bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Sounds of Peterloo
Authors: Haywood Ian
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on an overlooked aspect of the Peterloo massacre: its soundscape. While much critical attention has been given to radical discourse and print culture in early nineteenth-century Britain, there has been less focus on the material question of how the 'voice' of the people was projected, heard, and contested, both in reality and in representations. Not only was Peterloo a cacophony of politically symbolic sounds ranging from marching bands and alternative patriotic songs to the 'bad' sublime of the screaming multitude, it was also an aural earthquake that generated noisy aftershocks throughout the cultural sphere - in P. B. Shelley's words (as he lay asleep in Italy), it was an 'eloquent' volcano. The paper will look at range of verbal and visual texts, including caricature, to investigate the soundscape and 'soundtrack' of one of the later Romantic period's loudest and most resonant events.
William Cobbett, ‘Resurrection Man’: The Peterloo Massacre and the Bones of Tom Paine
Authors: Castellano Katey
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses William Cobbett's relationship to the Peterloo Massacre. First, it examines Cobbett's 'To the Journeymen and Labourers' (1816), a cheap, mass-produced pamphlet that provoked working-class discontent before Peterloo. Second, the chapter analyzes Cobbett's reaction to the Peterloo Massacre while he was self-exiled in America. Cobbett exhumed Thomas Paine's body and then brought it back to England in order to establish a memorial for a 'noble' of the working-class. The chapter argues that Cobbett believed that Peterloo occurred because of the rhetorical rendering of the poor as an animalized 'surplus population,' and both 'To the Journeymen and Labourers' and his post-Peterloo project for Paine's memorial sought to the counter the marginalization of the working class by insisting that they were connected to intergenerational traditions and monuments beyond their animal bodies.
Modernism and Time Machines
Authors: Tung Charles M.
Published: January 2020

Modernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the scales and shapes of time, the consistency of timespace, and the nature of history.
Conclusion
Authors: Tung Charles M.
Published: January 2020

The idea of unilinearity is not a shibboleth solidifying an aesthetic and historical period dialectically; rather, unitary time – its putatively isochronic character, its anthropocentric narrativity and its monochronic nature – is a phenomenon that arose in particular technological and cultural conditions, and which provoked or was met with a hotchpotch historicity expressed in certain aesthetic and cultural objects, political orientations and scientific theories. Time is a stable backdrop in other conjunctures, and time has been conceived as unstable in other cultural and historical currents in the past. However, the difference this study underlines comes from the insistent attempt to think of timespace and history as literally multiple – with irregular internal consistency and pace, variable scales and distinctive frames of reference. To hold apart timespace and history analytically, and to keep individual experience separate as well, has often resulted in the preservation of unitary time as the fundamental base layer, as that which underlies narrative sense-making at the level of chronology of fabular order, on which we deploy tropes and figures in rendering both individual and collective experience to ourselves. But there are many base layers, many times.
Belledonne
Authors: Burgin Victor
Published: January 2020

Victor Burgin's projection work, Belledonne (2016), which poignantly evokes the sanatorium in which Barthes lived for a number of years in his youth due to tuberculosis, is rendered in print in this chapter. The impossible panoramic views of this work along with the numerous inter-titles often using Barthes' beloved haiku form evoke a poetic imagining of life in the asylum where Barthes spent World War II. Scattered throughout the projection piece are allusions to Barthes' entire body of work while evoking the work being done to his body. The rendering of Belledonne offers a vivid visual preface to the 'zero degree' that pervades the book, and which beckons the exploration of a political aesthetic of 'zero degree seeing'
Photography as Rhythm: On Prairie
Authors: Torlasco Domietta
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores Victor Burgin's Prairie through rhythm and the aesthetic conditions for constituting politically viable engagements with the image. The chapter posits rhythm as something simultaneously organising the relationship between the political and the aesthetic and as a principle that can undo that organisation. In this manner, the argument draws on Barthes' concept of 'zero degree' to render the contradictory and ultimately irreconcilable concerns of Burgin's projection pieces evoked and embodied by their rhythms. Drawing on writings by Sergei Eisenstein and many others, the chapter asks the following questions in relation to still and moving images: can we envision a rhythm that, at a juncture between the aesthetic and the political, does not operate as a principle of systematic organisation? What image of the past and of the collective would this other rhythm engender?
Women and the Welsh Newspaper Press: The Cambrian News and the Western Mail, 1870–1895
Authors: O’Malley Tom
Published: January 2020

