Carolyn Steedman's "Culture, Cultural Studies and the Historians" (Summary)

 

Carolyn Steedman’s essay Culture, Cultural Studies and the Historians discusses the concept of culture, cultural studies in Britain since the last war, and the connection between these concepts to the practice and writing of history. Steedman follows a historiographical tradition laid down by British cultural studies, which usually organize themselves in a particular way, rendering up their own account in terms of three key-texts: Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), Raymond Williams's Culture and Society (1958), and E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963).

Steedman argues that history is the most impermanent of written forms, as it is only an account that will last a while. The practice of historical work, the uncovering of new facts, and the endless reordering of the immense detail that makes the historian's map of the past performs this act of narrative destabilization daily. The written history is a story that can only be told by the implicit understanding that things are not over, that the story isn't finished, and can never be finished.

However, when text-based historical knowledge is removed from the narrative and cognitive frame of historical practice and used within another field, it loses its impermanence and potential irony. The historical item taken out of its narrative setting to explain something else is stabilized, making it a building block for a different structure of explanation. This has been observed in the use of the written history within sociological explanation.


Steedman asserts that the first bourgeois individual was not an economic man but a domestic woman, born of conduct books, educational manuals, and possibly Samuel Richardson's pen.

She expresses concerns about the authenticity of Raymond Williams' account of culture in Marxism and Literature and Keywords. They argue that Williams' account may have been influenced by historical events, such as the sociology of the gendered reader, family and childcare, and the influence of Locke's text. They suggest that a program of reading and archive research could help identify the historicized subjectivity in the feminine and explore Freud's theory of human inwardness and interiority. The author believes that by 1995, the terms 'woman' and 'child' might be added to the schema, potentially leading to a more profound change in the account. They also question whether there is a connectedness to everything, suggesting that Williams may have never read Some Thoughts Concerning Education, as the ideas expressed in the book would be available from the historical air he breathed when writing about the late seventeenth century.

Carolyn Porter discusses the underlying formalism of critical practice in historical studies, focusing on the tendency of new historicists to use "riveting anecdotes" to explore texts and contexts. This technique reflects a principle of arbitrary connectedness, where any aspect of a society is related to any other. Dominick LaCapra criticizes social historians for their reliance on the concept of culture, where everything connects to everything else and "culture" is the primordial reality in which all historical actors have their being, do their thing, share discourses, worldviews, and languages.

The social historian's reliance on the notion of "culture" as the bottom line has its own history, as seen in the academy's elevation of nineteenth-century historians like Burkhardt and de Tocqueville to canonical status in the post-Second-World-War period. Cultural studies in Britain has intersected with these questions, revealing a more general social and institutional shaping of history and historical knowledge in Britain over the last thirty years. Cultural studies in Britain is nervous about codifying methods of knowledge and attempts at institutionalization, and is constantly repositioning subjects and defining themselves through autobiography and oral history.

Cultural studies in the UK has evolved from native texts and was institutionally established at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. However, the arrival of "structuralisms" disrupted this evolution. The teaching and learning forms in cultural studies degrees have been influenced by the culture concept in schools, which has played a role in organizing historical knowledge for young children and adolescents. The organization of historical knowledge in British cultural studies has been about questions of education, accommodation to learners, and the allure of certain teacher-student relationships.

The practice of history in university-based cultural studies began in the late 1960s, with the MA program at Birmingham. The center's Popular Memory Group struggled with history's empiricism and resistance to theory. The educational form within which they did their wrestling is inimical to conventional historical practice, particularly archive research. Archive research is expensive, time-consuming, and not practical for a group of people.

The textual approach used in these studies was inadequate, making no distinction between spoken and written language, not acknowledging language as a form of cognition and a process of development, and lacking strategies for analyzing literary form as a negotiated form. The most urgent need for history is an adequate model of both spoken and written language, and whether developed within historical studies or by students of cultural studies working on the past does not matter as much as the fact that it might be done.

The curriculum change in national education systems has been influenced by the establishment of English literature as the foundation of a national system of education between 1880 and 1920. This led to the reorganization of education in terms of cheapness and practicality, with accessible texts being the primary focus. However, the amount of history taught in British society has steadily diminished over the last thirty years. The cheapness and practicality of text-based historical inquiry can also be seen as a theoretical propriety. The last great flowering of English progressive education in schools in the 1970s was seen in both the English departments of secondary schools and the practice of integrated topic work in many primary schools. This flowering was seen in the breaking down of barriers between teachers and taught, common involvement in a common project, and the use of texts to make enquirers of them all. The practice of history in primary and lower forms of secondary schools has also been influenced by pedagogical forms.

The focus of cultural studies has shifted from Masters teaching to undergraduate degrees, with the need for historians to teach history. This shift is due to the institutional setting, alignment of humanities subjects under departmental reorganization in polytechnics, and the need for students to understand the interface of different knowledges brought together in undergraduate teaching. As a result, British cultural studies needs to consider its approach to history and the kind of historical thinking it will ask its students to perform.

