Communitas and the commons: The open access movement and the dynamics of restructuration in scholarly publishing

In this article, the author reflects on the open access movement as a social and political phenomenon via the lens of Turner’s work on liminality and communitas. Moving beyond the neo-liberalization frame, which is the primary way that the transformations in open access have been conceptualized to date, she argues that they are better understood as a product of the hybridizing relationship between structure and anti-structure. This perspective allows us to make sense of the open access movement’s seemingly paradoxical qualities, which, the author suggests, point to cultural processes still very much in the subjunctive mood.     

For the love of cuddly toys

ABSTRACT

This essay reflects upon a particular moment at the end of Chris Philo’s Children’s Geographies lecture [see Philo 2016. “‘Childhood is Measured Out by Sounds and Sights and Smells, Before the Dark Hour of Reason Grows’: Children’s Geographies at 12.” Children’s Geographies 14 (6): 623–640. doi:10.1080/14733285.2016.1187896], when discussion turned to cuddly toys. I recall a particular mood constituted in and by this moment: of apparent bashfulness, hesitancy, things-left-unsaid, and disinclination to discuss cuddly toys within the formal space of an academic conference. I suggest that this incident might be understood as indicative of three sets of silences which, still, characterise a great deal of work within the fantastically vibrant sub-disciplines of Children’s Geographies and Cultural Geographies. This argument is accompanied by photographic portraits of three particular toys: Angus, Arnold and the B.B.D. I hope that the presence of these portraits helps bring to the surface something of the often-silenced geographies – of memories, affects, intimacies and vulnerabilities, of play, fun and care, and of material and popular cultures – upon which my argument is focused.     

Is the United States in decline—again? An essay

After a decade long period during which it was optimistically assumed that under conditions of unipolarity the United States was likely to reign supreme in world affairs for many decades to come, the mood, and with it the debate about the future of the US, has changed dramatically. Hubris has been overtaken by a new mood of intellectual pessimism; the idea of a new American century by the notion of a failing Empire. Though few may wish to call it such, there is no doubting the fact that a new‘decline debate’is now under way in the United States, one that will no doubt be as intense, if not more so, than the one occasioned by the publication in 1987 of Paul Kennedy's hugely influential The rise and fall of the Great Powers. In this article, the sources of the decline debate in the US are traced, as are how and why the debate disappeared following the collapse of the USSR, and why it has now returned to haunt the American landscape.     

Criteria for a Socially Sanctionable Drug

Abstract

In all recorded history, including accounts of preliterate peoples, there is irrefutable evidence that in practically every culture and every society man has developed technique or found mecbanisms whose psychological, physiological and biological effects have permitted him temporarily to alter the state of his consciouness and tbereby escape a world that seem all too present, all too humdrum, all too much with him. The occasional need to alter his state of consciousness appear to be one of man's basic drives. The e alterations-which must be dearly different by an order of magnitude from man ‘normal’ experience and expectations-involve one or more of man senses, his conceptual cognitive and ideational processes, his mood and emotions, and the integrative functions of hi mind. That tbese alte.rations appear to be a basic need for p ychic relea e can be seen in the enormous ran e and variety of the psychobiological consciousness-changing technique and mechanisms that have been developed and explored and the multiplicity of purpose to which they have been put. Their very en tence is a testament to the efficacyof man's ability to atisfy thi need.     

魏晋南北朝时期的铜香炉——兼论魏晋南北朝时期的熏香习俗

魏晋南北朝铜香炉可分为熏炉和熏斗两大类,总体上为汉代铜香炉样式的延续和发展,而形制有所简化。装饰艺术方面有所创新,融合新的时代因素,与同时期的其他生活家居用品风格配套。尽管受到瓷器制造业兴起的影响,铜香炉仍在生活中占有一席之地。这一时期,熏香习俗更加普及,内涵更为丰富,生活用香和宗教用香在文献中有不少记载。香料、香具和熏香习俗也随着贸易和交往传播域外。     

Anna Comnena's account of the First Crusade: History and politics in the reigns of the emperors Alexius I and Manuel I Comnenus

