Materials and devices of the public: an introduction

Abstract

This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.     

The critical problem of cynical irony meaning what you say and ideologies of class and gender

ABSTRACT

Critical theorists such as Slavoj ?i?ek have for some years discussed the ideological significance of cynical or “blank” irony in fairly general terms. Less attention has been paid to the practical implications of such irony for critical semiotic analysis. With this in mind, this paper discusses the problems that sexist and “classist” jokes – specifically jokes about “chavs” – pose for the critical analyst. On the one hand, they seem to be saying deeply ideological things. On the other, their ironic nature means that they evade the claim that they are really saying, asserting, meaning anything. Theirs is a kind of blank irony which can be identified in all kinds of contemporary semiotic practice and is therefore an important phenomenon for critical analysts to get to grips with. The paper attempts to get to grips with it by outlining some semiotic clues to blank irony, and, more importantly, by suggesting some ways in which we might try to bring a critical perspective to bear in cases of cynical irony.     

Foreign Aid,Democratization, and Civil Conflict: How Does Democracy Aid Affect Civil Conflict?

It has been suggested that democratizing states are prone to civil wars. However, not all democratizing states experience domestic political violence. We argue that one of the key factors that “shelters” some democratizing states from domestic political violence is the receipt of democracy aid. Democratizing states that receive high levels of democracy assistance are less likely to experience civil conflict than countries that receive little or no external democracy assistance. During democratic transitions, the central authority weakens and uncertainty about future political commitments and promises among domestic groups increases. Democracy aid decreases the risk of conflict by reducing commitment problems and uncertainty. Using an instrumental variables approach that accounts for potential endogeneity problems in aid allocation, we find empirical support for our argument. We conclude that there is a potential path to democracy that ameliorates the perils of democratization, and democracy assistance programs can play a significant positive role in this process.     

The Fog of Humanitarianism: Collective Action Problems and Learning-Challenged Organizations

This essay explores humanitarian action, and by effect post-conflict state-building, in the so-called new wars of the post-cold war period – especially the targeting of civilians, the proliferation of non-state actors, and the perils of war economies. The host of reactions by aid agencies, termed ‘new humanitarianisms’, has called into question traditional operating principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence while the system has experienced dramatic increases in the number of organizations and available funds. Arguing that too little institutional learning has yet occurred, the authors call for changing the culture of aid agencies and investing in information gathering and sharing, policy analysis, and planning. In an era when reflection time is as valuable as reaction time, they stress the need to develop a humanitarian equivalent of military science.     

Ramchand Pakistani,Khamosh Pani and the traumatic evocation of Partition

This article will address the themes of partition, gender and trauma within two independent films from Pakistan, Sabiha Sumar's Khamosh Pani (2003) and Mehreen Jabbar's Ramchand Pakistani (2008). The article will consider how the events of 1947 – partition of India and creation of Pakistan – recur within the films as disruptive trauma. The article will consider what an engagement with the characteristics of trauma such as involuntary recall and disruption can bring to my readings of the films. Connections are established between women's experiences of ethnic tensions within the contemporary settings of the films and the gendered experiences of 1947. These are expressed in distinct ways, however; the prominence of the themes of trauma within both work to create a powerful presentation of women's subjectivity in Pakistan. Further to this, they draw attention to the possible inevitability of trauma being central to identities and locations forged out of a partition that entailed border creation, large-scale disruption, and violence. The article will conclude that close readings of both films highlight the role of the traumatic in the formation of gendered national identities.     

Sudpolitik: the political economy of Taiwan's trade with Southeast Asia

Abstract

In December 1993 the Taiwan government adopted a policy called nanjin zhengce or sudpolitik, a policy aimed at diverting part of Taiwan's trade and investment flows from China to Southeast Asia. This paper addresses the following questions: what is sudpolitik? why adopt such a policy? what are the economic, political, and strategic considerations in the pursuit of this policy? which countries are its specific targets? how do the countries directly affected by this policy respond to it? The paper also discusses the issue of Taiwan's aid in connection with sudpolitik. While the effectiveness of the policy is far from clear at present, the paper concludes with four observations: Taiwan's trade and aid are beginning to intertwine; Taiwan's diplomacy is largely economically or commercially led; Taiwan has achieved some positive results in improving its relations with Southeast Asian countries; and, Taiwan has reached a new stage in its economic development whereby it needs to invest overseas in order to sustain its economic growth. Overall, sudpolitik represents a novel step in Taiwan's diplomatic practice.     