In a dehistoricized intellectual world, all children in society will be taught exactly the same set of historical knowledges from the age of five to sixteen. British cultural studies may be able to achieve what history cannot, as the history of pedagogical practice and educational forms puts cultural studies in a position to do its own historiography. However, after conference days, cultural studies must ask questions about why they want history, what new acts of transference will items from the past help cultural studies perform, how it will be done and taught, whether there will be room for detailed historical work or rely on schematic and secondary sweeps through time.

Raymond Williams, 9. Typification and Homology (Marxism and Literature)

The concept of 'typicality' has been significant in nineteenth-century thought, with two general forms: the 'ideal' type, which is typically associated with heroes in literature and is a rendering of 'universals', which are permanently important elements of human nature and the human condition. This can be seen as distinct from religious, metaphysical, or idealist forms of thought, but can also be argued that permanent elements of the human social situation, always modified by specific historical situations, are 'typical' or 'universal' in a more secular sense.

A different emphasis on 'typicality' was made by Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov, which became influential in Marxism. The 'typical' is the fully 'characteristic' or fully'representative' character or situation, which concentrates and intensifies a much more general reality. This redefined the notion of'reflection' to reflect the essential or underlying or general reality as an intrinsic process rather than as a separated process in time.

The Marxist theory of art insisted that'social reality' is a dynamic process, and that it is this movement that is reflected by 'typification'. Art, by figurative means, typifies the elements and tendencies of reality that recur according to regular laws, although changing with the changing circumstances. This description of social reality as a dynamic process is a major advance, but there is a danger of reducing this theory to art as the typification (representation, illustration) not of the dynamic process but of its ('known') laws.

In metaphysical and idealist thought, a comparable theory had included recognition of the essential and indication of its desirable or inevitability according to the basic laws of reality. In Marxist theory, the concept of 'ideal type' took on connotations of the 'future man'. However, the concept of 'typicality' is confusing due to its variety.

The sense of 'typicality' most consistent with Marxism is that based on recognition of a constitutive and constituting process of social and historical reality, which is specifically expressed in some particular 'type'. This related movement, of recognition and means of specific expression, is one of the most commonerious senses of'mediation', despite its basic disadvantages. However, 'type' can still be understood in two radically different ways: as an emblematic example of a significant classification, or as the represenative example of a significant classification. This presupposition repeats the basic dualism of all theories centred on the concept of'reflection' or'mediation'.

In the later work of the Frankfurt School, other concepts were developed, including the strict notion of 'correspondences' and the radically new concept of 'homology'. Walter Benjamin used the term from Baudelaire to describe an experience which seeks to establish its own crisis-proof form within the realm of the ritual. His presence and authenticity can be recognized by what he called its 'aura', which can be held at a simple subjectivist level, or it can be moved towards the familiar abstractions of myth, collective unconscious, or creative imagination.

The Frankfurt School was developing the idea of 'dialectical images' as crystallizations of the historical process. This concept is very near one sense of 'fyp~'J gi~.in_gJl' new social and historical sense of 'emblenuitic' or'symbolic' art.

The idea of 'dialectical images' needs definition. Adorno complained that they were often in effect'reflections of social reality', reduced to'simple facticity'. He argued that 'dialectical images' are models not of social products but rather objective constellations in which the social condition represents itself. This argument depends on a distinction between 'the real social process' and the various fixed forms, in 'ideology' or'social products', which merely appear to represent or express it. The real social process is always mediated, and one of the positive forms of such mediation is the genuine 'dialectical image'.

There is still a problem in the description of all inherent and constitutive consciousness as'mediated', even when this mediation is recognized as itself inherent. Yet in other respects, this is a crucial step towards the recognition of art as a primary process.

Theoretically, correspondences are resemblances, in seemingly very different specific practices, which may be both direct and directly related expressions of and responses to a general social process. At another level, correspondences are neither resemblances nor analogies but displaced connections, as in Adorno's example of the negative relation between Viennese 'number games' and the backward state of Austrian material development, given its intellectual and technical capacities.

Homology is a concept that extends from a sense of correspondence in origin and development to a sense of corresponding forms or structures, which are the results of different kinds of analysis. It was developed in the life sciences and includes a radical distinction from 'analogy'. Homology is correspondence in origin and development, while analogy is in appearance and function. The related distinction between'structure' and 'function' is directly relevant, with a range from 'general homology' (the relation of an organ to a general type) through'serial homology' (related orders of connection) to'special homology' (the correspondence of a part of one organism to another part of another organism).

The radical distinction between variants of 'correspondence' and 'homology' in cultural analysis must be related to the fundamental theoretical distinctions that have already been examined. Both 'correspondence' and 'homology' can be modes of exploration and analysis of a social process, which is grasped from the beginning as a complex of specific but related activities. Selection is evidently involved, but there is no a priori distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the'social' and the 'cultural', the 'base' and the'superstructure'.

