Inscriptions Vol. 3, No. 2

INSCRIPTIONS

journal for contemporary thinking on 
art, philosophy and psycho-analysis

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Inscriptions, an international peer-reviewed journal that publishes contemporary thinking on art, philosophy and psycho-analysis, vol. 3, no. 2, is available Open Access at https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

Power in a time of pandemic

Among our key questions in this open issue is the relation between the subject and power: what is the substance and appearance of the sovereign, what is the domain and limits of state power, and what are the effects of governance in the time of a health scare. Two short texts by Giorgio Agamben show how a religion of science became a tool to administer an exceptional governmentality under the pandemic. This issue features contributions by Leopold Haas, Christopher Norris, Mehdi Parsa, Lukas Reimann, Philippe Stamenkovic, and Regina Surber.

- Table of contents: https://www.tankebanen.no/inscriptions/index.php/inscriptions/issue/view/5
- Get a beautifully printed softbound copy (84 pp; USD 9.95): https://www.tankebanen.no/backcopies.html
- To subscribe to the print-edition of Inscriptions contact our publisher at post@tankebanen.no

Call for Paper: Ethics and Artifical Life

Deadline for proposals: 15 September 2020. Full manuscripts due 15 October 2020.

Ethics, the question of how to live right and well, has been one of philosophy’s key concerns from its beginnings. In the thought of Wolfgang Schirmacher the ethical life is connected to artifice: subjected to the event of technology we recognise our ethical being in mediated form, and it is through reflecting on this our present condition that we can begin regain our composition as ethical subjects.

For our volume 4, n1, Inscriptions, a journal for contemporary thinking on art, philosophy and psycho-analysis, seeks essays that reflect on, interrogate, and bring new perspectives to the notion of artificial life and ethical living in general. Key questions include:

· How must I compose myself in order to live a good, satisfying life?

· What is the good life, and what values are relevant to us in our present time?

· How has the figure of the subject been challenged by our technological order, and how may we begin to ethically reassess our present condition?

Please submit a brief proposal (of up to 300 words) or full-length manuscript (of up to 5000 words) through our online platform. Proposals receive a preliminary assessment. All scholarship published by Inscriptions undergo double-blind peer review. We also accept book reviews, commentaries, and short interventions of up to 1500 words.

Open Access, no APCs

Access to content in this journal remains open on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. For this upcoming issue we will not charge authors for submission or publication.

Inscriptions is published online and in print, and is indexed by, among others, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Our authors include Wolfgang Schirmacher, Siobhan Doyle, Christopher Norris, and Jørgen Veisland.

Our issues are archived electronically and in print by Norway's National Library.

Recent Issues

· Inscriptions 3, no. 2: Power in a time of pandemic, July 2020

· Inscriptions 3, no. 1: Outsourced!, January 2020

· Inscriptions 2, no. 2: Kierkegaard, July 2019

· Inscriptions 2, no. 1: The Global Unconscious, January 2019

· Inscriptions 1, no. 1-2: Consecrations, July 2018

Yours sincerely,
Dr. Torgeir Fjeld
Editor-in-Chief, Inscriptions

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https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

 

Economics on Screen

by Gábor István Bíró

The double threat posed by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany gave rise to a pioneering educational project in the thirties: the first economics film. 

Image Credit: Unemployment and Money: The Principles Involved (1940), British Gaumont Instructional Ltd.

While most economists have heard about Karl Polanyi, the mastermind who linked economics with anthropology in pursuit of  understanding the social insensitivity of the West, they rarely have noticed that his younger brother, Michael, also found unorthodox ways to guide his peers into economic realms. One of these unconventional ways was to develop an economics film. Michael Polanyi’s aim was to convey the message of a specific breed of Keynesian economics, neutral Keynesianism, to the masses. He hoped that, by informing society about this new stream, people would be more resistant to the siren calls of economic planners who carefully disguised the pillage of liberty as the promise of security.

