The historical novelty of the attacks on metaphor can perhaps be attributed to the playful metaphorical language with which they were waged. As A. K. Croston observes in the introduction to the 1949 edition, “The movement towards unvarnished expression associated with the Royal Society goes so far in Fairfax as to confound itself – the ideal of Perspicuity is lost in the distracting oddities of the surface we are supposed to look through” (Croston x). To be sure, lines like the following are not easily reconciled with the author’s self-declared project of absolving discourse of the “bewitcheries of speech that flow from Gloss and Chimingness” (36):

“So long as he who has but a teeming brain, may have leave to lay his eggs in his own nest, which is built beyond the reach of every mans puddering pole, why should the ears of all the neighborhood be dinn’d & grated with the Cackle, as if the whole world besides were all Weasils and Poulcats, vermine and Lurchers?” (35)

Fairfax may lack Parker’s vitriol, but their goals are comparable: the restoration of clarity in, and extrication of superfluity from, wordplay — which, in terms of schools and influence, translates to rolling back the baroque literary movements of the seventeenth century – e.g. euphuism (from John Lyly’s Euphues), gongorismo (Luis de Góngora), conceptismo, concettismo (conceit), marinismo (Giambattista Marino), secentismo, préciosité, etc. As is clear in Parker’s speech – which associates a diversity of interpretations with the scattering and weakening of a nation (see the footnote below) – Fairfax’s opposition to the baroque is expressed through stolid, conservative affirmations of nation, class, and gender.

1. “And indeed however our smoother tongued Neighbours may put in a claim for those bewitcheries of speech that flow from Gloss and Chimingness; yet I verily believe [page] that there is no tongue under heaven, that goes beyond our English for speaking manly strong and full.” (36-37)
2. “For the words that are every day running to and fro in the Chat of Workers, have not been gotten into Books and put aboard for other Lands, until this way of Knowing by Doing was started amongst us. So that we and others of the Handed Philosophers may either find better words among our own Yeomanry, for such businesses of workmanship as are already known by name, or at least coin fitter for new ones in a likewiseness to the old, than can be lent us from that Tongue wherein we know not how the Folks talkt in the Country, nor do any body else or ever shall do. Whereby too we shall not only vvith more ease, and kindliness be understood by the Pains-taking men amongst us, whose Crafts will be more helpful to an hail Philosopher, than the Bookishness of others.” (41)
3. “But as Learnings being lockt up in the Tongues of the Schools, or Love’s being lickt up in the more womanly simprings of the lips, and the smiling kissing speeches of some others abroad, have been enough to enkindle in us a panting after, and fondness for some of those Outlandish dynns” (41).

Where Parker, always the extreme case, is obtuse, Fairfax is subtle, conflicted, and, so it seems, self-consciously embroiled in the paradoxes of communicating clarity and precision through what is inevitably an unwieldy, figurative apparatus. To be sure, the immediate concern is to describe the relation between a preface – the preface he’s writing – and the book prefaced. Not simply a matter of introduction and elaboration, which in fact threaten the text (as “extravagance”), but rather, as a result, the opposite problem of “detension”, where to curb your thoughts, where to end, how to determine what is proper to the subject and what isn’t – in short, closing off what might otherwise turn out to be an endless chain of thoughts, or, vis-à-vis Descartes, a countering to define where the self folds back and forms a whole (–not extension but de-tension). The greatest danger is to say too much, to chatter, to fail to keep close to the subject “at hand” (an image that recurs throughout, e.g. the “Handed Philosophers” above).

Generally speaking, this kind of strategy marks, in part, the modern beginnings of what is now considered self-evident – the honing of a self-disciplined, fastidious writing style, the rigorous refining of an economy of thought that at every turn must ask itself if what it thinks is essential and relevant or excessive and rhetorical. Indeed, in a remarkable passage, in which Fairfax both aligns himself with the Royal Society, against metaphor and Conning, and characteristically engages in a profusely metaphoric, playful language, he describes his thinking as a kind of interior journey or wandering through a discursive landscape.

“That finding in my self a kind of forwardness towards Philosophy, and mainly to that part of it which takes [page] knowledge of Bodies; as which, of all others, I found I could receive most helps and furtherance in, from those spreading lights and wealthy stores, with which the Royal Society at home and others abroad, set into the way bye their showing and enheartned to go on by their works, had both enbellisht and enricht it, I let my mind alone to take its full swing in the Conning of Bodies, this and that; and forthwith or ere I could well help it, I fell a Roving, and plung’d out from what I was medling with and tossing of, to another thing that was earlyer and Bulkier, and to somewhat still that was more betimes and more of Boak; and being quite lost in wilde and a frightful on and on, I e’en took back again where I was, and fell to unravel the thing that was too big to be fathom’d, that I might make it little enough for my mind to grapple with: but I was as unluckie at lessening and narrowing as I had been before at widening and bigning. As the one had wrackt and limm’d my thoughts, with endless tenters and boundless retchings out; so had the other nipt in my soul and shrivell’d up my thoughts, with restless gripes and unwearyed parings off: so that I had both lost and benothing’d my self in the lessenings made within [page] myself, as I had lost and bewildred my self in the scopes still left without my self.” (27-29)

As an interior, subjective version of the problem Diderot encountered in writing the “Encyclopedia” entry for the Encyclopedia (see Creech), where the question arose as to how to curb the endless chain of referrals (to other entries), Fairfax (above) considers the correlate problem in writing:

“I let my mind alone to take its full swing in the Conning of Bodies, this and that; and forthwith or ere I could well help it, I fell a Roving, and plung’d out from what I was medling with and tossing of, to another thing that was earlyer and Bulkier, and to somewhat still that was more betimes and more of Boak; and being quite lost in wilde and a frightful on and on, I e’en took back again where I was […]” (28)

Before he knows it, he’s off topic – to something “earlyer and Bulkier,” and so into abstraction, “more of Boak”; fright returns him to where he started, as if retracing a trail or doubling-back. Thus caught between a censure on narrative excursions, on the one hand, and a reluctance to ‘return home’, on the other, the question turns toward the establishment of a scale or view capable of circumscribing ‘exactly’ the right amount; he describes his own thinking as, “as unluckie at lessening and narrowing as I had been before at widening and bigning.” Then:

“Nor could I be at rest in my mind, till I had tryed, whether I could not cut off Boundlessness and endlessness, so as at length I might have ease, to find, that Body, which I had to do withal, had both beginning and end, an inmost part and an outmost whole, as I my self had […]” (29)

Now, while the self, for Fairfax, is supposed to be finite, defined, and more or less empirically determined, it is nonetheless always primordially dispersed, ‘exterior to itself,’ and so in need of a border to set himself off or cut himself back from an otherwise pervasive ubiquity. The self, insofar as it here theoretically and philosophically precedes the body, is in a state of exposure and loss of exterior form. Curiously, the body does not already exist ‘as such’ (although in what sense remains unclear), but must be carved out of the ‘boundlessness and endlessness’ from which it is presumably drawn. And though this gesture is certainly Cartesian in its project of ascribing finitude to the universe, the figuration of the body’s delimitation from that world speaks to the Scholastic problematic of “ubiety,” perhaps especially as it pertains to the writings of Duns Scotus and Liebniz.

