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In Japan, most contemporary readers expect comics, or manga, to be entertaining fiction ('story manga'), magazine-based, and targeted at age- and gender-specific demographics. These narratives eventually reappear in bound book editions ('tankōbon'), after they have proven to be popular to an extent that would warrant print runs of more than 5,000 copies. Due to the central role of magazines as first site of publication since the 1960s, genre specificity has been essential – for editors, readers, and artists alike. While manga's traditional genres have been gender- and age-specific, thematic genres such as SF, horror and comedy, or recently also blog-like essay manga, come to the fore whenever the otherwise prevalent categories forfeit efficacy. But there is one genre which does not comply with these categories, i.e. gakushū manga, educational or instructional comics.
A comic can tell the story of almost anything: a single atom, the entire solar system, the past, future events, dreams and thoughts. All this, and more, can be depicted. When presenting facts, a certain artistic licence can be deployed if, for instance, the author wants to emphasise important details; likewise, aspects he or she deems irrelevant can be left out. Moreover, questions and issues can be laid out that are difficult or even impossible to portray photographically or cinematically. However, when the cartoon strip sets out its version of information, events, objects and people, it can also result in a distortion of reality. The graphic may not always make clear exactly how something looks or the precise way in which something happened. And even where documentary images exist, the comic strip representation of the non-fictional is always coloured by artistic interpretation.
There is no doubt that factual discourse exists in comics – the kind of communication that intends to be understood as a reference to a shared and actual reality. Factual comics are not, however, common. While the formal structure of comics clearly allows for factuality, the historical specificity of its aesthetics seems to introduce a non-binding but plausible 'drift' of the art form, ultimately pulling away from reality and towards fiction. This does not prevent factual comics, but it allows for subversive remnants in their aesthetic make-up. One of these is a 'parasitic imagination', which might be understood in the context of Michel Serres' concepts of the parasite. It opens up cartoonish depictions for tertiary significations beyond the drawing and its ultimate real reference. Rather than avoid this basic vehicle of comic book discourse, the 'challenge to factual comics' must be how to employ them in the service of the intended communication.
Beyond Illustration
(2017)
Sophisticated science reported on in comics. The once unthinkable is here as comics are being leveraged and enthusiastically welcomed into forums that would have been off limits not long ago. It's an exciting time of change. But in this headlong dash forward, I want to offer a pause for consideration, and suggest that we ask, what are the things that comics do uniquely compared to other forms of representation? And from there, let us explore how we can best take advantage of comics' particular affordances to do with comics things only comics can do.
The present volume documents the twofold character of the conference 'Science meets Comics' with the first part focusing on comics as a format for communicating complex topics and the second part addressing food in the age of the Anthropocene as one such example for complex topics. The overall objective of the symposium was to deal with the results and suggestions of the presentations and discussions, to find possible pathways on how to feed the world in the future and to co-produce the final chapter of the scientific comic 'Eating Anthropocene' together with all artists participating in the project. In order to sum up the framing, contents and design process of the comic as well as to highlight its Anthropocene context we below provide a slightly abridged version of the preface of our comic book.
In Britain in the late 1880s, two pop cultural icons had an extraordinary meeting: one, Ally Sloper, the fictional star of comic books and stage productions and the other Jack the Ripper, the real-life serial killer who was instantly fictionalised on page and stage as the bogeyman of the moment. The aim here is to explore the way in which this dynamic developed, with a focus on a single issue of 'Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday' (October 20, 1888), which appeared at the point in time when it was first realised that the killings were being done by a lone individual, and when panic was at its peak. What was at stake politically in the comic’s reaction? What can it tell us about Victorian attitudes to fear, death, and poverty? About the status of women? Finally, about law and order, and the social contract that existed between citizen and police?
Monsters are no rarity in the history of U. S.-American comics, but in Ken Dahl's eponymous small press comic they assume a articular function: His morphing monsters tell a story about how being a carrier of the herpes virus leads to incessant worry and social isolation. Dahl's narrative exposes the instability of the body's boundaries, and that of the distinction between illness and health. This chapter reads Monsters through traditions and theorizations of the Monstrous and Grotesque, as well as cultural histories of medicine that have shed light on discourses of contagion and (in-)visibility of illness. It is the idiosyncrasies of the comics medium and its history, and those of Dahl's stylistic choices, that enable a particularly tangible representation of social and personal illness experience.
