bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘with the mechanics of which I am unfamiliar’: The Strangeness of Technology in Beckett
Authors: Bird Dúnlaith
Published: May 2022

In a letter to Donald McWhinnie of 7 March 1958, Samuel Beckett mentions that his new monologue ‘involves a tape-recorder with the mechanics of which I am unfamiliar. I can’t release it until I check up on some points. I have asked John B. to send me a book of the words (instructions for use)’. To what extent can technical difficulties be seen more broadly as creative generators in Beckett’s work? Can the use of technology, including tape recorders (Krapp’s Last Tape), or even desk lamps (Rough for Theatre II), be seen as material evidence of a desire to explore the mechanics of failure? Does Beckett use technology as a means of ‘defamiliarising’ writing, rendering the process strange through technological as much as linguistic means? Exploring first the uncanny role of instruction manuals in Beckett’s work, and then the unsettling presence of electronics on stage, this chapter suggests that Beckett’s dramatic works are wired for highly fruitful technological and mechanical failures.
Beckett and La Mettrie: From Man a Machine to Techno-Human Being
Authors: Thobois Céline
Published: May 2022

In Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, Krapp’s Last Tape stands out as the first theatrical play to feature a technological apparatus as a central agent of the performance. This innovative dramaturgy invites audiences to analyse human processes in connection with the functioning of the machine. Beckett’s interest in mechanist theories has often been related to his study of René Descartes and post-Cartesian philosophers. In this lineage, Julien Offray de la Mettrie appears as the most radical thinker of anthropological materialism, but one who remains underexplored in Beckett studies. In recent years, the eighteenth-century physician and philosopher has been celebrated as a forefather of neurophysiology and as an early thinker of the posthuman condition.
By proposing a parallel reading of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and La Mettrie’s Man a Machine, this chapter investigates how both texts open unexpected avenues for thinking about what it means to be human in the context of changing paradigms of humanness. After an analysis of Krapp’s mechanistic digestive and creative processes through the Lamettrian concepts of continuity and organisation, the chapter focuses on Krapp’s imagination and sensuality via La Mettrie’s neurophysiology. The chapter eventually reflects on selfhood and the ever-growing technological assistance of cognitive processes.
Coda Viral Beckett
Authors: Johnson Nicholas
Published: May 2022

This coda to Beckett and Technology considers the spread of Beckettian references, viral memes, acts of identification, and intermedial adaptations in digital culture. Noting the increased flow of Beckett-related citation (especially humour) across media during the international lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic, this short essay explores both the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of Beckett's contagion. It argues that the 2020 global public health emergency – the first such event in the era of digital culture – has acted as an accelerant for already existing trends in the evolving reception of the author, in which the power and relevance of old-media gatekeepers (publishers, agencies, Estates) is naturally attenuated by the sheer scale, creativity, and non-commercial nature of what is happening to Beckett on the internet. Rather than mourn this shift, the coda concludes that such technological mutation is a natural process of adaptation, enabling the work’s long-term survival.
Russian in Belarus: A Feature of Belarusian Identity or Moscow’s ‘Trojan Horse’?
Authors: Brüggemann Mark
Published: May 2022

Language issues in Belarus are strongly politicised. While Russian had been the preferred language during the Soviet period, Belarusian was strongly favoured during the early years of Belarusian independence (1991–4). Following Lukashenka’s ascent to power, bilingualism was the official line in language policies. In the absence of any substantial support for the less popular Belarusian, this policy amounted to a stabilisation of the dominant position of Russian in the public space. In the wake of the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of armed conflicts in the Donbas, the government position on the language question changed again. While Belarusian is increasingly understood as a marker of Belarusian nationality, some degree of ambivalence is retained, as Lukashenka in public continues to call Russian a language that does not exclusively ‘belong to the Russians’.
The Russian World in Perspective: Comparing Russian Culture and Language Promotion with British, German and French Practices
Authors: Noack Christian
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the rationale, the institutional set-up and the practice of Russia’s language promotion and puts it into perspective by juxtaposing it to British, French and German practices. How do the aims of Russian cultural diplomacy, in terms of “influencing” and “mediating” compare to those of the Western European States? In how far is the institutional set-up of the Russkii Mir Foundation and of the state agency Rossotrudnichestvo and their relationship to educational and foreign ministries comparable to those of the British Council, the Alliance Française and the Goethe Institutes? Which methods of language promotion do these organisations offer to prospective students? Finally, the chapter compares Russia’s contemporary language and culture promotion with the history of Soviet cultural diplomacy and discusses whether or not Russia’s soft power initiative is more than old wine in new bottles.
‘The accumulated and single’: Modernity, Inheritance and Orphan Identity
Authors: Warren Diane
Published: May 2022

