This chapter contains sections titled: Why Asset Ownership? The Content of Work: Meaningful Work The Governance of Work: Protection against Arbitrary Interference The Status of Work: Workers as Property Owners Conclusion References.

State ownership, worker ownership, and household ownership are the three main forms in which productive assets (firms) can be held. I argue that worker ownership is not wise in economies with high capital-labor ratios, for it forces the worker to concentrate all her assets in one firm. I review the coupon economy that I proposed in 1994, and express reservations that it could work: greedy people would be able to circumvent its purpose of preventing the concentration of corporate wealth. (...) Although extremely high corporate salaries are the norm today, I argue these are competitive and market determined, a consequence of the gargantuan size of firms. It would, however, be possible to tax such salaries at high rates, because the labor - supply response would be small. The social-democratic model remains the best one, to date, for producing a relatively egalitarian outcome, and it relies on solidarity, redistribution, and private ownership of firms. Whether a solidaristic social ethos can develop without a conflagration, such as the second world war, which not only united populations in the war effort, but also wiped out substantial middle-class wealth in Europe - thus engendering the post-war movement towards social - insurance is an open question. (shrink)

Justice in production is concerned with ensuring the benefits and burdens of work are distributed in a way that is reflective of persons' status as moral equals. While a variety of accounts of productive justice have been offered, insufficient attention has been paid to the distribution of work's benefits and burdens in the future. In this article, after granting for the sake of argument forecasts of widespread future technological unemployment, we consider the implications this has for egalitarian requirements of (...) productive justice. We argue that in relation to all the benefits affiliated with work, other than undertaking social contribution, the technological replacement of work is unproblematic as these benefits could in principle be attained elsewhere. But because social contribution uniquely corresponds to work (when work is understood as more than a paid job), the normative assessment of technological unemployment will turn on the value that theories of justice give to contributive activity. We then argue that despite technological replacement being plainly beneficial insofar as it relieves persons from the burdens of work, such as dangerous work or drudgery, because the nature of care work makes it less susceptible to technological replacement, egalitarian concern will require the burdens of care work to be shared equally between individuals. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship is considered a key element for economic and social development, requiring cognitive, attitudinal, and procedural competencies for its realization. This study focuses on a documentary review aimed at answering the following questions: How is research on entrepreneurial capabilities approached in different countries? What is the volume of scientific production on this topic? In light of this, the present work is developed within the inclusion criteria: publications between 2012 and 2022, various types of documents, written in English, and included in (...) the SCOPUS database. To conduct the analysis, a combination of tools such as VOSviewer, Biblioshiny, and Excel was used. These tools allowed for the identification of clusters, co-occurrence frequencies, and network nodes. Based on this, the behavior of authors, countries, journals, and the evolution of the topic over time were examined. The results reveal that the United States is the leading country in publishing research on entrepreneurship. There is an increase in scientific production related to this topic, with the majority of publications concentrated in a limited number of journals (53). Limited collaboration among authors and institutions is also evident. The co-authorship network is divided into 47 clusters, with weak grouping among them. (shrink)

The world of mental health has become used to the notion of co-production as a good thing. While the paper is not a critical analysis of co-production, the authors make the case that while it is a good thing, it is not the only good thing; and it is neither sufficient, nor necessary for good things to happen in mental health services. Alternative concepts of progressive innovation in this field are introduced. Real world case studies (most of them previously unpublished) (...) are then worked through to test which concept(s) – co-production, or the alternatives, or neither – are the better fit, bearing in mind the complex relationships to be negotiated, not just between service users and mental health professionals, but between service users and members of other professions, and of the general public. Finally, the question is raised as to whether there is anything (such as the flattening of hierarchies or stigma reduction) which all these innovations – co-production and the alternatives – have in common. (shrink)

One of the most intuitive views about the metaphysics of laws of nature is Tim Maudlin's idea of a Fundamental Law of Temporal Evolution. So-called FLOTEs are primitive elements of the universe that produce later states from earlier states. While FLOTEs are at home in traditional Newtonian and non-relativistic quantum mechanical theories (not to mention our pre-theoretic conception of the world), I consider here whether they can be made to work with relativity. In particular, shifting to relativistic spacetimes poses two (...) threats to FLOTEs. First, the lack of a privileged spacelike hypersurface in relativistic spacetime makes it unclear how to understand what produces what. A survey of several conceptions of the nomic production relation compatible with relativity reveals all of them to be lacking. Second, relativity motivates a four-dimensional block universe conception of time, according to which all events that will ever occur already exist. On such a view, it's unclear what work there is to be done by FLOTEs. I consider how a proponent of FLOTEs might respond, but conclude that these combined threats seriously undermine the prospects of a productive conception of laws. In short, if spacetime is relativistic, laws are not productive. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore how nurses are enrolled into and take part in programmes of efficiency and effectiveness. Using the philosophical theorizing about desire as a force or power, I focus specifically on what is understood as relations between desire and productivity in current Westernized health‐care systems. Use is made of the idea from Spinoza that human emotions consist only of pleasure, pain, and desire as these act as a motive force. This is then linked with (...) more contemporary work on the politics and discourses of desire. A report on the implementation of a productivity programme in the United Kingdom, The Productive Ward: Releasing time to care™, is explored for the ways its developers set about motivating nurses to endorse and enact the programme. In exploring the mechanics of desire in these processes, a view of desire as productive is promoted. Looking at desire as assembling actions, and an assemblage, moves the analysis to an interrogation of actions and practices used to enable and bring nurses to the process. Moreover, in working through the various modalities and operations of desire, the potential and limits of such projects are abstracted. Such potentials and limits are necessarily set by the intensification of power and desire in the capitalist economy, saturating areas of nursing, and health‐care provision. (shrink)

