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Throughout the years of Belarusian independence, remnants from the Soviet Union have permeated the everyday lives of its citizens as well as the country's colloquial and political rhetoric, often thoroughly detached from their original cultural contexts, discourses, and imaginaries. But what can we learn from watching Soviet movies today? The movies in question bear complex meaning pertaining to different Soviet eras and transition periods. Through an informed viewing, we not only perceive the official agenda - be it political, ideological, or cultural - but also traces of social and political tensions, metaphors, and "clues" on historical reality. Historicizing these movies and understanding their initial cultural and social context as part of a sociocultural analysis of film allows to uncover implicit, often unintentional meanings inherent to this cinematic heritage. My analysis here will focus on the social drama "The Woman" ("Женщина"), a late masterpiece of Soviet avant-garde cinema directed by Yefim Dzigan and Boris Shreyber. Artistically and stylistically, this widely forgotten silent movie provides one of the most vivid and interesting pre-War filmic representations of collectivization and village life on Belarusian territory. Produced by Belgoskino, the first Belarusian state-run film studio, and released throughout the Soviet Union in the summer of 1932 through an all-Union distribution, "The Woman" portrays the difficulties of establishing life on a collective farm.
This paper relies on an unedited and unpublished nineteenth century love correspondence of a heterosexual couple from the German speaking area. The aim of this study is to contribute to the knowledge regarding the nineteenth century love experience of ordinary and unknown lovers. In fact, while there are plenty of books on love correspondences of famous personalities, little research has been dedicated to love letters and romantic experiences of 'ordinary and unknown' people. For this reason the main aim of this article is to shed light on love stories and love experiences that otherwise will fall into the abyss of oblivion. A new theory regarding the love experience in the nineteenth will be proposed: in this century love was perceived more in its material than in its abstract nature; I argue that in the nineteenth love was more about what people did, than to what they said. Lovers are in constant need of material and 'seeable' proof in order to perceive the love of their partners as real and authentic. The examples extrapolated from the following correspondence will corroborate this statement. Furthermore, this article has the purpose to underline the great value of love letters not only from an historical perspective (being evidence of past lives and dynamics), but also and more importantly from a cultural and societal one: analyzing love letters means to acquire knowledge not only about cultural and societal dynamics, but also and more importantly to add knowledge to the love discourse. In fact, they say a lot about the way people talked, expressed and materialized love in their daily lives. Correspondences without any publication in view are the most precious ones because they represent an unregulated and more spontaneous expression 'of the language of the heart'.
Rethinking Romanticism with Spinoza : encounter and individuation in Novalis, Ritter, and Baader
(2021)
Siarhei Biareishyk setzt sich mit Berührung bei Novalis, Joachim Ritter und Franz Baader auseinander, bei denen er ein materialistisches Denken findet, das starke Parallelen zur Philosophie Spinozas zeigt. Mit Novalis erweist sich Berührung - und nicht 'Begegnung' wie etwa bei Gilles Deleuze - als eine zentrale Denkfigur für Individuierungsprozesse und Konzepte der Transindividualität. Der um Novalis angesiedelte Kreis der 'Freiberger Romantik' bildet so ein interessantes Scharnier zwischen einem Denken von Berührung und aktuellen Debatten um einen neuen Materialismus.
This article takes the renowned study "Der Akt des Lesens" (1976) by Wolfgang Iser and its translation "The Act of Reading" (1978) as its starting point. The differences between the two texts are discussed in terms of Iser's own idea of translatability as a cultural practice that was outlined in the short text "On Translatability". This theoretical frame will shed light on the decisions made in his own translations, and will help to develop a conceptualization of self-translation as a practice inherent in cultural change. [...] I will propose a combination of two concepts, Iser's 'translatability' (in II.) and the notion of 'autocommunication' by Lotman (III.), to suggest a concept of self-translation that entails three interrelated aspects: a) translation as a rewriting of the text as such, b) translation as continued work on one's argument as well as c) the re-translation back to the original source as a manifestation of a change in one's thought structure - Änderungen der eigenen Denkstruktur, as one of Werner Heisenberg's papers is entitled, and to which I will come back in my conclusion (IV.). Hence, the focus is mainly systematic and conceptual, however, I will first comment on my example of self- and re-translation and start with a comparison of different versions of Iser's "Der Akt des Lesens" and the shorter texts that led to the actual monograph.
In the first half of this article I will explore Van Helmont's philosophy of language and translation, in part by contextualizing it within the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century traditions upon which he drew. Since Van Helmont is so explicit about the philosophy of language and translation that he developed, I will investigate in this article if he turned his philosophy into practice. Therefore, the second half of this article will discuss Van Helmont's practices of using and translating between his two main languages (Dutch and Latin). The way in which he employed the languages in which he wrote raises questions about his practice of self-translation and the use of language. Did his mother tongue always figure as the first language into which his thoughts were translated, or could it also have been Latin as the first language for his profession? Van Helmont might have been switching primary languages for the different purposes of his writings. Before going into more detail about his philosophy and use of language, I will briefly introduce this relatively unknown author to the reader.
February 18th 2024 marked the centenary of the birth of Evald Ilyenkov (1924–1979) - a brilliant and influential Soviet philosopher whose most important early works remained unpublished during his lifetime. Two days before Ilyenkov's 100th birthday, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was found dead in a Siberian prison colony; that news overshadowed the little attention given to Ilyenkov's anniversary in Russia. The manner in which Ilyenkov's centenary and Navalny's death were treated reflects memory culture in Putin's Russia, where the legacies of Soviet Marxism are often suppressed by ultra-nationalist propaganda. Abroad, Ilyenkov's prestige has seen a remarkable rise in recent years, accompanied by translations and new scholarship in, for example, Sweden, Ukraine, Peru, Turkey, Canada and Cuba.
Jeanette Winterson's newest novel "Frankissstein: A Love Story" revolves around technological innovation and its effects on human development. The book's examinations feature trans* character Ry Shelley and transhumanist Victor Stein who interprets Ry's transitioned body as a metaphor for his ideal transhumanist future. This metaphor is based on three main textually conceptualized similarities between trans* identity and transhumanism: a hybridity in Ry's gender identity and embodiment as well as in a transhumanist vision of future human identity, the dissolution of biological determinism and the autonomy to change one's body, associated with recent technological advancement. The novel characterizes this metaphorization process as questionable, positing it with a character who represents not just the Frankenstein archetype but a possibly metaphysical, non-human entity. However, despite this inherent critique of harmful practices of objectification and exploitation of trans* people, "Frankissstein" ultimately reproduces similar practices in other aspects of its trans* representation.
Starting from the editorial committee's proposal concerning strategies for the recognition of Global South researches, in this letter I indicate a number of broader impasses related to neoliberal academia in a context in which ecological crisis emerges as a major crisis of capital. To do so, I resort to concepts drawn from feminist, decolonial, and post-structuralist literature and bring them into dialogue with a Marxist framework of analysis.
For thirty years, Berlin was the metropole of the German colonial empire. For most German citizens, however, this statement is relatively unknown. Even though there is an increased interest in decolonial praxis within Berlin-based cultural and educational settings, the persistence of such efforts and their implications within larger society is hard to assess in advance. In response, this text proposes a walking tour through Berlin, highlighting places related to this part of German history. In doing so, it demonstrates the presence of many references to colonialism spread through the city and, more significantly, many initiatives and projects seeking to make this past more visible. By offering an overview of four specific locations within the city, this chapter hopes to critically reflect on the extensive trajectory of the ongoing struggles for historical reparations.