Like the orphan figure, literary modernism can be characterised by its complex and often contested relations with the past, especially the Victorian past, whose influences were still palpable. Modernist responses range from the rejection of inherited values, distilled in the injunction to ‘Make it New!’ to the embrace of the past seen in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. Similarly, literary orphan figures modulate between attempts at self-fashioning and the impulse to (re)create or trace their relation to their inheritance. This chapter traces the varying ways in which the relationship between the accumulation of inheritance and the attempt to innovate and change are teased out in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) and Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times (2000). Nightwood makes use of the narrative of Felix Volkbein to reach into the past as a way of coming to terms with inheritance and through this, approaching the future. Conversely, When I Lived in Modern Times examines the effects of the last vestiges of Victorian treatment of both orphans and ‘wayward women’ and explores the extent to which Modernist idealism can really function as an escape from that inheritance.
Introduction
Authors: Barbato Matteo
Published: May 2022

This chapter illustrates the methodology of the book and its contribution to the scholarship on Athenian democracy. After reconstructing the Marxist and culturalist approaches to ideology in the social sciences, the chapter discusses the scholarship on Athenian democratic ideology inspired by those approaches, with a particular focus on the works of Nicole Lorax and Josiah Ober. Loraux’s view of ideology as a cover-up for internal conflict is reviewed in the light of Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined community to account for the constructive function of ideology in creating civic bonds. Ober’s interpretation of ideology as a fixed set of shared ideas is reconceptualised as a process of ideological practice which allowed both the mass and the elite actively to produce shared, flexible ideas and values under the influence of Athenian democratic institutions. The New Institutionalism and the book’s relationship with previous scholarship on social memory are also illustrated. Finally, the chapter delimits the topic of the investigation to Athenian myths, which are defined as those stories that dealt with the legendary times which the Athenians considered their remote past.
Myth and Athenian Democracy
Authors: Barbato Matteo
Published: May 2022

This chapter assesses the Athenians’ mythical knowledge and demonstrates that the social memory of Athens’ mythical past is a valuable evidence for the study of Athenian democratic ideology. It shows that the Athenians engaged with myth in virtually every aspect of their public and private lives and were familiar with the Greek mythical tradition in all its complexity. As a result, they were able to appreciate variations in mythical narratives and their potential ideological value. The chapter first reviews the myths deployed at the dramatic festivals and the Panathenaea. It then explores the myths adopted in the institutional settings of Athenian oratory: the state funeral for the war dead, the lawcourts, the Assembly and the Council. The presence of myth in the private contexts of the family and the symposium is also addressed. The chapter ends with an analysis of some mythical variants attested in Athens, which demonstrates that the Athenians often deployed multiple versions of the same myths.
Between Charis and Philanthrōpia : The Heraclidae
Authors: Barbato Matteo
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores the myth of the Heraclidae and shows that institutions enabled potentially conflicting ideas about the community to coexist in Athenian ideological practice. Theseus’ debt of reciprocity (charis) towards Heracles, which motivates the Athenians to protect the Heraclidae in Euripides’ Children of Heracles, is omitted in Lysias’ Funeral Oration, where the Athenians, with no private interests at stake, acted entirely out of altruism and justice. This chapter argues that this variation attests the influence of, respectively, the dramatic festivals and the state funeral for the war dead in fostering either of two distinct and only apparently contrasting ideas: the Athenians’ solicitude in reciprocating the charis due to benefactors, and their disposition to humaneness (philanthrōpia). A comparison is then introduced with Isocrates’ Panegyricus, a speech produced for private circulation. Isocrates states that the Heraclidae sought Athens’ help because it was the only city capable of reciprocating Heracles’ benefactions to humanity. It is shown that the orator, not bound by the discursive parameters of any institution, downplayed Athenian philanthrōpia and exploited charis to emphasise the power of the Athenians rather than their ideas about the importance of reciprocating benefactions.
Fading Shades of Hybris : The Attic Amazonomachy
Authors: Barbato Matteo
Published: May 2022

This chapter argues that democratic institutions influenced how the Athenians conceptualised the causes of the Attic Amazonomachy and used them to foster ideas about their own attitude towards hybris. Due to the influence of the state funeral, Lysias’s Funeral Oration ignores Theseus’ abduction of Antiope and depicts the Athenians as righteous punishers of the hubristic Amazons. Aeschylus’ Eumenides states that the Amazons invaded Athens out of phthonos (meaning either envy or rightful indignation) for Theseus. The dramatic festival enabled the poet to both hint to and challenge the picture of the Athenians as righteous enemies of hubristic invaders. Private settings, which were free from institutional constraints, allowed for a wider range of variations. The abduction of Antiope/Hippolyta could be vaguely alluded to as the Amazons’ pretext for pursuing the conquest of Greece (Isocrates’ Panegyricus); it could be described as a lawful acquisition as a war prize, which contradicted the righteous picture of Athens by portraying Theseus as the original aggressor (Philochorus and Pherecydes); or it could be portrayed as Hippolyta’s deliberate choice, which characterises Theseus as guilty of seduction and potentially endangers the Athenians’ image as the champions of justice (Isocrates’ Panathenaicus).
Hindu Orientalism: The Sachar Committee and Over-representation of Minorities in Jail
Authors: Ahmad Irfan
Published: May 2022

