Review of Eklundh, Zevnik, and Guittet's Politics of Anxiety
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nightly news, social media feeds, and everyday conversations are sources of anxiety that pervade our individual, social, and political worlds.Recently, we hear of increasing tensions between the United States and North Korea, for example, or texts sent in error alerting the public of incoming ballistic missiles.The anxiety produced by such events permeates all of society, from individual psyches to institutional, state, and global entities.While anxiety is not a new phenomenon, anxiety has increasingly become a tool that can be used for political purposes and political ends.Politics of Anxiety, a collection edited by Emmy Eklundh, Andreja Zevnik, and Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet focuses on how anxiety today is different from political uncertainty and how the logic of anxiety may help to unravel and reveal aspects of contemporary politics.The editors divide the contributions into three main parts: Part I, Politicising Anxiety; Part II, Security: Control; and Part III, Resistance: Reclaiming.Part IV, Epilogue, concludes the volume.The editors' introduction to the collection explains that anxiety has replaced risk as the primary "logic of operation" through which individuals, corporations, and governments operate.Unlike the logic of risk and the risk society, which anticipates a particular type of future depending upon the actions taken today, with anticipation based on fear, the editors explain that anxiety is instead the outcome of recognizing that given the gravity of immediate threats and the realization that institutions do not know how to offer security, there may be no future.There are two primary logics of anxiety-the logic of security and the logic of resistance.The logic of security is premised on, as the editors note, "the excessive present."By this they mean that anxiety fuels the notion that present threats need only to be identified and will reveal themselves if appropriate efforts are made today to reveal them.An example is the analysis of big data and the idea that threats can be identified if enough data is gathered and manipulated.The often unreachable quest is to secure the present in order to secure a particular kind of future.At the same time, anxiety is also characterised by a logic of resistance.The logic of resistance works as the public begins to recognize and appreciate that governing bodies do not know how to provide security, nor can they even identify threats in the first place.From this recognition the seeds of resistance may be planted and may provide opportunity to use anxiety to resist government involvement, creating new understandings of the present through protest and "delegitimi[zing] the political elites" (9).Part I, Politicising Anxiety, begins with an examination of the theoretical underpinnings of what anxiety is and how it is significant for political and social life.The chapter by Burgess provides a fascinating examination of the Lacanian psychoanalytic conception of anxiety and how the new age of anxiety "alters
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".