bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
On Property and the Philosophy of Poverty: Agamben and Anarchism
Authors: Bignall Simone
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses Agamben’s work in the context of the split between the anarchist and cmmunist strands of the revolutionary tradition. One of the few points at which anarchism explicitly appears in Agamben’s work is The Time That Remains where, in the context of a discussion of klesis (calling), class, and the role of the proletariat in Marxist thought, he identifies in Max Stirner an ‘ethical-anarchic interpretation of the Pauline as not’. Bignall draws on Marx’s ridiculing of Stirner’s ‘ethical-anarchism’ and his critique of Proudhoun, to argue that Agamben’s recent work on poverty and use bring him closer to the communitarian anarchist tradition than to Marx’s governmental communism. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Agamben’s thought extends anarchist critiques of property to the level of social ontology and so should be read as a restoration of anarchism to its potential for use in the present.
Drawing the Line
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the logic or the ‘line’ or linearity, which signifies the connectedness, or the ‘and then … and then’ process in music and poetry. It illustrates the continuous pattern of notes in a melody and how the notes come one at a time and have a stronger relationship to each other than to other musical lines going on at the same time. They are chronologically connected. Residually, and often actually, they are also connected by something internal, yet constitutive: they share a ‘breath’. In addition, music demonstrates linearity in a different way, by ‘growing’ in parallel to poetry. Fleshing out the themes of linearity between the two genres are rhythms, grammar, and semantics, among many others.
Density
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the ‘vertical’ or the simultaneous way in which non-denotative elements contribute to a piece or poem. This simultaneous quality is referred to as ‘density’. As so often with abstract forms, density is more easily spotted in music than in verse, as it is easier to believe there just is more going on at any one moment of a thickly orchestrated symphony than of a string trio: more diversity, even though not necessarily more in the way of musical ideas, and above all simply more noise. In poetry, however, the chapter sums up the principle of poetic density through an equation: D = CV (or, density = content × versification).
Song
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at how music and poetry meet in song. The ballad form is one way of recognising the continuity between genres, with its familiarity and narrative potential. Song also links music and poetry by the obvious means of making them collaborate directly with each other. But this is also where tensions between the two forms are most marked. Precisely because they must work most closely together, we see here the ways they struggle with each other: for example, in ongoing debate about the status of song lyrics. As well as such arguments about songs, makerly tensions exist within them, as music and words struggle for priority, and force each other into compromises.
Performance: The Role of the Audience
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers how we experience as well as draw meaning from music and poetry. Far from arguing about the true value of a poem or a piece of music, the chapter instead emphasises a smaller and more ‘intimate’ way of experiencing artforms. The point is simply that whatever is there, in a piece of music or a poem, is something we co-create each time that work happens. One way to say this might be that experience is something that cannot exist without us, but that is built into verse and music so as to be released by us. It is not raw time, but it is a temporal element that we are the measure of — and that is also the measure of us. Their experiential nature is what makes poetry and music chronologic; and experience is what locates us as ourselves.
The Incurable-Image
Authors: Elhaik Tarek
Published: January 2018

This chapter introduces concept of the ‘incurable-image’: a species of images that throws us into clinical, ethical and pedagogical struggle. A limit to both ethnographic and curatorial practice, this struggle is symptomatically devalued, concealed, and discouraged by what can be called our ‘states of curation’. The chapter considers three lessons that can be learned from the work of the incurable-image and shows how concept-work and conceptual art gradually emerge as anthropology's incurable-images. It also examines the opening sequence from Rubén Gámez's experimental ethnographic film La Fórmula Secreta: Coca Cola en Las Venas (1965), which provides us with an incurable-image and an intriguing point of intrusion into the diseased body politic of the post-Mexican condition, as well as the autopsies and modalities of intrusion celebrated by the curatorial platforms it has affinities with.
Epilogue
Authors: Elhaik Tarek
Published: January 2018

In this epilogue, the author reflects on his time in Mexico City during one of those routine visits characteristic of fieldwork follow-ups. In particular, he talks about the announcement made by Subcomandante Marcos, the charismatic leader of the Zapatista Liberation Front, that he was going to retire. Marcos's announcement was enigmatic and of great signifcance to anthropologists. He took everyone by surprise because of the insistence with which his message wished to update both the metaphorics and materiality of his usual mask with the vernacular of digital media. The author wonders why Marcos chose to replace the mask with the meme and the hologram, and without removing the mask. He concludes with the belief that what will remain of Mexico is an assemblage of friends, incurable-images, a hologram, and the task of curating anthropos: an ars curatoria in search of an anthropology to come.
Parody, Symbol and the Literary Past in Lucian
Authors: Maciver Calum
Published: January 2018

