In the eighties of the nineteenth century Ubu comes into the world. Thanks to Alfred Jarry, in around ten years this imaginary tyrant with unrestrained longings will rise to an outstanding position in the Parisian theatrical arena. Ubu, anyway, is not a mere culture phenomenon: he is also – better, he is first of all – the outcome of an unprecedented and primitive reflection on power. So Ubu, from the beginning, is the embodiment of the excess, the expression of tyranny (...) as the childish power par excellence, driven by a bulimic imagination and dragged by overwhelming yearnings, always associated with the denial of any decorum and mediation. Ubu is, to a certain extent, one of the most prophetic and accurate anticipations of that imbalance between the autocrat’s longings and the endurance degree of the environment around him: a political pathology which will be the eminent and dramatic feature of the terrible catastrophes of the 20th century. Jarry’s work is even more significant when, in the last of its plays, describes an institutional system protected by a brittle glass bell, unbreakable only by those who hesitate to strike it, and an administrative apparatus so much subject to arbitrary power that it seems built «by the tyrant himself». (shrink)

This article shows that forms of analysis and calculation specific to finance are spreading, and changing valuation processes in various social settings. This perspective is used to contribute to the study of the recent transformations of capitalism, as financialisation is usually seen as marking the past three decades. After defining what is meant by “financialised valuation,” different examples are discussed. Recent developments concerning the valuation of assets in accounting standards and credit risk in banking regulations are used to suggest that (...) colonisation of financial activities by financialised valuations is taking place. Other changes, concerning the valuation of social or cultural activities and environmental issues are also highlighted in order to support the hypothesis of a parallel colonisation of non-financial activities by financialised valuations. Specifically, the language of finance appears to gradually being incorporated into public policies, especially in Europe—and this trend seems to have gathered pace since the 2000s. Some interpretations are proposed to understand why public policies are seemingly increasingly reliant on financialised valuations. (shrink)

The study of the notion of ideology shows that this corpus lends itself to a wide variety of different definitions. A certain opposition runs all the way through this set of definitions. Ideology would appear to be torn between a conception that emphasises its distortion and dissimulation dimensions and another conception which views as a set of social representations. After rapidly presenting the main characteristics of these two polar extremes, Paul Ricoeur's suggestion that these two conceptions can be united is (...) discussed and illustrated by the concept of the `spirit of capitalism', as defined in the book by Boltanski and Chiapello (1999). It is shown that this constitutes an ideology which is in fact an attempt to encompass both these conceptions. It is also shown that the concept of `trial' as proposed in that book helps greatly to understand how this reconciliation is actually possible. (shrink)

Answering a question raised by Shavrukov and Visser :569–582, 2014), we show that the lattice of \-sentences ) over any computable enumerable consistent extension T of \ is uniformly dense. We also show that for every \ and \ refer to the known hierarchies of arithmetical formulas introduced by Burr for intuitionistic arithmetic) the lattices of \-sentences over any c.e. consistent extension T of the intuitionistic version of Robinson Arithmetic \ are uniformly dense. As an immediate consequence of the proof, (...) all these lattices are also locally universal. (shrink)

It is universally recognized that in the fragments of Hipponax there are many references to Homer, in both language and content. In this paper I analyse the relationship between Hipponax’ poetic persona and the character of Odysseus.

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

In this paper I analyze the rhetorical function of compositional neologisms in Cercidas’ versification, in order to provide a new semantical and/or syntactical explanation for single words that have not been correctly interpreted before. In particular I analyze the fragments 1.41–50 Lom., 2.25–7 Lom. and 60 Lom., focusing especially on the correct interpretation of τεθνακοχαλκίδης, συοπλουτοσύνη and μεταμελλοδύνη. At the end of the paper, final considerations on the rhetorical function of neologism in Cercidas’ text are offered.

The logic of proofs was introduced by Artemov in order to analize the formalization of the concept of proof rather than the concept of provability. In this context, some operations on proofs play a very important role. In this paper, we investigate some very natural operations, paying attention not only to positive information, but also to negative information (i.e. information saying that something cannot be a proof). We give a formalization for a fragment of such a logic of proofs, and (...) we prove that our fragment is complete and decidable. (shrink)

Different summarized shape indices, like mean shape index (MSI) and area weighted mean shape index (AWMSI) can change over multiple size scales. This variation is important to describe scale heterogeneity of landscapes, but the exact mathematical form of the dependence is rarely known. In this paper, the use of fractal geometry (by the perimeter and area Hausdorff dimensions) made us able to describe the scale dependence of these indices. Moreover, we showed how fractal dimensions can be deducted from existing MSI (...) and AWMSI data. In this way, the equality of a multiscale tabulated MSI and AWMSI dataset and two scale-invariant fractal dimensions has been demonstrated. (shrink)