Newspapers were an important space for imagining women’s domestic lives. Women’s pages, columns, and advertisements were designed to reach a growing female readership. As Tom O’Malley notes in this chapter, newspapers contributed to separate spheres ideology by depicting women as subordinate to men and by highlighting their roles as wives, daughters, mothers, and consumers in the home. Yet, O’Malley notes, such ‘ideological convention was always under pressure from the heterogeneous content papers were obliged to contain if they were to appeal to the men and women in the locality on whom they depended as purchasers, readers, and advertisers’ (95). Consequently, at the same time that newspapers constructed the angel in the house they also imagined women as litigants, entertainers, labourers, and charity workers—identities that defined women as participants in world outside the home. Newspapers, then, by virtue of their differentiated readerships, dismantled separate spheres ideology at the same time they seemed to confirm it.
Claiming Medicine as a Profession for Women: The English Woman’s Journal’s Campaign for Female Doctors
Authors: Pusapati Teja Varma
Published: January 2020

This chapter highlights a model of active femininity that places young women outside the domestic sphere. Pusapati explores the support extended to the mid-century campaign for women’s entry into medicine in England by the feminist periodical the English Woman’s Journal (1858–64). The journal’s promotion of a ‘specific and highly ambitious model of the college-educated, professional female physician’ functioned to encourage young women to strive for access to higher education as well as entry to the world of medicine (122). As Pusapati demonstrates, the English Woman’s Journal frequently looked to examples from beyond Britain’s borders to buttress this sense of possibility for female readers, not only in terms of professional achievement but also to reassure readers, male and female, that women could practice medicine without flouting ‘women’s culturally sanctioned domestic and social roles’ (123).
The ‘Most-Talked-Of Creature in the World’: The ‘American Girl’ in Victorian Print Culture
Authors: Nicholson Bob
Published: January 2020

As a celebrated and vilified figure in the British press, the American girl constituted yet another prominent form of contested femininity in Victorian Britain, one which Bob Nicholson suggests was reflective of a growing fetishisation of America in British print culture, as well as of a broader cultural anxiety about the effects of the same. If Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘Girl of the Period’ constituted a threat to the moral health of the nation from within, then the American girl was seen by many as an invasive threat to femininity from beyond Britain’s borders. Nicholson’s essay demonstrates the potency of the girl as a symbolic force in Victorian Britain, as well as the crucial role of the periodical in shaping the various, often competing cultural forms that she assumed.
Victorian Women Wood Engravers: The Case of Clemence Housman
Authors: Kooistra Lorraine Janzen
Published: January 2020

In this essay, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra explores the career of an important yet neglected artist whose work in the illustrated press deserves more concentrated attention. From 1885 to 1895, Clemence Housman (1861–1955) worked as an engraver for the Graphic (1869–1932), but by the mid-1890s there was little work in the trade since most papers were converting to systems of photomechanical reproduction. She then transitioned to fine-art wood engraving in the book trade, producing several exquisite titles in collaboration with her brother Laurence Housman, including The Were-Wolf (1896). She continued working the field until the 1920s, eventually producing her masterpiece, an engraving of James Guthrie’s ‘Evening Star.’ The trajectory of her career not only demonstrates how new reproductive technologies altered women’s work in the periodical press over the course of the nineteenth century but also reminds us of the thousands of other women who contributed to this industry but have been largely overlooked in press history. Indeed, as Janzen Kooistra’s essay makes clear, women were not just the subject matter or intended audience for periodical advertisements and illustrations; they were actively engaged in the production of the images that proliferated throughout the Victorian illustrated press.
Elizabeth Gaskell and the Habit of Serialisation
Authors: Delafield Catherine
Published: January 2020

In this essay, Catherine Delafield highlights the importance of the literary periodical and the practice of serial publication for the form and content of women’s novels. By revisiting the original periodical publishing contexts of two novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854–5), first published in Household Words (1850–9), and Wives and Daughters (1864–6), first serialised in the Cornhill Magazine (1860–1970), Delafield demonstrates Gaskell’s incisive understanding of the publishing conventions of the serial novel, even if she struggled with the artistic limitations of that form. A careful comparison of the periodical and volume versions of the novels yields the conclusion that the ‘structure and style of her novels’ were ‘formed in response to their periodical contexts,’ with Gaskell shown to not only be a diligent student of the serial but also an innovator of that form (p.429). Gaskell’s prominent place within the genealogy of the Victorian serial was not entirely without friction, however. As Delafield demonstrates, she actively challenged the interventions of her male editors, including Charles Dickens (1812–70), though not always successfully. In this sense, Gaskell’s ‘habit of serialisation’ was flavoured with both ‘conformity and instruction,’ given her willingness to work within and push the boundaries of the artistic and material constraints of the serial form (p.440).
Mary Smith (1822–1889): A Radical Journalist under Many Guises
Authors: Boos Florence S.
Published: January 2020