When producing a description of a target referent in a visual context, speakers need to choose a set of properties that distinguish it from its distractors. Computational models of language production/generation usually model this as a search process and predict that the time taken will increase both with the number of distractors in a scene and with the number of properties required to distinguish the target. These predictions are reminiscent of classic findings in visual search; however, unlike models of reference (...) production, visual search models also predict that search can become very efficient under certain conditions, something that reference production models do not consider. This paper investigates the predictions of these models empirically. In two experiments, we show that the time taken to plan a referring expression—as reflected by speech onset latencies—is influenced by distractor set size and by the number of properties required, but this crucially depends on the discriminability of the properties under consideration. We discuss the implications for current models of reference production and recent work on the role of salience in visual search. (shrink)

This essay is a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” a classic text in critical theory and media studies. Appropriating Benjamin’s sentence, paragraph, and essay structures, the essay presents a series of theoretical reflections on the status of art during the current age of transmedia production. The essay seeks to contribute to a theory of contemporary art that moves beyond capitalist, and increasingly fascist, ideologies. As in Benjamin’s essay, this work is (...) an effort to think dialectically about the contradictions that structure our contemporary moment, and therefore to formulate a socialist aesthetics. (shrink)

Praxis is the identifying signature of the most prevalent contemporary versions of the reception and interpretation of Marx and of the movements of thought inspired or provoked by him. This view seems to accord well with the early “Theses on Feuerbach” and is frequently mobilized in support of the further claim that the “mature” or “scientific” Marx, the Marx of Das Kapital, above all had left behind his former preoccupations with philosophy in anything like a traditional sense, in order to (...) pursue single-mindedly and whole-heartedly his critical diagnosis of bourgeois political economy, the opening wedge in his “practical” campaign to establish first socialism and then communism. In this essay, I want to call into question some of the central commitments of this consensus. In particular, I shall suggest that Marx’s understanding of praxis, of human activity and interaction, is pervasively shaped by his conception of poiesis, the production of hitherto non-existing objects and, therewith, the ongoing transformation of external Nature. Accordingly, appreciations of Marx’s supposedly revolutionary transfiguration of the relation between theoria and praxis need to be recast and reconstrued in light of his reduction of praxis to technical production. Poiesis is the cardinal, indeed the unique, category in the ontological vocabulary Marx adopted in his earliest works and never abandoned afterwards, even when he went on to treat ontological issues much more economically. This monochromatic vocabulary so colored Marx’s analysis of the nature and civic places of labor and human interrelations, that both tended to lose the variegated contours by which pre-modern, if not all pre-Marxist, thinkers recognized them. Marx’s elliptical, not to say sibylline, allusions to the condition and the telos of “socialized humanity” in the Grundrisse and in the final volume of Das Kapital prove so perplexing exactly because ‘labor’ itself has become paradoxical—does it figure with equal prominence in both the ‘realm of necessity’ and the ‘realm of freedom’?—while praxis, once it seems finally set free from the spell cast on it by the presumptive ultimacy of poiesis, appears to lose its bearings, its pre-modern orientation to a goal such as achieved and mutually-acknowledged human excellence. The claims and promises of praxis turn out to be deeply enigmatic. (shrink)

Biennials – periodic, independent and international exhibitions surveying trends in visual art – have with startling speed become key nodes in linking production, distribution and consumption of contemporary art. Cultural production and consumption have been typically separated in research, neglecting phenomena, like biennials, sitting in between. Biennials have become, however, key sites of both the production of art’s discourse and where that discourse translates into practices of display and contexts of appreciation. They are, this article argues, key sites of art’s (...) symbolic production. Symbolic production is what makes a work, an artist, or even a genre visible and relevant, providing its sense in a system of classifications and, in an exhibition like a biennial, literally giving it a place in the scene. This article proposes a cultural analysis of biennials, focusing on the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 and the first of the genre, through which we can trace biennials’ rise and transformations. (shrink)

Engagement with stakeholders and civil society is increasingly important for new scientific and technological developments. Preparation of such engagements sets the stage for engagement activities and thus contributes to their outcomes. Preparation is a demanding task, particularly if the facilitating agent aims for timely engagement related to emerging technologies. Requirements for such preparation include understanding of the emerging science & technology and its dynamics. Multi-level analysis and socio-technical scenarios are two complementary tools for constructing productive engagement. Examination of the (...) emergence of nanotechnologies in the food packaging sector demonstrates how these tools work. In light of recent policy demands for responsible innovation, but also more generally, the role of organizers of engagement activities is one that deserves reflection insofar as it can extend beyond that of preparation and facilitation. (shrink)