In this article I read Jaime Cortez's graphic novel 'Sexile' as an intervention into linear narratives of crossing such as the "victim-rescuing narrative" (Shaksari) or the "transsexual narrative" (Bhanji). 'Sexile' celebrates the resourcefulness and creativity with which the denizens of the borderlands craft homes in the no-man’s land between departures and impossible arrivals. I argue that it is both the story that Sexile (re)tells as well as the format of the graphic novel that make 'Sexile' a life-affirming, useful, and challenging monument to life in the borderlands of national and gendered belonging.
Insects, the new food?
(2017)
In many parts of the world it is common to eat insects while in the western world it is regarded as a bizarre habit, even evoking disgust. Is this justified? What if insects were nutritionally similar to our common meat products and have proven to be delicious in blind tests? Insects have an environmental impact which is much less than our common production animals, so why not eat it? If these questions can be answered affirmatively, then the question is: Can we persuade the western consumers to take this psychological barrier? There has been a tremendous interest during the last five years to promote insects as food. There are now close to 200 start-up companies listed. Also, in the scientific world the interest is growing exponentially, testified by the number of articles on edible insects that have appeared during the last 15 years (83 from 2011 to 2015 against 9 from 2001 to 20051). These articles deal with harvesting from nature, environmental benefits, nutritional value, food safety, processing, and consumer attitudes. I will give a short overview of the developments in these different areas.
Human-induced environmental change represents one of the major challenges of current and future generations. To evaluate the anthropogenic impacts on the biosphere, the concept of Planetary Boundaries was developed, indicating that in case of four out of nine environmental indicators a transgression of corresponding boundaries has already taken place: Biodiversity loss, climate change, land-system change, and biogeochemical flows. Further, paleoclimate research has shown that the earth´s environment has been relatively stable for the last 12,000 years. Researchers assume that this, in geological terms, very short period – called Holocene – is now already again replaced by a new geological era: the Anthropocene, due to the tremendous impacts humans had on earth.
Our daily food consumption is slowly but surely turning into the largest environmental threat. The agricultural sector consumes 70% of the water used by humankind. The production of meat consumes enormous amounts of water compared to plants. Innovations in the area of food production are lately summarized as AgTech, agricultural technology. This encompasses all sorts of areas, ranging from drone-controlled tractors to printed hamburgers. Specifically the challenge of making use of the limited areas available in cities and maximizing crop yields has seen a recent boom in novel approaches – and quite a bit of investor finance.
Ruth Preser's essay 'Things I Learned from the "Book of Ruth": Diasporic Reading of Queer Conversions' performs a queer appropriation of history. The "Book of Ruth" is a biblical narrative that opens with two women, Naomi the Israelite, a bereaved woman who wishes to return from Moab to Judea, and her no-longer-daughter-in-law Ruth the Moabite, who pledges to follow Naomi, turning away from her gods and people. This laconic tale of nomadic intimacies and speech-acts of pledges and conversions has become an iconic narrative and a seminal text in Judaism, and it has also been appropriated by contemporary feminist and lesbian readings. Indeed, since it is not fully narrated but rather full of gaps, voids, and 'ghostly matters', the "Book of Ruth" provides apt ground and a malleable vessel for contemporary appropriation by stories seeking incarnation beyond linear or teleological constraints. In Preser's 'palimpsest reading', the biblical tale continues to communicate a story of successful assimilation of the poor and the foreign, and of a 'home-coming', but it is troubled by displacement, unresolved diasporic longing, and an acute and continuous sense of vulnerability. Thinking with Avery Gordon's modality of haunting, Preser's reading aims to understand contemporary forms of dispossession and their impact, especially when their oppressive nature is denied. It reflects on what kind of theory might emerge by remobilizing the category of 'home' through its de-constitution, through movement rather than destination, through disintegration rather than determination. Troubled by questions of race, nomadism, gender, and sexuality, in an era when (some) bodies may traverse national, sexual, and class borders, Preser's investigation asks what happens to bodies that continuously signify precarity and loss.
BLACK KIRBY is a collaborative "entity" that is the creative doppelganger of artists / designers John Jennings and Stacey "Blackstar" Robinson. The manifestation of this avatar is an exhibition and catalog1 of primarily visual artworks-on-paper that celebrate the groundbreaking work of legendary comics creator Jack Kirby regarding his contributions to the pop culture landscape and his development of some of the conventions of the comics medium.