Abstract

Anna Comnena's history the Alexiad has been accorded a high honorary status by Byzantine historians. Her pioneering efforts in philosophy and the thoroughness of her historical methodology are admired, although there is a distinct reluctance to analyse her historical writing. On a superficial level the Alexiad is a straightforward text: an historical panegyric in its organisation, frequently eulogistic in tone, in the manner of court orations, and rhetorically strongly influenced by conventional Byzantine pastiches of Homer. A triumphal mood pervades the biography. A somewhat more careful assessment soon reveals the significant tensions and contradictions which lurk beneath the formalised strength of this epic historical narrative. Ideological and cultural problematics abound. The self-conscious celebratory presentation of Byzantium's cultural elitism is frequently subverted by the author's pessimism. The spatial and temporal terrain of the Alexiad contains many visionary qualities, even though the text purports to narrate the events ‘as they occurred‘. Historical perspectives and idiosyncratic philosophical positions impinge, blend, envelop, and disorganise the text. Among the many themes is Anna's presentation of the ‘Latin West’, and in particular her characterisation of the appearance of crusaders in Byzantine society. A more personalised feature is Anna's self-projection of herself within the Alexiad as ‘a dutiful daughter’ and ‘a loving wife’. Yet the narrative contains elements of gender confusion, for there is an assertive and possessive interest in forms of political power that were usually culturally exclusive to Byzantine men.     

The Pied Piper of the ghetto: Lyndon Johnson, environmental justice, and the politics of rat control

When Congress rejected President Lyndon Johnson’s Rat Extermination and Control Bill in the summer of 1967, in a mood of growing conservatism, it inadvertently sparked a heated political controversy that brought the desperate conditions of life in inner-city America into sharp focus. This article focuses on the issue of rat infestation to explore the conditions of “urban blight” that disproportionately afflicted ghetto communities in the United States during the 1960s and that represented a form of environmental inequality linked to racial marginalization and poverty. It is suggested that a growing awareness of environmental aspects of inequality increasingly fueled ghetto discontent, feeding the outbreak of riots during the “long, hot summers,” and spurring liberals to think of new ways to understand the problems of inner-city poverty.     

Girlhood,participation and empowerment in Tanzania: climbing material and discursive walls

In this paper I reflect upon encounters with ‘young people’s participation’ during ethnographic research on girlhood and sexual agency with teenage girls in Tanzania. I argue that methodology which centralises participants’ experiences is particularly important in research on issues related to sex and sexuality, where young people’s voices are often disregarded or downplayed. However, such an approach might run up against a number of practical challenges. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in two sites during 2014 and 2015 to show that attention to the networks of relationships within which young people are embedded and the structural conditions which might generate or obstruct sexual agency is essential for research which seeks to promote their meaningful participation.     

博物馆展览文字浅析——观众研究视野中的案例分析

观众研究是现代博物馆学的核心内容。西方博物馆学通过对观众行为模式观察研究和数据统计分析,来剖析博物馆观众阅读行为的特点。相关研究成果表明,观众自身的认知体系主导着包括阅读行为在内的博物馆观众行为,并在此基础上形成博物馆体验。文字风格和形式设计影响着观众对博物馆展览文字的阅读行为。而针对具体展览的目标观众调查和展览评估应是进行展览策划和文字撰写的前提,是构建"高效"的博物馆展览文字的关键所在,却也是目前中国博物馆展览策划中的重要缺环。     

Patterns and Laughter in Euripides’ Helen ∗

An examination of Euripides’ use of traditional stories in composing two remarkably similar plays of his, IT and Helena. In the first he draws on that of Troas and Hypsipyle, in the second on that of Odysseus’ return to Penelope. I suggest that the two plays, along with the now fragmentary Andromeda, formed a single trilogy, produced in 412 BC, just after the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, which seems to have influenced the mood of the two surviving plays.     

Shakespeare as a method. Carl Schmitt’s reading of Othello and Hamlet

While in the 1960s Allan Bloom suggested to read William Shakespeare’s works through the prism of political philosophy, a decade earlier Carl Schmitt used the works of English poet in a reverse way: he read political philosophy and history through Shakespeare. Deprived – under the influence of Leo Strauss – from the possibility of considering Thomas Hobbes a decisionist thinker, Schmitt in his ‘Hamlet or Hecuba’ used Shakespeare’s most famous work to interpret origins of disappearance of the state of emergency from English soil. Shakespeare was seen by Schmitt as a writer who captured the Sixteenth and seventeenth century changes in thinking about sovereignty and the state. Interestingly, Schmitt did not use Shakespeare as method for the first time: in first decades of twentieth century, in his diary, he made ‘Othello’ a prism through which he read his love life. Because the author of ‘The Concept of the Political’ is one of the less methodologically cohesive writers of twentieth century, his usage of Shakespeare twice, in different circumstances, is interesting. In an article, author links ‘Hamlet or Hecuba’ with Schmitt’s geopolitical works and presents Shakespeare’s works as the coherent method of interpretation in Schmitt’s philosophy of decisionism.     