Guaspari (J Symb Logic 48:777–789, 1983) conjectured that a modal formula is it essentially Σ1 (i.e., it is Σ1 under any arithmetical interpretation), if and only if it is provably equivalent to a disjunction of formulas of the form ${\square{B}}$ . This conjecture was proved first by A. Visser. Then, in (de Jongh and Pianigiani, Logic at Work: In Memory of Helena Rasiowa, Springer-Physica Verlag, Heidelberg-New York, pp. 246–255, 1999), the authors characterized essentially Σ1 formulas of languages including witness comparisons (...) using the interpretability logic ILM. In this note we give a similar characterization for formulas with a binary operator interpreted as interpretability in a finitely axiomatizable extension of IΔ 0 + Supexp and we address a similar problem for IΔ 0 + Exp. (shrink)

In her recent article “The Ontology of Social Groups”, Thomasson (Synthese 196:4829–4845, 2019) argues that social groups can be characterized in terms of the norms that surround them. We show that according to Thomasson’s normativity-based criterion, the dead constitute a social group, since there are widespread and well-defined social norms as to how to treat the dead, such as the norm expressed in the title (“Speak no ill of the dead”). We argue that the example of the dead must not (...) be interpreted as a counterexample to this criterion, and that, rather, there are good reasons to think of the dead as a genuine social group. Furthermore, the dead as a social group exist, regardless of whether or not the dead (i.e. the members of this social group) exist as persons. This view is clearly incompatible with the idea that social groups can be explained by citing features of their members, which is why we take the case of the dead to pose a challenge for the thesis of individualism. We consider the ontological implications of this example and suggest that social groups ought to be seen as reifications of social norms. Another implication of taking the dead to be a social group is that the presence of external norms is sufficient for the existence of a social group, and therefore internal norms are not necessary. We defend this implication against some potential theoretical and moral problems. (shrink)

This paper is part of a project that is based on the notion of a dialectical system, introduced by Magari as a way of capturing trial and error mathematics. In Amidei et al. (2016, Rev. Symb. Logic, 9, 1–26) and Amidei et al. (2016, Rev. Symb. Logic, 9, 299–324), we investigated the expressive and computational power of dialectical systems, and we compared them to a new class of systems, that of quasi-dialectical systems, that enrich Magari’s systems with a natural mechanism (...) of revision. In the present paper we consider a third class of systems, that of p-dialectical systems, that naturally combine features coming from the two other cases. We prove several results about p-dialectical systems and the sets that they represent. Then we focus on the completions of first-order theories. In doing so, we consider systems with connectives, i.e. systems that encode the rules of classical logic. We show that any consistent system with connectives represents the completion of a given theory. We prove that dialectical and q-dialectical systems coincide with respect to the completions that they can represent. Yet, p-dialectical systems are more powerful; we exhibit a p-dialectical system representing a completion of Peano Arithmetic that is neither dialectical nor q-dialectical. (shrink)

La pensée conventionnaliste de l’environnement se heurte à un problème central : l’absence d’un ordre de grandeur écologiste qui obéisse à la même grammaire que les six autres. Cet article propose une piste afin de surmonter ce problème. Il s’agit d’envisager l’écologisme, non plus sous le modèle idéal de la cité, mais comme une critique du capitalisme. Dans cette perspective, les fondements théoriques et l’effectivité historique de la critique écologiste du capitalisme sont étudiés. Codes JEL : B5, N5, O13, O440, (...) P10, Q5. (shrink)

La pensée conventionnaliste de l’environnement se heurte à un problème central : l’absence d’un ordre de grandeur écologiste qui obéisse à la même grammaire que les six autres. Cet article propose une piste afin de surmonter ce problème. Il s’agit d’envisager l’écologisme, non plus sous le modèle idéal de la cité, mais comme une critique du capitalisme. Dans cette perspective, les fondements théoriques et l’effectivité historique de la critique écologiste du capitalisme sont étudiés. Codes JEL : B5, N5, O13, O440, (...) P10, Q5. (shrink)

Critical accounts over the past years have focused on neoliberalism as a subject of knowledge; there has been a recently growing interest in neoliberalism as an object of knowledge. This article considers the theoretical, epistemological and political implications of the relationship between neoliberalism as an epistemic subject and neoliberalism as an epistemic object. It argues that the ‘gnossification’ of neoliberalism – framing it an epistemic project, and deriving implications for political engagement from this – avoids engaging with numerous ambiguous elements (...) of the production of knowledge. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘scholastic fallacy’ and Boltanski and Chiapello’s work in sociology of critique, the article lays out a framework for the study of the relationship between epistemic, moral, and political elements of critique of neoliberalism, including the conditions of its own production in contemporary academic contexts. (shrink)

