title: Louis Althusser

text: During the 1970s, Althusser's institutional roles at the ENS increased but he still edited and published his and other works in the series "Théorie", with François Maspero. Among the essays published, there was "Response to John Lewis", a 1973 reply of an English Communist's defence of Marxist Humanism. Two years later, he concluded his "Doctorat d'État" (State doctorate) in the University of Picardie Jules Verne and acquired the right to direct research on the basis of his previously published work. Some time after this recognition, Althusser married Hélène Rytmann. In 1976, he compiled several of his essays written between 1964 and 1975 to publish "Positions". These years would be a period in which his work was very intermittent; he gave a conference titled "The Transformation of Philosophy" ("La transformation de la philosophie") in two Spanish cities, first Granada and then in Madrid, in March 1976. The same year he gave a lecture in Catalonia titled "Quelques questions de la crise de la théorie marxiste et du mouvement communiste international" ("Some Questions on the Crisis of Marxist Theory and the International Communist Movement") in which Althusser outlined empiricism as the main enemy of class struggle. He also started a rereading of Machiavelli that would influence his later work; he worked between 1975 and 1976 on "Machiavel et nous" ("Machiavelli and Us"), a draft, only published posthumously, based on a 1972 lecture, and also wrote for the National Foundation of Political Science a piece titled "Machiavelli's Solitude" ("Solitude de Machiavel", 1977). In Spring 1976, requested by Léon Chertok to write for the International Symposium on the Unconscious at Tbilisi, he drafted a presentation titled "The Discovery of Dr. Freud" ("La découverte du docteur Freud"). After sending it to Chertok and some friends, he was unsettled by the requested criticism he received by Jacques Nassif and Roudinesco, and then, by December, he wrote a new essay, "On Marx and Freud". He could not attend the event in 1979 and asked Chertok to replace the texts, but Chertok published the first without his consent. This would become a public "affair" in 1984 when Althusser finally noticed it by the time Chertok republished it in a book titled "Dialogue franco-soviétique, sur la psychanalyse".


title: Louis Althusser

text: After the PCF and the left were defeated in the French legislative elections of 1978, Althusser's bouts of depression became more severe and frequent. In March 1980, Althusser interrupted the dissolution session of the École Freudienne de Paris, and, "in the name of the analysts", called Lacan a "beautiful and pitiful harlequin." Later, he went through a hiatal hernia-removal surgery as he had difficulties breathing while eating. According to Althusser himself, the operation caused his physical and mental state to deteriorate; in particular, he developed a persecution complex and suicidal thoughts. He would recall later:


title: Louis Althusser

text: After the surgery, in May, he was hospitalized for most of the summer in a Parisian clinic. His condition did not improve, but in early October he was sent home. Upon returning, he wanted to get away from ENS and even proposed to buy Roudinesco's house. He and Rytmann were also convinced about the "human decline", and so he tried to talk to the Pope John Paul II through his former professor Jean Guitton. Most of the time, however, he and his wife spent locked in their ENS apartment. In the fall of 1980, Althusser's psychiatrist , who by now was also treating Althusser's wife Hélène Rytmann, recommended that Althusser be hospitalized, but the couple refused.


title: Louis Althusser

text: On 16 November 1980, Althusser strangled Rytmann in their ENS room. He himself reported the murder to the doctor in residence who contacted psychiatric institutions. Even before the police arrival, the doctor and the director of ENS decided to hospitalize him in the Sainte-Anne hospital and a psychiatric examination was conducted on him. Due to his mental state, Althusser was deemed to not understand the charges or the process to which he was to be submitted, so he remained at the hospital. The psychiatric assessment concluded he should not be criminally charged, based on article 64 of the French Penal Code, which stated that "there is neither crime nor delict where the suspect was in a state of dementia at the time of the action". The report said Althusser killed Rytmann in the course of an acute crisis of melancholy, without even realizing it, and that the "wife-murder by manual strangulation was committed without any additional violence, in the course of [an] iatrogenic hallucinatory episode complicated by melancholic depression." As a result, he lost his civil rights, entrusted to a representative of the law, and he was forbidden to sign any documents. In February 1981, the court ruled Althusser as having been mentally irresponsible when he committed the murder, therefore he could not be prosecuted and was not charged. Nonetheless, a warrant of confinement was subsequently issued by the Paris police prefecture; the Ministry of National Education mandated his retirement from the ENS; and the ENS requested his family and friends to clear out his apartment. In June, he was transferred to the L'Eau-Vive clinic at Soisy-sur-Seine.


title: Louis Althusser

text: The murder of Rytmann attracted much media attention, and there were several requests to treat Althusser as an ordinary criminal. The newspaper "Minute", journalist and Minister of Justice Alain Peyrefitte were among those who accused Althusser of having "privileges" because of the fact he was Communist. From this point of view, Roudinesco wrote, Althusser was three times a criminal. First, the philosopher had legitimated the current of thought judged responsible for the Gulag; second, he praised the Chinese Cultural Revolution as an alternative to both capitalism and Stalinism; and finally because he had, it was said, corrupted the elite of French youth by introducing the cult of a criminal ideology into the heart of one of the best French institutions. Philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff went further on claiming Althusser taught his students to perceive crimes positively, as akin to a revolution. Five years after the murder, a critique by "Le Monde" Claude Sarraute would have a great impact on Althusser. She compared his case to the situation of Issei Sagawa, who killed and cannibalized a woman in France, but whose psychiatric diagnosis absolved him. Sarraute criticized the fact that, when prestigious names are involved, a lot is written about them but that little is written about the victim. Althusser's friends persuaded him to speak in his defense, and the philosopher wrote an autobiography in 1985. He showed the result, "L'avenir dure longtemps", to some of his friends and considered publishing it, but he never sent it to a publisher and locked it in his desk drawer. The book was only published posthumously in 1992.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Despite the critics, some of his friends, such as Guitton and Debray, defended Althusser, saying the murder was an act of love—as Althusser argued too. Rytmann had bouts of melancholy and self-medicated because of this. Guitton said, "I sincerely think that he killed his wife out of love of her. It was a crime of mystical love". Debray compared it to an altruistic suicide: "He suffocated her under a pillow to save her from the anguish that was suffocating him. A beautiful proof of love ... that one can save one's skin while sacrificing oneself for the other, only to take upon oneself all the pain of living". In his autobiography, written to be the public explanation he could not provide in court, Althusser stated that "she matter-of-factly asked me to kill her myself, and this word, unthinkable and intolerable in its horror, caused my whole body to tremble for a long time. It still makes me tremble... We were living shut up in the cloister of our hell, both of us."


title: Louis Althusser

text: The crime seriously tarnished Althusser's reputation. As Roudinesco wrote, from 1980, he lived his life as a "specter, a dead man walking". Althusser was forced to live in various public and private clinics until 1983, when he became a voluntary patient. He was able to start an untitled manuscript during this time, in 1982; it was later published as "The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter" ("Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre"). From 1984 to 1986, he stayed at an apartment in the north of Paris, where he remained confined most of his time, but he also received visits from some friends, such as philosopher and theologian Stanislas Breton, who had also been a prisoner in the German stalags; from Guitton, who converted him into a "mystic monk" in Roudinesco's words; and from Mexican philosopher Fernanda Navarro during six months, starting from the winter of 1984. Althusser and Navarro exchanged letters until February 1987, and he also wrote a preface in July 1986 for the resulting book, "Filosofía y marxismo", a collection of her interviews with Althusser that was released in Mexico in 1988. These interviews and correspondence were collected and published in France in 1994 as "Sur la philosophie". In this period he formulated his "materialism of the encounter" or "aleatory materialism", talking to Breton and Navarro about it, that first appeared in "Écrits philosophiques et politiques I" (1994) and later in the 2006 Verso book "Philosophy of the Encounter". In 1987, after Althusser underwent an emergency operation because of the obstruction of the esophagus, he developed a new clinical case of depression. First brought to the Soisy-sur-Seine clinic, he was transferred to the psychiatric institution MGEN in La Verrière. There, following a pneumonia contracted during the summer, he died of a heart attack on 22 October 1990.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser was such a homebody that biographer William S. Lewis affirmed, "Althusser had known only home, school, and P.O.W. camp" by the time he met his future wife. In contrast, when he first met Rytmann in 1946, she was a former member of the French resistance and a Communist activist. After fighting along with Jean Beaufret in the group "Service Périclès", she joined the PCF. However, she was expelled from the party accused of being a double agent for the Gestapo, for "Trotskyist deviation" and "crimes", which probably referred to the execution of former Nazi collaborators. Although high-ranking party officials instructed him to sever relations with Rytmann, Althusser tried to restore her reputation in the PCF for a long time by making inquiries into her wartime activities. Although he did not succeed in reinserting her into the party, his relationship with Rytmann nonetheless deepened during this period. Their relationship "was traumatic from the outset, so Althusser claims", wrote Elliott. Among the reasons were his almost total inexperience with women and the fact she was eight years older than him.


title: Louis Althusser

text: His feelings toward her were contradictory from the very beginning; it is suggested that the strong emotional impact she caused in him led him to deep depression. Roudinesco wrote that, for Althusser, Rytmann represented the opposite of himself: she had been in the Resistance while he was remote from the anti-Nazi combat; she was a Jew who carried the stamp of the Holocaust, whereas he, despite his conversion to Marxism, never escaped the formative effect of Catholicism; she suffered under Stalinism at the very moment when he was joining the party; and, in opposition to his petit-bourgeois background, her childhood was not prosperous—at the age of 13 she became the sexual abuse victim of a family doctor who, in addition, instructed her to give her terminally ill parents a dose of morphine. However, this story could have been invented by Althusser, who admitted to incorporating "imagined memories" into his "traumabiography." According to Roudinesco, she embodied for Althusser his "displaced conscience", "pitiless superego", "damned part", "black animality".