The following think piece explores what it means to exist in a culture of idols by questioning the universalistic practice of canonization. By rejecting homogenous Eurocentric thinking, this piece makes room for the voices of plurality and collective thinking with each other. To this end, it relies on feminist praxis to criticize the genius-based, self-contained understanding of creativity and success perpetuating within contemporary scientific research. Indeed, it presents a case for cultivating cultures of failure within academia and demonstrates with its own stylistic development how cultivating a stream of thoughts can speak to the fragmented and collective nature of the entangled process of thinking and writing.
Inner world and milieu : art, madness, and Brazilian psychiatry in the work of Nise da Silveira
(2024)
This short essay focuses on the work of Brazilian doctor Nise da Silveira, a pioneer in psychiatry who introduced artistic tools to work with psychiatric patients, especially those diagnosed as psychotic. She founded the Museum of Images from the Unconscious in 1952 inside an asylum in Rio de Janeiro to assemble and exhibit the works produced by her patients. As an iconoclast who did not systematize her theory, she engaged with several European psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and thinkers to produce a very innovative reflection and practical clinical work. Her work resonates in particular with French Institutional Psychotherapy, as well as with Frantz Fanon's psychiatric work in Algeria, but, differently from the former, places art at the core of its clinical method and proposes a radical positioning against every form of medicalized approach.
With reference to the Marx Seminars at the University of São Paulo, this chapter discusses the creation of a specific tradition in the social sciences that marks a crucial moment in the history of postcolonial and decolonial studies. By means of the concept of periphery, I reconstruct how this tradition refuted temporal and stadial dualisms. Moreover, I argue that the development of this new perspective in the social sciences must be understood in terms of its efforts to rethink Marx but also, and more importantly, by the need to rethink Brazil's place in the world. Following this thread, I analyse Roberto Schwarz's work as paradigmatic for a proper understanding of the centrality of the concept of periphery in these discussions.
During fieldwork, anthropologists are given many names that point to their intersectional placement regarding race, class, gender, nationality, and religion. Yet, careful consideration of vernacular forms of designation reveals that such generalizing categories do not always reflect the ways in which people are named and positioned in a given context. While acknowledging the relevance of intersectionality, this paper discusses the relationship between naming and social positionality through a comparative consideration of names employed to designate Dulley in Angola and Santos in Senegal. It explores how these designators, ascribed to the researchers by their interlocutors, contextually identify their positionality. Through concrete examples, it shows how this process of emplacement can both enable and restrict one's possibilities of action and experience.
Invitation, to exi(s)t
(2024)
This joint piece aspires to be a dialogue. In a dialogue, people speak and, most importantly, listen, from their respective positions. Drawing from Trinh T. Minh-ha's notion of speaking nearby, Dulley and Streva reflect on the relationship between authorship, authority, and authoritarianism; the parallel between listening and reading, on the one hand, and speaking and writing, on the other hand; the entanglement between disciplinary systems of knowledge and colonial structures of power; the opacity of others and the imperialistic drive to reduce them to transparency; the supposed subject of knowledge and the void. As they converse on these matters, they speak nearby authors from both the so-called Global South and the so-called Global North who are thus juxtaposed, further developed, and displaced towards a politics and ethics of fugitivity. What follows is an invitation to exi(s)t.
Focusing on the specific case of knowledge production in and about Iran, in this chapter, we discuss the risk of reproducing a Northern perspective in the attempts to produce knowledge on and through the Global South(s). We argue that such reproduction leads to cognitive suppression, further peripheralization, or even recolonization of the South(s). We also stress the lasting effects of methodological nationalism among attempts at decolonization and its political consequences, such as in the adoption of nativist discourses historically connected to the 'Islamic' Revolution by scholars focusing on the Global South(s) and in area studies concerning Iran. To avoid these effects, we suggest considering the politics of scale in our recognition and problematization of the hierarchization of Northern and Southern sites of knowledge production and their particularities.
In this reflection piece, I look at the feminist artistic landscape emerging in Berlin with its growing, diverse migrant community. I examine the ways in which women* artists challenge the imposed notions of their migrant status in the city and their states of belonging within it. I demonstrate this through two feminist initiatives I have been involved in that aim to amplify the voices of women* artists whose creative practices disrupt carefully constructed frameworks relating to borders of inclusion and exclusion. I argue that the artistic practices of women* in these networks are killjoy because they unapologetically get in the way, dismantling carefully constructed frameworks that delineate borders of inclusion and exclusion. By reflecting on homemaking practices in exile, I exemplify how feminisms from the global south decentralize claims to truth by taking the means of production into their own hands. By framing the chapter around the recent protests in Berlin unfolding in solidarity with the feminist revolution in Iran, I reveal the possible limits of such actions when they do not embrace intersectionality. Ultimately, I propose to invest in feminist artistic practices that destabilize exclusionary politics by creating visibility and bridging theory and practice.
This chapter is a journey of thought exploring decolonial critique as a situated practice while thinking through exilic consciousness and its constitutive conditions. I begin by reflecting on decolonialities to gesture toward varied forms of decolonial projects that need to be situated, given that each location generates different sets of questions/problems that demand different answers. In this way, I reconfigure the exilic condition, and the space of displacement in general, as a plurilingual space that unsettles various colonial forms of epistemic monolingualism predicated on the selfsufficiency of thought. To this end, I reflect on the potentiality of exilic consciousness to generate decolonial critique when thinking from/about the Global South. Finally, this chapter demonstrates the significance of acknowledging the diverse locations and trajectories of decolonial critique and the plurality of thought embedded within the exilic intellectual formation that can potentially undo colonial forms of knowledge-making and being in the world.
In this brief discussion, I reflect on the significance of using the category of the global south for reconfiguring the scope of the history of knowledge. While I see this as a productive paradigm shift that has already given rise to mould-breaking works, I focus here on the cross-hemispheric histories of extractive capitalism and how both colonial violence and anticolonial resistance have shaped knowledge-making. I argue that thinking through 'entangled ecologies' can be a tool for countering the existing conceptual order, which has led to the north-south division in the first place. Attending to epistemic and ontological entanglements would enable us to ask better and deeper questions about the increasingly complex interconnections across human and nonhuman worlds, especially given the planetary crises we face today.
This contribution gathers eight interviews with international scholars of different generations and disciplines who study Black European literatures: Elisabeth Bekers, Jeannot Moukouri Ekobe, Polo B. Moji, Deborah Nyangulu, Jeannette Oholi, Anne Potjans, Nadjib Sadikou, and Dominic Thomas. The aim is to make literary research on Black Europe more visible to scholars in comparative literature and to contribute to a discussion on research perspectives, theories, and future challenges and needs.
This article studies two African American examples of provincialising Europe "from the inside", James Baldwin's essay "Stranger in the Village" and Vincent O. Carter's "The Bern Book", both set in 1950's Switzerland. It investigates how these texts reverse the ethnographic gaze at the "other" and use the rural Swiss scenario to imagine Europe as historically backward. While the authors differ in their intentions, both acts of provincialisation leave the superiority of European high culture intact.
