bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Norse in the North Atlantic: Iceland, Faroe Islands and Greenland
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: January 2018

Chapter 7 moves to the North Atlantic to the regions settled by the Norse people, starting with Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland. By close examination of thing sites and their features in these areas, it becomes clear that the overall concept behind these sites was the same as in Scandinavia and variations of the same rituals and activities seem to have taken place. The assembly site features, were, however, different in two important aspects; assembly booths were constructed and there is no coincidence between burials and assemblies. As these areas were substantially unpopulated prior to the Norse arrival, there were no monuments to reuse and no need to link back to past rulers. Instead, above all through the assembly booths, the assembly-sites connect to the recent past and current political patterns.
The Norse in Scotland: Assembly and New Ancestors
Authors: Sanmark Alexandra
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the evidence of Norse administrative structures and thing sites in Norse Scotland. This area, unlike Iceland, Greenland and the Faroes, had been populated since the Mesolithic period, and the Norse therefore interacted with existing populations. In this area, the Norse expressed themselves just as in Scandinavia, through the appropriation of monuments, above all large mounds. The other assembly site features are similar to those found in the other Norse settlements as well as Scandinavia, although some influence from the Picts and Gaels of Scotland is seen.The nature of the evidence of law and assembly varies across Norse Scotland, partly as a result of the different political situations. The most detailed evidence relates to Orkney and Shetland, where Norse rule lasted the longest.
Introduction: Agamben and Radical Politics
Authors: McLoughlin Daniel
Published: January 2018

This chapter explains the rationale for the book by surveying the reception of Agamben’s work and the development of the Homo Sacer project. It notes that Agamben was often criticised for political quietism and for focusing on sovereignty and the totalitarian state at the expense of capitalism and liberal government. It suggests that we should re-think Agamben’s contribution to critical thought on the basis of his recent works, which develop a genealogy of the theological roots of economy, and develop his account of a non-sovereign politics. It also emphasises the importance of Agamben’s engagement with classical and contemporary theorists associated with the revolutionary tradition for understanding his contribution to political thought.
Lyric Cousins
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.
Introduction: A Little Conversation
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter ponders on the connections between poetry and music, their similarities, and also what sets them apart. It talks about music and poetry from a maker's standpoint, in particular how poetry and music are performed and that poetry turns out to share with music in performance, was connected with other qualities both genres share. These qualities, in turn, have more to do with technical, makerly concerns than with types and occasions of performance. They are more concerned with something intrinsic to how music and poetry are structured than simply with the giving and receiving of a particular experience.
Closer Still: The Total Artwork
Authors: Sampson Fiona
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the Gesamtkunstwerk, which English musicologists translate as ‘total artwork’. Richard Wagner had used the expression to characterise his operas, though he had only ever used the term in two essays, both published in 1849: ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘The Artwork of the Future’. Moreover, the term did not originate from Wagner himself, and he did not even spell it in the conventional way. Since the late twentieth century ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has been applied to other artforms, particularly architecture, which like opera can unite a number of elements. (Architecture, for example, marries engineering, landscaping and interior decoration, among others.) But the term's origins are in the late eighteenth-century notion that all the arts could be unified in poetry.
Untimely Futures
Authors: Elhaik Tarek
Published: January 2018

This chapter speculates on the future of contemporary anthropological ‘installations’ by reappropriating the very term ‘installation’ beyond its traditional home in the art world. Such reappropriation — indeed theft — invites the reader to sense the incurable-image as a form of life that harbors and struggles with a futurist mode of care. This symptomatology enables a renewed encounter between the conceptual personae composing this book's assemblage — curator, anthropologist, artist. The personae they repeat are ‘not just a matter of diagnosis. Signs imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, they're the symptoms of life gushing forth and draining away’. Ultimately, these incurable-images and iterative assemblages begin to release untimely futures in which the artists, anthropologists, and curators use inter-media experimentation as part of a demanding ethics of immanence to endure our states of curation.
Laughter and Tears in Early Greek Literature
Authors: Seaford Richard
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses, in a wide range of pre-Hellenistic authors, passages based on the similarity between – or even the indistinguishability of – tears of grief and tears of joy or of laughter. The contexts in which this combination of negative with positive emotion occurs are not random. They often involve a fundamental contradiction, or fundamental transition, pertaining to personal identity (between family and community, death and life, married and unmarried). Several passages of tragedy exploit the combination of negative with positive emotion that occurred in rites of passage (mystic initiation and wedding ritual). But whereas in the actual practice of rites of passage the transition is positive, in tragedy the transition tends to fail, allowing enhancement of the pathos inherent in the ambivalence of tears. The ambivalence is not confined to ritual. Homer and Xenophon are both struck by the resemblance of tears of joy to tears of grief. In two famous passages, in Herodotus and Thucydides, weeping seems to acquire special status by prefiguring eventual military catastrophe.
Imagining Divine Laughter in Homer and Lucian
Authors: Halliwell Stephen
Published: January 2018