After its proliferation as a primarily psychological term in the literature of the late 1960s, creativity has since advanced to a core notion also for sociology. The first part of the paper tackles “the creativity narrative” according to three paradigmatic readings brought forward by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, Maurizio Lazzarato, and most recently Andreas Reckwitz. Despite the insightful accounts that those readings provide concerning the entanglement of creativity to capitalist ways of production, the practical consequences they offer regarding (...) how to contest this entanglement are debatable. Therefore, in the second part of the article a fourth understanding of creativity is invoked that was proposed by Cornelius Castoriadis. As argued, the radicality of this concept lies in defining creativity as a mode of production of the subject’s psyche as a collective co-existence from which broader, necessarily collective practices can be derived.Après sa prolifération en tant que notion psychologique dans la littérature des années 1960, la créativité est aussi devenue une notion fondamentale pour la sociologie. La première partie de l’article aborde le « récit de la créativité » à partir des trois lectures paradigmatiques proposées par Luc Boltanski et Ève Chiapello, Maurizio Lazzarato et, plus récemment, par Andreas Reckwitz. Malgré le fait qu’elles éclairent de manière signi????icative l’enchevêtrement de la créativité aux modes capitalistes de production, les conséquences pratiques que ces lectures tirent sur les contestations possibles de cet enchevêtrement sont sujettes au débat. C’est pourquoi, dans la deuxième partie de ce texte, une quatrième compréhension de la créativité est proposée à partir de Cornelius Castoriadis. La radicalité de ce concept repose sur sa dé????inition en tant que mode de production du psychisme du sujet compris en tant que co-existence collective, à partir de laquelle des pratiques plus larges et nécessairement collectives peuvent découler. (shrink)

Taking Max Weber's conception of the modern capitalist world system as a classical precedent, and with reference to a series of analytical schemas on capital formation, this essay takes three recent books as a starting point for examining the revival of critical theoretical attention to 'the new capitalism'. The Social Structures of the Economy by Pierre Bourdieu focuses on the erosion of the separation between business and household economies by providing a case study of the construction boom in single-family dwellings (...) which replaced the public housing movement in 1980s France. Also concentrating on recent French history, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in their monumental book The New Spirit of Capitalism, argue that the post-industrial restructuring of 'formally free' labour was provoked by countercultural protest in the 1960s and further justified by managerial discourses advocating postmodern 'flexibilization' in the 1990s. Finally, Nigel Thrift's Knowing Capitalism enumerates recent examples demonstrating how the 'rational' accounting of economic capital is increasingly expanded and intensified by commodified cultural circuits which facilitate flows of information between business schools, management consultants and entrepreneurial gurus and in a variety of everyday spaces and ordinary practices. While each of these works convincingly projects the resurrection of 'the spirit of capitalism' on local and global scales, they have less to say about the underlying political dynamics or emerging alternatives to this process. (shrink)

The European crisis has provoked widespread critique of capitalist arrangements in most if not all countries in Europe. But to what extent do contemporary social protest and critique indicate a revival of critical capacity? The range of criticisms against the existing capitalist system raised by various social movements is seen as ineffectual and fragmented. Such observations are mirrored in sociological analyses of the critique of capitalism. A distinct type of critique of capitalism has, however, not been explicitly conceptualized. This political (...) critique, denouncing the depoliticization and the erosion of autonomy resulting from capitalist arrangements, indicates the crucial role of the political in formulating common projects. The article will, first, briefly discuss Boltanski and Chiapello’s historical identification of forms of critique of capitalism as well as the contemporary relevance of these. In a second step, it will conceptualize and in a way recuperate a political critique of capitalism. In a third step, it will show that the contours of a critique that explicitly refers to the political is available in the contemporary European context, not least in claims made by movements that pursue a ‘Europe of the Commons’ and an ‘alternative Europe’. (shrink)

Adrian Stokes , long admired by a small, highly distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art historian is the narrative of “the form, prophet-saviour-apostles,” in (...) which the first artist poses some problem that his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich’s narrative—antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative, nineteenth-century landscape—function like Clement Greenberg’s sequence—old master art, early French modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg disagree about how to narrate art’s history and about which works to include in that narrative—Gombrich asserts that cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism anticipates Jackson Pollock—but in each case, the art historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable. Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand before?Stokes’ attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture aimed to “refer to nothing that lay beyond it.” For Ezra Pound, an image “is real because we know it directly”; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue, “always there in its entirety before you.”2 Such an artwork need not be interpreted because it contains “within itself all that is relevant to itself.”3 All art is accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner points to this issue:There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4 1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 , p. 75.2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil , p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir , p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , p. 174.3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image , p. 107.4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , p. 428. David Carrier, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art history. (shrink)

