Critical Theory and Libertarian Socialism Realizing the Political Potential of Critical Social Theory

This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series examines the role critical theory plays in today's political, social, and economic crises, showing how it can help to both diagnose and remedy such problems

Marx, Cole and the Frankfurt School: Realising the political potential of critical social theory

In this article, the author proposes that whilst Habermas's attempt to conceptualise a political form oriented towards the institutionalisation of emancipatory practice represents a positive step for critical theory, it is best served by developing a theoretical framework that does not presuppose or apologise for the instrumental mastery of external nature. It is argued that in order to achieve such a task, the political potential of the critique of instrumental reason elaborated by the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists ought to be realised through the labour-mediated reconciliation of humanity with both internal and external nature, for which the libertarian socialism of G. D. H. Cole provides an adequate basis. © The Author(s) 2012

Humans and deep networks largely agree on which kinds of variation make object recognition harder

View-invariant object recognition is a challenging problem, which has attracted much attention among the psychology, neuroscience, and computer vision communities. Humans are notoriously good at it, even if some variations are presumably more difficult to handle than others (e.g. 3D rotations). Humans are thought to solve the problem through hierarchical processing along the ventral stream, which progressively extracts more and more invariant visual features. This feed-forward architecture has inspired a new generation of bio-inspired computer vision systems called deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN), which are currently the best algorithms for object recognition in natural images. Here, for the first time, we systematically compared human feed-forward vision and DCNNs at view-invariant object recognition using the same images and controlling for both the kinds of transformation as well as their magnitude. We used four object categories and images were rendered from 3D computer models. In total, 89 human subjects participated in 10 experiments in which they had to discriminate between two or four categories after rapid presentation with backward masking. We also tested two recent DCNNs on the same tasks. We found that humans and DCNNs largely agreed on the relative difficulties of each kind of variation: rotation in depth is by far the hardest transformation to handle, followed by scale, then rotation in plane, and finally position. This suggests that humans recognize objects mainly through 2D template matching, rather than by constructing 3D object models, and that DCNNs are not too unreasonable models of human feed-forward vision. Also, our results show that the variation levels in rotation in depth and scale strongly modulate both humans' and DCNNs' recognition performances. We thus argue that these variations should be controlled in the image datasets used in vision research

Critical theory and contemporary social movements: Conceptualizing resistance in the neoliberal age

The advent of an unregulated and financial form of capitalism, combined with a sharp rise in income inequalities and economic insecurity since the 1970s, appears to pose, at first glance, a significant challenge for the relevance of the works of first-generation critical theorists, which are often confined to an historically specific 'artistic' critique of the bureaucratic stage of capitalist development. Through an analysis of the various concerns and demands expressed by members of the alter-globalization and Occupy movements, the article nevertheless aims to demonstrate that first-generation critical theory can continue to play a significant role in conceptualizing contemporary forms of resistance by: (1) capturing the social malaise engendered by neoliberal capitalism; and (2) informing the practice of resistance in contemporary capitalist societies. © The Author(s) 2013

Beyond Co-optation: Revisiting the Transformative Function of "Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises"

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.No abstrac

Labour, knowledge and communication: rethinking the practical content of critical social theory

In response to the reification of social reality caused, according to the first generation of the Frankfurt School, by the instrumental mastery of nature, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse have elaborated a critique of instrumental reason aimed at providing the theoretical tools for a treatment of the social realm as a field of human practice. Concerned with the risks of reproducing the relationship between humanity and nature hindering human emancipation, they have nevertheless sought to limit the task of critical theory to a theoretical form of resistance, thereby divorcing social theory from the practical orientations found in Marx‟s critique of political economy. It was not until the works of second-generation critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, that one could find a renewed attempt to link theory with the objective conditions of existence thought to be required for human emancipation. With these theoretical developments, however, social theory was effectively stripped of its critique of technology, and became primarily concerned with the problem of human emancipation as a matter strictly regarding intersubjective relations. The present work proposes that the formulation of a social critique oriented towards the institutionalisation of emancipatory practice cannot presuppose or apologise for the instrumental mastery of external nature. It shall be argued that in order to achieve such a task, the critique of instrumental reason elaborated by the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists must be complemented and completed with the broad outline of an institutional framework capable of indicating the conditions of existence required for the actualisation of human emancipation as the labour-mediated reconciliation of humanity with both internal and external nature, and for which the works of G.D.H. Cole provide a potential basis for rethinking critical theory and updating libertarian socialism