In this essay, Florence S. Boos examines the career of Mary Smith, a writer who used the correspondence columns of the Carlisle Journal and other periodicals to write on religious pluralism, women’s enfranchisement, Liberal party politics, Irish Home Rule, and British imperialism. The extent of her contributions will probably never be fully known since her letters were signed with initials or with pseudonyms such as ‘Burns Redivivus’ or ‘Sigma.’ Anonymity was crucial for a lower-middle-class woman writer who could not vote but yearned to influence public debate. ‘If men knew who the writer was,’ she acknowledged, ‘they would say, “What does a woman know about politics?”’ (p. 510). When adopting various signatures, she shifted her tone and persona accordingly, reserving her most strident voice for the letters she published on Liberal party politics, styling herself as ‘Sigma’ or ‘Z.’ ‘Periodical journalism,’ Boos concludes, ‘provided Smith with the opportunity to explore a range of personae, topics, and rhetorical approaches over several decades, and to influence public opinion in favour of her chosen causes while retaining her cherished mental independence and broadly critical stance’ (p. 513).
Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria
Authors: Womack Deanna Ferree
Published: January 2020

The Ottoman Syrians - residents of modern Syria and Lebanon during the Ottoman Empire - formed the first Arabic-speaking Evangelical Church in the region. Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria offers a fresh narrative of the encounters of this minority Protestant community with American Presbyterian missionaries, Eastern churches and Muslims at the height of the Nahda (or Arab renaissance), from 1860 to 1915. Drawing on rare Arabic publications, the book challenges histories that focus on Western male actors. Instead it shows that Syrian Protestant women and men were agents of their own history who sought the salvation and modernization of Syria while adapting and challenging missionary teachings. These pioneers included scholars, poets, novelists, activists, school teachers, Protestant pastors, evangelistic preachers, Biblewomen, and public speakers. Such Syrian Protestants established a critical link between evangelical religiosity and the socio-cultural currents of the Nahda, making possible the literary and educational achievements of the American Syria Mission and transforming Syrian society in ways that still endure today. Locating Syrian Protestant narratives within American, Ottoman, and global histories, this book brings Middle Eastern Studies into conversation with the field of World Christianity and explores questions of American-Arab relations and gender roles in the Islamic world.
Arabs in the Early Islamic Empire
Authors: Ulrich Brian
Published: January 2020

Examining a single broad tribal identity - al-Azd - from pre-Islamic Arabia through the Umayyad and into the early Abbasid era, this book notes the ways it was continually refashioned over that time. It explores the ways in which the rise of the early Islamic empire influenced the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula who became a core part of it, and examines the connections between the kinship societies and the developing state of the early caliphate. This helps us to understand how what are often called 'tribal' forms of social organisation identity conditioned its growth and helped shape what became its common elite culture. Studying the relationship between tribe and state during the first two centuries of the caliphate, the focus is on understanding the survival and transformation of tribal identity until it became part of the literate high culture of the Abbasid caliphate and a component of a larger Arab ethnic identity. The book argues that, from pre-Islamic Arabia to the caliphate, greater continuity existed between tribal identity and social practice than is generally portrayed.
Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth
Authors: Thomas Jayne
Published: January 2020

This book explores Tennyson’s poetic relationship with Wordsworth through a close analysis of Tennyson’s borrowing of the earlier poet’s words and phrases, an approach that positions Wordsworth in Tennyson’s poetry in a more centralised way than previously recognised.
Focusing on some of the most emblematic poems of Tennyson’s career, including ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Ulysses’, and In Memoriam, the study examines the echoes from Wordsworth that these poems contain and the transformative part they play in his poetry, moving beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in the selected texts to uncover new and revealing connections and interactions that shed a penetrating light on Tennyson’s poetic relationship with his Romantic predecessor.
The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting
Authors: Balafrej Lamia
Published: January 2020

This book constitutes the first exploration of artistic self-reflection in Islamic art. In the absence of a tradition of self-portraiture, how could artists signal their presence within a painting? Centred on late Timurid manuscript painting (ca. 1470-1500), this book reveals that pictures could function as the painter’s delegate, charged with the task of centring and defining artistic work, even as they did not represent the artist’s likeness. Influenced by the culture of the majlis, an institutional gathering devoted to intricate literary performances and debates, late Timurid painters used a number of strategies to shift manuscript painting from an illustrative device to a self-reflective object, designed to highlight the artist’s imagination and manual dexterity. These strategies include visual abundance, linear precision, the incorporation of inscriptions addressing aspects of the painting and the artist’s signature. Focusing on one of the most iconic manuscripts of the Persianate tradition, the Cairo Bustan made in late Timurid Herat and bearing the signatures of the painter Bihzad, this book explores Persian manuscript painting as a medium for artistic performance and self-representation, a process by which artistic authority was shaped and discussed. In addition, each chapter explores a different theme: how painters challenged the conventions of royal representation (chapter 1); the role of writing in painting, its relation to ekphrasis and the context of the majlis (chapter 2); image, mimesis and potential world (Chapter 3); the line and its calligraphic quality (Chapter 4); signature (Chapter 5); the mobility of manuscripts (epilogue).
Calligraphic Line
Authors: Balafrej Lamia
Published: January 2020