BLACK KIRBY also functions as a highly syncretic mythopoetic framework by appropriating Jack Kirby’s bold forms and revolutionary ideas combined with themes centered around AfroFuturism social justice, Black history, media criticism, science fiction, magical realism, and the utilization of Hip Hop culture as a methodology for creating visual expression. This collection of work also focuses on the digital medium and how its inherent affordances offer much more flexibility in the expression of visual communication and what that means in its production and consumption in the public sphere. In a sense, BLACK KIRBY appropriates the gallery as a conceptual "crossroads" to examine identity as a socialized concept and to show the commonalities between Black comics creators and Jewish comics creators and how they both utilize the medium of comics as space of resistance. The duo attempts to re-mediate "Blackness" and other identity contexts as "sublime technologies" that produce experiences that sometime limit human progress and possibility. This paper / presentation will examine some of the themes of this inaugural exhibition of this new artistic team and share the processes involved with the ideation, execution, and installation of the exhibition.
In this paper we propose a sociological concept of innovation capable of transcending the limitations faced by the approaches of common theories of action. The concept was formulated by Ulrich Oevermann and is based upon Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority. We apply this concept to archaeological data, using the example of Neolithic copper metallurgy in central Europe, and discuss the importance of analyzing innovations that failed to materialize even though they might have been "in the air" at the time. The concept sketched here enables the scientific study of such a phenomenon.
Marcus Coelen's essay 'An Eclipse of the Screen: Jorge Semprún's Scripts for Alain Resnais' starts from the assumption that the peculiar status of film scripts (not written to be read as such) can be illustrated by the figure of their eclipse. For they are, in inverting the very logic of the figure they invite, eclipsed for the sake of and by the fractured light on the screen they help to produce. Yet just as the sun, obscured by the 'black writing' of the moon, leaves an ephemeral contour in the skies - a spectacle to many when happening - so too can the script that is made to disappear by the screen be assumed to draw its own particular and even more vanishing traits into the movie that is given not only to sight but also to thought. The analyses and critical constructions proposed by Coelen try to detect such traits in the work of Jorge Semprún the screen writer. Writing not only for movies by Alain Resnais - most notably "La guerre est finie" (1966) and "Stavisky" (1974) - but also publishing versions of them after their release and calling those versions 'scénarios' despite various divergences and subtly violent inversions of the movies' images, the screenwriter's figure describes yet another twist of the eclipse. It can be assumed not only that Semprún strongly resisted the influence of the constellation formed by writing and cinematographic shooting, as well as projecting, but furthermore that this writing was almost imperceptibly yet essentially directed against the eclipse it was drawn into. No minor forces are conjured up in this enterprise. Driven by the desire to re-appropriate cinema's a-personal and anti-psychological movement, to domesticate the images of scribbling lights drifting away from the mental and into thought - as well as into a history not mastered -, Semprún attempted to shape mastery itself and most traditional forms of authorship, along with memory and agency, in order to cloud the eclipse of script - that is, we might add, to conjure up a ghost recovering the trace of what has been eclipsed so that it may continue to haunt.
This essay on the nature of the boundary of the comics form is an analysis of US Congressman John Lewis’s autobiography March, which recounts his early days as a civil rights leader and is in the form of a comic or "graphic novel". A few key examples are examined in which normally distinct images and textual elements blend together thereby bringing into question the nature of the boundary in a more general sense as it functions in the comics. Some of the formal elements of the graphic novel analyzed by the essay include its symbolic composition, arrangement of panels and images, treatment of light and dark areas, deployment of racialized icons, and blurring of temporalities and history.
Wholes are said to be more than the sum of their parts. This 'more' contains both a promise and a threat. When different elements - which might be individuals, cultures, disciplines, or methods - form a whole, they not only join forces but also generate a surplus from which the parts can benefit. Being part of a whole is a way to acquire meaning and to extend beyond one's limited existence; and having a part in the whole is to have an enlarged agency. But wholes are also more powerful than the sum of their parts. Wholes constitute their parts: they determine what is a part and what is apart, what can become a part, and which parts have no part. Even if parts therefore may not be said to pre-exist a whole, there may still be something in them that exceeds being a part - if only the possibility of being part of a different whole.