Laughter and the elicitation of laughter in Lucian are dependent principally upon the paideia which his readers require in order to unravel fully the complexity of his literary allusion and satire. Through analysis of key satirical passages in the True Histories, the Charon, the Icaromenippus and the Nigrinus, this chapter demonstrates that Lucian, and his readers, laugh at the history of interpretation, both philosophical and literary. It delves into the literariness of Lucian’s satire, and in particular his representation of the literary past as a lens for laughing at the less educated. Lucian parodies historiographical and philosophical accounts of the moon in the lunar voyages in the True Histories and Icaromenippus, undercuts allegorical accounts of the cosmos in the Charon, and proves the absurdity and shallowness of contemporary Roman pretentions of Greek paideia in the Nigrinus by parodying the pseudo-learning so much on display.
Towards a Byzantine Theory of the Comic?
Authors: Pizzone Aglae
Published: January 2018

This chapter tackles the question of laughter and humour from a theoretical perspective. Rather than map out the Byzantine ‘comic landscape’ by resorting to modern theorisations, it looks at Greek medieval humour and laughter from within, in the attempt to single out elements of a Byzantine theory of the comic. Recent scholarship has gone some way towards dismantling the prejudice that there was no room for laughter in Byzantine society, combing the sources for tangible evidence of humour and jokes, or focusing on the scant traces for the survival of genres such as mimes and satires. Less reflection has been devoted to understanding how the Byzantines construed, conceptualised and justified comic features of discourse. Patristic and devotional texts, frowning upon laughter and humour, have taken the lion’s share of attention. This chapter sheds light on the other side of the coin, concentrating on secular texts used for educational purposes in middle Byzantine literature (rhetorical handbooks and commentaries), aiming to unravel the function that the Byzantines assigned to laughter, irony and humour in their literary production. Four major areas are explored, crucial to the deployment and legitimation of the comic in Byzantium: psychology, rhetorical display, didacticism and narrative.
Laments by Nicetas Choniates and Others for the Fall of Constantinople in 1204
Authors: Angold Michael
Published: January 2018

Nicetas Choniates’s History contains a famous lament for the fall of Constantinople in 1204 to the crusaders. It is beautifully phrased, but so conventional that it tells us very little about the emotional reaction of the Byzantines to a dreadful event. More interesting are the funeral orations delivered soon afterwards by survivors for those they had lost, because they mixed tears of grief over the departed, with tears of shame for the overthrow of Byzantium. In doing so, their authors, who were drawn from the highest ranks of the church and imperial administration, reveal the self-regard of the elite, which ran Byzantium. They could not understand how beings, as superior as they were, had been bested by a rabble of foreigners. At least, they knew they were not to blame. Their message was that they and their friends and relatives had displayed their moral and spiritual worth in the face of the indignities that were heaped upon them. They could see that this was God’s way of testing them for the failings of others. It was their duty as the guardians of Orthodoxy to lead the people of Byzantium through this challenge.
The Tragic, the Comic and the Tragicomic in Cretan Renaissance Literature
Authors: Holton David
Published: January 2018

Greek tragedy and comedy re-emerge in late sixteenth-century Crete, now based on Renaissance neo-classical prescriptions. Besides ‘pure’ examples of the genres we also find a tragedia di lieto fine (the biblical drama Abraham’s Sacrifice) and a pastoral idyll with a tragic outcome (The Shepherdess), while Kornaros’ verse romance Erotokritos plays with the possibility of a tragic ending before settling for the outcome proper to romance. This intermingling of the tragic and the comic – of tears and laughter – is common in Cretan Renaissance literature, and most fully realised in the new hybrid genre of tragicommedia pastorale, which seems to have been popular in Crete around 1600. Taking Panoria by Georgios Chortatsis as its main textual focus, this chapter explores the interaction of tears and laughter both at a textual level and in plot structure. While the theoretical bases of tragicomedy, as propounded by Guarini, clearly underpin works like Panoria, in the case of works belonging to other genres other factors are involved: Petrarchising tropes, which are common in Cretan literature, and the antithetical structures characteristic of the folk tradition. Panoria, set on Mount Ida, is thoroughly Cretan and at the same time thoroughly imbued with late-Renaissance poetics.
Castoriadis and the Tradition of Radical Critique
Authors: Rockhill Gabriel
Published: January 2018

This chapter turns to the work of one of the major philosophic figures in France to have stalwartly resisted the theoretical constellation of the philosophy of difference, in part through his identification with a tradition of radical critique that calls into question the standard academic role of philosophy and redefines it as ‘the attempt to think the totality of the thinkable.’ Situating his work in relationship to the so-called structuralists and post-structuralists, it presents the fundamental stakes of his broad intellectual project by providing a succinct but comprehensive account of how his historical ontology and his defense of political autonomy form the backdrop for his writings on aesthetics and psychoanalysis.
The Hermeneutics of Art and Political History in Rancière
Authors: Rockhill Gabriel
Published: January 2018

