Brunella Casalini, “Care of the self and subjectivity in precarious neoliberal societies”

E. Munch, Ansia

The word “precarity” derives from the Latin prex, precis, meaning request or prayer. The Latin precarius, used both as a religious and juridical term, meant “obtained by prayer,” as a favor, in an asymmetrical relationship of dependency, and thus was always revocable, with no guarantee of lasting over time. Through an extension of its original meaning, “precarious” has come to mean something that is uncertain or insecure. Since the end of the 1980s, the term precarity has been used to describe the new social insecurity experienced by many in “precarious work,” meaning work that is “uncertain, unstable, and insecure, and in which employees bear the risks of work (as opposed to business or the government) and receive limited social benefits and statutory entitlements”.

According to Brunella Casalini, neoliberal individuals are invited to think themselves as free, or, better, as free entrepreneurs of themselves. However, being owners and developers of ourselves is not the same as being our own masters. In a competitive environment the entrepreneurial self is engaged in a never ending struggle to remain in the winning side of a zero sum game in which there are no longer horizontal relationships of exchange, but only winners and losers. Here precarity has become a general regime, “a hegemonic mode of being governed and governing ourselves”. “Self-care” and care of others are not absent: they need, however, to be conceived as an investment, justified as such and pursued in terms of profit or as a means to add value to one’s human capital.

For this reasons the owners of themselves are, at the same time, their own exploited slaves – precarious workers praying for mercy in a merciless world whose very atomization makes it impossible to organize a critical, collective resistance.

Cynicism, depression, burnout and exhaustion  are the inevitable outcomes of such a situation, but it would be mistaken to treat them as medical questions: they are public feelings and critical resources. The question is only how to make them political. The illness, indeed, is not individual: it is systemic.

Brunella Casalini, Care of the self and subjectivity in precarious neoliberal societies

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Call for reviewers: Mauro Lenci, “Italian moderates between absolute monarchy and the sovereignty of the people”

Via di mezzo 38, targa con nome della via da Wikimedia CommonsBetween 1843 and 1861, Italian moderates were crucial in the process of the country’s unification. The latest historiography has extensively analyzed their role in all of its internal and international implications and has often emphasized their cultural backwardness in comparison to the major European currents of thought.

On the other hand, the Italian historian Luca Mannori has denounced the inconsistency of portraying Italian liberals as feeble and narrow-minded, vis à vis their mobilization for the constitution involving all of the states of the peninsula in the first few months of 1848. Indeed, their theories proved to be decisive in the transition from the old monarchic and aristocratic world to the new democratic one. Therefore, according to Mauro Lenci, it is worth analyzing their two-faced relation with popular sovereignty, to contribute to understand the neglected political and theoretical reasons of their success.

We are submitting the essay to our experimental open peer review. Commenting is easy: you should simply register here, log in our Commentbfp site, click back to Mauro Lenci’s paper and start writing your remarks.

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Mauro Lenci, Scylla and Charybdis: Italian moderates between absolute monarchy and the sovereignty of the people 1843–1861

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Research evaluation and academic freedom: an Italian debate

Particolare della Scuola di Atene di Raffaello The Bollettino telematico di filosofia politica is submitting to an open peer review a couple of articles meant for the debate on the theoretical and practical justification of the Italian research assessment system, which entrusts an academic élite nominated by the government with a huge, unbalanced power. In the opinion of Andrea Bonaccorsi, a former member of the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Institutes board of directors, the governmental evaluation of scientific research can be justified on the basis of his – peculiar – reading of R.K. Merton’s normative sociology of science.

The articles written, respectively, by Roberto Caso and Maria Chiara Pievatolo, scrutinize Bonaccorsi’s claims both from a legal and from a philosophical point of view.

Roberto Caso, in Una valutazione (della ricerca) dal volto umano: la missione impossibile di Andrea Bonaccorsi [The Human Face of Evaluation of Science: the Mission Impossible of Andrea Bonaccorsi], challenges the main argument of Bonaccorsi, according to which the governmental evaluation of scientific research is an expression of Mertonian norms of science (communism, universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism). Such an interpretation, in Roberto Caso’s opinion, is untenable for two main reasons:

  • it rests on a remarkable misrepresentation of Merton’ s thought;
  • it neglects the difference between fixed, formal legal rules and fluid, informal norms; hence, it underestimates the effects of a transformation from the former to the latter.

Maria Chiara Pievatolo’s La bilancia e la spada: scienza di stato e valutazione della ricerca [The scale and the sword: science, government and research evaluation] goal is showing that the research assessment system resulting from Bonaccorsi’s misinterpretation of Merton would be both practically despotic and theoretically retrograde even if, at the very moment of the evaluation, the sociological description of the state of the research were true and we lived in a faultless Mertonian world.

The resulting system would be despotic because it would transform an informal ethos into a rigid set of administrative laws outside the researchers’ control; and it would be retrograde because such a set would also freeze the evolution of the ways in which scientists publish, discuss and assess their works, in a kind of enchanted Sleeping Beauty castle.

Both articles are in Italian: nostra res agitur. You may review them on SJScience.org, here and here.