This chapter employs a historicising approach to laughter, of the kind elaborated in the same author’s Greek Laughter: a Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity, in order to investigate some important but elusive aspects of the Greek mythico-religious imagination. Its central focus is on depictions of divine laughter at opposite ends of the spectrum of ancient Greek culture, in Homeric epic and Lucianic satire. What does it mean to imagine gods who can laugh at and/or with one another, as well as at and/or with humans? Is such laughter a marker of distance between divine and human conditions of existence, or does the idea of laughter serve to limit the gods by subjecting them to inescapably human evaluation? The chapter rejects models of explanation (both ancient and modern) which treat the laughter of the Olympians either as a contamination of an originally purer conception of the gods or as consistently expressing a serenely detached state of immortality. It argues, instead, that divine laughter reflects tensions between the literal and the symbolic which are intrinsic to anthropomorphising Greek religious sensibilities, and that far from conveying blissful detachment divine laughter characterises gods who are heavily invested in the conflicts of the human world.
Lamenting for the Fall of Jerusalem in the Seventh Century CE
Authors: Papadogiannakis Ioannis
Published: January 2018

The capture and sack of Jerusalem by the Persians in 614 CE was a momentous event in the eyes of the local Christian communities. The most extensive account of this event comes from Strategius’, Capture of Jerusalem which purports to be an eyewitness account. Read often almost exclusively for the historical information that it provides this work is an avowed, sustained, carefully composed lament for the fall of the city and the fate of its Christian community. Thus, the significance of this work lies not only in its degree of correspondence to historical facts but also in the intensity of mourning that Strategius seeks to induce in his readers. For he was involved in an economy of emotional expression that also helped to shape, maintain and manage an emotional community. Through an examination of this account the aim of this contribution is: a) to survey the sort of emotions that these events aroused in Christian communities and b) to show how Strategius, through an array of emotive techniques, invites the reader to join an emotional community of mourners and to feel empathy for the loss and affliction that befell his community in Jerusalem.
Interventions in Contemporary Thought
Authors: Rockhill Gabriel
Published: January 2018

With the aim of rethinking the state and stakes of contemporary theory, Gabriel Rockhill critically works through some of the most important recent philosophical writings on the intertwined topics of history, politics and art. He offers guidance to some of the complex debates in these areas, as well as a commanding overview of the key issues and some of the central figures, including Foucault, Derrida, Castoriadis, Badiou and Rancière. By resituating theoretical work in a broader force field of culture and power, he advances an innovative and nuanced description of recent intellectual developments that calls into question the now standard but rather stereotypical accounts of prominent thinkers and philosophical movements. Far from hiding behind the towering figures with whom he engages, Rockhill stakes out positions in relationship to them and formulates precise arguments in favour of a novel understanding of the historical relationship between art and politics, arguing that there is a need for a deep shift in the tectonic plates that undergird these debates. The result is an invitation not only to retool extant methodological paradigms but also to ultimately reinvent the practice of theory itself.
How Do We Think the Present? From Ontology of Contemporary Reality to Ontology without Being1
Authors: Rockhill Gabriel
Published: January 2018

The opening chapter explores a philosophic question that reflexively sheds light on the orientation of the book as a whole: how can we write the history of the present? Against the backdrop of the more specific question of how to understand the present state of philosophy, it turns to the late work of Michel Foucault and his unique account of the ontology of actuality or of contemporary reality (ontologie de l’actualité). It carefully reconstitutes his concern with providing a historico-philosophical justification of his own project, which he situates in a trajectory that begins with the emergence of the ontology of actuality in the later Kant. It assesses the contemporary relevancy of his critique of historical periodization and his redefinition of modernity in terms of a critical attitude. Given the apparent contradiction between his rejection of periodic history and his identification of a new era of historical thought, the chapter goes on to suggest that an alternative logic of history—founded on the three dimensions of time, space and social practice—would allow us to completely reformulate the way in which we think the present.
‘From Schoolgirl to Stardom’: The Discovery and Development of Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Lloyd in the 1980s and 1990s
Authors: Williams Melanie
Published: January 2018

This chapter compares and contrasts the fortunes of two different teenage discoveries of 1980s British cinema, Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Lloyd, finding similarities in the prurient sexualisation attached to their personae but distinctive differences in terms of their class identities (both on and off screen) and their work in divergent genres. Their different experiences of working in Hollywood and career longevity are also discussed.
National Treasure: Judi Dench and Older Female Stardom into the 2000s
Authors: Williams Melanie
Published: January 2018