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser considered that Rytmann gave him "a world of solidarity and struggle, a world of reasoned action, ... a world of courage". According to him, they performed an indispensable maternal and paternal function for one another: "She loved me as a mother loves a child... and at the same time like a good father in that she introduced me ... to the real world, that vast arena I had never been able to enter. ... Through her desire for me she also initiated me ... into my role as a man, into my masculinity. She loved me as a woman loves a man!" Roudinesco argued that Rytmann represented for him "the sublimated figure of his own hated mother to whom he remained attached all his life". In his autobiography, he wrote: "If I was dazzled by Hélène's love and the miraculous privilege of knowing her and having her in my life, I tried to give that back to her in my own way, intensely and, if I may put it this way, "as a religious offering", as I had done for my mother."


title: Louis Althusser

text: Although Althusser was really in love with Rytmann, he also had affairs with other women. Roudinesco commented that "unlike Hélène, the other women loved by Louis Althusser were generally of great physical beauty and sometimes exceptionally sensitive to intellectual dialogue". She gives as an example of the latter case a woman named Claire Z., with whom he had a long relationship until he was forty-two. They broke up when he met Franca Madonia, a philosopher, translator, and playwright from a well-off Italian bourgeois family from Romagna. Madonia was married to Mino, whose sister Giovanna was married to the Communist painter Leonardo Cremonini. Every summer the two families gathered in a residence in the village of Bertinoro, and, according to Roudinesco, "It was in this magical setting ... that Louis Althusser fell in love with Franca, discovering through her everything he had missed in his own childhood and that he lacked in Paris: a real family, an art of living, a new manner of thinking, speaking, desiring". She influenced him to appreciate modern theatre (Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett), and, Roudinesco wrote, also on his detachment of Stalinism and "his finest texts ("For Marx" especially) but also his most important concepts". In her company in Italy in 1961, as Elliott affirmed, was also when he "truly discovered" Machiavelli. Between 1961 and 1965, they exchanged letters and telephone calls, and they also went on trips together, in which they talk about the current events, politics, and theory, as well made confidences on the happiness and unhappiness of daily life. However, Madonia had an explosive reaction when Althusser tried to make her Rytmann's friend, and seek to bring Mino into their meetings. They nevertheless continued to exchange letters until 1973; these were published in 1998 into an 800-page book "Lettres à Franca".


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser underwent psychiatric hospitalisations throughout his life, the first time after receiving a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He suffered from bipolar disorder, and because of it he had frequent bouts of depression that started in 1938 and became regular after his five-year stay in German captivity. From the 1950s onward, he was under constant medical supervision, often undergoing, in Lewis' words, "the most aggressive treatments post-war French psychiatry had to offer", which included electroconvulsive therapy, narco-analysis, and psychoanalysis. Althusser did not limit himself to prescribed medications and practised self-medication. The disease affected his academic productivity; in 1962, he began to write a book about Machiavelli during a depressive exacerbation but was interrupted by a three-months stay in a clinic. The main psychoanalyst he attended was the anti-Lacanian René Diatkine, starting from 1964, after he had a dream about killing his own sister. The sessions became more frequent in January 1965, and the real work of exploring the unconscious was launched in June. Soon Althusser recognized the positive side of non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; although sometimes tried to ridicule Diatkine giving him lessons in Lacanianism, by July 1966, he considered the treatment was producing "spectacular results". In 1976, Althusser estimated that he had spent fifteen of the previous thirty years in hospitals and psychiatric clinics.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser analysed the prerequisites of his illness with the help of psychoanalysis and found them in complex relationships with his family (he devoted to this topic half of the autobiography). Althusser believed that he did not have a genuine "I", which was caused by the absence of real maternal love and the fact that his father was emotionally reserved and virtually absent for his son. Althusser deduced the family situation from the events before his birth, as told to him by his aunt: Lucienne Berger, his mother, was to marry his father's brother, Louis Althusser, who died in World War I near Verdun, while Charles, his father, was engaged with Lucienne's sister, Juliette. Both families followed the old custom of the levirate, which obliged an older, still unmarried, brother to wed the widow of a deceased younger brother. Lucienne then married Charles, and the son was named after the deceased Louis. In Althusser's memoirs, this marriage was "madness", not so much because of the tradition itself, but because of the excessive submission, as Charles was not forced to marry Lucienne since his younger brother had not yet married her. As a result, Althusser concluded, his mother did not love him, but loved the long-dead Louis. The philosopher described his mother as a "castrating mother" (a term from psychoanalysis), who, under the influence of her phobias, established a strict regime of social and sexual "hygiene" for Althusser and his sister Georgette. His "feeling of fathomless solitude" could only be mitigated by communicating with his mother's parents who lived in Morvan. His relationship with his mother and the desire to deserve her love, in his memoirs, largely determined his adult life and career, including his admission to the ENS and his desire to become a "well-known intellectual". According to his autobiography, ENS was for Althusser a kind of refuge of intellectual "purity" from the big "dirty" world that his mother was so afraid of.


title: Louis Althusser

text: The facts of his autobiography have been critically evaluated by researchers. According to its own editors, "L'avenir dure longtemps" is "an inextricable tangle of 'facts' and 'phantasies'". His friend and biographer , after a careful analysis of the early period of Althusser's life, concluded that the autobiography was "a re-writing of a life through the prism of its wreckage". Moulier-Boutang believed that it was Rytmann who played a key role in creating a "fatalistic" account of the history of the Althusser family, largely shaping his vision in a 1964 letter. According to Elliott, the autobiography produces primarily an impression of "destructiveness and self-destructiveness". Althusser, most likely, postdated the beginning of his depression to a later period (post-war), having not mentioned earlier manifestations of the disease in school and in the concentration camp. According to Moulier-Boutang, Althusser had a close psychological connection with Georgette from an early age, and although he did not often mention it in his autobiography, her "nervous illness" may have tracked his own. His sister also had depression, and despite the fact that they lived separately from each other for almost their entire adult lives, their depression often coincided in time. Also, Althusser focused on describing family circumstances, not considering, for example, the influence of ENS on his personality. Moulier-Boutang connected the depression not only with events in his personal life, but also with political disappointments.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser's earlier works include the influential volume "Reading Capital" (1965), which collects the work of Althusser and his students in an intensive philosophical rereading of Marx's "Capital". The book reflects on the philosophical status of Marxist theory as a "critique of political economy", and on its object. Althusser would later acknowledge that many of the innovations in this interpretation of Marx attempt to assimilate concepts derived from Baruch Spinoza into Marxism.


title: Louis Althusser

text: The original English translation of this work includes only the essays of Althusser and Étienne Balibar, while the original French edition contains additional contributions from Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet. A full translation was published in 2016.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Several of Althusser's theoretical positions have remained influential in Marxist philosophy. His essay "On the Materialist Dialectic" proposes a great "epistemological break" between Marx's early writings (1840–45) and his later, properly Marxist texts, borrowing a term from the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. His essay "Marxism and Humanism" is a strong statement of anti-humanism in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and "species-being", which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths of a bourgeois ideology of "humanity". His essay "Contradiction and Overdetermination" borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony).


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology. His best-known essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation", establishes the concept of ideology. Althusser's theory of ideology draws on Marx and Gramsci, but also on Freud's and Lacan's psychological concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that enable the concept of self. For Althusser, these structures are both agents of repression and inevitable: it is impossible to escape ideology and avoid being subjected to it. On the other hand, the collection of essays from which "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" is drawn contains other essays which confirm that Althusser's concept of ideology is broadly consistent with the classic Marxist theory of class struggle.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser's thought evolved during his lifetime. It has been the subject of argument and debate, especially within Marxism and specifically concerning his theory of knowledge (epistemology).


