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.

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.

scholarly journals Revisiting Health in Colonial Bengal: A Literary Overview (1880 -1930)

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 374-377
Author(s):  
Tinni Goswami Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Public Health Policies ◽  
British Raj ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Tensions ◽  
The One ◽  
Active Link

The essential theme of this paper is to highlight the condition of health and hygiene in the British Bengal from the perspective of official documents and vernacular writings, with special emphasis on the journals and periodicals. The fatal effects of the epidemics like malaria and cholera, the insanitary condition of the rural Bengal and the cultivated indifference of the British Raj made the lives of the poor natives miserable and ailing. The authorities had a tendency to blame the colonized for their illiteracy and callousness, which became instrumental for the outbreak of the epidemics. On the other, in the late 19 th and the beginning of the 20th, the vernacular literature played the role of a catalyst in awakening health awareness, highlighting the issues related with ill health, insanitation and malnourishment. More importantly, it became an active link between the society and culture on the one hand, and health and people on the other. The present researcher wants to highlight these opposite trajectories of mentalities with a different connotation. The ideologies of the Raj and the native political aspirations often reflected in the colonial writings, where the year 1880 was considered as a landmark in the field of public health policies. On the other, the dichotomy between the masters and the colonized took a prominent shape during 1930s. Within these fifty years; the health of the natives witnessed many upheavals grounded on the social, economic and cultural tensions.

scholarly journals Natural Sciences and Social Sciences

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-119
Author(s):  
C.S.A (Kris) van Koppen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nature And Society

Klintman, Mikael. 2017. Human Sciences and Human Interests: Integrating the Social, Economic, and Evolutionary Sciences. London: Routledge.Jetzkowitz, Jens. 2019. Co-evolution of Nature and Society: Foundations for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Biological Ideas and Their Cultural Uses

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 111-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Benton
Keyword(s):  
Biological Evolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Do So

The topic of my talk is a very ancient one indeed. It bears upon the place of humankind in nature, and upon the place of nature in ourselves. I shall, however, be discussing this range of questions in terms which have not always been available to the philosophers of the past when they have asked them. When we ask these questions today we do so with hindsight of some two centuries of endeavour in the ‘human sciences’, and some one and a half centuries of attempts to situate the human species within a theory of biological evolution. And these ways of thinking about ourselves and our relation to nature have not been confined to professional intellectuals, nor have they been without practical consequences. Social movements and political organizations have fought for and sometimes achieved the power to give practical shape to their theoretical visions. On the one hand, are diverse projects aimed at changing society through a planned modification of the social environment of the individual. On the other hand, are equally diverse projects for pulling society back into conformity with the requirements of race and heredity. At first sight, the two types of project appear to be, and often are, deeply opposed, both intellectually and politically.

scholarly journals Seasonality and Correlations between Water Quality Parameters in the Lower Danube at Chiciu for the Period 2010-2012

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-455
Author(s):  
Rodica-Mihaela Frincu ◽  
Cristian Omocea ◽  
Cerasela-Iuliana Eni ◽  
Eleonora-Mihaela Ungureanu ◽  
Olga Iulian
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Dissolved Oxygen ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Water Quality Monitoring ◽  
Quality Parameters ◽  
The Other ◽  
Danube River ◽  
Quality Monitoring ◽  
The Social ◽  
Pollution Loads

The Danube River receives tributaries with different pollution loads, according to the social-economic characteristics of the adjacent regions. Water quality monitoring data from Chiciu, Calarasi county, Romania, for the three-year period (2010-2012), were analysed using statistical methods in order to identify correlations between parameters, as well as their evolution during the study period. The analysis has confirmedpositive correlations between nitrates and total nitrogen and between ortho-phosphates and total phosphorus. Negative correlations were found between water temperatures on one side and dissolved oxygen and nitrates on the other side. These parameters have a seasonal evolution, with high temperatures and low dissolved oxygen and nitrates levels during summer periods. Linear regression highlights decreasing nutrients pollution during the study period, which may be due to improved wastewater treatment along Danube tributaries.

scholarly journals Vidljive i prikrivene sociokulturne posljedice uniformiranosti suvremenog turizma

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (15) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlatko Jadrešić
Keyword(s):  
Stable Distribution ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Economic Effects ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Phenomenon ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Project ◽  
The One ◽  
Negative Phenomena

