Using the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate in dealing with the new questions that are asked by (...) post-human thought. Instead, we attempt to engage the work of Spinoza and Sloterdijk in rethinking the human as a strategic position or point of purchase amongst the shared materiality of present and future worlds. We offer the concepts of the materially affective and atmosphere in order to identify points of connection, drawing on moments in Into Eternity to work through these arguments in a tentative repositioning of the human as a site of concern. (shrink)

Marxists regard works of art as meaningful, and look for political meanings even when they are not addressing political subjects. But where does music’s meaning lie? The conventional view is that music is non-referential, capable only of supporting other artforms or of expressing emotions. Adorno rejects the idea of music as a language of emotions, and does not believe that music has universal grammatical and syntactical rules. Yet he claims that music has language characteristics which make it as political as (...) other artforms. What does he mean, and is he right? To answer those questions, we need to know how he understands language. This article examines how Adorno's view compares with the Marxist theory of language and consciousness developed by Valentin Voloshinov, and explores the extent to which approaching music from this direction might clarify a Marxist understanding of music and contribute to solving the thorny question of musical meaning. (shrink)

In Debord, Time and SpectacleTom Bunyard provides a detailed philosophical study of the theoretical work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Drawing on evidence from Debord’s books, films, letters and notes, Bunyard reconstructs the Hegelian and Marxian ideas that support Debord’s central concept of ‘spectacle’. This affords a reconsideration of Debord’s theoretical claims, and a reinterpretation of his broader work that foregrounds his concerns with history and lived time. By bringing Situationist theory into dialogue with recent reinterpretations of Marx, (...) this book also identifies problems in Debord’s critique of capitalism. It argues, however, that the conceptions of temporality and spectacle that support that critique amount to a philosophy of praxis that remains relevant today. (shrink)

In this article I read Elaine Scarry’s account of torture in her The Body in Pain alongside Adriana Cavarero’s account voice and its relationship to violence in her A più voci: Per una filosofia dell’espressione vocale and Orrorismo: Ovvero della violenza sull’inerme. This serves a dual purpose: first, to demonstrate that Scarry’s account of torture is implicitly committed to an Aristotelian distinction between phone and logos which mirrors Cavarero’s account of ‘The Devocalization of Logos’ ; and second, to probe the (...) limits of Cavarero’s notion of ‘horrorism’ by reading it against Scarry’s account of torture and some of Cavarero’s own examples from For More than One Voice. Unlike Cavarero, for whom torture is a form of horrorism because it effaces the uniqueness of the prisoner, I argue that Scarry’s account of torture demonstrates the gross reverence that the torturer pays to the prisoner’s uniqueness. In this way I argue that torture places the prisoner’s uniqueness into a suspended state of dissolution. (shrink)

This article is a close reading of Rasheed Araeen's 'Cruciform' works of the 1980s-90s, which brings to the surface Araeen's immanent critique of the colonial and imperialist underpinnings of the history of western Modernism.

Introduction This paper applies the thought of Jacques Rancière to the concept of democracy as it is traditionally understood in library studies literature. Methods The paper reviews a cross-section of instances of the link between democracy and the public library in library studies literature. It offers a close textual analysis of Michael Gorman's Our Enduring Values as typifying the link between the public library and democracy. It critically applies the theoretical account of democracy developed by Jacques Rancière to Gorman's account (...) in Our Enduring Values. Analysis Making use of the theory of Rancière, the paper argues that the link between the public library and democracy should instead be situated in the impropriety of the public library: the assumption of equality libraries make, and the consequent open possibility for the contestation of their function and values. Results The paper finds that the link between democracy and the public library is situated in libraries' instrumental value to democracy; libraries are typically seen as holding an educative function for democracy. Conclusion The paper concludes by arguing that focusing on the impropriety of public libraries is especially important in the context of their current neo-liberal restructuring. An instrumental link between democracy and the public library too easily falls prey to neo-liberal rationalisation. A link which focuses on the improper character of public libraries encourages a contestation over this restructuring. (shrink)

While the relationship between ethics and design is usually thought of in terms of the application of the former to the latter, it is not as if ethics is a settled body of theory that can authoritatively guide design practice. Depending which theories or ideas we refer to we receive different guidance as to what to do. Indeed, design may have as much to contribute to ethical theory as vice versa. This essay builds connections between design and ethics, looking to (...) the similarities of structure between wicked problems in design and those dilemmas that are of central concern in normative ethical theory. Understanding design and ethics in mutual terms, ethical questions in design need not be understood in terms of external limitations or trade offs between competing priorities. Moreover, the way designers cope with the ethical challenges presented by wicked problems may inform how we approach complex ethical challenges in other contexts, including some of those that arise within ethical discourse itself. (shrink)

I reference a popularly-held assumption that attachment relationships in the home and particularly, in most instances, between a mother and her child - are fundamental to the healthydevelopment of young children. Thus, when a mother returns to work following the birth of her baby, the decision-making process about choice of childcare is likely to be difficult and complex. This chapter is based on the findings of a life historical study which examined the policies, practices and relationships which underpinned and influenced (...) the decisions taken by six mothers to return to paid employment when their infants were under 12 months of age. The mothers’ need for their infants to develop close, secure, emotional attachments with other, key adults was an overwhelming concern. My focus is on the mothers’ perceptions of love. When mothers were able to distinguish the mutually-loving attachment between caregiver and their child as an intellectual encounter, complementary to their mother - child relationship, rather than seeking to undermine their own mother-child relationships, they were able effectively to give caregivers the permission they needed to love the children in their care. The study coined the term “professional love” and showed how the issue of love in day care is highly complex. In this chapter, I urge that a space is made for further debate so that “love” can be properly conceptualised, positively valued and appropriately taught with caregivers working in infant -toddler education and care. (shrink)

In the current risk-averse climate of the United Kingdom necessarily intimate relationships that early years educators develop with young children have become a matter for intense scrutiny. This chapter draws on a field-based study which investigated how early years educators in England engage intimately with young children to meet their needs and determine what ‘love’ looks like in early years settings. Emerging from a critical review of the attachment literature the study used an online survey, in-depth interviews and focus groups (...) to explore how notions of professional care and love are constructed within a contemporary early childhood discourse in England. The findings of the study suggest educators want to feel more confident about their professional decisions in relation to expressions of love, care and intimacy. Educators also wanted to inform their everyday intimate relationships with young children with a better understanding of attachment theory and its focus on attuned relationships. (shrink)

Framed as an extension of Noddings’ notion of the ‘ethic of care,’ the paper sets out an argument about ‘Professional Love’ as both a term to comprehend the reciprocal pedagogic relationship which develops in positive interactions between primary caregiver, child and parent and as a core normative component of early years educational discourse; the paper grounds this conceptualisation of Professional Love in attachment theory ; it then posits the dynamic of child-parent-practitioner love as a Triangle of Love which is essentially (...) complementary to the parent/child relationship as opposed to representing any risk or threat to parents’ relationships with their children. The paper examines the work of theorists of care who have been particularly influential in developing the notion of Professional Love, and it considers the work of interdisciplinary scholars whose challenges to notions of love and care help problematise and clarify Professional Love beyond romanticised or other contextually inappropriate forms of love. The paper is intended as a provocative and explorative piece of critical enquiry; it highlights the prevalent devaluation of care/love in policy making and posits a semi-operationalisable prospectus for cultivating Professional Love in early childhood settings. Consistent with the author’s editorial foreword, tensions between practitioner, child and parent, as well as internal encumbrances placed on practitioners to develop Professional Love in the absence of policymaker support, emerge as recurring themes. (shrink)

This essay investigate the notion of syncope as a ‘breaking of rhythm’ and as method in contemporary performance practice. Scenarios that facilitate ruptures, interruptions and syncopic experiences are proposed as small ‘catastrophes’ which evoke the mutable body and challenge the rational concepts of self. I am drawing on my own performance practice to theorise rupture as an excess that foregrounds embodiment. The paper takes Clément’s syncope as a starting point, and also draws on phenomenological understandings of the body, and Drew (...) Leder’s work in particular, whose reading of the phenomenological body is consistent with Clément’s critique of the Cartesian divide between body and mind, in that it accounts for the stronghold that this division has within Western cultures. I am arguing that rapture or rupture may be a response to sensing too much of the self. (shrink)

The chapter explores the connections between David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, in particular their respective novels Infinite Jest and End Zone, by analyzing the similar ways in which both are engaged with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Specifically, it uses Wittgenstein’s thought on how language use connects meaning and reality to compare the ‘Eschaton’ episode from Infinite Jest with the theme of games and nuclear war in End Zone.

