The Idea of a Category Mistake: From Ryle to Habermas,and Beyond

Summary

The term ‘category mistake’ began to turn up regularly in public discourse in the 1990s as a general term to describe a confusion between different fields of thought with serious practical consequences. But it began its career in philosophy, introduced by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind in 1949 to attack Cartesian dualism and assert a monistic solution to the so-called mind-body problem. This paper traces the stages by which it came into general usage, arguing that while by the later 1960s it had generally been rejected by philosophers, it was saved from disappearance by its migration into fields such as psychology and theology. From there, it moved into critical theory and then into international relations. Its entry into these latter areas first made plain its potential in political argument. Eventually, multiple meanings of the term came to coexist with one another, with the practical and rhetorical usage supplementing rather than replacing its original philosophical sense.     

Theories of the Sublime in the Dutch Golden Age: Franciscus Junius,Joost van den Vondel and Petrus Wittewrongel

This article explores how writers from the Dutch Golden Age thought about human contact with that which is elevated far above everyday life. The Dutch Republic offers an interesting context because of the strikingly early use there by seventeenth-century humanists of the Greek concept ?ψο?, from (pseudo-)Longinus, to discuss how writers, artists and their audiences were able to surpass human limitations thanks to an intense imagination which transported them to supreme heights. Dutch poets also used the Latin sublimis to discuss how mankind constantly aims at that which is far above it, but, despite this, can never entirely be a part of it. Thirdly, protestant writers discuss the concept of the Fear of God by explaining that elevated contact with God should be accompanied by the contrasting emotions of attraction and fear. With reference to the humanist Franciscus Junius, poet Joost van den Vondel and preacher Petrus Wittewrongel, I will discuss how these artistic, literary and religious discourses concerning contact with the sublime are related to one another.     

The technologies of distance: new migrations in Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King

This article analyses Conor O’Callaghan’s collection The Sun King as an expression of contemporary migration practices. It places the poet’s technological mobilities within larger global movements and argues that the collection reconfigures poetic versions of migration for the twenty-first century. The Sun King (2013) is located in explicitly transient spaces, while its formal innovations serve to mimeticise contemporary dislocation. In reinventing the dual demands of memory and migration in the postmodern society, The Sun King recognises and pursues alternative poetic possibilities. The article suggests that O’Callaghan’s Twitter-poem “The Pearl Works” can be read as indicative of an expansive impulse towards ephemeral online works. In particular, the article raises questions around composition, stability and memory practices in the digital era, and highlights how both migration and memory are complicated by technological innovations.     

Exploratory Models in a time of Big Data

This paper aims to trigger discourse about the emergence of a new type of social scientific model — Exploratory Models — which draw on Big Data, computer modeling and interdisciplinary research to tackle complex social scientific processes. First, we define Exploratory Models referring to Batty and Morgan and Morrison. We then present changes to the traditional modeling paradigm. We show how Exploratory Models circumvent challenges related to the idiosyncracy, self-reflexivity and acceleration of social phenomena, which limit predictive effectiveness of traditional models. We show that Exploratory Models are better equipped to tackle complex problems due to their capacity to process heterogeneous datasets. Having established that Exploratory Models are predominantly problem- and data-driven, we emphasize that scientific theory is indispensable to their progress. Finally, the development of an integrative platform is suggested as a way of maximizing the benefits of this approach. Discussion concludes by flagging areas for further research.     

Hedwig revisited

The mainstream success of the 2014 Broadway revival of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch is in stark contrast to the precarity of the central protagonist’s life and the communities out of which the original Hedwig production emerged. While these tensions reveal some of the complicities between homonormativity, gentrification, and neoliberalism, by tracing Hedwig’s other genealogies, a more complicated vision of queer possibility emerges.     

