Extending Honneth’s Shift in Focus for Critical Theory

Axel Honneth has called for a change of focus in Critical Theory "from the self-generated independence of systems to the damage and distortion of social relations of recognition." I argue that Honneth does not shift his methodological focus sufficiently to succeed in his goal of illuminating the social relations of recognition. Despite Honneth's shift to relations of recognition, he considers these relations in terms of the macrosocial Hegelian triad of social spheres of recognition. A deeper analysis of recognition behaviors shows they cannot be mapped exactly to these spheres. I conclude that the Hegelian triad of social spheres is an insufficient basis for an exploration of misrecognition behaviors. To understand misrecognition, we need to seek a picture of misrecognition that reflects the complex diversity of individuals' lived experiences and practices, gives sufficient attention to interpersonal recognition and misrecognition, and offers potential reasons for why individuals might engage in misrecognition behaviors

Offending White Men: Racial Vilification, Misrecognition, and Epistemic Injustice

In this article I analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in Australia. I argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm Australians of colour through these utterances. These complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). Further, I argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the complainants misrecognize themselves in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. Such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of Australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity.Bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. I argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream Australians”can do their part in bringing about a just society

Mass supervision, misrecognition and the ‘Malopticon’

This paper aims to contribute to debates about ‘mass supervision’ by exploring its penal character as a lived experience. It begins with a review of recent studies that have used ethnographic methods to explore how supervision is experienced before describing the two projects (‘Supervisible’ and ‘Mass Supervision: Seen and Heard’) on which the paper draws, explaining these as an attempt to generate a ‘counter-visual criminology’ of mass supervision. I then describe two encounters with ‘Teejay’; encounters in which we explored his experiences of supervision firstly through photography and then through song-writing. Both media are presented alongside Teejay’s commentary on what he sought to convey, inviting the reader to engage with and interpret the pictures and song. In the concluding discussion, I offer my own analysis, arguing that Teejay’s representations suggest a need to recognize mass supervision as ‘Maloptical’ as much as ‘Panoptical’. Through the ‘Malopticon’, the penal subject is seen badly, is seen as bad and is projected and represented as bad. Experiences of misrecognition and misrepresentation constitute significant yet poorly understood pains of supervisory punishment. The paper concludes by suggesting several ways in which a counter-visual criminology might follow Teejay’s lead in exposing and challenging of mass supervision

Challenging media (mis)representation: an exploration of available models

This article is a theoretical analysis aimed at articulating the harm caused by media (mis)representation, and at showing existing ways in which this harm can be contested. The approaches analysed are largely from the United Kingdom. However, the issues they raise are not unique and the models explored are potentially transferable. The examples cover a range of media, including British right-wing press, television and Facebook; and characteristics protected by equality legislation in the UK such as sex, sexual orientation, race, religion and mental health stigma. Crucially, all the initiatives presented demonstrate the group-based nature of media (mis)representations, which cannot be understood and, therefore, cannot be addressed through individualistic approaches. Therefore, the article concludes that the role of groups as the targets of media (mis)representation and as potential claimants should be fully acknowledged and enabled

Janet Halley and the Art of Status Quo Maintenance

Over the past few years, Janet Halley emerged as one of the most avid critics of campus rape feminist activists, activists who push for the reformulation of university investigative rules to shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused. Halley contends that Title IX policies, embedded with affirmative consent, are not only procedurally unsound, but bad for boys, bad for sex, and bad for feminism, charging its agenda with “radical feminism” influences. Halley’s stance on campus rape is consistent with her long-held “queer theory” and its anti-feminist deregulatory drive. In this article, I argue that Halley’s “queer theory,” which she developed by polemically critiquing Catharine Mackinnon’s work, in an attempt to extol “sex positivism” in legal academia with the dignity of “fancy” theory, in effect stands Mackinnon on her head. By inverting Mackinnon’s gender/ sex constructions, Halley’s theory fronts as an idealist proposition indicting feminism with the invention of sexual injury and inspiring women to manipulate innocuous facts into scandalous protest. Flipping Mackinnon’s equality approach when it comes to legal rules takes Halley to the right of “consent” where Mackinnon had gone to its “left.” By mirroring Mackinnon’s critique of “consent,” except from the right, Halley’s theorizing echoes a sexual libertarian agenda without/before feminism. It defends male sexual entitlement avant liberal feminism. Ideologically, such theoretic formulations, along with the bundle of rules they advocate for, are designed to keep pressure on ruling liberal feminism from departing in its understanding of sex from the “pathology” model whereby all men are good except for those who are “pathologically” violent (classical liberalism) in the direction of understanding sexual entitlement as part of the social construction of maleness. By clamoring from the right of liberal feminism, mainstream liberal feminism is kept in check. In order to explain the various elements of Halley’s theories on gender/sex and expose their underlying pre-feminist “classical liberal” orientation, I position her comparatively within the gender/sex theories of the non-liberal academic left: Mackinnon (her antagonist), Duncan Kennedy (her ally), and Judith Butler (her theoretical homebody). I analyze the way these theorists used the theoretical traditions of Marxism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism to posit a relationship between gender and sex: sex is gender simpliciter (Mackinnon), gender is sex simpliciter (Halley), and the split difference between gender and sex (Kennedy). This exercise illuminates the doctrinal approaches of each theory, be it to the left or right of consent. I conclude the article with a succinct critique of Halley’s theoretic excursions and argue Halley is guilty of five themes of “misrecognition:” (A) theoretical, oscillating between an antagonism to the very idea of sexual injury and proposing a neutral proceduralist approach to identifying it; (B) political, targeting radical feminism with her critique while smashing liberal feminism on the way; (C) sociological, reading women’s sexual injury through the eyes of an “uninjurable” promiscuous gay man advocating a radical sexual ideology; (D) ideological, attempting to ally her sexual libertarianism with the left when the ideological universe it travels is “classical liberalism,” definitively, the left’s most pronounced critic; and (E )historical, advocating a “sex positive” agenda in radically sex positivist times

Data Mining by Soft Computing Methods for The Coronary Heart Disease Database

For improvement of data mining technology, the advantages and disadvantages on respective data mining methods should be discussed by comparison under the same condition. For this purpose, the Coronary Heart Disease database (CHD DB) was developed in 2004, and the data mining competition was held in the International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems (KES). In the competition, two methods based on soft computing were presented. In this paper, we report the overview of the CHD DB and the soft computing methods, and discuss the features of respective methods by comparison of the experimental results

Spoken query processing for interactive information retrieval

It has long been recognised that interactivity improves the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. Speech is the most natural and interactive medium of communication and recent progress in speech recognition is making it possible to build systems that interact with the user via speech. However, given the typical length of queries submitted to information retrieval systems, it is easy to imagine that the effects of word recognition errors in spoken queries must be severely destructive on the system's effectiveness. The experimental work reported in this paper shows that the use of classical information retrieval techniques for spoken query processing is robust to considerably high levels of word recognition errors, in particular for long queries. Moreover, in the case of short queries, both standard relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback can be effectively employed to improve the effectiveness of spoken query processing

'Desiderio in search of a master': desire and the quest for recognition

This essay examines the manner in which desire and Hegelian recognition intersect in Angela Carter’s 1972 novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. After providing a brief description of Hegel’s famous account of the interaction between the lord and the bondsman, the essay goes on to discuss the manner in which the novel invests the figure of the love-object with the potential to become an ideal master. The image of the reflecting eye, which recurs throughout Carter’s text, is then analyzed as an enactment of, and a commentary upon, the desiring gaze