With the release in 2006 of the Sachar Committee Report (SCR), instituted by the Government of India, the social-economic backwardness of Muslims became a public issue. Discussing responses to the SCR, this chapter sheds light on the interrelationships among democracy, minorities and ‘inclusive development’. The principal contention is that behind the reluctant, perhaps even insincere, implementation of the SCR under the Congress administration and its near dumping under the Modi administration was the successful mobilisation of Re-Orientalism. This Re-Orientalism – or what Mita Banerjee, Lisa Lau and Ana Mendes allude to as ‘Hindu Orientalism’ – stigmatised the relative deprivation of Muslims vis-à-vis other communities by deploying tropes of ‘Islamic terrorism’, ‘fanaticism’, ‘Muslim appeasement’, ‘separatism’, ‘disloyalty to the nation’ and so on – tropes supplied by British colonialism. That this Re-Orientalism won was not inevitable. An anti-Orientalist alternative notion of democracy – democracy as an ethos resonant with suffering and mutual care – did exist, but it was sacrificed to prolong the ceremonial, mediatised, arithmetic, corporate national democracy. The chapter conclude with theoretical observations about the limits and possibilities of the term ‘Re-Orientalism’.
Lessons from South Africa: A First-Hand Testimony *
Authors: Kasrils Ronnie
Published: May 2022

Former Minister for the Intelligence Services in South Africa, Ronnie Kasrils, writes about the challenges faced by the African National Congress (ANC) during the transition to peaceful political activism. He explains the ruptures he faced personally as one of the founders of the military wing of the ANC (Umkhonto we Sizwe – MK, or Spear of the Nation), and as a former deputy minister of defence in South Africa, following the end of apartheid and the transition to democracy. The chapter focuses on the establishment of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in 1961, its transformation and demobilisation in 1994, and the challenges of the amalgamation of the previous adversarial military forces into a new South African National Defence Force up to 1999. The chapter also outlies some of the reforms in both the military and the intelligence establishments.
The Mahdi Army and the Sadrist Movement in Iraq: The Struggle for Transformation
Authors: Saeed Haider
Published: May 2022

Based on interviews with the founder of the Mahdi Army – Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr – and several of its commanders, this chapter analyses the transformation of Jaysh Al Mahdi (JAM), which significantly differs from the common relationship between Iraqi ideological parties and their armed wings. JAM was not created as an armed wing of an existing political organization, but by a group of Sadrist clerics from the Shiite religious establishment in Najaf. JAM’s objective was to carry out whatever tasks the marja’iyya (the Shiite clerical establishment) sees fit, according to its founding statement, announced by Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr in July 2003. The chapter analyses the causal factors of the transformations that took place, from the moment JAM was formed to the rise of the Sadrist movement. It does so via focusing on the leadership role of al-Sadr in the transformations, the combat outcomes in battles with the British forces and the Iraqi government, and the inducements and opportunities proffered by abandoning the militia and turning into a political party and controlling the ballot boxes in Southern Iraq. The chapter addresses the factional defections within the Mahdi Army, which became main constituents of the Hashad al-Sha‘bi (Popular Mobilisation) Forces.
A Draw or a Defeat? How the Ira Transitioned from Bullets to BallotS
Authors: Clubb Gordon
Published: May 2022

This chapter focuses on the collective transformation of the Provisional IRA from arms to peace. This has been explained in the literature as a result of successful counter-terrorism strategy which led to the IRA’s defeat or a hurting stalemate (or readiness to negotiate) between the IRA and the UK government. Yet neither of these characterisations sufficiently account for how the transformation of social, agential and leadership forces, and the interplay within and between these forces, led the IRA to disengage. Rather than necessarily defeating or drawing with the IRA, the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy facilitated intra-movement dynamics which enabled (and constrained) agency to transition to peaceful activism. To account for the transition to peace, the chapter analyses the interplay between macro- and meso-level factors over two periods, the first leading up to the Good Friday Agreement and the second following the agreement. Overall, the chapter argues that charismatic leadership, the British government’s innovative counter-terrorism strategy, the European Union peace funding (inducements), and the role of ex-combatants particularly at the community level (internal interactions) have led to both the initiation and sustainability of the peace process.
Transformations and Defeats: Eta and the End of the Armed Campaign
Authors: Hutcheon Nick
Published: May 2022

