social work contexts, such as neoliberalism, and standardisation are implicated in practice and how identity and context compete for recognition and space within the home visit depicted in this video.     

Trust in complementary medicine: the case of cranial osteopathy

Trust has been seen as operating within situations in which an individual's ability to assess risk or probability is absent and yet they still choose to believe in something. The development of new sets of knowledge in modern societies raises interesting questions about how the public come to trust the ‘experts’ who practice them and there is a paucity of work which addresses how trust ‘happens’ in these new relationships. This paper uses the accounts of patients who use cranial osteopathy to discuss the bases of trust in complementary medicine. It is argued that the practitioner and their therapy is not the basis of patient trust. For the initial attendance the patient relies upon the accounts and credibility of other people (network trust). After this it is the phenomenological work of the patient, who strives to find meaning in the treatments they experience, which is essential to the development of trust relationships. The paper demonstrated that patients mobilise ideas and understandings which they are familiar with to understand the unfamiliar and that it is this process of seeking meaning which is central to the creation of trust.