The “inmost part and an outmost whole, as I my self had” recalls, and transforms, the dialectic of presence and absence as conceived in the question of haecceity – i.e. the exception to ubiquity that must nonetheless inter-face with it, often tropically rendered as an outer limit ‘touching’ an enveloping inner limit (via a Scholastic-Aristotelian physics). But here, in Fairfax, the border of the self literally frays and assumes the image of a “selvedge” – etymologically, “its own edge,” the corruption self + edge (as descended from Biblical usage, referring to the dark edge of Creation, e.g. where Cain wanders). In Fairfax’s piece, the finitude of the universe merges with a spatially conceived finitude of the self, such that to establish the one is to establish the other. Where the world provides a limit to inquiry and knowledge (and, as Croston observes [ix], this text is motivated in part by his objection to Henry More’s claim that the universe is boundless), the self or the mind finds correspondent limit to its otherwise wheeling, disorienting excursions of thought:

“and when I came at the Selvedge of Bulk, I took heart afresh to think with my self, that there was all, and nothing at all beyond and I need weary my self with no more wandrings in a wast, but might come home again fair and soft” (29).

Similarly, the “handle” – the preface, this preface – by which the book itself is to be taken, reappears as the figure for limit itself: “Thus having shaken off the things I could never grasp, and taken Body by the right handle, I found I was freer to think, and better at ease to work” (30). The handle, which is at once the preface that abbreviates what follows and the proper view or access to the Bulk itself, thus smartly defines the interface of self and world as identical to that of preface and book. (“I am wont hastily to take forth to the Forespeech for the Reader, as thinking that to be the handle, that I am to hold the Book by, which, according as I relish or mislike, oftentimes so fares the whole with me.” [27]) All of this is to say that the self is a preface to the book of the world, and in prefacing it abbreviates it, re-presents it in microcosmic form, without residue or lack. The edge of the self – which is what allows there to be a self – is likewise explicitly dependent on the figure of the boundary of the universe, its edge, a selvedge, self + edge. There is more than a hint of Leibniz’s monadic structure, on the one hand, and the problem of its interaction – ubiety – with a pervasive, all-embracing ubiquity, on the other; but the essential concept is Bodies: The Body of the self depends on the Body of the universe, and words themselves must in turn refer to Bodies — objects, things, material — or else they are so much rhetoric:

“For inasmuch as almost the whole of those words, that we speak in things or knowledges of things that are body, and spoken in a borrowed meaning from thence, either as they have Beings from God, or a Suchness of being from our handy-work: so all the words about body and hangers on to body that we have to do with, are either such as flow from or mainly well fall in with those that are utter’d by Workmen, for such things as are done by hand-deed.” (40)

The closer one looks at this text, the more difficult it becomes to assign enduring importance to the curious blend of dogmas at work within it; but in this ‘failure’ lies, to a certain extent, its value or novelty. For one, it shores up the Cartesian paradox of establishing a hyper-materiality through its opposite, an intensive inner rumination. How will thought itself return and confirm the materiality — which in the Cartesian tradition is a matter of space, extension — of the body itself, which has, until now, been suspended. Descartes’ “I” is, after all, dramatically bodiless; that it should be subject to a highly theoretical determination seems an inevitability. Sense, perception, presence are conspicuously absent from the pages of this elaborate proof, and in their place an imagery of thought itself: borders, edges, “boundless and endlessness,” “widening and bigning,” thought ‘roaming’ and ‘plung’d’ – its movement, specifically, to fix it in its proper place. This place – the selvedge – where the proper frame or distance to comprehend an object is achieved is, however, also the border of the self, where the self begins and ends. Thus they share a border without distance: “so that I had both lost and benothing’d my self in the lessenings made within myself, as I had lost and bewildred my self in the scopes still left without my self.” This kind of sentimental wordplay, where the object is meaningfully lost in the folds of its articulation, is of course still with us, if in different form.

Notes

[*] The reference to Parker is Croston’s, as well; but, with a little digging on EEBO, I’ve dug up the passage, which is worth producing in full.

“And thus is the Nation shattered into infinite Factions, with sensless and phantastick [page] Phrases; and the most fatal miscarriage of them all lies in abusing Scripture-Expressions, not only without but in contradiction to their sense. So that had we but an Act of Parliament to abridge Preachers the use of fulsom and luscious Metaphors, it might perhaps be an effectual Cure of all our present Distempers. Let not the Reader smile at the odness of the Proposal: For were men obliged to speak Sense as well as Truth, all the swelling Mysteries of Fanaticism would immediately sink into flat and empty Nonsense; and they would be ashamed of such jejune and ridiculous Stuff as their admired and most profound Notions would appear to be, when they, want the Varnish of fine Metaphors and glittering Allusions. In brief, were this a proper place to unravel all their affected Phrases and Forms of Speech, which they have learn’d like Parrots to prate by Rote, without having any Notion of the Things they signifie, it would be no unpleasant Task to demonstrate, That by them they either mean nothing at all, or some Part or Instrument of Moral Vertue. So that all Religion must of necessity be resolv’d into Enthusiasm or Morality.” (75-76)

References

James Creech, “‘Chasing After Advances’: Diderot’s Article ‘Encyclopedia’” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 183-197. [Link]

Croston, A. K. Introduction to Two Seventeenth-Century Prefaces, iii-xi. London: University Press of Liverpool, 1949. [Link]

Fairfax, Nathaniel. “A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvedge of the World,” In Two Seventeenth Century Prefaces, edited by A. K. Croston, 25-51. London: University Press of Liverpool, 1949. Originally published, 1674. [Link]

Parker, Samuel. A discourse of ecclesiastical politie wherein the authority of the civil magistrate over the consciences of subjects in matters of external religion is asserted: the mischiefs and incoveniences of toleration are represented, and all pretenses pleaded in behalf of liberty of conscience are fully answered (1671), Bodleian Library (P460, 1533:10)

