Foucault on the ‘question of the author’: a critical exegesis

This analysis of Foucault's ‘What is an Author?’ produces three main findings. First, Foucault was arguing—subtly yet powerfully—against Barthes's ‘The Death of the Author’. Second, ‘What is an author?’ systematically mystified the figure of the text, even as it clarified the figure of the author by revealing that figure to be an interpretative construct. Third, Foucault's achievement was vitiated by the terms in which it was cast, for his concept of the ‘author-function’ obliterated the personal quality of the author-figure. It is suggested in conclusion that all such interpretative figures—‘text’ as well as ‘author’, and many others besides—merit critical analysis, since these embody the fore-having which precedes interpretation

Mixing the medicine: the unintended consequence of amphetamine control on the Northern soul scene

Examining the influences leading to the introduction of amphetamine controls in Britain, this article focuses upon the consequences of the Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act 1964, and subsequent legislation. These laws had a major impact upon earlier Mod and later Northern Soul Scene subcultures in Britain, because both held amphetamine use as a central component of their recreational activities. The paper aims to provide greater understanding of the way criminalisation of amphetamines impacted on a user subculture that developed prior to criminalisation. While the 1964 Act effectively restricted supplies of amphetamines from the grey market, its failure to reduce demand created the market conditions for illicitly manufactured amphetamines. The changed legal setting also provided subcultural justification for the burglary of retail pharmacies which began soon after criminalisation. The response of the authorities to increased burglary of pharmacies had a particularly damaging impact on the amphetamine user culture of the post-mod Northern Soul Scene in the mid-1970s. The introduction of tighter storage regulations, stipulating the need to store Class B drugs in a secure metal cabinet with the opiates, led to a new cultural exchange between the amphetamine using chemist burglars and opiate user groups that involved the sale of the unwanted class A drugs, including exchanging opiates for amphetamine powder. The resulting spread of intravenous drug use on the Northern Scene, introduced a number of negative health impacts including the spread of hepatitis and drug related deaths

Conflict, consensus and charity: politics and the provincial voluntary hospitals in the eighteenth century

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] The voluntary hospitals were amongst the most original and enduring monuments of Georgian England. Financed on the seemingly flimsy basis of voluntary benefactions and annual subscriptions, they nevertheless flourished in the eighteenth century and subsequently became the leading medical institutions of the industrial age. By entitling even the small subscriber to recommend patients, they recruited substantial support amongst the large class of shopkeepers and traders; by weighting this power in proportion to the size of the contribution, they nevertheless preserved the pre-eminence of local magnates. By making subscription open to men and women of all confessions, they worked for the hegemony and unity of property against the threat of religious divisions; by enlisting subscribers as governors, they rewarded the act of giving with a share of power. Managed by honorary committees elected annually from the subscribers themselves, they enabled the shopkeeper to join the grandee in a common enterprise; by restricting committee membership to male subscribers, they kept within bounds the participation of 'the sex'. Through the annual publication of the financial accounts, the subscribers' names, and the numbers of patients `cured' and `relieved', they ensured probity of management, gave publicity to the subscribers great and small, and assured those subscribers that their money had been well spent. With their strong local roots, they promoted a sense of civic identity; by bringing together local medical men as honorary consultants, they helped to forge a professional medical community; by constructing a new context for medicine, they led to innovations in medical practice and teaching. And by making charity dependent upon the channel of personal recommendation, they exacted a political tribute from the sick poor who sought the benefit of their facilities. To each individual patient the hospitals made available a massive though brief donation of help in a time of need. To the poor collectively they offered a profound and highly visible subordination, translating the practice and rhetoric of personal dependence into an institutional setting)

Eugenics as wrongful

In a landmark legal case in 1996, eugenics survivor Leilani Muir successfully sued the province of Alberta for wrongful confinement and sterilization. The legal finding implied that Ms. Muir should never have been institutionalized at the Provincial Training School of Alberta as a “moron” and sterilized under the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta. The trial itself revealed many unsettling features of the province’s practice of eugenics, raising questions about how a seemingly large number of people, like Ms. Muir, who were not mentally defective, could have been wrongfully confined at an institution for the feeble-minded, and subsequently sterilized on eugenic grounds. Employing a three-agent model of wrongful accusation and conceiving of eugenics as wrongful more generally may help in understanding the operation of eugenic practices, such as institutionalization and sterilization, both in Western Canada and elsewhere. Eugenic practice involves a form of wrongful accusation that marks a significant departure from eugenic ideology

Velocity accelerator for particles

Sheet explosive and metal tube, fitted to the inner periphery of a cam-shaped chamber, accelerate particles to velocities nearing 20 km/sec to evaluate efficacy of spacecraft meteoroid shields

Roles of science in eugenics

The relationship of eugenics to science is intricate and many-layered, starting with Sir Francis Galton’s original definition of eugenics as “the science of improving stock”. Eugenics was originally conceived of not only as a science by many of its proponents, but as a new, meliorative science emerging from findings of a range of nascent sciences, including anthropology and criminology in the late 19th-century, and genetics and psychiatry in the early 20th-century. Although during the years between the two World Wars many central claims made by eugenicists were critiqued by scientists in these disciplines, in more recent years forms of eugenics (e.g., liberal eugenics”) have been defended as an inevitable outcome of biotechnologies and respect for autonomous choice. Understanding the shifting and varied roles that science has played in eugenics requires an appreciation of the ways in which science and values are intertwined

Sociobiology

This is an introductory article on sociobiology, particularly its relationship to eugenics