We investigate empirically whether framing in general, and the use of Simplifying Models as a framing tool in particular, has an effect on the way topics are cognitively construed. Existing studies on framing in linguistics have either been theoretical or descriptive. Going beyond such methodologically simple approaches, we use a more rigid test design involving the use of a control group, the construction of test conditions in which different Simplifying Models constitute the major source of variation, the inclusion of independent (...) variables like age and prior knowledge of the subjects, and the use of linear and logistic regression analysis. Our results show that our more rigid methodological approach yields a more reliable image of the effect of Simplifying Models on the way in which people deal with information on a complex topic like sustainable food production. Fleshing out these effects further may in time lead to a better informed construction of communication on complex social topics. (shrink)

This article argues for the value of working with conflicts in social practice as resources for collaboration, learning and development. The interest in conflicts in social practice is rooted in a preoccupation with social power relations and how to understand and analyse power relations from a subject-science perspective. Following this interest, a methodological framework, best described as a kind of ‘mobile ethnography’, is discussed and exemplified through an empirical example. A preliminary conceptual framework for understanding power as a capacity for (...) action is presented. The overarching ambition of the article is to consider what democratic collaboration and coexistence entails and how it might be supported conceptually and analytically by the notion of conflicts as heuristics for social inquiry and by the notion of power as a capacity for action and social participation. (shrink)

The present study analyzes specific traits of Lysenkoism dogmas as they were reflected in Soviet hydrobiology. As a case study, I use the now-forgotten productivity theory of bodies of water developed in 1940 by the Soviet hydrobiologist Vladimir I. Zhadin. Zhadin’s views on production relied on his observations of changes in the communities of riverine faunas caused by the construction of water reservoirs. The theory is of particular interest because it attempts to address the unresolved problems of that period. Some (...) of these unsettled problems provided the foundation for the ideological debates during the dialectization period in Soviet biology of the early 1920s to mid-1930s and were influenced by Lysenkoism. Zhadin’s theory thus serves as a suitable model for identifying cognitive and ideological components in science and for the analysis of the influence of ideology on science. The analysis of Zhadin’s works shows that an attempt to separate ideologically imposed perceptions and the author’s own scientific views presents a challenging task. This can be explained by a highly efficient behavioral pattern of “protective coloration” employed by the scientist and by Zhadin’s sincere acceptance of some Lysenkoist ideas. Furthermore, I argue that the system of Lysenkoist dogmas concerning the association between an organism and its environment are in fact entirely sensible scientific principles which were taken to an extreme. The results of the study suggest a need for more careful and deeper evaluation of scientific works published during the period of the personality cult in the USSR. The “Lysenko affair” in branches of biology other than genetics is more complicated and needs further examination. (shrink)

Marx’s conceptualization of history emphasizes the succession of modes of production. However the dynamics of productive forces and relations of production are continuous. Central to this analysis is the “socialization of production” and the rise of the managerial class. These trends require the adjustment of institutions, notably those in which the ownership of the means of production is expressed, an adjustment that is often implemented under the pressure of structural crises. The article illustrates these dynamics in the United States (...) since the late 19th century, in particular in relation to the tripolar class patterns, capitalists, popular classes and managerial class. What is involved is the gradual emergence of a new mode of production whose dominant class is intended to be the managerial class. A “social order” is a shorter period marked by the configuration of class dominations and alliances: the hegemony of capitalist classes during the first third of the 20th century, the alliance between managers and popular classes after the Great Depression and World War II, and neoliberalism as a new hegemony of capitalists in alliance with managers. The approach in terms of social orders allows for the interpretation of the state as the institutional “locus” in which social orders are formed, rather than as the exclusive domination of a ruling class. (shrink)

Contemporary law offices use many different technologies for storing and retrieving documents produced in the course of legal work. This article examines two approaches in detail: document management, as exemplified by SoftSolutions, and electronic publishing, as exemplified by Folio VIEWS. Some other approaches are reviewed, and the pragmatics, politics, economics, and legalities of legal work product retrieval are discussed.

Two claims are discussed. One is that works of art are a product of nature, no less than rocks and flowers. The other is that nature itself is an artifact, constructed by scientists and artisans, throughout centuries, from a partly yielding, partly resisting material of unknown properties. Since both claims are supported by convincing evidence, the world appears much more slippery than commonly assumed by rationalists. Intellectual generalizations around ?art,? ?nature? or ?science? are simplifying devices that can help us order (...) the abundance that surrounds us. They should be understood as such?opportunistic tools, not final statements on the objective reality of the world. (shrink)

