Steen Nepper Larsen

Resistance, Politics, Space, Architecture: Interview with Nigel Thrift

This interview was conducted in Copenhagen on January 23rd 2010 after Professor Nigel Thrifts keynote lecture on ‘Life World Inc.’, delivered at the Danish Sociological Congress. The interview takes as its starting point Professor Thrifts lecture but soon moves on to a broader discussion of resistance, politics, space, and architecture, among other things.

Critical Notice: Michael Tomasello on the "Prosocial" Human Animal

Abstract According to Michael Tomasello humans cannot help but be informative. Apes, like chimps, do not point at each other, only humans do so in order to attract attention, that is, to (get) help, play and share experiences. In shared cooperative activities, individual rationality is transformed into social rationality. A feeling of ‘we-ness’ is being born, a ‘we’ intentionality. It is Tomasello’s claim that in shared cooperative activities, the collaborators must first all be mutually responsive to each other’s intentional states. In The Cultural Origins of Human Cognitionhe states that human infants are very social from the moment they are born, if not before, and that intention reading and human beings’ inborn capability to identify with conspecifics are the clues to the unique human interaction and joint attention. The four theses of this article are: (1) the idea of the prosocial nature of the infant lacks convincing arguments; (2) Tomasello reflects and honours the zeitgeist(that is, the hope that we will see a scientific shift away from predominant methodological individualism towards more ‘social’ and ‘emphatic’- oriented approach); (3) his concepts of language as a tool and linguistic interaction as a derived form of pointing gestures are very limited; and (4) he underestimates the power and ‘nature’ of unforeseen events. Social synchronisation creates the possibility for joint attention and not intention reading. New forms of social interaction do notspring from cognitive intention reading processes insidethe brain. Humans have certain biological predispositions, but they cannot explain joint attention patterns.

A Critical Essay on the Exercise of Critique: On the Impossibility of Reconciling Ontology and Epistemology

Ontology and epistemology will never be reconciled, this article argues. There is widespread opinion among scientists and laymen alike that we are standing at the threshold of a fusion and reconciliation of ontology (being, what the world is) and epistemology (acknowledgement theory, how the world is). But my thesis is that this will never happen – and my argument can be read as a credo for non-identity. The tensions between being and thinking are here to stay, and this philosophical ‘position’ has a wide range of implications for politics, education, Bildung and thinking. Strongly rooted in Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno’s philosophy, it is claimed that he was right in emphasizing that the non-identical must be honored, defended and emancipated. The vivid dream is that conceptual work opens and ‘dignifies’ the non-identical, while the non-identical ‘longs for’ conceptual assistance so it can come to exist among us.

Top-Down University Governance Eradicates Thinking and Good Teaching1

The raison d’etre of the university is threatened. Allegedly, the political system believes that the main objective of higher education can be reduced to the remuneration of the production of an employable workforce in the shortest possible time and at the lowest possible cost.2