Extension and intension are two ways of indicating the fundamental meaning of a concept. The extent of a concept, C, is the set of objects which correspond to C whereas the intent of C is the collection of attributes that characterise it. Thus, intension denotes the set of objects corresponding to C without naming them individually. Mathematicians switch comfortably between these perspectives but the majority of logical diagrams deal exclusively in extension. Euler diagrams indicate sets using curves to depict their (...) extent in a way that intuitively matches the relations between the sets. What happens when we use spatial diagrams to depict intension? What can we infer about the intension of a concept given its extension, and vice versa? We present the first steps towards addressing these questions by defining extensional and intensional Euler diagrams and translations between the two perspectives. We show that translation in either direction leads to a loss of information, yet preserves important semantic properties. To conclude, we explain how we expect further exploration of the relationship between the two perspectives could shed light on connections between diagrams, extension, intension, and well-matchedness. (shrink)

In this paper I speak directly to the subject matter of this conference: to its theme of flourishing, and to the subject areas of systems thinking and design that this conference series as a whole seeks to bring together. The conference theme of flourishing is a direct reference to ethics, and in particular the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. There has been a revival of interest in this in recent decades under the heading of virtue ethics. Aristotle defined the good as (...) that at which all things aim, and so in terms of goals and purpose. He described the goal of human life in terms eudemonia, which is usually translated as either human flourishing or the good life. There is a clear connection between this conception of ethics in terms of purpose and both design and systems. Design is an explicitly purposeful activity, which can be understood as the attempt to devise “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”. Purpose is of central concern for how we understand systems, most explicitly in cybernetics. The aim of this paper is to make explicit some of the deep interconnections between these three areas in terms of the theme of purpose, and to suggest areas of common concern where they might lend support to each other. In order to do this within the scope of this paper, I focus on a specific point of reference in each of the three areas: to Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Dalibor Vesely’s account of architecture, and to the debate around Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow’s proto-cybernetic paper. (shrink)

On the basis of a recent field-trip to Mexico, this paper advances the thesis of my 2009 Malcolm Lowry Centenary International Conference paper on ‘Souls and Shamans’ presented at UBC, Vancouver which considered the cultural, psychological, and spiritual links between Lowry’s cosmic, terrestrial, subterranean, and aquatic world-views. In assessing the interface between the material and spiritual domains perceived by both the Aztecs and the Oaxacan Zapotecs, it examines the subconscious dimensions of the Mexican Day of the Dead festival witnessed by (...) Malcolm Lowry in 1936. It investigates anthropological, cultural, and ethnographic influences, dating back to pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican rituals, reflected in Under the Volcano, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid, La Mordida, and The Forest Path to the Spring. In establishing Lowry’s preoccupation with seeking atonement with the spirits of the dead and his recognition of the need to repent for the debts of the past and for the sins of mankind, synergies are made with the cosmic, shamanic, and animist concepts of the universe, expressed by the divine consciousness of the Zapotec and Aztec civilizations. (shrink)

However hopeless we often feel, we are creatures of hope. This collection of short, accessible essays explores the ways in which hope is bound up with power in worlds that are composed through imagination, transformation and feeling. Hope is the most precious ingredient of power. However, the essays do not assume hope to be inherently good or emancipatory. Rather, they reflect on how hope can support and obstruct us in our efforts to make lives more liveable, or futures more just. (...) The essays draw on social research, philosophy, literature, music and film to show how hope might re-enchant writing and politics for a post-hopeful age. This is a book for those who want to remain hopeful but find it hard to see how. (shrink)

Despite the abundance of intertextual credits to Russian writers, film directors, and intellectuals in the publications of Malcolm Lowry, relatively little has appeared regarding their impact on his creative mind. This paper aims to rectify this shortfall by probing Lowry’s Russian dimension in the context of his cinematic and psychogeographic imagination, as revealed in, for example, Under the Volcano, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid, and his correspondence. The extent of his fascination for the inner, spiritual worlds (...) portrayed by Russian writers is surveyed in the light of his frequent mention of a range of prominent, ‘Golden Age’ authors, including Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lev Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov. Tormented by the interior turmoil of a divided self and by the alienating effects of an external, socio-economic, and political environment on the brink of the Second World War, his heroes are prone to mirror his strife to attain a higher level of intuitive consciousness. In view of Lowry’s tortuous, shamanic quest to exorcise the phantoms of the past, contemporary, international affairs afflicting humanity are perceived through the kaleidoscope of subconscious intelligence. Observing cinematic techniques reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage, the reader is thrust into an era of revolutions and civil wars, contemplating allusions to Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and even Hitler. Stimulated by ideas emanating from Russian writers and thinkers – including Peter D. Ouspensky and Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, Lowry is insightful of the inter-dependence of cultures and civilizations. Astute at combining East-West philosophies, he rejuvenates his subconscious, imaginative intuition in his spiritual pursuit of the truth, harmony, and co-existence of Eridanus in a belligerent world. (shrink)

This article examines the 'Teaching Excellence Framework' for UK universities through the lens of Jean Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality. I argue that the TEF is a hyperreal simulacrum, a sign which has no traceable genealogy to the practice of learning and teaching.

In this paper I put forward an argument concerning the place and significance of painting in Merleau-Ponty’s famous last essay Eye and Mind. I argue that for Merleau-Ponty modern philosophy comes about through an engagement with vision – in an attempt to think its peculiar virtue of “action at a distance” – but ends up betraying this dynamic, by offering us an account of vision that is grounded in the spontaneity of the mind. In this sense I claim that Eye (...) and Mind is genealogical in intent, and that Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of painting is central to accomplishing this task. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to present a critical overview of the interrelations, echoes and distinctions that can be identified between critical theory and cultural studies. Concentrating primarily upon its British and American instantiations, the chapter outlines the emergence and development of cultural studies, and places this tradition in relation to Frankfurt School critical theory. Having noted some initial differences and similarities between the two bodies of thought, particularly vis à vis their differing approaches to mass culture, the chapter (...) then draws on Horkheimer’s definitions of ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ theory, and considers how they might pertain to cultural studies’ various contributions, contemporary relevance, and current forms. (shrink)