“(In Moscow I lived in a hotel in which almost all the rooms were occupied by Tibetan lamas who had come to Moscow for a congress of Buddhist churches. I was struck by the number of doors in the corridors that were always left ajar. What had at first seemed accidental began to be disturbing. I found out that in these rooms lived members of a sect who had sworn never to occupy closed rooms. The shock I had then must be felt by the reader of [Breton's] Nadja.) To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence, once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of petty-bourgeois parvenus. Nadja has achieved the true, creative synthesis between the art novel and the roman à clef.” (209)

Though the chorus of voices - parents, teachers, and career consultants, primarily - rising up to remind us of the life consequences for the smallest indiscretion would have us believe their interest is strictly practical and beneficent, in actuality their social role and effect can hardly be distinguished from the more reproachful voice of the moralist or the urbane sneer of Benjamin’s parvenu (who, though upwardly mobile enough to intuit their role as enforcers of good decorum, are yet lowly enough to care).

If it was once the priest or religious leader that openly censored public behavior, so as to install in the youth an inner, watchful voice that would do their job for them, today it is the high school guidance counselor and human resources professional who, under the auspices of ‘careerism’, invades one’s privacy with the aim to distort and misconstrue, so as to demonstrate how easily character may be distorted and misconstrued.

Indeed, when the Web Worker Daily suggests separating “your personal life and your work when it comes to online interaction”, the requisite ‘this may be far-fetched’ disclaimer that follows is purely, and necessarily, rhetorical. The outlandish and hypothetical - the more imaginative the horror scenario, the better - is precisely what empowers this discourse and makes it so compelling.

“This might seem time consuming, but you don’t want a diligent internet troll to start harassing your friends or playing with your holiday photos via Photoshop and sharing it with your clients.  You don’t want your friends and family to be too informed about your work either (I remember my mother seeing one of my clients on Facebook and asking me if she could go out with him). That may be far-fetched, but it’s not something I personally want to risk.“

In the form of a ‘general attentiveness’ to the traces one leaves behind, privacy here appears as an imaginary pragmatics of self-presentation that can neither be rigorously implemented - how could you separate your personal from professional selves without damaging either? - nor described beyond the vaguest of qualifications. “Get a pseudonym.” “Monitor your digital footprint.” “Check your privacy settings.”

Recruiters and human resources professionals are even more blunt in their prognostications: an indecent profile, an errant comment, will cost you that job and you’ll never know why. “Be Careful What You Write on People’s Walls”, one recruiter ominously warns today’s youth, before asking, completely disingenuously, “Must their young adult lives always be structured to the opinions of recruiters and companies?” Nevertheless, “Remember That Friends Are Liabilities”, so be sure to “Understand Guilt by Association”.

Statistics are not hard to come by. In a recent article, Mike Hargis, CareerBuilder’s Vice President of Customer Care, noted that “Twenty-two percent of employers say they use social networking sites when evaluating job candidates, and an additional 9 percent intend to do the same soon. Yet, only 16 percent of workers with social networking profiles have modified their pages with potential employers in mind.” The youth must therefore learn to present themselves accordingly - not as they are, but as the person they presume a potential employer would want them to be.

“We can also learn a little about the candidate’s culture fit and professionalism,” says Kelly Vergara, executive director of human resources at digital marketing agency Resource Interactive. “We screen for culture above all else, so this is important.”

Thirty-four percent of hiring managers chose not to hire a candidate based on what they found in profiles.

Controversial information, such as information about the candidate drinking or using drugs and inappropriate photographs, were the top reasons for dismissal. But job qualification was still a top priority, as evidence of poor communication skills, negative comments about a former employer and lies about qualification were the next most popular reasons not to hire someone.

Vergara and other hiring managers are also actively using these sites to seek out the right candidates. Of the hiring managers who use social networking sites for candidate research, 24 percent said profiles encouraged them to hire the job seekers. Forty percent of those hiring managers saw proof in the profiles that the employees were a good cultural fit.

We come, then, to the main structuring contradiction of rhetorics of privacy and professionalism. On the one hand, as a conversation with any recruiter will quickly make clear, social media has revolutionized hiring and recruiting precisely because of the (presumably) genuine glimpse into the life of an applicant that it affords the employer, but on the other hand, this same insight is blamed, tasked, and ultimately regulated for being too genuine - which is to say, too indecent.

Thus, the networks and social spaces that began as personal, social networking are now in the process of becoming professionalized and incorporated into a new performative framework, one that’s based not on disinterested, social interaction but on disingenuous, if seemingly natural, posturing. As the corporate blog for Beyond.com, a large niche job board, put it, in a post entitled “How Your Facebook or MySpace Page Can Hurt and Help Your Job Search”:

“Since social networking sites are no longer seen as an evil of the job search world, but rather a professional networking tool, it is important to remember that when participating in these sites, you are creating an online image that will make a good impression on your site visitors, especially those who may be looking to hire you.”

That being said, the professionalization of social media can be seen to have, for our purposes, three key facets or effects:

1. the instillation of a moralistic self-discipline, directed at the youth first and foremost - who are tasked to inculcate an inner voice that asks how each online act and each otherwise natural expression may be interpreted or misinterpreted by a future hiring professional or college recruiter. These rhetorics work to develop a historically novel form of self-surveillance, one that appears as the antidote to the original, liberating drive behind social media.
2. the progressive dissimulation of the genuine: though the value of social media lies precisely in its unprofessional, expressive, social - and, yes, indecent, obscene, unfiltered - character, the moralistic and professional forces that strive to censor it - be it through puritan censoring of breastfeeding photos, or through the self-censorship proper to a ubiquitous professionalism - do so at their own expense, rendering it inauthentic, practiced, imaged, so strong is the moral substrate underlying the control of the labor market.
3. the coerced fragmentation of identities: even though hiring and recruiting strategies now stress ‘good fit’ over ’skill set’ - i.e. ‘getting to know’ your candidates instead of simply assessing them with stagnant, impersonal criteria - this seemingly humanized approach is in the next step neutralized by pressures to hide, dissimulate, or translate one’s ‘true, expressive, social self’ into yet another professional, prop profile. Now, instead of ‘friends’, you have potential ‘liabilities’, and what you might otherwise think is a passing comment is in fact an incriminating remark in disguise. Thus, the corollary to the new human face of HR, according to which personality and occupation are no longer to be at odds, is an injunction to separate personal from professional identities.