This chapter outlines Rancière’s major contribution to contemporary debates on art and politics by situating it in relationship to the work of his predecessors, and more specifically the paradigms of content-based commitment and formal commitment found respectively in Sartre and Barthes. It highlights the refreshing departure that he proposes from established models for thinking art and politics, but it also underscores some of the limitations inherent in his transhistorical conception of politics as well as in the hermeneutic framework he uses to interpret works of art.
‘A Constant Threat’: Glenda Jackson and the Challenges of Seventies Stardom
Authors: Williams Melanie
Published: January 2018

Moving on from the 1960s into the 1970s, a notoriously penurious decade for British film production after the sixties boom, this chapter examines the film career of Glenda Jackson, one of the few female British stars who flourished in the 1970s. It looks at her persona in terms of its perceived abrasiveness and sexual or social challenge as well as examining how critics debated the value of her physical beauty.
‘Could the Scots Become True British?’ The Prelude to the Scottish Peerage Bill, 1706–16
Authors: Matsuzono Shin
Published: January 2018

This chapter revisits the debates and contests surrounding the question of the role of post-union Scots peers in the House of Lords, thus illuminating the interaction of political argument and party interests in the early eighteenth century. In June 1706, thirty-one Scottish commissioners met their English counterparts for the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland and, after heated discussions, succeeded in making a framework for the Union. Even before the ratification of the Union, Scotland's approach to the nuptials was fraught with numerous challenges, one of which was the Scottish peerage question. In 1719 the Whig ministry expected that a Peerage Bill would answer it, by turning the notorious system of representative peers into one based on heredity, but the government failed to pass the legislation. This chapter examines the controversies surrounding Union negotiations and how they led to the crisis around the Peerage Bills in 1718–1719.
Political Toasting in the Age of Revolutions: Britain, America and France, 1765–1800
Authors: Duthille Rémy
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the emergence of political toasting in revolutionary France and during the ‘age of revolutions’ in Britain and America from 1765 to around 1800. Drinking and toasting were integral to the expression of popular politics. Contemporaries and historians have used toast lists as precious, if rough, indexes of popular opinion and, during the 1790s, as evidence of sympathy for the French Revolution and transnational republicanism. Toasting was a common practice in the American colonies and the young republic, and was adopted later in France. David Waldstreicher has shown the crucial role of civic celebrations and convivial gatherings in the forging of a new, republican identity during the American Revolution and in the early years of the republic. In his work on Ireland, Martyn Powell showed how toasting, while drawing on English and American symbolism, displayed an increasing sense of Irishness after the 1760s.
The Vilification of Thomas Paine: Constructing a Folk Devil in the 1790s
Authors: Davis Michael T.
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on Thomas Paine as a ‘folk devil’, the ways in which stories and myths about him and his works were implicated in the tense politics of the 1790s. Two narratives, one involving a baker named John Atwood and the other a physician named Theodore Wilson, were deliberately designed to foster anti-Paine sentiments; both men were allegedly bewitched by Paine. The stories drew on several common elements to articulate moral and didactic tales about the dire consequences of reading Paine. The evil effects begin with the psychological impact of Paine's writings which mesmerise men, creating a desperate and deranged state of mind — a form of political madness that makes the subject lose all sense of control. The chapter examines how conservatives' characterisations of Paine as an evil force relate to the construction of deviant identities that creates personas of ‘otherness’, whereby scapegoats are stigmatised as folk devils.
Interculturalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship
Authors: Meer Nasar , Modood ariq
Published: January 2018

This chapter provides an entry point in developing a discussion on the relationship between interculturalism and multiculturalism. The question it raises is to what extent the present criteria proposed by advocates of interculturalism, in positively contrasting it with multiculturalism, are persuasive. In addressing this the chapter maintains that whilst interculturalism and multiculturalism share much as approaches concerned with recognising cultural diversity, the answer to the question — is interculturalism merely an ‘updated version’ of multiculturalism? — is ‘no’. That is to say that while advocates of interculturalism wish to emphasise its positive qualities in terms of encouraging communication, recognising dynamic identities, promoting unity, and challenging illiberality, each of these qualities already features in multiculturalism.
Quebec Interculturalism and Canadian Multiculturalism
Authors: Bouchard Gérard
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers how pluralism provides the general background of interculturalism, which translates into respect for human rights, support for immigration, assistance to minority languages and cultures, wider practices of accommodation, and so forth. At the micro level, a second defining trait of interculturalism is its emphasis on exchange and interaction between citizens of all origins, with a view to activating diversity as a resource, fighting stereotypes, avoiding ‘groupism,’ and preventing social exclusion. This model of interculturalism further stresses integration as a two-way process but, in addition, is designed for societies where perceptions of ethnocultural realities are structured on the basis of a majority/minorities relationship. In this view the protection of minority rights must be reconciled with majority rights.
Afterword: Multiculturalism and Interculturalism – A Critical Dialogue
Authors: Parekh Bhikhu
Published: January 2018