Guy Debord’s famous concept of ‘spectacle’ is perhaps one of the most widely misunderstood and misappropriated ideas in contemporary theory. This essay will respond to that problem by offering a clarification of the concept, advanced via a discussion of the philosophical positions that inform Debord’s often dense formulations. Through doing so, the essay will show that the conceptual framework that the theory rests upon possesses far greater sophistication and complexity than is often acknowledged, insofar as it contains the following, still (...) largely ignored components: 1) a philosophical anthropology; 2) a speculative philosophy of history; 3) the rudiments of an epistemology; 4) an implicit ethics; 5) a dialectical conception of strategy. Through outlining those elements the essay will advance the following, broader argument. Debord’s work is best understood as a 20th Century re-articulation of the classical 19th Century concern with realising philosophy in lived praxis; after all, the heralded supersession of spectacular representation, in all of its various formulations within his thought, essentially revolves around the need to begin consciously making history, as opposed to merely admiring and interpreting its results. Therefore, if his theory is indeed to be viewed as having become ‘more relevant than ever’, as many of his more enthusiastic commentators would have it, then that key orientation towards praxis should form part of its purported relevance. The essay will show that such a claim to pertinence can indeed be made: that whilst the theory may be of limited value as an account of modern capitalism, the model of praxis that one can draw from its conceptual mechanics – a model that amounts, we will argue, to a highly politicised ethics – may, nonetheless, be of contemporary interest. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to reconstruct the philosophical ideas that support Guy Debord's theory of 'spectacle'. By drawing on a wide range of textual evidence from across Debord's oeuvre, and by reading that evidence in the light of the philosophical and theoretical texts that informed his claims, the book develops a holistic interpretation of his work, and frames the latter as being primarily concerned with time, history and historical agency. Through doing so, the book advances an interpretation of Debord's (...) Hegelian Marxism, and contends that the latter can be seen to afford a philosophy of praxis that merits further scholarly attention. The book also offers a detailed critique of Debord's engagements with Marx's mature value theory, and proposes that the conception of historical time that supports Debord's work may in fact be of greater interest than the more overtlly Marxian elements of his thought. (shrink)

This text address critically addresses claims concerning the contemporary relevance of the theoretical work produced by Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Through highlighting some of the key aspects of Debord's views on temporality, and by connecting those views to his concerns with strategic thought, the essay argues that Debord's theoretical work is supported by a philosophy of praxis that implies the need for continual innovation and intervention. The essay contends that those underlying ideas are inherently opposed to any attempt (...) to simply transpose Debord and the S.I.'s theories onto our present moment, and that they instead imply the generation of new theoretical positions. (shrink)

In designing architecture we put forward ways in which to live, enabling particularpatterns of living while limiting other possibilities. In this sense architecture has anormative function and can be compared to the way that ethical theories and moralcodes purport to guide us on how to live. Given this, I suggest that ethical reflectionabout how we design—and in particular about how we constitute the relationshipbetween designers and those they design for—can be used to help formulate ethicalquestions regarding how we speak and (...) reason about ethics itself. Recognising Heinz vonFoerster’s criticisms of moral codes as an instance of this, I use the example of designingarchitecture to challenge and extend von Foerster’s position, suggesting the recursiveapplication of ethics to its own discourse. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to begin an experiment with th e ethics of security. In asking whether it is possible to have a ‘ good ’ security, we encounter an ethical issue in two senses: first, in considering the possibility of goodness, whatever that may be, in the techniques of security and, second, a way of cond ucting the self in the face of the indubitable and apparently increasing power of security apparatuses. We are more interested in the (...) second aspect because we want to look more closely at the ethical side of the power relations of security. (shrink)

This paper will analyse the power relations involved in social movement research, exploring alternative epistemological practices that resist and subvert academic conventions in order to create new modes of knowing. I will critique the production of a knowledge that aims at liberation and emancipation by conducting research 'about' or 'on behalf of' social movements, and I will show how this approach might lead to their very subjection. It will be argued that, in order to avoid the reproduction of power relations (...) they seek to resist, research practices need to go beyond dialectical modes of knowing, departing from assumptions of the subject/object of knowledge, of objective/subjective research and from the hierarchy between theory and praxis. A precedent is found in the research approaches of post-colonial, activist, and queer studies that seek to experiment different modes of knowing, based not on observation and participation, but on learning from the experience of resistance in social movements: in this way resistant practices become an epistemological perspective rather than an object of study, and research can become a tool of resistance. (shrink)

This paper presents methodological reflections on the practice of ethnographic research. In particular it explains the challenges and potentialities of 'double observation', where two ethnographers of different backgrounds, genders and place of origin conduct research on the same issue.

The purpose of this paper is to build on my previously published critique of phenomenological-humanist representational practices in mental health nursing qualitative inquiry. I will unpack and trouble these practices from an explicitly posthumanist philosophical position on the basis of seminal posthumanist texts and my own single- and co-authored work. My argument will be that researchers in mental health nurse qualitative inquiry, who display a phenomenological-humanist narrative bent in their writing, continually endorse the validity of the institutional psychiatric assumptions, practices (...) and ways of representing human psychological distress. These are all explicitly rejected in more critical forms of qualitative inquiry in mental health, including in my own work. I will conclude that the use of phenomenological-humanist representational practices, in mental health nursing and by implication and extension other healthcare disciplines, is un-ethical, un-empathic and morally compromised. This is because such practices present accounts of the worlds of mental health service users, survivors and carers that lack necessary and sufficient levels of criticality and context. (shrink)

While all poetry partakes to some degree in both visual and aural dimensions, Eliot’s Four Quartets examines this relationship in a particularly deliberate way, continuing a philosophical conversation between Schopenhauer, Wagner and Symons. This dialogue is connected with a Romantic concern with painting and music, reflecting contemporary ideas of the beautiful and the sublime and the growing association of the sublime with music. Despite extensive consideration of the role of music in Four Quartets, Eliot's poem has not been read in (...) the light of this nineteenth-century inquiry into the relation between music and the arts. In particular, the Schopenhauerian influence on Eliot’s aesthetics explains the association in his poem between music and a metaphysical reality that lies beyond appearance. (shrink)

This article examines recent claims that conceptual art was the first truly global art form, by analysing its material circuits of production, exhibition and distribution. Undertaking a close analysis of artistic developments in various regions of the world in the postwar era, it seeks to show that existing narratives—either that conceptual art was specific to US and Europe, or that it was a 'spontaneously global' phenomenon—are both reductive. Instead, conceptual art is redefined as the crystallisation and institutionalisation of an already (...) relatively generalised Modernism, yet one whose material conditions must be contextualised within the economic and socio-political 'internationalism' of the end of the post-war era. Despite this, the 'global imaginary' of conceptualism can obscure these material specificities. (shrink)

This updated paper - translated into Mexican Spanish - analyses Malcolm Lowry, La Mordida in terms of its provision of redemption and atonement for the debts of the past. It also traces various English, European, and American literary influences on Lowry's novel, as well as that of Walter Benjamin.

If, as Derrida supposes, each era creates its own ghosts, we live in extraordinarily creative times. Our rational, technological world is populated with more phantoms than ever. We are paralysed in a frozen now, smothered by the massed murmurings of the past, stalked by the angry revenants of forgotten radicals and the awful twins of a future, that is at once inconceivable and yetinevitable. In this, final, session of the current Speculative Tate seminars, we take a spectral turn to explore (...) haunting, the figure of the ghost and hyperstitional forms of temporality. The ghost, rather than supernatural relic of a primitive age, is an increasingly prevalent aspect of the modern world. From avatars and chatbots to bump maps and page curls, the digital world is populated with a host of skeuomorphic phantoms clothed in shroud sails of the dust scratches and imperfections of lost surface patination and the process noise of unfulfilled modernism. Whether these persistent incursions are understood in religious, ontological, scientific or epistemological terms, they taunt us by flouting our schemata. Life has become an immense accumulation of ghosts. Everything that was once directly lived is now haunted byitself. (shrink)

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” is T. S. Eliot's expression of his poetics of impersonality, a spirited rejection of romantic subjectivism and emotionalism. But could Eliot's modernist essay be derived in part from what he presents as the unremittingly “emotional” philosophy of Schopenhauer? Section 51 of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation I presents a metaphor resoundingly familiar to modern readers: the chemistry of verse-writing. A closer examination of “Tradition” and “Hamlet and his Problems” betrays Schopenhauer's unacknowledged role in (...) Eliot's dictums of impersonal emotion and the “objective correlative.”. (shrink)