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser argues that Marx's thought has been fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated. He fiercely condemns various interpretations of Marx's works—historicism, idealism and economism—on grounds that they fail to realize that with the "science of history", historical materialism, Marx has constructed a revolutionary view of social change. Althusser believes these errors result from the notion that Marx's entire body of work can be understood as a coherent whole. Rather, Marx's thought contains a radical "epistemological break". Although the works of the young Marx are bound by the categories of German philosophy and classical political economy, "The German Ideology" (written in 1845) makes a sudden and unprecedented departure. This break represents a shift in Marx's work to a fundamentally different "problematic", i.e., a different set of central propositions and questions posed, a different theoretical framework. Althusser believes that Marx himself did not fully comprehend the significance of his own work, and was able to express it only obliquely and tentatively. The shift can be revealed only by a careful and sensitive "symptomatic reading". Thus, Althusser's project is to help readers fully grasp the originality and power of Marx's extraordinary theory, giving as much attention to what is not said as to the explicit. Althusser holds that Marx has discovered a "continent of knowledge", History, analogous to the contributions of Thales to mathematics or Galileo to physics, in that the structure of his theory is unlike anything posited by his predecessors.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser believes that Marx's work is fundamentally incompatible with its antecedents because it is built on a groundbreaking epistemology (theory of knowledge) that rejects the distinction between subject and object. In opposition to empiricism, Althusser claims that Marx's philosophy, dialectical materialism, counters the theory of knowledge as vision with a theory of knowledge as production. On the empiricist view, a knowing subject encounters a real object and uncovers its essence by means of abstraction. On the assumption that thought has a direct engagement with reality, or an unmediated vision of a "real" object, the empiricist believes that the truth of knowledge lies in the correspondence of a subject's thought to an object that is external to thought itself. By contrast, Althusser claims to find latent in Marx's work a view of knowledge as "theoretical practice". For Althusser, theoretical practice takes place entirely within the realm of thought, working upon theoretical objects and never coming into direct contact with the real object that it aims to know. Knowledge is not discovered, but rather produced by way of three "Generalities": (I) the "raw material" of pre-scientific ideas, abstractions and facts; (II) a conceptual framework (or "problematic") brought to bear upon these; and (III) the finished product of a transformed theoretical entity, concrete knowledge. In this view, the validity of knowledge does not lie in its correspondence to something external to itself. Marx's historical materialism is a science with its own internal methods of proof. It is therefore not governed by interests of society, class, ideology, or politics, and is distinct from the superstructure.


title: Louis Althusser

text: In addition to its unique epistemology, Marx's theory is built on concepts—such as forces and relations of production—that have no counterpart in classical political economy. Even when existing terms are adopted—for example, the theory of surplus value, which combines David Ricardo's concepts of rent, profit, and interest—their meaning and relation to other concepts in the theory is significantly different. However, more fundamental to Marx's "break" is a rejection of "homo economicus", or the idea held by the classical economists that the needs of individuals can be treated as a fact or "given" independent of any economic organization. For the classical economists, individual needs can serve as a premise for a theory explaining the character of a mode of production and as an independent starting point for a theory about society. Where classical political economy explains economic systems as a response to individual needs, Marx's analysis accounts for a wider range of social phenomena in terms of the parts they play in a structured whole. Consequently, Marx's "Capital" has greater explanatory power than does political economy because it provides both a model of the economy and a description of the structure and development of a whole society. In Althusser's view, Marx does not merely argue that human needs are largely created by their social environment and thus vary with time and place; rather, he abandons the very idea that there can be a theory about what people are like that is prior to any theory about how they come to be that way.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Although Althusser insists that there was an epistemological break, he later states that its occurrence around 1845 is not clearly defined, as traces of humanism, historicism, and Hegelianism are found in "Capital". He states that only Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Programme" and some marginal notes on a book by Adolph Wagner are fully free from humanist ideology. In line with this, Althusser replaces his earlier definition of Marx's philosophy as the "theory of theoretical practice" with a new belief in "politics in the field of history" and "class struggle in theory". Althusser considers the epistemological break to be a "process" instead of a clearly defined "event" — the product of incessant struggle against ideology. Thus, the distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is not assured once and for all by the epistemological break.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Because of Marx's belief that the individual is a product of society, Althusser holds that it is pointless to try to build a social theory on a prior conception of the individual. The subject of observation is not individual human elements, but rather "structure". As he sees it, Marx does not explain society by appealing to the properties of individual persons—their beliefs, desires, preferences, and judgements. Rather, Marx defines society as a set of fixed "practices". Individuals are not actors who make their own history, but are instead the "supports" () of these practices.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser uses this analysis to defend Marx's historical materialism against the charge that it crudely posits a base (economic level) and superstructure (culture/politics) "rising upon it" and then attempts to explain all aspects of the superstructure by appealing to features of the (economic) base (the well known architectural metaphor). For Althusser, it is a mistake to attribute this economic determinist view to Marx. Just as Althusser criticises the idea that a social theory can be founded on an historical conception of human needs, so does he reject the idea that economic practice can be used in isolation to explain other aspects of society. Althusser believes that the base and the superstructure are interdependent, although he keeps to the classic Marxist materialist understanding of the determination of the base "in the last instance" (albeit with some extension and revision). The advantage of practices over human individuals as a starting point is that although each practice is only a part of a complex whole of society, a practice is a whole in itself in that it consists of a number of different kinds of parts. Economic practice, for example, contains raw materials, tools, individual persons, etc., all united in a process of production.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser conceives of society as an interconnected collection of these wholes: economic practice, ideological practice, and politico-legal practice. Although each practice has a degree of relative autonomy, together they make up one complex, structured whole (social formation). In his view, all practices are dependent on each other. For example, among the relations of production of capitalist societies are the buying and selling of labour power by capitalists and workers respectively. These relations are part of economic practice, but can only exist within the context of a legal system which establishes individual agents as buyers and sellers. Furthermore, the arrangement must be maintained by political and ideological means. From this it can be seen that aspects of economic practice depend on the superstructure and vice versa. For him this was the moment of "reproduction" and constituted the important role of the superstructure.


title: Louis Althusser

text: An analysis understood in terms of interdependent practices helps us to conceive of how society is organized, but also permits us to comprehend social change and thus provides a theory of history. Althusser explains the reproduction of the relations of production by reference to aspects of ideological and political practice; conversely, the emergence of new production relations can be explained by the failure of these mechanisms. Marx's theory seems to posit a system in which an imbalance in two parts could lead to compensatory adjustments at other levels, or sometimes to a major reorganization of the whole. To develop this idea, Althusser relies on the concepts of contradiction and non-contradiction, which he claims are illuminated by their relation to a complex structured whole. Practices are contradictory when they "grate" on one another and non-contradictory when they support one another. Althusser elaborates on these concepts by reference to Lenin's analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Lenin posited that despite widespread discontent throughout Europe in the early 20th century, Russia was the country in which revolution occurred because it contained all the contradictions possible within a single state at the time. In his words, it was the "weakest link in a chain of imperialist states". He explained the revolution in relation to two groups of circumstances: firstly, the existence within Russia of large-scale exploitation in cities, mining districts, etc., a disparity between urban industrialization and medieval conditions in the countryside, and a lack of unity amongst the ruling class; secondly, a foreign policy which played into the hands of revolutionaries, such as the elites who had been exiled by the Tsar and had become sophisticated socialists.


title: Louis Althusser

text: For Althusser, this example reinforces his claim that Marx's explanation of social change is more complex than the result of a single contradiction between the forces and the relations of production. The differences between events in Russia and Western Europe highlight that a contradiction between forces and relations of production may be necessary, but not sufficient, to bring about revolution. The circumstances that produced revolution in Russia were heterogeneous, and cannot be seen to be aspects of one large contradiction. Each was a contradiction within a particular social totality. From this, Althusser concludes that Marx's concept of contradiction is inseparable from the concept of a complex structured social whole. To emphasize that changes in social structures relate to numerous contradictions, Althusser describes these changes as "overdetermined", using a term taken from Sigmund Freud. This interpretation allows us to account for the way in which many different circumstances may play a part in the course of events, and how these circumstances may combine to produce unexpected social changes or "ruptures".


title: Louis Althusser

text: However, Althusser does not mean to say that the events that determine social changes all have the same causal status. While a part of a complex whole, economic practice is a "structure in dominance": it plays a major part in determining the relations between other spheres, and has more effect on them than they have on it. The most prominent aspect of society (the religious aspect in feudal formations and the economic aspect in capitalist formations) is called the "dominant instance", and is in turn determined "in the last instance" by the economy. For Althusser, the economic practice of a society determines which other formation of that society dominates the society as a whole.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser's understanding of contradiction in terms of the dialectic attempts to rid Marxism of the influence and vestiges of Hegelian (idealist) dialectics, and is a component part of his general anti-humanist position. In his reading, the Marxist understanding of social totality is not to be confused with the Hegelian. Where Hegel sees the different features of each historical epoch – its art, politics, religion, etc. – as expressions of a single essence, Althusser believes each social formation to be "decentred", i.e., that it cannot be reduced or simplified to a unique central point.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Because Althusser held that a person's desires, choices, intentions, preferences, judgements, and so forth are the effects of social practices, he believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image. Within capitalist societies, the human individual is generally regarded as a subject—a self-conscious, "responsible" agent whose actions can be explained by their beliefs and thoughts. For Althusser, a person's capacity to perceive themselves in this way is not innate. Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on individuals the role ("forme") of a subject. Social practices both determine the characteristics of the individual and give them an idea of the range of properties they can have, and of the limits of each individual. Althusser argues that many of our roles and activities are given to us by social practice: for example, the production of steelworkers is a part of economic practice, while the production of lawyers is part of politico-legal practice. However, other characteristics of individuals, such as their beliefs about the good life or their metaphysical reflections on the nature of the self, do not easily fit into these categories.


title: Louis Althusser

text: In Althusser's view, our values, desires, and preferences are inculcated in us by ideological practice, the sphere which has the defining property of constituting individuals as subjects. Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called "ideological state apparatuses" (ISAs), which include the family, the media, religious organizations, and most importantly in capitalist societies, the education system, as well as the received ideas that they propagate. No single ISA produces in us the belief that we are self-conscious agents. Instead, we derive this belief in the course of learning what it is to be a daughter, a schoolchild, black, a steelworker, a councillor, and so forth.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Despite its many institutional forms, the function and structure of ideology is unchanging and present throughout history; as Althusser states, "ideology has no history". All ideologies constitute a subject, even though he or she may differ according to each particular ideology. Memorably, Althusser illustrates this with the concept of "hailing" or "interpellation". He compares ideology to a policeman shouting "Hey you there!" toward a person walking on the street. Upon hearing this call, the person responds by turning around and in doing so, is transformed into a subject. The person being hailed recognizes themselves as the subject of the hail, and knows to respond. Althusser calls this recognition a "mis-recognition" ("méconnaissance"), because it works retroactively: a material individual is always already an ideological subject, even before he or she is born. The "transformation" of an individual into a subject has always already happened; Althusser here acknowledges a debt to Spinoza's theory of immanence.


