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Record W1643097411 · doi:10.3138/topia.22.179

The Virus of Fear and the Politics of Globalization

2010· article· en· W1643097411 on OpenAlex
Mark Featherstone

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueTOPIA Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPolitical Theory and Influence
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsUtopiaModernityPoliticsAestheticsCapitalismNihilismLiberalismPhilosophyPsychoanalysisSociologyPolitical scienceLawEpistemologyPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Tocqueville employed the notion of the virus to describe the strange process that led the utopian ambitions of the French revolution to collapse into bloody terror. I use this idea to trace the history of the relationship between utopia, dystopia and the virus of fear. Following discussion of Tocqueville’s notion and its connection to the modern event par excellence, I examine the origin of ancient modernity in Herotodus’s Histories. I show that anxiety, fear and paranoia were embedded in the normal symbolic order of capitalism from the beginning and suggest that the modern version of Platonic communism expressed by Rousseau, Marx and Engels, and realized by Robespierre, Lenin and Stalin, was fated to produce nightmarish totalitarianisms because of the ways it reacted to the radical collapse of European totalitarianisms and the rise of American liberalism in the post-Second World War neoliberal utopia of fear, which suggests that radical anxiety is a condition to be embraced. New fundamentalisms reflect the emergence of new conservative utopias: psycho-social reaction-formations meant to resolve the anxiety of global insecurity. Throughout the paper I hold onto Tocqueville’s metaphor of the virus to suggest that the fear of otherness has always been at the heart of efforts to control radical anxiety.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.552
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.327
Teacher spread0.302 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it