Bourdieu, Foucault and the politics of precarity

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.Precarity is widely regarded as a defining condition of advanced capitalist societies. Given its existentially troubling character and a range of movements condemning its social consequences, several contemporary analysts have sought to diagnose the prospects for liberating society from its rule. Many of those accounts have been inspired by the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault. It is nevertheless argued here that Pierre Bourdieu offers more suitable conceptual tools for diagnosing precarity-induced domination and making sense of resistance in the contemporary age of precarity. With a focus on Foucault’s neoliberal ‘art of government’ and Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic power,’ this article exposes the differences between each theorist’s account of precarity. While doing so will help grasp the complex and singular character of the operations of power today, it will also serve to highlight the merits of Bourdieu’s work for capturing the limits of, and cracks within, precarity-induced domination. Realising the full potential of his own approach for conceptualising resistance, however, rests on supplementing it with insights drawn from intersectionality theory

Electrochemical Kinetic Study of LiFePO4 Using Cavity Microelectrode

Lithium cation insertion and extraction in LiFePO4 were electrochemically studied with a cavity microelectrode (CME). Cyclic voltammetry measurements were used to characterize the kinetics of the material. LiFePO4 was successfully cycled from 0.1 mV s–1 up to 1 V s–1 and is therefore a suitable material to be used in high power applications, such as asymmetric hybrid supercapacitors. Several kinetic behaviors were observed depending on the sweep rate. The LiFePO4 was found to follow different kinetics behaviors depending of the sweep rate. The charge storage mechanisms were investigated for Liþ extraction/insertion

Distribution of micro-organisms along a transect in the South-East Pacific Ocean (BIOSOPE cruise) from epifluorescence microscopy

International audienceThe distribution of selected groups of micro-organisms was analyzed along a South-East Pacific Ocean transect sampled during the BIOSOPE cruise in 2004. The transect could be divided into four regions of contrasted trophic status: a high Nutrient Low Chlorophyll (HNLC) region (mesotrophic) near the equator, the South-East Pacific Ocean gyre (hyper-oligotrophic), the transition region between the gyre and the coast of South America (moderately oligotrophic), and the Chile upwelling (eutrophic). The abundance of phycoerythrin containing picocyanobacteria, autotrophic and heterotrophic eukaryotes in different size ranges, dinoflagellates, and ciliates was determined by epifluorescence microscopy after DAPI staining. All populations reached a maximum in the Chile upwelling and a minimum near the centre of the gyre. Picocyanobacteria reached a maximum abundance of 70×10³ cell mL-1. In the HNLC zone, up to 50% of picocyanobacteria formed colonies. Autotrophic eukaryote and dinoflagellate abundance reached 24.5×10³ and 200 cell mL-1, respectively. We observed a shift in the size distribution of autotrophic eukaryotes from 2–5 µm in eutrophic and mesotrophic regions to less than 2 µm in the central region. The contribution of autotrophic eukaryotes to total eukaryotes was the lowest in the central gyre. Maximum concentration of ciliates (18 cell ml-1) also occurred in the Chile upwelling, but, in contrast to the other groups, their abundance was very low in the HNLC zone and near the Marquesas Islands

Distribution of micro-organisms along a transect in the South-East Pacific Ocean (BIOSOPE cruise) using epifluorescence microscopy

International audienceThe distribution of selected groups of micro-organisms was analyzed along a South-East Pacific Ocean transect sampled during the BIOSOPE cruise in 2004. The transect could be divided into four regions of contrasted trophic status: a High Nutrient Low Chlorophyll (HNLC) region (mesotrophic) near the equator, the South-East Pacific Ocean gyre (hyper-oligotrophic), a transition region between the gyre and the coast of South America (moderately oligotrophic), and the Chile upwelling (eutrophic). The abundance of phycoerythrin containing picocyanobacteria (PE picocyanobacteria), autotrophic and heterotrophic eukaryotes (classified into different size ranges), dinoflagellates, and ciliates was determined by epifluorescence microscopy after DAPI staining. Despite some apparent loss of cells due to sample storage, distribution patterns were broadly similar to those obtained by flow cytometry for PE picocyanobacteria and picoeukaryotes. All populations reached a maximum in the Chile upwelling and a minimum near the centre of the gyre. The maximum abundance of PE picocyanobacteria was 70 103 cell mL-1. Abundance of autotrophic eukaryotes and dinoflagellates reached 24.5 103 and 20 cell mL-1, respectively. We observed a shift in the size distribution of autotrophic eukaryotes from 2–5 µm in eutrophic and mesotrophic regions to less than 2 µm in the central region. The contribution of autotrophic eukaryotes to total eukaryotes was the lowest in the central gyre. Maximum concentration of ciliates (18 cell mL-1) also occurred in the Chile upwelling, but, in contrast to the other groups, their abundance was very low in the HNLC zone and near the Marquesas Islands. Two key findings of this work that could not have been observed with other techniques are the high percentage of PE picocyanobacteria forming colonies in the HLNC region and the observation of numerous dinoflagellates with bright green autofluorescence