In late Timurid manuscript painting, the area devoted to the illustration of the story narrated in the manuscript shrank dramatically, while a multitude of non-illustrative forms proliferated. Painting became filled with figures and motifs that bore no apparent relationship to the surrounding text. This chapter argues that visual abundance destabilized illustration in order to reference taswir, the process of image making. Aspects of composition and technique such as the painting’s even surface and its grid-like composition further lauded the artist’s creative power. This chapter also shows that painting became a metamedium, designed to interrogate the ontological boundaries of painting and to define its relationship, not to the world as we see it but to God’s creation, to the ideal forms and concepts from which reality was created. As such painting represented potential, rather than actual, worlds.
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?: Coming to Terms with Deleuze
Authors: Cohn Jesse
Published: January 2020

In this chapter, the author narrates his extended encounter with Deleuze, explaining how he went from a fairly sharp mistrust of his philosophy to a place where, as Wittgenstein might have put it, he now no longer sees certain things as problems, but from a standpoint where some of the apparent “problems” were formerly thought to be. The ‘drama’ has roughly four acts.
Deterritorialising Anarchist Geographies: A Deleuzian Approach
Authors: de la Torre Hernández Alejandro , Barrera de la Torre Gerónimo
Published: January 2020

This chapter outlines a geography of historical anarchism (between 1871 and 1918) from three main ideas in which the authors bring together interdisciplinary contributions from geography and history, with a number of theoretical postulates from Deleuze and Guattari. The first examines the symbolic geography and imaginaries regarding anarchism; the second the militant migration and the connexions between groups around the world, analysed through anarchist newspaper records; and the third covers the prior two issues by contrasting capitalism expansion with anarchism expansion.
Dialectical Encounters
Authors: Wilkinson Taraneh
Published: January 2020

Discussions of Turkish Islam are still frequently dominated by political considerations and dualistic paradigms: modern vs. traditional, secular vs. religious. Yet there exists a body of Muslim institutions in Turkey, Turkish theology faculties, or ilahiyat faculties, whose work cannot always be so easily reduced to political considerations or black and white paradigms. By taking Turkish theology up on its theological rather than political concerns, this book sheds light on complex Muslim theological voices already entangled in encounters with a largely Western and Christian modernity.
Rather than ask whether or not Turkish Muslim theology is “modern,” this book aims to re-frame the binary implied in such a question by delving into the conceptual worlds of Turkish Muslim theologians. As part of this reframing, this book examines how Turkish theology dialectically mediates multiple intellectual traditions, lending particular focus to Turkish Muslim engagement with Western Christian thought.
Featuring the work of RecepAlpyağıl (Istanbul University) and Şaban Ali Düzgün (Ankara University), this study provides a concise survey of Turkish Muslim positions on religious pluralism and atheism as well as detailed treatments of both critical and appreciative Turkish Muslim perspectives on Western Christianity. The result is a critical reframing of the category of modernity through responses of Turkish theologians to the Western intellectual tradition alongside a detailed exploration of an ongoing chapter in Muslim-Christian relations.
Human Agency, Responsibility, and Tawḥīd
Authors: Wilkinson Taraneh R.
Published: January 2020

This chapter continues to treat Şaban Ali Düzgün’s work, exploring his take on human agency and moving from an abstract sense of communal responsibility towards more concrete and constructive Muslim responses to the trauma of Western colonialism. By highlighting his understanding of human agency, it explores Düzgün’s theological and conceptual toolbox, showing how he draws confidently on Enlightenment and classical Islamic resources to produce a holistic vision of the individual in positive relationship with God. Specifically, this chapter shows how Düzgün finesses conceptions of human knowledge and affirms human plurality—a plurality facilitated by divine unity that does not stand in antagonistic relationship to individual agency. For Düzgün, tawḥīd, or God’s utter oneness, stands in positive and open relation to an empowered individual piously conscious of her responsibility to society and those around her.
The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy
Authors: Oppitz-Trotman George
Published: January 2020