This article compares Chika Unigwe's novel "On Black Sisters' Street" and Sudabeh Mortezai's film "Joy", both about Nigerian women trafficked for sex work to Belgium and Austria respectively. They share a genre genealogy with slave narratives but are primarily concerned with European (neo-)colonialism. Drawing on postcolonial and intersectional theory as well as imagology, this article analyses the Black female re-imagination and strategic exoticisation of Europe in the two narratives.
The introduction informs about Black literary imaginations of Europe that reverse or complicate the (neo-)colonialist European gaze at the "African Other". It reviews the state of research and provides an overview of the aims and sources of the special issue, whose individual contributions take into account both national specificities and transnational contexts. Sandra Folie and Gianna Zocco emphasise the important role of comparative literature for the field of African European studies (and vice-versa).
How can music history help us understand the establishment of national character? This article discusses a prosaic text by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz as a medium for implementing stereotypical ideas of "the Italian" in German music historiography and, thereby, in public consciousness. It shows how particular musical qualities of the story's fictional protagonists are blurred with ideas of national character. Against this background, the predominant reception of the author Rochlitz in the realm of German music historiography can be reevaluated from a more transnational scholarly perspective. Key to this reassessment is investigation into the categories of fictional and musical characters with regard to notions of both "the German" and "the Italian."
This article contributes to the European history of musical nationalism with regard to operatic debates in the eighteenth century. The investigation reveals that within operatic debates national categories were used for all levels of the multimedia genre of opera: music, text, composer, and actor. Moreover, the relationship between national character and national taste was a highly critical point: there was general agreement that only outstanding aesthetic abilities enable composers to go beyond their own particular national character. Only in this respect could aesthetic abilities stand above national taste, which was said to be shaped by national character.
Throughout history, songs have been considered effective instruments to strengthen the formation of collective identities. Eighteenth-century Dutch songwriters engaged with this idea in their striving for national unity. Political songs from that period employ several tropes, and the music often reinforces such images through musical imagery and intertextual references. Moreover, the imagined identities voiced in the songs might have become embodied identities through the performative act of singing. Therefore, for an investigation of the construction of collective identities in songs, the imagological approach can be expanded to musical imagery and take into account cognitive theories explaining the effects of singing.
Italy has experienced a high number of earthquakes. However, the identity of "the Italians" has not yet been defined by their "landscape of wounds." Referring to an earthquake in central Italy (Amatrice) in August 2016, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published a controversial caricature of two wounded Italians standing alongside the "Lasagnes," a pile of bodies layered like the well- known Italian pasta dish. By analysing the caricature's text, intertext, and context, while drawing on imagology and geopoetics, this article aims to show how earthquakes are linked to Italian cultural stereotypes and national identity.
In visual narratives such as comics, national images are actually depicted. While Franco-Belgian comics have been the subject of detailed studies regarding the national stereotypes they convey, Flemish comics have been largely ignored. This article focuses on three albums of the Flemish comic series "Suske en Wiske", in which the heroes travel to a fictitious Eastern Bloc country, Japan, and China. It will examine how both heteroimages and auto-image are presented (visually, textually, and as part of the plot), and how comic characters may combine contradictory ethnotypes. As it will turn out, in the early album (1945) ethnotypes are perpetuated, whereas in later ones (1984, 2008) they are rather undermined.
Visual representations of sexual violence in the Bosnian War in Jasmila Žbanić's "Grbavica" (2006) and Angelina Jolie's "In the Land of Blood and Honey" (2011) reveal different dimensions of victim feminism. Both directors sought to raise awareness of the issue of wartime rape and to direct viewers' attention to the pain of the distant Other. An intersectional analysis of the two productions (one domestic and one US-based) helps convey the impact of national and gender stereotyping both on self-representations and on representations of Otherness. Moreover, the analysis of a cinematic response to the Western gaze encourages rethinking prevalent images of the so-called Balkans.
This article examines striking similarities between stereotypical characters in Caroline Lee Hentz's US-American plantation novel "The Planter's Northern Bride" (1854), and Charlotte Brontë's classic "Jane Eyre" (1847). Especially, a connection can be made between Hentz's Italian "Madwoman in the attic" Claudia, and Brontë's transatlantic Caribbean counterpart Bertha. An intersectional methodology performed through a close reading will show how both women are literally and metaphorically trapped within spaces and stereotypes. This article transfers imagology into a global setting while extending its scope beyond investigating national characteristics.
Nationality traditionally is one of imagology's key terms. In this article, I propose an intersectional understanding of this category, conceiving nationality as an interdependent dynamic. I thus conclude it to be always internally constructed by notions of gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, age, ability, and other identity categories. This complex and multi-layered construct, I argue, is formed narratively. To exemplify this, I analyse practices of stereotyping in Honoré de Balzac's "Illusions perdues" (1843) and Henry James's "The American" (1877) which construct the so-called 'Parisienne' as a synecdoche for nineteenth-century France.
Starting from the definition that stereotypes are based on categorization and attribution, this article first deals with the relationship between categorization and stereotyping as well as images and imagology. The multitude of categories and stereotypes used in the process of perception raises the question of which categories are decisive in which social contexts and how different social categories are intertwined. Following an examination of categories, stereotypes, and images, these questions of interdependence lead to the fourth important topic of this article: intersectionality.
This study compares and analyses hetero-stereotypes in Flaubert's travelogue "Voyage en Égypte" and Bachmann's prose fictions "Wüstenbuch" and "Das Buch Franza" in order to find out to what extent Flaubert resorts to stereotypical representations of the colonial Orient, and Bachmann perpetuates, transforms, or revises Flaubert's imagological discourse in the age of postcolonialism. Whereas Flaubert's sexist and racist narrative posits white superiority, Bachmann's protagonists subvert the male hegemonic stance of her French predecessor, insisting on white and male inferiority, causing just another stereotypization of race and gender.
The ways in which Self and Other are represented in fiction play a significant role in the formation of racial and other stereotypes in any culture. This article is a reading of the children's book "The Brave Rabbit in Africa" (1931) by Slovak modernist author Jozef Cíger-Hronský. It attempts to point out and analyse the ways in which racial and national identities are constructed in the written text of the book. Arguably, the story deploys colonialist motifs typical of Western literature in order to appraise the modern, civilized identity of the young Slovak nation.
A study on "The Travel Journal and Pictures" : Li Danlin's image of foreign lands and cultures
(2022)
This article studies the hetero-images in premodern Chinese painter Li Danlin's travelogue "The Travel Journal and Pictures" with regard to Daniel-Henri Pageaux's and Jean-Marc Moura's theories. Li draws pictures of foreign lands and cultures to express his exoticist interest, following the tradition entailed from "The Classic of Mountains and Seas". He transforms the reality and constructs two forms of hetero-images: those of Western cultures by applying clichés, and stereotyped images of indigenous peoples as "Manyi." These hetero-images give us insights into premodern Chinese ideology and offer an example of Occidentalism as a Sinocentric form of ethnotype.