Both 'correspondence' and 'homology' can be in effect restatements of the base-superstructure model and the 'determinist' sense of determination. Analysis begins from a known structure of society or a known movement of history, and specific analysis then discovers examples of this movement or structure in cultural works. Or, where 'correspondence' seems to indicate too simple an idea of reflection, analysis is directed towards instances of formal or structural homology between a social order, its ideology, and its cultural forms.

Theoretically, the'social order' has to be given an initially structured form, and the most available form is 'ideology' or 'world-view', which is already evidently but abstractly structured. This procedure is repeated in the cultural analysis itself, as the homological analysis is now not of 'content' but of 'form', and the cultural process is not its active practices but its formal products or objects. The 'fit' or homology between 'ideology' and 'cultural object' is often striking and important, but it comes with a heavy price: first, in the procedural selectivity of historical and cultural evidence; second, in the understanding of contemporary cultural process. An alternative approach to the same problems can be found in the developing concept of 'hegemony'.

Edward Soja's "History, Geography, Modernity" (Summary)

The nineteenth-century obsession with history, as described by Foucault, has not fully been replaced by a spatialization of thought and experience. An essentially historical epistemology continues to pervade the critical consciousness of modern social theory, understanding the world primarily through the dynamics arising from the emplacement of social being and becoming in the interpretive contexts of time. This enduring epistemological presence has preserved a privileged place for the 'historical imagination' in defining the nature of critical insight and interpretation.

As we move closer to the end of the twentieth century, Foucault's premonitory observations on the emergence of an 'epoch of space' assume a more reasonable cast. The material and intellectual contexts of modern critical social theory have begun to shift dramatically, with calls for a far-reaching spatialization of the critical imagination. A distinctively postmodern and critical human geography is taking shape, brashly reasserting the interpretive significance of space in the historically privileged confines of contemporary critical thought.

New possibilities are being generated from this creative commingling, such as a simultaneously historical and geographical materialism, a triple dialectic of space, time, and social being, and a transformative re-theorization of the relations between history, geography, and modernity.

Postmodern critical human geography emerged in the late 1960s, but was largely ignored due to the reaffirmation of history over geography in Western Marxism and liberal social science. C. Wright Mills's sociological imagination provides a basis for spatializing the historical narrative and reinterpreting critical social theory. Mills argues that the sociological imagination is rooted in historical rationality, a concept that applies to critical social science and Marxism. He argues that individuals can understand their own experiences and fate by locating themselves within their period and becoming aware of the chances of all individuals in their circumstances. The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography, and their relations within society. Recognizing this task and promise is the mark of a classic social analyst.

The historical imagination, as described by Edward Soja, is a central aspect of critical social theory. It reduces meaning and action to the temporal constitution and experience of social being. This rationality is grounded in the intersections of history, biography, and society, and is shared by all social theories. The historical imagination is never completely spaceless, but it is always time and history that provide the primary "variable containers" in these geographies. Critical social theory has been particularly central to the search for practical understanding of the world as a means of emancipation versus maintenance of the status quo.

The development of critical social theory has revolved around the assertion of a mutable history against perspectives and practices that mystify the changeability of the world. The critical historical discourse sets itself against abstract and transhistorical universalizations, naturalisms, empiricals, positivisms, religious and ideological fatalisms, and any conceptualizations of the world that freeze the frangibility of time, the possibility of 'breaking' and remaking history.

Historicalism has been conventionally defined in several ways, including neutral, deliberate, and hostile. However, this definition identifies historicism as an overdeveloped historical contextualization of social life and social theory that actively submerges and peripheralizes the geographical or spatial imagination. This definition does not deny the extraordinary power and importance of historiography as a mode of emancipatory insight but identifies historicism with the creation of a critical silence, an implicit subordination of space to time that obscures geographical interpretations of the changeability of the social world.

Michel Foucault's contributions to critical human geography can be traced back to his historical insights, particularly in his lectures and interviews. He introduced the concept of 'heterotopias' as the characteristic spaces of the modern world, moving away from the hierarchical 'ensemble of places' of the Middle Ages and the enveloping'space of emplacement' opened up by Galileo. Foucault emphasized the importance of an external space, the lived and socially produced space of sites and their relations. These heterogeneous spaces are constituted in every society but take varied forms and change over time. He identified many such sites, such as the cemetery, church, theater, garden, museum, library, fairground, barracks, prison, Moslem Hamam, Scandinavian sauna, brothel, and colony. Foucault contrasts these'real places' with the 'fundamentally unreal spaces' of utopias, which present society in either a perfected form or turned upside down. The heterotopia can juxtapose in a single real place several incompatible spaces, either creating a space of illusion or creating a space that is other, as perfect as ours is messy and ill-constructed.
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Foucault's work argues against historicism and prevailing treatments of space in human sciences. He proposes a heterogeneous and relational space of heterotopias, which is neither a substanceless void nor a repository of physical forms. Foucault's innovative interpretation of space and time is influenced by structuralism, a critical reorientation that connects space and time in new and revealing ways. Structuralism aims to establish an ensemble of relations that make elements appear juxtaposed, set off against one another. This synchronic configuration is the spatialization of history, the making of history entwined with the social production of space. Foucault's spatialization of history was provocatively spatialized from the very start, opening up history to an interpretative geography. He emphasizes the centrality of space to the critical eye, especially regarding the contemporary moment. In an interview, Foucault reminisces about his exploration of 'Of other spaces' and the enraged reactions it engendered from those he once identified as the 'pious descendants of time'. He believes that space is fundamental in any form of communal life and any exercise of power.