title: Louis Althusser

text: To highlight this, Althusser offers the example of Christian religious ideology, embodied in the Voice of God, instructing a person on what their place in the world is and what he must do to be reconciled with Christ. From this, Althusser draws the point that in order for that person to identify as a Christian, he must first already be a subject; that is, by responding to God's call and following His rules, he affirms himself as a free agent, the author of the acts for which he assumes responsibility. We cannot recognize ourselves outside ideology, and in fact, our very actions reach out to this overarching structure. Althusser's theory draws heavily from Jacques Lacan and his concept of the Mirror Stage—we acquire our identities by seeing ourselves mirrored in ideologies.


title: Louis Althusser

text: In various short papers drafted from 1982 to 1986 and published posthumously, Althusser is critical of the relation of Marxist science to the philosophy of dialectical materialism and materialist philosophy in general. Althusser rejects dialectical materialism and introduces a new concept: the "Philosophy of the Encounter", renamed "Aleatory Materialism" in 1986. To develop this idea, Althusser holds, that there exists an “underground” or barely recognized philosophical current of "Aleatory Materialism", articulated by Marx, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida.


title: Louis Althusser

text: He argues that it was an idealist and teleological mistake to think that there are general laws of history and that social relations are determined in the same manner as physical relations. Emphasising the role of contingency in history over laws of development he states that reconstructed historical materialism has as its object complex historical singularities or "conjunctures", The "conjuncture" is the pivotal point, where political practice may intervene, and Aleatory Materialism is a materialist philosophy to understand this conjuncture.


title: Louis Althusser

text: While Althusser's writings were born of an intervention against reformist and ecumenical tendencies within Marxist theory, the eclecticism of his influences reflected a move away from the intellectual isolation of the Stalin era. He drew as much from pre-Marxist systems of thought and contemporary schools such as structuralism, philosophy of science and psychoanalysis as he did from thinkers in the Marxist tradition. Furthermore, his thought was symptomatic of Marxism's growing academic respectability and of a push towards emphasizing Marx's legacy as a philosopher rather than only as an economist or sociologist. Tony Judt saw this as a criticism of Althusser's work, saying he removed Marxism "altogether from the realm of history, politics and experience, and thereby ... render[ed] it invulnerable to any criticism of the empirical sort."


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser has had broad influence in the areas of Marxist philosophy and post-structuralism: interpellation has been popularized and adapted by the feminist philosopher and critic Judith Butler, and elaborated further by Göran Therborn; the concept of ideological state apparatuses has been of interest to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek; the attempt to view history as a process without a subject garnered sympathy from Jacques Derrida; historical materialism was defended as a coherent doctrine from the standpoint of analytic philosophy by G. A. Cohen; the interest in structure and agency sparked by Althusser was to play a role in Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser's influence is also seen in the work of economists Richard D. Wolff and Stephen Resnick, who have interpreted that Marx's mature works hold a conception of class different from the normally understood ones. For them, in Marx class refers not to a group of people (for example, those that own the means of production versus those that do not), but to a process involving the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labour. Their emphasis on class as a process is consistent with their reading and use of Althusser's concept of overdetermination in terms of understanding agents and objects as the site of multiple determinations.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser's work has also been criticized from a number of angles. In a 1971 paper for "Socialist Register", Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski undertook a detailed critique of structural Marxism, arguing that the concept was seriously flawed on three main points:


title: Louis Althusser

text: Kołakowski further argued that, despite Althusser's claims of scientific rigour, structural Marxism was unfalsifiable and thus unscientific, and was best understood as a quasi-religious ideology. In 1980, sociologist Axel van den Berg described Kołakowski's critique as "devastating", proving that "Althusser retains the orthodox radical rhetoric by simply severing all connections with verifiable facts".


title: Louis Althusser

text: G. A. Cohen, in his essay 'Complete Bullshit', has cited the 'Althusserian school' as an example of 'bullshit' and a factor in his co-founding the 'Non-Bullshit Marxism Group'. He says that 'the ideas that the Althusserians generated, for example, of the interpellation of the subject, or of contradiction and overdetermination, possessed a surface allure, but it often seemed impossible to determine whether or not the theses in which those ideas figured were true, and, at other times, those theses seemed capable of just two interpretations: on one of them they were true but uninteresting, and, on the other, they were interesting, but quite obviously false'.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Althusser was vehemently attacked by British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson in his book "The Poverty of Theory". Thompson claimed that Althusserianism was Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of a theory. Where the Soviet doctrines that existed during the lifetime of the dictator lacked systematisation, Althusser's theory gave Stalinism "its true, rigorous and totally coherent expression". As such, Thompson called for "unrelenting intellectual war" against the Marxism of Althusser.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Since his death, the reassessment of Althusser's work and influence has been ongoing. The first wave of retrospective critiques and interventions ("drawing up a balance sheet") began outside of Althusser's own country, France, because, as Étienne Balibar pointed out in 1988, "there is an absolute taboo now suppressing the name of this man and the meaning of his writings." Balibar's remarks were made at the "Althusserian Legacy" Conference organized at Stony Brook University by Michael Sprinker. The proceedings of this conference were published in September 1992 as the "Althusserian Legacy" and included contributions from Balibar, Alex Callinicos, Michele Barrett, Alain Lipietz, Warren Montag, and Gregory Elliott, among others. It also included an obituary and an extensive interview with Derrida.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Eventually, a colloquium was organized in France at the University of Paris VIII by Sylvain Lazarus on May 27, 1992. The general title was "Politique et philosophie dans l'oeuvre de Louis Althusser", the proceedings of which were published in 1993.


title: Louis Althusser

text: In retrospect, Althusser's continuing influence can be seen through his students. A dramatic example of this points to the editors and contributors of the 1960s journal "Cahiers pour l'Analyse": "In many ways, the 'Cahiers' can be read as the critical development of Althusser's own intellectual itinerary when it was at its most robust." This influence continues to guide much philosophical work, as many of these same students became eminent intellectuals in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière in philosophy, Pierre Macherey in literary criticism and Nicos Poulantzas in sociology. The prominent Guevarist Régis Debray also studied under Althusser, as did the aforementioned Derrida (with whom he at one time shared an office at the ENS), noted philosopher Michel Foucault, and the pre-eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller.


title: Louis Althusser

text: Badiou has lectured and spoken on Althusser on several occasions in France, Brazil, and Austria since Althusser's death. Badiou has written many studies, including "Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject", published in his book "Metapolitics" in 2005. Most recently, Althusser's work has been given prominence again through the interventions of Warren Montag and his circle; see for example the special issue of "borderlands e-journal" edited by David McInerney ("Althusser & Us") and "Décalages: An Althusser Studies Journal", edited by Montag. (See "External links" below for access to both of these journals.)


title: Louis Althusser

text: In 2011 Althusser continued to spark controversy and debate with the publication in August of that year of Jacques Rancière's first book, "Althusser's Lesson" (1974). It marked the first time this groundbreaking work was to appear in its entirety in an English translation. In 2014, "On the Reproduction of Capitalism" was published, which is an English translation of the full text of the work from which the ISAs text was drawn.


title: Louis Althusser

text: The publication of Althusser's posthumous memoir cast some doubt on his own scholarly practices. For example, although he owned thousands of books, Althusser revealed that he knew very little about Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel. While he was familiar with Marx's early works, he had not read "Capital" when he wrote his own most important Marxist texts. Additionally, Althusser had "contrived to impress his first teacher, the Catholic theologian Jean Guitton, with a paper whose guiding principles he had simply filched from Guitton's own corrections of a fellow student's essay," and "he concocted fake quotations in the thesis he wrote for another major contemporary philosopher, Gaston Bachelard."


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: Aikaterini Hadjipateras (; born 9 April 1957), known professionally as Kathryn Hunter, is an American-born British actress and theatre director, known for her appearances as Arabella Figg in the ""Harry Potter" film series", and as Eedy Karn on the Disney+ "Star Wars" spinoff series, "Andor".


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: Hunter was born in New York to Greek parents, and was raised in England. She trained at RADA where she is now an associate, and regularly directs student productions.


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: In her stage work, Hunter is particularly associated with physical theatre, having been described as a "virtuoso physical performer."


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: She has worked with renowned companies in that field including Shared Experience and Complicité. She won an Olivier Award in 1991 for playing the millionairess in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "The Visit".


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: Critics have noted Hunter's unusual physical presence and her range. Charles Spencer of "The Telegraph" wrote, "diminutive in stature, and slightly lame, she has a deep, guttural voice, eyes like black olives and the most expressive of faces. Almost nothing seems beyond her range, from farcical clowning to deepest, darkest tragedy."


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: Katryn Hunter's "uncommon ability to shape-shift" has led her to play roles typically reserved for male actors. She was the first British woman to play "King Lear" professionally.


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: Hunter's portrayal of Lear conscientiously challenged the audience to separate character and performer: her voice and clothing read as male, but she physicalized lines such as "Down from the waist they are Centaurs/Though women all above" to remind the audience of the female body playing the part. Another male role she played was in "The Bee", directed by Hideki Noda, which played at the Soho Theatre in June 2006 and 2012.