This article takes the suggestions by Jameson and Žižek that Hardt and Negri's recent Empire is an important `new theoretical synthesis' and a challenge to a politically complacent Cultural Studies as its starting point to explore Negri's understanding of `production'. It opens out Negri's apparent synthesis to consider the formative elements of his work: operaismo's `social factory', Marx's `Fragment on Machines' and Deleuze's figure of `control society'. The article argues that whilst Negri develops the important analytic categories of socialized and (...) affective labour, he breaks with operaismo's and Deleuze's `cramped' and `minor' interrogation of the intricacies of capitalized production to develop a problematic understanding of an emerging autonomy-in-production. In this Negri makes a strange return to the orthodox Marxian and - in an inverted way - neo-Gramscian positions which operaismo had sought to undermine; so making Empire less a synthesis of, than a break with some of the core theoretical principles of operaismo, Marx and Deleuze. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the consideration of a number of stage projects by Chinese directors, in which the work of the writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is reinterpreted. Analysis of such productions and projects as the international drama festival "Chekhov Forever" in 2004, a hybrid work based on Chekhov's story "Three Sisters" and Beckett's novel "Waiting for Godot" by Lin Zhaohua in 1998 and 2018, a double performance by Stan Lai based on the works "I take You by the Hand" (...) by Carol Rocamora and "The Seagull" Chekhov 2014, etc. It allows us to trace innovative approaches to reading Chekhov's works in the context of the life of modern Chinese society. These works cause a great resonance not only in the professional environment, but also among the mass audience, who invariably penetrates the depth of Chekhov's images, the subtlest shades of emotional experiences; the Chinese audience finds themselves close to the problems, hopes and aspirations of the heroes, brilliantly transferred to the actual socio-cultural environment of China, always topical and recognizable. The scientific novelty of the article is connected with the fact that the nature of mastering the creativity of the Russian playwright in the theater of the East is a fairly new and at the same time promising topic for research. The conclusions and results of the study can become the basis for further studies of the specifics of the adaptation of foreign dramaturgy in the national theatrical tradition on the example of other countries and regions. (shrink)

In a review of our work, Kincaid suggests that we are 'productivist', reducing interpretation of Marx and capitalism to production at the expense of the relatively independent role that can be played by the value-form in general and by the money-form in particular. In response, we argue that he distorts interpretation of our work through this prism of production versus exchange, unduly emphasises the independence of exchange to the point of underconsumptionism, and simplistically collapses the mediation between production and exchange (...) in the restructuring that accompanies the accumulation of capital. (shrink)

This work investigates how ancient philosophers understood productive knowledge or technê and used it to explain ethics, rhetoric, politics and cosmology. In eleven chapters leading scholars set out the ancient debates about technê from the Presocratic and Hippocratic writers, through Plato and Aristotle and the Hellenistic age, ending in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus. Amongst the many themes that come into focus are: the model status of ancient medicine in defining the political art, the similarities between the Platonic (...) and Aristotelian conceptions of technê, the use of technê as a paradigm for virtue and practical rationality, technê´s determining role in Platonic conceptions of cosmology, technê´s relationship to experience and theoretical knowledge, virtue as an 'art of living', the adaptability of the criteria of technê to suit different skills, including philosophy itself, the use in productive knowledge of models, deliberation, conjecture and imagination. (shrink)

Using the concept of purity to reflect on the relationship between chemical practice and the philosophy of science, this article considers the philosophical significance of the chemical manipulations that aim to purify or otherwise transform matter. Starting from a consideration of the nature and role of pure (or idealised) examples in philosophy of science, the article underlines the temptation towards abstraction and theory for both scientists and philosophers. The article goes on to argue that chemistry, despite its increasing theoretical sophistication, (...) is a science that remains particularly close to laboratory manipulations. This point is made in reference to the work of Gaston Bachelard on the production of purity and with the aid of historical examples, notably exploring the interplay between techniques of purification and the definition of elements, with special attention paid to Lavoisier’s definition of elements as the final limit of analysis. The closing section concerns the manufacture of steel from iron ore in the eighteenth century, illustrating this process using texts by Pierre-Joseph Macquer and Denis Diderot. Steel production is used to illustrate the kinds of philosophical question that are raised by paying attention to the details of chemical practice rather than jumping straight to chemical theory and also suggests how scientific theory can emerge from this practice itself. (shrink)