State transformation and the domestic politics of foreign aid in Taiwan

Abstract

This article challenges the dominant narrative that overlooks the role of domestic factors in Taiwanese foreign aid in favour of politics cast at the cross-Strait and international levels. It examines the emergence and effects of partisan politics on Taipei's foreign aid policies, including aid budgets and the motivation for providing foreign aid. It argues that, rather than the cross-Strait conflict as such, it was contests and rivalries among Taiwan's political parties and government agencies – underpinned by ongoing projects of state building – that shaped the variable objectives, policies and processes of Taipei's foreign aid-giving.     

Bugs,predations or manipulations? Incompatible epistemic regimes of high-frequency trading

Abstract

Calls for greater transparency as well as corporate and individual accountability have emerged in response to the recent turbulence in financial markets. In the field of high-frequency trading (HFT), suggested solutions have involved a call for increased market information, for example, or better access to the inner workings of algorithmic trading systems. Through a combination of fieldwork conducted in HFT firms and discourse analysis, I show that the problem may not always stem from a lack of information. Instead, my comparative analysis of different market actors (regulators, market analysts and traders) shows that the diverse and complex ways in which they access and construct knowledge out of information in fact lead to what I call different epistemic regimes. An understanding of how epistemic regimes work will enable us to explain not only why the same market event can be viewed as very different things – as market manipulation, predation or error – but also why it is so difficult to arrive at a unified theory or view of HFT. The comparative perspective introduced by the idea of epistemic regimes might also serve as a starting point for the development of a cultural approach to the study of financial markets.     

Rethinking calculation: the popularization of financial trading outside the global centres of finance

Abstract

The paper looks at the popularization of financial trading in Israel. It presents a qualitative analysis of the calculative models and techniques that are promoted by financial trading schools, service firms and books. Broadly, the popularization of trading in this field involves a focus on ‘technical analysis’ (TA) and relies upon a socio-psychological reading of financial charts. Incorporating explicitly non-economic ideas into traders’ calculative logic – including an emic notion of ‘performativity’ – popular TA constitutes an attempt to ‘reverse’ the making of markets: to calculatively trace price formations back to the minds, hearts and arrangement from which they had allegedly sprung as a means of foreseeing their future shape before it fully materializes. Tying the psyche and the market in a calculative loop, popular TA transcends existing social theories of financial calculation. The paper discusses this challenge and its implications for our understanding of the expansion of finance.     

Accountability infrastructures: Pragmatic compliance inside organizations

We trace the pragmatic turn in regulatory governance from the level of the state and civil society to the coalface of the regulated organization. Since the 1980s, an array of new regulatory models has emerged. These models, while distinct, are unified in two related tendencies. First, they support the devolution of responsibility for standard setting, program design, and enforcement to the regulated organization. This delegation of governance to the organization itself has catalyzed the creation of accountability infrastructures within organizations, a network of offices, roles, programs, and procedures dedicated to aligning the organization's operations with external standards, codes of conduct, ethical and normative expectations, and regulations. Second, the diverse regulatory models depend, often implicitly, on organizational accountability infrastructures that incorporate the tenets of pragmatist philosophy: inquiry through narration, adaptation to context, and problem-solving through experimentation. Reviewing the empirical literature on organizational compliance, we find ample evidence of inquiry through narration at the organizational coalface. However, we find limited evidence of narrating plurality in the organization and narrating experimentation as problem-solving, as these activities create tensions with internal and external parties who expect singular, stable representations of governance. These tensions reveal an important incongruity between pragmatic governance across organizations and pragmatic governance within organizations. We contribute to the regulatory governance literature by documenting this important shift in the locus of governance to the organizational coalface and by charting a new research agenda. We argue that examinations of regulatory governance should be retraced in three ways. First, attention should shift to the organizational coalface, recognizing and analyzing accountability infrastructures as the central contemporary mechanism of governance. Second, the long-standing focus in regulatory studies on why parties comply should shift to understanding how regulated parties manage themselves to achieve compliance. Third, analyses of compliance should examine the tensions in narrating adaptation and experimentation, and the implications of such tensions for the achievement of prosocial outcomes.     

