IR theory, historical materialism, and the false promise of international historical sociology

The three-decades old call for an inter-disciplinary rapprochement between IR Theory and Historical Sociology, starting in the context of the post-positivist debate in the 1980s, has generated a proliferating repertory of contending paradigms within the field of IR, including Neo-Weberian, Post-Structuralist, and Constructivist approaches. Within the Marxist literature, this project comprises an equally rich and diverse set of theoretical traditions, including World-Systems Theory, Neo-Gramscian IR/IPE, the Amsterdam School, Political Marxism, Neo-Leninism, and Postcolonial Theory. More recently, a “third wave” of approaches has been announced from within the field of IR, suggesting to move the dialogue from inter-disciplinarity towards an integrated super-discipline of International Historical Sociology (IHS). This proposition has been most persistently advanced by advocates of the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), claiming to constitute a universal, unitary and sociological theory of IR. This article charts the intellectual trajectory of this ongoing IR/HS dialogue. It moves from a critique of Neo-Weberianism to a critique of UCD against the background of the original promise of the turn in IR to Historical Sociology: the supersession of the prevailing rationalism, structuralism, and positivism in extant mainstream IR approaches through the mobilization of alternative and non-positivistic traditions in the social sciences. This critique will be performed by setting UCD in dialogue with Political Marxism. By anchoring both approaches at opposite ends on the spectrum of Marxist conceptions of social science – respectively the scientistic and the historicist - the argument is that UCD reneges on the promise of Historical Sociology for IR by re-aligning, first by default and now by design, with the meta-theoretical premises of Neo-Realism. This is most visibly expressed in the articulation of a deductive-nomological covering law, leading towards acute conceptual and ontological anachronisms, premised on the radical de-historicisation of the fields of ontology, conceptuality and disciplinarity. This includes the semantic neutering and hyper-abstract re-articulation of the very category, which in IR’s self-perception lends legitimacy to its claim of disciplinary distinctiveness: the international. The article concludes by suggesting that an understanding of Marxism as a historicist social science subverts all calls for the construction of grand theories and, a fortiori, a unitary super-discipline of IHS, premised on a set of universal, space-time indifferent, and abstract categories that hold across the spectrum of world history. In contrast, recovering the historicist credentials of Marxism demands a constant temporalisation and specification of the fields of ontology, agency, conceptuality and disciplinarity. The objective is to lay the foundations for a historicist social science of geopolitics

Quantifying Solid Findings in Mathematics Education: Loss of Meaning for Algebraic Symbols

We report an example of a research approach aimed at gathering quantitative pieces of evidence of solid findings in mathematics education. The main goal of this project is to provide an additional perspective on solid findings in education, to be used by teachers and by researchers in their work. As a case study, we present a situation of “loss of meaning” in algebra, exploring it with data coming from a large-scale assessment interpreted by means of theoretical lenses. We are able to give information about the extent of the phenomenon and to highlight how the phenomenon is relevant also for high-level students. This approach can provide a link between large-scale assessment results, educational research, and teachers’ practices, and suggests further research issues

Constructing a concept of number

Numbers are concepts whose content, structure, and organization are influenced by the material forms used to represent and manipulate them. Indeed, as argued here, it is the inclusion of multiple forms (distributed objects, fingers, single- and two-dimensional forms like pebbles and abaci, and written notations) that is the mechanism of numerical elaboration. Further, variety in employed forms explains at least part of the synchronic and diachronic variability that exists between and within cultural number systems. Material forms also impart characteristics like linearity that may persist in the form of knowledge and behaviors, ultimately yielding numerical concepts that are irreducible to and functionally independent of any particular form. Material devices used to represent and manipulate numbers also interact with language in ways that reinforce or contrast different aspects of numerical cognition. Not only does this interaction potentially explain some of the unique aspects of numerical language, it suggests that the two are complementary but ultimately distinct means of accessing numerical intuitions and insights. The potential inclusion of materiality in contemporary research in numerical cognition is advocated, both for its explanatory power, as well as its influence on psychological, behavioral, and linguistic aspects of numerical cognition

Playing with Codes. Steve Tomasula's "Vas, an Opera in Flatland"

Steve Tomasula's Vas delivers an effective critique of humanism from the vantage point of literature by exposing the inconsistencies and assumptions that narratively restrictive definitions of humanity rely on. The main rhetorical strategy the novel employs is appropriative and deconstructive: it retrieves discourses and figurations generated by myths, historical records, statistics, genetic charts, and advertisements for transgenic manipulations, and then reactivates them, turning this material into a literary and artistic medium. The novel incorporates themes and structures from genetics and genomics and exposes their instrumental role in transgenic business as well as their impact on the redefinition of the body and the self. It does so in order to enlist readers in its larger political project aimed at rethinking the human beyond its humanist containment. In its attempt to bind technical innovations in artistic and communication media to the critique of the institution of art and literature, and in its tendency to extend such a critique to larger social practices, the novel self-consciously recuperates the critical impulse shared by all avant-garde aesthetics, regardless of the singularity of each project and of its specific targets and objects.