_Ontology of Production_ presents three essays by the influential Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, translated for the first time into English by William Haver. While previous translations of his writings have framed Nishida within Asian or Oriental philosophical traditions, Haver's introduction and approach to the texts rightly situate the work within Nishida's own commitment to Western philosophy. In particular, Haver focuses on Nishida's sustained and rigorous engagement with Marx's conception of production. Agreeing with Marx that ontology is production and production is (...) ontology, Nishida in these three essays—"Expressive Activity", "The Standpoint of Active Intuition", and "Human Being" —addresses sense and reason, language and thought, intuition and appropriation, ultimately arguing that in this concept of production, ideality and materiality are neither mutually exclusive nor oppositional but, rather, coimmanent. Nishida's forceful articulation of the radical nature of Marx's theory of production is, Haver contends, particularly timely in today's speculation-driven global economy. Nishida's reading of Marx, which points to the inseparability of immaterial intellectual labor and material manual labor, provokes a reconsideration of Marxism's utility for making sense of—and resisting—the logic of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Production Determines CategoryAn Ontology of ArtMichael Weh (bio)1. Are There Singular Artworks?It is a mainstream view within the ontology of art that there are singular as well as multiple artworks, but it is also a view that is contested. In what follows, I will investigate whether the singular/multiple distinction can be sustained and will argue for a new way to determine the category to which an artwork belongs. Though (...) this seems to be an enterprise of rather theoretical concern, it has a direct practical dimension to it as well. Whether we are right to distinguish between singular and multiple artworks, and on what grounds such a distinction could be made, is of course affecting our treatment of artworks and our whole practice of exhibiting, selling, and appreciating works of art because it is based on the assumption that certain works are unique (and thus exhibited in museums and sold for considerable prices), whereas others exist in several instances (which make them widely available and not to be identified with a single object of appreciation). I hope to show that our practice of categorizing art is mostly appropriate but for different reasons than it has been suggested before.The first question to consider is, What defines a singular artwork? The most obvious characteristic is that it is singular—that is, it exists in only one instance. There is only one Mona Lisa, and there cannot be multiple instances of the Mona Lisa, whereas there can be multiple instances of Ulysses. But a little more precision is advisable. The criterion to decide whether a given work is singular cannot be if there actually is just one instance of the work.1 There might be a multiple artwork, say the novel x, of which there is only one instance—the manuscript. But this does not make x a singular artwork because there could be many copies of x, and they would all be instances of x if they fulfilled the necessary identity criteria between type and token.A copy of the Mona Lisa, on the other hand, would not—according to the common understanding of "singular artworks"—be an instance of the [End Page 84] painting but just that: a copy of the Mona Lisa. Thus, a singular artwork can only exist in one exemplar, and it is impossible that there is more than one. There can only be copies, reproductions, posters, forgeries, facsimiles, or pictures of the Mona Lisa but not an exemplar of the Mona Lisa other than the original. Talking of one exemplar or instance of the Mona Lisa might even be slightly misleading, as it is not supposed to suggest that there is some abstract entity Mona Lisa of which Leonardo's painting is the one and only possible instance. The claim is rather that in the case of singular artworks, there is no type the painting would be a token of at all but only the original physical object. The original is the work.The view that paintings and sculptures are singular artworks that are to be identified with physical objects is held by many ontologists of art, including Richard Wollheim, Jerrold Levinson, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The view is not unchallenged, however, and some people think that what would normally be considered as singular artworks can—at least in principle—exist in several instances as well. In other words, there are no singular artworks at all. And if there could be several instances of the Mona Lisa, this not only means that the Mona Lisa is not a singular work of art but also that it is not a physical object; rather, it is an abstract object like a literary or musical work.2 This view is defended by, amongst others, Gregory Currie, Maria Reicher, and Peter Strawson.But let us first look at some reasons why one might want to insist that some artworks are concrete particulars. To begin with, this is how we deal with and think about paintings and sculptures. The assumption that, say, paintings are singular artworks is implied in our social practices concerning paintings. We put the originals in museums and not copies of them. We buy and... (shrink)

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles. _The Field of Cultural Production_ brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of (...) literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power. The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Idiot Patrick BatemanA New Configuration of Caricatural "Ultra-Christianity"Fabrizio Arcuri (bio)INTRODUCTIONThis paper1 aims to analyze the figure of Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of the novel American Psycho,2 through René Girard's mimetic theory. It links the character created by Bret Easton Ellis to the concept of caricatural "ultra-Christianity," meaning the degeneration of Christian-based concern for innocent victims.Methodologically, it adopts the approach of the sociology of the imaginary, which is characterized (...) by the division between invisible levels of signification and visible elements of culture. The latter, as a set of representations, narratives, and products, both material and ideal, are influenced by the former, which represent their condition of possibility.3 When considering caricatural "ultra-Christianity" as a phenomenon traceable to the "Regimes of the Imaginary" of the sacred,4 it can be regarded as the deep substratum from which Patrick [End Page 177] Bateman's particular idiocy emerges as a paranoid and victimistic intensification of mimetic desire.For this reason, this paper is subdivided into three sections. In the first, the focus is on the conception of caricatural "ultra-Christianity" that derives from Girard's work, identifying its origin in the revelation of Christ Paraclete. The second examines "idiotism," one of the types of "ultra-Christianity" present in contemporary society. "Idiotism" is understood as a paranoid reaction due to the traumatic split, psychiatrically based, between one's idios kosmos (own-world) and koinos kosmos (common world). Finally, in the third, I concentrate on the peculiarities of American Psycho via the theoretical framework delineated in the previous parts.FROM PARACLETE TO CARICATURAL "ULTRA-CHRISTIANITY"To provide a definition of the nature and function of caricatural "ultra-Christianity," we must first refer to the main concepts of mimetic theory, specifically, the revelation of Christianity in Girard's work. According to René Girard, desire is never authentically spontaneous or individual. Rather, it is influenced by the mutual fascination of subjects. These, often unconsciously, regard their fellow human beings as entities endowed with the fullness of being that they irretrievably lack.5Desire is a form of ontological contagion perpetuated by the continuous activity of imitation. The individual aspires to resolve metaphysical contradictions by emulating the physical, moral, symbolic, and social features of all those he/she prefers as his/her models.6 Nevertheless, within a mimetic relationship, the mediator will defend his/her own position, denying the imitating disciple the chance to match his/her status. Due to the "viral" characteristics of mimesis, the result is a situation of vindication and rivalry that is likely to spread throughout the community, fomenting a vicious cycle of fratricidal violence.7In Girard's view, that form of generalized conflict can lead society to collapse. A community needs to find an object or, better, an individual, always in a mimetic way, on whom to discharge the growing tension. The identification of the collective nemesis occurs through the scapegoat mechanism.8 Although the epidemic of violence plaguing the community is due to the desires and rivalries of all its members, the construction of the collective nemesis designates a single culprit for the mimetic crisis and results in both the disavowal of blame and the enfranchisement of the majority from responsibility. The enemy must be immolated, as only his sacrifice can save the collective. The violence of lynching [End Page 178] becomes the only means of restraining the previous violence of the mimetic escalation. Once the antagonist is killed, the destructive effects of fratricidal mimesis are appeased, at least temporarily.For Girard, the handling of salvific violence represents the essence of the sacred.9 This is a type of managing that, in its regenerative and foundational aspects, constitutes the value system that regulates the circulation of mimesis and the desires of each member of the community. It ensures, albeit precariously, the compactness of the group structure. It could be argued that the construction of meaning that emerges from the lynching of the scapegoat structures the representation of the social order,10 that is, the collective imaginary, understanding it as an instituting narrative of meanings: "This narrative resides in the shared imagination of the group that constructed it and encompasses... (shrink)