The last case study chapter examines the later-life stardom of Dame Judi Dench who has been acclaimed not only as an excellent actress but also a model for ageing gracefully. Her stardom represents a more recent strain of gerontophilia in contemporary cinema, both in Britain and overseas, which has offered new opportunities for stardom for a number of older actresses, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren among them.
Conclusion: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (a Female British Star)
Authors: Williams Melanie
Published: January 2018

This concluding chapter goes back over the time period covered by the book’s preceeding chapters and thinks about the exclusisons from the category of star which have operated in British cinema, with particular emphasis on the whiteness of the ‘English Rose’ ideal which still dominates British female stardom in spite of some inroads towards a greater BAME presence and greater ethnic diversity. The exclusionary middle-class and heteronormative dimensions to idealised visions of British femininity are also assessed.
‘The Press Ought to be Open to All’ From the Liberty of Conscience to the Liberty of the Press
Authors: Hellmuth Eckhart
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines a number of texts, dating from the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, that took a new look at the problem of the freedom of religion, the press, and opinion. This represents part of the debate that was conducted after the abolition of the licensing system in 1695. The chapter traces the line that leads from Matthew Tindal's Letter to a Member of Parliament (1698) to Anthony Collins' Apology for Free Debate and Liberty of Writing (1724). These positions from the deistic milieu are contrasted with reflections on the liberty of the press from the camp of High Church orthodoxy. It also considers how a number of writers, both supporters and opponents of the 'liberty of the press', linked the issue of press freedom to liberty of conscience and increasingly employed an idiom of natural rights in doing so.
Parliament and Church Reform: Off and On the Agenda
Authors: Innes Joanna
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the interactions between politics inside and outside of the British Parliament as well as the issue of Church reform. Attempts by Parliament to improve the Church of England's performance of its pastoral functions ceased following the Hanoverian accession, but resumed in the later eighteenth century. During the intervening period, Parliament passed increasing numbers of acts relating to individual parishes or churches along with various acts adjusting or revising rules relating to merely tolerated religious sects, but by contrast left the established church in charge of its own pastoral operations. In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Convocation provided a forum for clerics to promote their own ideas about how to improve pastoral efficacy. The chapter establishes the complex route by which challenges to and changes within the Church of England translated into a concern to act among parliamentary elites.
Thomas Spence, Children’s Literature and ‘Learning … Debauched by Ambition’
Authors: Grenby Matthew
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the synergies between Thomas Spence's work as a radical educationalist and the non-canonical utopian children's literature of John Newbery. One of the most infamous phrases of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ‘war of ideas’ came from Edmund Burke, who described the people as a ‘swinish multitude’. This ‘swinish multitude’ barb was used in the context of scholarship and education, something that the chapter argues would appear particularly provocative to Spence. A teacher himself, Spence recognised how important children's education was to social and political renewal. By juxtaposing Newbery's publications and Spence's writings, this chapter highlights the remarkable radicalism of mid-eighteenth-century children's literature and emphasises the importance of education as a strand of Spence's utopian thinking.
Nelson’s Circles: Networking in the Navy during the French Wars
Authors: Czisnik Marianne
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the means by which Admiral Horatio Nelson established a wide range of contacts throughout his career and the ways in which he used the resulting social networks inhis campaigns during the French wars. Nelson was an officer in the Royal Navy, the largest organisation of its day and a huge network in its own right. Not only did Nelson operate within and rely on this network, he was also one of its major actors whose activities were of major public, and now historical, importance. Drawing on Nelson's letters published in the 1840s, the chapter analyses how efficiently this naval networking functioned to allow him to navigate personal, professional and political challenges. It shows that professionally motivated letter writing was central to Nelson's social networking, which is supported by the fact that Nelson did not become involved in other forms of networking, notably the club.
Diversity, Duality and Time
Authors: Brahm Levey Geoffrey
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at how the tensions between interculturalism and multiculturalism can also run across interculturalism and multiculturalism. So while the issue of ‘ad hoc majority precedence’ is central between multiculturalism and interculturalism, at least on the Quebec model, in this chapter it runs across liberal nationalist multiculturalism and parity multiculturalism too. Sociologist Gerard Bouchard argues that interculturalism and multiculturalism are rooted in opposite paradigms. Where interculturalism turns on a ‘duality’ paradigm that endorses a foundational majority culture and ad hoc majority precedence, multiculturalism operates on a diversity paradigm that does not recognise a majority culture and instead places all constituent groups and individuals on an equal footing. The chapter suggests another possible point of differentiation between multiculturalism and Quebecan interculturalism — one that is related to the acceptability of losing the established culture over time.
Towards an Intercultural Sense of Belonging Together: Reflections on the Theoretical and Political Level
Authors: Loobuyck Patrick
Published: January 2018