The influence of Beethoven on Eliot's Four Quartets is mediated by Wagner and Schopenhauer and relates fundamentally to the philosopher's understanding of instrumental music as expressing a universalised and abstract emotion. Schopenhauer's aesthetics are intimately connected with Wagner's treatment of the idea of absolute music – a discussion that begins in his early prose writings and culminates in his essay 'Beethoven'. At the origin of Wagner's thinking about absolute music is a striking metaphor: that of Beethoven as Columbus, exploring the (...) sea of absolute music. This metaphor is found at the heart of Four Quartets, powerfully connecting the poem with Beethoven's music, and with a Schopenhauerian aesthetics that understands this music as inhabiting a realm beyond human affect and desire. (shrink)

This article examines Cavell's critique of Rawlsian citizenship, namely that Rawls’ desire to seek a democratic way of life in which citizens can reassure themselves that their behaviour has been ‘above reproach’ reflects a distorted and hence inadequate conception of the demands of the moral life. Although the aim to be ‘above reproach’ was only expressed in Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’, I extend Stephen Mulhall's work to show that Cavell's concern holds not only for Rawls’ ‘Political Liberalism’ but also (...) ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’. Having shown that Rawls did not attend to this concern, I then demonstrate the importance of Cavell's argument in the practical context of responding to resentment in democracy. I examine the challenging case of supporters of the BNP's extremist politics, arguing that Rawlsian public reason potentially restricts justice in a way avoided by Cavell's, albeit more demanding, appeal to conversation. (shrink)

This paper proceeds from MacIntyre’s moral philosophical perspective of individual human lives constituting unified narratives, in the context of co-evolving framing and guiding master narratives. This perspective accords specific episodes in people’s lives the status of significant component parts of their developing, storied and enacted individual histories. From this philosophical base, autoethnographic principles will be employed in providing accounts from my own professional life narrative strand as a mental health nurse educator that speak to the issue of institutionalised dishonesty and (...) deception in mental health nursing education and practice. On the basis of my pre-existing experience of publishing in nursing journals and scholarly identity, my argument will proceed from contesting the idea of an imagined stable foundational professional ethos underpinning mental health nursing practice, against which to judge professional dishonesty and deception. Using illustrative, relatively recent short stories, drawn from my lived-experience base as a mental health nurse educator, I will argue throughout at implicit and explicit levels that dishonesty and deception are always an inevitable part of the lives of mental health nurses and their educators. This is because of a constant gap between the nursing rhetoric and ideology that both groups espouse and how they actually behave on a day-to-day, mundane level, in and out of work and classroom practice. This gap shows up the public front of what mental health nursing is supposed to be about as dishonest and deceitful window dressing. I will assert that the use of more first person, lived experience accounts in mental health nursing teaching and publication are important educational resources in reducing this gap at professional practice, academic and informal levels. Such storied accounts may also be useful in moving nurses and their educators towards more morally and ethically sensitive and reflexively-attuned positions around what they talk and write into existence. (shrink)

This article traces the emergence of the chord symbol in twentieth century musical notation, and discusses its significance both for musical aesthetics and for the development of new musical practices. Using Adorno as a reference point, Abel argues that despite being a product of a reified and conservative conception of musical language, the abstraction involved in the chord symbol has provided the basis for radically new forms of music-making which indicate ways in which the individualistic and hierarchical priorities of the (...) Western art-music tradition might be overcome. (shrink)

The relationship between ethics and design is most usually thought of in terms of applied ethics. There are, however, difficulties with this: for instance, conventional ethical stances such as deontology or consequentialism depend on procedures that are inapplicable in the sorts of complex situations which designers commonly face. In any case, it is not as if ethics is a settled body of theory that can act as an authority with which to guide practice. Depending on which theories we refer to, (...) we receive different, and often directly conflicting, guidance. Paralleling the idea that design has its own epistemological foundations, rather than needing to import ideas from science, I propose an alternative way to think of the relation between design and ethics, looking to the ethical questioning implicit in what designers do, and the similarities between those situations which they encounter as a matter of course and those questions with which normative ethics is both most concerned and confused. I suggest that we might reason about ethical questions in design in design’s own terms and, also, that rather than apply ethical theory to design we explore what design can contribute to ethics, inverting the more usual hierarchy. (shrink)

One of the major themes of Ranulph Glanville's work has been the intimate connection between cybernetics and design, the two principle disciplines that he has worked in and contributed to. In this paper I review the significance of the analogy that he proposes between the two and its connection to his concerns with, firstly, the cybernetic practice of cybernetics and, secondly, the relation between cybernetics and ethics. I propose that by putting the cybernetics-design analogy together with the idea that in (...) cybernetics epistemological and ethical questions coincide, we can understand design as not just a form of cybernetic practice but also one in which ethical questions are implicit. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore ways in which cybernetics leads to distinctive ways of acting. Design/methodology/approach – Paralleling von Foerster’s argument that it makes more sense to speak of the cybernetics of epistemology than the epistemology of cybernetics, the author argues that cybernetics is not one form of practice amongst others but an account of what it is to practice, understood as where we relate how we act to how we understand so that each informs (...) the other. The author explores the potential difference that adopting this understanding of practice makes in practice and show its significance by establishing connections between the eponymous cybernetic example of steering and questions regarding teleology in ethics. Findings – While all practice is cybernetic in the sense of involving a relationship between understanding and acting, the relationship between cybernetics and practice is not a neutral one. Understanding practice in cybernetic terms enables us to pursue goods internal to the practice, which, in turn, makes a difference to how we act. Practical implications – The author argues that how we understand the relation between our understanding and our acting leads to significant differences of action in practice. Originality/value – The author argues that cybernetics has non-neutral, and ethically significant, consequences in practice that are beyond the application of cybernetics to practice or the advantages of adopting explicitly conversational ways of acting. (shrink)

The design of academic conferences, in which settings ideas are shared and created, is, we suggest, of more than passing interest in constructivism, where epistemology is considered in terms of knowing rather than knowledge. The passivity and predominantly one-way structure of the typical paper presentation format of academic conferences has a number of serious limitations from a constructivist perspective, which are both practical and epistemological. While alternative formats abound, there is nevertheless increasing pressure reinforcing this format due to delegates’ funding (...) typically being linked to reading a paper. In this special issue, authors reflect on conferences that they have organized and participated in that have used alternative formats, such as conversational structures or other constructivist inspired approaches, in whole or in part. While issues raised are of relevance across disciplinary boundaries, contributions focus on two fields, that of cybernetics / systems, and that of design, in which the organisation of conferences is of particular concern: the environment of a design conference is something that we design; while a conference regarding systems or cybernetics is itself an instance of the sorts of process with which these disciplines are concerned. As well as contributing to conference design, discussions in this issue also reflect back on constructivism itself. Conference organization is an area in which constructivism may itself be understood in terms of practice rather than theory. This in turn helps connect ideas in constructivism with pragmatic fields, such as knowledge management, and recent discussions in this journal regarding second-order science. (shrink)

Geographies and the territories that opportunistically spring up to inhabit them, populate their landscapes and exploit their riches are merely superficial manifestations of more substratal tendencies of movement. What appears stable and static is, in fact, volatile, mutable, unstable. Coastal erosion, whether attributed to climate change or less anthropocene causes, can be read as a hyper-accelerated manifestation of geological time on a human scale. The processes of geological change, measured out in millennia and thus ordinarily imperceptible to the evanescent oscillations (...) of human mortality, and the imaginations seated therein are dromologically condensed to a scale measurable in months or years. This sudden access or awareness, or maybe confluence between human and geological time, gives us a glimpse into the scales of the universe normally incomprehensible, and in doing so a glimpse too of our fragility and ephemerality. This article in itself ‘a quantity of faded images accompanied by only partial notations’ explores the way in which the tools and apparatuses we use to interrogate the detritus of both past and the present are unstable, mutable and often inadequate. (shrink)