The chapter examines the transformation of an armed secessionist movement into a peaceful one. The Basque armed group ETA was founded in 1959 and formally disbanded in 2018. During those six decades, this clandestine group evolved to become the central node in a complex network of organizations that shared the strategic goal of political independence from Spain. The chapter argues that the pressures of the armed path, innovative counterterrorism policies, and an internal process of debate triggered a factional transformation of the ETA. The chapter accounts for the transition from armed to unarmed activism with a multi-level approach that combines individual, organisational and contextual data. Ultimately, the transformation of ETA can be accounted for by analysing the meso- and the macro-level variables of leadership, internal and external interactions with the “other,” inducements and failures of the armed path. The continuous factional transformation of ETA – from the 1970s to 2017 – has shown the critical importance of meso-level factors (especially charismatic leadership), even when macro-level changes occur (such as democratic transition in Spain and the EU’s consistent support for transformations to unarmed politics).
Transformations after ‘Defeats’: The Cases of the Tupamaros and the Armed Left in Latin America
Authors: Marchesi Aldo
Published: May 2022

The chapter reviews the transition from armed organizations to political parties and unarmed social movements in the context of the re-democratisation (and onwards) that took place in the 1980s in the southern cone of Latin America. It focuses on three aspects that are integral to understanding the ways in which armed organizations were successful in their adaptation to new democratic regimes. Firstly, the chapter assess the impact that brutal state repression had on the political and ideological transformations of these activists. Secondly, the chapter evaluates the ways that internal debates and interactions have affected the ideological changes of these groups and therefore affected their chances of participating in the new democracies. Thirdly, the chapter analyzes the ways in which legal and political incentives (including amnesty legislations) of the new regimes promoted or limited the possibilities of adaptation to political participation under democratic rules. Finally, the chapter shifts to the role of leadership on the micro-level and compares the political trajectory of two key political figures from Argentina and Uruguay, Enrique Gorriaran Merlo and José Mújica, to understand how leadership and the three variables mentioned above (repression, interactions, inducements) have interplayed in each political scenario.
Transformations of Armed Nonstate Actors: Enduring Challenges and Strategic Implications
Authors: Ashour Omar
Published: May 2022

The book’s findings and conclusions are outlined in this chapter. These are presented as a framework for understanding the collective transformations of a once armed movement to unarmed political activism, as a function of micro-, meso- and macro-level variables that determine the successful initiation and sustainability of the transformations. The chapter also outlines the policy implications and recommendations of the findings and the global impact of successful transformations on insurgencies, democratisation and security crises. The findings may have a substantial impact on official policies encouraging the renunciation of political violence, violent extremism, and the transition towards unarmed/non-violent politics.
Overall, although major progress has been made worldwide in terms of initiating, sustaining and understanding collective de-radicalisation and transformations towards non-violent activism – in both academic and practitioner circles – major challenges can still impede or even completely undo that progress. To highlight the challenges and opportunities in light of revising our understanding of collective de-radicalisation, the concluding chapter outlines summary reflections and then proceeds to outline some of the strategic implications of the transformations from bullets to ballots.
Spinoza's Political Philosophy
Authors: Caporali Riccardo
Published: May 2022

Riccardo Caporali makes a close and circular connection between metaphysics, ethics and politics in Spinoza’s thought. He offers an examination of all of Spinoza’s works while addressing the challenges imposed by the historical curcumstances at the time. As a result, Spinoza’s work and its author, the philosopher and the man, go hand in hand. Focusing on Spinoza’s constant preoccupation with the relationship between metaphysics and politics, Caporali shows that it takes different forms in his various major works. He highlights specific moments of this discontinuity, particulary in the transition between the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Tractatus Politicus. Caporali’s reconstruction of Spinoza’s political philosophy, alongside the historical context and events, is interwoven with with comparisons and references to Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Vico and Hegel, as well as to many contemporary interpretation of Spinoza’s thought.
Metaphysics and Politics
Authors: Caporali Riccardo
Published: May 2022

This initial chapter examines the notion of causa sui as the strategic point of the entire first part of Spinoza's Ethics. In the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition (Thomas Aquinas, Suarez - but then, in the end, also Descartes) this notion is accepted only in a metaphorical and approximate sense because, as Aristotle teaches, an entity cannot be, strictly speaking, the efficient cause of itself: the cause is in fact necessarily different and "eminent", temporally prior and ontologically more powerful, than its effect. Spinoza instead uses the notion of causa sui in an unequivocal and direct way. God ("that is, Nature, that is, Substance") is literally the cause of himself in the same sense in which he is the cause of things. Spinoza accepts the paralogism of the "cause of itself" with the aim of completely demolishing the traditional image of a personal God, endowed with intellect and will, and as such transcendent with respect to finite entities. Spinoza's God-Nature-Substance is thus resolved into pure expressive-productive energy, in his being the cause of his "modes". This position opens up a perspective of radical immanence, and the possibility of an ethical and political perfection of man in the dynamic terms of potentia, up to that beatitudo, which represents the culminating point of power.
A Militant Design: The Theological-Political Treatise
Authors: Caporali Riccardo
Published: May 2022