A Martian in Manchester

Polanyi must have felt that the death of liberty was in his wake. He fled from the terror in Hungary (1919) and found a temporary liberal sanctuary in the German scientific milieu. But soon he needed to flee again (1933). This time from the nazis.[1] When he started to see the spread of authoritative patterns in his third home, the United Kingdom, he took action to counter the illiberal threat. For that, he needed to redirect his energies from chemistry to economics. Being the head of a well-equipped laboratory at the University of Manchester gave him exactly what he needed: free time. Stepping away from doing experiments himself, he devoted much of his time to reading and writing about economics. He soon joined a most notable network of liberal intellectuals by attending the Walter Lippmann Colloquium (1938) and becoming a member of the Mont Pelerin Society (1947). But Polanyi was not satisfied with any of the available liberal proposals so he decided to forge a new one which would be appealing to the masses.

Polanyi, the Walt Disney of Economics

He first had the idea of making an economics film to teach economics in 1929. After getting grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Manchester and teaming up with British Gaumont Instructional, his film project was on a fast track. He developed two versions of his pioneering motion picture. The first premiered as An Outline of the Working of Money (1938), the second as Unemployment and Money: The Principles Involved (1940). The film portrayed the circulation of money in the economy and proposed a specific kind of Keynesianism to counter the recession. Similarly to the Keynesian recipe, the Polanyian proposal urged state intervention into a troubled economy. But, unlike orthodox Keynesianism, it did not accept infrastructural investments and public works as healthy solutions. How else can the state intervene if not by these fiscal means? Well, by monetary means. Polanyi proposed to inject more money into the circulation when needed simply by tax remissions and budget deficits. Not removing the expected amount of money from the circulation, Polanyi advised, would have a similar effect to putting more money into the circulation. He imagined this to be a neutral solution, that is, a way which does not favour any group at the expense of others. For him, no discretionary decisions (e.g., about which infrastructural projects to support by the state) meant no opportunities for corruption. Polanyi envisioned the additional amount of money to be spread uniformly over the given amount without causing spikes of riches and valleys of poverty. His talking and moving picture economics immediately drew serious interest. Journals and newspapers like Nature and Times celebrated Polanyi’s novelty and one of the first reports called it an ‘art of a new Walt Disney.’ (unknown 1938) What happened then? Why did this story become a long-forgotten chapter in the history of economics?

The Silence of the Tutors

The film left the projection room and entered British classrooms all over the country. In cooperation with the Workers’ Educational Association (hereafter W.E.A.), Polanyi had his film tested by at least nine tutors in various schools between 1941 and 1942. Experience from these test screenings shows that neither the schools nor the tutors were prepared to use educational films. One tutor noted that it took forty-five minutes for the technician to get a properly focused picture on the screen. Another indicated that there was no screen at all in his school so they needed to improvise one. However, the most crucial critiques were not related to technical applicability but to pedagogical applicability. One of the tutors complained that the audio track of the film forced her to be silent during her own class. She felt deprived of the freedom to teach what and how she pleased. Some tutors complained that the narrative of the film made traditional blackboard work unnecessary. Others complained that the film made it necessary to do even more blackboard work than before because tutors needed to explain what was happening on the screen. Most tutors simply did not know what to do with the film: they could not see how to make it fit to the given syllabus and to their usual verbal narrative. As Polanyi’s film left the projection room and entered the classroom its perception changed. From a promising novelty it became an impractical curiosity.

A Textbook Remake

Polanyi recognized the undesirable reception of his film and started to work on a textbook, Full Employment and Free Trade (1945), which told a similar story in a very similar way (he even used the same artistic style for the illustrations). Why was he so presistent about his project? For him, it was not only an innovative scholarly endeavour but an important social mission. He wanted to educate the public for a special reason: to make people more resistant to the threat of autoritarianism. This threat was coming from various places. It was coming from the ideologies of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that had already reached British shores. And it was coming from certain proposals for economic crisis management (e.g., the Beveridge plan) that aimed to ease economic hardships at the expense of public liberties. Polanyi was unwilling to compromise and worked vigorosly to kickstart his liberal rescue mission. Not surprisingly, a reviewer of his book called Polanyi the ‘buoyant economist’ (unknown5 1946) of liberal capitalism in contrast to Hayek, who was described as the rather passive ‘warning prophet’ (ibid) of the same ideology. One might wonder, what could have these two accomplished together in the 1940s by fusing Polanyi’s energy with Hayek’s scholarly rigor?