After Empire: Karl Renner's Danubian model of pluralism

This article argues that Karl Renner's multinational model for the Austrian‐Hungarian Empire is an alternative model for contemporary a‐territorial, multinational and federal arrangements. Nations, in his view, should act as intermediary bodies between the relevant communities and the state. His concept of ‘subjective public law’ combines principles that most authors find mutually exclusive: individual rights, choice over one's national cultural membership, non‐territorial administration of national communities and overseeing of equal collective rights by the state. Neither Staatsnation nor Kulturnation, the model is a combination of the two under the auspices of a federal state combined with a strong theory of individual and collective rights. I provide the reader with a comprehensive intellectual biography of Karl Renner, as I argue that an understanding of the man himself, his political pragmatism and his statism are crucial to comprehending this theoretical position. Throughout his life, Renner was a German nationalist, held a strong nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire and voted in favour of the Anschluß. His concurrent careers as a scholar and as a politician account for a series of contradictions. I argue however that these can be reconciled and explained by a careful comparative reading of his scholarly work and his political statements.     

Governing urban regeneration in the UK: a case of ‘variegated neoliberalism’ in action?

The article focuses on the redevelopment of previously developed land by public-private sector partnerships in three cities/towns in South-West England, two of which can be described as medium-sized places with little previous experience of such developments. In each case we situated the redevelopment process in its wider multi-level and horizontal relationships using Social Network Analysis to produce network and centrality maps to reveal the complex network of relationships the process was embedded within and shaped by. These developments took place in what is termed the ‘roll-out’ phase of neoliberalism and we illustrate how the overarching planning and regulatory regimes (including contracts), along with wider economic conditions, shaped the development process, with the proviso that in each case these factors were mediated and themselves shaped by the assortment and interaction of local organizational, political, economic and civic forces. These included local planning committees and their interpretation of planning regulations and the developers involved, but also opposition to the developments from local sources. Much, however, depended on the ‘capacity to act’ of the relevant partnerships, in the sense of mobilizing and deploying available resources to realize the proposed developments.     

地方发展变迁与居民地方感关系研究——以广州荔枝湾涌历史文化街区为例

本文以广州荔枝湾涌历史文化街区为例,运用扎根理论研究荔枝湾涌1940年代以来地方发展变迁与居民地方感的关系,进而挖掘居民地方感变化机制。研究发现：荔枝湾涌居民的地方感主要受生态环境、建筑与配套服务、集体记忆、活动类型、人际关系等因素的影响,其中生态环境起主导性作用;积极地方感主要来源于集体记忆的保留与延续;消极地方感主要来源于破旧的居住环境及落后的配套服务;此外,文章提出内向型地方感和外向型地方感的概念,认为随着城市发展,在地方发展变迁过程中,地方感由内向型地方感转变为内向型和外向型相结合的地方感。两种地方感相互作用,互相调节,更有利于地方稳定、开放、包容地发展。     

Frontiers of Urban Control: Lawlessness on the City Edge and Forms of Clientalist Statecraft in Zimbabwe

This article develops the concept of “urban frontier” to explore conflicts over state regularisation of city edge informal settlements in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. It conceptualises the presence of “lawless” urban frontiers and “illegal” territorial authorities in capital cities as expressions of a permissive form of central statecraft. In so doing, the article takes forward debates over the politics shaping the margins of Africa’s rapidly expanding cities, redressing scholars’ tendency to neglect central party‐state strategic calculations and party politics in their analyses of unregulated settlements. Dominant interpretations generally hinge on state absence or weakness and emphasise localised influences. The case of Harare’s highly politicised city‐edge informal settlements reveals the inadequacy of apolitical approaches particularly clearly, as all were controlled by the ruling ZANUPF party. The conflicts provoked by regularisation provide a lens on disputes within the ruling party, which we interpret as disputes over different forms of clientalist statecraft. Analyses of urban frontiers can thus help move away from generic one‐size‐fits‐all explanations of informality and patronage politics in Africa’s expanding cities.     

Not About Land,Not Quite a Grab: Dispersed Dispossession in Rural Russia

In most literature in geography and agrarian studies, rural dispossession is neatly related to land rights or access, a trend that increased with debates about the recent wave of farmland investments worldwide. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork in rural Russia, this paper critiques that focus and the assumed nexus between rural dispossession and farmland, as is prevents an understanding of more dispersed stakes, modes and temporalities of dispossession. I introduce the concept of dispersed dispossession which advances our understanding of social and relational objects of dispossession beyond natural resources (such as sustaining institutions and infrastructures), and the tangled, complex, often slow and silent modes and temporalities of dispossession beyond spectacular events. I show how the concept sheds new light on current agrarian change in Russia, and how it contributes to debates on (rural) dispossession and “land grabs” more generally.