Charting a new course between performance studies and literary criticism, this book discovers a poetics of figuration in English tragic drama. It demonstrates that our recognition of the dramatic person in printed drama of the early modern period is involved in the terms on which those plays were first realized in the theatre. Since many such tragedies challenge and confuse the straightforward discernment of dramatic character, a strong distinction between performance studies and literary criticism breaks down in the course of an attentive reading. In the past this problem of recognition was artificially resolved or ignored so as to launch various sorts of moral interpretation. In fact, the ethical and political difficulty of revenge in plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet and The Duchess of Malfi is inseparable from the difficulty of discerning human shapes in the theatre and on the page. Moreover, the epistemological issues created by these games of personation have been inadequately addressed by historicist criticism purporting to unearth the social, religious, and political impulsions of Shakespearean drama. Intervening in a wide range of current debates within early modern studies, The Origins of English Revenge Tragedyholds that the origins of English tragic drama cannot be understood without considering how the common player appears in the play.
Points
Authors: Oppitz-Trotman George
Published: January 2020

The closing scene of Hamletentangles the play’s tragedy in a series of problems relating to intention, accident, and physical dexterity. Showing how many of the epistemological difficulties intrinsic to the play’s climax arise from legal and social issues around the status and purpose of the early modern duel, this chapter argues that Shakespeare used the occasion of swordplay to launch a daring formal experiment. Hamlet’s subjectivity disappears into the fencing-match, and it is uncertain whether he achieves his revenge against Claudius by accident, in spontaneous reaction, or with full intent. The sovereignty of Hamletthe artwork is thus connected inextricably to its realization on the stage. For it is only in a specific performance of Hamlet that the problem of Hamlet’s intention can be provisionally resolved.
A Brief Interlude of Vice
Authors: Oppitz-Trotman George
Published: January 2020

Bridging from the dialectic of action explored in the previous chapters to the dialectic of figuration and appearance considered in those which follow, this chapter sketches a triangular historical relationship between plays of revenge, the professionalisation of theatre, and the figure known as the ‘Vice’. The common player became the Vice when that figure disappeared from English plays in the 1570s and 1580s. Those were the years in which the professional actor emerged and theatre became an object of greater suspicion. In this way the appearance of the actor and his agency within the fictional scene acquired a specific and complex moral value. For revenge tragedy this was significant because the Vice had been the origin and impetus of the revenge narrative since English playwrights had first shown interest in the theme of extra-judicial vengeance, in translations of Seneca in the 1560s. To ask whether revenge was a moral deviation or devilish concoction, as did more famous plays of later decades, was to question the agency of the player and his interest in producing dubious illusions.
Presidential Privilege and the Freedom of Information Act
Authors: Baron Kevin M.
Published: January 2020

Executive privilege (EP) as a political tool has created a grey area of constitutional power between the legislative and executive branches. By focusing on the post-WWII political usage of executive privilege, this research utilizes a social learning perspective to examine the power dynamics between Congress and the president when it comes to government secrecy and public information. Social learning provides the framework to understand how the Cold War's creation of the modern American security state led to a paradigm shift in the executive branch. This shift altered the politics of the presidency and impacted relations with Congress through extensive use of EP and denial of congressional requests for information. When viewed through a social learning lens, the institutional politics surrounding the development of the Freedom of Information Act is intricately entwined with EP as a political power struggle of action-reaction between the executive and legislative branches. Using extensive archival research, this historical analysis examines the politics surrounding the modern use of executive privilege from Truman through Nixon as an action-reaction of checks on power from the president and Congress, where each learns and responds based on the others previous actions. The use of executive privilege led to the Freedom of Information Act showing how policy can serve as a congressional check on executive power, and how the politics surrounding this issue influence contemporary politics.
Eisenhower’s executive privilege and the public interest
Authors: Baron Kevin M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter delves into the depths of one of the most important developments within modern American politics, the creation and institutionalization of executive privilege. In facing a fervent Congress in the grips of McCarthyism, Eisenhower issued a letter denying testimony to the Senate for the Army-McCarthy hearings. His letter included a memo from Attorney General Brownell that claimed the president had an inherent constitutional privilege to deny information to Congress or the public if it was in the public interest and for national security. This action institutionalized the Cold War Paradigm in the executive branch and created an extra-constitutional power for the president. Eisenhower issued several executive orders concerning classification and public dissemination of government information, along with the creation of the Office of Strategic Information (OSI) within the Commerce Department to oversee these policies. Eisenhower claimed historic precedent to justify his inherent constitutional power, regardless, it showed a learned response that changed executive power. Congress would respond in 1955 by creating the Special Subcommittee on Government Information chaired by Rep. John Moss, given jurisdiction for oversight on all executive branch information policies and practices. With the issue of freedom of information institutionalized in Congress, a 12-year legislative power struggle would unfold between Congress and the White House ending with the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966.
Critiquing Violence: Benjamin on Law and the Divine
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

