Media Genealogy of the Contagion: Syphilis — AIDS — COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-112
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Control Society ◽  
Object Based ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form ◽  
Society Of Control

The article is devoted to a genealogy of the attitude toward viruses in social and political practice in light of the new coronavirus pandemic. The disciplinary society and the society of control have taken on a completely new configuration since the HIV crisis in the 1980s. AIDS and now COVID-19 as phenomena of social crisis have had a great impact on (sexual) relationships and have also caused a significant change in the social and political order. Epidemics and pandemics mobilize political structures and constitute power relations, thus changing the way bodies are controlled, establishing new differentiations and redefining what disease is. The authors trace the development of discourses about syphilis, AIDS and COVID-19 to describe how knowledge about the disease is being generated today; it has origins in myth and would be unthinkable without aesthetic visualization and mass media technologies. Syphilis was an exact fit for the paradigm of the disciplinary society, which stigmatized bodily pleasure and abstracted pathology by activating projection mechanisms as a sign of the Other. However, AIDS already differed significantly from that paradigm because other medical technologies are used to define HIV, and that has affected the epistemology of the disease and epidemic. The article considers HIV/AIDS as a transitional model that forms a bridge between the epidemics of the past (leprosy, plague, smallpox, syphilis) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all there is a change in the biopolitical regime so that bodies are no longer controlled and regulated through sexuality. COVID-19 is a new form of sociality which is not based on the exclusion of “pathological” forms of sexuality or on “deviant” or “perverted” bodies, but involves the object-based, microlevel of relations between viruses, the immune system, and the human genome, which are then mapped with distortions and substitutions onto social relationships and practices. The authors use the term “delegated control” in a new context and introduce the original term “omniopticum” to describe the new regime of biopolitics and the “control society” in the post-COVID era.

Escape Velocity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Escape Velocity ◽  
Category Mistake ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form

This chapter examines how historical time was conceptualized in imperial debate. It explores two broad variations that were articulated across the human sciences and in public debate, focusing in particular on the writings of historians. In the first, the modern British empire was figured as uniquely progressive, as capable—either in actuality or in potentia—of avoiding the social, economic, and political dynamics that had annihilated all previous specimens. This argument was most frequently employed in relation to India. The other strategy was to insist that the empire (or a part of it) was not really an empire at all, but rather a new form of political order that could circumvent the entropic degeneration of traditional imperial forms. To think otherwise was to make a category mistake. This argument was often applied to Britain and its settler colonies from the 1870s onwards. “Greater Britain,” as the settler colonial assemblage was often termed, could attain permanence, a kind of historical grace.

Critical Times for the Social Contract

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-40
Author(s):  
Charles Devellennes
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Contracts ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Fundamental Challenge ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
Critical Times

This chapter proposes a theory of the social contract, in the context of the gilets jaunes. This theory is detailed in the five chapters that follow. The theory proposed here is that the movement itself is best understood as a fundamental challenge to the existing social contract in France — and by extension to other social contracts throughout the world — and its history is not limited to the months of political turmoil it engendered in France or even to the past couple of years of political upheaval in the wider world, but it poses a challenge to the very future of political order. A rethinking of the social contract is necessary given this crisis, and framing the present political turmoil in philosophical terms will help shed some light on the opportunities for change that are arising, in part thanks to the movement.

scholarly journals Social Relationships, Age and the Use of Preventive Health Services: Findings from the German Ageing Survey

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (21) ◽  
pp. 4272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bremer ◽  
Daniel Lüdecke ◽  
Olaf von dem Knesebeck
Keyword(s):  
Health Services ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Preventive Health Services ◽  
Preventive Health ◽  
Informational Support ◽  
The Past ◽  
Flu Vaccination ◽  
Functional Aspects ◽  
The Social ◽  
Preventive Health Behavior