To be sure, as massive recruiting companies like Accenture reorient their strategies to target the ‘Facebook generation’ - setting-up shop in Second Life for instance - the social media identities they solicit are increasingly encouraged, paradoxically, to style themselves not as social profiles, but as professional ones.

It is in this respect that, as Benjamin observed, “discretion concerning one’s own existence” is an enforced, disciplinary affair that should be resisted. And the false morality that affirms it should be exposed as such. If statistical studies find that recruiters form character judgments from, and ultimately reject candidates based on, indecent photos discreetly attached to social media profiles, then these recruiters should be trained to learn how arbitrary and misguided, not accurate and insightful, such judgments really are. Just think how many good candidates have been secretly rejected under false criteria and on account of ‘personal’ documents they never knew were open to professional scrutiny.

In this regard, it would perhaps be instructive, and no doubt ideologically revealing, to conduct a study to find what percentage of those recruiters who reject candidates for ’social media indecency’ would themselves be rejected if a rigorous perusal of their own ‘digital footprint’ were conducted, formed into a sweeping characterization, and held against them. Few, I imagine, would survive so capricious an assessment.

References

Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005.

The Process of fMRI

Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks links to a forthcoming Perspectives on Psychological Science article by Edward Vul et al. that is sure to prove a “bombshell” for the field of cognitive neuroscience.  Vul’s analysis demonstrates, in rigorous detail, how the too-good-to-be-true results of (mostly) headline studies are produced by complex statistical errors and biases.

Vul’s analysis begins with a lucid, layman description of how fMRI scans can produce different kinds of images.

“The output of an fMRI experiment typically consists of two types of “3D pictures” (image volumes): “anatomical” (a high resolution scan that shows anatomical structure, not function) and “functional”. Functional image volumes are lower resolution scans showing measurements reflecting, among other things, the amount of deoxygenated hemoglobin in the blood – blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal. A functional image volume is composed of many measurements of the BOLD signal in small, roughly cubeshaped, regions called “voxels” (‘volumetric pixels’). The number of voxels in the whole image volume depends on the scanner settings, but it typically ranges between 10×64x64 and 30×128x128 voxels. Thus, each functional image contains somewhere between 40,000 and 500,000 voxels, with each of these voxels covering between 1 mm3 (1×1x1 mm) and 125 mm3 (5×5x5mm) of brain tissue (except for voxels outside of the brain). A new functional image volume is usually acquired every 2 or 3 seconds (TR, or repetition time) during a scan, so one ends up with a timeseries of these functional images.” (6-7)

How this enormous set of data is to be interpreted is by no means self-evident, however. Thus, to establish a ‘base’ against which experimental results can be measured, a “number of average-brain models exist, the most famous being Talairach (Talairach & Tournoux, 1988) and MNI (Evans et al. 1993)” (7), but even then “fMRI researchers typically focus not on the activation in particular voxels during one task, but rather on a contrast between the activation arising when the person performs one task versus the activation arising when they do another” (7). The contrast in brain activity between ‘reading words’ and ‘looking at nonlinguistic patterns’, a commonly used model, is derived from establishing, “separately for each voxel, the sequence of activation levels measured at that voxel”.

Once these basic steps have been completed, yielding “matrices consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of numbers indicating activation levels” (7), qualitative summaries must still be obtained if correlations with behavioral measures are to be determined. An “investigator must somehow select a subset of voxels and aggregate measurements across them.” (7-8)

“This can be done in various ways. A subset of voxels in the whole brain image may be selected based on purely anatomical constraints (e.g., all voxels in a region generally agreed to represent the amygdala, or all voxels within a certain radius of some a priori specified brain coordinates). Alternatively, regions can be selected based on “functional constraints”: meaning voxels are selected based on their activity pattern in functional scans. For example, one could select all the voxels for a particular subject that responded more to reading than to non-linguistic stimuli. Finally, voxels could be chosen based on some combination of anatomy and functional response.” (7-8)

Whatever the case may be, “the critical question is: how was this set of voxels selected?” (8) Vul then wrote each of the research teams in question, inquiring whether the “fMRI signal measure that was correlated across subjects with a behavioral measure represented the average of some number of voxels, or instead, the activity from just one voxel that was deemed most informative (referred to as the peak voxel).” (8) If they used an average of some number of voxels, how was that average calculated? Or, if a peak voxel was used, how was that one voxel determined to be most informative based on its activation? What was the measure of activation? “Was it the difference in activation between two task conditions computed on individual subjects, or was it a measure of how this task contrast correlated with the individual difference measure?” (8) It is alone meaningful that the answers to these questions are not always included in the studies themselves, that respected publications did not encourage greater rigor.

Needless to say, a statistical threshold was in each case determined, past which results were eliminated as ‘noise’. 54% of the papers reviewed by Vul employed the following logic to determine that threshold and establish a correlation between behavior and brain activity:

“(a) From each subject, the researchers obtain a behavioral measure as well as BOLD measures from many voxels. (b) The activity in each voxel is correlated with the behavioral measure of interest across subjects. (c) From this set of correlations, researchers select those voxels that pass a statistical threshold, and (d) aggregate the fMRI signal across those voxels to derive a final measure of the correlation of BOLD signal and the behavioral measure.” (10)

In what might be an important moment in cognitive neuroscience, Vul then explains, with some math that I won’t reproduce, how that particular statistical move is a fallacy that comes with dramatic consequences:

“What are the implications of selecting voxels in this fashion? Such an analysis will inflate observed across-subject correlations, and can even produce significant measures out of pure noise. The problem is illustrated in the simple simulation displayed in Figure 4: (a) investigator computes a separate correlation of the behavioral measure of interest with each of the voxels. Then, (b) those voxels that exhibited a sufficiently high correlation (passing a statistical threshold) are selected. Then an ostensible measure of the ‘true’ correlation is aggregated from the voxels that showed high correlations (e.g., by taking the mean of the voxels over the threshold). With enough voxels, such a biased analysis is guaranteed to produce high correlations even if none are truly present (Figure 4). Moreover, this analysis will produce visually pleasing scattergrams (e.g., Figure 4c) that will provide (quite meaningless) reassurance to the viewer that s/he is looking at a result that is solid, “not driven by outliers”, etc.” (11)

Using examples outside of cognitive neuroscience to illustrate his point, Vul goes on to show just how clearly fallacious the “nonindependence error” really is - as when, to take one of his examples, it is applied to the world of market trading and investment advising (the effects of which we are now all too familiar with). The selection of voxels is by definition circular, if subtly so. “This approach amounts to selecting one or more voxels based on a functional analysis, and then reporting the results of the same analysis and functional data from just the selected voxels. This analysis distorts the results by selecting noise exhibiting the effect being searched for” (12).