Focusing on Walter Benjamin’s famous critique of violence in his 1921 essay of the same title, this chapter argues that Benjamin’s distinction between divine and legal violence also points to two distinct forms of sovereignty, one internal to law and one external to it. With this, he disrupts the classic notion that sovereignty is indivisible. Tracing the relationship between the two forms demonstrates that Benjamin develops a sophisticated account of the relationship between law and violence, undermines the classic notion that violence is instrumental to (legal) sovereignty, and shows that divine sovereign violence can justifiably usurp legal sovereign violence, thereby offering the possibility of a fresh start. However, the chapter also notes the ambiguity in Benjamin’s account regarding whether divine violence can take on (non-divine) political significance to suggest that his appeal to divine violence is an attempt to develop a just order based on an ethics of responsibility, whereby he allows that we can confront legal sovereignty in the name of create a more just legal framework, but insists that we cannot ground that decision on a transcendent principle. It concludes that Benjamin’s point is that any challenge to legal sovereign violence must emanate from a pure decision that we take responsibility for.
Life Excluded from Law: Agamben, Biopolitics, and Civil War
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitical sovereignty. It focuses on Homo Sacer and State of Exception to show that Agamben links sovereign violence to the establishment of a state of exception, wherein life is controlled through its exclusion from the juridical order. With this, Agamben continues the biopolitical line that sovereignty is orientated towards the regulation of life rather than the establishment of juridical order. The second part of the chapter ties this to Agamben’s discussion of civil war to argue that, contra Foucault, Agamben holds that the fundamental division marking Western politics is not a racial one, but one between oikos and polis, private and public. From this, Agamben argues that this political division makes possible and so subtends the sovereign decision to exclude individuals from law by establishing a state of exception. The key point is that Agamben links sovereign violence to life by excluding the latter from the juridical order. The chapter concludes by critically evaluating Agamben’s proposals to overcome this.
Augustine, Free Will, and Evil
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

Early Christian attempts to resolve the problem of evil initially led to a turn away from the ‘soft’ metaphysical dualism of Christianity to the ‘hard’ dualism of Manicheism. This, however, led to a resurgence in Christian attempts to incorporate the problem of evil within a monotheistic framework, the most important of these, both historically and conceptually, was Augustine’s. This chapter focuses on his insistence that ‘evil’ entails a privation of being and is a choice of individual free will. Two problems are, however, identified with this formulation: first, by claiming that ‘evil’ entails a privation, it seems to disavow the reality of evil, and, second, it is not clear that making individuals responsible for ‘evil’ is compatible with the Christian claim that God is omnipotent.
Aquinas, Privation, and Original Sin
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on Thomas Aquinas’ analysis of evil in On Evil to respond to three questions: (1) how does Aquinas conceptualise the relationship between good and evil? (2) what does Aquinas understand by the notion of original sin? And (3) what role does the body play in Aquinas’ conception of evil? The argument developed shows that, while Aquinas is influenced by Augustine, he departs from Augustine in a number of subtle, but important ways, particularly relating to the relationship between good and evil and, linked to this, his conceptualisation of the body and, indeed, the role that the body plays in his analysis.
Kant on Radical Evil
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that with Kant’s critical philosophy, the metaphysical and epistemological premises of the Christian tradition were severely criticised, which, in turn, led to a new conception of morality and evil based on the decision of autonomous, moral agents. Focusing on the late Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason reveals that Kant’s alternative conception of radical evil refers to the choice of a moral maxim that turns away from the moral law. The chapter outlines the conceptual schema and problematic orientating Kant’s analysis, namely his claim that the individual is constituted by an original natural disposition (Anlage) to the good and an innate propensity (Hang) to evil, before concluding by examining Kant’s claim that overcoming ‘evil’ is possible, despite his recognition that its grounding in individual noumenal freedom means that it is not possible to explain how this is possible.
Castoriadis: Evil and the Social Imaginary
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

This chapter engages with Cornelius Castoriadis’s analysis of the ways in which the meaning of (moral) concepts is generated. It starts by outlining Castoriadis’s critique of Lacan’s symbolic account of meaning generation to show that he rejects Lacan’s claim that it occurs through anonymous differential linguistic symbolic relations, to instead claim that it happens through the anonymous, collective, social-historical imaginary of each society. With this, Castoriadis suggests that existence and meaning ‘evil’, including the narrative and myths associated with it, depends on the social imaginary of each society. Evil is then part of the ways in which a society and the individuals composing it create a narrative to construct its/their self-understanding.
Conclusion
Authors: Rae Gavin
Published: January 2020

The history of evil outlined in the previous chapters has, amongst other things, shown that in the Western philosophical tradition the question of evil was initially framed within an explicitly theological, predominantly Christian, metaphysical framework, before moving to secular premises with the advent of Kant’s critical philosophy. At first glance, it appears then that Western thinking on evil has undergone a historical process of secularisation....
Cinematic Time and Animal Worlds
Authors: McMahon Laura
Published: January 2020