Filippo Trentin's essay 'Warburg's Ghost: On Literary Atlases and the "Anatopic" Shift of a Cartographic Object' analyses the atlas as a method of assemblage in literary theory. It takes issue with the use of cartography advocated by proponents of a 'spatial turn' within literary studies, including Malcolm Bradbury's "Atlas of Literature", Franco Moretti's "Atlas of European Literature", and Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà's "Atlante della letteratura italiana". While these atlases claim to dismantle the normative canon of historicism and to offer a different way of gathering knowledge, Trentin argues that they often risk reproducing analogous positivistic, hierarchical, and colonizing assumptions. Showing a totalizing attitude embedded in modern atlases and in the 'cartographic reason' emerging from the sixteenth century onwards, the essay proposes a speculative and heuristic use of the term 'anatopy' that aims to capture the disorienting potentialities that are intrinsic to non-cartographic explorations of space. In particular, it interprets Aby Warburg's "Bilderatlas Mnemosyne" as an 'anatopic' object that keeps troubling any purely cartographic use of the atlas. In Trentin's reading, by theorizing an anti-foundational (and anti-identitarian) method of knowledge organization based on the morphological affect between disparate images and objects, Warburg's project leads to the profanation of the atlas as a topographical machine and, with its recurrences, intervals, and voids, destitutes its traditional apparatus of power. This disparate and anti-holistic aesthetic disposition challenges the solid foundations of the constructions of historicism and cartographic reason. It breaks up the technical explanation of cause and effect and substitutes it with a 'danced causality', which Trentin relates to Leo Bersani's idea of 'aesthetic subject' and the possibility of moving beyond an immobile and filial principle of identity formation towards a virtual and impersonal one that is located beyond the 'ego', as well as beyond the rigid borders of cartographic reason and the linearity of positivistic historicism.
A paradigm for thinking about wholes, their constitution and re-production, has long been provided by living organisms. While the emphasis is often on the relation between parts and wholes - between the functionally differentiated organs and the organism, or, on a lower level, between cells and organs - Robert Meunier and Valentine Reynaud's essay 'The Innate Plasticity of Bodies and Minds: Integrating Models of Genetic Determination and Environmental Formation' poses the question of the whole in biology with respect to the organism and its environment. A developmental system involves not only what we conventionally discern as the organism, that is, initially, the fertilized egg and the cellular mass arising from it by cell division, but also the physical and biological surrounding of the developing embryo. In the sense that not every aspect of the environment plays a role, the organism as part of the system constitutes this whole by determining what has an effect on the process and what does not. On the other hand, by not only enabling development or providing material but instead shaping the process in specific ways, the whole of organism-environment interactions constitutes its part, i.e., the developing organism. If there are therefore different, potentially incommensurable constitutions of the whole developmental system, there are also different ways of identifying the relevant units of selection in evolution, such as the living organism as a whole or the genes as the units of replication. In their essay, Meunier and Reynaud argue for a view on development and evolution that integrates notions of environmental influence and genetic determination. The notion of plasticity that has recently gained currency in the life sciences seems to oppose genetic determination and innateness by underlining the importance of environmental influence. However, while morphological and cognitive development is indeed plastic and sensitive to the environment, the essay emphasizes that the mechanisms and elements enabling a system to respond to influences must be available for development to happen in the first place. These resources for development are not homogeneous 'stuff' that becomes formed by the environment through the course of development. Instead, they are highly structured and specific and thus enable specific responses to contextual conditions. Under varying conditions they will of course appear in different combinations and produce different outcomes. Thus, they enable plasticity. And yet, as they are specific mechanisms and elements, which mainly gain their specificity from the structure of the genetic material on which the environment can act, it appears appropriate to refer to them as innate.
The de-constitution of the 'I' is at the centre of Manuele Gragnolati's essay 'Differently Queer: Temporality, Aesthetics, and Sexuality in Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Petrolio" and Elsa Morante's "Aracoeli"'. The essay explores the relationship between temporality, aesthetics, and sexuality in the final novels of two twentieth-century Italian authors: Pasolini's "Petrolio" (1972–75) and Morante's "Aracoeli" (1982). Both novels mobilize a form of temporality that resists a sense of linear and teleological development and that instead appears contorted, inverted, and suspended. The article argues that both novels thereby allow for the articulation of queer desires and pleasures that cannot be inscribed in normative logics of completion, progression, or productivity. It shows how the aesthetics of Pasolini's and Morante's texts replicate the movement of queer subjectivity and dismantle the traditional structure of the novel but do so differently. The fractured and dilated movement of "Petrolio's" textuality corresponds to a post-Oedipal and fully formed subject who is haunted by his complicity with bourgeois power and wants to shatter and annihilate himself by replicating the paradoxical pleasure of non-domesticated sexuality. "Aracoeli", by contrast, has a 'formless form' ('forma senza forma') that corresponds to the position of never completing the process of subject formation by adapting to the symbolic order. The poetic operation of Morante's novel consists in staging an interior journey, backwards along the traces of memory and the body and at the same time forward towards embracing the partiality and fluidity of an inter-subjectivity that is always in the process of becoming.