This chapter understands interculturalism neither as an anti-multiculturalist position nor as a remedy for the alleged failures of multiculturalism, but instead as an additional strategy that might rest alongside modes of liberal nationalism and constitutional patriotism. The challenge that each sets itself is to create a sense of belonging as a necessary condition for solidarity and deliberative democracy in multicultural societies. The chapter understands this as presently expressed across three intercultural policy applications concerned with social mixing, language and civic integration programmes, and integrative religious education. In this account, while multiculturalism and interculturalism do not contradict each other on the theoretical level, there may be some tensions on the policy level.
Transformation and Glamour in the Cross-Cultural Makeover: Return to Eden, Khoon Bhari Maang and the Avenging Woman in Popular Hindi Cinema
Authors: Lawrence Michael
Published: January 2018

Rakesh Roshan’s Khoon Bhari Maang (Blood-Smeared Forehead, India, 1988) is closely modelled on the iconic Australian television 3-part, mini-series Return to Eden (Karen Arthur, Kevin James Dobson, 1983), itself a self-conscious appropriation and strategic indigenisation of the melodramatic conventions and “feminised address” of the prime time American soap opera. In Return to Eden, a treacherous tennis champ marries a meek and dowdy heiress, Stephanie Harper, and throws her into alligator-infested waters; she survives, has plastic surgery, becomes a supermodel, and returns to exact revenge on her husband. In the transnational film remake, Khoon Bhari Maang, the heroine’s transformation is more extreme – in accordance with her revenge, which is more violent – and also more complex, in terms of cultural identity, since her journey, from frumpy Aarti to the sultry Jyoti, necessitates a negotiation of traditional/modern and Indian/non-Indian modes of womanhood (and this also resonates with the ‘reinvention’ of its star, Rekha, in the late 1970s). Drawing on recent discussions of the anxious “assemblage” of femininity in popular Hindi cinema this chapter focuses on issues raised by Khoon Bhari Maang’s presentation of the make-over conceit.
Abstracted Subjectivity and Knowledge-Worlds: Aleksandr Sokurov’s Taurus (2001)
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

Taurus poses questions about the nature of death and life whereby the two are indistinguishable from one another. One of the main technical features and optical tropes in the film is that of the dissolve shot which emphasises the blurring of boundaries between all states and which codes subjectivity in terms of transience and transcendence. I demonstrate how film as a form of art constructs particular forms of subjectivity and relates them to the discourse of intelligence—cinema as a metaphor for thought. Sokurov is interested in a type of ontology which is invisible and is a matter of transcendental evocation, guessing and anticipation, and one which is visible but only to the subject itself in the ultimate act of internalising knowledge and experiencing it as a knowledge-world. Sokurov never reduces one to another and instead engages in the retroactive act of re-assembling knowledge-worlds as matters of relation and intentionality. His worlds are infinite in the composition and limited by duration and change. The worlds of Sokurov are always political in that they contradict the laws of being, and particularly the ontology of spectatorship. This chapter sets the agenda for my further investigation.
Reading a Dead Man’s Mind: Hellenistic Philosophy, Rhetoric and Roman Law
Authors: Tellegen-Couperus Olga , Tellegen Jan Willem
Published: January 2018

Which Hellenistic school of philosophy was most influential in the development of Roman law, Stoicism or the New Academy? Within the broader and familiar topic of the connection between philosophy, rhetoric and law in ancient Rome, an unequivocal, or at least potentially persuasive, answer to this question has so far remained elusive. While we would caution against overheated expectations of a conclusive resolution, we believe that the concept of the voluntas testatoris, whose interpretation was as much a matter of debate in Roman antiquity as it is now among Romanists, will bring us closer. Using this notion as a case study, we will argue that while the Roman jurists did not construct a balanced and general voluntas testatoris theory, they might in this area at least have been more likely to favour the New Academy approach.
Cicero and the Small World of Roman Jurists
Authors: Benferhat Yasmina
Published: January 2018

This paper aims at studying the career of three major jurists of the Late Republic: Q. Mucius Scaevola, Ser. Sulpicius Rufus, G. Trebatius Testa. The order is chronological to underline the evolution from men who had a brillant career following the cursus honorum to specialists who refused to enter the cursus and made their career in the shadow of a general becoming the Prince. Mucius was a consul in 95 BC; Servius had to wait a long time because of the aleas of political crises, but he finally became a consul in 51 BC; Trebatius never was a consul. it is important to keep on mind Cicero was no neutral witness of the evolution since he was convinced his own way to serve his ambition was the best, with eloquence. Nevertheless he knew very well those jurists and even contributed to the evolution by sending Trebatius to Caesar.
Multiple Charges, Unitary Punishment and Rhetorical Strategy in the Quaestiones of the Late Roman Republic
Authors: Alexander Michael C.
Published: January 2018

The anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero’s early De Inventione place great emphasis on the Judicial type of oratory that takes place in the Roman courts. By teaching their readers how to speak in this context through comments and examples, the two texts also provide a unique insight into the law, legal systems and personnel in the early first century BCE. This chapter focuses on the information they provide about the people involved in the Roman courts: the jurists, the advocates, and the jurors.
Early-career Prosecutors: Forensic Activity and Senatorial Careers in the Late Republic
Authors: Steel Catherine
Published: January 2018

The focus of this chapter is on the ways in which members of the senatorial order in the late Republic (and those who aspired to join that order) exploited a knowledge of the law to further their careers. Cicero is the best-documented example, whose activity demonstrates a complex relationship between those who claimed expert theoretical knowledge of the law and those who spoke in the courts, between ‘jurists’ and ‘orators’. Drawing on the results of a ERC-funded project based at the University of Glasgow which is editing the fragments of Republican oratory (‘The Fragments of Republican Roman Oratory’), this chapter explores the intersections between political careers and the varieties of forensic activity. It argues that forensically-active senators formed only a very small proportion of the Senate, and that forensic activity was not a normal part of public life, but as a specialised task which only added consistent value to a career if pursued with diligence and a high degree of technical competence.
Postscript
Authors: Plessis Paul J. du
Published: January 2018

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Contact
Authors: Millar Robert McColl
Published: January 2018

Contact discusses the ways in which linguistic contact between closely related varieties differs from contact between fully discrete varieties. Particular focus is given to the development of English. Case studies are taken from recent contact of this type – such as the creation of New Zealand and Australian English. These are then compared with similar contact areas, such as Irish English, Ulster Scots and the Scots dialects of Orkney and Shetland. Finally, the rapid breakdown of inflection in late Old English and early Middle English will be considered as an example of near-relative contact. Throughout, the concept of koine is used as a means by which near-relative contact can be understood. Near-relative contact between varieties perceived to be dialects of the same language and similar contacts between closely related varieties perceived as being discrete languages are postulated to be of highly similar types.
Introduction
Authors: Evans Victoria L.
Published: January 2018

After describing one of Peter Greenaway's recent efforts to move beyond the limits of the cinema, Evans proposes that Douglas Sirk had already begun to dissolve the boundaries the medium by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into his mise-en-scène. She goes on to assert that Sirk's importation of a high art aesthetic into the low genre of melodrama echoed the widespread European Modernist preoccupation with the creation of a synergistic Gesamtkunstwerk or "total art work" during the period in which he intellectually came of age. Finally, the director's tendency to create "pictures" of the external landscape that the characters (and the viewer) are obliged to contemplate through the window frame is interpreted in the light of the theories of Le Corbusier.
The Invasion of Machines and Machine Culture
Authors: Evans Victoria L.
Published: January 2018

Chapter 3 ("The Invasion of Machines and Machine Culture") builds upon Ben Singer's observation in Melodrama and Modernity that this genre reflects the spectator's growing fear of the machines that have begun to physically invade our space. It further expands upon this insight by moving beyond the widespread feelings of psychic unease Singer identifies to address some of the more specific pathologies that arose from theincreased mechanisation of war during the early twentieth-century. This chapter culminates in an explication of The Tarnished Angels that has been grounded in Ernst Jünger' spaens to the hard-bodied men who were forged in the furnace of battle (a particularly apt means of explaining Roger Schumann's personality), widely circulated writings that the German born director would no doubt have known.
From Here to Timbuktu
Authors: Ford Talissa J.
Published: January 2018

Timbuktu was a site for both mystical and imperial projections, both the city of gold and the (always impossible) destination of European explorers. This chapter begins with the narrative of Robert Adams who, in 1815, declared to Britain's African Company that he was the first white man ever to have been to Timbuktu. But Adams was a poor mixed-race sailor who was found starving on the London docks, and he invented the Timbuktu tale to secure food, clothing, and passage back to America. Five years later, James Grey Jackson published the narrative of Al-Sayid al-Hajj ‘Abd al-Salaam Shabeeny, a Muslim merchant who also claimed to have been to Timbuktu; Jackson made the mistake of citing Adams’ narrative as evidence of the veracity of some of Shabeeny’s claims. This chapter argues that Adams and Shabeeny take advantage of British self-conception and colonial imagination to manipulate systems of control, rather than to merely respond to them. Like pirates, Shabeeny and Adams recognize how to work the colonial territorial imagination to their own ends.
‘Bulk Surveillance’, or The Elegant Technicities of Metadata
Authors: Coté Mark
Published: January 2018