The Picture of Artificial Intelligence and the Secularization of Thought

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical interpretation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a philosophical notion which exemplifies a secular conception of thinking. One way in which AI notably differs from the conventional understanding of “thinking” is that, according to AI, “intelligence” or “thinking” does not necessarily require “life” as a precondition: that it is possible to have “thinking without life.” Building on Charles Taylor’s critical account of secularity as well as Hubert Dreyfus’ influential critique of AI, this article offers a theological analysis of AI’s “lifeless” picture of thinking in relation to the Augustinian conception of God as “Life itself.” Following this critical theological analysis, this article argues that AI’s notion of thinking promotes a societal privilege of certain rationalistic or calculative ways of thought over more existential or spiritual ways of thinking, and thereby fosters a secularization or de-spiritualization of thinking as an ethical human practice.     

《史记索隐》“■县”地名校议

今本《史记·黥布列传》“兹乡”《索隐》注“番阳■县之乡”,当作“鄡阳县之乡”。“■”为“鄡”之俗讹字。“鄡”字又作“郻”,《汉书·地理志》郻县在巨鹿郡,鄡阳县在豫章郡,与番阳近者为鄡阳县,《索隐》作“鄡县”误。西汉无番阳郡,依《索隐》体例亦不得言“番阳鄡阳县”。《史记索隐》当是据《汉书》颜师古注为说,今本《索隐》此注有误。     

Wahnsinnige Bilder – Zu einer medialen Wissensgeschichte des Psychischen um 1900

Mental Images: Towards a Media History of the Psyche around 1900. Presupposing that visual practices are inherent to the social constitution of knowledge, this article suggests juxtaposing photographs and films produced in a psychiatric environment to popular films run in theaters around 1900, thus identifying cinema’s particular “Denkstil” (Fleck). Rejecting science’s dominating paradigm of visual objectivity (Daston/Galison), the visual apparatus [dispositif] of early cinema facilitates subjective experience of unreason and irrationality and thus initiates a different epistemological approach to knowledge as self-knowledge of a modern, self-reflexive subject. This is particularly evident in early cinema’s depiction of the psyche, which does not solely focus on the physical manifestation of the ‘mad’, ‘insane’ body, but also visualizes the subject’s inner life: technical means like montage, multiple exposure or stop motion can be employed to illustrate subjective visions, fantasies or dreams. Thus, the invisible mind becomes visible as the “unthinkable within thinking” (Deleuze), while the subject is invited to participate in cinema’s “gay science” (Nietzsche).     

The Function and Iconography of the Minstrels’ Gallery at Exeter Cathedral

The Minstrels’ Gallery of Exeter cathedral has received attention in almost every major account of the church’s fabric, but has never been taken as a subject in its own right. This paper seeks to review and assess existing interpretations of the gallery’s construction and purpose, along with those of the nave’s north entrance with which the gallery’s history is inextricably linked. In addition to evaluating existing scholarship, this paper will also propose three further theses: first, that the gallery was inserted into a finished nave bay, probably in the 1350s or 1360s, which already contained a north porch built entirely by the mason Thomas of Witney on the foundations of its Romanesque predecessor; secondly, that its function was to offer an inexpensive alternative to the singing-gallery which was planned but not built in the image-screen on the cathedral’s west front; and, thirdly, that the role of the gallery and the north entrance to the nave in the Palm Sunday liturgy has influenced the iconography of the nave and gallery. This paper seeks to gather together the wealth of interest which the gallery has attracted over the last two centuries and to contribute to this exceptional history of scholarship.     

“In Front of the World”: Translating Beatriz Nascimento

This collection translates some of the work of the influential Black Brazilian thinker and activist Beatriz Nascimento (1942–1995) for the first time into English, in collaboration with her only daughter, Bethânia Gomes. Historian, poet, theorist and organiser, Beatriz Nascimento was a key figure in Brazil’s Black Movement until her untimely death in 1995. She dangerously wrote at the height of Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (1964–1985), and theorised extensively on the Black condition in Brazil; the unique experience of Black women; and quilombos—Brazilian maroon societies that she imagined as spaces of both historical and contemporary fugitivity. Following Alex Ratts, this introduction outlines her contribution to radical geography, in particular Black geographies, territoriality and embodiment. It also positions Nascimento within the trans‐Atlantic Black radical tradition. We present two of Nascimento’s essays in translation here. The first, “The Concept of Quilombo and Black Cultural Resistance”, introduces a crucial strand of her scholarly work, on the history and socio‐political significance of quilombos (maroon communities). The second, “For a (New) Existential and Physical Territory”, shows Nascimento in a different mood: philosophical, reflective and iconoclastic. In addition, two of her poems—“Dream” and “Sun and Blue”—are also translated here for the first time.     

