Suchergebnisse

The Will to Predict -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations -- Note on Translation and Transliteration -- Introduction -- 1. What Is Scientific Prediction? -- 2. Visibility, Transparency, and Prediction -- 3. Cybernetic Prediction and Late Modern Governance -- 4. Forecasting and the Cybernetic Sensibility -- 5. Prediction and the Opaque: Prospective Reflexivity -- 6. Reflexive Control -- 7. Global Prediction: From Targeting to Orchestration -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.

The Power of Systems -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: The Rise of System-Cybernetic Governmentality -- 1. Gray Eminences of the Scientific-Technical Revolution -- 2. Bridging East and West: The Birth of IIASA -- 3. Shaping a Transnational Systems Community (1): Networks and Institutions -- 4. Shaping a Transnational Systems Community (2): Family versus War Room -- 5. The East-West Politics of Global Modeling -- 6. From Nuclear Winter to the Anthropocene -- 7. Acid Rain: Scientific Expertise and Governance across the Systemic Divide -- Epilogue: The Avant-Garde of System-Cybernetic Governmentality -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z

This article maps the presentation of nuclear power as valuable cultural heritage in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Drawing on the analysis of archival documents, exhibitions, site visits and interviews, it argues that the nuclear cultural heritage-making that is taking place in Russia is not limited to self-promotion by the nuclear industry but is shaped by different professional and societal groups seeking to define their identity and gain recognition in the public sphere. The selected case studies, the Polytechnical Museum (Politekh) in Moscow and Rosatom's recent attempts to institutionalize nuclear cultural heritage, add new empirical material to the existing studies of Soviet and post-Soviet nuclear culture and offer new insights into its character.

This article explores the political effects of the development of systems analysis as a form of "infrastructural knowledge"—that is, as a form of knowledge concerned with infrastructure, and an infrastructure of knowledge—that contributed to internal dissensus among scientific experts in the Soviet Union. Systems expertise is largely missing from existing work on the history of Soviet infrastructure. The article analyzes the development of governmental, managerial, and industrial applications of systems analysis in the Soviet context, as well as the transfer of Soviet systems expertise to developing countries. It argues that systems analysis constitutes a form of infrastructural knowledge that enabled Soviet scientists to criticize governmental policies, particularly largescale, top-down infrastructure projects. This critique is interpreted as an expression of a new normativity about what constitutes good governance; it became particularly salient when Soviet scientists were facing infrastructural projects in the global South. Systems analysis, in this way, constituted an important intellectual resource for endogenous liberalization of the authoritarian regime.

This article introduces non-Western policy sciences into the burgeoning field of the intellectual history of Earth system governmentality, a field that studies the ideas, institutions and material systems that enable action at the global scale. It outlines the rise of debates on the idea of the governability of the global biosphere in late Soviet Russia (1970s–1980s), focusing particularly on the extension of Vladimir Vernadskii's famous theory of the biosphere and its governance (the stage of the noosphere) into computer modeling and systems analysis. As a result, a new notion of governance as guidance through milieu arose to conceptualize global governance of the biosphere. This conceptual innovation was part of Soviet scientists' attempt to liberalize the centrally commanded Soviet governmental system.

Dans cet article, je défends l'idée que la perspective théorique de l'objet-frontière peut utilement enrichir les études concernant la présentation du passé soviétique dans les musées. Je m'appuie sur ce concept développé par Susan Lei Star et James R. Griesemer pour montrer comment différents objets et structures matérielles sont attribués à l'ère communiste, et assemblés à la façon d'un patrimoine culturel puis mis en scène grâce à l'expertise des professionnels par le biais de politiques institutionnelles. En me centrant sur trois exemples de musées en Lituanie, je montre que les expositions consacrées au passé soviétique doivent être comprises comme le résultat de la diffusion depuis le haut vers le bas de points de vue officiels soutenus par les élites du gouvernement. Au contraire, je suggère que l'on comprend mieux ces musées en tant que sites où les différents groupes se trouvent en compétition pour fixer les limites des reliques du passé soviétique.

This article analyzes the development of Soviet scientific future studies after World War II, arguing that the field's theory and methods undermined the certainty of the communist future and laid the foundations for a new Soviet governmentality that acknowledged the intrinsic uncertainty of future development. The emphasis on uncertainty—but also the need for more data that could freely circulate between different branches of government and hence more transparency (glasnost')—called for radical revisions to Soviet notions of effective governance. Whereas some used future studies to criticize the actual practices of Soviet economic planning, others used this new type of expertise to extend personal influence and accumulate organizational power. Both cases, however, made it clear that Soviet governance had to accommodate the shift toward new constellations of power/knowledge in which scientific experts would play an ever-increasing role in shaping policy with regard to a fundamentally uncertain future.