The specific intellectual's pivotal position: action, compassion and thinking in administrative society, an Arendtian view
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Political action is frequently conceptualised as starting from the ground up. Plausible as this point may be, it pays insufficient attention to well‐established arguments that we inhabit administrative society, implicitly contrasted against political society, with technocrats operating the requisite power/knowledge grid away from the street. Like Foucault's ‘specific intellectuals’, technocrats work in pivotal positions in apparatuses of population regulation, but nevertheless can potentially recognise the plight of the marginalised ‘masses’ as they themselves are also alienated subject‐objects of population regulation. This article draws on a range of ethnographic encounters with technocrats working in diverse areas of migration management in the European Union to prompt an examination of the historical and social conditions that impede, and often render unthinkable, direct engagement between technocrats and the migrants whom they are paid to regulate. The article draws explicitly on Hannah Arendt's work on the , compassion, thinking, judging and revolution (1) to explain how the apparatus's systemic isolation of both its policy experts and policy targets impedes political action and (2) to identify a form of ethnographic engagement that might help to overcome it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.173 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".