What is Left for Critique? On the Perils of Innocence in Neoliberal Times
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay explores the implications of what we call attachments to innocence for critical scholarship and progressive politics. After tracing the appearance of innocence in various strands of contemporary thought, we turn to how it shields individuals and groups from examining the depth of our own participation in oppression and harm. This evasion of responsibility works in our perspective as a hindrance to understanding power and engaging with others ethically. The essay more concretely examines how the reductionist and authoritarian dimensions of innocence dovetail with the neoliberal uptake of ‘progressive’ politics in university and activist settings. We are interested in how academics and activists of different kinds are rewarded for cultivating their innocent-selves through discursive and material interventions that leave power relations untouched. It is not merely monetary or status rewards that perpetuate this, but the crisis produced by our implication in the very violence we reject. Working with and through the mobility of agency, power, abuse, and justice, we explore what is at stake in shedding our attachments to innocence in the hope of a different sort of encounter – one that proceeds from the recognition that innocence is not a precondition for our engagement in political life.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.180 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".