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: Hunter has also played animals and other creatures. In "Kafka's Monkey", a solo piece based on Franz Kafka's "A Report to an Academy," she played a monkey delivering a speech to a scientific society about its transformation from a monkey to a man. The piece was a highly acclaimed sell-out success at the Young Vic in 2009, where it was reprised in May 2011. It toured to the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York in April 2013. According to Charles Isherwood of the "New York Times", Hunter's performance had "wry wisdom, a touch of cheeky humor and, above all, a sense of dignity."


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: In November 2013, she co-starred as the fairy Puck in Julie Taymor's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the show that opened the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. Ben Brantley of the "New York Times" described Hunter's Puck as "genuinely original" and "part music-hall comedian, part fairground contortionist."


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: In 2008, Hunter co-starred in the first English-language production of "Fragments", a collection of short plays by Samuel Beckett, directed by Peter Brook. Of the London run at the Young Vic, Andrew Dickson of "The Guardian" wrote, "the evening belongs to Kathryn Hunter, who crams into a few minutes of stage time more than most actors achieve in a career." The piece toured internationally, appearing in New York in 2011.


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: From January to March 2009, she debuted as an RSC director with a production of "Othello" at the Warwick Arts Centre, Hackney Empire, Northern Stage, Oxford Playhouse and Liverpool Playhouse. Her husband Marcello Magni was movement director on the production and appeared in it as Roderigo. Other cast members included Michael Gould as Iago, Patrice Naiambana as Othello, and Natalia Tena as Desdemona.


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: In 2010, Hunter played Cleopatra in a production of "Antony and Cleopatra" and the Fool in a production of "King Lear" at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. The latter performance was described as "outstanding".


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: In February 2016, Hunter took the title role of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Southwark Playhouse, London. "Guardian" critic Michael Billington wrote, "Hunter is an astonishing shape-shifting performer who can play just about anything" but Telegraph critic Jane Schilling called Rusell Bolam's production "an opportunity squandered." In 2017 she starred in the title role in "The House of Bernarda Alba" at the Royal Exchange, Manchester.


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: In 2018, Hunter returned to the Royal Shakespeare Company to play the title role in "Timon of Athens", directed by Simon Godwin.


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: From December 2022 to June 2023, Hunter is playing the lead role of Janina Duszejko in a stage adaptation of the Polish mystery novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, adapted for the stage by Complicité.


title: Kathryn Hunter

text: Her screen work includes a supporting role in the TV series "Rome" as Cleopatra's companion, Charmian, and voicing Gorn in "". Notable film work includes Mike Leigh's "All or Nothing" (2002) and Harry Potter's neighbour, Arabella Figg, in the fifth movie of the "Harry Potter" series, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (2007). A 2001 episode of "Silent Witness" entitled "Faith" (BBC), Hunter played the role of Sister Geraldine Catterson. In 2018 she starred in the BBC Two drama "Black Earth Rising" as Capi Petridis, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. In 2021, she earned acclaim in her portrayal of the Three Witches in Joel Coen's "The Tragedy of Macbeth", and for her performance was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress.


title: Social network analysis

text: Social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graph theory. It characterizes networked structures in terms of "nodes" (individual actors, people, or things within the network) and the "ties", "edges", or "links" (relationships or interactions) that connect them. Examples of social structures commonly visualized through social network analysis include social media networks, memes spread, information circulation, friendship and acquaintance networks, business networks, knowledge networks, difficult working relationships, social networks, collaboration graphs, kinship, disease transmission, and sexual relationships. These networks are often visualized through "sociograms" in which nodes are represented as points and ties are represented as lines. These visualizations provide a means of qualitatively assessing networks by varying the visual representation of their nodes and edges to reflect attributes of interest.


title: Social network analysis

text: Social network analysis has emerged as a key technique in modern sociology. It has also gained significant popularity in the following - anthropology, biology, demography, communication studies, economics, geography, history, information science, organizational studies, political science, public health, social psychology, development studies, sociolinguistics, and computer science and is now commonly available as a consumer tool (see the list of SNA software).


title: Social network analysis

text: The advantages of SNA are twofold. Firstly, it can process a large amount of relational data and describe the overall relational network structure. tem and parameter selection to confirm the influential nodes in the network, such as in-degree and out-degree centrality. SNA context and choose which parameters to define the “center” according to the characteristics of the network. Through analyzing nodes, clusters and relations, the communication structure and position of individuals can be clearly described.


title: Social network analysis

text: Social network analysis has its theoretical roots in the work of early sociologists such as Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim, who wrote about the importance of studying patterns of relationships that connect social actors. Social scientists have used the concept of "social networks" since early in the 20th century to connote complex sets of relationships between members of social systems at all scales, from interpersonal to international.


title: Social network analysis

text: In the 1930s Jacob Moreno and Helen Jennings introduced basic analytical methods. In 1954, John Arundel Barnes started using the term systematically to denote patterns of ties, encompassing concepts traditionally used by the public and those used by social scientists: bounded groups (e.g., tribes, families) and social categories (e.g., gender, ethnicity). Scholars such as Ronald Burt, Kathleen Carley, Mark Granovetter, David Krackhardt, Edward Laumann, Anatol Rapoport, Barry Wellman, Douglas R. White, and Harrison White expanded the use of systematic social network analysis.


title: Social network analysis

text: SNA has been extensively used in research on study abroad second language acquisition. Even in the study of literature, network analysis has been applied by Anheier, Gerhards and Romo, Wouter De Nooy, and Burgert Senekal. Indeed, social network analysis has found applications in various academic disciplines, as well as practical applications such as countering money laundering and terrorism.


title: Social network analysis

text: Homophily: The extent to which actors form ties with similar versus dissimilar others. Similarity can be defined by gender, race, age, occupation, educational achievement, status, values or any other salient characteristic. Homophily is also referred to as assortativity.


title: Social network analysis

text: Multiplexity: The number of content-forms contained in a tie. For example, two people who are friends and also work together would have a multiplexity of 2. Multiplexity has been associated with relationship strength and can also comprise overlap of positive and negative network ties.


title: Social network analysis

text: Mutuality/Reciprocity: The extent to which two actors reciprocate each other's friendship or other interaction.


title: Social network analysis

text: Network Closure: A measure of the completeness of relational triads. An individual's assumption of network closure (i.e. that their friends are also friends) is called transitivity. Transitivity is an outcome of the individual or situational trait of Need for Cognitive Closure.


title: Social network analysis

text: Bridge: An individual whose weak ties fill a structural hole, providing the only link between two individuals or clusters. It also includes the shortest route when a longer one is unfeasible due to a high risk of message distortion or delivery failure.


title: Social network analysis

text: Centrality: Centrality refers to a group of metrics that aim to quantify the "importance" or "influence" (in a variety of senses) of a particular node (or group) within a network. Examples of common methods of measuring "centrality" include betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, eigenvector centrality, alpha centrality, and degree centrality.


title: Social network analysis

text: Distance: The minimum number of ties required to connect two particular actors, as popularized by Stanley Milgram's small world experiment and the idea of 'six degrees of separation'.


title: Social network analysis

text: Structural holes: The absence of ties between two parts of a network. Finding and exploiting a structural hole can give an entrepreneur a competitive advantage. This concept was developed by sociologist Ronald Burt, and is sometimes referred to as an alternate conception of social capital.


title: Social network analysis

text: Tie Strength: Defined by the linear combination of time, emotional intensity, intimacy and reciprocity (i.e. mutuality). Strong ties are associated with homophily, propinquity and transitivity, while weak ties are associated with bridges.


title: Social network analysis

text: Groups are identified as 'cliques' if every individual is directly tied to every other individual, 'social circles' if there is less stringency of direct contact, which is imprecise, or as structurally cohesive blocks if precision is wanted.


title: Social network analysis

text: Clustering coefficient: A measure of the likelihood that two associates of a node are associates. A higher clustering coefficient indicates a greater 'cliquishness'.


title: Social network analysis

text: Cohesion: The degree to which actors are connected directly to each other by cohesive bonds. Structural cohesion refers to the minimum number of members who, if removed from a group, would disconnect the group.


title: Social network analysis

text: Visual representation of social networks is important to understand the network data and convey the result of the analysis. Numerous methods of visualization for data produced by social network analysis have been presented. Many of the analytic software have modules for network visualization. Exploration of the data is done through displaying nodes and ties in various layouts, and attributing colors, size and other advanced properties to nodes. Visual representations of networks may be a powerful method for conveying complex information, but care should be taken in interpreting node and graph properties from visual displays alone, as they may misrepresent structural properties better captured through quantitative analyses.


title: Social network analysis

text: Signed graphs can be used to illustrate good and bad relationships between humans. A positive edge between two nodes denotes a positive relationship (friendship, alliance, dating) and a negative edge between two nodes denotes a negative relationship (hatred, anger). Signed social network graphs can be used to predict the future evolution of the graph. In signed social networks, there is the concept of "balanced" and "unbalanced" cycles. A balanced cycle is defined as a cycle where the product of all the signs are positive. According to balance theory, balanced graphs represent a group of people who are unlikely to change their opinions of the other people in the group. Unbalanced graphs represent a group of people who are very likely to change their opinions of the people in their group. For example, a group of 3 people (A, B, and C) where A and B have a positive relationship, B and C have a positive relationship, but C and A have a negative relationship is an unbalanced cycle. This group is very likely to morph into a balanced cycle, such as one where B only has a good relationship with A, and both A and B have a negative relationship with C. By using the concept of balanced and unbalanced cycles, the evolution of signed social network graphs can be predicted.