This paper investigates the associations between social relationships, age and the use of preventive health services among German adults. Data stem from the German Ageing Survey (10,324 respondents). The use of preventive health services was assessed by asking for regular use of flu vaccination and cancer screening in the past years. Predictors of interest were structural (having a partner, size of the social network) and functional aspects of social relationships (perceived informational support) and age. Logistic regression models were used to measure the associations between preventive health services use and these predictors. Self-perceived health, gender and education were considered as covariates. Having a partner (OR = 1.20, 95% CI: 1.07–1.34) and perceived informational support (OR = 1.38, 95% CI: 1.13–1.69) were associated with a higher probability of getting flu vaccination regularly over the past years. Informational support (OR = 1.42, 95% CI: 1.17–1.72) and having a partner (OR = 1.57, 95% CI: 1.41–1.75) were positively associated with regular cancer screening over the past years. Associations between the size of the social network and use of preventive health services were not statistically significant. Associations between the use of preventive health services and social relationships varied by age. Structural and functional aspects of social relationships may support preventive health behavior. To increase preventive health behavior and the use of preventive health services, it is necessary to integrate information on social relationships into routine care and to strengthen sources of social support.

Uploading selves: Inuit digital storytelling on YouTube

2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Wachowich ◽  
Willow Scobie
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Canadian Arctic ◽  
Internet Technology ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Youth And Young Adults

This article explores the contemporary use of open-access video-sharing sites by Inuit youth and young adults. Based on 12 months of cyber-fieldwork and focused specifically on YouTube, it explores how Inuit young people across the Canadian Arctic are using online spaces to post short excerpts from their lives and connect with others. The paper situates these digital autobiographies in the recent trajectory of Inuit storytelling, showing that Internet technology allows individual narrators the freedom to bypass established rules and institutions of cultural representation. Self-produced videos posted online are more multivalent, dialogical, and provocative expressions of Inuit selfhood than those texts that may have circulated in the past. While the Internet has been celebrated for its global reach, many of the social relationships and dialogues seemingly fostered by this technology are intimate and localised. Inuit youth and young adults use video-sharing technology to creatively mediate pasts, presents, and futures in the creation of new social worlds.

scholarly journals Controlled Freedom - the Formation of the Control Society

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludwig Pongratz
Keyword(s):  
Transition Period ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Control Society ◽  
Reform Pedagogy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fourth Step ◽  
The Government ◽  
Society Of Control ◽  
Governmental Strategy

Controlled Freedom - the Formation of the Control Society My analysis develops via the following five conceptual steps. The first step links up with Foucault's analysis of techniques of ‘soft’ discipline, which relates to ‘classical’ reform pedagogy, in the transition period from the 19th to the 20th century. The second step thematises the shifts in these disciplinary techniques in the context of the crisis of the so-called ‘environments of enclosure’. Here there is a particular focus on Deleuze's arguments concerning the emergence of a modern ‘society of control’. The third step considers the specific form of the ‘government of the social’, which Foucault approaches with the concept of ‘governmentality’. The fourth step aims to show that the current educational reforms can be understood as a ‘governmental strategy’. The fifth step, finally, thematises the inconsistency of governmental practices. It pursues the possibility that such practices advance, en passant or contrary to their aims, their own contradiction: the preparedness and capacity for critical opposition.

scholarly journals Consensus in Opinion Formation Processes in Fully Evolving Environments

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 6022-6029 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Auletta ◽  
Angelo Fanelli ◽  
Diodato Ferraioli
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Weighted Average ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Personal Beliefs ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Formation Dynamics ◽  
Previous Round

Friedkin and Johnsen (1990) modeled opinion formation in social networks as a dynamic process which evolves in rounds: at each round each agent updates her expressed opinion to a weighted average of her innate belief and the opinions expressed in the previous round by her social neighbors. The stubbornness level of an agent represents the tendency of the agent to express an opinion close to her innate belief. Motivated by the observation that innate beliefs, stubbornness levels and even social relations can co-evolve together with the expressed opinions, we present a new model of opinion formation where the dynamics runs in a co-evolving environment. We assume that agents’ stubbornness and social relations can vary arbitrarily, while their innate beliefs slowly change as a function of the opinions they expressed in the past. We prove that, in our model, the opinion formation dynamics converges to a consensus if reasonable conditions on the structure of the social relationships and on how the personal beliefs can change are satisfied. Moreover, we discuss how this result applies in several simpler (but realistic) settings.

