Subhumanism: The re‐emergence of an affective‐symbolic ontology in the migration debate and beyond
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A critical analysis of social behavior proposes that the contempt for immigrants, refugees, or asylum seekers around the world is explicitly or implicitly powered by an ontology of the subhuman, a term that was used in early 20 th century American race and eugenic theory, as well as in fascist Germany, to describe and justify the mistreatment of minorities or perceived enemies. “Migrants” are not afforded the same rights and respect as other people, because they are not conceived as real humans, and their subhuman status allows them to be understood as criminals, degenerates, and even parasites, which are infesting the orderly body of the nation. Subhuman theory works with affects rather than with theoretical analyses, with visualizations and imaginations instead of intellectual concepts, and with a normalized, manufactured common sense. It is argued that at the core of the subhuman lies the idea of chaos, unhealthy appearance, and disorderly behavior, from which humanity is removed. Discussed are processes of subhumanization, the relationship between subhumanism and racism as well as fascism, and the dialectics between the particular and the general, which proposes a shared world for all humans. It is suggested that psychological concepts are limited, and that political, legal, and resisting action is required to combat the re‐emergence of a normalized ontology.
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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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".