Metaphorical patterns in Anthropocene fiction

This article explores metaphorical language in the strand of contemporary fiction that Trexler discusses under the heading of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ – namely, novels that probe the convergence of human experience and geological or climatological processes in times of climate change. Why focus on metaphor? Because, as cognitive linguists working in the wake of Lakoff and Johnson have shown, metaphor plays a key role in closing the gap between everyday, embodied experience and more intangible or abstract realities – including, we suggest, the more-than-human temporal and spatial scales that come to the fore with the Anthropocene. In literary narrative, metaphorical language is typically organized in coherent clusters that amplify the effects of individual metaphors. Based on this assumption, we discuss the results of a systematic coding of metaphorical language in three Anthropocene novels by Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and Ian McEwan. We show that the emergent metaphorical patterns enrich and complicate the novels’ staging of the Anthropocene, and that they can destabilize the strict separation between human experience and nonhuman realities

QPCF: higher order languages and quantum circuits

qPCF is a paradigmatic quantum programming language that ex- tends PCF with quantum circuits and a quantum co-processor. Quantum circuits are treated as classical data that can be duplicated and manipulated in flexible ways by means of a dependent type system. The co-processor is essentially a standard QRAM device, albeit we avoid to store permanently quantum states in between two co-processor's calls. Despite its quantum features, qPCF retains the classic programming approach of PCF. We introduce qPCF syntax, typing rules, and its operational semantics. We prove fundamental properties of the system, such as Preservation and Progress Theorems. Moreover, we provide some higher-order examples of circuit encoding

Theory-inspired rather than theory-based criticism: Towards a semeiocritical method for the interpretation of literature

The present article is written almost a decade and a half after the reticent announcement of the death of literary theory by a number of scholars around the world. But during all these years, the humanities have not managed to drive Theory out of the seminar rooms of English departments, nor have the anti-theory proponents managed to remove it from the syllabi of English studies or even from the shelves of specialized libraries. After all these years, English studies academicians find themselves still doing Theory: holding conferences on how to conduct literary studies, organizing debates on how to launch new approaches that could possibly replace critical theories, and encouraging research into less-theorized methods of literary interpretation that could respond to the ineluctable need for a method in studying literature. For good or ill, whether we admit it or not, the echoes of literary theories continue to linger behind the scenes of all debates about literature and literary studies. The question is therefore not how to bring those echoes to silence, but rather how to find a way out of the post-theory deadlock by proposing what I have chosen to name the semeiocritical method as a theory-inspired, rather than theory-based approach to literature. The present article seeks to answer two questions: (1) how can we benefit from the lessons of literary theory without systematically doing theory or being methodically loyal to theories? and (2) how can we maximize the effects of literary interpretation in such a way as to cover as many aspects as possible of the signifying processes in the literary text while maintaining interpretive consistency

WRITING UTOPIA NOW: Utopian Poetics In The Work Of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

This thesis examines Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE (1982), Audience Distant Relative (1977) and Reveillé dans la Brume (Awakened in the Mist) (1977). The premise of the thesis is an exploration of the various ways in which these works both perform and gesture toward the possibility of a ‘utopian’ experience of nonalienation. In Cha’s vocabulary, this takes the form of ‘interfusion’ and is related to the role of the artist as alchemist. Cha employs formal and linguistic innovations in her text, mail art and performance works to invite active participation from her readers and audience in a gesture toward embodied intersubjectivity. Her grappling with the challenges relating to the articulation of subjectivity place her work at the centre of contemporary critical debates around subjectivity and innovative poetics. In particular, recent scholarship on race and the poetic avant-garde has called for cross-disciplinary approaches to reading DICTEE as a text that explores the intersections of subjectivity and its performance in contemporary innovative poetics. Developing a theory of Utopian Poetics from my reading of Ernst Bloch’s utopian philosophy, I explore the ways in which DICTEE and Cha’s other works perform a yearning for non-alienated subjectivity that remains necessarily open and incomplete. My reading of DICTEE, in particular, is primarily informed by my own practices of yoga and meditation, and these practices form the basis of both my scholarly and creative engagements with this research. This scholarly thesis comprises Part 1 of a two-part submission. Part 2 comprises my own creative experiments with UtopianPoetics