This paper advances the findings of Alexander Dolinin and Svetlana Evdokhimova relating to A. S. Pushkin’s view of history by advocating the significance of a combination of irrational with rational elements in charting history. In both Boris Godunov and The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin provides visions of history in which the forces of chance and certainty are key factors in determining the course of Russia’s rise to great power status. Influenced by Shakespearian tragedy and by N. M. Karamzin’s History of the (...) Russian State, in Boris Godunov he develops a concept of history as a dynamic, non-linear process, without a simple repetition of events. Using historicisms to link the past with the present, he recognizes the importance of narrative and the chronicler, on the one hand, and chance occurrences and historical coincidence, on the other. In The Bronze Horseman dialogue with the eighteenth-century odic tradition contributes to dual interpretations of the 1703 founding of St Petersburg. Socio-political and moral themes are reflected in the linguistic contrast of church slavonicisms with colloquial terminology. Arising from the clash between the determinedly hard elements of St Petersburg and the more anarchic, soft ones of the River Neva, the Bronze Horseman may also be perceived as, in part, a natural emblem as it bears traits of the tree of life, bringing to mind the myth of Perun, the Slavic storm-god. For Pushkin, neither the guilt-ridden Boris Godunov, nor the visionary Peter the Great, a figure of Napoleonic volition, is able to impose the certainty of reason on chance occurrences without releasing a natural backlash arising from Russia’s mythical past and the haphazard pattern inherent in historical unpredictability. (shrink)

This article explores the intersection of literature and philosophy in order to present a reworked textual ethics for the twenty-first century. Tracing over the last thirty years a remarkable philosophical engagement with the ethical imperative of literary criticism, the “turn to ethics” it is argued has largely settled into two competing critical camps: a neo-Aristotelian, narrative ethics on the one hand, and an other-oriented, deconstructive ethics on the other. But by bringing into productive tension for the first time the major (...) works of two of the most significant ethical philosophers, Martha Nussbaum and Emmanuel Levinas, this study reveals in their mutual engagement of the textual encounter “language as a way of touching a human being,” and thereby proposes an ethical criticism open to new forms of community and social possibility. (shrink)

What is the relationship between music and time? How does musical rhythm express our social experience of time? In Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, Mark Abel explains the rise to prominence in Western music of a new way of organising rhythm - groove. He provides a historical account of its emergence around the turn of the twentieth century, and analyses the musical components which make it work. Drawing on materialist interpretations of art and culture, Mark Abel engages with aesthetic (...) arguments, challenging in particular Adorno's critique of popular music. He concludes that groove does not simply reflect the temporality of contemporary society, but, by incorporating abstract time into its very structure, is capable of effecting a critique of it"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Alexander Pushkin deals with crucial turning-points in the rise of Russia in Boris Godunov and The Bronze Horseman . In the former he is influenced not only by Shakespearian drama, but also by N. M. Karamzin’s History of the Russian State . Without simply recreating Russia’s past, he challenges the ideas of the Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement, identifying rational and irrational forces at work and linking the present with the past through the use of historicisms. In The Bronze Horseman (...) he combines two different interpretations of the founding of St Petersburg in 1703, launching a dialogue with the eighteenth-century odic tradition from which he liberates modern Russian literature. As in Boris Godunov, a measured blend of church slavonicisms and colloquialisms provides a parallel linguistic contrast, mirroring socio-political and moral themes. Dynamic conflict between the rational and the irrational is considered inherent in historical events and the forces of nature. In The Bronze Horseman it is symbolized by a clash between the hard elements of St Petersburg and the soft ones of the River Neva. The guilt-ridden Boris Godunov and the visionary Peter the Great, a man of Napoleonic volition, are unable to impose reason on a world of disorder without unleashing the unpredictable, irrational, elemental forces which they seek to quell. In the ensuing struggle for survival either one loses one’s way and goes mad, like Evgeny in The Bronze Horseman, or one conquers, like the paranoid Boris Godunov, the imaginative Peter the Great, and, indeed, the resourceful Pushkin himself. (shrink)

This study of shamanic and psychogeographic influences on the work of Malcolm Lowry considers psychological, anthropological, and ethnographic forces - cultural, social, and linguistic. It elucidates Lowry’s complex mind-set and examines East-West cross-cultural and historical factors. The impact of Sir James Frazer’s ethnographic research and of the actions of Hernán Cortés on Aztec civilization is discussed, as reflected in the novel, Under the Volcano , set in Mexico on the Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead. The way in (...) which Zapotec and Aztec anthropological, shamanic, cabbalistic, and cosmic elements interface with a psychological reading of Lowry’s works is analyzed. Russian nineteenth-century literary and twentieth-century filmic and historical sources are also investigated, as are European avant-garde and surrealist influences. (shrink)

The interplay between emotion and learning is a continuing source of debate and inquiry in organization studies, attracting an increasing number of important contributions. However, a detailed understanding of the interaction between emotion and learning remains elusive. In an effort to extend the existing debate, this article offers an alternative approach that draws on the tradition of pragmatist philosophy, where emotion and learning can both be defined as dynamic processes that emerge in the relational context of social transactions. The mutually (...) constructing interplay between these two processes is then illustrated with an example of a collaborative project in which anxiety, love, guilt, and hostility are all entangled in the learning process. (shrink)

This paper evaluates the nature and significance of Nigel Foxcroft’s current research into the worldview of the late Modernist writer, Malcolm Lowry by considering the latter’s search for new ways of understanding the world, based on his ideas relating to the soul. In considering various influences on his life and work, it highlights the theme of shamanism and the relationship between Lowry’s creative mind and the cosmological concepts held by the indigenous peoples of Mexico, such as the Aztec and Zapotec (...) civilizations. The different planes of reality in Under the Volcano are considered, as are Surrealist influences emanating from Edward Burra and Diego Rivera. Lowry’s interest in Russian literature - for example in Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Lev Tolstoy is discussed. Gogol’s novel, Dead Souls is deemed as being particularly influential in its interface with the Day of the Dead Festival in Mexico. (shrink)

This article provides a multi-disciplinary framework for an ongoing inter-disciplinary research project analyzing the influence of social, linguistic, ethnographic, and shamanic forces on human psychology in Malcolm Lowry’s works, as evidenced by his ‘landscape of memory’ publications, such as Under the Volcano and Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid. It investigates his perception of psychogeographic impact on the Aztec mind in the context of the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico and his fascination with different cultures (...) and civilizations. It also scrutinizes his application of psychoanalysis and the Cabbala in his quest for spiritual and celestial harmony, considering ways in which the humanities, psychology, and anthropology may be bridged. An in-depth analysis of the cosmic significance of the symbol of Eridanus – as exemplified in The Forest Path to the Spring - is deemed crucial for a real appreciation of Lowry’s attempts at reconciliation of the achievements of the Enlightenment and those of European Romanticism and Modernism. (shrink)

Over the last few years several essays have been published which include a comparison of Deren’s concept of vertical and horizontal film form with Deleuze’s theory of movement-image and time-image; for example, Annette Michelson’s and Renata Jackson’s essays in Maya Deren and The American Avant-garde and Erin Brannigan’s discussion of Deren’s work in Dancefilm . Given the tentative nature of their comparison this essay will undertake a more systematic review of the relation between film and language which underpins Deren’s and (...) Deleuze’s terminologies and further investigate both similarities and differences between them. The intention is to further clarify Deren’s legacy within experimental film and interdisciplinary discourses. (shrink)

David Hinton and Sue Davis go back to the beginnings of cinema in All This Can Happen. A fascination with movement, the desire to understand movement - and stillness - was also at the heart of the work of photographers like Etienne-Jules Marey and Muybridge and filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and is central to All This Can Happen. This paper discusses how the still, which is held on screen, replayed and multiplied, and then released, invite the viewer to watch, to (...) recognize, to marvel, to compare, to be struck, and perhaps to notice a little more about this complexity that is movement. The paper draws on an essay by Maurice Blanchot entitled Two Visions of the Imaginary , in which he reflect on the nature of images. (shrink)

This paper explores a potential relation between architecture and ethics intrinsic to design processes when understood in terms of dialogue or conversation. We draw on separate but related research interests: one focused on the design process, especially the significance of drawing, and the other on the ethics of designing for the public realm, with reference to Bakhtinian dialogism. Our investigation concentrates on two aspects of the design process both of which can be thought of in terms of conversation – first, (...) the relation between architect and Other, and second, the act of drawing. Through this, we support the idea that in design the ethical and the aesthetic cannot be meaningfully separated from one another. Instead, their relation must be understood as a dialogue in and of itself, as well as part of the dialogue between all participants in the design process. (shrink)

A review of Theories of Memory: A Reader, edited by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead.