Eirini Avramopoulou asks the following questions in her essay 'Claims of Existence between Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics': How is the desire for existence implicated in the experience of identity as wound? Under which conditions does the demand for desire appear to confront the repetition of trauma? Or else, what echoes in the last breath of someone dying? In Istanbul, a city built upon neoliberal structures of governance and cosmopolitan aesthetics, and defined by severe policing and local histories of ethnic and gender violence, these questions reflect upon a particular historical and political period through a personal story. The essay focuses on a transgender activist named Ali, his fight against transphobia, his illness and death, while reflecting on the 2013 public uprising in Istanbul following attempts by the Turkish government to demolish Gezi park. By exploring the notion of spectral survival as a political praxis, it argues that this notion, rather than acceding to claims over a fuller subjectivity, mobilizes an aporia of de-subjectivation. De-constituting the 'I' here attests to an attempt neither to reconfigure its parts nor to merely perceive life as dismantled, but rather to speak of a loss that no familiar language can yet describe. The spectrality of this 'I' troubles and repoliticizes, then, the very notion of haunting, as it lays claims to its own differing and deferral from the constitution of a proper name, or of a 'self'-acclaimed existence, especially when the fight for existence here is also a performative assertion of loss and death connected to processes of resisting sexist, neoliberal, heteronormative, and phallogocentric representations of possession and belonging.
A different take on knowledge, history, and totalization is presented in Jamila Mascat's essay 'Hegel and the Ad-venture of the Totality', which aims at exploring the controversial notion of the Hegelian totality. Countering Louis Althusser's critique of Hegel's 'expressive totality', where every part is thought to expresses the whole, it proposes to consider such a speculative figure as a temporalizing instance situated at the entanglement of Knowing and History. Firstly, it illustrates the paradoxical inclination of Hegel's totality to being both complete and a never-ending task. Secondly, it analyses the accomplishment of totality at the peak of the Science of Logic, focusing on the temporal circularity of the Concept ('Begriff'). Thirdly, drawing on the readings of Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, and Jean Hyppolite, the essay illustrates the peculiar relation between becoming and eternity that is located at the heart of Hegel's conception of time. Finally, it approaches the last section of the "Phenomenology of Spirit" devoted to Absolute Knowing in order to highlight the twofold movement of seizure ('Begreifen') and release ('Entlassen') that characterizes the activity of the Spirit and that is constitutive of the contingent ad-venture of the totality as a philosophical achievement. In other words, it is by embracing contingency as its limit that Absolute Knowing reaffirms the status of its absoluteness precisely because of its capacity to sacrifice itself and let it go. Critically engaging with Catherine Malabou's reading of plasticity in Hegel, Mascat highlights that Absolute Knowing is a process of totalization that entails cuts and interruptions. The essay shows that the Hegelian totality may be interpreted and actualized as a theoretical construct densely charged with temporal and historical implications: on the one hand, totality expresses a timely standpoint for thought - the standpoint of Hegel's age, which is, as claimed by the philosopher at the end of his "Lectures on the History of Philosophy", 'for the time being completed', as well as the standpoint of the present time to be speculatively accomplished; on the other hand, Hegel's idea of a speculative totalization sets for the philosophies yet to come the never-ending task of constituting and re-constituting wholes.
Arnd Wedemeyer's article focuses on the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86), who did not shy away from describing the social order with traditional organic metaphors, such as the notion of a 'central organ'. However, it is above all the - plastic - relationship between society and art that is at issue in Wedemeyer's article, entitled 'Pumping Honey: Joseph Beuys at the documenta 6'. Using the term 'Soziale Plastik', Beuys not only classified his own artistic practice as essentially sculptural but, more importantly, thematized its heterogeneous yet anything but passive relationship to art market, exhibition, museum, and various modes of reception, as well as staked its political claim. Wedemeyer looks at Beuys's contribution to the 1977 documenta, 'Honey Pump at the Workplace', in order to argue that the layered invocation of plasticity characteristic of Beuys's practice and theorizing ought not be historicized, as is commonly done, as an instantiation of the excessive, transgressive - and quite possibly disingenuous - zeal of the neo-avant-garde. Beuys's 'Plastik' should not be confused with anti-aesthetic formlessness, base materialism, a post-Duchampian ruination of the 'objet trouvé', and least of all a Neoromantic or Wagnerian projection or hypostatization of the autonomous work of art. The avant-gardes of the twentieth century have rendered the relationship of art and aesthetics tenuous at best, their artistic 'innovations' straining against the supratemporally or anthropologically defined characteristics of aesthetic valuation, play, or force. While many have sought to address this problem by tethering art to society in a shared 'contemporaneity', the article explores the implications of recasting this relation as one of plasticity, using the conceptual richness harvested by Catherine Malabou.