Comparison of Policy Experiments: Practices in Asia

Abstract

Policy experimentation has become a global trend in recent decades. The dynamics of policy experiments in Western countries have been extensively investigated, whereas those in non-Western contexts have not. The latter is theoretically relevant in testing the generalizability of existing theoretical arguments and provides opportunities for developing new theories, and practically relevant given that academic research could provide scientific evidence that facilitates the decision-making of practitioners. This introduction summarizes six articles that examine the practices of policy experiments in Asia and identify multiple patterns of policy experimentation, such as policy laboratories, policy syntheses, and proportionate policy responses. Particularly, evidence drawn from China, India, and Singapore suggests that policy experiments tend to fit the characteristics and scale of the policy problem and the risks or uncertainty of the policy environment.     

Intelligence Requirements at the Crossroads: The 1948 French Plan de Renseignement,Intelligence Requirements and the Role of Intelligence History

Very often intelligence history concentrates on the knowledge produced by a country's intelligence service and its impact on national decision-making, or – in the case of intelligence failures – the lack thereof. Using a previously unexplored document from the archives of the French Foreign Ministry, this research note proposes another contribution of intelligence history to diplomatic history: By analysing national intelligence requirements – the ‘top secret diaries’ of governments – intelligence history can provide a window into the minds of decision-makers. The 1948 French plan de renseignement illustrates this case. Written shortly after the Cold War started in earnest in 1947, the plan de renseignement shows a French government deeply worried about the danger of global conflict and of internal upheaval in its empire, but also a government not fully committed to the western cause and particularly sceptical about American intentions. French foreign policy was at a crossroads in 1947/48 and, quite sensibly, French policy-makers wanted to know exactly what lay on all the possible roads ahead. While these findings do not contradict existing scholarship, they may help to encourage a re-weighing of existing arguments.     

Activist and Citizen Political Repertoire in Spain: A Reflection Based on Civil Society Theory and Different Logics of Political Participation

Abstract

Citizen participation in Spain has significantly increased, and its repertoire has broadened as a result of the 15M Movement. From assemblies and acampadas (occupations) to the current proliferation of new political parties, there has been constant movement through a wide range of techno-political actions and experimentation with means and political tools used by civil society and activists. This article aims to reflect on this complex and novel political repertoire from a theoretical framework of civil society. This framework is complemented with the differentiation of (horizontal versus vertical) political logics used in social movement studies.     

Cultures of high-frequency trading: mapping the landscape of algorithmic developments in contemporary financial markets

Abstract

As part of ongoing work to lay a foundation for social studies of high-frequency trading (HFT), this paper introduces the culture(s) of HFT as a sociological problem relating to knowledge and practice. HFT is often discussed as a purely technological development, where all that matters is the speed of allocating, processing and transmitting data. Indeed, the speed at which trades are executed and data transmitted is accelerating, and it is fair to say that algorithms are now the primary interacting agents operating in the financial markets. However, we contend that HFT is first and foremost a cultural phenomenon. More specifically, both individuals and collective agents – such as algorithms – might be considered cultural entities, charged with very different ways of processing information, making sense of it and turning it into knowledge and practice. This raises issues relating to situated knowledge, distributed cognition and action, the assignment of responsibility when regulating high-speed algorithms, their history, organizational structure and, perhaps more fundamentally, their representation.     