title: Social network analysis

text: Especially when using social network analysis as a tool for facilitating change, different approaches of participatory network mapping have proven useful. Here participants / interviewers provide network data by actually mapping out the network (with pen and paper or digitally) during the data collection session. An example of a pen-and-paper network mapping approach, which also includes the collection of some actor attributes (perceived influence and goals of actors) is the * Net-map toolbox. One benefit of this approach is that it allows researchers to collect qualitative data and ask clarifying questions while the network data is collected.


title: Social network analysis

text: Social Networking Potential (SNP) is a numeric coefficient, derived through algorithms to represent both the size of an individual's social network and their ability to influence that network. SNP coefficients were first defined and used by Bob Gerstley in 2002. A closely related term is Alpha User, defined as a person with a high SNP.


title: Social network analysis

text: By calculating the SNP of respondents and by targeting High SNP respondents, the strength and relevance of quantitative marketing research used to drive viral marketing strategies is enhanced.


title: Social network analysis

text: Variables used to calculate an individual's SNP include but are not limited to: participation in Social Networking activities, group memberships, leadership roles, recognition, publication/editing/contributing to non-electronic media, publication/editing/contributing to electronic media (websites, blogs), and frequency of past distribution of information within their network. The acronym "SNP" and some of the first algorithms developed to quantify an individual's social networking potential were described in the white paper "Advertising Research is Changing" (Gerstley, 2003) See Viral Marketing.


title: Social network analysis

text: The first book to discuss the commercial use of Alpha Users among mobile telecoms audiences was 3G Marketing by Ahonen, Kasper and Melkko in 2004. The first book to discuss Alpha Users more generally in the context of social marketing intelligence was Communities Dominate Brands by Ahonen & Moore in 2005. In 2012, Nicola Greco (UCL) presents at TEDx the Social Networking Potential as a parallelism to the potential energy that users generate and companies should use, stating that "SNP is the new asset that every company should aim to have".


title: Social network analysis

text: Social network analysis is used extensively in a wide range of applications and disciplines. Some common network analysis applications include data aggregation and mining, network propagation modeling, network modeling and sampling, user attribute and behavior analysis, community-maintained resource support, location-based interaction analysis, social sharing and filtering, recommender systems development, and link prediction and entity resolution. In the private sector, businesses use social network analysis to support activities such as customer interaction and analysis, information system development analysis, marketing, and business intelligence needs (see social media analytics). Some public sector uses include development of leader engagement strategies, analysis of individual and group engagement and media use, and community-based problem solving.


title: Social network analysis

text: Social network analysis is also used in intelligence, counter-intelligence and law enforcement activities. This technique allows the analysts to map covert organizations such as an espionage ring, an organized crime family or a street gang. The National Security Agency (NSA) uses its electronic surveillance programs to generate the data needed to perform this type of analysis on terrorist cells and other networks deemed relevant to national security. The NSA looks up to three nodes deep during this network analysis. After the initial mapping of the social network is complete, analysis is performed to determine the structure of the network and determine, for example, the leaders within the network. This allows military or law enforcement assets to launch capture-or-kill decapitation attacks on the high-value targets in leadership positions to disrupt the functioning of the network.


title: Social network analysis

text: The NSA has been performing social network analysis on call detail records (CDRs), also known as metadata, since shortly after the September 11 attacks.


title: Social network analysis

text: Large textual corpora can be turned into networks and then analysed with the method of social network analysis. In these networks, the nodes are Social Actors, and the links are Actions. The extraction of these networks can be automated by using parsers. The resulting networks, which can contain thousands of nodes, are then analysed by using tools from network theory to identify the key actors, the key communities or parties, and general properties such as robustness or structural stability of the overall network, or centrality of certain nodes. This automates the approach introduced by Quantitative Narrative Analysis, whereby subject-verb-object triplets are identified with pairs of actors linked by an action, or pairs formed by actor-object.


title: Social network analysis

text: In other approaches, textual analysis is carried out considering the network of words co-occurring in a text. In these networks, nodes are words and links among them are weighted based on their frequency of co-occurrence (within a specific maximum range).


title: Social network analysis

text: Social network analysis has also been applied to understanding online behavior by individuals, organizations, and between websites. Hyperlink analysis can be used to analyze the connections between websites or webpages to examine how information flows as individuals navigate the web. The connections between organizations has been analyzed via hyperlink analysis to examine which organizations within an issue community.


title: Social network analysis

text: Another concept that has emerged from this connection between social network theory and the Internet is the concept of netocracy, where several authors have emerged studying the correlation between the extended use of online social networks, and changes in social power dynamics.


title: Social network analysis

text: Social network analysis has been applied to social media as a tool to understand behavior between individuals or organizations through their linkages on social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook.


title: Social network analysis

text: One of the most current methods of the application of SNA is to the study of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). When applied to CSCL, SNA is used to help understand how learners collaborate in terms of amount, frequency, and length, as well as the quality, topic, and strategies of communication. Additionally, SNA can focus on specific aspects of the network connection, or the entire network as a whole. It uses graphical representations, written representations, and data representations to help examine the connections within a CSCL network. When applying SNA to a CSCL environment the interactions of the participants are treated as a social network. The focus of the analysis is on the "connections" made among the participants – how they interact and communicate – as opposed to how each participant behaved on his or her own.


title: Social network analysis

text: There are several key terms associated with social network analysis research in computer-supported collaborative learning such as: density, centrality, indegree, outdegree, and sociogram.


title: Social network analysis

text: Researchers employ social network analysis in the study of computer-supported collaborative learning in part due to the unique capabilities it offers. This particular method allows the study of interaction patterns within a networked learning community and can help illustrate the extent of the participants' interactions with the other members of the group. The graphics created using SNA tools provide visualizations of the connections among participants and the strategies used to communicate within the group. Some authors also suggest that SNA provides a method of easily analyzing changes in participatory patterns of members over time.


title: Social network analysis

text: A number of research studies have applied SNA to CSCL across a variety of contexts. The findings include the correlation between a network's density and the teacher's presence, a greater regard for the recommendations of "central" participants, infrequency of cross-gender interaction in a network, and the relatively small role played by an instructor in an asynchronous learning network.


title: Social network analysis

text: Although many studies have demonstrated the value of social network analysis within the computer-supported collaborative learning field, researchers have suggested that SNA by itself is not enough for achieving a full understanding of CSCL. The complexity of the interaction processes and the myriad sources of data make it difficult for SNA to provide an in-depth analysis of CSCL. Researchers indicate that SNA needs to be complemented with other methods of analysis to form a more accurate picture of collaborative learning experiences.


title: Social network analysis

text: A number of research studies have combined other types of analysis with SNA in the study of CSCL. This can be referred to as a multi-method approach or data triangulation, which will lead to an increase of evaluation reliability in CSCL studies.


title: Mariqueen Maandig

text: Mariqueen Maandig Reznor ("née" Maandig; born April 5, 1981) is a Filipino-American singer, songwriter, and musician.


title: Mariqueen Maandig

text: She is the vocalist for How to Destroy Angels & the former vocalist of Los Angeles-based rock band West Indian Girl.


title: Mariqueen Maandig

text: Maandig was a vocalist for the band West Indian Girl from 2004 to 2009, performing on the albums "West Indian Girl" and "4th & Wall".


title: Mariqueen Maandig

text: In 2010, Maandig and her husband Trent Reznor formed the group How to Destroy Angels, along with long-time Reznor collaborator Atticus Ross.


title: Mariqueen Maandig

text: They have released two EPs named "How to Destroy Angels" and "An Omen", and a studio album, "Welcome Oblivion".


title: Mariqueen Maandig

text: Maandig has worked with LA-based songwriter BAO and appeared as a guest vocalist on two of his band Ming & Ping's songs, "Mixed Melodies" from their eponymous 2009 album and "Chinatown" from 2012's "The Darkness of Night".


title: Mariqueen Maandig

text: She also provided backing vocals on the track "She's Gone Away" on Nine Inch Nails' 2016 EP "Not the Actual Events", as well as on "Shit Mirror" off the band's 2018 album "Bad Witch".


title: John Schneider (producer)

text: John Steven Schneider (born April 23, 1962) is an American film, television and multi-media producer and artists' manager based in Los Angeles, California. The Pacifica, California, native made his first forays into show business when he took on the position of personal manager for his younger brother, comedian and actor Rob Schneider, and subsequently managed the San Francisco area rock band Head On. Eventually, John transitioned into producing movies such as "The Hot Chick" and "", alongside executive producers Adam Sandler and Jack Giarraputo.


title: John Schneider (producer)

text: John was the executive producer of "Rob", a situation comedy starring Rob Schneider, which aired on the CBS television network in 2012, and co-produced the Academy Award-nominated 2012 feature film "Hitchcock". He also serves as the personal manager of comedian, talk-show host and actor Tom Green, and creative consultant for Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst. Schneider produced "Tom Green Live"—the weekly talk show hosted by Green on entrepreneur/media mogul Mark Cuban's AXS TV channel—and is currently engaged in program development for CBS-TV, Showtime and The CW networks in conjunction with The Tannenbaum Company. In addition to his various production and management credits, John previously owned and operated the San Francisco nightclub DNA Lounge, and, at the age of 23, was elected to the Pacifica, California school board. He now resides in the Los Angeles area with his wife and three daughters.