BLACK KIRBY is a collaborative "entity" that is the creative doppelganger of artists / designers John Jennings and Stacey "Blackstar" Robinson. The manifestation of this avatar is an exhibition and catalog1 of primarily visual artworks-on-paper that celebrate the groundbreaking work of legendary comics creator Jack Kirby regarding his contributions to the pop culture landscape and his development of some of the conventions of the comics medium.
BLACK KIRBY also functions as a highly syncretic mythopoetic framework by appropriating Jack Kirby’s bold forms and revolutionary ideas combined with themes centered around AfroFuturism social justice, Black history, media criticism, science fiction, magical realism, and the utilization of Hip Hop culture as a methodology for creating visual expression. This collection of work also focuses on the digital medium and how its inherent affordances offer much more flexibility in the expression of visual communication and what that means in its production and consumption in the public sphere. In a sense, BLACK KIRBY appropriates the gallery as a conceptual "crossroads" to examine identity as a socialized concept and to show the commonalities between Black comics creators and Jewish comics creators and how they both utilize the medium of comics as space of resistance. The duo attempts to re-mediate "Blackness" and other identity contexts as "sublime technologies" that produce experiences that sometime limit human progress and possibility. This paper / presentation will examine some of the themes of this inaugural exhibition of this new artistic team and share the processes involved with the ideation, execution, and installation of the exhibition.
We present a method for detecting word sense changes by utilizing automatically induced word senses. Our method works on the level of individual senses and allows a word to have e.g. one stable sense and then add a novel sense that later experiences change. Senses are grouped based on polysemy to find linguistic concepts and we can find broadening and narrowing as well as novel (polysemous and homonymic) senses. We evaluate on a testset, present recall and estimates of the time between expected and found change.
Volker Woltersdorff's essay 'Sexual Ghosts and the Whole of History: Queer Historiography, Post-Slavery Subjectivities, and Sadomasochism in Isaac Julien's "The Attendant"' discusses the controversial concept of wholeness in historiography with regard to the fascination with past horrors and the desire to do justice to their victims who retain a ghostly presence. The essay retraces how this commitment produces a dilemma, as it can result either in the aspiration to historical wholeness as full memoralization or alternatively in the radical rejection of wholeness as an impossible healing. Employing Elizabeth Freeman's notion of 'erotohistoriography', Woltersdorff introduces affect into the work of historiography in order to find an escape from the dilemmatic impasse between history's wholeness as pacified reconciliation and as ongoing catastrophe along the lines of Walter Benjamin. Sadomasochism is presented as a practice that may correspond most adequately to the paradoxical affect caused by traumatic history that continues to haunt the present. Indeed, re-enactments of historical oppression and violence occur frequently within the BDSM community. However, what distinguishes them from 'living history' re-enactments is their potential to modify affective attachments to history by altering the historical script. The essay elaborates this potential through Isaac Julien's 1993 short film "The Attendant", which, in a kind of queer re-enactment, overwrites the memory of colonial chattel slavery by a sadomasochistic encounter of a black guardian and a white visitor in a museum dedicated to the history of slavery. The film raises the ethical and political question of how to relate affectively to the legacy and ongoing presence of racism. Against this backdrop, the author argues that, through the BDSM scenario and its changes to the historical script, Julien's film represents and promotes a paradoxical way to perform both the memorialization and the forgetting of past horrors and pleasures. Here, historical wholeness acquires a conflicting double meaning of both achieving completeness and restoring integrity. Woltersdorff concludes by interpreting "The Attendant" as urging a utopian perspective, produced by the tension between the impossibility of history's wholeness and the necessary, reparative desire for it. The article concludes by highlighting the paradox that Julien's film shows wholeness 'to be impossible and yet necessary' and 'expresses a necessary desire made impossible'. While the essay explicitly engages with the figure of haunting, one could perhaps speak here also of plasticity insofar as the contradictory conjunction of remembering and forgetting seems to rely on a malleability of affects and on producing an affective economy that sustains the fantasmatic remembrance of a painful past through paradoxical pleasure but breaks with any pleasure derived from real inequality, injustice, or suffering imparted non-consensually.