This chapter develops key aspects of the book’s theoretical framework, moving between philosophies of animal worlds and Deleuze’s account of cinematic time. It draws on the concept of the Umwelt proposed by Uexküll, and the different responses to this concept offered by Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari. Focusing in particular on Deleuze and Guattari’s reworking of the Umwelt as a process of ‘desubjectified’ assemblages, the chapter links this to Deleuze’s thinking of the time-image as a shift from subject to world, and as a realm that is intricately bound up with questions of differing, becoming and the virtual. While suggesting ways of thinking through links between Deleuze, cinema and the slow animal film, the chapter also turns to recent accounts of the relation between animals and film, by Burt, Pick, Lippit, Sobchack and others. Engaging with yet also moving beyond the recourse to Bazin that has tended to shape the field thus far, it emphasises what Deleuze’s theory of cinematic time can add to this developing body of work, as well as what a more detailed and wide-ranging account of Deleuze and Guattari’s model of animal worlds can contribute to the field of critical animal studies.
Leviathan, Meat and the Annihilation of Worlds
Authors: McMahon Laura
Published: January 2020

Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s Leviathan documents the daily activities of a commercial fishing boat, captured on multiple GoPro cameras. Its radically mobile, unstable audiovisual world represents a striking contrast to the long takes and static shots that shape the other films in this book. This chapter argues that Leviathan’s lack of durational attentiveness leads to a closing down – rather than an opening up – of animal worlds. While much attention has been devoted to the film’s sensory, immersive aesthetics, commentary has tended to elide questions of industrialized slaughter. This elision is striking given the celebratory framing of the film as nonanthropocentric by critical commentary and by the filmmakers themselves. Drawing on Shukin, the chapter traces how the ‘carnal traffic’ of Leviathan’s dying animals is simultaneously disavowed and exploited – by the film and its critical reception – as a form of theoretico-aesthetic capital that frames the film’s immersive, visceral vision as a return to a prediscursive ‘real’. In place of the durational attentiveness to animal lives traced elsewhere in the book, Leviathan’s flitting, indiscriminate vision reduces the fish to undifferentiated matter, closing down the possibility of singularity, the film’s deathly, fusional logic refusing what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the ‘spacing’ of the world.
Actual/Virtual: Bovines ou la vraie vie des vaches
Authors: McMahon Laura
Published: January 2020

Gras’s Bovines/A Cow’s Life is a contemplative documentary reflection on a herd of Charolais cows, offering up delayed, wandering images of bovine life. The film invites particular links to be drawn between the ‘pure optical and sound situations’ of the Deleuzian time-image and the account of animal art and expressive territory given by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?. Building also on Bailly’s notion of pensivity, while expanding this account beyond its privileging of the gaze (through attention to bovine sounds in the film), this chapter allows for further development of dynamics of worlding traced in previous chapters. Yet it also suggests that Bovines allows us to probe the possible limitations of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. In risking a privileging of what Hallward calls, in his critique of Deleuze, ‘virtual creatings’ over ‘actual creatures’, the film’s time-images might be seen as aestheticising political paralysis over political action, favouring a celebration of biovitality over a critique of biopolitics. While Bovines’s pastoral setting and lingering, durational aesthetic thus stage a set of ambivalences and contradictions, the film also points to the limitations, as well as the ongoing possibilities, of a Deleuzo-Guattarian engagement with cinema’s animal worlds.
Introduction
Authors: Van Puyvelde Damien
Published: January 2020

Today, close to a million contractors hold a security clearance in the United States. This is a quarter of all cleared personnel, and more than the total population of the District of Columbia, where most major federal government institutions are located. Tens of thousands of contractors contribute to core intelligence functions like collection and operations, analysis and production, and even mission management....
A Shared History of Successes and Excesses
Authors: Van Puyvelde Damien
Published: January 2020

This chapter provides an in-depth account of the relationship between the U.S. intelligence apparatus and its private outriders, from the earliest days of the Republic to the end of the Cold War. Covering such a large period sheds light on the deep roots, the broad evolution, and the multiple opportunities and risks accompanying intelligence outsourcing. In the United States, the legitimacy of the federal government has always been entwined with the private sector and this is related to the values underpinning American political culture. As a result, the private intelligence industry continued to thrive, deepen and diversify its involvement in national security affairs when the federal government established itself more firmly in this realm. The institutionalization of intelligence in the twentieth century was accompanied by the diversification and formalisation of the ties between the intelligence community and its contractors. Contractors and their government sponsors share the responsibility for some of the greatest achievements and controversies in U.S. intelligence history, from the success of the U2 spy plane to the excesses of Project MKUltra. The history of U.S. intelligence is characterized by successive movements of expansion and regulation through which outsourcing and accountability have become increasingly intertwined.
The Accountability Regime for Contractors during the Global War on Terrorism
Authors: Van Puyvelde Damien
Published: January 2020