The "World Geography" ("Wanguo dili quanji" 萬國地理全集) published in 1844 by the Protestant missionary Karl F.A. Gützlaff was the first geographical account to introduce some European ethnotypes to China. Based on recent archival findings, my article compares this book with both its presumed Western source and its rendering in the 1847 edition of Wei Yuan 魏源's "Maps and Documents of the Maritime Countries" ("Haiguo tuzhi" 海國圖志). It thus explores the role that interlingual and intralingual transfers respectively played first in negotiating and then renegotiating two European stereotypes in their early travels to and within the Qing empire.
This article aims to show that imagology is a promising method for analysing images of the European Other and the Turkish Self as expressed in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's novel "Huzur" (1948; trans. "A Mind at Peace", 2007). The narrative challenges the rhetoric of early Turkish nationalism by promoting a synthesis of the national present with both the melancholically evoked Ottoman heritage and with European cultures. At the same time, the novel's protagonists stand for diverse and often contradicting conceptions of Self and Other and thus provide an insight into the various identity conflicts present in Republican Turkey.
This article compares two similar yet never compared cases of intra-European othering: Spain and the South Slavic region. Their common denominator is what I call the Periphery Problem: a hierarchical cultural difference between Europe's symbolic centre (Western Europe) and its exotic peripheries. Using paradigmatic examples intertextually linked to Prosper Mérimée, this article focuses both on the centre (exemplified by Mérimée), and the peripheries' recent responses to Mérimée through meta-images (your image of others' image of you). The structural commonalities in characterization and the entanglements of internal and external images show that national characterization in Europe is profoundly a transnational phenomenon.
This article applies imagology to "migration literature" - a genre that is described as a "peripheral phenomenon" in the 2007 handbook "Imagology", but that requires more thorough attention due to the increasing number of significant writings by immigrant authors. Focusing on works by Rafik Schami, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Amara Lakhous, Igiaba Scego, Hatice Akyün, Yoko Tawada, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and considering theoretical observations by Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, and Homi Bhabha, this article analyses how most texts prefer arguments and metaphors of everyday life to the traditional images and stereotypes of nationalistic discourse. It concludes by distinguishing two perspectives central to most of them: that of an "in-between" and/or a "Third Space."
The fall of the Berlin Wall and its literary representations have often been described as a purely (white) German affair, as a discourse regarding (East/West) German identity. Taking on Leerssen's claim for a trans-/postnational imagology, this article provides an analysis of two novels depicting the fall of the Berlin Wall from transnational, not-(only)-German perspectives: Yadé Kara's "Selam Berlin" (2003) and Paul Beatty's "Slumberland" (2008). Comparing images and stereotypes used by both the Turkish-German narrator of Kara's and the African American narrator of Beatty's novel, it aims to undertake an exemplary case study of how imagology may be employed in contexts characterized by complex interferences of national, ethnic/racial, and urban ascriptions of belonging.
This article analyses processes of collective and individual identity formation in European travel writing from the late eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century and argues that these processes are based not least on the national stereotypes described and performed in the texts. I explore how the genre-specific stylistic elements of multilingualism and intertextuality inform the performance of auto- and hetero-images and in doing so suggest converging travel writing studies and imagological studies. To illustrate my thesis, I analyse travelogues by Charles Dickens and Karl Philipp Moritz.
This article outlines a production-oriented imagology and equips the imagological toolkit with concepts and terminology from cultural memory studies, reception aesthetics, narratology, rhetoric, and text linguistics. It thereby presents the theoretical framework which makes it possible to analyse generic elements without a national connotation with regard to their function in generating a national image. Using as examples genres from English Romanticism and how they evoke Englishness, the article highlights the aesthetic complexity of national images and their range of variation. Simultaneously it paves the way for a more nuanced deconstruction of these images.
Images, the main object of imagological analysis, are by nature value-charged. Despite this fact, previous research has neglected the axiological foundations of imagology. This article discusses in brief some fundamental axiological questions of imagological investigations. The here analysed corpus includes an eighteenth-century visual-textual source (the so-called "Leopold-Stich"), and a famous imagological handbook ("Imagology", by Beller and Leerssen). The analysis starts with the problem of value connotations of the signifier of geocultural spaces and continues with a cluster of questions concerning the nature of value of imagotypical representations. The final part examines two relevant imagological phenomena—diachronic changes in evaluation of certain geocultural spaces and a somewhat opposite phenomenon of evaluative apriorism.
Imagological analysis can be fruitfully applied to political discourse, most importantly the discourse of international antagonism and national self-positioning used in government decision-making circles. Historians studying that discourse have tended to see its rhetoric of national characterization merely as a distracting accompaniment to actual, factually driven policies and developments. This, it is argued here, questionably presupposes that those policies were never driven by anything but cerebral reasons of state (such as these are seen by latter-day historians); it makes us unduly heedless of an important historical corpus throwing light on the force of emotive and national prejudice in policymaking.
With this volume, the editors Katharina Edtstadler, Sandra Folie, and Gianna Zocco propose an extension of the traditional conception of imagology as a theory and method for studying the cultural construction and literary representation of national, usually European characters. Consisting of an instructive introduction and 21 articles, the book relates this sub-field of comparative literature to contemporary political developments and enriches it with new interdisciplinary, transnational, intersectional, and intermedial perspectives. The contributions offer [1] a reconsideration and update of the field's methods, genres, and theoretical frames; [2] trans-/post-national, migratory, and marginalized perspectives beyond the European nation-state; [3] insights into geopolitical dichotomies such as Orient/Occident; [4] intersectional approaches considering the entanglements of national images with notions of age, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race; [5] investigations of the role of national images in visual narratives and music.
With this volume, the editors Katharina Edtstadler, Sandra Folie, and Gianna Zocco propose an extension of the traditional conception of imagology as a theory and method for studying the cultural construction and literary representation of national, usually European characters. Consisting of an instructive introduction and 21 articles, the book relates this sub-field of comparative literature to contemporary political developments and enriches it with new interdisciplinary, transnational, intersectional, and intermedial perspectives. The contributions offer [1] a reconsideration and update of the field's methods, genres, and theoretical frames; [2] trans-/post-national, migratory, and marginalized perspectives beyond the European nation-state; [3] insights into geopolitical dichotomies such as Orient/Occident; [4] intersectional approaches considering the entanglements of national images with notions of age, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race; [5] investigations of the role of national images in visual narratives and music.
Havana's apartment-galleries have been vital venues for the city's art scene since the 1990s, hosting art exhibitions, workshops, and conferences. In the context of Cuba's limited art market and dearth of cultural institutions with international reach, these residential spaces have offered artists a unique opportunity to display their work and to connect with international art circuits. Focusing on the histories of three specific apartment-galleries - El Apartamento, Estudio Figueroa-Vives, and Avecez Art Space - this chapbook reflects on the complex interplay of the local and the global in the 'worlding' of cultural institutions.
As is well known, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and what is considered beautiful is contextual. The itinerant symposium "Medicine, Beauty, and the Body: Materials, Texts and Artifacts" which took place from September 24 to 28, 2023 in Innsbruck, Salzburg and Vienna explored this topic in an interdisciplinary way and examined the intertwining of beauty, health and medicine from antiquity to early modern Europe. The event was a cooperation between the programme "Figurations of Transitions" of the inter-university institution Science and Art of the Paris-Lodron-University Salzburg and the University Mozarteum in Salzburg, Schloss Ambras and the Museumsverband Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. Not only the sheer diversity of sources in the field of historical beauty cultures became apparent, but also their circulation and transformation through time and space as well as their significance as social, political, religious, and economic variables. The practical approach of the event in particular showed new paths in the field of historical beauty studies.