The Daily Lives of Early Archaic Foragers in the Mid-South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kandace D. Hollenbach ◽  
Stephen B. Carmody
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Behavioral Ecology ◽  
Human Behavioral Ecology ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Archaic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday

This chapter is a narrative-based construction of a seasonal year using various archaeological datasets, with a focus on subsistence. The authors approach the fictional interpretation of the past from the framework of human behavioral ecology, which they find particularly useful in everyday research because it focuses on the decisions of individuals – specifically those decisions that result in the everyday actions from which the archaeological record is constructed. By imagining the daily, seasonal activities through the eyes of a young girl, they give those individuals identities and begin to think about the social relationships among earlier Archaic peoples and the landscapes that are rooted in economic relationships.

scholarly journals The Role of Comparisons in Judgments of Loneliness

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Arnold ◽  
Heather Barry Kappes ◽  
Eric Klinenberg ◽  
Piotr Winkielman
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
Social Comparisons ◽  
Important Public Health Problem ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Content Analyses ◽  
Perceived Social Isolation

Loneliness—perceived social isolation—is defined as a discrepancy between existing social relationships and desired quality of relationships. Whereas most research has focused on existing relationships, we consider the standards against which people compare them. Participants who made downward social or temporal comparisons that depicted their contact with others as better (compared to other people’s contact or compared to the past) reported less loneliness than participants who made upward comparisons that depicted their contact with others as worse (Study 1–3). Extending these causal results, in a survey of British adults, upward social comparisons predicted current loneliness, even when controlling for loneliness at a previous point in time (Study 4). Finally, content analyses of interviews with American adults who lived alone showed that social and temporal comparisons about contact with others were both prevalent and linked to expressed loneliness (Study 5). These findings contribute to understanding the social cognition of loneliness, extend the effects of comparisons about social connection to the important public health problem of loneliness, and provide a novel tool for acutely manipulating loneliness.

scholarly journals Adam Bede, Realism, the Past, and Readers in 1859

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Way

This article gives an account of the immediate publication context of George Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, in terms of competing opportunities for leisure, anxieties about the reading of fiction, the publishing industry, and the social and political context of February 1859. It examines the way in which the novel engages with its first readers, specifically through its treatment of the experience of reading fiction, and the ways in which Adam Bede differs from readers’ previous experiences. The article argues that the novel’s impact is determined by its engagement with the past of its setting, and by the ways it which it encourages a historically-nuanced appreciation in its readers, and that these factors are integral to Eliot’s articulating a new form of realist fiction.

scholarly journals Is Religion Coming Back as a Source for Antisemitic Views?

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 255
Author(s):  
Gunther Jikeli
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Reasons ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Role Of Religion

The most violent American and European antisemites in the 21st century, including not only Jihadists but also white (and black) supremacist terrorist, made some reference to religion in their hatred of Jews. This is surprising. Religious antisemitism is often seen as a relic of the past. It is more associated with pre-modern societies where the role of religion was central to the social and political order. However, at the end of the 19th century, animosity against Judaism gave way to nationalistic and racist motives. People such as Wilhelm Marr called themselves antisemites to distinguish themselves from those who despised Jews for religious reasons. Since then, antisemitism has gone through many mutations. However, today, it is not only the actions of extremely violent antisemites who might be an indication that religious antisemitism has come back in new forms. Some churches have been accused of disseminating antisemitic arguments related to ideas of replacement theology in modernized forms and applied to the Jewish State. Others, from the populist nationalist right, seem to use Christianity as an identity marker and thus exclude Jews (and Muslims) from the nation. Do religious motifs play a significant role in the resurgence of antisemitism in the 21st century?

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