This paper investigates various psychological, psychogeographical, and anthropological forces - cultural, social, and linguistic – bearing on Malcolm Lowry’s works. With its focus on the influence of nineteenth-century Russian literature upon his creative mind, it examines East-West cross-cultural and historical factors and their implications for the ‘ascent of man’. It explores the impact of Sir James Frazer’s ethnographic research and of Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, upon Aztec civilization, as reflected in Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano, set in Mexico on (...) the Day of the Dead. Previous research is also advanced by pursuing Lowry’s spiritual odyssey in his mystic quest for truth and salvation. Consideration is given to connections established with his natural, supernatural, and celestial roots. His application of psychoanalysis is probed, as are synergies with social, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, cabbalistic astrology, and even voodoo in Dark as the Grave wherein my Friend is Laid. Lowry’s paradisean symbol of the soul of Eridanus in The Forest Path to the Spring is considered in the context of his attempt to harmonize the rational, scientific, and materialistic intellect of the Enlightenment with the aspirations of European Romanticism. An analysis of his cosmic consciousness and his preoccupation with the Cabbala reveals links between Modernism and shamanism. Psychotherapeutic and shamanic healing is seen as a way of enabling regeneration via ethnographic and aesthetic methods. Developing the inclinations of Ted R. Spivey, it may be deduced that, for Malcolm Lowry, true salvation is attainable only in a fusion of the two worlds and the two minds. (shrink)

Education has always occupied a contradictory position in society, expected to ensure compliance and continuity and yet to encourage critique and renewal. Since the early 1980s, however, successive UK governments have directly mobilised education, and higher education in particular, as an ideological tool in the task of embedding neo-liberalism as ‘common sense’. Modularisation has been in the vanguard, first in the universities, more latterly at secondary level. The effect has been disastrous: here as elsewhere, choice has become depressingly fetishised; knowledge, (...) and with it learning, have been fragmented and commodified; academics, like others, have been de-professionalised; and students, like the rest of us, have been transformed into clients or customers. The details of the history and impact of all this are too close to readers’ experience to require elaboration here: its significance, however, has been too little considered. In particular, the question of how we allowed it to come about is one worth asking – if only so that we can learn from our complicity. Since, however, that judgement depends on the negative view of modularisation just outlined, I start by giving a summary argument for such an evaluation (section 1). I then offer some remarks about the specifically ideological character of modularisation (section 2) as an introduction to some initial reflections on our complicity in this aspect of the neo-liberals’ efforts to make universities safe in their attempt to ensure that the future belongs to them (section 3). Finally I offer a brief suggestion about what we might yet do to overcome the disaster (section 4). (shrink)

This timely and passionate book is the first to address itself to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s controversial arguments for the limited use of interrogational torture and its legalisation. Argues that the respectability Dershowitz's arguments confer on the view that torture is a legitimate weapon in the war on terror needs urgently to be countered Takes on the advocates of torture on their own utilitarian grounds Timely and passionately written, in an accessible, jargon-free style Forms part of the provocative and (...) timely _Blackwell Public Philosophy_ series. (shrink)

In this essay I evaluate Uwe Steinhoff’s arguments for “The Moral Equality of Modern Combatants and the Myth of Justified War.” I introduce, and briefly explore, several ways of critiquing Steinhoff’s claim that combatants fighting on two sides of a war have an equal liberty-right to kill each other even if one side is fighting a justified war and the other is not. Moreover, I contend that Steinhoff’s thesis about the myth of justified war, despite being too strong, does not (...) suffer from a lack of general plausibility. The notion of “just” warfare is fragile for moral as well as epistemic reasons, and this fragility may not have found sufficient recognition and expression in contemporary moral thinking about war. While Steinhoff’s intricate moral architecture may not be aesthetically pleasing, it seems better suited to account for the fragility of justified warfare than moral accounts which draw strictly binary distinctions between just and unjust warfare. (shrink)

In tracing the evolution of the cosmic consciousness of Malcolm Lowry , a prominently significant English Modernist novelist and poet, this paper provides a multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural, intercontinental framework for analysing the influence of cultures and civilizations - both east and west – upon national identity, as expressed through literature. In its investigation of the material and spiritual domains of the Aztecs and Oaxacan Zapotecs, it considers anthropological, cultural, and ethnographic influences associated with pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican rituals. Hence, it scrutinizes the psychogeographic (...) ecosphere and subconscious dimensions of the Mexican Day of the Dead Hispanic festival observed by Lowry in Cuernavaca in 1936. It also evaluates his dedication to a quest for atonement with the spirits of the dead in Under the Volcano , Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid , La Mordida , and The Forest Path to the Spring . In recognition of Lowry’s need to repent for the debts of the past and for the alienating sins of mankind, synergies are made with the animist, cosmic, and shamanic concepts of the universe reflected in the celestial visions of the Aztec and Zapotec civilizations. In pursuit of Lowry’s search for universal harmony from Russia to Mexico, and on to Canada, cosmopolitan connections are established between the rhythms of the universe reflected in Aztec and Zapotec world-views, the significance of the Pleiades star cluster, the intergalactic symbol of Eridanus, and the philosophical concepts of Taoism. (shrink)

While modernism and its avant-garde are often excluded from studies of environmental or ecological concerns, associated mostly with modern technologies, urban life and expanding media, this essay in contrast proposes that the arc that culminates in postmodern ecopoetics extends backwards to WWI-era Dada ecology. Using as a case study the body poetics of German-born New York Dada poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, this study advances a theory of Dada ecopoetics, exploring a number of crucial themes such as a radical dismantling of (...) nature/city boundaries; a desublimated trash aesthetic; a multi-sensorial immersive perspective; an anti-pastoral aesthetic; and ultimately, a radical ecopoetic liminality. (shrink)

J. M. Coetzee’s Foe has been heralded as a record of the trajectory of the English novel and as a postcolonial retelling of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe . It is also a testament both to the power and, ironically, to the latent limitations of language - language as an expression of truth and as the antithesis of silence. With the sleight-of-hand of a magician, the wordsmith is seen as being divinely inspired. Logocentrism is considered as a challenge to phonocentrism. However, (...) Friday’s truth is witnessed through non-verbal communication via the medium of the performing arts, in its variety of forms. In ascertaining his true identity, the reader is taken on a journey through the pain of the untold history of slavery and subjugation in the hope of reaching a post-colonial utopia. The divine dimensions associated with Friday - ensnared in a mesh of words - are revealed in the magic of his respectful, Sangha-, or Buddhist–like rituals. Acting as a subaltern, he resorts to mimicry to express defiance of the Other as a muted form of protest. Highly receptive to the dynamic, liberating influence of music and dance, Friday spins - in his dervish-like way - not a tale, but an unnamed jig akin to the sixteenth-century, African Capoeira; to the cathartic, Trinidadian Calypso; and to the venerating, Buddhist Circumbulation. Indeed, it is Friday’s non-verbal communicative abilities which empower him to speak his mind – not through words, but through “the slow stream” of his uninterrupted, syllabic, aquatic messages. (shrink)