Foucault's exploration of the "fatal intersection of time with space" in his writings is a reflection of his post-historicist and postmodern critical human geography. He was a historian who never abandoned his allegiance to the master identity of modern critical thought. Foucault had to admit that geography was always at the heart of his concerns, and this realization appeared in an interview with the editors of the French journal of radical geography, Herodote.

Foucault's argument takes a new turn, questioning the origins of the devaluation of space that has prevailed for generations. He takes an integrative rather than deconstructive path, holding onto his history but adding the crucial nexus of the linkage between space, knowledge, and power. For those who confuse history with the old schemas of evolution, living continuity, organic development, the progress of consciousness, or the project of existence, the use of spatial terms seems to have an air of an anti-history.

Foucault's spatializing description of discursive realities gives way to the analysis of related effects of power. In 'The Eye of Power', he restates his ecumenical project, stating that a whole history remains to be written of spaces, which would also be the history of powers, from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat. Foucault postpones a direct critique of historicism with an acute lateral glance, maintaining his spatializing project while preserving his historical stance.

Marshall Berman's book, All that Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, explores the reconfigurations of social life in capitalism over the past four hundred years. He defines modernity as a mode of vital experience, encompassing time, space, history, geography, sequence, and simultaneity. Modernity is comprised of both context and conjuncture, reflecting the specific and changing meanings of space, time, and being. Berman's work serves as a means of reinforcing debates on history and geography in critical social theory and defining the context and conjuncture of postmodernity. The spatial order of human existence arises from the social production of space, while the temporal order is concretized in the making of history. The social order of being-in-the-world revolves around the constitution of society, the production and reproduction of social relations, institutions, and practices.

The experience of modernity is shaped by the changing "culture of time and space" that took place from around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I. Technological innovations and independent cultural developments created new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space, leading to a transformation of life and thought dimensions. This expanded fin de siècle saw industrial capitalism survive its predicted demise through radical social and spatial restructuring, intensifying production relations and divisions of labor.

An altered culture of time and space emerged, restructuring historical geography and introducing ambitious new visions for the future. Both fin de siècle periods resonate with transformative socio-spatial processes, with a complex and conflictful dialogue between urgent socio-economic modernization sparked by systemwide crises affecting contemporary capitalist societies and a responsive cultural and political modernism aiming to make sense of material changes and gain control over their future directions.

Modernization is a continuous process of societal restructuring that is periodically accelerated to produce a significant recomposition of space-time-being in their concrete forms. For the past four hundred years, these dynamics have been predominantly capitalist, as has the nature and experience of modernity during that time. Modernization is unevenly developed across time and space, inscribes different historical geographies across different regional social formations, and has become systematically synchronic, affecting all predominantly capitalist societies simultaneously.

The last half of the twentieth century has followed a similar trajectory, with a prolonged expansionary period after the Second World War and an ongoing, crisis-filled era of attempted modernization and restructuring taking us toward the next fin de siècle.

 

 

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Acquinas and Metaphysics

 

Aquinas, explains the nature of metaphysics by distinguishing between two types of intellectual operations: speculative and practical. In speculative sciences, the intellect contemplates truth but does not apply it for practical purposes, leading to two distinct classes of science: speculative science and practical science.

The subject-matter of speculative sciences is that which can be understood to some extent. Aquinas believes that understanding something is dependent on its separation from matter and motion. This leads to three divisions of speculative objects: those dependent on matter and motion both for their being and understanding; those dependent on matter and motion for their being but not for their being understood; and those that depend on matter and motion neither for their being nor for their being understood.

Physical science considers these objects, while mathematics considers them but not for their being; and metaphysics or theology deals with those that depend on matter and motion neither for their being nor for their being. Aquinassees this division of the speculative sciences as exhaustive, as there could be no fourth speculative science since the subject-matter of such a science would have to be those things that depend on matter and motion for their being understood but not for their being.

Aquinas' metaphysics focuses on the third class of speculative objects, which includes things that depend on matter and motion. These objects are called positively immaterial, while neutrally immaterial are those that do not depend on matter and motion but can be found there. The neutrally immaterial can apply to both material and immaterial things.

Aquinas argues that unaided human reason cannot directly know the positively immaterial, as they outstrip human intellect's capacity to know. However, direct knowledge of the positively immaterial requires revelation. Metaphysics is a purely rational science, not dependent on revelations, and is a study of the neutrally immaterial aspects of things.

