Mathematics, capitalism and biosocial research

In my previous work, I criticised studies within the sociopolitical turn for disavowing a comprehension of schools as places of capitalist production. Here, I extend this critique to what is being flagged as a new turn in educational research. I am referring to biosocial research, particularly in the way it is coupled with new materialist and more than human philosophies in the work of Elizabeth de Freitas. I use elements from Marxian theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore the concomitances between mathematics and capitalism, showing how both mathematics and capital need to suture the subject in order to thrive. Biosocial research epitomises this drive towards automation and totality, and, notwithstanding de Freitas’ attempts to rescue it from the logic of control, I will argue that agent-centred intentions dismiss the underlying workings of capital as a real abstraction. I do so by engaging with elements of Deleuze’s philosophy, showing how the more than human frame in which de Freitas’ biosocial research rests contradicts her own perception of how biosocial research can be rescued for inclusive purposes

Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method

Abstract In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread—and reasonable—sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized—but inadequately internalized—understanding that humans are part of nature

Beyond the horizon : philosophy and religion in the late work of Tang Junyi (1909–1978)

This chapter addresses the specific issue of the relation between philosophical reasoning and the quasi-religious goal of spiritual self-transformation in Tang Junyi’s Life, Existence, and the Horizons of the Mind from 1977 in order to cast light upon what I take to be the overall orientation and main intentions of his mature work. After a brief outline of his life and writings, I begin by drawing attention to the combination of epistemological and religious concerns in Tang’s philosophy. In describing how such a fusion of “knowledge and action” is expressed in Tang’s approach to the central notion of “innate moral awareness,” I point toward the historical background against which he developed his distinctive understanding of philosophy as both a specific form of rational knowledge as well as a performative exercise in practical self-transformation. I then go on to offer an outline of what I believe to be the basic structural logic underpinning The Horizons of the Mind and explore the conceptual ramifications of this outlook in detail. More specifically, I analyze the tension attested to in this work between Tang’s programmatic refusal to privilege either the subjective or objective pole of “affective resonance” on the one hand, and his continued attempt to preserve what he called a “space for spirit,” that is to say, to safeguard the relative autonomy of the subject over and against its various “horizons,” on the other. Finally, I relate the seemingly abstract concerns reflected in this fundamental conceptual tension to the close alignment between philosophical and religious commitments which runs through Tang’s New Confucian enterprise as a whole

Restoring the radical imagination in political economy

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