This fine collection has the unique merit of bringing together and setting up a stimulating dialogue between multiculturalism and interculturalism represented by uniformly impressive essays. The editors’ excellent introduction skilfully signposts the direction of the dialogue and highlights the issues lying at its heart. In recent years multiculturalism has been subjected to considerable criticism and held responsible for all sorts of ills such as social fragmentation, ghettoisation, lack of patriotism and absurdly even terrorism. The criticism is deeply misguided. It homogenises its target and ignores its internal diversity. Secondly, it gives a misleading account of multiculturalism and virtually borders on a caricature. I shall take each in turn....
Fritz Lang Remakes Jean Renoir for Hollywood: Film Noir in Three National Voices
Authors: Palmer R. Barton
Published: January 2018

Fritz Lang’s 1954 noir romance Human Desire (1954), both an adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel La Bête humaine (1890) and a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1938 screen version of the same title, provides an invaluable site for the examination of the complex intersections among the three principal traditions, literary and cinematic, that are constitutive of the American film noir. These are: the fiction of James M. Cain, with its emphasis on destructive romantic entanglements; the filmic tradition of poetic realism, recognised in the early post-war period as a stylistic and thematic practice that anticipated the American film noir; and, German Expressionism, as represented by one of its most famed practitioners, Fritz Lang, whose concerns with the workings of the modern justice system notably inflect his versioning of Zola’s sordid tale. Like many transnational film remakes, Human Desire displays a complex series of recontextualising gestures, the larger interest of which is that they illustrate the ways in which the traditions constitutive of noir can be invoked in the process of re-assembling for another cinematic tradition a text that was wildly successful in a related, but finally distinct, form of filmmaking.
A Tale of Two Balloons: Intercultural Cinema and Transnational Nostalgia in Le voyage du ballon rouge
Authors: Diffrient David Scott , Burgchardt Carl R.
Published: January 2018

Millions of movie lovers around the world have experienced a range of emotions upon viewing Albert Lamorrise’s 1956 French classic Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon). Many adulatory responses have been triggered but perhaps none other more clearly than Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon, France-Taiwan, 2007). Although lacking the fantastical interludes of the earlier film and filled with fewer flaneurial excursions through the alleyways of Paris, Hou’s feature-length work is no less compelling as a series of quotidian scenes concerning the interwoven themes of companionship, loneliness, memory, nostalgia, and the restorative power of art. Drawing upon phenomenological and memory-based studies of intercultural cinema, this chapter explores the relationship between recollections, references, and transnational film remakes, ultimately aiming to transnationalise (or “uproot”) nostalgia and show how twenty-first century cinephilia performs a similar cultural function to the remaking process.
The Lacking Sense of Cinema: Aleksandr Proshkin’s The Miracle (2009)
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

The Miracle documents the introduction of the symbolic into the real by means of sensing the lack, or in Lacan’s terms, the lack-of-being. The lost object—whether voice, memory or senses—is the ultimate horror because it reveals the uncanny voids in the discourse. Being is conceived simultaneously in the ontological sense of openness within which ideas emerge, and being in the noumenal sense of the world, or of entities separated in the world from the temporal perspective—the vibrations of time and culture. The symbolic is the ontological horizon of Being whereas its anterior is the lack-of-being, that is, the there-of-Being (Dasein) lacks its place in the order of reality. The symbolic mode is characterised by the minimal gap between its elements and places they occupy: as Lacan noted, in order for the gap between elements to occur, something has to be fundamentally excluded. What happens in psychosis—and in The Miracle—is precisely the inclusion of this lacking object into the frame of ‘reality’. It appears within the constructed world as the hallucinated, or imagined, or mystified object: the voice, which in this case equals the gaze, haunts the cultural discourse as paranoiac.
Abandoned Being: Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field (2008)
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

In his theory of subjectivity, Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of ‘abandoned being’: ‘From now on the ontology that summons us will be an ontology in which abandonment remains the sole predicament of being, in which it even remains—in the scholastic sense of the word—the transcendental’. For Nancy ‘abandoned being’ is a solution to the problem of western discourse with its obsession with representation defined in such terms as appropriation, fulfilment, destination and so forth: ‘“the West” is precisely what designates itself as limit, as demarcation, even when it ceaselessly pushes back the frontiers of its imperium’. I engage with Nancy’s problematisation by analysing a film that situates knowledge, literally, at the frontier of the ‘imperium’. Mikhail Kalatozishvili’s The Wild Field (2008) deals with the problems of presence as identified by Nancy, by means of exploring post-imperial subjectivity in crisis whereby post-imperial legacy designates the demarcations of knowledge and being after crisis, involving re-negotiations of being in a world that has escaped the ontological ‘closure’ determined by the imperatives of representation. I argue the symbolic mode opens being to transcendental inferences when the subject confronts gaps in discourse in the state of impartation and dislocation.
‘Jurists in the Shadows’: The Everyday Business of the Jurists of Cicero’s Time
Authors: Lehne-Gstreinthaler Christine
Published: January 2018