The proper subject-matter of metaphysics is ens commune (common being), which is the common aspects of being without which a thing could not be. Metaphysics primarily investigates the nature of essence and existence, which are generally applicable to all beings. After investigating essence and existence, the metaphysician must investigate the composition of substance and accident, and matter and form. The format of Thomistic metaphysics takes a dyadic structure of descending generality, focusing on essence and existence, substance and accident, and matter and form.

Aquinas's concept of essence is the definable nature of a thing that exists, signified by its definition. In finite entities, essence is that which has existence but is not existence. This is a fundamental metaphysical teaching that essence and existence are distinct in finite entities. Thomas's most famous and controversial instance is in De Ente et Essentia [On Being and Essence] Chapter Four, where he argues for a distinction between a thing's essence and its existence.

Aquinas takes the notion of universal hylemorphism as absurd, as it contradicts common philosophers' beliefs and contradicts the potency of immaterial substances. Instead, Aquinas argues that immaterial substances are composed of essence and existence, and it is the essence of the thing that accounts for the potentiality of creatures and distinguishes them from God.

Acquinas's argumentation for the distinction between essence and existence unfolds on three stages, with some commentators arguing that he intended and established the real distinction therein. Some argue that it is merely a logical distinction, while others focus on the distinction between the act of understanding a thing's essence and the act of knowing its existence.

Aquinas argues that a being whose essence is its existence would be unique and exist in a single absolute reality. This is evident from the way things can be multiplied, which can be in three ways: as a genus multiplied into its species, as a species multiplied into its individuals through being composed with matter, or as a thing is absolute and shared in by many particular things. Aquinasargues that a being whose essence is its existence cannot be multiplied in either of these ways, as it would not be subsistent but would be subsistent if it exists in virtue of what it is.

John Wippel argues that this is the decisive stage in establishing that essence and existence are really distinct. He argues that there cannot be more than one being whose essence is its existence, so there could not be many such beings in reality. Joseph Owens, on the other hand, argues that we cannot establish the real distinction until we have established that there is something whose essence is its existence. He argues that Aquinasestablishes the real distinction by comparing the existence of a being whose essence is its existence with the existence of finite entities, demonstrating that essence and existence are really distinct.

Aquinas’ metaphysical teachings on essence and existence are based on the idea that essence and existence are distinct concepts. He concludes that in immaterial substances, essence is related to existence as potency to act, which means that what receives existence stands in potency to the existence it receives. All things receive existence from the being whose essence is its existence, and the existence that any one finite thing possesses is an act of existence that actuates a corresponding potency: the essence.

Aquinas’ fundamental metaphysical teachings emphasize the importance of existence being efficiently caused in the essence/existence composite. He defines participation as taking part in something, which can happen in three ways: receiving universally relevant information, participating in accidents, or participating in its cause. Participation limits the nature of the thing in which it participates, as the participant will not possess the nature of the thing in which it participates in any total fashion but only in partial fashion.

Essences exist, but they do not exist essentially, participating in their acts of existence. Insofar as an essence participates in its act of existence, the essence limits that act of existence to the nature of the essence whose act it is. The act of existence is thus limited and individuated to the essence whose act it is, as the essence merely participates in and thereby limits the act of existence that it possesses.

Aquinas's metaphysical category of substance is primarily comprised of substances, which are essence/existence composites. Substances are basic entities that exist per se but are not identical with existence. The paradigm instances of substances are medium-sized objects like horses, cats, trees, and humans.

Accidents are incidental to substances and can only exist as part of some substance. In Aquinas's metaphysical framework, substances can be both material (cats, dogs, humans) and immaterial (angels). Material substances are composites of matter and form, and their parts cannot exist independently.

While parts of a substance are parts of a substance, they cannot themselves be substances. However, the elements out of which a substance is made can subsist beyond the dissolution of the substance. When the substance dissolves, the elements remain as independent substances in their own right.

In contemporary terms, atoms are substances in themselves before they form bodily substances, but when united in a certain form, they become substances in themselves. When the cat or dog or human perishes, its flesh and bones perish, but its atoms regain their substantial nature and remain as substances in themselves.

In conclusion, Aquinas's metaphysical framework focuses on the existence of substances and their relationships with their constituent parts. While parts of a substance cannot exist independently, they can be considered as substances in themselves when the substance decomposes.

Matter and form are fundamental concepts in physics, with matter being the substance from which a thing is made and form signified by its organization. A common example is a marble statue, where the marble is the material and the shape signifies the form. Form is the principle of potency in a thing, meaning it can be potentially an indefinite number of forms.

There are certain levels of matter/form composition, with the marble being the form and the marble being the matter. Prime matter, on the other hand, is the ultimate subject of form and indefinable. It is neither a substance nor any other categories of being, as it does not exist except as potency.

Matter can be considered in two senses: designated and undesignated. Designated matter is the type of matter to which one can point and make use, while undesignated matter is the abstracted notion of matter. Designated matter individuates some form, ensuring individuals of the same form (man).

Form can be substantial or accidental, with substantial form always informing prime matter and bringing a new substance into existence. Accidental form informs an already existing substance, modifying some substance. There can only be one substantial form of a thing, as any other form that may accrue to a thing is posterior to it and informs an already constituted substance.