Metadata has jumped from the specialist vernacular of the archivist and programmer to public discourse in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Yet the precise nature and import of this seemingly technical artifact remains dimly understood. This chapter will undertake a cold war archaeology of metadata, from analogue information gathered by the East German Stasi to the born digital data accessed by the NSA and GCHQ. Metadata is a key cipher for the contemporary technocultural condition, and the chapter offers a case study of broader shifts in techne (the constitutive relationship between the human and technology) and in labouring practices as afforded by our data-infused digital environment. The chapter provides a concise history of metadata as highly structured data for the information discovery of data objects. Changing surveillance practices reflect the increasingly fine granularity of the digital human to the extent that now we can be considered as data objects. The degree to which this manifests an ontological shift is addressed in relation to philosophical debates about materiality and the nonhuman. It also illustrates a changing ecosystem for new kinds of informational politics. The chapter concludes by reconceptualising the persistent generation of born-digital metadata via Simondon.
Insect Technics: War Vision Machines
Authors: Collignon Fabienne
Published: January 2018

This chapter investigates insectile weapons systems, 'weird' war machines that, in one way or another, pertain to a 'becoming-insect'. Jussi Parikka argues that ‘insect media’ might yield a weird futurity that emerges due to modes of perception that are radically other. Yet this ontology of perceptive enmeshment also functions as immersion into sovereign super power and its swarm technologies. What Peter Sloterdijk calls an ‘aesthetics of immersion’ is considered in relation to ‘weird’ (China Miéville) war machines, focusing on the 1960s anti-missile missile project Safeguard in North Dakota. This pyramidal architecture of ‘defense’ also repeats a gigantic insect eye on each side of its building, whose fly-like ‘gaze’ transposes a wish to perceive the latent dimensions of the earth as total vision-field. Safeguard is linked to newer conceptualizations of war machinery whose ‘scopic’ regime operates through drone warfare. As a networked entity, the drone, also fly-like, acts in a functional circle of immersion and death distribution: the ‘face’ of the drone as expression of a weird futurity in which the notion of the insectile expresses, updates, super power as affective, rhythmic, a ‘becoming-insect’ that maintains a ‘thanatopolitics’.
Conclusion: Error Screens
Authors: Dwyer Tessa
Published: January 2018

In summary, this book proposes that improper sites of subtitling and dubbing provide a key to revaluing translation’s role within screen culture broadly. By analysing a range of emergent practices, Speaking in Subtitles has explored ‘errancy’ as a fault line rapidly spreading across the surface of contemporary screen translation, transferring attention away from endless, unresolvable debates on ‘quality’ towards the geopolitics that determine and delimit value systems in the first place. The concrete translation practices explored in this book identify language diversity as a major trajectory within digital and online modes of media engagement. Paying attention to improper sites of subtitling and dubbing provides a crucial key, it argues, to revaluing translation’s role within screen culture broadly—these ‘error screens’ are central, not peripheral, to screen culture as the risks of linguistic and cultural mutation that attend interlingual translation keep films, TV programs and other forms of screen media circulating, evolving and living-on.
The common origin approach to comparing Indian and Greek philosophy
Authors: Allen Nick
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on two kinds of similarity between the two cultures that relate to their shared Indo-European origin. One is a series of correspondences between the journeys to the next world in the Odyssey and in the Kausitaki Upanishad. The other arises from a critique of the Indo-European 'trifunctional ideology' found by Dumézil in Greece and India. The total of three and category of socila function are both too restrictive for a worldview. Dumézil's triadic structure should be replaced with a pentadic one, in which the triad acquires at the bottom what is undesirable and at the top something transcendent. A pentadic structure is found in, for axample, the philosophy known as Samkhya and in the Greek set of five elements.
Harmonia and ṛtá
Authors: Chaturvedi Aditi
Published: January 2018

Greek harmonia and Sanskrit rta, both meaning cosmological principles of order, both derive from an Indo-European root meaning to fit or arrange. The similarity of harmonia and rta is explored in various texts: the Rgveda and the fragments of Philolaus, Empedocles, and Heraclitus. Each term refers to a cosmological principle that involves a harmonic regulation of opposites and that has moral applications. At the most abstract level, harmonia and rta each involve the dynamic fitting together of disjointed entities in both the macrocosm (nature) and the self (microcosm).
Cosmology, psyche and ātman in the Timaeus, the Ṛgveda and the Upaniṣads
Authors: Höchsmann Hyun
Published: January 2018