The third chapter examines the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. This book is the first example of modern biblical exegesis, which consists in the renunciation of the preliminary fideistic acceptance of "revelation", in order to interpret Scripture instead as a text to be investigated in terms of form, language, literary genre, and the vicissitudes it has undergone in the course of time. The political objective is a rational analysis of the Bible that establishes a few, nuclear principles of a "universal faith" compatible with reason and democracy, polemically opposed to the dogmatic and intolerant cults (the Calvinist Church, the Synagogues) that support the Dutch monarchical faction. Spinoza tries in this way to give breath to the declining republican elite (metaphorically represented by the lector philosophus, the only addressee of the TTP) with respect to the vulgus, that people-plebe who, inflamed by the prejudices of theologians and preachers, support the monarchical faction. The TTP, in this way, ends up prefiguring a "democracy without the people", which is as problematic on a conceptual level as it is unworkable on a historical-political one. A "defeat", however, that takes nothing away from the powerful and fascinating ambiguity of the work, between theory and militancy.
The Thinkpiece Seriality of Girls
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

The chapter focuses on Girls (HBO, 2012-2017) and the academic and journalistic writing of what I make out as its preferred audience, its viewer-critics or critical sphere. Serial TV criticism develops alongside television shows, filling in gaps between individual episodes and attempting to either document or initiate discussions. The chapter develops the concept of thinkpiece seriality to explore how serial TV criticism is much more than an exterior reaction to television; how through various narrative practices the dramedy Girls mobilizes analytical responses which intertwine with the show’s storytelling. In other words, with Girls, HBO attempted to recreate the buzz of its early-mid-2000s watercooler shows by creating a specifically gendered, yet ambiguously open text leeching onto a variety of contemporary discourses. As a simultaneous observer of the show and the show’s viewer-critics, the chapter identifies textual and discursive trends as practices of such a thinkpiece seriality.
Outward Spiral: Gendering through Recognisability
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

The chapter focuses on How to Get Away with Murder’s black, female protagonist Annalise Keating, and in different sections provides readings of beauty and professional appearance (in contrast with Alicia Florrick of The Good Wife), and bisexual orientation. The chapter employs the analytical figure of the outward spiral to capture the affective, immediate responses the show encourages. Spiral gendering permits Murder to mine intersectional characterizations for cultural resonance with viewers. Murder’s gender performances begin from starting points such as the racialized tropes of black femininity that Patricia Hill Collins describes as “controlling images” (76-106). They then proceed to mobilize viewer affect in the form of two distinct, yet similarly affect-driven patterns: first, viewers may recognize themselves in the show's portrayals, and second, they may perceive themselves to be witnesses to a television history in the making.
Conclusion: Archiving Snapshots
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

The conclusion argues that altogether their participation in various cultural discourses allows these analyzed television shows to pursue a kind of commercial taming of forms of previously radical critique, thought, and activism. Overall, the previous chapters’ analysis demonstrate how television’s commercial containments of political thought rarely occur neatly or without tension but always depend on these show’s respective serial genders and gendered serialities.
The Ethics of Filmmaking: How the Genetic History of Works Affects Their Value
Authors: Hjort Mette
Published: May 2022

This chapter argues that ethical demerits characterizing a given film’s production process have direct implications for the value of the film in question. Ethical demerits often arise when relatively powerful figures within the production process direct abuse at more vulnerable parties, typically child actors or female actors. Whereas ethicists such as Berys Gaut contend that it is the implicit attitudes of works that determine their ethical valence, and, through this, their aesthetic value, this chapter insists that the actual attitudes governing the production process are in fact decisive. A spectrum of such attitudes, ranging from the severely abusive to the thoroughly ethical is established, with an eye to offering a map of how different kinds of ethical merits and demerits affect the value of works. The chapter builds on such global movements as #MeToo and has implications for policy makers and funding bodies. It invites a serious re-evaluation of some of the most traditionally valued works of various film canons, the claim being that once the genetic histories of works are taken into consideration many films should not retain their canonical status.
Mindhunter : The possibility of knowing evil
Authors: Cox Damian
Published: May 2022