 

Aquinas and Epistemology

Aquinas emphasized the importance of scientific knowledge (scientia) and the existence of non-scientific forms of knowledge, such as sense knowledge and knowledge of self-evident propositions. He compared faith and scientia as subjectively certain, with faith being grounded in compelling reasons and understanding why they compel belief. In contrast, scientia is grounded in rational belief that someone else has scientia or intellectual vision, such as divine faith.

For Aquinas, scientia is used analogously to science, which involves drawing conclusions from things we already know. He contrasts science as an act of inquiry with contemplation, which is a speculative activity with truth as its immediate object. Aquinas believes that scientific inquiry aims to discover a truth not already known, while contemplation aims to enjoy a truth already known.

Science can be seen as an act of inquiry and a strong argument for the truth of a proposition, known as a scientific demonstration. If a person possesses a scientific demonstration of a proposition, they understand an argument that is logically valid and knows with certainty that the premises are true.

Aquinas recognizes the Aristotelian sense of scientia as an intellectual habit or disposition that involves the possession of scientific demonstrations and knowledge about a subject matter. This habit is more than the fruit of inquiry and the possession of arguments; it involves knowing the basic facts, principles, causes, and logical connections between these facts. A person with a science of a subject has systematic and controlled knowledge, allowing them to speak about it with ease, coherence, clarity, and profundity.

Aquinas notes that the first principles of a science are sometimes naturally known by the scientist, but sacred theology does not fit this characterization of science. The first principles of sacred theology are articles of faith, not known by the natural light of reason but by the grace of God. However, contemporary philosophers of science would not find sacred theology's inability to fit neatly into a well-defined univocal conception of science a problem for its scientific status.

Sacred theology draws on principles known by those with a higher science, in this case, the science possessed by God and the blessed. Despite not being known by the natural light of reason, sacred theology is still a science, as those who possess such a science can draw logical conclusions from the articles of faith, argue that one article of faith is logically consistent with other articles of faith, and answer objections to the articles of faith.

Aquinas' understanding of science is more restrictive than contemporary notions, as he believes that we know something scientifically only if our knowledge of it is certain. This is based on demonstrative knowledge, which begins from premises we know with certainty by way of reflection upon sense experience. However, modern notions of science often make claims of science fallible and uncertain.

In his philosophy of science, Aquinas believes that the most capacious scientific account of a physical object or event involves mentioning its four causes: efficient, material, formal, and final causes. He believes that material objects, whether natural or artificial, have four causes: material cause (what O is made of), formal cause (what O is), final cause (what the end, goal, purpose, or function of O is), and efficient cause (what brings or conserves O in(to) being).

The Efficient Cause is a being that acts to bring or conserve a feature F in x. Aquinas thinks that there are different kinds of efficient causes, such as God being the primary efficient cause of any created being and creatures being secondary efficient causes. God is the primary efficient cause as creator ex nihilo, while creatures are secondary efficient causes in the sense that they work on pre-existing matter such that matter that is merely potentially F actually becomes F.

In conclusion, Aquinas' philosophy of science is more restrictive than contemporary notions, but it is still a valuable perspective on the nature of knowledge and the role of the four causes in understanding and addressing the world.

Aquinas's concept of "material cause" is crucial for understanding change and the subject of change. He believes that the material cause for a substantial change is prima materia (prime or first matter), which is the intrinsic cause of a substance that can undergo substantial change. Aquinas believes that substances are unified objects of the highest order, and if substantial changes had actual substances functioning as the ultimate subjects, then it would be reasonable to question the substantial existence of those substances.

Prime matter is the ultimate material cause of a substance that can undergo substantial change, and it never exists without being configured by some form. Matter always exists under dimensions, and this prime matter is configured by the accidental form of quantity, specifically the accidental quantity of existing in three dimensions. It is never the case that some prime matter exists without being configured by some substantial form.

The theoretical significance of the view that material substances are composed of prime matter as a part is that prime matter is the material causal explanation of the fact that a material substance's generation and potential corruption are changes that are real, substantial, natural, and intelligible. For example, a quantity of prime matter might be configured by the substantial form of an insect, living cells, chemical compounds, or incorporated into the body of a frog.

Aquinas's formal cause can be understood in three ways: the nature or definition of a thing, intrinsic to or inheres in a substance, and the pattern or definition of a thing insofar as it exists in the mind of the maker. He believes that all substances have final causes, but not all substances have functions.

For Aquinas, the formal cause of a substance is the end, goal, purpose, or function of the object. For example, a knife has the function of cutting, while the heart has the purpose of pumping blood. Aquinas thinks that all substances have final causes, but not all final causes are functions. For example, clouds do have final causes, but not in the same way as artifacts or parts of organic wholes.

In the broadest sense, the final cause of an object is an inclination or tendency to act in a certain way, bringing about a certain range of effects. For example, a knife is something that tends to cut, and a cloud is a substance that tends to interact with other substances in the atmosphere in certain ways.