The duality of contemporary tourism is reflected in the stable distribution o f, on the one hand, positive and, on the other, negative and unfavourable social and economic functions. The paper investigates the causes and the manifestations of a specific and more and more significant (regarding its immanent dangers) field of tourism which speaks of the so-called “other”, dark, negative, unfavourable, conflictual, even pathological in certain elements side of this contemporary and prestigious-important social-economic phenomenon. The investigation is a segment of the author’s scientific project which has been accepted by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Technology entitled “Social and Economic Contradictions of Croatian Tourism” and whichwill investigate the social and sociocultural negative phenomena in tourism both in Croatia and elsewhere. The aim and purpose of die project is to diagnose the problems, to systematise them, to establish the ways and measures to relativise, alleviate or uproot a part or the totality of these phenomena all with the purpose to affirm and advance its positive social and economic functions and activities in order to achieve more permanent and lucrative social and economic effects. Various examples of visible and hidden consequences from world tourism culled from the relevant sources warn and make suggestions to Croatian toursim how to “actualize” this question for the benefit of tourism in Croatia.

Inclusions: Concerning a Theory and Aesthetics of Police

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogl
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form

AbstractSince the eighteenth century what is known as the ›body politic‹ has duplicated itself in a very specific way. Alongside the models of the social contract we can observe, under the label ›police‹, the emergence of political knowledge dealing with the regulation of social, economic, medical and moral spheres. This tension between sovereign representation and the empirical ›body politic‹ became critical after the French Revolution. The works of Friedrich Schiller may serve as an example of the intense exchange between aesthetic and police-theoretical problems: a quest to mediate between the laws of reason and the scope of empirical forces; and to grasp the economics of a political power which converts the inclusion of the excluded into a new form of degenerate life.

Clouds, Clocks, and the study of Politics

1977 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel A. Almond ◽  
Stephen J. Genco
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Hard Science ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The Social ◽  
Psychology And Economics

In its eagerness to become scientific, political science has in recent decades tended to lose contact with its ontological base. It has tended to treat political events and phenomena as natural events lending themselves to the same explanatory logic as is found in physics and the other hard sciences. This tendency may be understood in part as a phase in the scientific revolution, as a diffusion, in two steps, of ontological and methodological assumptions from the strikingly successful hard sciences: first to psychology and economics, and then from these bellwether human sciences to sociology, anthropology, political science, and even history. In adopting the agenda of hard science, the social sciences, and political science in particular, were encouraged by the neopositivist school of the philosophy of science which legitimated this assumption of ontological and meta-methodological homogeneity. More recently, some philosophers of science and some psychologists and economists have had second thoughts about the applicability to human subject matters of strategy used in hard science.

2. Contexts

2015 ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
R. B. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Landed Gentry

The founding fathers were born into a remarkable variety of families, occupations, religious loyalties, and geographic settings: from landed gentry destined to join the ruling elite, to middling or common sorts who chose the law or medicine as a professional path to distinction, or immigrants from other parts of the British Empire. They lived within and were shaped by three interlocking contexts—the intellectual world of the transatlantic Enlightenment; the political context within which Americans sought to preserve and improve the best of the Anglo-American constitutional heritage; and the social, economic, and cultural context formed as a result of their living on the Atlantic world’s periphery.

scholarly journals Against network thinking: A critique of pathological sovereignty

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 440-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Coward
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Drone Strikes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

This article advances a critique of network thinking and the pathological sovereignty that it gives rise to. The network is ubiquitous as a metaphor for understanding the social, economic and political dynamics of the contemporary era. Implicitly drawing on an analogy with communications infrastructures such as the telegraph or internet, the network metaphor represents global politics in terms of nodes related to one another through conduit-like links. I begin by demonstrating the widespread nature of network thinking and outline the way in which conventional metaphors structure both thinking and action. I then recreate an episodic history of network thinking in order to demonstrate the key entailments of the network metaphor. I argue that there are four entailments of network thinking: the prioritisation of connectivity; the identification of novel actors; de-territorialisation; and a lack of concern for contiguity and context. The article then outlines the corresponding political and ethical consequences that follow from these entailments, specifically: fantasies of precision; new threat imaginaries; unboundedness; and a failure to attend to culture and community. I contend that network thinking gives rise to a pathological sovereignty whose dual faces can be seen in drone strikes and invasive surveillance. Finally, I argue that thinking beyond the network requires us to foreground the importance of contiguity and context in understanding global politics. This article contributes both a novel theoretical framework for challenging the hegemony of network thinking and an ethical call for greater recognition of the harm caused by pathological sovereignty.

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