This paper provides an intercontinental, cross-cultural, multi-disciplinary framework for an analysis of the influence of cultures and civilizations - both east and west – upon literature and national identity. It investigates the evolution of the cosmic consciousness of the English Modernist novelist and poet, Malcolm Lowry by scrutinizing the psychogeographic and subconscious dimensions of the Mexican Day of the Dead Hispanic festival which he observed in Cuernavaca in 1936. In its analysis of the material and spiritual domains of both the (...) Aztecs and the Oaxacan Zapotecs, it considers anthropological, cultural, and ethnographic influences associated with pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican rituals. In doing so, it determines Lowry’s dedication to his quest for atonement with the spirits of the dead in works, such as Under the Volcano , Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid , La Mordida , and The Forest Path to the Spring . In recognition of his need to repent for the debts of the past and for the alienating sins of mankind, synergies are made with cosmic, shamanic, and animist concepts of the universe, as reflected in the celestial visions of the Aztec and Zapotec civilizations. In pursuit of Lowry’s search for universal harmony, cosmopolitan connections are established between the rhythms of the universe reflected in Aztec and Zapotec world-views, the significance of the Pleiades star cluster, the intergalactic symbol of Eridanus, and the philosophical concepts of Taoism. (shrink)

In recent years, austerity-related discourses have become a popular means of imagining and promoting more sustainable living. This article situates the re-emergence of the slogan ‘dig for victory’ in the wider discursive formation of ‘anti-consumerism’, and explores the relationship between the ‘defetishizing’ qualities of commodity histories and the constitution of ethico-political consuming subjects. Following Laclau’s notion that a conversion of subjectivity results from persuasion, I suggest that the persuasiveness of ‘dig for victory’ lies in its insistence upon historical solutions to (...) today’s problems. The discourse seems to consolidate the dominant-hegemonic ‘myth of the home front’, yet ‘dig for victory’ also appears to have the capacity to render certain radical ideas, such as operating outside of the capitalist commodity system, unthreatening and even appealing. I explain why this case study points to an urgent need to rethink the historical as a resource for the constitution of radical collective projects and agents. (shrink)

In reinterpreting his vision of the world, this paper investigates international influences – especially Russian literary sources mentioned in his letters – on the multicultural, cosmic mindset of the English Modernist novelist, Malcolm Lowry . It assesses the psychological, psychogeographic and ethnographic forces at work in his approach to Jacob Bronowski’s ensuing Ascent of Man. In doing so, it analyses how Aztec and Zapotec anthropological, shamanic, and cabbalistic factors impact upon a psychological reading of Under the Volcano and Dark as (...) the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid , and how the soul of Eridanus both inspires and lies at the heart of The Forest Path to the Spring . It concludes that, for Lowry, the true salvation of mankind is attainable only in the fusion of the two worlds and the two minds. (shrink)

During the 2007 OSVD conference at Findhorn, Scotland a working group formulated a manifesto on screendance with the proposition that “through an accretion of images of bodies in motion, a larger truth may unfold’. Written a year later this paper revisits the manifesto and discusses its propositions in the light of André Lepecki’s recent publication Exhausting Dance. In accordance with Lepecki the paper draws on Sloterdijk’s notion of a kinetic excess of modernity and argues that current screendance practice colludes with (...) a modernist agenda in its production of ongoing spectacles of movement. Rather than unfolding any truths these ongoing flows of bodies in motion perform imagined idealist subjects. (shrink)

The so-called ticking bomb is invoked by philosophers and lawyers trying to justify, on behalf of their political masters, the use of torture in extremis. I show that the scenario is spurious; and that the likely consequences of the use of interrogational torture in such cases are disastrous. Finally, I test the argument against a real case.

Even people who think torture is justified in certain circumstances regard it - to say the least - as undesirable, however necessary they think it is. So I approach the issue by analysing the extreme case where people such as Dershowitz, Posner and Walzer think torture is justified, the so-called ticking bomb scenario. And since the justification offered is always consequentialist - no one thinks that torture is in any way “good in itself” – I confine myself to consequentialist arguments. (...) That is to say, I take the argument on its own terms, since any non-consequentialist objection to torture merely invites the response, ‘So much the worse for non-consequentialism’: if a moral theory insists that torture is wrong even if it would save thousands of lives that just shows how wrong the theory is . I focus only on the question of the moral justifiability of torture in the ‘ticking bomb’ case, and do not not ask whether, even if admittedly immoral, it should nonetheless be legalised (see Brecher, Torture and the Ticking Bomb, Wiley-Blackwell 2007)). My main argument is in two parts: (1) the “ticking bomb” scenario falls apart when analysed; and (2), even if it did not, the likely consequences of permitting torture would be worse than the bomb’s going off. Finally I briefly consider a genuine case. Further questions and readings are appended. (shrink)

For a few years in the 1980s, Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women appeared to have changed the intellectual landscape – as well as some people’s lives. Pornography, she argued, not only constitutes violence against women; it constitutes also the main conduit for such violence, of which rape is at once the prime example and the central image. In short, it is patriarchy’s most powerful weapon. Given that, feminists’ single most important task is to deal with pornography. By the early (...) 1990s, however, the consensus had become that her project was a diversion, both politically and intellectually. Today, who would argue that pornography is a crucial political issue? I shall argue that Dworkin has in fact a great deal to teach us – perhaps even more today, as we are going through the neo-liberal revolution, than thirty years ago. Her argument is not a causal one, despite in places reading as if it were. The legal route she chose as the ground on which to fight may well be a dead end, but that does nothing to undermine the force of her analysis. Nor does the fact that she makes arguments that might not be recognized as professionally philosophical or social scientific undermine their substantive force. It may even be that pornography itself is not the sole key she thought it was to understanding and dealing with political realities; but even if that were so, the form of her analysis, far from rhetorical and/or fallacious, is exactly what is needed to counter the depredations of neo-liberal “common sense”. That she herself found it difficult to find a language beyond that of liberalism to express her argument is no reason either for ignoring or misinterpreting it. (shrink)

I argue that neo-liberalism requires a managerialist view of our universities; and to the extent that managerialism cannot be ameliorated, to that extent neo-liberalism signals the end of universities as places of learning. Rather than calling for “friendlier” management practice, we need to organise opposition by articulating and rallying around some vision of what the ends should be of the university, and which managing such an institution should therefore serve. Such a vision, whatever exactly its details might consist in, would (...) have to be in explicit opposition to the neo-liberal ideal of universities as providers of “flexible” workers for employers and compliant subjects for governments. A precondition of reclaiming our universities from the managerialists, whether they be committed neo-liberal cadres or reluctant bit-players, is to tell the truth; and to be able to tell the truth, one has first to identify it aright. Happily that attempt describes exactly what it is to be an academic. (shrink)

This chapter argues against Frank Furedi’s urging of a ‘pre-political’ humanism. Having considered the possible bases of appeals to "human nature" as a starting-point for political claims, I argue that, unless we already have a pre-existent non- or anti-humanist commitment, the movement in appeals to "human nature" is from our philosophical/political commitment to our view of it. But since that is precisely what the call for a pre-political humanism opposes, it founders on two difficulties. First, in what sense might a (...) humanism – a commitment to humanity and a confidence in humanity’s capacity to improve its state – be ‘pre-political’at all? Second, since no humanism can be founded on some purely factual conception of what human beings are, since in that case no normative recommendations could be drawn from that conception, the ‘pre-political’ has to be understood as ‘non-normative'. But how could it be? What other normative conception than a political one of what human beings are could there be? Precisely to the extent that we have a conception of our species at all, we are already a political species. To distinguish, for example, between ‘human being’ and ‘person’ – between ourselves as members of a specific biological species and ourselves as moral and political beings – is to imply a notion of people as some sort of moral-political beings, even if that sort remains (as yet) unspecified. So if by a ‘pre-political’ humanism is intended a humanism which is non-political, then it cannot be a humanism at all. (shrink)

Fulford’s discussion of ‘values-based practice’ as a model for medical ethics is deeply puzzling. First, it remains unclear what exactly he takes values to be or how tyhey can be based in clinical skills. Second, his proposal does not make it clear whose values these are supposed to be. I conclude that his attempt in effect to take the morality out of ethics fails.