In summary, Aquinas' formal cause can be understood in three ways: the nature or definition of a thing, the intrinsic form of a substance, and the final cause of an object.

Aquinas' philosophical psychology focuses on the final cause, which is the cause of all causes. He believes that an object's tendency to act in a certain way requires a certain formal cause, such as being a thing of a certain kind and composed of certain sorts of stuffs and organs. Some final causes are intrinsic, meaning that every substance tends to act in a certain way, given its nature. However, some final causes are extrinsic, meaning that an object acts as an efficient cause of an effect partly due to the final causality of an object extrinsic to it.

Aquinas also recognizes different kinds of knowledge, such as sense knowledge, knowledge of individuals, scientia, and faith. For Aquinas, scientia is the ability to understand an argument that is logically valid and knows the premises of the argument with certainty. He believes that reasoning, the act of drawing a logically valid conclusion from other propositions, is one of the sources of scientia.

To come to know the premises of a demonstration with certainty, Aquinas thinks that various powers and operations are necessary. He agrees with Aristotle that intellectual powers differ from the sensitive powers such as the five senses and imagination. However, Aquinas also believes that all human knowledge begins with sensation, and even our knowledge of God begins with what we know of the material world.

Aquinas argues that a comprehensive account of human cognition requires mentioning various interior senses as preambles to proper intellectual activity. Perfect animals, such as horses and oxen, must have a faculty that senses whether they are sensing and unifies the distinct sensations of the various sense faculties. This faculty is called common sense, and humans also possess this faculty.

In addition to common sense, Aquinas argues that we need phantasy or imagination to explain our experience of the cognitive life of animals, including humans. Perfect animals sometimes move themselves to a potential food source, and therefore, they need to imagine things they have never cognized by the exterior senses. The faculty of imagination is distinct from the exterior senses and the common sense, and humans are capable of imagining objects they have never cognized by the exterior senses.

To explain the behavior of perfect animals, we need to posit two additional powers: the estimative power, which perceives certain cognitions instinctively, and the memorative power, which retains cognitions produced by the estimative power. The presence of intellect in humans transforms the nature of these powers, with the estimative power being called the cogitative power and the memorative power called the reminiscitive power.

The cogitative power enables humans to make an individual thing, event, or phenomenon an object of thought, while the reminiscitive power helps us remember intellectual cognitions about individual objects.

 

Gayatri Spivak, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Culture Studi...

Spivak begins her essay “scattered speculations on the question of cultural studies” by discussing the appropriation of ecology by dominant discourse on environmental issues, in the First World. She argues that the existing paradigm favors the North and the elites of the South, leading to rural ecological problems being perceived as peripheral and precapitalist. The author also discusses the expansion of the subjectship of Capital, which can lead to self-perpetuating discourse at the mercy of forces of reaction.

Spivak shares stories from Bangladesh, where the rehabilitation of disenfranchized migrants would help forge links with the bottom layers of society in postcolonial countries. However, she disagrees with this view, arguing that the trajectories of the Eurocentric migrant poor and the postcolonial rural poor are discontinuous and may be opposed through the chain-linkage that we are encouraged to ignore.

Spivak emphasizes the importance of examining the appropriation of ecology by the dominant discourse on environmental issues. By critiquing development ideology and the marginalization of the rural subaltern, we can better understand the complex relationship between the migrant poor and the postcolonial rural poor. By acknowledging the risks associated with these narratives, we can work towards a more inclusive and critical understanding of the complexities of globalization and the struggles of the marginalized.

The text explores the concept of the Constitution as an instrument of higher lawmaking through Popular Mandate, arguing that constitutional victory operates within a calculus that does not correspond to the possibility or guarantee of justice in the name of any personalized picture of a collection of subjects called "We the People." A constitution can only operate when the person has been coded into rational abstractions manipulable according to the principle of reason. The narrative guarantee of justice in the name of a collection of subjects is perennially offered as legitimation to the people who will secure the "Popular Mandate." The authority behind this narrative legitimation is secured with reference to an origin-story: the original documents left by the Founding Federalists, Reconstruction Republicans, and New Deal Democrats.

The author suggests that an innovative and flexible text for use such as the US Constitution can only be given what Jean-François Lyotard has called a paralogical legitimation, which provides occasion for morphogenetic innovation. However, the more accurate guarantee, not of justice as the expression of a general will of We the People but of a persistent critique of originary legitimations, by the very people who supply the Popular Mandate for the electoral machinery, can be precariously fabricated if the paralogical is kept in mind.

Transnational Culture Studies aims to understand the complex relationship between Europe and America in the context of national discourse. By examining the Ottoman Empire, one can see parallel but highly differentiated formations developing in Mediterranean and Western Europe, and the Ottoman Empire on the other hand. Contemporary scholars argue that the economic formations of late eighteenth-century Western Europe began to shift the balance within the Ottoman Empire, leading to religious nationalism and a "failed originary moment" in the United States and India.