One can see just how far Vul’s critique could reach. For the half of the studies that calculated an average voxel, “the reported correlation coefficients mean almost nothing, because they are systematically inflated by the biased analysis” (13), a problem that is only “exacerbated in the case of the 38% of our respondents who reported the correlation of the peak voxel (the voxel with the highest observed correlation) rather than the average of all voxels in a cluster passing some threshold.” (13)

Vul’s criticisms do not, however, amount to a wholesale rejection of the field itself. Building on a 2007 study by Kross et al, Vul in conclusion sketches out what he calls a ‘functional Region of Interest’ (fROI) method, which will not only provide “an unbiased measure of any relationships between evoked activity and individual differences” but will also avoid making “implausible assumptions about voxelwise correspondence across different individuals’ functional anatomy (Saxe, Brett, & Kanwisher, 2006).” (16-17)

In an intellectual climate where specific results can be programatically guaranteed in advance, Vul’s perspective couldn’t be more refreshing. In place of unquestioned homologies, Vul maintains a rigorous, skeptical attitude. “Although it is possible for voxels registered to the ‘average brain’ to be functionally matched across subjects,” Vul and his team observe, “the variability in anatomical location of well-studied regions even in early visual cortex (V1, MT) and visual cognition (FFA) suggests to us that higher-level functions determining individual differences in personality and emotionality is not likely to be anatomically uniform across individuals (Saxe, Brett, & Kanwisher, 2006).” (17) Which is to say, even imaging based on anataomical, rather than functional, constraints assumes too much - namely, that cognitive functions’ location in the brain, the body, are uniform across all individuals.

Vul is everywhere attentive to the many confounding factors besetting the imaging process. Even when an fMRI test is administered correctly, easily overlooked conditions proper to the experiment itself can disturb its findings. All of these concerns must be taken into account, though few are in the studies reviewed.

“For instance, proneness to anxiety may lead people to breathe faster, drink more coffee, or make slightly different choices in which lipids they ingest. All of these are known to have effects on BOLD responses (Weckesser et al, 1999; Mulderink et al., 2002; Noseworthy et al, 2003), and those effects could easily interact slightly with the specific hemodynamic responses of different brain areas. Or perhaps anxious people are more afraid than others of failing to follow task instructions and attend ever so slightly more to the required auditory stream. The weaker the correlation, the greater the number of indirect and uninteresting causal chains that might be accounting for it, and the greater the chance that the effect itself will appear and disappear in different samples in a completely inscrutable fashion (e.g., if the dietary propensities of anxious people in England differ from those of anxious people in Japan).” (20-21)

It would be difficult not to read Vul’s paper as a profound and far-reaching critique of the state of cognitive neuroscience, in terms of both the studies it produces and the internal standards of scholarship by which they are reviewed. If “it is quite possible that a considerable number of relationships reported in this literature are entirely illusory” (22), this can only be the effect of a much deeper problem internal to the discipline itself. “Interestingly,” Vul et al. concludes, “we suspect that the problems brought to light here are ones that most editors and reviewers of studies using purely behavioral measures would usually be quite sensitive to.”

That being said, a more important question remains. If all those studies are indeed fundamentally flawed (and not simply ‘off’) - which is to say, if they lack scientific value - then their force and execution must have been, and must be, cultural and ‘predisposed’. Usually, when a given study or wave of scholarship is debunked or dealt a blow, its effect on the world thus far, not to mention the complex cultural reasons for its half-blind acceptance, disappear from consideration, if only because, in a scientific framework, questions of meaning and ideology have a way of being neutralized by questions of validity.

For instance, Vul, in a brief aside picks apart Takahashi’s (2006) study that purported to demonstrate how “Men and women show distinct brain activations during imagery of sexual and emotional infidelity”. Now, if this study is as fundamentally flawed as Vul indicates, the question should arise as to what motivated and created, out of thin air and through sophisticated means, a study that assumed the highest legitimacy afforded knowledge today. Hardly a week goes by without some new brain-based study purporting to vindicate the crudest of stereotypes - that women love shopping because they’re “gatherers”, that girls have different kinds of brains and need to be taught separately, that gay men and straight women read maps similarly. The list could go on and on.

The moment of debunking or reassessment should be a beginning not an end; it is at precisely this point that social scientists, the most equipped to intervene, ought to step in to show how, in addition to a science, cognitive neuroscience can also be an apparatus, an ideology, and a conduit for far-ranging, deep-seated biases. Vul’s study shows this quite clearly, but it also shows just how promising rigorous scientific work can be.

References

Takahashi, H., Matsuura, M., Yahata, N., Koeda, M., Suhara, T., & Okubo, Y. (2006). Men and women show distinct brain activations during imagery of sexual and emotional infidelity. Neuroimage, 32, 1299-1307. [Link]

Vul, E., Harris, C., Winkielman, P., & Pashler, H. (2008). Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, in press. [Link]

Before asking “How would the activity of sublimation be solicited?” Jodi Dean of I cite isolates a provocative passage from Zizek that begins: “What if, however, this very choice between the dissolution of a symptomal knot and its acceptance as a positive condition is, again, a false one? What if the very structure of a drive (as opposed to instinct) provides a solution? We are stuck on a knot around which drive circulates, yet it is this very stuckness that pushes us again and again forward to invent ever new forms to approach it.”

Neurophilosophy points us to a study, conducted by Vilayanur Ramachandran and David Brang of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, that found a new form of synaesthesia: tactile-emotion synaesthesia.

Emily Yoffe of Slate makes the case that Obama tapped into a new “powerful – and only recently studied – human emotion called ‘elevation.’” Quintilian and Vico would be proud.

Referencing a new Harvard study, Discover Magazine tell us what we already know: a punch hurts more when your attacker really means it.

Focusing on Deleuze and Kant, respectively, Larval Subjects explains the profound difference between the transcendent and the transcendental.

Matt Kinsman of Folio prepares us for a return, in the tough economic years ahead, of community publishing and new multimedia workflow strategies.

Farhang Erfani of Continental Philosophy links to Simon Critchley’s latest salvo in his battle with Zizek, entitled: “Critchley’s Violent Thoughts about Slavoj Zizek”.

Thomas Söderqvist of Biomedicine on Display ruminates over two projects concerning the auditory space of contemporary medicine: Øystein Horgmo’s work on the sounds of the operating room, and “sound artist John Wynne’s recordings of the medical soundscape at Harefield heart hospital, aired in BBC3’s Between the Ears slot in June.”