The first season of the Netflix series Mindhunter (2017) poses a question: what does it take to understand the mind of a serial killer? The season explores contrasting forms of understanding: practical understanding, as represented by the character of Bill Tench; categorical and causal knowledge, as represented by the character of Wendy Carr. A third character, Holden Ford, seeks to understand serial killers from the inside, empathetically and phenomenologically. The chapter examines the epistemological struggles and conflicts of its three protagonists and argues that the task of fully understanding the evil of a serial killer is impossible and ethically dubious. The impossibility and moral hazard of the task are illustrated in the final episode of the season.
Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children! On the Moralisation of Video Game Violence
Authors: Tavinor Grant
Published: May 2022

Videogames with violent content have been the target of criticism from scientists, politicians, and the media for over a quarter of a century. While recent scientific investigations of the association between game violence and real-world violence are now much less confident than they once were, this criticism has continued to be a dependable talking point in the media, particularly on the occasion of violent events such as mass shootings. This chapter examines recent claims that this worry is a case of a moral panic that is at least partly sustained by the political capital inherent in the moralisation of popular entertainment. It argues that the moral criticism of games frequently betrays class-based moral and aesthetic attitudes, and that it employs the idea of “protecting the children” as a means of regulating adult play. The chapter also investigates if this moralism may act as a distraction from other significant social dangers and if it represents a misdirected overstepping of valid social concerns about violence more generally.
Re-Reading Personal Influence in an Age of Social Media
Authors: O’Regan Tom
Published: May 2022

This article explores the many parallels – but also discontinuities – between the interpersonal communication medium and research enterprise pursued by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld in Personal Influence (1955) and the social media agenda and associated research enterprise of Facebook and Instagram. The essay begins with a discussion of ‘personal influence’ as the concept was first developed in the 1950s, outlining its historical context and initial limited application. It then shows how key ideas of Personal Influence can be seen as having been applied and embedded in the very fabric of social media itself. Yet Facebook represents a significant departure from both Katz and Lazarsfeld’s research agenda and from the market research and information regime of traditional media. Their audience research work of 1955 was avowedly public and transparent in its commitments. They were providing a market research product for advertising agencies, advertisers and media providers to re-purpose. In contrast, Facebook is private, proprietorial and opaque in its research provision. Facebook combines, under one roof, the roles of market research provider, media provider, and advertising agency. By prioritizing the collection and analysis of individual user profiles, Facebook has created a media enterprise that seamlessly integrates user-generated content, data collection, analysis, strategy, media provision and associated advertising machinery.
Precursors, Terms and Manifestos between Theory and Practice
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: May 2022

The chapter presents an overview of the modern precursors of the 1960 prose poem, tracing the transformation of verse and prose into mediums of poetry. If the free verse Arabic poem remains within the purview delineated for poetry in Arabic by its rearrangement but not abandonment of meter, the prose poem is the first poetic form to jump the fence of meter and make a claim of being poetry in unchartered territory. It established itself as a perpetuation of an “other” tradition, alternate and dissenting in its relationship to the established poetic aesthetic and became a subversive space from which literary, critical, ideological, and social institutions are challenged.
The Prose Poem and the Arabic Tradition
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: May 2022

This chapter turns to the role of the prose poem as a critical framework or lens. The poets/theorists of the Arabic prose poem engaged in a “motivated” reading of the Arabic prose tradition. They turned to the rich tradition of Arabic prose, singling out texts that helped validate the modern prose poem and offer it Arabic legitimacy. The chapter examines the ways in which prose poets appropriated the works of mystics such as al-Niffari (d. 965) and prose stylists such as al-Tawḥidi (d. 1023), writings which share the prose poem’s generic evasiveness, its linguistic ambiguity, and shock effect. I also bring into the discussion work on the Qurʾan as a poetic prose text and explore its usefulness as a lens for approaching the prose poem in Arabic.
A More Expansive Conception of Deliberation
Authors: Gormley Steven
Published: May 2022

Critics of the deliberative approach argue that deliberative theory works with an overly restrictive understanding of argumentation that leads to the unjust exclusion of voices from public deliberation. Successive generations of deliberativists have developed two approaches in response. The first, supplementing approach, supplements rational argumentation with ‘other’ forms of communication to better accommodate difference. Drawing on the work of Iris Young, this strategy is shown to fail. The second, systemic approach, replaces the categorical criteria of the supplementing approach with systemic criteria. While this response significantly opens up deliberation, it sacrifices core deliberative ideals for perceived net benefits to the deliberative system. This can result in the violation citizens’ deliberative freedom and the political impoverishment of vulnerable actors. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of rhetoric, a third, constitutive approach, is suggested, an approach that opens up deliberation in a way that overcomes the problems with the supplementing approach, whilst avoiding some of the unwelcome consequences of the systemic approach. The chapter ends with an unexpected crossing of paths between Bohman and Derrida that points the way to a deconstructive entry into the debate.
Arguments and Hearing Something New
Authors: Gormley Steven
Published: May 2022