title: Burnaby

text: Burnaby is a city in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia, Canada. Located in the centre of the Burrard Peninsula, it neighbours the City of Vancouver to the west, the District of North Vancouver across the confluence of the Burrard Inlet with its Indian Arm to the north, Port Moody and Coquitlam to the east, New Westminster and Surrey across the Fraser River to the southeast, and Richmond on the Lulu Island to the southwest.


title: Burnaby

text: Burnaby was incorporated in 1892 and achieved its city status in 1992. A member municipality of Metro Vancouver, it is British Columbia's third-largest city by population (after Vancouver and Surrey), and is the seat of Metro Vancouver's regional district government. 25% of Burnaby's land is designated as parks and open spaces, one of the highest in North America.


title: Burnaby

text: The main campuses of Simon Fraser University and the British Columbia Institute of Technology are located in Burnaby. It is home to high-tech companies such as Ballard Power (fuel cell), Clio (legal software), D-Wave (quantum computing), General Fusion (fusion power), and EA Vancouver. Burnaby's Metropolis at Metrotown is the largest mall in British Columbia, the third most visited in Canada and the fifth largest in the nation. Canada's largest film and television production studio and more than 60% of BC's sound stages are in Burnaby, contributing to the growth of Hollywood North.


title: Burnaby

text: The city is served by SkyTrain's Expo Line and Millennium Line. Metrotown station in downtown Metrotown is the busiest station on weekends and the second-busiest on weekdays in regional Vancouver's urban transit system as of 2021.


title: Burnaby

text: Burnaby is the original home to Halkomelem- and Squamish-speaking Central Coast Salish Nations. Local landmarks such as Burnaby Mountain, Deer Lake, and Brunette River feature prominently in Indigenous history passed down through oral traditions. The northern shorelines of Burnaby, along the second narrows of Burrard Inlet was site of an ancient battle between the attacking Lekwiltok and the defending Musquem according to Chief Charlie Qiyəplenəxw.


title: Burnaby

text: The Coast Salish people living in BC and Washington state numbered more than 100,000 people, a level of population density only supported by agriculture in other geographies. Techniques to preserve and store surplus food sustained a hierarchical society. Burnaby's marshlands along its rivers and lakes were cranberry harvesting areas for numerous villages, some numbering over 1,000 residents. Indigenous people travelled through Burnaby to reach the mouth of Brunette and Fraser River for the bountiful fishing seasons, eulachon in the spring and sockeye salmon in the late summer. Early European explorers and fur traders introduced diseases that decimated the Indigenous population. This false appearance of Burnaby as a vast open space, along with traditional Indigenous farming techniques which did not permanently alter the landscape, meant Indigenous land in Burnaby was mislabelled as terra nullius.


title: Burnaby

text: The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858, the first of many gold rushes in British Columbia, brought over 30,000 fortune seekers, including many American miners. The fear of an impending annexation by the United States led to the creation of the Colony of British Columbia in 1858 and the establishment of New Westminster as its capital.


title: Burnaby

text: Settlers in Burnaby acquired land through a process called pre-emption which allowed people to claim a piece of land by clearing forests and building houses. Pre-emption was excluded from Indigenous people. Royal Engineers dispossessed land from Indigenous people with the assistance of military force including the original routes of North Road, Kingsway, Canada Way, and Marine Drive. Logging permits given to settlers destroyed the forests of southern Burnaby which had provided vital sustenance for Indigenous people.


title: Burnaby

text: The City of Burnaby is named after Burnaby Lake, in turn named after Robert Burnaby, who was a Freemason, explorer, and legislator. He was previously private secretary to Colonel Richard Moody, the first land commissioner for the Colony of British of Columbia. In 1859, Burnaby surveyed a freshwater lake in the city's geographic centre. Moody named it Burnaby Lake.


title: Burnaby

text: Burnaby was established in 1891 and incorporated a year later in 1892. In the same year, the interurban tram connecting Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster began construction.


title: Burnaby

text: The expanding urban centres of Vancouver and New Westminster influenced the growth of Burnaby. It developed as an agricultural area supplying nearby markets. Later, it evolved into an important transportation corridor between Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and the Interior. The introduction of the Skytrain's Expo Line cemented this trend into the 21st century.


title: Burnaby

text: As Vancouver expanded and became a metropolis, Burnaby was one of the first-tier suburbs of Vancouver, along with North Vancouver and Richmond. During the suburbanization of Burnaby, "Mid-Century Vernacular" homes were built by the hundreds to satisfy demand by new residents. The establishment of British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) in 1960 and Simon Fraser University (SFU) in 1965 helped Burnaby gradually become more urban in character. In 1992, one hundred years after its incorporation, Burnaby officially became a city.


title: Burnaby

text: Since the 1970s, Burnaby has seen a decline in resource sectors and a subsequent rise of high value-added services and technology sectors. The presence of BCIT and SFU promoted research & development in the area. For example, manufacturing plants near Still Creek closed in the late 1970s, only to reopen few years later as film production studios. The continued expansion of media production in Burnaby contributed to Hollywood North.


title: Burnaby

text: Burnaby occupies and is located at the geographic centre of the Metro Vancouver Regional District. The regional district's government is located in Burnaby's Metrotown area. Situated between the city of Vancouver on the west and Port Moody, Coquitlam, and New Westminster on the east, Burnaby is bounded by Burrard Inlet and the Fraser River on the north and south, respectively. Burnaby, Vancouver and New Westminster collectively occupy the major portion of the Burrard Peninsula. The elevation of Burnaby ranges from sea level to a maximum of atop Burnaby Mountain. Due to its elevation, the city of Burnaby typically has more snowfall during the winter months than nearby Vancouver or Richmond. Overall, the physical landscape of Burnaby is one of hills, ridges, valleys and an alluvial plain.


title: Burnaby

text: Burnaby is home to many industrial and commercial firms. British Columbia's largest (and Canada's second largest) commercial shopping mall, Metropolis at Metrotown, is located in Burnaby. Still, Burnaby's ratio of park land to residents is one of the highest in North America. It also maintains some agricultural land, particularly along the Fraser foreshore flats in the Big Bend neighbourhood along its southern perimeter.


title: Burnaby

text: Major parklands and waterways in Burnaby include Central Park, Robert Burnaby Park, Kensington Park, Burnaby Mountain, Still Creek, the Brunette River, Burnaby Lake, Deer Lake, and Squint Lake.


title: Burnaby

text: Burnaby's Simon Fraser University weather station is located above sea level on Burnaby Mountain. Therefore, climate records are cooler and wetter, with more snowfall, as compared to the rest of the city.


title: Burnaby

text: In the 2021 Canadian census conducted by Statistics Canada, Burnaby had a population of 249,125 living in 101,136 of its 107,046 total private dwellings, an increase of from its 2016 population of 232,755. With a land area of , it had a population density of in 2021.


title: Burnaby

text: In 2016, the median age is 40.3 years old, slightly younger than the British Columbia median of 43.0 years old.


title: Burnaby

text: Similar to the Metro Vancouver region, Burnaby has always had diverse ethnic and immigrant communities. For example, North Burnaby near Hastings Street has long been home to many Italian restaurants and recreational bocce games. Metrotown's high-rise condominium towers in the south have been fuelled in part by arrivals from China (Hong Kong and Macau) during the 1990s, Taiwan, and South Korea. Accorrding to the 2021 census, ethnic Chinese make up the largest ethnic group of Burnaby with 33.3% while Europeans make up a close 2nd with 30.5%.


title: Burnaby

text: According to the 2006 census, 54% of Burnaby residents have a mother tongue that is neither English nor French. The 2016 census found that English was spoken as the mother tongue of 41.33 percent of the population. The next three most common languages were Mandarin (14.53 percent), Cantonese (12.32 percent) and Tagalog (3.35 percent).


title: Burnaby

text: The city features major commercial town centres, high-density residential areas, two rapid transit lines, technology research, business parks, film studios such as The Bridge Studios, and TV stations such as Global TV.


title: Burnaby

text: Major technology firms such as Ballard Power Systems (fuel cell), D-Wave Systems (quantum computing), Clio (legal tech), Creo (imaging), and Electronic Arts Canada (studio) have their headquarters in Burnaby.


title: Burnaby

text: Metropolis mall located in the Metrotown neighbourhood, the downtown area of Burnaby, is the largest mall in British Columbia with West Vancouver's Park Royal in second place. It is the second largest in Canada behind the first-place West Edmonton Mall in Alberta. Metropolis was the second most visited mall in Canada in 2017 and third most visited in 2018.


title: Burnaby

text: Heavy industry companies including Chevron Corporation and Petro-Canada petroleum refines oil on the shores of Burrard Inlet.


title: Burnaby

text: Best Buy, Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, Pacific Blue Cross and Nokia have significant facilities in Burnaby.


title: Burnaby

text: Other firms with operations based in Burnaby include Canada Wide Media, Doteasy, Telus, Teradici, AFCC, Mercedes-Benz Fuel Cell, HSBC Group Systems Development Centre, and TransLink. eBay ceased local operations in 2009.


title: Burnaby

text: Over 24,000 studentsacross the 41 elementary schools and 8 secondary schoolsare managed by School District 41 in Burnaby. It operates a community and adult education department, an international students program, and a French immersion program.


title: Burnaby

text: The British Columbia School for the Deaf is located on the same grounds of the Burnaby South Secondary School.