The successful introduction of Lucian to Western Europe in late 14th century, which was followed by Latin translations of a number of his works produced in the first half of the 15th century, continued in Italy also in the second half of the century. This attitude subsequently passed to scholars from outside Italy, and by late 15th century almost all of Lucian’s texts had met with at least one Latin version and started reaching the printing houses of the time. The (...) edition of the Greek text in 1496 prompted scholars to produce new Latin translations, most of which were soon printed in places all over Europe. The printing boom of the first half of the 16th century facilitated and accelerated their diffusion, and then the gradual decline of the printed editions of Lucian’s Latin versions may be attributed to the vernacular translations, which had started appearing already in the 15th century. Tracing the production and diffusion of the Latin versions of Lucian from the late 15th to the late 16th century, both in manuscript and in print, reveals some informative details about the texts that appealed most to humanists of the time, the geographical and chronological fluctuations of their interest in Lucian’s texts as these emerge from the printed editions, but also the most influential of the translators and their Latin versions and the reasons for this. (shrink)

We argue that ritual is not a by-product as Boyer & Lienard (B&L) claim, but rather an evolved adaptation for social communication that facilitates non-agonistic social interactions among non-kin. We review the neurophysiological effects of ritual and propose neural structures and networks beyond the cortical-striato-pallidal-thalamic circuit (CSPT) likely to be implicated in ritual. The adaptationist approach to ritual offers a more parsimonious model for understanding these effects as well as the findings B&L present. (Published Online February 8 2007).

This is a review-essay on William Haver’s recent translation of three essays by Nishida Kitarō in a volume entitledOntologies of Production. Nishida is one of the founders of the famous Kyoto School of philosophy and, while his philosophy is not really Marxist, Haver attempts to bring Nishida into dialogue with Marx in his Introduction and through his selection of essays to translate. I attempt to situate Haver’s translation in a brief discussion of a recent debate on how to write modern (...) Japanese intellectual history and, through this examination, I suggest a framework for analysing modern intellectual history drawing on the work of Harry Harootunian, Moishe Postone and Jacques Bidet. In short, this framework attempts to relate the production of ideas to the temporal dynamic associated with capital, the commodity-form and other related mediations that make up the modern global capitalist system. Then I turn to Haver’s Introduction and translations and both explain some of the key concepts of Nishida and show how, using the framework that I outlined, Nishida’s work can be conceived of as failing to understand its own conditions of possibility in the multiple mediations of capitalism. For this reason, Nishida’s work, like many other romantic critiques of capitalism, criticises the abstractions of modernity at an abstract level, failing to account for the mediations of capitalism such as class and the commodity. (shrink)

The argument thatAgainst World Literaturemakes about why we might perceive translation as a form of anti-capitalist or ‘deowned’ property does not jibe with basic features of the material organisation of the publishing industry and the intellectual-property regime on which it depends. While it is perhaps unfair to expect everyone to be a cultural materialist or literary sociologist, I point out a number of features of the organisation of the World Literature industry that trouble Apter’s arguments about the anti-capitalist implications of (...) our recognition of the untranslatable. Ultimately ownership is not a matter of perception, and non-owned literature, like non-alienated literary labour, cannot exist under capitalism. These circumstances will not change in the absence of some fundamental reorientation of the class dynamics of writing, publishing, and reading. To deown literature, the whole material constitution of the industry would have to be abolished and replaced with something else. (shrink)

With increasing technological improvements, production processes are becoming more and more automated. Nevertheless, full automation is improbable in the medium term since human abilities cannot yet be completely replaced. Therefore, it is likely that so-called hybrid human–robot teams will assume the future production. This raises questions regarding the shaping of future production and the effects it will have on the employees, workstations, and the companies as a whole. The project “Work in the Industry of the Future” addresses the entirely new (...) cooperative relationship between man and technology in the Industry 4.0 and its impact on opportunities for the work force. To derive the requirements and effects of hybrid workplaces, an initial work analysis of existing workplaces with varying levels of technological enhancement will be conducted. Multiple standardized work analysis instruments that vary in method, duration, level of analysis, and recorded characteristics already exist. This paper gives an overview of an assortment of these methods that can be used in production. (shrink)

