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“THE ANALOGY OF THE CLOSED UNIVERSE: I shall now seek to characterize epistemic cultures more systematically, switching from laboratories to laboratory processes and to the ways different sciences understand and enact empirical research. I want to begin with high energy physics; the chapter examines the observable order of HEP’s research policies as these are displayed in physicists’ experimental activities, in their meetings, in their explanations to me, and in their conversations.

When defining laboratories I said that the empirical machinery of HEP is a sign-processing machinery. It moves in the shadowland of mechanically, electrically, and electronically produced negative images of the world––in a world of signs and often fictional reflections, of echoes, footprints, and the shimmering appearances of bygone events. In what follows I show how this world that is marked by a loss of the empirical operates in terms of a negative and reflexive epistemics (the notion of epistemics is used here to refer to the strategies and practices assumed to promote the “truth-like” character of results). An analogy appropriately describes the “truth-finding” strategies of experimental HEP, which I want to present up front. This is the analogy of the brain as an informationally closed system, The neurophysiology of cognition is based on theories developed in the nineteenth century proposing that states of arousal in a nerve cell in the brain represent only the intensity but not the nature of the source of arousal…”

-Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures

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”The idea of reflexivity has much to offer to the analysis of taste – but reflexivity in its ancient sense, a form neither active nor passive, pointing to an originary state where things, persons, and events have just arrived, with no action, subject or objects yet decided. Objects of taste are not present, inert, available and at our service. They give themselves up, they shy away, they impose themselves. ‘Amateurs’ do not believe things have taste. On the contrary, they make themselves detect them, through a continuous elaboration of procedures that put taste to the test. Understood as reflexive work performed on one’s own attachments, the amateur’s taste is no longer considered (as with so-called ‘critical’ sociology) an arbitrary election which has to be explained by hidden social causes. Rather, it is a collective technique, whose analysis helps us to understand the ways we make ourselves sensitized, to things, to ourselves, to situations and to moments, while simultaneously controlling how those feelings might be shared and discussed with others.”

Antoine Hennion, “Those Things that Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology,” Soc 420, Sociology of Culture

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In the case of the stranger, the union of closeness and remoteness involved in every human relationship is patterned in a way that may be succinctly formulated as follows: the distance within the relation indicates that one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near.

Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” Soc 406, Classical Theory

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In short, Foucault’s discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes. It is there that its strength and its seduction lie, and not at all in its “truth index,” which is only its leitmotive: these procedures of truth are of no importance, for Foucault’s discourse is no truer than any other. No, its strength and its seduction are in the analysis which unwinds the subtle meanderings of its object, describing it with a tactile and tactical exactness, where seduction feeds analytical force and where language itself gives birth to the operation of new powers. Such also is the operation of myth, right down to the symbolic effectiveness described by Lévi-Strauss. Foucault’s is not therefore a discourse of truth but a mythic discourse in the strong sense of the word, and I secretly believe that it has no illusions about the effect of truth it produces. That, by the way, is what is missing in those who follow in Foucault’s footsteps and pass right by this mythic arrangement to end up with the truth, nothing but the truth. 

-Jean Baudrillard, ‘Forget Foucault,’ Phil 315 ‘Reading Foucault’

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“By Karl Marx’s account, society can be explained through a description of material conditions that pit the interests of those in power against the interests of those without power. Integral to Marxist philosophy is a fundamental opposition between capitalists and wage workers within the capitalist mode of production that systematically dominates laborers and alienates them from the products of their own labor through technological advances, market competition, and the need to increase surplus value within the capital/labor/commodity circuit. The labor power of wage workers is purchased by capitalists, who then use the bodies of those workers to augment the means of production until commodities are produced. In this system the value of a commodity is a measure of the labor that went into making it. If all goes as the capitalist plans, however, commodities are sold at a price high enough to both pay the workers and yield surplus value. Through this oppressive system, the worker is alienated from both the fruits of his own labor and from his relationship to the natural world. (Marx, 1847).”

-Joseph, paper for Soc 406, Classical Theory.

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“The fact that in the development of the productive powers of labour the objective conditions of labour, objectified labour, must grow relative to living labour––this is actually a tautological statement, for what else does growing productive power of labour mean than that less immediate labour is required to create a greater product, and that therefore social wealth expresses itself more and more in the conditions of labour created by labour itself?––this fact appears from the standpoint of capital not in such a way that one of the moments of social activity—objective labor—becomes the ever more powerful body of the other moment, of subjective, living labour, but rather—and this is important for wage labour—that the objective conditions of labour assume an ever more colossal independence, represented by its very extent, opposite living labour, and that social wealth confront labour in more powerful portions as an alien and dominant power.”

Karl Marx, “Capitalism, Alienation, and Communism,” from The Grundrisse
Soc 406, Classical Theory

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“Under the terms of the current contractual agreement, Burger Queen (BQ) is entitled to 20 percent of the revenue earned by each of its franchises. BQ’s best-selling item is the Slopper (it slops out of the bun). BQ supplies the ingredients for the Slopper (bun, mystery meat, etc.) at cost to the franchise. The franchisee’s average cost per Slopper (including ingredients, labor, cost and so on) is $.80. At a particular franchise restaurant, weekly demand for Sloppers is given by P=3.00-Q/800.

a. If BQ sets the price and weekly sales quantity of Sloppers, what quantity and price will it set? How much does BQ receive? What is the franchisee’s net profit?

b. Suppose the franchise owner sets the price and sales quantity. What price and quantity will the owner set? (Hint: Remember that the owner keeps only $.80 or each extra dollar of revenue earned.) How does the total profit earned by the two parties compare to their total profit in part (a)?…”

-Managerial Economics 6th Ed., Samuelson and Marks

Managerial Economics

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“By means of structure, what representation provides in a confused and simultaneous form is analyzed and thereby rendered suitable to the linear unwinding of language. In effect, description is to the object one looks at what the proposition is to the representation it expresses: its arrangement is a series, elements succeeding elements. But it will be remembered that language in its empirical form implied a theory of the proposition and a theory of articulation. In itself, the proposition remained empty; and the ability of articulation to give form to authentic discourse was conditional upon its being linked together by the patent or secret function of the verb ‘to be.’”

-Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
Philosophy 315: ‘Reading Foucault’