In scholarly discussions, ancient didactic poetry is sometimes considered a 'technical' form of literature. The 'technical' aspect of didactic poems would seem to concern mainly their contents, not the poems' form, which is described instead as literary. And so, didactic poetry appears to be both 'technical' and, at the same time, more than just technical. To what extent were didactic poems considered 'artistic' in our modern sense? Or should we call them simply 'technical' poems in the sense that they deal with 'techne' as a form of practical expertise? Was the 'art' of ancient didactic poems one specific domain that ancient audiences easily identified? Or was this somewhat unclear? These are some of the key questions that I am concerned with, as I wish to explore to what extent the ancient poets themselves utilize the idea of 'techne' and what is the added value that the concept of 'techne' brings to their poetic works. I will present three authors to address these questions, namely in order: Ovid, whom I take as example of a poet who grandly advertises the presence of 'ars' in his poem; then, Archestratus of Gela, the first, partly extant poet to write 'didactic poems' in Greece in the manner that will impose itself in the following centuries, and an early example of how this poetry engages with what idea(s) about 'ars'; and, lastly, Aratus of Soli, the likely most canonical author of this type of poetry in Antiquity. This selection of authors, to be sure, does not provide a full picture of didactic poetry in Antiquity, with all its peculiarities. But it does have some paradigmatic meaning for two reasons. First, Archestratus and Aratus are significant within the history of didactic poetry, as I anticipated, because the former is a pioneer in this genre and the latter is a widely popular and influential author. Thus, analysis of their poems is useful to understand also certain features of the didactic genre more in general. Ovid's "Ars Amatoria", on the other hand, while perhaps being less influential for the whole history of the genre, becomes paradigmatic in so far as one explores the issue of didactic 'art'. For, this work features the topic of 'techne' much more extensively than many other didactic poems. But before I move to these authors, I wish to make a preamble about ancient didactic poetry as genre. For one might then wonder whether these questions about didactic poetry and 'techne' would find an easy solution if one considered first the meaning and category of the 'didactic' - a name that by itself seems to evoke the idea of knowledge and the sharing of a certain form of expertise.
"Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories" presents a unique form of creative scholarship. It employs Dante's late medieval take on Ulysses and his tragic pursuit of 'virtue and knowledge' as a prism that refracts an ancient myth of journey and return into a modern story of discovery and nostalgia. Working notes, fragments from Ulysses' many stories, personal memories, illuminations, and rewritings combine to form a new chain of narratives about the desire to create, the art of travelling, and the will of self-reinvention.
Through a contrastive comparison between the classic detective Sherlock Holmes and contemporary research agencies such as Forensic Architecture, this paper examines a recent shift in the "evidential paradigm" (Ginzburg). Based on the role that the "evidential paradigm" plays for critical literary and cultural studies, the state-supporting positivism of Sherlock Holmes is distinguished from the state-critical constructivism of Forensic Architecture: Whereas Holmes conceived of the trace as a positive datum, in Forensic Architecture's virtual investigations it becomes an emergent from data. However, this juxtaposition needs to be differentiated when critically examining the "aesthetics of objectivity" (Charlesworth) of the animated videos Forensic Architecture use to present their findings. The essay closes by asking what conclusions can be drawn from the new forms of knowledge generation for the methodology of literary and cultural studies.
Das zusammengesetzte chinesische Wort 東西 hat die Doppelbedeutung von 'Ost-West' und 'Ding' bzw. 'Objekt'. In der Gedichtsammlung des Hongkonger Schriftstellers Leung Ping-kwan mit dem Titel 東西 ('Dong-Xi', Ost-West-Angelegenheiten) erscheinen der Osten und der Westen jeweils als eine Erweiterung des anderen, wobei ihre anhaltenden Interaktionen eine vitale Welt offenbaren, die unaufhörlich im Entstehen begriffen ist. Umgekehrt erweisen sich das Globale und das Lokale nicht nur als geografische Signifikanten, sondern auch als zeitliche Indikatoren von Sinneswahrnehmungen, Erinnerungen, Erfahrungen, Gefühlen und Vorstellungen, deren dynamisches Zusammenspiel eine poetische Welt fortwährend erschafft und wieder auflöst. Leungs Lyrik, die die traditionelle poetische Form des 'Dinggedichts' aufgreift, versucht durch die Würdigung alltäglicher Objekte, deren Formen, Gerüche und Farben im modernen Leben oft ignoriert werden, zu einer Wiederverzauberung der Welt zu gelangen. Leungs Dinggedichte führen uns in eine Welt, in der Objekte von ihrer Funktionalität gelöst und mit einer eigenen Sensibilität versehen werden. Dabei verändert sich auch die Sensibilität der Leser:innen. Leungs Dinggedichte können als Inbegriff von 'Sinngemeinschaften' gelesen werden, deren Zusammenhalt von der Bereitschaft der Mitglieder zur Offenheit für Andersartigkeit sowie zur eigenen Veränderung abhängt.
Der sizilianische Dichter und Romanautor Giuseppe Bonaviri - 1924 in Mineo bei Catania geboren und 2009 in Frosinone nahe Rom verstorben - gründete 1984 den öffentlichen Gedichtpark "Il libro di pietra" (dt. "Das Buch aus Stein") in Arpino, dem Geburtsort des berühmten Staatsmannes, Redners und Rhetorikers Marcus Tullius Cicero. Zu diesem Anlass schenkte der seit 1980 wiederholt für den Nobelpreis vorgeschlagene, sein Leben lang auch als Arzt tätige und schon früh nach Mittelitalien ausgewanderte Schriftsteller der Stadt Arpino das Gedicht "Il bianchissimo vento" (1984, dt. "Der weißeste Wind"), das dort noch heute als Gründungsgedicht in Stein gemeißelt im öffentlichen Raum permanent ausgestellt ist. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht Bonaviris europäisches, kollaborativ angelegtes Kulturprojekt als Blaupause eines literarischen Glokalisierungsformats unter den Aspekten seiner Transkulturalität, dekolonialisierten Literarizität, weltliterarischen Parametern und kommunikativen Transmedialität. Bonaviris lokal verwurzeltes und zugleich kosmopolitisch ausgerichtetes, postmodernes Kulturkonzept verweist durch seine vielfältigen Synergieeffekte nicht nur auf die zeitlose Relevanz von Literatur und Lyrik, sondern auch auf die Schlüsselrolle einer transkulturell wirkungsmächtigen Kreativität und zukunftsorientierten 'humanitas'.
La plupart des théories de la littérature mondiale ont émergé pendant les années de l'ascension de la mondialisation néolibérale et supposent que cette ascension se poursuivra. En conséquence, l'avenir du roman mondial suscite une grande inquiétude, compte tenu de l'hégémonie de l'anglais et de la mondialisation d'un modèle culturel particulier. Des événements plus récents, que ce soit le Brexit et l'élection de Donald Trump ou la pandémie de COVID-19, remettent en cause l'inéluctabilité de la mondialisation de diverses manières, même s'ils laissent présager des avenirs encore plus inquiétants. Cependant, ces défis propres à la mondialisation peuvent présenter de nouvelles opportunités pour le roman mondial: des opportunités de raconter des crises globales dans des contextes glocaux.