The diagnosis that we are living in a world risk society formulated by Ulrich Beck 20 years ago (Beck, Kölner Z Soziol Sozialpsychol 36:119–147, 1996) has lost nothing of its power, especially against the background of the Anthropocene debate. “Global risks” have been identified which are caused by human activities, technology, and modernization processes. Microplastics are a by-product of exactly these modernization processes, being distributed globally by physical processes like ocean currents, and causing effects far from their place of origin. In recent years, the topic has gained great prominence, as microplastics have been discovered nearly everywhere in the environment, raising questions about the impacts on food for human consumption. But are microplastics really a new phenomenon or rather a symptom of an old problem? And exactly what risks are involved? It seems that the phenomenon has accelerated political action—the USA has passed the Microbead-Free Waters Act 2015—and industries have pledged to fade out the use of microbeads in their cosmetic products. At first sight, is it a success for environmentalists and the protection of our planet?
This chapter deals with these questions by adopting a social-ecological perspective, discussing microplastics as a global risk. Taking four main characteristics of global risks, we develop four arguments to discuss (a) the everyday production of risk by societies, (b) scientific risk evaluation of microplastics, (c) social responses, and (d) problems of risk management. To illustrate these four issues, we draw on different aspects of the current scientific and public debate. In doing so, we contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the social-ecological implications of microplastics.
The ubiquitous detection of microplastics in aquatic ecosystems promotes the concern for adverse impacts on freshwater ecosystems. The wide variety of material types, sizes, shapes, and physicochemical properties renders interactions with biota via multiple pathways probable.
So far, our knowledge about the uptake and biological effects of microplastics comes from laboratory studies, applying simplified exposure regimes (e.g., one polymer and size, spherical shape, high concentrations) often with limited environmental relevance. However, the available data illustrates species- and material-related interactions and highlights that microplastics represent a multifaceted stressor. Particle-related toxicities will be driven by polymer type, size, and shape. Chemical toxicity is driven by the adsorption-desorption kinetics of additives and pollutants. In addition, microbial colonization, the formation of hetero-aggregates, and the evolutionary adaptations of the biological receptor further increase the complexity of microplastics as stressors. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to synthesize and critically revisit these aspects based on the state of the science in freshwater research. Where unavailable we supplement this with data on marine biota. This provides an insight into the direction of future research.
In this regard, the challenge is to understand the complex interactions of biota and plastic materials and to identify the toxicologically most relevant characteristics of the plethora of microplastics. Importantly, as the direct biological impacts of natural particles may be similar, future research needs to benchmark synthetic against natural materials. Finally, given the scale of the research question, we need a multidisciplinary approach to understand the role of microplastics in a multiple-particle world.
In recent years, interest in the environmental occurrence and effects of microplastics (MPs) has shifted towards our inland waters, and in this chapter we provide an overview of the issues that may be of concern for freshwater environments. The term ‘contaminant of emerging concern’ does not only apply to chemical pollutants but to MPs as well because it has been detected ubiquitously in freshwater systems. The environmental release of MPs will occur from a wide variety of sources, including emissions from wastewater treatment plants and from the degradation of larger plastic debris items. Due to the chemical makeup of plastic materials, receiving environments are potentially exposed to a mixture of micro- and nano-sized particles, leached additives, and subsequent degradation products, which will become bioavailable for a range of biota. The ingestion of MPs by aquatic organisms has been demonstrated, but the long-term effects of continuous exposures are less well understood. Technological developments and changes in demographics will influence the types of MPs and environmental concentrations in the future, and it will be important to develop approaches to mitigate the input of synthetic polymers to freshwater ecosystems.
