Reading 'Hangover Square': ideology and inversion in the novels of Patrick Hamilton

The novelist Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) is routinely portrayed as an author of bleak but comic tales of thwarted love and unfulfilled desire. His ear for the banalities of everyday pub talk and his ability to articulate the internal contortions of the self-deluded are much remarked upon. However, his Marxism, which was crucially important to Hamilton, especially during the period coinciding with the appearance of his most masterful work, is routinely dismissed, sidelined or simply ignored. This is a curious omission given the contemporary proclivity for reading things into, rather than 'out of', texts. His one explicitly Marxist novel, 1939's Dystopian fable, 'Impromptu in Moribundia' is used as a convenient target to attack the literary manifestation of an apparently naive, ill-informed and jejune Marxism. In it Hamilton uses a technique of 'inversion' (linguistic, ideological, scientific and social) to produce a far reaching critique of English society and bourgeois culture set in an explicitly public, Dystopian space. After this critically and commercially unsuccessful novel, Hamilton produced 'Hangover Square' (1941) his most internal, sombre and pessimistic book. For many commentators it is his finest novel but one which is unconnected to its gauche predecessor. This paper argues that 'Hangover Square' uses the same technique of 'ideological inversion' (via the often criticised device of its chief character, George Harvey Bone, being prey to 'dead' moods during which the world is recast as unfamiliar) as found in 'Impromptu in Moribundia'. However, the result in 'Hangover Square' is the exploration of a private, Dystopian space dialectically linked to a description of a society heading towards the inevitable outbreak of war. Focusing predominantly on 'Hangover Square', it is argued that the novel represents an accomplished application of dialectical analysis, Dystopian pessimism, and the explosive resolution of objective contradictions

Norm, Virtue and Information: Individual Behaviour and the Just Price in Thomas Aquinas' Summa theologica

This paper aims at putting forward the analytical stake of the few passages that Thomas Aquinas devotes to prices and exchange, mainly in the Summa Theologiae. At first sight, his objective is to enlighten a confessor vis-à-vis his penitent, or the judge in an ecclesiastical tribunal, by way of a group of normative prescriptions, tending to distinguish that which is just in commercial transactions from what is not. But on second thoughts, this objective leads the author to a more complex construction, which involves establishing a referential norm - the just price - to which the transaction price should be compared. It is recalled here that resorting to the just price - the discussion of which chiefly takes place in the commentaries on the Ethics avoids any consideration of individual behaviour. However, this last comes to the forefront when the issue dealt with is to explain the reasons why such a transaction price is equal to, or on the contrary departs from the just price. Thomas Aquinas' treatment of this issue allows one to acknowledge a) that individual behaviour is characterized by virtue or by vice in various informational contexts, and b) that the making of a transaction price is the result of a negotiation process between buyer and seller. In a context of correct information, where the partners are both virtuous, Thomas Aquinas explains why the transaction price is equal to the just price - in the exchange in se - or could differ from it - in the exchange per accidens. But focussing on the exchange in se, both an asymetry of information and the vice of at least one of the partners give rise to deception strategies leading to transaction prices, presented as just by the party who knows it is not, and agreed upon as just by the deceived party. Lastly, the possibility of retaining information during the negotiation process paves the way for the opportunity for the virtuous seller to protect himself against the higher power of negotiation of a possible vicious partner. Although aiming at a different goal, Thomas Aquinas thus provides a complete theory, not only of the just price, but more generally of exchange, in which ethical considerations become decisive in determining transaction prices.Just price; juste prix; medieval economics; pensée économique médiévale; Thomas Aquinas; Thomas d'Aquin; ethics; éthique

A unified framework for building ontological theories with application and testing in the field of clinical trials

The objective of this research programme is to contribute to the establishment of the emerging science of Formal Ontology in Information Systems via a collaborative project involving researchers from a range of disciplines including philosophy, logic, computer science, linguistics, and the medical sciences. The re­searchers will work together on the construction of a unified formal ontology, which means: a general framework for the construction of ontological theories in specific domains. The framework will be constructed using the axiomatic-deductive method of modern formal ontology. It will be tested via a series of applications relating to on-going work in Leipzig on medical taxonomies and data dictionaries in the context of clinical trials. This will lead to the production of a domain-specific ontology which is designed to serve as a basis for applications in the medical field

Bureaucratic Minimal Squawk: Theory and Evidence

Regulators appointed on finite contracts have an incentive to signal their worth to the job market. This paper shows that, if contracts are sufficiently short, this can result in "minimal squawk" behaviour. Regulated firms publicise the quality of unfavourable decisions, aware that regulators then set favourable policies more often to keep their professional reputation intact. Terms of office vary across US states, prompting an empirical test using firm-level data from the regulation of the US electric industry. Consistent with the theory, we find that shorter terms are associated with fewer rate of return reviews and higher residential prices.