In this chapter I try to define who was a jurist in the Late Republic arguing that, among others, legal representatives and the staff of the magistrates had considerable legal knowledge. Some of these lesser known jurists are presented and I explain why these jurists are for the most part not included in modern manuals and why they should be taken into account.
Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity
Authors: Evans Victoria L.
Published: January 2018

The first truly interdisciplinary analysis to link Douglas Sirk’s striking visual aesthetic to key movements in twentieth century art and architecture, this book reveals how the exaggerated artifice of Sirk's formal style emerged from his detailed understanding of the artistic debates that raged in 1920s Europe and the post-war United States.
By providing an extensive analysis of nine of this director's most pivotal works, including lengthy case studies of Final Chord (1936), Magnificent Obsession (1953), All That Heaven Allows (1954), The Tarnished Angels (1957) and Imitation of Life (1959), Victoria L. Evans demonstrates how Sirk attempted to dissolve the boundaries of the cinema by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into the colour, composition and settings of many of his most well-known films. Treating Sirk’s oeuvre as a continuum between his German and American periods, Evans argues that this influential director's non-naturalistic mise-en-scène was the result of an interdisciplinary, transnational dialogue, and she illuminates the broader cultural context in which his films appeared by establishing connections with archival documents, Modernist manifestos and the philosophical writings of his peers.
Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Magnificent Obsession and the Influence of Modernist Painting
Authors: Evans Victoria L.
Published: January 2018

Chapter 2 investigates the influence of Modernist art and art theory on this highly sophisticated film artist's formal approach, which includes a rereading of Magnificent Obsession that has been deeply informed by the writings of the pioneering German Expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky. Some mid-century American responses to Modernist art published in the popular press are also scrutinised before looking at Sirk's depiction of the other characters' reactions to the self-described "Surrealist" artist that appears in his 1951 small town musical comedy Has Anybody Seen My Gal? Finally, two texts that have previously addressed the relationship between film and painting, Brigitte Peucker's Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts and Angela Dalle Vacche's Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film, are considered in passing.
Introduction: Romanticism Off the Map
Authors: Ford Talissa J.
Published: January 2018

For the Spaces reachd from the starry heighth, to the starry depth;

And they builded Golgonooza: terrible eternal labour!

What are these golden builders doing?

William Blake, Jerusalem 12: 22–4

Things extra and other insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order....
Coming Up From the Midst of the Sea
Authors: Ford Talissa J.
Published: January 2018

During the time when Joanna Southcott and Richard Brothers squabbled over their respective claims to God's word, England was embroiled in the French Revolutionary Wars, and slaves in Saint-Domingue were fighting for their independence. Despite their interest in the world to come, Southcott and Brothers were also very much invested in the world that was, and that they were attuned to the means by which prophetic accounts of space could be used as a commentary on political revolution. Southcott compares Napoleon to Satan and concludes that his defeat is evidence of God’s triumph; Brothers insists that London, with its trade in exotic goods and slaves, is the spiritual Babylon and will be destroyed. Their respective Jerusalems, conversely, insist on space as mutable and unfixed. This chapter argues that the global nature of these prophecies and the flexibility of the spaces they imagine enable Southcott and Brothers to imagine a land of God that exists beyond the national aims of revolution.
Jerusalem is Scattered Abroad
Authors: Ford Talissa J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter expands on the complicated relationship between the actual city of Jerusalem and its literary representation. It begins with travel narratives about the real Jerusalem and concludes with Blake’s poem about an imagined Jerusalem, arguing that Jerusalem during the Romantic period is in fact always both real and imagined, simultaneously a material city and the site of an imminent heaven on earth. The second half of the chapter shows that these travel narratives’ vision of a Jerusalem that insists upon being simultaneously literal and metaphorical is key to reading William Blake’s visionary poem Jerusalem. Blake was keenly aware of the contemporary political conditions that framed Britain’s relation to the East, and in particular to the Ottoman Empire (then in control of Jerusalem). Blake uses prophetic revolutionary language to imagine political revolution; Blake’s poem describes a Jerusalem built from the ruins of empire both symbolically and materially. This chapter argues that in imagining such a Jerusalem, the poem offers an alternative to the interconnectedness of empire, calling instead for a planetary network of revolution and resistance.
The Future: RAND, Brand and Dangerous to Know
Authors: Beck John
Published: January 2018