Identity theft and the care of the virtual self

Abstract

This paper analyses how major institutions are publicly responding to the crime of identity theft. It concentrates on how individuals are encouraged to responsibilize themselves against this potentiality, and what they should do in the event they are victimized. These two distinct discourses (prevention and victimization) aim to fashion a hyper-vigilant citizen whose daily routines, home environment, consumption patterns and sense of self are being brought into accord with wider power dynamics. These measures can be understood as encouraging a care of the virtual self – a wider social project characteristic of an informational age that encourages individuals to reduce the risks and maximize the potentialities related to their data double. In the context of identity theft, however, institutionally promoted methods for the care for the virtual self transcend what is reasonably practicable for most citizens and mask the role played by major institutions in fostering the preconditions for identity theft.     

Putting the Cart before the Horse : Statebuilding,Early Warning and the Irrationality of Bureaucratic Rationalization

Abstract

Despite the transition of a government from authoritarian to democratic rule, the root causes of civil war persist and require monitoring in a post-conflict phase. The collapse of the Arusha peace accord in Rwanda is a prime example of both the importance of early warning in statebuilding and the severe consequences of its failure. This article demonstrates that such a crucial interaction between the detection of warning signals and peacebuilding has been obstructed by intervening mechanisms in international organization. These are, principally, those of bureaucratic rationalization – drawing on Max Weber's views of bureaucratic universalism and institutional rationality (Zweckrationalität) – and Western normalization – which moralises intervention scenarios to fit self-images of the pursuit of ‘noble causes’, often detaching policy from the complex realities on the ground.     

What the Secretary Said Next: ‘Public Rhetorical Leadership’ in the Australian Public Service

Every year, senior departmental secretaries in Australia deliver keynote speeches to a range of audiences. What are these secretaries talking about, and to whom are they directing their comments? This article will examine keynote addresses by the secretaries of the two key central agencies in Australia – the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and The Treasury – over the calendar years 2009 and 2010. I argue that ‘public rhetorical leadership’ by secretaries poses challenges for traditional understandings of Westminster governance. Utilising the concepts of public value theory, the significance of this ‘public rhetorical leadership’ is assessed in terms of its impacts on policy implementation and questions of accountability.     

Recognition as if sovereigns? A procedural understanding of indigenous self-determination

In the last two decades we have witnessed a growing global acknowledgement of indigenous rights – manifested in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – challenging the traditional nation-state-centred understanding of political rights and democracy. In this paper, the author argues that indigenous self-determination is to be understood as a way to level the balance of power between indigenous peoples and the nation-states in which they live. Without a solid legal foundation for indigenous peoples to define self-determination in their own languages and to negotiate the conditions of their relation with the nation-states on their own terms, the colonial past (and present) of violent conquest and domination might continue. Indigenous peoples' right to self-determination ought in this perspective to imply recognition of indigenous peoples as having a standing equal to nation-states, i.e. as if they were sovereigns. What self-determination means in political practice would thus be the outcome of negotiations between two (or more) equal political entities. In this way, the right to self-determination has to be interpreted procedurally rather than substantially.     

Framing blame: toward a better understanding of the effects of populist communication on populist party preferences

Although previous research has argued that the media play a crucial role in populism’s success, we know too little about how populist messages affect preferences for populist parties. To advance this knowledge, we conducted an experiment in which the core of populist rhetoric – constructing the people as innocent in-group opposed to the establishment as culprit out-group – was manipulated in news articles. The findings indicate that when political elites are blamed for a salient national problem, people are more likely to vote for a populist party and less likely to vote for the largest party in government. Populist vote intentions are indirectly affected via blame perceptions. These findings offer important insights into the media’s role in the electoral success of populism.     

Who are the ‘international community’? Development professionals and liminal subjectivity

ABSTRACT

This article explores international development space at the micro-level through the career stories and discursive representations of three aid workers—two nationals, one expatriate—who worked together on the same project in Tajikistan in 2008–9. Findings bear witness to the ‘liminal subjectivity’ of development where professional aid workers are, vocationally and socially, culturally and politically, neither domestic nor foreign. Aid workers’ careers demonstrate the resilience of ‘the international’ in contemporary humanitarian practice. At the same time, their biographies are not easily sutured into emergent cosmopolitanism as they remain encumbered by the boundaries of the national and international. Moreover, the article demonstrates that, while the rhetoric of international development and its putative leaders are criticized within the community itself, the international community may be formed by subordinate individuals in their liminal subjectivities.