This chapter compares the Rgveda, the early Upanishads, and Plato's Timaeus for their conception of the universe, the inner self, and the relation between them. All three texts envisage the universe as a hierarchically organised system in which order (rta in the Rgveda) prevails. But only in the Timaeus is there the motivation to create a cosmos endowed with beauty and goodness. Only in the Timaeus and the Upanishads is cosmology a prerequisite for self-knowledge and ethics, and both texts lay the foundations for moral realism, the belief in the objective validity of moral values.
‘Master the chariot, master your Self’: comparing chariot metaphors as hermeneutics for mind, self and liberation in ancient Greek and Indian sources
Authors: Schlieter Jens
Published: January 2018

Chariots in both Greece and India involved danger and intense experience in their various uses, and were used metaphorically for the interpretation of various abstract domains. They were vehicles of gods such as the sun, and symbols of royal power and prestige. Similar use (actual and metaphorical) of chariots in Greece and India had already been established before they provide a metaphor in both cultures for the inner self and its liberation. Cognitive analysis of the metaphor (and of its differences in the two cultures) brings out philosophical preconceptions prevalent in abstract domains associated with the inner self. In late antiquity, which saw the end of the light and fast chariot and of a certain ideal of embodied self-mastery, chariot imagery ceased to be fully 'functional'.
Rebirth and ‘ethicisation’ in Greek and South Asian thought
Authors: Burley Mikel
Published: January 2018

This chapter engages with the theory of Gananath Obeyesekere to the effect that ethicised reincarnation derives from the ethicisation of existing rebirth beliefs. The theory, which applies primarily to South Asian traditions, assumes that a metaphysical conception of rebirth is logically and chronologically prior to any ethical outlook that accompanies it. Catherine Osborne on the other hand argues that it was the ethical outlook of certain Greek philosophers that generated their transmigration theories. But there need be no order of priority between metaphysics and ethics. Talk of a transition from non-ethicised to ethicised conceptions of rebirth should be replaced by considerations of transition from one kind of ethically imbued conception to another.
Nietzsche on Greek and Indian philosophy
Authors: Syea Emma
Published: January 2018

Nietzsche was struck by the similarities between Greek and Indian philosophy. From the perspective elaborated in On the Genealogy of Morality - in which values are derived from the physiogical, psychological, and social domains - we would expect the similarities of thought to derive from similarities in the conditions of the two cultures. A role is played here by the agonal spirit manifest in the Iliad, Hesiod and Heraclitus as well as in Indian philosophy and in the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Nietzsche found in both cultures viable models of self and state, born from an agonal context, that provided for him modes of being alternative to the Christian slave morality that he despised.
A Slap in the Face of American Taste: Transporting He Who Gets Slapped to American Audiences
Authors: White Frederick H.
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the impact of Leonid Andreev’s 1915 play He Who Gets Slapped on the U.S., where it was adapted into three genres: film, novel, and opera. Andreev’s play represents an example of his invented genre of panpsyche theater, in which the external action is driven by inner, psychological struggle, in this case of a clown who runs from a failed marriage and tries to find solace in the world of the circus. Victor Sjöström’s 1924 film of the play, the first MGM production, emphasized motifs of romance and revenge rather than Andreev’s focus on psychological development. Later, the play was adapted into a novel by George Carlin (1925) and a 1956 opera by Robert Ward and Bernard Stambler. The semiotic system of the circus allowed this play to be transported successfully to American audiences.
Chasing the Wealth: The Americanization of Il’f and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs
Authors: Mulcahy Robert
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores Mel Brooks’s transformation of Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov’s 1928 novel about three men chasing a stash of jewels hidden in a set of dining room chairs into the American “buddy film” genre. Brooks adapts the novel’s satire, grounded in the specific realia of the Soviet New Economic Policy period, into a film that dissolves national and temporal borders by combining US, Russian, Soviet, and Jewish motifs. The director thus reinvents of Russia for American audiences, focusing on the universal theme of friendship and cooperation triumphing over greed.
“The Soviet Abroad (That We Lost)”: The Fate of Vasilii Aksenov’s Cult Novel A Starry Ticket on Paper and on Screen
Authors: Boele Otto
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores Aleksandr Zarkhi’s film adaptation of Vasilii Aksenov’s 1961 “youth novel” A Starry Ticket into My Younger Brother just a year later. Despite the relative liberalism of the Thaw period, ideological strictures had to be adhered to, and this necessitated correction of the novel’s “flaws,” namely Aksenov’s use of youth jargon, his focus on the generational divide in Soviet society, his undermining of the the myth of a big Soviet family, and the lack of positive development in the hero. The film simplifies and sanitizes the novel by removing the generational conflict and transform the novel’s ambiguous conclusion into a more optimistic vision of social progress and personal maturation.
Conclusion: Passport Control—Departing on a Cinematic Journey
Authors: White Frederick H.
Published: January 2018