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The ambassadors’ honor: a citation policy for open access

The authors whose works are openly accessible make a public use of reason. The ones that prefer closed access make a private use of it. They do not address themselves to the citizens of the world through the best media technology available: they talk only to the restricted group of people who can afford to pay. Usually authors choose closed access either because they are accustomed to follow the publishing practices of their scholarly communities without thinking too much, or because they fear that their career could be damaged by a way of publishing still perceived as uncommon. Their theater of action, here, is not a virtually universal public sphere: it is a particular set of institutions.

Citations are the currency in the trade of science communication. When I build my thesis upon the ideas of others, they are useful both to pay my debts and to display the soundness of my credit: my voice resonates louder if I back it with the literature assets I withdrew from the big bank of learning.

Moreover, citations are the raw matter of bibliometrics, which may be crucial to research evaluation, career advancements and libraries purchase policies. In such a use, citations are currency not only metaphorically, but also in a very literal sense.

Besides, in a paper published on the web, citations, as links, are money in the meaning of the attention economy: every time I link a resource, I increase its value, by boosting its search engine rank and making it more visible. And, as Open Access brings an increased citation impact, a citation in an openly accessible article is a wonderful present.

If the cited document is openly accessible as well, such a citation is a token of gratitude for the very gift of its presence. However, can we say the same about closed access papers?

According to George Monbiot’s Guardian recent article, academic publishers “are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world”: they exploit the work of researchers and reviewers without paying them; they privatize their product, which is publicly funded by research grants and academic stipends, and they sell it to its very producers for outrageous prices. Why should open access authors advertise their journals for free and without reciprocity, for the sake of their profit?

The recommendation to cite only openly accessible resources would be radical but unfair. The oligopolists of academic publishing are inclined to make us believe that the worth of our contents depends on where they have been published (Björn Brembs, What’s wrong with scholarly publishing today? slide 87): we cannot make the same mistake, by ruling out that a really good idea might appear even in a closed access site. Therefore, we have to figure out a kind of harm reduction citation policy, with some changes to the current practices.

  1. Give always preference to open accessible literature over closed access items;
  2. always cite the documents archived in open access institutional or disciplinary repositories even when there is a closed access version of them;
  3. if ideas are relevant regardless of their authors, always cite an openly accessible paper that contains them, even if you have to prefer the article of a Ph. D. candidate over the latest book of some well-known academic star;
  4. if the closed access resource is irreplaceable, do not cite it directly, but mention the openly accessible papers reporting and reviewing its content. If they are missing, write a short, openly accessible report about it, stressing that, if it is the case, the access to it is closed and behind a paywall whilst it could have been open.

A second hand citation leaves almost unchanged the citation impact of the text and it has another major merit.

In an environment of increasing information overload, curators – or trail blazers in the meaning of Vannevar Bush – play a creative role: they suggest which way to turn, reduce complexity by means of standards more sophisticated and human than popularity based algorithms, create new ideas from the combination of already known concepts. Just for this reason only, they deserve to be given credit.

However, the curators who expound the content of a closed access resource in an openly accessible site, add something still more important: they make free for the public use of reason something that was captive of its private use; they speak in light what was told in darkness and publish upon the housetops what they heard in the ear. In this regard, they are the actual scholars, because they are the ones telling the citizens of the world something that the nominal authors reserved for the chosen few blessed with money.

According to the current scholarly practices, second hand citations are deprecated because they make people suspect we did not read the cited text, especially if they contain the same inaccuracies of the copied citation. The proposed citation policy does not comply with such a rule. Second hand citations are right and proper when they are not due to the laziness of the citing person, but to a choice, sometimes unwitting, of the cited authors. If they prefer to speak to the few and in behalf of someone while they could speak to everyone and in behalf of everyone, they must become aware that they are declining to enter into the public sphere first-hand as well. That they have to accept the mediation – not necessarily accurate and well-meant – of others taking away their merit. For today’s public use of reason is in the open access.

The present proposal is a reaction to the still prevailing publishing practices in the field of human and social sciences and to the still lingering lack of awareness of a wide portion of the Italian scholarly community. Do you have better solutions? They are welcome.

–dnt

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Edmund Burke and the issue of a conservative and liberal tradition in Italy, 1791-1945 – Call for Reviewers

We are submitting the article Edmund Burke and the issue of a conservative and liberal tradition in Italy, 1791-1945 by Mauro Lenci to an experimental open peer review.

Commenting is easy: you should simply register here, log in our Commentbfp site, click back to Mauro Lencii’s paper and start writing your remarks.

If you are not familiar with the Commentpress interface we are using, check How to read a Commenpress document on the Commentpress site. If you need more information, ask us.

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Accessi: 385

Justice and the Family in a Transnational Perspective – Call for Reviewers

We are submitting the article Justice and the Family in a Transnational Perspective by Brunella Casalini to an experimental open peer review.

Commenting is easy: you should simply register here, log in our Commentbfp site, click back to Brunella Casalini’s paper and start writing your remarks.

If you are not familiar with the Commentpress interface we are using, check How to read a Commentpress document on the Commentpress site. If you need  more information, ask us.

 

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