In case you’re having a tough time getting a hold of Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell’s edited volume Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual – it’s notoriously expensive ($180), usually checked-out, and unavailable for preview on Amazon – you can view a good chunk of it on Google Books.

In a remarkable post on Concurring Opinions, Mark Edwards explains how a 1642 case, Paradine v. Jane, taught in every property law class, is suddenly relevant. Just as the King’s court found back rent to be owed on a lease despite that property’s recent occupation by a foreign army, after the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, when “lessees were deprived of use and possession of land through no fault of their own, and would be for years [...] the question arose: who should bear the cost?”

Putting people first links to a pamphlet in which authors Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard provide an overview of “the key issues, historical precedents, and contemporary approaches to designing situated technologies and inhabiting cities populated by them.”

Brita d’Agostino of Wired tips us off to the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art retrospective exhibit The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, which shows “how artists have dabbled in two-way communication with viewers over the past 60 years.”

In a timely post on the “occupation” – his quotes – of a Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago, Patrick S. O’Donnell of Ratio Juris responds to Professor Slater’s observation that some “labor historians have a tendency to romanticize and exaggerate the importance of certain forms of worker ‘militancy.’”

In a two post response, Michael Drake of Strange Doctrines eloquently dismantles Nadeem Hussain’s argument that “Nietzsche’s criticisms of value cannot generally be so restricted—that we should ascribe to him an error theory about all evaluative judgments.”

A new study, conducted by Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, shows that dogs have a sense of fairness. As for humans, the jury’s still out.

Alex Leo catalogs five sexist trends the advertising world just can’t shake. If only they were trying.

Thinking of having that iPod engraved for a loved one? Better hope they like it, because it can’t be returned. So reveals the Consumerist.

Called Muxlim Pal, the first virtual world aimed at the Muslim community has just been launched, and shut down by “griefers”, “organized bands of anonymous idiots whose goal is to harass and annoy other users.” Rose Springvale of Dispatches from the Information Age gives background in a post on “Understanding Islam Through Virtual Worlds”.

Christopher Green of Advances in the History of Psychology points us to an article by Herbert A. Friedman, published in the British Psychological Society’s journal The Psychologist, on the failed use of sex in World War II propaganda.

Molly Wright Steenson, doctoral student of architecture at Princeton, just announced the topic of the project that will undergird her dissertation, and it sounds rather brilliant: Postal services and pneumatic tube systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in Paris. “I’m reading these services in terms of their urban interfaces, their material qualities and the interest in the 1870s-1890s of physical networks across cities.”

Julie Robotham of The Sydney Morning Herald reports that because of a company’s patent on a gene, “Babies with a severe form of epilepsy risk having their diagnosis delayed”. “It is the first evidence that private intellectual property rights over human DNA are adversely affecting medical care.” (via Chris Williamson of Blogging the Singularity)

Simon Pegg of The Guardian makes a convincing case for why, in film, the undead shouldn’t run: “The fast zombie,” she writes, “is bereft of poetic subtlety.” “Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.”

Before asking, politely if disingenuously, “Should art museums remain purely temples to art? Are interactives in an art museum condescending to the primary audience?”, Paul Orselli of ExhibiTricks praises The Detroit Institute of Arts’ recent “reinvention” of itself, and links to a “report from the radio show Studio 360 that details an interactive ‘virtual dining’ experience that serves to highlight some of the DIA’s decorative arts collection.”

Christine L. Borgman, professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of the recently published Scholarship in the Digital Age, explains to The Chronicle of Higher Education how the new “scholarly information infrastructure” demands that the accumulation of data “be considered a scholarly act as well as the publication that comes out of it.”

An enRoute article by Craille Maguire Gillies profiles curator Scott Burnham, who has a knack for taking the gallery to the street.

Ian and Alex from The Art of the Title Sequence find the True Blood intro to be inspired by Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, and a commenter notes that the decaying fox clip was used in the Nine Inch Nails live music video for “Hurt”.

Wraps Magazine

In a story related to yesterday’s post on the new NYC Transit window ads, it was noted that the semi-transparent film on which these ‘wrap ads’ are printed is manufactured by 3M for specifically that purpose.

Paul J. Fleuranges, a spokesman for New York City Transit, said the agency hoped that the film, called Scotchcal, would cut down on the frequency of scratchitti. The vinyl graphic film, made by 3M, is widely used to wrap buses, because a it allows a full image to be printed on the outside, while the little perforated holes allows people (in theory) to look outside.

In an age of ad creep, Scotchcal is proving to be a powerful motivator. As a technology, it solves a longstanding obstacle for advertisers: how to transform windows — the surfaces people look at the most — into surfaces for display. Otherwise incompatible modes of perception are neatly synchronized with Scotchcal: from one side, up close, it preserves the transparency of the window, but from the other side, and farther away, an image is formed. One can look through or at the same surface.

As riders of public transit are finding, the power of this patent can hardly be overestimated. As the visual field becomes more and more cluttered and broken up with signs and solicitations, we can only expect attention-seeking strategies to become more sophisticated, if less subtle. The wrapped ad’s design, and the type of film on which they are printed, are already gaining in complexity. 3M now offers variations for acrylic, for glass, for short term and long term use, for backlit settings, for window displays, for buses and tractor trailers. A whole new industry is emerging to facilitate this expansion. Trade publications like Wraps Magazine (above) track industry developments and chart its growth, seeking new ways to wrap some overlooked object or site in ads and solicitations.

One can sense in these rapid developments the beginning of an almost metaphysical shift in the aspect of objects and the urban terrain they serve to multiply: advertising and the art of display have advanced one more step over the object and its materiality. Benjamin was perhaps more right than he could have possibly known when he said:

“Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value.” (3)

References

Benjamin, Walter. “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrelism,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005.

He then goes on to list the many ways in which this idea of ‘mapping’ from gene to body fails to describe the actual process of biological development - which is much more dispersed and complicated than this simple, deterministic figure would suggest.

Pigliucci’s main example, however, can’t help but make use of a new metaphor - the ‘gene network’ - which, it seems to me, brings a new set of problems to bear on the question of metaphor and genetics.

