By David Pan · Monday, June 17, 2019 Telos 187 (Summer 2019) is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 After a modern era of technological progress that has led humans to believe in their increasing ability to control nature, we are reaching a point at which this power on a small scale has given way to increasing uncertainty and uncontrollability on the large scale. Not only are the specific effects of climate change difficult to predict and control, the only mechanisms available for such control—agreement and cooperation across national and cultural divides—are not the stuff of engineering but of politics. So with every technological advance that promises to bring us more control over our lives, we as a species are facing ever greater risks and uncertainties. The question concerning technology has become the unpredictability and uncontrollability of its development itself. The key difficulty is a problem of a tension between community or national interests and species-wide interests. While there might be an ethical imperative on a species-wide level to exercise self-restraint in pursuing dangerous technologies such as nuclear weapons, gene manipulation, or coal-fired power plants, such self-restraint could very well lead to the decline or even annihilation of the group that exercises it. The path forward will not be revealed by new technological advances, which can easily create more problems than they solve, but through the development of new ethical, political, and affective frameworks by which people understand themselves and their connections to the rest of the world. This issue of Telos, devoted to Carl Schmitt and the critique of technical rationality, investigates the ways in which Schmitt’s critique moved him toward ways of considering law, politics, and human history as fundamentally uncertain movements, requiring strategies that accept such unpredictability even as we try to intervene in our historical development as a species.
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By Peter C. Herman · Friday, May 11, 2018 In the April 12, 2018, issue of Art Journal, the editor, Rebecca Brown, introduces a work of art (really, a computer program), called CitationBomb by Zach Kailer, intended to create a kind of “denial of service” attack on Google Scholar: “The more users do this, the more Google Scholar will become overflowed with citations. This will make it difficult for the algorithms to make sense of influence or impact.” The overall point is to “devalue scholarly metrics” as they represent in small the horrors of the neoliberal university. As Brown puts it, “what numerical value applies to achieving the arc of a compelling paragraph? [It makes] manifest the un-usefulness of analytics . . . its profound, destructive force.”
Why are “analytics” so destructive? Kaiser explains that Google Scholar incentives “clickbait scholarship.” Meaning, since Google Scholar puts first the books or articles that get the most citations, this leads to a “winner take all” situation with scholarship. Only the articles that are cited often get cited at all, leaving all the other scholars in the dust.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, April 5, 2018 Cary Nelson and Telos editor, Russell Berman, respond to Saree Makdisi and raise broader questions about the contemporary humanities. Read their essay at Fathom.
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By Cary Nelson · Wednesday, December 20, 2017 The large room at the Marriott Wardman Park was filled to overflowing on Sunday afternoon for a special session billed as “Thinking Palestine Intersectionally.” The seats were occupied and scores of others stood along the walls, sat on the floor in front of the stage, and spilled out into the hallway. For many it was clearly the highlight of The Middle East Studies Association’s November 2017 annual meeting of faculty and graduate students, held in Washington, DC. Perhaps 500 people were present to hear Noura Erakat, Judith Butler, Samera Esmeir, and Angela Davis be hailed as symbolic conquerors of the Jewish state. “The peace process is over,” Erakat began, and then affirmed “the entwinement of our liberation,” offering her own take on intersectionality. The real reason the United States blocked the “Zionism is racism” framework, she declared was “to prevent itself from having to pay reparations for slavery,” a claim that would have surprised the very people who fought against the 1975 UN resolution. The days of progressive advocacy “except for Palestine are over,” she concluded. It is time “to bar supporters of Israel from feminist movements.” Even this last agenda item, a call to cast out the female devils in our midst, met with loud applause.
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By Telos Press · Wednesday, October 5, 2016 “Incidentally, I notice that our professors, trying to show off to their students, rant and rail against the state and against law and order, while expecting that same state to punctually pay their salaries, pensions, and family allowances, so that they value at least this kind of law and order. Make a fist with the left hand and open the right hand receptively—that is how one gets through life.”
—Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
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By Cary Nelson · Tuesday, September 27, 2016 Debates about the status of academic freedom in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank have for years focused almost exclusively on claims about the negative impact particular Israeli government and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) policies and practices have had on Palestinian students and faculty. Largely ignored, especially as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) levels accusations against Israel and promotes boycott and divestment resolutions directed against the Jewish state, has been the broader character of academic freedom on Palestinian campuses. Indeed there is little evidence that most students and faculty in the West know what the major threats to academic freedom in Gaza and the West Bank are, let alone who is responsible for carrying them out.
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