The author discusses the rise of nationalism in the West, focusing on secularism without moralistic fervor and the impact of world trade on the region's discursive formation. They argue that the contingency in the narrativeization of history should not be interpreted as the Laws of Motion of History, but rather as a contrast between the circumstances contingent upon two great monotheisms – Christianity and Islam – in the possibility of their reinscription as secularism.

The Khilafat movement in India (1918-25) was an anti-imperialist nationalist attempt at consolidating the minority rights of Islam in India. In the sphere of decolonization, European-style nationalism was on the agenda. The Khilafat movement supported the rise of Mustafa Kemal, the creator of'modern Turkey', but it was abolished by Kemal's Constitution in early 1924. For the Indians, after a negotiated Independence in 1947, Western European codes and English Common Law offered models of origin.

In the Turkish case, a simulated alien origin or source appears politically and philosophically cognizable, facing a terrain reterritorialized in response to the global release of industrial capital. The ideological vision of a Turkish 'nation' now effaces the incessantly negotiated multinationality that was the Ottoman Empire because that can no longer be recognized as multi-nationality.
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Spivak focuses on the 'free Turk', arguing that the good people of these Colonies in whose name the representatives sign the American Declaration of Independence do not strictly speaking exist. However, they are required to produce the authority for a Declaration which gives them being. This undecidability between a performative structure and a constative structure is required to produce the sought-after effect.

The distinction between the US and Turkish cases lies in the area of the origin from which the new nation separates itself. The Turkish Constitution separates itself from its own past, or rather it secures a separation already inaugurated by the Ottoman Constitution of 1876.

Culture studies must constantly risk (though not flaunt) a loss of specialism, as the idea that the founding of agency is seen as the birth of a new man or woman, celebrating political independence, comes to be seen as an end in itself.

The debate over the teaching of the canon is crucial as there cannot be a general theory of canons. Canons are the condition of institutions and the effect of institutions, and they secure institutions as institutions secure canons. The canon, such as the Bible, provides a clear-cut example of this. To canonize new entries into the canon, single-author courses must be removed from the English major curriculum and make room for the co-ordinated teaching of the new entries.

The matter of the literary canon is actually a political matter: securing authority. In order to secure authority, we sometimes have to engage in scrupulous versions of 'doctrinaire gesture polities'. However, in the double-take that the daily administration of that authority entails, there can be no 'knowledge' in political practice. Political practice involves the calculation of effect, possibilities, and results of political action, which rests on political relations within the institutional network of United States tertiary education.

The text explores the literature of gender, sexuality, and homosexuality in the context of the American literary canon, highlighting the importance of understanding the diverse range of writers, including women, women of color, gays, lesbians, Afro-America, immigrants, ethnicity, working-class literature, workingclass women, non-Western literature, and theory. The author argues that there is no shortage of material for studying the literature of gender-differentiated homosexuality in the canon, as it continues to complicate and supplement the network of literary production.

The restoration and insertion of the white-majority feminist canon is a matter of correcting and altering the established image-structure line of representation, as if it restrained the garment of the body politic. The literature of slavery, struggle, freedom, and social production is different from the narratives of migrant ethnicity inscribed on the body of something called "America."

The author warns against the undergraduate teaching of post-structuralism, arguing that it breeds recuperative analogies or preprogrammed hostility toward post-structuralism within the institutional calculus. Instead, the text suggests returning to the English major, excited about learning to read the diversity of the new canon: women's literature, black women's literature, Afro-America, gendered homosexuality, migrant ethnicity, and the exploited in struggle.

The author argues that the old canon has sometimes unintentionally made the straight white Christian man of property the ethical universal. To challenge this, the author suggests that doctoral students should be educated in theory and the use of theory in educating educators. The goal is not only to expand the canon with a counter-canon but also to dethrone canonical methods in literary criticism and social production.

The author suggests that a general acquaintance with world literature outside of Europe should be part of the general undergraduate requirement, and a one-semester senior seminar should be shared with the terminal MA to share the difficulties and triumphs of translation in Asian, Latin American, Pacific, and African studies. This would fill out an English major better by understanding the limits of the language.

The author warns that the institutional imperatives for breaching the imperium of English cannot be fully developed within English departments. Institutes and curricula for a historically sophisticated transnational study of culture have become an item on the agenda, helping to undo disciplinary boundaries and clear a space for study in a constructive way.

Cultural studies focuses on the negotiation between national, global, historical, and contemporary diasporic aspects. It is essential to anthropologize the West and study the various cultural systems of Africa, Asia, Asia Pacific, and the Americas as if peopled by historical agents.

To teach culture studies, it is crucial to move from high tech to humanism and learn and teach how to distinguish between "internal colonization" and the various different heritages or operations of colonization in the rest of the world. The new culture studies must displace this opposition by keeping nation and globe distinct and taking a moratorium on cultural supremacy as an unquestioned springboard.

Educators must educate themselves in effective interdisciplinary teaching, asking questions about how models of reasoning can be taken as culture-free, help and explanation can be both culture-specific and objective, and how these questions can remain relevant across disciplines.