Chicanas and Mexican women share a history of colonialism that has (a) sustained oppressive constructions of gender roles and sexuality, (b) produced and reproduced them as racially inferior and as able to be silenced, conquered, and dominated physically and mentally, and (c) contributed to the exploitation of their labor. Given that colonialism has also come to shape the way young women of Mexican heritage learn in mainstream US schools, informal education from everyday women's conviviality and solidarity becomes a pivotal context (...) in which they can learn how to reconstitute colonial legacies. We examine how a group of Mexican working-class immigrant women at home and in a sweatshop fashion a girl named Ana, the main character in the popular film Real Women Have Curves, into a confident young woman who engages in what Pérez (1999, 2003) refers to as empowering and dynamic decolonial ways of seeing, knowing, doing, being, and reconstituting. In spite of its contradictions that, at times, assist in reproducing Ana as an oppressed laborer, it is their doing that helps produce her as a woman who engages in decolonial practices by facilitating her to deftly negotiate an oppressive economic and patriarchal space, a mainstream feminist space, and a space where their embodiments and creative cultural discourse, practices, and beliefs shine. As such, the film provides a powerful counterstory (Delgado 1989) that disrupts the chokehold of the logic of colonialism and how it seeks to classify, stereotype, and control young women like Ana. (shrink)

A doctrine of intelligent design through evolution is not going to find many friends. It is destined to encounter opposition on all sides. Among scientists the backlog of evolution will have little patience for intelligent design. Among religiousists, many who form intelligent design have their doubts about evolution. In the general public s mind there is a diametrical opposition between evolution and intelligent design: one excludes the other. This book will argue that this view of the matter is not correct, (...) and that in actuality one can regard evolution itself as a pathway to intelligent design. We would do well to go beyond The Origin of Species and taking as our guide such works as W. Wentworth Thomson s On Growth and Form acknowledging that evolutionary adaptation can result in solutions of a sort that intelligence could readily ratify. Accordingly, what the present book seeks is a naturalization of Intelligent Design that sees such design as itself the result of natural and evolutionary processes.". (shrink)

Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space and real space. In the course of his exploration, (...) Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures. (shrink)

This essay explores some of the elements by which Muslim women who wear the hijab in the United States are managed so as to produce and distinguish "unruly" from "good" Muslim female citizens within the context of American liberation. Unlike the French state, which has regulated both the hijab and niqab through national legislation, the American liberal framework utilizes a laissez-faire approach, which relies on a range of public and private institutions to determine acceptable public presentations of the liberal female (...) subject. I refer to this form of management as "neoliberalism." Neoliberalism management works in conjunction with popular political discourses and domestic events in ways that alternately contract and expand the boundaries that allow "suitable Muslim women" in the public sphere. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s relation to Gestalt Psychology is typically understood through the lens of his engagement with Wolfgang Köhler’s work. Though valuable, this framing may obscure certain broader points of similarity between Wittgenstein’s methodological approach and the Gestalt school considered as a whole. In what follows I pursue this line of thought by comparing Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations with Max Wertheimer’s concept of productive thinking. I argue that Wertheimer’s emphasis on the shared and public aspects of (...) Gestalt phenomena counteracts Köhler’s tendency to characterise Gestalts as essentially private entities. I suggest that in this respect at least, Wertheimer’s approach is closer than Köhler’s to Wittgenstein’s later philosophical orientation. (shrink)

The main problem which I wish to discuss in this paper may be set out in the form of a very simple question. It is this: What makes an artist—whether he be painter, sculptor, musician, poet, or anything else—desire to produce a work of art and to go on working until he has done so?

As gatekeepers, editors and reviewers play a central role in identifying reliable and valuable scientific works for preservation and dissemination, contributing to subsequent knowledge production and public use. Despite its benefits, the rejection mechanism often carries significant emotional and career consequences for researchers. The analysis of 304 rejection letters since 2022 indicates that over 97% of rejections were attributed solely to authors’ shortcomings or the journal’s rigorous evaluation standards, while less than 3% cited journal-side limitations. This pattern suggests a prevailing (...) tendency where journals position themselves as the standard of quality, implicitly framing rejected research as inherently unqualified and placing an undue burden on authors—the primary producers of knowledge. Given the fallibility of journals, we propose a shift from viewing them as gatekeepers to recognizing them as facilitators of knowledge production. This transition would require embracing intellectual humility, thereby alleviating the rejection-induced burdens on researchers and fostering a more constructive scholarly environment. (shrink)

In the layered and deeply modernist approach, this chapter explores the tension between Westworld as an entertainment commodity and Westworld as “high art” utilizing the kind of self‐reference that typifies aesthetic modernism. To do this, elements of the series are connected to classic works of aesthetic theory by Immanuel Kant, Clement Greenberg, Theodor Adorno, and Arthur Danto. Michael Crichton's original Westworld film of 1973 selected the Western as the prime focus of the amusement park, grounding the story in the very (...) notion of kitsch consumerism and heteronomous commodification. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's reworking of The Original, the first episode of Westworld, presents further layers ‐ a developed production team, engineers, “narrative and design department”, and corporate executives. Thus the show explicitly draws on the kitsch elements of the Western to highlight entertainment art as commodity. (shrink)