The Myth of Network Neutrality and What We Should Do About It

A quarter century ago, there was a very influential paper that shaped thinking on how best to design what we now call the Internet. The article offered a design principle called "end-to-end." The idea was to keep the inner part of a computer network as simple as possible and allow the "intelligence" to reside at the edges of the network closer to the end user. Proponents of this grand design have pushed for net neutrality legislation, which would discourage access providers from placing any intelligence in the inner part of the network. Their ideal of a "dumb network" would be achieved by preventing access providers from charging content providers for prioritized delivery and other quality enhancements made possible by placing intelligence at the center of the network. This essay examines the merits of the end-to-end argument as it relates to the net neutrality debate. First, we review the evidence on the current status of the Internet, concluding that all bits of information are not treated equally from an economic standpoint. Second, we demonstrate that because consumers and business place a premium on speed and reliability for certain kinds of Internet services, network owners and specialized service providers have responded with customized offerings. Third, we consider our findings in the context of the current legislative proposals involving net neutrality. Fourth, we consider some of the problems with regulating prices and quality of service, which is essentially what the net neutrality proponents propose. Our principle conclusions are that the end-to-end principle does not make sense from an economic perspective and that further regulation of the Internet is not warranted at this point in time.Technology and Industry

Mimimal Length Uncertainty Principle and the Transplanckian Problem of Black Hole Physics

The minimal length uncertainty principle of Kempf, Mangano and Mann (KMM), as derived from a mutilated quantum commutator between coordinate and momentum, is applied to describe the modes and wave packets of Hawking particles evaporated from a black hole. The transplanckian problem is successfully confronted in that the Hawking particle no longer hugs the horizon at arbitrarily close distances. Rather the mode of Schwarzschild frequency $\omega$ deviates from the conventional trajectory when the coordinate $r$ is given by $| r - 2M|\simeq \beta_H \omega / 2 \pi$ in units of the non local distance legislated into the uncertainty relation. Wave packets straddle the horizon and spread out to fill the whole non local region. The charge carried by the packet (in the sense of the amount of "stuff" carried by the Klein--Gordon field) is not conserved in the non--local region and rapidly decreases to zero as time decreases. Read in the forward temporal direction, the non--local region thus is the seat of production of the Hawking particle and its partner. The KMM model was inspired by string theory for which the mutilated commutator has been proposed to describe an effective theory of high momentum scattering of zero mass modes. It is here interpreted in terms of dissipation which gives rise to the Hawking particle into a reservoir of other modes (of as yet unknown origin). On this basis it is conjectured that the Bekenstein--Hawking entropy finds its origin in the fluctuations of fields extending over the non local region.Comment: 12 pages (LateX), 1 figur

Like a dog: constitutionalism in J.M. Coetzee’s "Disgrace"

Coetzee’s Disgrace can be read as an engagement with the post apartheid constitution of South Africa. However, the novel does not focus on a legal text. It draws attention to what could be called an ethics of social being or the psychic life of constitutionalism. Disgrace thus resonates with the broader argument that a constitution is a complex of political, social and psychic economies that are bound up with (and in certain senses prior) to positive law. Any proper elaboration of these themes cannot be made from within the terms of legal discourse itself, at least as presently composed. This paper is therefore an exercise in deconstruction or, an attempt to develop a “language that is foreign to what [a] community can already hear or understand only too well”; a practice that will allow a cultural unconscious to speak through the text of Coetzee’s novel. But this problematic is not simply a question of language. An ethics of social being is also necessary. A culture must be held responsible for the symbolic forms of the secrets that it holds. How can we think about this strange matter? Our first task will be to engage with notions of being and social life that have not generally been deployed in constitutional discourse. We will then see how these terms relate to a psychoanalytic account of constitution at both a political and a personal level. The final section of this paper will be a reading of Disgrace