Social Notes: Oscar Wilde,Francis Bacon,and the Medium of Aphorism

This paper reads Oscar Wilde's aphoristic style in terms of the note-taking practices he develops as an undergraduate at Oxford. It treats his use of small, mobile pieces of language as a strategy for dealing with methodological uncertainty in a time of curricular upheaval. His trademark style is perhaps best understood as a form of social notation, whereby pieces of information behave as actors seeking sociality and recombination, rather than placement in systematic arrangements. One significant unpublished source – the ‘Notebook on Philosophy’ – discloses Wilde's engagement with a surprising aphoristic precursor, Francis Bacon, who deploys the form for similar purposes. In modelling a form of non-teleological informational assembly, Wilde's notebooks also body forth the utopian social life he conceives in his later critical writings.     

Spatial extensions of childhood: from toy worlds to online communities

Digital technologies offer children opportunities to expand their everyday worlds and manipulate their spatial surroundings in real time. This article draws from ethnographic research in Helsinki focusing on children's sociality and technology encounters. Particular attention is given to techno-toys and online networking communities. Connections between companies developing digital technologies and children's everyday spaces give rise to new generational involvements. Adult-designed technologies support and exploit children's mutual relations, create opportunities for these relations, and are aimed at directing their course. Consequently, the fascination with commercial spaces is not surprising: they appeal to children by supporting their aims. The article suggests that in order to understand emerging techno-worlds that arrange, extend, and transform children's everyday doings, childhood scholars need to learn to ask questions that go beyond either/or stands. Only through a detailed understanding of the ways in which corporate offerings participate in, and promote, the production of everyday spaces for children can adults efficiently guide the very complex ways in which such spaces influence children.     

中国城市单位制研究的一个新框架

单位制是计划经济时期,在特殊的时代背景和社会经济条件下,国家在城市构建中通过管理和控制人力及物质资源以实现共产主义和国家现代化为目标的基本工具,经历了形成、发展、成熟和转型的历史过程。单位制研究走过了30余年的历程,成果丰硕,但相对制度性研究,空间性和社会性研究还比较薄弱,实践性研究更加匮乏。提出将单位制研究置于人类社会历史的长时段背景中,从单位化、去单位化和新单位主义三个阶段和单位的制度性、空间性、社会性和实践性四个视角展开。三个阶段分别对应计划经济时期、改革开放的30年和今后和谐社会建设时期。制度性研究包括制度思想、构建逻辑和制度体系三个方面;空间性包括第一空间、第二空间和第三空间;社会性包括社会结构、社区发展和个体历程;实践性包括社会重建、旧单位改造和新单位规划。     

Taming Space: Drug use,HIV, and homemaking in Downtown Eastside Vancouver

This article explores ideas of home and place making that bear on the narrated realities of 14 women who are drug users living with HIV in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. ‘Taming Space’ refers to the negotiations, transgressions and accommodations they make within particular spatial regimes. As residents of a ‘skid row’ district, research participants work to reconcile personal identities within representations of stigmatized space. As the subjects of epidemiological enquiry, clients of public health services and recipients of harm reduction initiatives, women both resist and acquiesce to the parameters of medicalized space. Housing and social service policies further demarcate spatial orders, especially framing women's options for mobility and homemaking. Finally, as street-involved persons they are subject to the often contradictory socio-spatial codes of street drug sociality. Drawing on the concept of turning points, I analyze the diverse narratives of these women as they flesh out particular dynamics of space and identity within broader structural contexts of colonialism, public health and poverty.     

Life Beyond Judgment: Communication. Response to Section III of The Ways of Judgment by Oliver O'Donovan

Abstract

This article is a response to Section III of Oliver O'Donovan's The Ways of Judgment, addressing his account of the Church's "higher sociality" as the proper context for all theological reflection on politics. In particular, it explores the importance of the theme of communication, affirming many of O'Donovan's central instincts in this area though questioning his emphasis on the role of the individual believing heart as the privileged site of ecclesial transformation of the world.     

Neither ‘New Melanesian History’ nor ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’: Recovering Emplaced Matrilineages in Southeast Solomon Islands

ABSTRACT For two decades, Melanesianists have sought to reconcile what Robert Foster (1995) termed the ‘New Melanesian History’ and the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’. The former describes historically oriented studies that critique representations of Melanesian custom as recent objectifications of strategically positioned discourses and practices. The latter describes culturally oriented, particularist studies that characterize Melanesian sociality as an undifferentiated plane of being without integral a priori units; on every scale, human agency must individuate persons and collectivities by means of ‘fraction’, ‘de‐conception’, and ‘decomposition’. In this article I present data from Solomon Islands that resist analysis in terms of an unqualified both/and synthesis of these orientations. Specifically, I argue that articulations of matrilineal connections to land among the Arosi of Makira are neither merely postcolonial reifications of custom nor historically conditioned ‘depluralizations’ from an always pre‐constituted social pleroma. Through historically situated case studies, I show how Arosi land disputes both reproduce and revalue matrilineally defined categories, each understood as the humanized continuation of an autonomous primordial essence. Recognition of the continuing importance of these categories among Arosi highlights what the New Melanesian Ethnography has obscured: that some Melanesians confront a historically transforming problem of how pre‐existent parts fit together to make up social totalities.     

唐朝下层士人社会交往特征及其心态

唐朝下层士人的社会交往具有鲜明的时代特色,他们以科举和入幕为社交中心,以上层权贵、名士及地方官为社交对象,展开觅举、游丐、游幕等社交活动,并在这些社交活动中表现出不同的心态。     

The Schillers of the suburbs – creativity and mediated sociality

Theories around the cultural geography of creativity have given new life, in recent years, to negative perceptions of the suburbs as ‘isolated’. These theories have emphasised the importance of ‘clusters’, ‘precincts’, ‘incubators’ and ‘hubs’, suggesting that even in the era of the Internet, creativity requires an immediacy of social interaction, which can only be found where there is social concentration. The paper brings these theories into question through a long historical perspective on the relation between creativity and ‘mediated sociality’. Drawing on the work of Elias, it suggests some surprising parallels between the position of German artists and intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and suburban creative practitioners today. The former were in many respects ‘isolated’, relatively dependent on mediated sociality, and yet they produced a major historical flowering of creative activity. The example prompts us to think more sympathetically and optimistically about the creative potential of contemporary suburbia.