This chapter argues that Derrida’s long-standing efforts to multiply the forms and codes of reasoned argument contributes to the democratic task of developing of more expansive conception of deliberation so as to avoid unjust exclusions. This is developed by responding to a recurring claim made about Derrida’s work, namely, that it does not engage in argumentation. The first half of the chapter focuses on Richard Rorty’s version of that claim. Unlike other formulations of this argument, Rorty’s charge is not deployed to justify a certain non-engagement with Derrida’s work; rather, it emerges form a long-standing engagement with his work. In addition, Rorty is very clear about the political stakes underpinning this discussion. The second half of the chapter sets out Derrida’s attempts to develop a more differentiated, and thus more inclusive, conception of reasoned argument. Here Derrida and Bohman cross paths once again to reveal a deconstruction that has consistently engaged in what I call a politics of the stage.
The Democratic Venture
Authors: Gormley Steven
Published: May 2022

This chapter critically discusses deconstructive and deliberative approaches to the paradoxes of constitutional democracy. It is argued that Derrida’s deconstructive account of democracy presupposes constitutional safeguards that, in principle, check the pervertibility he identifies. Pervertibility cannot be eliminated, but deconstruction demands that we pursue the least perverting perversion. The deliberative and deconstructive accounts of constitutional making are then brought into dialogue. While they share a historical understanding of democratic legitimacy, there’s a key difference: the deliberative approach understands this process as a dialectical story of self-correcting learning processes, which risks slipping into self-congratulation and missing the injustice of our current practices. The deconstructive approach emphasises the ‘non-dialectizable’ antinomies of this process, which risks slipping into despair. Drawing on the insights of both, a less confident, but no less hopeful, deliberative-deconstructive approach is sketched out, one that maintains hope in the perfectibility of democracy and the promise of doing justice to the other, but which nevertheless remains haunted by an anxious vigilance regarding the inevitable aporias generated by our very striving for justice. The chapter ends by considering contemporary empirical research that would ground this approach.
Preamble
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

Reading Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise as symptomatic of his epicureanism offers both a radical reconsideration of his work and suggests why he is still relevant to our contemporary political predicament. This double gesture – an historicization of Spinoza’s argument so as to highlight his political relevance – is not uncommon. For instance, Gilles Deleuze in ...
The Many Faces of a Hidden God: Agamben’s Relations to Kierkegaard Reconsidered
Authors: Lazzaretti Lucas
Published: May 2022

Agamben’s relations to Kierkegaard usually cross the concept of exception through an interpretation that is mediated by the philosophy of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt does not pay attention to Kierkegaard’s nuances and “points of view”; rather, he considers the concept of exception in a non-dialectical way precisely because this interpretation is convenient for Schmitt’s use of the “universal” and the “exception”. Because of Schmitt’s selective appropriation, Kierkegaard is not only distant from Agamben but is on a different ground. Agamben’s relations to Kierkegaard are closer than they seem at first look and if we invert the comprehension of Kierkegaard’s concept of exception, we can see an existential portrait of individual fragility while we critique this fragility. Once these relations are put into a new perspective, it becomes clear that the concept of exception that Kierkegaard presents in his philosophy can be more productive to Agamben’s political considerations.
Biopolitics and Probability: Modifications on Life’s Way
Authors: Brower Virgil W.
Published: May 2022

This project retraces activations of Kierkegaard in the development of political theology. It suggests alternative modes of states of exception than those attributed to him by Schmitt, Taubes and Agamben. Several Kierkegaardian themes open themselves to 'something like pure potential' in Agamben, namely: living death, animality, criminality, auto-constitution, modification, liturgy, love and certain articulations of improbabilities. Attention is drawn to a modal ontology and auto-constitution at work in Kierkegaard's writings, as well as a complicated and indissociable operation between killing and letting-live in legalist exceptionalism, comparable to Foucault on biopowers and necropolitics. It closes in consideration of Kierkegaard's critique of enumeration, large numbers, and statistical probability alongside contemporary tele-technoscientific social controls via the online datafication of people by surveillance or platform capitalisms. After Kierkegaard, such apparatuses are suspect as calculated to tranquilize humanity as it fools folk into becoming part of its numbers.
Destituent Potential and Camus’s Politics of Rebellion
Authors: Christiaens Tim
Published: May 2022

Giorgio Agamben has introduced the concept of 'destituent potential' to evade the perennial debate between reform or revolution. He argues that the rendering inoperative of political communities can destitute the hold of sovereign power over living beings. I argue that Agamben's version of destituent potential, however, encounters some problems that can be addressed through Albert Camus' politics of rebellion in The Rebel. Camus similarly wishes to circumvent the 'reform or revolution'-dilemma, but not by rendering community inoperative. He rather attempts to conceptualize the formation of human communities on their shared resistance to pain and suffering.
A Politics Like No Other: Agamben, Fanon and the Colonial Fracture
Authors: Brophy Susan Dianne
Published: May 2022