Am 6. Juli 1916 notierte Ludwig Wittgenstein in seinem Tagebuch: "Und insofern hat wohl auch Dostojewskij recht, wenn er sagt, dass der, welcher glücklich ist, den Zweck des Daseins erfüllt." Diese Aussage ist eingebettet in Überlegungen zur Beziehung von Ethik und Ästhetik in seinem Tagebuch, die später in den 'Tractatus logicophilosophicus' einfliessen (ab Satz 6.42). Die Figur Dostojewskijs, die am explizitesten solche Sätze aussprach, wie den oben zitierten, ist der Starez Sosima aus den 'Brüdern Karamasow'. Wittgenstein hat diesen Roman so oft gelesen, dass er ihn nahezu auswendig konnte, insbesondere die Reden des Starez Sosima. Obwohl Wittgenstein darauf bestand, dass Ethik "unaussprechbar" ist, deutet er an, dass Literatur das gute Leben "zeigen" kann. Somit überschreitet er die Grenzen der frühen analytischen Philosophie, die sich an mathematischen Wissenschaften orientierte und sich möglichst von der Kunst abzugrenzen suchte.
Cet article examine le rôle souvent occulté et pourtant essentiel de la traduction comme source d'innovation et de créativité dans l'histoire littéraire et la théorie. Il s'appuie sur plusieurs exemples allant du fameux épisode de la création d'Ève à partir de la "côte d'Adam" dans la Bible de Jérôme, basée sur la traduction fautive du mot hébreu "qaran" en latin et reflétant le biais patriarcal de Jérôme, à la traduction, tronquée du Deuxième Sexe de Simone de Beauvoir (1946) par le zoologiste retraité Howard M. Parshley qui allait néanmoins inspirer des études marquantes de la seconde vague féministe américaine telles que "The Feminine Mystique" (1963) de Betty Friedan et "Sexual Politics" (1970) de Kate Millett. L'exemple le plus développé retrace l'interaction productive de la traduction et de la réécriture dans la fiction d'Angela Carter, de "The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault" (1977) jusqu'à ses célèbres "stories about fairy stories" recueillies dans "The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories" (1979) et "American Ghosts and Old World Wonders" (1992). Je propose de lire les variations de Carter sur "Aschenputtel" dans "Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost" comme un correctif à sa traduction de la morale de "Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre" de Perrault. La poétique traductive (translational poetics) de Carter démontre ainsi l'impact crucial de la traduction – y compris des erreurs – sur la démarche de l'écrivain, qui associe la (re)lecture créative inhérente à l'activité de traduction au travail de (ré)écriture jusqu'à en faire la matrice à partir de laquelle elle a élaboré son oeuvre singulière.
Des critiques et écrivains de nouvelles ont défendu l'idée que la brieveté et un unique moment de clarté sont les éléments essentiels du format court typique de la nouvelle. Cependant, la nouvelle postcoloniale est plurielle, polyphonique et versatile, et elle a tendance à s'appuyer sur le désaccord culturel, social, et linguistique. Ce chapitre examine la traduction et l'échec de celle-ci dans l'oeuvre de deux nouvellistes prolifiques qui viennent des deux différentes traditions postcoloniales : Nadine Gordimer et Anita Desai. La prémisse de mon argument est que les nouvelles de ces écrivains ont pour la plupart lieu dans des espaces périphériques, par exemple des villages et des avant-postes. Elles dramatisent une forme de processus postcolonial de désengagement des centres de pouvoir en explorant et en remettant en question des hiérarchies discursives. Cette renégociation implique la présence de perspectives multiples et de subjectivités plurielles, de même qu'elle insiste sur des traductions problématiques et des malentendus surgissant en leur sein. Par l'étude de textes de Gordimer et Desai, ce chapitre considère plusieurs formes de malentendus – fausses représentations, mécompréhension, traductions erronées et obstructions linguistiques – qui ses présentent dans deux nouvelles. Il ressort de cette analyse que les malentendus sont susceptibles de devenir les instruments de l'expression d'une résistance dans les sites hégémoniques de la langue et du pouvoir.
This chapter reviews the boron isotopic composition of the ocean floor, including pristine igneous oceanic crust such as mid-ocean ridge basalts and ocean island basalts and their implications for the B isotopic composition of the mantle. The chapter further discusses the B isotopic effects of assimilation of altered crustal materials in mantle-derived magmas. The systematics of seawater alteration on oceanic rocks are discussed, including sediments, igneous crust and serpentinization of ultramafic rocks and the respective marine hydrothermal vent fluids. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the secular evolution of the B isotopic composition of seawater.
Interview mit Katerina Teaiwa über ihr Buch zu den Umweltschäden und schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen auf der Insel Ocean Island (Banaba) aufgrund des Phosphatabbaus durch Besatzungs- und Kolonialmächte.