Media and abstraction
(2019)
The question to be discussed in this essay concerns the relation between different media and the distinction between concrete and abstract entities or objects. [...] But what is the motivation for this paper? To put it bluntly - there seems to be a certain tendency in recent media studies to reject abstract entities and objects. And this comes as no surprise, given the insistence on materiality in media studies (but is materiality really identical to concreteness?).
Goats remain the most viable livestock in the warzone of South Lebanon because of their compatibility with wartime environments and ordnance. They can survive periods of scarcity during active war, occupations, or invasions by foraging for food and eating almost anything. Most crucially, goats are small and light and can graze in the borderland's many minefields without setting off the hidden explosives designed to kill humans, who are not as light-footed. In this essay, Munira Khayyat explores how an enduring, explosive military technology is both domesticated and resisted by a homegrown, anti-mine survival assemblage.
This essay is an excerpt from Jumana Emil Abboud's ongoing journal, which she started keeping in 2010. With the help of photographer Issa Freij, the artist identified spirited water spots in the topography of Palestine, based on her childhood memories and a 1922 study on "Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine". The text was written as part of a performance by Abboud at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in 2016.
A series of creative non-fiction short stories based on ethnographic interviews and participant observation in Iraq from 2014–2022, Kali Rubaii's reflection asks: what is a toxic affect? In these stories, war-torn ecologies are packed with living and non-living beings that emerge in the floor of a mosque, in a graveyard, from a pillow, a toilet, and construction sites in Iraq.
Who's afraid of ideology?
(2023)
Artist Marwa Arsanios shares textual fragments from research she conducted for the first and second parts of a video trilogy titled "Who's Afraid of Ideology?" Meditating on the voiding effects of war, and the ecological and affective texture of communal resistance and eco-feminist praxis as they emerge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Lebanon, and northern Syria, the text takes us to ecological milieux made of wild medicinal plants, fig trees, Kurdish guerrillas, and farmers in a women-only commune.
How can the Armenian genocide be considered in terms of its ecological roots and remnants? Umut Yıldırım explores the more-than-human flora and fauna indigenous to the banks of the Tigris river in Upper Mesopotamia - in particular, centenarian mulberry trees - as resistant roots that register the evidentiary ecologies of the Armenian genocide through the Turkish state's denialist present and its ongoing war against the Kurds.
Umut Yıldırım's introduction combines the genres of literature review and commentary. It re-examines contemporary works on posthuman life to articulate ecological life-and-death politics within the context of colonial, imperial, and genocidal mass violence, and their entangled environmental legacies and actualities. A dissident repertoire of anthropological and artistic research is offered, which examines the ecological impact of war through the perspectives of human and more-than-human actors whose racialized and geographically regimented lives endure and counter ongoing environmental destruction.
"War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East" identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East. It creates a counter archive of texts by ethnographers and artists, and enables divergent worlds to share a conversation through the crevices of mass violence across species. Delving into vital encounters with mulberry trees, wild medicinal plants, jinns, and goats, as well as bleaker experiences with toxic war materials like landmines, this volume expands an ecological sensorium that works through displacement, memory, endurance, and praxis.
Shigeko Kubota's pioneering video "Sexual Healing" (1998) presents an ambivalent take on her disabled husband Nam June Paik in physical therapy. Accompanied by Marvin Gaye's titular pop song, it considers love, sex, and care in old age within the much-debated field of Fluxus collaborations, and its ideal of working together as equals when fusing life and art. "Worlding Love, Gender, and Care" delves into the four decades of Kubota and Paik's time together, reflects on feminist worlding, and investigates the vital contribution of female Fluxus artists to art history.
In this paper, I will address the issue of translation as a critique of autochthony that emerges in the context of Fritz Mauthner's linguistic scepticism. Translation, for Mauthner, becomes a privileged prism through which to consider identity and belonging, as well as a way of understanding uprootedness, since language is a continuous product of borrowing, bastardization, stratification, and contingency. According to Mauthner, languages are not possession, but borrowing; not purity, but contagion; not an abstract crystallization, but transit. Therefore, love of the mother tongue - the only way to conceive patriotism - is not a physical connection with the land, roots, or nation, but a refuge, an always precarious 'Heimat' (home).
'The Staircase Wit; or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller's Prose' explores idioms and 'Sprachbilder' as poetic views of the mother tongue. This exploration involves a special focus on Müller's Nobel lecture, considered as both a compendium and an enactment of her meditations on language, on the nature of writing, and on the creative process. While Müller frequently employs idioms in her articles, lectures, and novel titles, she never uses them in a superficial way or as a mere reproduction of common or daily speech. Rather, as this essay argues, idioms in Müller's prose are indicative of her attitude toward language and toward the mother tongue in general. In the Nobel lecture as well as elsewhere, idioms serve a dual, occasionally conflicting purpose, combining the need for the 'singularity' of aesthetic experience with the search for a new kind of 'conventionality'.
This article reads Albert Cohen's "Le Livre de ma mère", which mourns the death of his mother, as a poetics of love and loss. It is a poetics of otherness that disavows the claim to expression and selfhood. The mother, being the paradigmatic figure of otherness, is a figure for literature, a form of language that is characterized by saying things differently. Literature itself is a motherly space insofar as it others the language of the self. This argument is developed along close readings of both the French original and the English translation of Cohen's work, following three thematic axes: first, the peculiar kinship of love and death; second, the mother as the other; third, literature as filio-logy: a logic of filiation that does not leave the self unchanged.
This article reads Fred Moten's collection "B Jenkins" as literalizing the poetic appeal to the mother tongue to reveal its mediated essence. Approaching its first and last poems in terms of Friedrich Kittler's techno-psychological history of the family casts Moten's detuning of natural language in terms of cultural mastery streaked with affirmative disfluency. With the 'cant', slang slides towards a broader awareness of the limits of knowledge. There, language may emerge for perceiving the role of the technological mother tongue in our postnational age.
The essay focusses on how Woolf's quest for a 'universal' language of the mind can be read as redefining and even reinventing the notion of mother tongue. In particular, "The Waves" offers a reconfiguration of the process of language acquisition that symbolically reverses its linear development. Woolf's stress on a dynamic, ever-moving conception of language, her connection with Coleridge's perspectives on language, and her view of ancient Greek as an ideal lost language reveal her questioning of the idea of a culturally homogeneous and monolithic language. The notion of mother tongue is thus reconfigured by the writer in terms of a dreamed and imagined ideal language combining familiarity and foreignness, reality and ideality, exactness and the perpetual deferral of meaning.
This chapter proposes the scar as a productive image to conceptualize the relation of speakers to the particular language otherwise called mother tongue, native or first language. Thinking of this relation in terms of a scar avoids the biopolitical implications of concepts derived from the context of family and birth that have, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, come to present language as basis of a nation state. The image of the scar also avoids the biographical normalization and linguistic hierarchization implied in the term first language, as both are equally important biopolitical strategies of forming individuals and communities. Thinking of the mother tongue in terms of a scar emphasizes the intensity of lasting formation and identification entailed by acquiring this particular language, and it highlights the violence inherent to these processes that tends to be covered up by the naturalizing and family-related imagery of native or mother tongue as well as by the favour implied in the term first language.