References

Frank, Tibor. 2009. Double Exile: Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919-1945. Oxford: Peter Lang.

Polanyi, Michael. 1938. An Outline of the Working of Money, G.B. Instructional Ltd.

——— . 1940. Unemployment and Money: The Principles Involved. G.B. Instructional Ltd.

——— . 1945. Full Employment and Free Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

unknown. 1938. ‘Money is Star of this Film.’ Evening News. 10th March, 1938.

unknown2. 1938. ‘First Demonstration of Money Movements.’ Nature, 21st May, 1938.

unknown3. 1940. ‘Economics Taught by Film: New Notation for New Ideas.’ The Times Educational Supplement. 15th June, 1940. London: The Times Publishing Company.

unknown4, 1942. The Film in Economics Classes: A W.E.A. Experiment. London: Workers’ Educational Association.

unknown5. 1946. ‘Capitalism and Work.’ The Church Times, 18th January, 1946.

Dr. Bíró is the vice head of the Department of Philosophy and History of Science at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and a research fellow at the Morals and Science Lendület Research Group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His interests are history of economic thought, science and technology studies and intellectual history. He recently published a research monograph titled The Economic Thought of Michael Polanyi (Routledge, 2019).

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[1] The Martians were a group of prominent Hungarian scientists fleeing from Hungary in a double exile (Frank 2009) first to Austria or Germany, and then, to the UK or the United States. Polanyi kept in touch with several other Martians including John von Neumann, Leó Szilárd and Eugene Wigner. He organized an economics discussion group in which several of his fellow Martians participated during the Berlin years.

Meaning of Life 2020

Tuesday 21st July, 15:35: R. T. Allen of the British Personalist Forum will be presenting a paper at the 3rd International Conference on Philosophy at the Meaning of Life.

Some Possible Meanings of ‘the Meaning of Life’ and of ‘the Meaninglessness of Life'

Discussions of ‘The meaning of life’ have often been distorted by the very wording of the topic, which wrongly assumes that life can have only one meaning. Obviously many different accounts of the meaning of life have been suggested, and these can be classified as, for example, secularist and theist. But the very wording of the question suggests that these types of meaning, and the particular versions of each, are all mutually exclusive. This paper aims to show that, there are also categories of meaningfulness and meaninglessness; that these can be, and usually are, combined; and that this is a necessary feature of any type of meaning and the particular instances of them. This will be shown by first listing the categories and then giving examples of how different particular examples combine at least some of these categories, either explicitly or implicitly, so that they envisage human existence as having one or more aspects that are meaningful in one way and others that are meaningless in another way. It builds on some recently acknowledgements of some of the ways in which world-and-life-views are structured. For example, the meanings of ‘meaning’ have been differentiated: e.g. signifying what will follow, intentions, intended signifying, and value. The last is clearly implied in any answer to the correct formulation of the question, ‘What are the meanings and lacks of meaning in human life?’, which asks for what is of value and what lacks value, but without indicating what those values may be and what embodies or could embody them. Another set of categories have also been distinguished: ‘cosmic’, of the whole universe, and ‘individualist’, of or for individuals. In turn ‘generic’ meanings, those applicable to all persons, and individual ones, applicable just to one person, and that a generic one, such as to develop one’s talents, admits individual ones. Furthermore it has been acknowledged that several meanings can be attached simultaneously to human life and that there are questions of why do the universe, human beings, and oneself exist, and for what purpose, if any. To these further categories will be added and exemplified, to give a more comprehensive and systematic account of the possible meanings and meaningless of human life.

The conference will be held entirely online, obviously, and is, by all accounts, free to attend. To register: meaninginlife2020@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

Conference Website:

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/ptr/departments/philosophy/events/2020/philosophy-and-meaning-in-life.aspx

Abstracts:

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/ptr/philosophy/Abstracts-Third-International-Conference-on-Philosophy-and-Meaning-in-Life-2020.pdf