Disembodied politics: commitment and formal distance in Rancière*

Abstract

In light of the theme and concerns of the present collection of essays, we may ask whether ‘distance in general’, and ‘critical distance in particular’ (Fredric Jameson), has truly disappeared with postmodernity. Proposing an immediate and interruptive political engagement with local issues, Jacques Rancière’s articulation of political mobilisation does seem to confirm this claim. Upon further inspection, however, his emancipatory politics repeat the same mistake of valuing an abstract universal at the expense of a concrete particular, however paradoxical this may seem at first sight. The present article develops this thesis in three moments. On the first hand, it highlights Rancière’s notion of conflict as being institutive of politics. Secondly, it connects this ‘sensible’, and Rancière’s understanding of politics as being aesthetic, to Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetics’. The French author sees in the leading section of the first Critique the grounding possibility of (I) freeing up time and space within the social realm; (II) the representation of a common political surface that can be reshaped; (III) political equality; (IV) emancipation. The last section shows how this recourse to the transcendental subject in Rancière’s politics follows and embraces a traditional position in the history of philosophy whereby identity is denigrated at the profit of a disembodied universalism.     

Critical proximity

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between critical distance and the idea of proximity. In times that are often described as ‘global’, ‘24/7’, ‘connected’, ‘networked’ and ‘immersive’, distance seems ever reduced and proximity omnipresent. The contemporary impression of ubiquitous proximity might constitute a threat to the survival of critical distance understood either as a cornerstone of enlightened and humanist critical practice or as a key metaphysical ‘technology’. The resulting ‘crisis of critical distance’ produces the question of how to position oneself with regard to the ‘other’ in a time that lacks distance and privileges proximity? In tracking the ambiguity (or the ‘aporia’) that surrounds proximity – the desire to be near and the need to maintain a distance – this article rereads some key Heideggerian and Derridean texts in order to attempt a deconstruction of the opposition of distance and proximity at work in the ‘metaphysics of presence’.     

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.     

Multi-objective fuzzy flexible job shop scheduling using memetic algorithm

Multi-objective flexible job shop scheduling problem with fuzzy processing time and fuzzy due date is a complicated combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, a genetic global optimization is combined with a local search method to construct an effective memetic algorithm (MA) for simultaneously optimizing fuzzy makespan, average agreement index and minimal agreement index. First, a hybridization of different machine assignment methods with different operation sequence rules is proposed to generate a high-performance initial population. Second, the algorithm framework similar to the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) is adopted, in which a well-designed chromosome decoding method and two effective genetic operators are used. Then, a novel fuzzy Pareto dominance relationship based on the possibility degree and a modified crowding distance measure are defined and further employed to modify the fast non-dominated sorting. Next, a novel local search is incorporated into NSGA-II, where some candidate individuals are selected from the offspring population to experience variable neighbourhood local search by using the selection mechanism. In the experiment, the influence of four key parameters is investigated based on the Taguchi method of design of experiment. Finally, some comparisons are carried out with other existing algorithms on benchmark instances, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MA.     

Covariate selection for accelerated failure time data

Selection of appropriate predictors for right censored time to event data is very often encountered by the practitioners. We consider the ?₁ penalized regression or “least absolute shrinkage and selection operator” as a tool for predictor selection in association with accelerated failure time model. The choice of the penalizing parameter λ is crucial to identify the correct set of covariates. In this paper, we propose an information theory-based method to choose λ under log-normal distribution. Furthermore, an efficient algorithm is discussed in the same context. The performance of the proposed λ and the algorithm is illustrated through simulation studies and a real data analysis. The convergence of the algorithm is also discussed.     

Diagnostic Measures for Generalized Linear Models with Missing Covariates

Abstract.  In this paper, we carry out an in-depth investigation of diagnostic measures for assessing the influence of observations and model misspecification in the presence of missing covariate data for generalized linear models. Our diagnostic measures include case-deletion measures and conditional residuals. We use the conditional residuals to construct goodness-of-fit statistics for testing possible misspecifications in model assumptions, including the sampling distribution. We develop specific strategies for incorporating missing data into goodness-of-fit statistics in order to increase the power of detecting model misspecification. A resampling method is proposed to approximate the p -value of the goodness-of-fit statistics. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate our methods and a real data set is analysed to illustrate the use of our various diagnostic measures.     

Bounds for how much influence an observation can have

That outliers or influential observations can affect the results in a regression is well-known. But it is not clear how much influence a specific observation can have on other statistics. In time series, especially in predictive situations, the effect of additional observations is of singular importance. We here examine bounds for the effect of an additional observation on the mean, variance, Mahalanobis distance, product moment correlation, and coefficients of linearity and monotonicity.     

关于广义等差数列性质的探讨

对广义等差数列的性质进行探讨,并提出广义等差数列的一阶递归表达式。     

陶诗远境说

陶渊明向大自然的远游远观,使其在自然冥会为一,构成其诗歌的空间之远境;向悠悠上古回溯,使其向古贤士获取精神力量,形成时间之远境;超越当下生活境界,悠然远迈,是为心远境界。远境的创造,使陶渊明的田园生活进一步诗意化,使其超越俗世羁绊和俗情牵累,进一步完善了恬淡、宁静的田园诗境界。     

南宁市居民消费行为研究及实践意义

南宁市居民消费行为受生活环境、商业环境和社会环境的影响,同时,消费者的个性特征(心理、年龄、性别和性格)和需求刺激也影响到居民的消费偏好。消费者作为“概率人”,其行为空间模型,受到认知和学习经验的影响,这对南宁市商业网点布局和调整商业结构具有现实意义。