scholarly journals Modernistyczny terror, czyli krótko o "tunnel vision" Jamesa C. Scotta

2014 ◽  
pp. 563-572
Author(s):  
Mateusz Pietryka
Keyword(s):  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
State Planning ◽  
Tunnel Vision ◽  
Liberal Economy ◽  
Methods Of Control ◽  
The Human Condition

The terror of modernism or Scott’s 'tunnel vision' The article analyses James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Scott’s book examines different aspects of a modern state’s activity and its methods of control over the population. Scott describes diverse failures in state planning and links them to the ideology of what he terms “high modernism”. Scott states that this ideology results in over confidence in scientific progress and omnipresent simplifications, since a modernist plan does not recognize the importance of local knowledge and tradition.Though the book clearly illustrates how the fore-mentioned centralist approach leads to failures, its methodology, however, lacks the critical analysis of the nature of governance and liberal economy. Furthermore, Scott offers no insight on the late capitalism nor legible solutions for the described issues. He seems to be unaware of constructing his own “tunnel vision” by selective case studies and building the narration on simplified oppositions. Modernistyczny terror, czyli krótko o tunnel vision Jamesa C. ScottaArtykuł jest analizą książki Jamesa Scotta, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Książka ta bada różnorodne aspekty aktywności współczesnego państwa i jego metody kontroli nad populacją. Autor opisuje rożnego typu niepowodzenia wynikające z państwowego planowania i wiąże je z ideologią nazwaną przez siebie „zaawansowanym modernizmem”. Scott twierdzi, że skutkuje ona pokładaniem nadmiernej wiary w postęp naukowy i wszechobecnymi uproszczeniami, ponieważ modernistyczny plan nie uznaje znaczenia lokalnej wiedzy i tradycji.Choć książka jasno pokazuje, jak wspomniane centralistyczne podejście kończy się porażkami, jej metodologii brakuje krytycznej analizy natury władzy i liberalnej ekonomii. Ponadto Scott pomija temat późnego kapitalizmu i jasnych rozwiązań opisywanych problemów. Wydaje się, iż poprzez selektywne studia przypadku i budowanie narracji na uproszczonych opozycjach nieświadomie konstruuje swoje własne tunnel vision.

Frances Burney and the Art of Accident

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-441
Author(s):  
Katarina O'Briain
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Unexpected Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This article argues that Frances Burney's long, diffuse works of fiction develop an ethics of accident within the history of the novel. Whereas critics from the eighteenth century to today have privileged “art”—in the sense of careful, deliberate skill and conduct—as a crucial marker of human character, Burney insists on filling her novels with a succession of unexpected events and a multitude of characters surprised by their own actions. By refusing to treat accident as a mistake to be improved upon—in the realm of either characterological conduct or authorial craft—Burney posits an ethics of the novel that treats matters of chance and modes of depleted agency as central aspects of the human condition rather than as markers of moral or aesthetic failure. Setting Burney's texts within ascendant modes of economy and finance in the eighteenth century, the article suggests that this ethics marks a key change within the rise of the novel that continues well into late capitalism.

Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: The Public, the Private and Evil

1984 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiraz Dossa
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Human Condition

Since its publication,Eichmann in Jerusalemhas provoked a storm of controversy. With a few exceptions, critics reacted to the substance of Arendt's thesis with considerable bitterness and hostility. This article argues that her detractors badly misunderstood Arendt because they were insufficiently conversant with, or unaware of, her political theory. Fundamental to this theory, articulated at length in herThe Human Condition, is the crucial distinction between the public and the private. None of her critics, including those who sympathized with Arendt, have understood that her critical analysis of Eichmann's conduct and of the response of the Jewish leadership to the tragic fate that befell their people makes sense on the peculiar terrain of her political theory and particularly in terms of the public-private distinction which lies at the core of this theory.

scholarly journals Genealogy of Experiential Frames: Methodological Notes on Arendt

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Frame Analysis ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Process Thinking ◽  
The World ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
The Human Condition

This article seeks to add a new theoretical voice to the tradition of genealogical inquiry in political theory and beyond by offering a re-reading of the thought of Hannah Arendt. Going beyond the letter of her thought, in this article I propose that placing Arendt in the genealogical tradition of inquiry (particularly its Foucauldian strand) helps to make sense of what she was “up to” when she turned to history in her work, especially in the analysis of totalitarianism and the account of modernity presented in The Human Condition. I will specifically highlight the historical emergence of “process-thinking” that Arendt traces across her writings. The article seeks to sketch a unique approach to genealogical inquiry that can be taken up by anyone interested in critical analysis of our present age and its politics. Towards the end of the essay, I elaborate this approach methodologically by making a reference to frame analysis. Thus, I articulate a “genealogical frame analysis”, an inquiry into historical emergence of various metaphors and frames that organize our experience of the world. I also highlight the centrality of events for Arendt’s genealogy, as well as its role in a broader set of world-building practices.

The Theology of Victorian Scientific Naturalists

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-254
Author(s):  
Bernard Lightman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Thomas Henry Huxley ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
History Of ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
The Human Condition

The Victorian scientific naturalists are particularly important for an understanding of the history of naturalism. They were the first group of scientists and intellectuals to adopt secular naturalism to forge an identity aimed at setting themselves apart from colleagues who remained loyal to Christianity. Three of the most important Victorian scientific naturalists, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, the physicist John Tyndall, and the philosopher Herbert Spencer, drew on several concepts closely associated with the Christian theology of their day to articulate, largely in a secularized form, some of their deepest beliefs about nature and the human condition. These beliefs were integral to their science and their vision of scientific progress. They were elements of a ‘theology’ in line with modern science.

The Road to Culture

J. G. Ballard ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Harlan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Gated Communities ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
The Road ◽  
Natural Landscapes ◽  
The Human Condition

The final chapter accounts for Ballard’s later career and is broken into two parts. The first, “Specters of Nature in Culture,” is devoted to Hello America, The Day of Creation and Rushing to Paradise, which are set in perilous natural landscapes where the technologies of late capitalism and electronic media render the human condition terminally performative, more a product of the “reality studio” than the real world. The second part, “Zones of Terror and Ennui,” examines Running Wild, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come. Set in gated communities, these so-called “crime novels” problematize the socio-psychological effects of consumer-capitalist life and hinge on an existential fear of bourgeois ennui, the pursuit of agential violence, and the discovery of truth and freedom in madness.

Natality or Birth? Arendt and Cavarero on the Human Condition of Being Born

Hypatia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fanny Söderbäck
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Conceptual Distinction ◽  
The Human Condition

This essay offers a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's notion of natality through the lens of Adriana Cavarero's feminist philosophy of birth. First, I argue that the strength of Arendtian natality is its rootedness in an ontology of uniqueness, and a commitment to human plurality and relationality. Next, I trace with Cavarero three critical concerns regarding Arendtian natality, namely that it is curiously abstract; problematically disembodied and sexually neutral; and dependent on a model of vulnerability that assumes equality rather than asymmetry. This last issue is further developed in the final section of the essay, where I examine the idea that birth, for Cavarero, becomes the very concept by which we can distinguish and normatively differentiate acts of care and love from acts of wounding and violence. Upholding the normative distinction here depends on a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and helplessness. To maintain the ethical potential of the scene of birth, I argue that we have to insist on the very characteristics Cavarero attributes to it—ones, as this essay aims to show, that are ultimately missing in the Arendtian account thereof.

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

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