The interdisciplinary field of futures research is now at the heart of policy-making and business strategy, but the serious study of the future has its roots in Cold War strategy, led by Hermann Kahn at the RAND Corporation and the Hudson Institute. The migration of futures research into business was accompanied by a burgeoning countercultural futurism, most vividly embodied in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. The founding of the Global Business Network in 1987 brought together many of the key players from business futurism and the avant-garde wing of futures studies, forging a high-powered consultancy that went on to provide services for multi-national corporations and government agencies. As pressing contemporary issues such as global security and climate change prompt futures researchers to develop scenarios intended to deal with potentially extinction-level catastrophes, can an interrogation of the recent history of the future contribute to the release of a critical engagement with the future that is not beholden to the lockdown of its Cold War legacy?
Deep Geological Disposal and Radioactive Time: Beckett, Bowen, Nirex and Onkalo
Authors: Piette Adam
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers nuclear futurity and long-term radioactive half-life and decay as timescales of continuity that are figured in eerie and apocalyptic ways not only in fictions that engage with nuclear anxiety during the Cold War (Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett) but also in the engineering projects that deal with the inconceivably long aftermath risks in deep underground nuclear waste disposal. Gunther Anders’ 1962 ‘Theses for an Atomic Age’ is compared with late 1980s Nuclear Industry Radioactive Waste Executive (Nirex) reports into the suitability of storing highly radioactive waste in deep boreholes, and pairs literary/cultural speculation with actual storage facility technologies to explore the deep time of nuclear waste continuities beyond the Cold War. The bunker mentality of the high Cold War is addressed through the relation between family nuclear shelters and the underground systems of the nuclear state. Geologist J. Laurence Kulp, who developed radioactive isotope dating of ancient rock formations, inadvertently stumbled on the radioactive effect of nuclear tests. Kulp's discovery led to the test ban treaty of 1963 and consolidated in the public imagination the link between deep geological time, radioactivity, and underground secret tomb/refuge systems. The article ends with a meditation on the contemporary nuclear repository.
Shifting the Nuclear Imaginary: Art and the Flight from Nuclear Modernity
Authors: Carpenter Ele
Published: January 2018

Drawing on Mackenzie & Spinardi’s research into the potential un-invention of nuclear weapons through the loss of tacit knowledge, this chapter explores a range of artistic responses to the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. Mackenzie & Spinardi’s work on nuclear weapons design, testing and computing, allows us to think about a new mode of nuclear aesthetics, providing conceptual frameworks relevant to contemporary art practice and discourse such as: the contested nature of sameness in the repetition of objects; the importance of the slowness of tacit knowledge; of the human eye, making and learning with others; the limits of code; and the erosion of nuclear belief systems. Recent artistic practices in Japan and internationally, explore counterfactual possibilities across time; where aspects of nuclear culture are made visible or possible in a world where apocalyptic scenarios are streamed live. The responsibility for nuclear materials is shifting from state weapons production to the privatized nuclear energy industry, and into the public realm of nuclear accidents and public consultation on long-term waste disposal. Artists are concerned with how the networks are interrupted, looped, mapped, slowed down for reflection on how things are made, how stories are told, and how knowledge is consolidated.
Notes from the Underground: Microwaves, Backbones, Party Lines and the Post Office Tower
Authors: Phillips John W. P.
Published: January 2018

This chapter links the essential parasitism of cold war systems to some general trends of 20th century telecommunications (economically motivated service-oriented multi-media). Certain (existential) fictions of the second half of the century explore and instantiate the peculiar logic of the parasite. The chapter draws out the implications of an ethics grounded in the attempt to deal with this logic and questions where such attempts, and the desires that drive them, might lead. These ethical concerns are connected via technological analysis to the 1956 plan for a radio link (known as Backbone) running north and south through the UK, avoiding large towns and meant to provide a safe route for communications vital to the prosecution of a war. The conjunction of existentialist fiction with the cold war technology ties together a triad of puzzles of the era: communication, existence and the problem of other minds. But the problems have since shifted—the rational subject now comes into being belatedly as an interrupter, a parasite, displacing or replacing the previous parasite. The parasitical arrangement does not follow the formal order of subject and object but occurs intersubjectively, producing its subjects in the process and figuring a fundamental alteration in social relations.
Vanishing Subtitles: The Invisible Cinema (1970–4)
Authors: Dwyer Tessa
Published: January 2018