El presente monográfico de Recerca titulado «Los nuevos discursos del management: contribuciones desde una perspectiva crítica», se compone de siete artículos de investigación y dos recensiones. A través de los diferentes escritos se pretende realizar un recorrido por el estado actual de los discursos del management y sus repercusiones no solo en el mundo del trabajo, sino en el grueso de la sociedad desde una perspectiva crítica. Así pues, a lo largo de las siguientes páginas el/la lector/a podrá transitar por (...) los diferentes discursos que hoy en día caracterizan el espacio social. Nos referimos a marcos generales de sentido como el individualismo y la descolectivización de lo social, pero también a cuestiones más concretas como el emprendimiento y la precariedad; todos ellos componentes que conforman el escenario al que nos estamos remitiendo en todo momento, esto es, el del discurso neoliberal o el «nuevo espíritu del capitalismo» (Boltanski y Chiapello, 2002). (shrink)

A partir de los conceptos de carácter, virtud y amistad propuestos por la ética de la ficción de Wayne Booth, realizamos un análisis comparativo entre los efectos éticos provocados por el territorio y la música en las novelas Península, Península de Hernán Lara Zavala y en El llamado de los tunk’ules de Marisol Ceh Moo. Sugerimos que, a pesar de estar ante dos novelas que comparten el mismo contexto geo-histórico, los efectos éticos causados por el territorio y la música, bajo (...) la idea de Yucatán, guardan diferencias que ameritan llevar a cabo una co- ducción para dilucidar el tipo de compañía literaria que nos ofrecen. (shrink)

Preface -- What is sociology? -- Capitalism and alienation : Marx and Weber -- Recognition and anomie : Durkheim and Honneth -- Social interaction and marginalisation: Simmel and the Chicago School -- Power and stratification : Foucault and Bourdieu -- System and differentiation : Luhmann and Habermas -- State and market : Althusser and Boltanski & Chiapello -- Uncertainty and risk : Bauman and Beck -- The reflective self : Goffman and Giddens -- Family and work : Sennett and (...) Hochschild -- Gender, body and identity : Butler and Haraway -- Factish and fetish : Latour and Zizek -- Sociology as an analytic praxis. (shrink)

The article is an evaluation of the economic, organizational and social theory of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism 15 years after its publication. The role of network capitalism, state capitalism, and aesthetic capitalism in French social life is analysed. The article concludes that flexible network capitalism was largely a chimera of the 1990s and that French political and economic life today is dominated by an ailing state capitalism.

The recognition of capitalism as a core component of modernity has often led to conflation of the two categories; this happens to critics as well as defenders of capitalism, and it reflects their shared but only partly acknowledged premises. A tendency to interpret capitalism as a self-contained system has strongly affected the debate on its historical significance; this reductionistic approach could be adapted to different ideological stances as well as to changing views of capitalism's long-term trajectory. The notion of a (...) `spirit of capitalism', in the sense of cultural sources essential to the constitution (and arguably also to the continuity) of the capitalist order, has been one of the most important correctives to economic determinism and reductionism, but it has proved difficult to link this dimension to other aspects of the problematic. The article surveys the contributions of Weber, Sombart, Castoriadis and - most recently - Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello to this debate. The last section then discusses the work of Fernand Braudel and suggests that it could serve to reformulate the problematic of capitalism in more multidimensional terms. (shrink)

In this discussion with Craig Browne, Luc Boltanski comments on how his recent work reconsiders the questions of agency and the nature of social explanation. Boltanski reflects on the connections between his investigations of grammars of justifications and his later work with Eve Chiapello on the historical transition to a new spirit of capitalism. The significance of politics, conflict and critique to Boltanski’s sociology are highlighted. Bolanski explains why he regards May 1968 as a major disruption of the capitalist (...) social order and how the conservative response to this contestation subsequently prevailed in France. The reorganisation of capitalism in recent decades has increased social division, yet Boltanski believes that the recent recession and existing discontent could lead to unexpected outcomes. (shrink)

How the new spirit of capitalism confronts the new modes of workplace radicalism The period 2008-2009 has seen a spate of workplace conflicts obeying a common logic in terms of the modes of mobilisation. The conflicts emerge inside the sphere of production. They occur in the wake of the announcement of a partial or total suspension of production and their stated goal is to save jobs and/or to negotiate redundancy payments going beyond the legal entitlement. The aim of the article (...) is to confront the paradigm which Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello formulated in The New Spirit of Capitalism in order to articulate the concepts of the civic and the critical to the features of the new discursive protocols which have emerged in the context of these recent conflicts. The article addresses two questions. The hypothesis put forward is that the discursive protocol which those promoting militant action draw upon goes beyond a model of intelligibility that is fundamentally built around the reference to a corrective critique and thus fails to take account of the place in which the discourse of radical critique is actually rooted. (shrink)