Fundamental to existentialist inquiry is the challenge of devising a meaningful politics based on the philosophical analysis of specific experiences. While Giorgio Agamben wavers in the face of this challenge, Frantz Fanon does not, and the reason for this stems from how ‘the other’ and ‘othering’  configures each thinker’s views on being and praxis. In this chapter, I trace Agamben’s existentialist treatment of being and praxis across the Homo Sacer series, highlighting the import of the realm of non-relation and stressing its provenance as a fascistic ontology. From there, I examine similar themes in Fanon’s work, which involves an assessment of his existentialist proclivities to arrive at a notion of radical relationality. I conclude that, while Fanon defies the Manichaean fracture that separates the human from humanity, Agamben internalises it as a transcendental yet individuated phenomenon as the basis of his anti-humanist politics. As I uncover the limits of the type of politics that emanates from a recuperation of non-relationality, I explain why anyone interested in applying Agamben’s politics to decoloniality may consider treading carefully.
4 Living with the Excessive Scale of Contemporary Photography
Authors: Andrew Fisher
Published: May 2022

Unprecedented facts of scale, processes of scaling and conditions of scalability face any understanding of photography today. The enormous number of photographs created and circulated daily forms an expansive milieu that frames every photographic image. The different relationships facilitated by photographic images unfold within this difficult to grasp horizon of massive number. This chapter sets out to understand this situation by analysis of two essays by Jean Luc Nancy. In ‘Nous Autres’ (We Others), Nancy theorises photography as a mode of relation in a way that speaks directly to the uneven distributions of power shaping contemporary visual cultures. ‘Human Excess’ examines the culture of massive numbers and bloated statistics, criticizing the way that 'the human' is so often taken to give a measure to both the known and the unknown. Reading these essays together suggests an idea of the photographic that is scaled according to the vast numbers which impinge on that mass of relations - between human beings, machines and automated processes - that comprise the contemporary visual milieu. The modes of enunciation through which this numerically enormous web of relations is thrown into relief can be thought of in socially and politically non-coercive and heterogeneous ways.
5 Feeling Photos: Photography, Picture Language and Mood Capture
Authors: Michelle Henning
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses the assumptions that contemporary social media photographs are primarily expressive and the gendered implications of the language used to describe this kind of photography. Photographs are increasingly recognised as conversational, and the chapter contrasts this with modernist ideas about picture languages and photography as a rational language. It contextualises the changing uses and perceptions of images in relation to the growth of service culture in the twentieth century and in comparison to emoji. Images have become the central focus of critique of emotional media, and this chapter draws attention to the continuing role of gendered assumptions in discussions about images. These discussions deploy the recurrent metaphor of the flood to articulate a fear of being "drowned” out; they describe a decline of attention into a superficial ”grazing”; they repeat concerns about meaningless and incoherent speech or chatter, and exhibit an iconoclastic anxiety, in which images are understood as both deeply attractive and deeply dangerous.
Strangely Unique: Pictorial Aesthetics; in the Age of Image Abundance
Authors: Josef Ledvina
Published: May 2022

The chapter deals with the aesthetic corollaries of contemporary image environment characterised by ephemerality and interchangeability. It argues that in such an environment attending to a particular materialisation of an image, that is to passing events of its being displayed on a particular device at a particular moment, is a source of aesthetic experience. This experience is interpreted as a case of ‘inflected seeing-in’ and the artistic strategies aiming for the image inflection as resulting in instances of what Alva Nöe calls ‘strange tools’.
Undigital Photography: Image-Making beyond Computation and AI
Authors: Joanna Zylinska
Published: May 2022

This chapter brings into conversation Trevor Paglen’s understanding of photography in terms of ‘seeing machines’ with Zylinska’s work on nonhuman photography to probe the algorithmic aspect of perception and vision across apparatuses, species and time scales. The rationale behind this conversation is to imagine better ways of seeing the world at a time when it’s being reshaped by artificial intelligence and machine vision. It is also to envisage better ways of acting in the world. While both seeing and acting can be undertaken by human and nonhuman agents, the reflective process on what constitutes this goodness will be uniquely human. By way of framing her argument, Zylinska proposes the concept of ‘undigital photography’. This is borrowed from the academic discipline of Computational Photography, a field which deals with images captured by means of digital computation rather than optical processes. ‘Undigital photography’ is an alternative name given to this field. Yet in this term Zylinska also identifies a conceptual promise for rethinking our understanding of image-making in the age of artificial intelligence. The chapter includes a discussion of a project from Zylinska’s own photographic practice which engages with human and nonhuman intelligence – and labour.