This chapter offers a comprehensive survey of Russian, American, British, French, German, and Italian films of Russian literature. It notes that regardless of national origin, such hypertexts always entail border crossings involving some combination of issues relating to language, culture, politics, society, and other topics, and that these crossings involve varying degrees of semantic shift. The broad survey aims to open up directions for future study of film transpositions of Russian literature, and new approaches to adaptation studies.
On the Idea of Potency
Authors: Castrucci Emanuele
Published: January 2018

Does there exist a Logos capable of limiting the very power of God? This question closely relates an inquiry arising in classical Greek philosophy to the theological knowledge originating in Jewish biblical exegesis. Two thoroughly unrelated worlds, one would say, yet a historical nexus between them existed, that created by Christianity, which has marked the destiny of our West. As Leo Strauss has masterfully shown, Christianity has been for two thousand years, despite its many inner contradictions, something like an interface between two hitherto unrelated worlds: Greek philosophy and biblical revelation. By reformulating them and turning them on their heads, it has shaped an entire civilization: our Western civilization, which is now drawing to a close. Thus, never has it been as appropriate as the present moment to come to grips with our opening question about the “limits of God”, or about the original laws of logic and ontology that somehow “limit” God’s very actions, since it arises from the profound need – prior to St. Paul unthinkable in concrete terms – to form a link between these two radically different worlds. Our West, with its devastating philosophical rationalism, its systematic Christian-Enlightenment repudiation of the Spinozist-Nietzschean concept of potency, from its very inception hinged on this question of knowledge of a law before God and above God. Today we must acknowledge that – precisely because of what this question, taken to its extreme consequences, implies – it was destined from its origins to end.
A Foucauldian Interpretation of Modern Law
Authors: Martire Jacopo
Published: January 2018

Although Foucault is certainly one of most influential scholars of our age, law is for Foucauldian scholarship akin to an “undigestable meal”. This is due to a seemingly unresolvable dilemma: how is it possible to analyse law through Foucauldian lenses if Foucault himself claimed (albeit cursorily) that law, in modernity, has been colonised by other disciplines and ousted from the locus of power? Building on Foucault’s ideas about power, freedom, and subjectivity, the present book tackles this problem through a critical genealogy of the philosophico-political ideas at the basis of modern law, delineating the historical emergence of the implicit regulative conditions of our legal present. The book proposes that modern law and modern forms of power – which Foucault termed biopolitical because they sort, train, and tame persons and populations with the aim of normalizing society – developed symbiotically and that, to the extent that modern law establishes the existence of a universal legal subject, law’s functioning is made possible by the homogenization of society through normalising practices. We are however fast moving towards the absolute limit of this normalizing complex. As normalising strategies are progressively unable to homogenise a social body which is increasingly composed by “fluid” subjects, modern law faces two interconnected challenges – a normative one (how can normalizing laws properly reflect the wills of a mass of differentiated fluid individuals?) and a functional one (how can normalizing laws effectively regulate such new protean social body?) – which put into question the very foundations of our legal discourse.
Aristotle’s Organism, and Ours
Authors: Bianchi Emanuela
Published: January 2018

Emanuela Bianchi’s “Aristotle’s Organism, and Ours” offers an account of Aristotelian thought in which the aspirations to organismic unity and healthy functioning as a sign of superiority are continually vitiated by unassimilable material factors. These factors can be understood through the paradigmatic figure of the female offspring. Bianchi names this the “feminine symptom” of Aristotelian philosophy, that which is both necessary for and disruptive of the normal operation of teleology. While contemporary philosophical and scientific critiques have undermined the theoretical priority and holism of the organism, Bianchi, by returning Aristotle’s discussion of the ontogenesis of the gendered organism, analyzes the normative and topological dimensions of our thinking about the organism, and thereby reimagines its contemporary status.
Modern Print Artefacts
Authors: Collier Patrick
Published: January 2018

Modern Print Artefacts examines the workings of literary value at the turn of the twentieth century through case studies of British periodicals and print genres. It argues that the materiality of print artefacts—including characteristics such as typography, paper quality, visual appearance, and organization—was both a sign and a generator of literary value in this period. Indeed, the materiality of print artefacts was particularly visible in these years, Collier argues, as literary modernism and growth in publishing and the press destabilized the landscape of literary value. The book traces these dynamics in the cases of three periodicals—the Illustrated London News, John O’London’s Weekly, and the London Mercury—and in the poetry anthology as a genre. In total, the book constitutes both a theorization and an empirical account of the workings of literary value in Britain in these years.