Rational accounts of language use such as the uniform information density hypothesis, which asserts that speakers distribute information uniformly across their utterances, and the rational speech act (RSA) model, which suggests that speakers optimize the formulation of their message by reasoning about what the comprehender would understand, have been hypothesized to account for a wide range of language use phenomena. We here specifically focus on the production of discourse connectives. While there is some prior work indicating that discourse connective production (...) may be governed by RSA, that work uses a strongly gamified experimental setting. In this study, we aim to explore whether speakers reason about the interpretation of their conversational partner also in more realistic settings. We thereby systematically vary the task setup to tease apart effects of task instructions and effects of the speaker explicitly seeing the interpretation alternatives for the listener. Our results show that the RSA-predicted effect of connective choice based on reasoning about the listener is only found in the original setting where explicit interpretation alternatives of the listener are available for the speaker. The effect disappears when the speaker has to reason about listener interpretations. We furthermore find that rational effects are amplified by the gamified task setting, indicating that meta-reasoning about the specific task may play an important role and potentially limit the generalizability of the found effects to more naturalistic every-day language use. (shrink)

We describe a unified framework for the understanding of structure representation in primate vision. A model derived from this framework is shown to be effectively systematic in that it has the ability to interpret and associate together objects that are related through a rearrangement of common “middle-scale” parts, represented as image fragments. The model addresses the same concerns as previous work on compositional representation through the use of what+where receptive fields and attentional gain modulation. It does not require prior exposure (...) to the individual parts, and avoids the need for abstract symbolic binding. (shrink)

"What is at stake in this book is nothing less than a dramatically new way of approaching literature, one which in its unostentatious, low key way scandalously smashes a whole range of liberal humanist icons." --Terry Eagleton Who is more important: the reader, or the writer? Originally published in French in 1966, Pierre Macherey's first and most famous work, A Theory of Literary Production dared to challenge perceived wisdom, and quickly established him as a pivotal figure in literary theory. In (...) this provocative work, Macherey puts the focus as much on the reader as the writer, stating that the very act of reading is a form of production in its own right, generating interpretation and meanings which are beyond the control of the author. Part of the birth of a whole new branch of post-structuralist theory, Macherey's work also influenced a new generation of critics among them Jacques Derrida, his contemporary, and Terry Eagleton. His ideas have also led some observers to claim that he announced the death of the author fully two years before Roland Barthes' famous essay. The reissue of this work as a Routledge Classic brings some radical ideas to a new audience, and argues persuasively for a totally new way of reading. As such, it is an essential work for anyone interested in the development of literary theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the comparatively neglected intuition of production regarding causality. I begin by examining the weaknesses of current production accounts of causality. I then distinguish between giving a good production account of causality and a good account of production. I argue that an account of production is needed to make sense of vital practices in causal inference. Finally, I offer an information transmission account of production based on John Collier’s work that solves the primary weaknesses of current (...) production accounts: applicability and absences. (shrink)

DCPS is a connectionist production system interpreter that uses distributed representations. As a connectionist model it consists of many simple, richly interconnected neuron‐like computing units that cooperate to solve problems in parallel. One motivation for constructing DCPS was to demonstrate that connectionist models are capable of representing and using explicit rules. A second motivation was to show how “coarse coding” or “distributed representations” can be used to construct a working memory that requires far fewer units than the number of different (...) facts that can potentially be stored. The simulation we present is intended as a detailed demonstration of the feasibility of certain ideas and should not be viewed as a full implementation of production systems. Our current model only has a few of the many interesting emergent properties that we eventually hope to demonstrate: It is damage‐resistant, it performs matching and variable binding by massively parallel constraint satisfaction, and the capacity of its working memory is dependent on the similarity of the items being stored. (shrink)

If persons fully own themselves and can acquire, by unilateral acts, unconditional full property rights to previously unowned natural resources, then by these same principles of property they also own the products of their property and of their labour. But the principles of property are silent on the question of the division of joint products; the market is a form of co-operation in production which makes the total social product a joint product. In the circumstances of an unrestrained fully developed (...) market, therefore, it is not fully determinate what one's product is. Thus the holdings that each person ends up with cannot be justified merely in terms of ownership of products. I offer an explanation of why some may resist this view of the market. (shrink)

While the concept of hegemony had a central place in the crystallization of 1980s cultural studies, recent developments in cultural economy, information and communication technologies, and globalization suggest a decline in the utility of the frameworks of democracy and the 'logic of equivalence' that lie at the heart of the hegemony thesis and its conception of the social. This article considers how cultural studies is engaging with this situation by arguing that a set of themes can be seen that approach (...) power and culture through an expanded understanding of production, a production considered as the patterning – or mobilization, arrangement and distribution – of rich social, technical, economic and affective relations. The perspective of production does not carry the unifying project that hegemony and democracy gave to an earlier cultural studies, but is instead composed of diverse problematics that suggest heterogeneous sites of critical intervention and politicization. Situating the discussion in the frame of Deleuze's figure of 'control society', the article explores the overlapping themes of communication, affect, fear, work, class and war. (shrink)