Nerven‐Saiten‐Stimmung. Zum Wandel einer Denkfigur zwischen Musik und Wissenschaft 1750–1850

‘Stimmung’. The Career of a Concept in Music and Science between 1750 and 1850. The German word ‘Stimmung’ originally refers to the musical praxis of tuning instruments. Whereas the English concepts of ‘tonus’ and ‘atunement’ used to describe the physical status of the body developed independently from the psychological ‘mood’, ‘Stimmung’ was used metaphorically in both physiology and psychology in the discussed period. This leads to various interrelations between the areas of knowledge involved. The paper investigates these on a synchronic and diachronic level. By concentrating a) on the analogy between musical strings and nerve fibres within the framework of a mechanistic conception of the body and b) on the metaphoric use of ‘Stimmung’ as a psychological concept describing the general mood of an individual, it becomes evident that the different metaphorical adaptations do not only have consequences within the specific area of knowledge, but also lead to distinct interpretations of musical effect. The second half of the paper concentrates on the diachronic development of ‘Stimmung’ in physiology and analyses the shifts within the semantic field of the metaphor occurring during the transformation from a mechanical to an organic conception of the body. On a theoretical level the emphasis lies on the conceptual potential of vague metaphors and the function of marginal metaphors in periods of theory change. In this context the results question Thomas Kuhns theory of an abrupt, gestaltlike change of theory by emphasizing the importance of continuous shifts within the semantic fields of vague metaphors.     

The regard of the first man: on Joseph Addison’s aesthetic categories

This study examines the sources that could inspire Joseph Addison’s influential ‘aesthetic’ triad of ‘great’, ‘uncommon’, and ‘beautiful’, as elaborated in his essay-series The Pleasures of the Imagination in 1712. After identifying a philological problem in the interpretative tradition which gives rise to Addison’s triad from a section of Ps Longinus’ Peri Hypsous, further three seventeenth-century texts – Thomas Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra, Dominique Bouhours’ Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, and Baltasar Gracián’s El Criticón – are presented in order to reconstruct a ‘reading glass’ through which Addison could peruse and understand the Longinian section, and then could create his ‘aesthetic’ triad. As a result of this reconstruction, the possible connection between Gracián’s allegorical novel and Addison’s essay can cast more light on the complex and insufficiently discussed relationship between theology or devotional literature and the emerging modern aesthetic discourse. From this angle, Addison’s ‘man of polite imagination’, that is, the homo aestheticus in the modern sense of the adjective, seems to be the heir of Gracián’s ‘first man’ who has the privilege of regarding the created world in a new light, and, as Addison’s aesthete, of discovering its greatness, novelty and beauty in ‘innocent pleasures’.     

Said,Auerbach, and the Return to Philological Hermeneutics

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the relationship between Edward Said’s well-known contrapuntal reading of history and Erich Auerbach’s Ansatzpunkt, or point of departure, as a means of entering a given hermeneutic circle. Although Auerbach occupied an increasingly prominent place in Said’s critical thought, his engagement with the work of the German philologist has been largely ignored or downplayed. In this essay I take the figure of exile, which is so central to Said’s scholarship and which he explicitly links with the intellectual mission of critique, as a point of departure for a deepened exploration of Said’s critical method—a method developed in critical dialogue with Auerbach’s work. Building on the existing literature, I argue that Auerbach offers more than simply a way for Said to problematize identity politics and to challenge the dogmatism of received notions of home and political belonging. More than this, I argue that the German philologist provides Said with a way to reconfigure the dialectic between history and literature; to develop his contrapuntal approach to reading history; and to rethink the parameters of a historicist humanism that, in turn, enables him to reactivate the critical potential of philological hermeneutics.     

Polylinear incursions and autochthonous adaptations: Neolithisation and sustainable sedentarisation of the Arabian Peninsula

This contribution’s broad and in parts essayistic approach to Arabia’s Neolithic is less a discussion of findings than an explicit advocacy for future holistic research strategies. Based on the contribution’s meta-theoretical inputs, it suggests two sets of theses to be tested by the hitherto gained fragmentary information and future research on Arabia’s Neolithic. It aims to encourage an “emancipation” of Arabia’s early to mid-Holocene research from conceptions developed outside its regions, and to identify the Neolithic elements and developments of the Arabian lands by distinguishing incursions from primarily autochthonous and/or autonomous adaptations in their own right. It is suggested that productive lifeways are considered to be the only crucial parameter to testify a Neolithic status. In our view this is the case, provokingly enough, for the productive foraging management of natural resources which attests surplus and pre-planning strategies and contacts with established Neolithic socio-economies. Polylinear incursions and autochthonous adaptations are discussed as the two poles between which early to mid-Holocene developments in Arabia took place. A set of basic and a set of trajectory hypotheses on Arabia’s neolithisation and finally sustainable sedentarisation (reliance on oases economies) is presented, offered as a possible framework for future multi-/ transdisciplinary research.