This case-study chapter focuses on the blanket rejection of both subtitling and dubbing at New York’s short-lived Invisible Cinema, established by Anthology Film Archives in the early 1970s. In resurrecting the silent-era dream of non-translation, the Invisible Cinema drew attention, paradoxically, to translation’s centrality for screen culture generally and Anthology in particular – pinpointing the re-evaluative role that translation plays in screen culture by keeping ‘originals’ in circulation and contention. This point is affirmed by Anthology’s present-day operations and the residual legacy of its translation ban. Additionally, the chapter explores how the Invisible Cinema’s excessive zero-tolerance approach to translation actually takes certain pro-subtitling arguments to their logical conclusion and is hence ripe for deconstruction. Hence, this chapter outlines a route for revaluation developed further in subsequent chapters, identifying the flaws and failures of screen translation as necessary to the preservation and destabilisation of screen culture.
The concept of ṛtá in the Ṛgveda
Authors: Jurewicz Joanna
Published: January 2018

The abstract Sanskrit concept rta (cosmos, order, truth) in the Rgveda can be shown to develop from the fundamental concrete experience of herding cows. Cognitive linguistics reveals the mechanisms by which the the concrete is used to express the abstract. This is significant for understanding the development of philosophy, both in India and generally, which is not to be regarded as dependent on literacy (as Havelock argued for Greece).
Technologies of self-immortalisation in ancient Greece and early India
Authors: Visigalli Paolo
Published: January 2018

This chapter adapts Foucault's concept of technologies of the self to the production, by means of certain composite psychophysical practices, of a post-mortem immortal self. Such technologies of self-immortalisation are examined in the Plato's Timaeus (self-immortalisation through the practice of philosophy) and in the ritual construction of an immortal self (atman) in the construction of the Vedic fire altar (agnicayana). There are both similarities and differences between the Greek and Indian practices.
The interiorisation of ritual in India and Greece
Authors: Seaford Richard
Published: January 2018

The interiorisation of ritual is a concept used by Indologists, referring to the replacement of the actual performance of ritual by its internal or mental performance, or to the adoption of the terminology and structure of ritual to describe an internal or mental transition. This chapter extends its use to ancient Greece. In India interiorisation arises from the discernible individualisation of sacrifice. In Greece the language and structure of mystic initiation is used by Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Plato to describe the intellectual progress of the individual. In both cultures interiorisation is associated with the advent of monism and the concomitant all-importance of the inner self. It is suggested that an important factor making for this development in both cultures was monetisation.
On affirmation, rejection and accommodation of the world in Greek and Indian religion
Authors: Obryk Matylda
Published: January 2018

This chapter applies to Indian and Greek religion the typology of religious movements created by Roy Wallis: world-affirming, world-rejecting, and world accommodating religions. World-affirming religion is exemplifed in Greece by polis religion and the practice of magic, in India by karma (action), in which the world is controlled by ritual. World-rejecting religion is exemplified in both cultures by the attempt to find a supreme principle behind the world of appearances. World-accommodating religion is exemplified by the theurgy of Iamblichus and (much earlier) the individual religiosity of Socrates, and in India by bhakti: what is in the world is ussed for the service of a transcendent but personal deity.
Introduction: ‘Audiences to this Act’
Authors: Deutermann Allison K.
Published: January 2018

The book’s introduction maps out its contribution to ongoing critical conversations surrounding literary form, the history of the body and the senses, the experience and effects of sound, and historical phenomenology. Through brief readings of The Revenger’s Tragedy and Epicoene, it introduces the two forms, and the two auditory models, that are at the heart of this analysis. How these two forms developed, and how and why hearing became so central to their content, plot, and structure, are introduced as the key questions that motivate this study.
‘Caviare to the General’?: Taste, Hearing and Genre in Hamlet
Authors: Deutermann Allison K.
Published: January 2018

This chapter turns to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an early modern play deeply interested in, and highly self-consciously about, hearing. Possibly a revision of an earlier revenge tragedy, Hamlet is vitally shaped by the formal contests emerging at the turn of the century. Hamlet himself articulates a Jonsonian model of selective and tasteful theatrical reception, but his own hearing trouble frequently, tragically, undermines his ability to perform such audition. The Prince’s longing for complete and absolute control over his body’s sonic circulation is juxtaposed against Horatio’s more measured, partial reception; it is only in the play’s final moments that the dying Hamlet is released from this doomed, tortured struggle. Hamlet recuperates revenge from charges of embarrassing obsolescence by suggesting that all sounds can be processed thoughtfully, consciously, and carefully -- that no one dramatic sound or form forces its audiences to hear it so unthinkingly, or so violently. The chapter closes by examining Hamlet’s influence on the sound and structure of a handful of Jacobean revenge tragedies and city comedies, with particular attention to the highly sophisticated, generically self-aware The Revenger’s Tragedy.
Listening for Form at the Cockpit Theatre
Authors: Deutermann Allison K.
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the repertoire of a single West End playhouse, the Cockpit, during the final decade of the early modern theatre’s existence. In this somewhat seedy rival to the more fashionable Blackfriars, new revenge tragedies and city comedies continued to be written and performed, but the two forms were becoming increasingly hybridized, their sonic and auditory investments less distinct. A set of supra-generic conventions, each deeply attentive to sound and space, began to emerge across the plays performed within this playhouse; collectively, these helped to a shape a kind of Cockpit brand. Combining a survey of the Cockpit’s 1630s repertoire with focused attention to two representatively hybrid plays (James Shirley’s revenge-comedy The Ball and John Ford’s urban tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore), the chapter asks how this playhouse’s scrutiny of formal and sonic contests participated in the development of early modern theatre as a cultural institution.
Epilogue
Authors: Deutermann Allison K.
Published: January 2018