“Ironically, the harbinger of the demise of the genetic program-blueprint metaphor is the serious study of genomics itself. A recent article by Tanguy Chouard in Nature (20 November 2008) explains why. Researchers are finding out that what matters is not so much individual genes, but the way networks of genes function together. Take the example of the Bicoid gene in Drosophila: it was thought to be essential in establishing the form of the body in all insects, based on its effects on the development of body shape in fruit flies. No such thing, as it turns out. Once scientists looked for Bicoid-like genes in other insects they simply did not find them! Turns out that Drosophila is an exception (ah, the perils of “model” organisms), and that in species from wasps to beetles the job carried out by Bicoid is achieved by minor rearrangements of a large regulatory network encompassing a myriad of other genes.“

The term network, and certainly the phrase regulatory network, still imply a computational model, if one that is less ‘causal’ and more ‘conditional’. There is also a lingering governmental association attached to the latter phrase, as if a gene network is itself a self-regulating, separate entity that modulates the body over which it presides. The term network indeed appears in nearly every area of scientific inquiry, and with wildly different meanings.

A recent Science News article, for instance, claimed, somewhat metaphorically, that the “the brain itself is a machine, a network of cells that computes its choices based on the sum of sensory inputs and their interactions with neural anatomy”. Much more could be said for the term network, but suffice it to say, it’s less than baggage-free and in no way promises a circumvention of ‘metaphor’.

The new anti-scratchiti NYC subway ads

I’ve been racking my brain trying to recall other instances where advertising has been used as a crime deterrence strategy - or at least this is what NYC Transit authorities are giving as the reason behind their new ad policy. According to Jennifer 8. Lee of the New York Times:

“Despite the M.T.A. budget shortfall, transit officials say that advertising revenue is not the main motivation for the program. Instead, the sprawling ads have a practical purpose. The first is to reduce what officials call “scratchiti,” or scratched graffiti on the windows.”

The rationale to this decision is of course absurd. I, for one, would much rather look through scratchiti than at an ad. Indeed, according to the Gothamist, the full window ads

aren’t the kind that you can see clearly out of either, as one disgruntled straphanger noted: “outward visibility is significantly reduced in outdoor lighting, and severely reduced to totally eliminated at night or in low lighting.”

Aside from the obvious personal safety issues introduced by the ads’ placement, which transit officials continue to refute, there is the more philosophical question of why a paid solicitation that directly inconveniences the rider should be considered categorically preferable to the relatively noninvasive, and no less aesthetically offensive, scratchiti-work.

Whatever the case may be, the NYC Transit’s decision to extend ad creep to subway windows for, so they say, crime prevention purposes signals one more step in the expansion of a highly manipulable CPTED logic. As to whether ‘crime prevention through environmental design’ actually works, - and CPTED designs have been shown to be effective, under certain circumstances - is here besides the point: not only do the negative effects of the new ad policy far outweigh the benefits, but its rationale now even seems to primarily function as a ‘rhetoric’ with which to dress up otherwise outrageous, unacceptable measures.

by Pat Kinsella

Squatter City has a post up describing one Miami group’s success in solving two not-unrelated problems: homelessness and foreclosure.

“A brilliant program from a Miami group vets homeless families and then moves them into foreclosed housing. The program is, at least technically, illegal. But no arrests have been made, and it seems a clearheaded way to prevent neighborhood deterioration while getting families desperate for housing into high-quality homes.”

As a sure sign of the surreal future in store for us, foreclosed oversized homes are finding new, unintended inhabitants. The scene described by the Miami New Times indeed sounds like something out of a bad, post-apocalyptic novel (where the rabble of the future live amidst the ruined decadence of today):

“This house is a castle,” says the slender, soft-skinned former university teaching assistant, shaking her head in disbelief. “I’ve never had a walk-in closet … and all this space.”

Two months ago, Cassy (not her real name) was homeless, out in the rain with her four kids. Now she has a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, sky-blue house on a tree-lined street in Miami’s Buena Vista neighborhood. She takes warm showers, cooks vegan dinners, and watches the news on a small, fuzzy TV screen. The only catch: The house isn’t hers. Cassy is a squatter and, at any moment, could be arrested for trespassing, even burglary.

The group responsible for Cassy’s tenancy is Take Back the Land, a small, well-run activist organization that relocates homeless families into empty houses and abandoned buildings. The irony of their work, which increasingly resembles a life-sized version of musical chairs, is that many of the families that are being moved into foreclosed homes are themselves victims of foreclosure.

So far, it seems, the system is working. According to FOX News, “for now, the neighbors - those legitimately living there - aren’t saying a word.” This silent support can be explained, in part, by the vetting process, which has the immediate effect of keeping abandoned properties from falling into a state of disrepair, which can happen rather quickly.

Max Rameau, co-founder of Take Back The Land, put it succinctly: “We think that vacant properties, when there are people living outside, is not good use of land,” and with the economy not looking like it’s going to get better any time soon, it’s not unreasonable to expect dramatic increases in both homelessness and foreclosure, for which Rameau’s strategy might just be the most logical, not to mention most affordable, solution.

However, in the event of government and private opposition to these measures, which is sure to follow, could this small, 10-person organization galvanize into a movement? In certain South American countries, this has long been the case, if for different reasons. But either way, we’ll probably start seeing things like the Brazil Landless Workers Movement (MST) take shape in the US, and we should be prepared for that possibility.

Paul Virilio

Void Manufacturing has posted a translation, by Patrice Riemens, of an interview with Paul Virilio, where he discusses the ongoing financial collapse. He begins by applying his well-known theory of accidents to the current crisis:

“With Tchernobyl, we have entered the era of global accidents, whose consequences are in the realm of the long term. The current crash represents the perfect ‘integral accident’. Its effects ripple far and wide, and it incorporates the representation of all other accidents.”

He also makes the important point that while it is all well and good to research the immediate causes of the collapse, it should also be understood that these kinds of global accidents are integral to capitalism and are systemically mandated:

“These accidents are not contingent occurrences. For the time being, the prevalent opinion is that researching the crash of the stock exchange as a political and economic issue and in terms of its social consequences is adequate enough. But it is impossible to understand what is going on if one does not implement a (policy based on the) political economy of speed, the speed that technological progress engenders, and if one does not link (this policy) to the ‘accidental’ character of History.”

Then, in the most provocative passage, he observes that the crisis has revealed the global integration of not only financial systems but also affective, cultural and emotional structures.

“Like with any contemporary event, it is essential to take into account the integration in synchronous time of various issues at the world-level. A synchronisation has taken place of customs, habits, mores, ways to react to things, and also, of emotions. We have left the era of class-based communitarism for that of instant and  simultaneous globalisation of affects and fears - but not longer of opinions. It was already the case with the attacks on the World Trade Center and with the Tsunami. The same happens now with the financial crash. After a short ‘technical’ phase - bank collapses, shares fall-out - kicks in a phase of ‘hystery-isation’ of responses. There is talk of “markets going mad”, of “irrational” reactions, you’d almost call it ‘end of the world craze’. Terrorists have very well understood this mechanism, and they make use of it.”