The post-9/11 trend toward intelligence outsourcing was accompanied by the emergence of a series of accountability problems. This chapter evaluates the accountability regime for contractors in the early 2000s and finds that this regime was imperfect but not inexistent. Six major cases of accountability failure shed light on three types of accountability problems involving contractors: inefficiencies, human rights abuses, and conflicts of interests. Intelligence contractors have not always been efficient, effective, or respected the law but they do not bear sole responsibility for the accountability problems in which they have been involved. These problems were caused by inadequate standards and deficient management on both sides of the public-private divide. While outsourcing can limit intelligence accountability, government accountability shortfalls also affect the outsourcing of intelligence. The chapter concludes that outsourcing and accountability are mutually interdependent.
How Do We Know Security When We See It? Problematisation as Method
Authors: Neal Andrew W.
Published: January 2020

This chapter tackles a methodological problem posed by the premise of the book: if ‘security’ cannot be recognised by its ‘anti-political’ logic, then how can we know ‘security’ when we see it? The chapter sets out a methodology for identifying and analysing ‘security’ as a historical and contextual moving target, based on Michel Foucault’s notion of problematisation. This methodology is four things: first, empiricist - it analyses what people said and did when they articulated (security-related) problems and responded to them. Second, historical - it assumes that problematisations are specific to certain times and places and change over time. This negates any core logic or objective definition of ‘security’, leaving only historically specific problematisations of security. Third, reflexive - it reflects on the role of the critical analyst, who does not have an objective God’s eye view, but holds a particular position within history and a critical intent to challenge prevailing theoretical and political assumptions in the present. Fourth, the method of problematisation is a double move: it identifies and describes problematisations in context, and then amplifies and problematises them further for critical purposes. This makes the analyst an active player in the problematisation, not a disinterested observer.
Security as Normal Politics: The Rise of Security in Parliamentary Committees
Authors: Neal Andrew W.
Published: January 2020

This chapter uses the rise in parliamentary committee engagement with ‘security’ to examine the migration of ‘security’ into ‘normal politics’. At the same time, it examines changing problematisations of security in committee activity. The chapter presents committee politics as a different kind of ‘political game’ in security. Although partisanship does play a role, at stake is not so much victory over the other side, but rather legitimacy and effectiveness in holding the government to account. The chapter discusses a number of explanations for the rise in activity on security, such as general increases in parliamentary activism over the same period, and a mirroring of security topics that appear in government activity and wider political debate. The chapter gives evidence to the book’s central claim that ‘security’ has been migrating into the ‘arena’ of ‘normal politics’.
Changing Ownership and Employment
Authors: Phillips Jim
Published: January 2020

Changes in communities and collieries reinforced economic security in the coalfields. Communities were subject to substantial divisions of class and gender but became more cohesive after nationalisation. Economic diversification helped, bringing a widening range of employment opportunities for coalfield women. Community security was weakened slightly by migration, encouraged by policy-makers, but strengthened by the major advances of new housing and local authority ownership. At workplace level there were continuities from private to public ownership, with security improved through union mobilisation and collective state action. Village Pits established before the First World War were redeveloped after nationalisation and remained important in the 1970s. New Mines in the 1920s and 1930s included enhanced welfare amenities secured by trade union pressure. Cosmopolitan Collieries from the late 1950s came at a cost, with local pit closures and miners travelling greater distances, but greater long-term security was promised. Moral economy expectations were satisfied: restructuring involved meaningful input from the miners and improved their economic and social standing.
Improving Safety
Authors: Phillips Jim
Published: January 2020

The Scottish miners’ central goal was economic security. An important generational element was involved in its pursuit. The Village Pit generation saw nationalisation as deliverance from the evils of private ownership. The New Mine generation was simultaneously more critical of nationalisation and willing to engage with its joint consultative features. Nationalisation was dynamic and the New Mine generation shaped it to fit the security needs of miners and their communities. Generational differences were highlighted during the Second World War. The Scottish coalfield politics of the Home Front were complex, involving Communism and the strategic interests of the Soviet Union. Whereas the Village Pit generation opposed unofficial strikes, these involved and were led by the New Mine generation, who saw them as evidence of powerful workplace and community anger that could be mobilised in pursuit of collective security. In the 1950s New Mine generation miners were more assertive in their defence of the coalfield moral economy. Their actions at workplace level placed significant limits on the managerial sovereignty of NCB officials.