title: Burnaby

text: Simon Fraser University's main campus, with more than 30,000 students and 950 staff, is located atop Burnaby Mountain. In "Maclean's" 2020 rankings, the university placed first in their comprehensive university category, and ninth in their reputation ranking for Canadian universities.


title: Burnaby

text: British Columbia Institute of Technology's main campus in Burnaby, home to more than 49,000 full-time and part-time students, was established in 1964. A new $78 million, net-zero emission Health Science Centre, expected to open in late 2021, will accommodate 7,000 students.


title: Burnaby

text: Burnaby is home to multiple museums highlighting the diverse history and culture of the city. Burnaby Village Museum is a open-air museum preserving a 1920s Canadian village. The Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre, which includes a Japanese garden, opened in 2000 to promote awareness and understanding of Japanese Canadian culture. The Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is located within the Simon Fraser University campus at the top of Burnaby Mountain.


title: Burnaby

text: Burnaby Public Library was first established in 1954. It currently has four locations throughout the city, including the central Bobbie Prittie Metrotown branch in downtown Burnaby. The library system holds over three million items in circulation, with more than 5,000 visitors per day.


title: Burnaby

text: Many cultural facilities are located in or around Deer Lake Park, including the Burnaby Art Gallery, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, and the Burnaby Village Museum.


title: Burnaby

text: Michael J. Fox Theatre, a community theatre that seats 613, with 11 wheelchair spaces, is situated within Burnaby South Secondary School.


title: Burnaby

text: The city's main stadium, Swangard Stadium, is located in Central Park (Burnaby). It was completed in 1969. The stadium was home to the Vancouver 86ers (now the Vancouver Whitecaps FC) in the Canadian Soccer League from 1986 to 2010, when the team relocated to BC Place to play in the Major League Soccer.


title: Burnaby

text: The SkyTrain Operations Controls Centre 1, built in the 1980s, is responsible for the maintenance and operations of both the region's Expo Line and Millennium Line. In 2021, construction began on a $110 million Operations Controls Centre 2 to accommodate growing transit ridership.


title: Burnaby

text: The Expo Line, completed in 1986, crosses the south along Kingsway. The Millennium Line, completed in 2002, follows Lougheed Highway. The SkyTrain has encouraged closer connections to New Westminster, Vancouver, and Surrey, as well as dense urban development at Lougheed Town Centre on the city's eastern border, at Brentwood Town Centre in the centre-west, Edmonds–Highgate in the southeast and, most notably, at Metrotown in the south.


title: Burnaby

text: Major north–south streets crossing the city include Boundary Road, Willingdon Avenue, Royal Oak Avenue, Kensington Avenue, Sperling Avenue, Gaglardi Way, Cariboo Road, and North Road. East–west routes linking Burnaby's neighbouring cities to each other include Hastings Street, Barnet Highway, the Lougheed Highway, Kingsway (which follows the old horse trail between Vancouver and New Westminster), Canada Way and Marine Drive/Marine Way. Douglas Road, which used to cross the city from northwest to southeast, has largely been absorbed by the Trans-Canada Highway and Canada Way.


title: Burnaby

text: The city is served by Metro Vancouver's bus system, run by the Coast Mountain Bus Company, a division of TransLink, the region's transportation authority. The 49 bus route, connecting Metrotown and the University of British Columbia, is the second most boarded bus route after route 99, which is the busiest bus route in North America. Burnaby is also served by the R5 Hastings St RapidBus.


title: Burnaby

text: The 2050 Burnaby Transportation Plan, adopted in December 2021, outlines three targets: to reduce traffic fatalities to zero, to increase public transit and active transportation to 75 percent of all trips, and to reduce vehicle emissions by 100 percent.


title: Burnaby

text: While Burnaby occupies about 4 percent of the land area of the Metro Vancouver Regional District, it accounted for about 10 percent of the region's population in 2016. It is the third most populated urban centre in British Columbia (after Vancouver and Surrey), with a population of 249,125 (2021).


title: Burnaby

text: Politically, Burnaby has maintained a left-wing city council closely affiliated with the provincial NDP and school board for many years, while sometimes electing more conservative legislators provincially (from the Social Credit and BC Liberal parties) and federally (from the Reform, Alliance, and Conservative parties). Its longest-serving politician had been Svend Robinson of the New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada's first openly gay member of Parliament, but after 25 years and seven elections he resigned his post in early 2004 after stealing and then returning an expensive ring. Burnaby voters endorsed his assistant, Bill Siksay, as his replacement in the 2004 Canadian federal election. In the May 2013 provincial election, residents of the city sent 3 NDP MLAs and one Liberal MLA to the British Columbia legislature. The NDP MLA for Burnaby-Lougheed, Jane Shin, faced controversy after the election for misrepresenting herself as a physician despite not having completed a medical residency nor holding a licence to practice medicine.


title: Burnaby

text: According to a 2009 survey by "Maclean's" magazine, Burnaby was Canada's best-run city. The survey looks at a city's efficiency, the cost of producing results, and the effectiveness of its city services. However, Maclean's did note that Burnaby has one of the worst municipal voter turnouts in the country, at 26 percent. In 2015, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) included Burnaby as a Vancouver periphery to rank eighth for entrepreneurial communities.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: Definitely, Maybe is a 2008 romantic comedy film written and directed by Adam Brooks, and starring Ryan Reynolds, Isla Fisher, Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Banks, Abigail Breslin, and Kevin Kline. Set in New York City, the film is about a former political consultant who tries to help his daughter understand his impending divorce by telling her the story of his past romantic relationships and how he ended up marrying her mother. The film grossed $55 million worldwide.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: Will Hayes works at an advertising agency in New York City and is in the midst of a divorce from wife Sarah. After her first sex education class, his 10-year-old daughter Maya insists on hearing the story of how her parents met. Will gives in, but changes the names and some of the facts, leaving Maya to guess which of the women from his past is Sarah, her mother.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: In 1992, Will graduates from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and leaves behind his college sweetheart, "Emily Jones", to work on the Bill Clinton campaign in New York City. There, he meets "April Hoffman", a fellow campaign staffer, and delivers a package from Emily to her college friend, "Summer Hartley". The package is revealed to be Summer's diary, which Will reads, learning she had a brief affair with Emily. Summer is dating her professor, Hampton Roth, but spontaneously kisses Will.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: He tells April his plan to propose to Emily, and rehearses his proposal; April replies, "Definitely, maybe". They go to her apartment where Will notices her many copies of "Jane Eyre". She explains that her father gave her a copy with a personal inscription shortly before he died, but the book was later lost. She has spent years searching secondhand bookstores to find it and collects any copy with an inscription. April and Will kiss, but he abruptly leaves. The following day Emily arrives but when Will tries to propose, she confesses that she slept with his roommate, and urges him to move on and pursue his ambitions.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: After Clinton is elected, Will opens a political consulting firm, and stays in close touch with April as she travels the world. He encounters Summer, now a journalist and single, and they begin a relationship. April returns from abroad, planning to tell Will that she loves him, but discovers he is planning to propose to Summer. Will learns that Summer has written an article that will ruin his candidate's campaign. He asks her not to publish it, but she refuses, and Will ends their relationship. The article derails the campaign, losing Will his political career and friends.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: Years later, April reaches out to Will, who has fallen into depression. She throws Will a birthday party, reuniting him with his old colleagues, but he quietly leaves the party early. Will then drunkenly confesses to April that he loves her, leading to an argument about the state of their lives. Passing a bookstore, he finds the inscribed copy of "Jane Eyre" April's father gave her. He goes to April's apartment to give her the book, but decides against it when he meets her boyfriend Kevin, who is living with her. Will runs into Summer who tells him she's pregnant and invites him to a party where he reunites with Emily, who has recently moved to New York City.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: In the present, Maya deduces that "Emily" is her mother. Maya hopes her parents will reunite, but Will assures Maya that she is the story's happy ending, before finalizing his divorce.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: Unpacking in his new apartment, Will discovers April's book. He brings it to her, apologizing for waiting so long, but she asks him to leave. At Maya's urging, Will realizes he is miserable without April, whose name he didn't change in the story like he did to "Emily"/Sarah and to "Summer", whose real name is Natasha. Will and Maya go to April's apartment and he tries to explain his reasoning to her, but she does not let them inside. Waiting in front of the door, Maya encourages Will to tell April the story, while April overhears the conversation through intercom. As Will and Maya walk away, April runs after them. Will explains that he kept the book as the only thing he had left of her. April invites them in to tell her the story, and she and Will kiss.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: The film was scored by English composer Clint Mansell. Lakeshore Records released the score on March 18, 2008. All Music Guide reviewer William Ruhlmann praised the album as filled with "sweet, melodic numbers that often seem to lack only a lyric to turn them into pop songs". He also stated that it functioned as "light accompaniment to an equally light entertainment".


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: A song from Nirvana, "Come as You Are", was featured during several scenes in the movie, as well as Nothing Lasts Forever by Maroon 5.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: In its opening weekend, the film grossed $9.8 million from 2,204 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking #5 at the box office. It went on to gross $56 million worldwide.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: The film was released on DVD June 24, 2008, with a widescreen transfer, deleted scenes, two short featurettes, and a commentary track by Reynolds and director Brooks.


title: Definitely, Maybe

text: On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 70% based on reviews from 148 critics, with an average rating of 6.5/10. The site's consensus reads: "With a clever script and charismatic leads, "Definitely, Maybe" is a refreshing entry into the romantic comedy genre." On Metacritic the film has an average score of 59 out of 100 based on 33 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.