Just as markets are globally regulated, interwoven, synchronized, so are emotional reactions, gestures, and responses. Indeed, though it is now something of a truism that the world has been rendered global by market forces, what is less understood are the non-market forces subtending this very process.

Virilio is next asked if he believes that capitalism is nearing its end, to which he responds, somewhat in parable:

“I rather believe that the end is nearing capitalism. My field is urban studies. This crisis shows that the Earth is not large enough for progress, for the speed of History (as we have it). Hence repetitive accidents. We were living in the belief that we had both a past and a future. But ‘the past does not pass’, it has become a monster, so much so that we do not mention it anymore. And as far as the future is concerned, it is severely questioned by the issue of the environment, and the end of natural resources like oil. So the only place left for us to inhabit is the present. But the writer Octavio Paz said it before: “you cannot live in the present moment, just as you cannot live in the future”. It is exactly what all of us are now going through, and that includes the bankers.”

Obviously, Virilio is not referring to literal time, so to speak. That will pass; what won’t, is us, our conditions. There is a growing feeling that there is nothing to expand into, no space in which to grow - physically and metaphorically. Some kind of limit - environmental, political, existential - is on the horizon, and the sudden visibility of this limit is something unprecedented and new. It cannot be written off as one more apocalyptic fantasy.

In conclusion, he makes a few more, sobering remarks regarding the ’cause’ of the crisis. While he agrees that greed played a part, he finds this explanation simplistic and in ignorance of the larger, systemic causes that cannot be reduced to a few individuals.

“I am not a vigilante. I do empathise with critics who say that some people have made obscene profits. I do not deny the damage caused by the accumulation of riches in a few hands. But to merely criticize this acceleration of profits and History, this ‘run-away avarice”, as Eugene Sue called it, while remaining in the materialist framework of profit, is a deficient, reductionist analysis.”

At the same time, he does manage to find a ‘materiality’ lurking in the roots of the crisis. It is, ultimately, about land, space, and homes. In all the philosophizing about capitalism, global systems, and the impersonal, ponderous forces they imply (some imaginary, some concrete), the so-called ‘real’ can easily be misplaced. And for Virilio, however much we speculate as to the cause of the collapse, its effects, at least, are material, unambiguous, and unmistakable.

“Where did the current crisis stem from? the answer is: subprime mortgages; housing credit that proved unsustainable; land. The victims are the hundred of thousands of people who are going to lose their homes. The whole concept of sedentarism had already been challenged by immigrants, exiles, deportations, refugees - and the delocalisation of economic activities. This phenomenon is bound to increase. Till 2040, one billion people will have to move out from their their residence. Those are the victims. We are in the realm of “stop/eject”. People are arrested, get expelled.”

It is telling that Esposito says nothing whatsoever about the ways in which biology and life have themselves been so totally reconfigured in the (more than) half-century following Watson and Crick’s determination of the structure of DNA. Biochemistry, genetics, neuroscience, genetic engineering, etc etc — all of these have profoundly changed how we conceive “life”, as well as how governments and corporations seek to manage and contain it — yet Esposito writes as if none of this were relevant. You wouldn’t know, from reading his genealogies, that today we tend to conceive a life force more on the model of mindless viral replication, than as anything like Bergson’s elan vital. Nor that eugenics has been recast, in its contemporary variant, as a matter of “bad genes” rather than “bad blood” (both formulations are lying, ideological ones, but they have entirely different connotations). Nor that the alleged fatality of genetic makeup has become an alibi for all sorts of social discrimination and inequality. Nor that the goal of contemporary biotechnology has to do with the pragmatic manipulation of genetic material — and hence with a certain notion of flexibility and differential control, rather than with the old-style racial essentialism. Although he is ostensibly concerned with how our society conceptualizes “life”, Esposito fails to consider how changes in biology have changed this conceptualization, and how things are still very much up for grabs today, as witnessed both by the continually emerging new potentials of biological research and bioltechnology, and by the ways in which, on a theoretical level, the orthodox neodarwinian synthesis is itself under considerable challenge from other biophilosophical visions (as I have written about before).

But not only is Esposito’s account of biology incomplete; his account of politics is, as well. This is due to the fact that, like far too many contemporary theorists, he considers questions of domination and authority, and political-philosophical arguments about the nature of law and sovereignty, without giving any thought to matters of political economy (more specifically, to processes of the extraction of surplus value, and the circulation and accumulation of capital). He has no account, in other words, of the ways in which conceptualizations of, and decisions about, “life”, are today at least as overdetermined by considerations of money and economy as they are by politics and political considerations. Biological research today is an expensive proposition; it must be publicly or privately funded (cf. the race between public and private bodies to sequence the human genome). Money sets the agenda. Even as the management of “life” expands, in terms of everything from health care to biometrics in the name of “public safety,” priorities are set more by cost-benefit analyses than by strictly “political” forms of decision. “Biopolitics” today is intimately entangled with neoliberalism, alike in theory, in policy, and in practice. And this is yet another dimension that Esposito altogether ignores. It’s significant that Foucault himself, in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, presciently focused his analysis mostly on the strategies and doctrines of a then (1978-1979) just emerging neoliberalism. Foucault discusses both the post-War German state-guided version of neoliberalism, and (at lesser length, but even more crucially for an understanding of the world today) the neoliberalism of the Chicago School of Milton Friedman, and especially Gary Becker. Rather than offering any judgment on neoliberal practices, Foucault discusses them with the icy objectivity of an entomologist describing the habits of parasitic wasps. His emphasis, nonetheless, is on “the generalization of the grid of homo oeconomicus to domains that are not immediately and directly economic” (page 268). This expansion of the “economic” (as narrowly understood by neoclassical marginalism, as a form of calculative rationality) to all forms of human activity is indeed the largest “ideological” change we have experienced in the years since Foucault’s death; it has altered our very sense of the social and the political. It is odd that, even as Foucault, at the extreme limits of his own thought, proclaimed the fundamental significance of this transformation of the modern episteme, his supposed disciples almost completely ignore it. (And I should note that the crisis we are currently undergoing does not in the least represent the “end” of neoliberalism — the state’s rescue of financial institutions, and its efforts to reboot the economy through spending and re-regulation, come out of the same economistic principles that motivated the deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s in the first place).