The chapter argues that communitarianism is the ‘postmodern bourgeois liberalism’ that Rorty, probably the leading avowedly epistemological, rather than political, or merely political, communitarian, describes himself as espousing. Proceeding by way of a detailed discussion of Philip Selznick’s definitive ‘Social Justice: a Communitarian Perspective’-- in which he seeks ‘to reaffirm, and to clarify if I can, the communitarian commitment to social justice’ -- I show that rooted in the particular as communitarianism is, it cannot but reflect the values, beliefs and (...) attitudes of the particular “community” in which it is variously found. Selznick's communitarianism, like any other, offers itself as a complement to, as well as a correction of, liberal principles: it could not do otherwise, since the institutional frameworks within which its values are to be realized are those of the modern nation-state and market econonmy. Communitarianism turns out to be the practice of postmodern liberalism. (shrink)

This chapter considers the wider significance of torture, addressing the manner in which it represents a touchstone for any universalistic morality, and arguing that it offers a means of refuting any moral relativism, something that ties in closely with my long-term theoretical work in metaethics (eg Getting What You Want? A Critique of Liberal Morality (Routledge: London and New York, 1998; and ongoing work around the ultimate justification of morality). Since torture consists in the erasure of a person on the (...) basis of their being an embodied rational agent, that is to say, of their being a person, it requires that the torturer at once recognise and negate the personhood of the person being tortured. The contradiction involved is immediate and integral: torture, one might say, is practical self-contradiction par excellence. For it is embodied rational agents who constitute the subject of any form, and thus of any theory, of morality -- and thus of global social and thus to torture a person is to both accept and deny our identity as embodied rational agents. This work also led to the opportunity for further collaboration with one of the editors, Heather Widdows, this time as part of a larger project on which I have been working for some time – both academically and as an activist -- namely to rescue work from the 1970s and 1980s for the Left. I have so far made two academic contributions: Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women – a Reassessment’, in eds H Marway and H Widdows, Women and Violence: the Agency of Victims and Perpetrators. Palgrave Macmillan: London, forthcoming 2013 and ‘The family and neo-liberalism: time to revive a critique’, Ethics and Social Welfare, forthcoming 2012. (shrink)

In 2008, Samantha Newbery, then a PhD student, discovered a hitherto confidential document: ‘Confidential: UK Eyes Only. Annex A: Intelligence gained from interrogations in Northern Ireland’ (DEFE 13/958, The National Archives (TNA)). It details the British Army’s notorious interrogations of IRA suspects that led to the eventual banning of the ‘five techniques’ that violated the UK’s international treaty obligation prohibiting the use of torture and ‘inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. Having decided that the document – Intelligence gained from should (...) be put in the public domain, she invited me, along with the eminent lawyer, Philippe Sands and Brian Stuart, a former Secretary to the British Joint Intelligence Committee, to contribute commentaries. I concluded that even if the document was accurate in both what it stated and in what it left out, that use of the ‘five techniques’ (tantamount to torture) was unjustified, since the normalisation and institutionalisation of torture is far worse than failing to obtain the information thus gained. Whether or not this joint paper will make a difference to UK policy concerning the use of torture remains an open question; whether or not it should is not. This piece is an example of how my book on torture, deliberately written for a public readership, has made it possible for me to make interventions in practical policy, or at least to attempt to, whether in occasional writing for eg The Chartist and the web-based Open Democracy, or directly for activist groups, eg my ‘Ethical Opinion’ for Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, Report: Holding Health to Ransom: GSS Interrogation and Extortion of Palestinian Patients at Erez Crossing (2008). (shrink)

This article develops a critique of Jurgen Habermas's account of communicative rationality. Habermas argues that communication harbours an implicit promise, that it is underpinned by a a claim to be valid which is in principle subject to verification. A close reading of Habermas's badic theoretical decisions demosntrates what communicative rationality occludes in the study of language. Habermas sidelines concerns about the ineliminable power underlying any communication, and occludes any focus on the slipperiness of meaning. The critique has implications for the (...) theoretical defence of deliberative democracy, the topic of so much secondary work in political studies nowadays. In the second section of the article I contend that Habermas’s account of reason is incapable of addressing two key political questions: economic inequality and bio-politics. This failure is a consequence of the way in which Habermas constructs reason, as communicative. The consequence is that any account of reason or deliberation premised upon formal pragmatics should be reconstructed. This reconstruction will need to give account of the violence that underpins the deliberative account of democracy. (shrink)

Gregory Bateson said that we are ‘governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong’ back in 1972. In the same book Bateson wrote: 'the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself.’ Almost forty years later global ecological systems are in steep decline and converging crises make a deep evaluation of the underlying premises of our philosophical traditions an urgent imperative. This paper will suggest that the roots of the economic crisis are epistemological and that to correct this error whole (...) systems thinking and ecological literacy will become increasing important in business management as well as in other disciplines. It will also suggest that the economic crisis opened new political space and has provided an opportunity for intervention. If we are brave enough to examine of the roots of our problems there is possibility for renewal. (shrink)

This is an introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Surgery and Embodiment: Carving out Subjects’. The collection of articles in the special issue demonstrates how surgery, as a set of discourses and practices, has become central to the mediation between body and psyche in cultural understandings and individual experiences of embodied subjectivity. This is achieved by examining, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, a range of historical and contemporary examples of surgical practice. The contributors share common concerns about embodied subjectivity, gender (...) and sexuality, and the complex relationships between medical practice, normativity and consumerist pressures that are brought to bear on practices of body modification. We are concerned with how surgical processes are variously employed by individuals, as well as imposed upon them, in the attainment and negotiation of an embodied sense of self. Attentive also to the ways in which surgery produces and reinscribes bodies as normative and non-normative, the contributors seek to challenge the power of surgery to define the body by exploring alternative epistemologies, as well as providing possibilities for negotiating clinical practices in the construction of self and subjectivity. (shrink)

Discussion of philosophy, celebrity and gender; review of Mark Rowlands' 2008 book on philosophy and Fame.

This paper focuses on a short passage by Nietzsche on the reciprocity between revolution and madness: ‘those men irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad’ (Daybreak, §I:14) The paper explores how from romanticism, through avant-gardism, to contemporary critical theory, some who sought to ‘make it new’ have willed madness as a means of (...) liberation and revenge, sanctifying madness as a politically, aesthetically, and ontologically subversive way of being. Nietzsche then asks: ‘do you understand why it had to be madness that did this?’, and ‘how can one make oneself mad when one is not mad?’ In response, the paper identifies the function that the words ‘madness’, ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘hysteria’ perform in the work of avant-gardists including Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Andrè Breton, and the radical theorists they influenced including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Helene Cixous. These thinkers equivalently imagine madness as the condition of existential and ontological authenticity that therefore precedes socialisation. If the perceived loss of self in mental illness is the negation of subjection and alienation, it promises a more devastating loss of the self - individual, innate, unified. So madness is the psychic precondition of social revolution: psychopathology as a politics. The paper concludes that this will to madness is a certain leftist political moral urge equivalent to what Nietzsche called the angry melancholia of ressentiment - the moralistic attachment to suffering that spends its will to protest in (ironically) self-alienation and synthetic ‘ecstasies of delirium and mental suffering’. Ultimately, radically imagined madness is a captivatingly narcissistic image of subversion and radical difference that is made to reflect the revolutionary’s own ideals of existential authenticity, ingenuous creativity, and social revolution. (shrink)