This chapter glances ahead to the Restoration and beyond, tracing the continued influence of the early modern theatre’s formal and thematic investments in sound and its reception.
Dostoevskii’s “White Nights”: The Dreamer Goes Abroad
Authors: Meyer Ronald
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores four versions of Dostoevskii’s 1848 story “White Nights,” whose nameless protagonist, referred to as the Dreamer, inspired many directors to transpose this early Dostoevskian short work into film. The focus is on four directors: Luchino Visconti, Robert Bresson, Sanjay Bhansali, and José Luis Guerín. As is argued in the chapter, each director takes a different approach to recontextualizing the first-person narrative in various locations, times, and cinematic traditions, ranging from Italian neo-realism and post-1968 Paris to Bollywood and Strasbourg. The author argues that the contemporary directors, Bhansali and Guerín take not only Dostoevskii’s story, but also, respectively, the earlier adaptations by Visconti and Bresson as their subtexts, thus forming a complex chain of intertextual connections.
Against Adaptation? The Strange Case of (Pod) Poruchik Kizhe
Authors: Renfrew Alastair
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores Iurii Tynianov’s 1934 film Lieutenant Kizhe, directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer and based on Tynianov’s own novel, which concerns a hero created in official documents due to a clerk’s transcription error. Tynianov’s adaptation involves an unusual border crossing in that the novel was written after the screenplay. In the chapter, it is argued that the director failed to find successful devices for meeting the challenge to realist fiction proferred by Tynianov’s narrative of a non-existent hero. The chapter explores the mutual relationship between Tynianov’s novel and screenplay and his theoretical writings on adaptation.
A Genealogy of Modern Law II: The Political Truth of Society
Authors: Martire Jacopo
Published: January 2018

In the present chapter the author analyses the development of modern law as a system of formalized interconnected rules. The author focuses on three historical events that ushered in the modern constitutional horizon: the English, American, and French revolutions. By scrutinizing how the features of generality, abstraction, equality, and freedom, were differently addressed in the various constitutional debates, the author demonstrates that these features were key in establishing a constitutional system that was both the expression as well as the limit of the social order, while at the same time reflective of diverging socio-political histories and traditions. The author suggests that, beyond their differences, the three revolutions share a common underlying constitutional discourse, which conceives law along the paradigm of the norm and the logic of normalization.
The Normalising Complex and the Challenges of Virtualisation
Authors: Martire Jacopo
Published: January 2018

In the present chapter, the author, drawing from his genealogical account, argues that modern law and biopolitical strategies of normalization are not to be conflated but came to work in a symbiotic fashion. Modern law itself functions as a normalizing apparatus, insofar as practices of normalization are capable of creating a seemingly homogeneous social body upon which the discourse of law can legitimately inscribe the universalism of the modern legal subject. Modern law and discipline/governmentality thus form a normalizing complex. Building on Bauman and Deleuze’s theories, the author indicates that this picture is changing as we are moving towards an understanding of the individual as a “virtual” entity, which is at odds with the normalizing paradigm that informs modern law and is unhinging the normalizing complex. The discourse of modern law in contemporary societies, faced with virtual individuals which increasingly challenge categories of normalization, is therefore caught into a double crisis: a normative one (how can normalizing laws properly reflect the wills of a mass of differentiates virtual individuals?), and a functional one (how can normalizing laws effectively regulate a new protean social body?).
Conclusions
Authors: Martire Jacopo
Published: January 2018

On the basis of the preceding argument, the author posits that the emergence of a new emergent virtual understanding of the individual, has brought us to the absolute limit of the normalizing complex. This vision of the subject as a virtual entity indicates a growing awareness of the presence of an existential uniqueness, or Otherness (born out of normalization’s inherent allusion to the Other as what lies beyond the norms), in everyone’s life that challenges the attempts at conceiving the social body in terms of normality. This has implications that are as yet undefined for our current legal system that has developed thus far in relation to the dynamics of normalization. Faced with the expansion of Otherness in our society, the author intimates that we may be forced to rethink the structure of our legal discourse, and imagine new foundations for the future of democracy and politics.