The mother tongue at school
(2023)
This paper focuses on a key contradiction in nineteenth century nationalist ideology, namely the opposition between the emphasis on the sacred status of the mother tongue, on the one hand, and the use of universal mandatory schooling as a means of homogenization, on the other. The influential philologist Jacob Grimm insisted that only people whose mother tongue was German counted as members of the German nation; the mother tongue was the key criterion of authentic belonging. Yet Grimm also realized that mandatory schooling imposed a uniform language across a wide territory, wiping out local dialects and effectively giving shape to a more linguistically unified people. He thus witnessed how modern mass instruction forged a more standardized culture at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language within families. In Grimm's writings on education, the valorization of the mother is continually disturbed by the presence of a surrogate figure, the school teacher.
This chapter examines Edmond Jabès, who chose to write his oeuvre in French despite his Jewish-Arabic origins and his being conversant in both Hebrew and Arabic. French was never a true 'mother tongue' to him but rather 'a foreign one'. This poetical choice was also instrumental to his creation of a cosmos that is very clearly defined by 'la page blanche', or the 'blank page'. His writing develops this idea, both literally and metaphorically. A blank sheet is the only thing a writer has to work with at the start of every writing act, therefore it represents a kind of material opposition that all writers must overcome. It represents in this context an existential nothingness that precedes and simultaneously escapes both human and divine creation. In Jabès's writings, a blank page has two connotations at once: a condition for writing and nothingness. This ambivalent condition results in the paradoxical assumption that his 'mother tongue is a foreign language', because it cannot offer the same spiritual intimacy as another language, say, the Holy Language, and because the writer's 'mother tongue' - and, by extension, human language - is always impure and infiltrated by foreignness.
This essay approaches the problem of untying the mother tongue using Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's critique of onto-typology, along with the concept of the 'outre-mère' (the 'beyond-mother'), a limit-figure he and Jean-Luc Nancy devised in their critical assessments of psychoanalysis and its relationship to politics and the problem of mimesis. The essay argues that it will not be possible to deconstruct the figure of the mother tongue, or to untie ourselves from it, as long as we leave unquestioned both the theoretical dependence on figuration and our affective tie ('Gefühlsbindung') to theory.
This chapter argues against the view that Derrida's emphasis on change makes him complicit in the neoliberal requirement of flexibility that results both in precarity and in the dominance of English. To the contrary, the essay argues that Derrida's idea of 'différance' includes the view that openness both involves loss and is always partial (since incision involves excision), that the singular is precious, and that deconstruction is justice since it is alert to what is excluded even by efforts at inclusiveness. Examples of the preciousness and loss of the singular are circumcision (where incision is excision), hospitality (in which unconditional hospitality has material limitations and conditions), subjectivity (which is never based on full presence), language (which both is my own and comes from an other), and neighbourhoods (since they continue only by incorporating new people). Deconstruction, the essay concludes, need not be complicit in neoliberal dominance but, properly understood, makes us aware of the power dynamics by which the openness of plurilingualism can lead to the dominance of English.
"Untying the Mother Tongue" explores what it might mean today to speak of someone's attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of 'mother tongue', rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions.
Report on the Workshop "Trust, Crisis, Catastrophe III: Practices," organized by Nina Doejen, Gerald Hartung, Katharina Kalthoff, Florian Kappeler, and Cécile Stehrenberger, January 18–20, 2023, University of Wuppertal (Germany).
Connecting narrative worlds
(2014)
The essay will focus on three of the "many faces of irreversibility", sketching a history of irreversibility in 20th-century Russian thought: The abstract irreversibility of time in physics, the 'embodied' irreversibility of biological evolution and, finally, the irreversibility of cultural processes. The first part will trace the history of irreversibility in 19th-century physics and biology. The second part will discuss Vladimir Vernadsky's theory of biological time as an attempt to synthesize physical and biological irreversible processes ('neobratimye protsessy') as phenomena of asymmetry in space-time. The third part will look at the migration of scientific ideas of irreversibility into the theory of culture, i.e., Juri Lotman's semiotic theory of irreversibility as unpredictable and unrepeatable processes of culture. In this three-step sketch, the history of irreversibility will be outlined as one of spatialization (from an abstract law to the image of 'time's arrow') and of specialization (from the law of entropy to the case of the generation of meaning).
This article follows the conceptual history of regulation in the Russian and Soviet context from the late 19th to mid-20th century and emphasizes its ecological dimension. Considering that regulation is a fundamentally interdisciplinary concept applied in biology, economics, law, or political science, such a history cannot strictly limit itself to the conceptual use of regulation in ecological theory. Here, ecology is rather generally understood as a scientific knowledge of nature that is being formed in various sciences throughout the 19th and 20th century by reintegrating knowledge generated in such different disciplines as natural history, biology, medicine, physics, or physiology. This paper exemplarily traces the constitutional process of ecology as a science with regard to the concept of regulation by acknowledging the transdisciplinary and sometimes metaphorical use of the concept and its oscillation between the organic and the social, the natural and the artificial, the mechanic and the dynamic, the intrinsic and the extrinsic.
Metabolism has long served as a broad organizing concept in Russian and Soviet culture for the exchange of material and energy between organisms and their environment. The Russian term 'obmen veshchestv', literally meaning "exchange of substances", semantically ranges beyond the Latinate 'metabolizm' (metabolism) and provides a framework for reflecting on bodies and material objects as open systems engaged in a constant process of transformation. 'Obmen veshchestv' appears in public discourse in mid-19th century Russia as a calque from the German term 'Stoffwechsel' (or 'Wechsel der Materie'). Its usage in Russia reflects the enduring influence of German science. In this entry, I will explore the development and expansion of this concept of material and energy exchange between organisms and their environment in Russia and the Soviet Union. In the course of a century, metabolism migrated from discussions of plant nutrition into physiology, thermodynamics, and ultimately into the Soviet practice of state economic planning. This entry will therefore pay particular attention to the early Soviet period when existing debates on metabolism took on new urgency as tools for praxis on every scale, from the body of the individual worker to humanity's future collective management of planetary material and energy flows.
In search for an ecological concept defining a "whole complex of organisms inhabiting a given region" with more methodological value than 'complex organism' or 'biome' and 'biotic community', the British phytocenologist Arthur Tansley introduced the term 'ecosystem' in 1935. [...] Independently of each other, other scientists from different countries also recognized the interconnectedness of all phenomena on the Earth's surface, resulting in the parallel coining of various notions. The Russian Botanist Vladmir Sukachev (1880–1967) introduced the term 'biogeotsenoz' ('biogeocoenosis' or 'biogeocoenose'), which was broadly used in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe. It was introduced into Russian in two stages: Following the forestologist Georgii Morozov (1867–1920), who systematically implemented Karl Möbius's term 'biocoenosis', Sukachev first suggested the term 'geotsenoz' ('geocoenosis') in 1942. It was meant to link the earth's surface with its inhabitants and abiotic environmental factors in a dynamic unit. However, in 1944, he changed geocoenosis into biogeocoenosis (BGC), implementing an integral connection with Vladimir Vernadsky's (1863–1945) concepts of the biosphere and the biogeochemical cycles. According to Sukachev, BGC came close to Tansley's notion of the ecosystem which also brings together a biocoenosis with its habitat (the ecotope). However, both terms were not used synonymously: as a more general term, ecosystem was not precise enough to classify the unit of nature itself, whereas the BGC, in accordance with Vernadsky's concept of 'living matter', did not include all abiogenic abiotic factors of the ecosystem. Also, the notions of 'facies' and 'landshaft', which were used by physical geographers, were discussed as similar conceptualization.
Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of living matter is central to his biogeochemistry, the science he founded. For several reasons, his original understanding of living matter is one of the most complex notions in the history of the life sciences. First, biogeochemistry is by definition an interdisciplinary enterprise that embraces biology, including evolutionary theory, geology, and chemistry, and combines them into a unique research program. Second, if understood in the original sense as used by Vernadsky, living matter is a concept built into idiosyncratic metaphysics constructed around the so-called principle of life's eternity. Third, the concept of living matter reflects the specificity of Vernadsky's sophisticated philosophy of science as he insisted that 'scientific thought' is a planetary phenomenon as well as a geological force. In our contribution, we will introduce Vernadsky's concept of living matter in its historical context. Accordingly, we will also give some chronology of Vernadsky's work related to the growth of his biosphere concept highlighting the 'Ukrainian' period as it is in this period that he intensively elaborated on the notion of living matter. This will be followed by his theory of living matter as it was formulated in his major works of the later period. We are going to locate the notion of living matter within Vernadsky's theoretical system and demonstrate that he regarded his theory of the living as an evolutionary theory complementary to that of Charles Darwin from the very beginning. Additionally, we will briefly present Vladimir Beklemishev's concept of 'geomerida' which he developed at approximately the same time as Vernadsky was elaborating on his 'living matter' to highlight the specificity of the latter's methodology.
The Soviet Union is remembered as a lab for socioeconomic changes on larges scales and environmental catastrophes: the Chernobyl disaster, the Aral Sea tragedy, and ecocide. However, little is known about the groundbreaking concepts and theories of Russian and early Soviet science which laid the foundation for systemic ecological thinking, environmental consciousness for nature conservation, and corresponding initiatives of the revolutionary years after 1917. The isolation of Eastern Europe that came as a result of Stalinism and the Cold War led to Soviet science developing its own scientific approaches and terminology during the 20th century. This does not only include ideological constructions and practices such as the pseudo-scientific Lysenkoism which outlawed genetics and led to disastrous effects on agriculture, the people, and the scientific community. Soviet science has also managed to continue and unfold the new concepts and interdisciplinary dynamics of the ecological turn on the threshold of the 20th century, a development which, at that time, was only sporadically noted in the West. In the context of its thematic focus on Eastern European ecological terminology, this issue discusses a selection of these concepts.
Self Study is a genre-bending work of autophilosophy. It opens a rare, rear window into the schizoid position of self-sufficient withdrawal and impassive indifference. This inability to be enriched by outer experiences feeds the relentless suspicion that hell is other people. Laying bare his life and work, Kishik engages with psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cultural inquiry to trace loneliness across the history of thought, leading to today's shut-in society and the autonomous subject of liberal capitalism.
Aumiller writes lists to externalize what overwhelms her. To be in control. To master and move on. Yet, her lists circle back to her. The process of writing the same list every day or the same act of writing the list is a looping. She returns to herself, to the parts she can remember and to the parts she can't remember, but also can't leave behind.
Usually, fears and phobias range under anxiety disorders, and are listed in psychiatric manuals. Their variety seems infinite, and their severity varies from a slight uneasiness or tension to a condition in which a state of great panic is induced by the specific stimulus, which can be an object, an animal, a number, people, spaces, ideas, or a particular situation. The list of fears by Czech artist Eva Kot'átková is part of the installation "Asylum" that was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2013. Kot'átková's works often reflect on the processes that restrict and manipulate people within institutions such as psychiatric hospitals or schools.
Proust list impulse
(2022)
Lists litter Marcel Proust's pages of "À la recherche du temps perdu" ("In Search of Lost Time"), but also the works about it. This short contribution collects together a number of those lists, and offers some reflection on the list's place and function within the work, on the level of the sentence and as a form in its own right.
This short essay offers thoughts on bell hooks's use of the list form in the phrase 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy'. While this list suggests that the social forces it contains work together in one unified direction, we can also look to instances in which they pull in opposing directions. However, the function of the list may not be to faithfully map the complexities of social life, but, rather, in its reduction and simplicity, to enable us to believe that social transformation is possible.
On the list
(2022)
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction - as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction - as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
Law is other wor(l)ds
(2022)
This paper turns to the thought of Yan Thomas to address the way of constructing categories and operating through them that is typical of law. The art of law displays a special quality: the reduction of the 'things' of the social world through the construction of categories, and the use of these same categories to conduct legal operations. The paper argues that the quintessential legal performance is instituting, and it finally asks how to exercise a legal imagination for Gaia.
The question of home is a complicated one. While home is emplaced, the notion of home does not simply point to just a location. This chapter thus utilizes what I call the trope of the 'vignette' to look at the concept of home in order to identify some aspects of what constitutes and/or (re)creates it for displaced individuals. It does so by performing a close reading of key moments in the film "Salt of this Sea" by Annemarie Jacir and the collection of essays "The Idea of Home" by John Hughes.
The chapter explores the dimension of the living present as a form of temporal reduction, looking at its manifestation in literary texts. Bazzoni proposes here a focus on the living present as different from a still, eternal moment, and contrasts the experience of the living present with the reduction at play in trauma. Finally, the author discusses the affective, ethical, and political dimensions of the temporality of the living present as a site of subjectivation, which effects a counter-reduction of normative discourses.
In the age of pervasive computing the way our body interacts with reality needs to be reconceptualized. The reduction of embodiment is a problem for computer music since this music relies heavily on different layers of (digital) technology and mediation in order to be produced and performed. The article shows that such a mediation should not be conceived of as an obstacle but rather as a constitutive element of a permanent, complex negotiation between the artist, the machinery, and the audience, aimed at shaping a different temporality for musical language (as the Italian artist Caterina Barbieri develops).
Nothing beyond the name : towards an eclipse of listening in the psychotherapeutic enterprise
(2022)
What are the different kinds of reduction that take place in a psychotherapeutic discipline? This article looks at the agonistic relations between the two types of reduction that fundamentally constitute a psychotherapeutic paradigm: naming and listening. At any given moment in the history of psychological theory, various schools and theories are in contention with each other over an institutional and state legitimation that will only be granted to one or some of them. It is argued that these disciplinary contentions for a dominant status subordinate the names and concepts that populate a particular psychotherapeutic paradigm to a property regime, thereby obscuring or compromising the attention paid to forms of listening that occur on the edge of naming and meaning.
Feminist, queer, and trans studies are all influenced significantly by anti-identitarian thought. Yet, contemporary gender and sexual identities only seem to be proliferating: nonbinary, graysexual, demigender, and more. This chapter focuses on a series of reference guides that schematize this recent expansion. Often miming reductive reference forms (the dictionary, the A-Z list), these texts and the questions they raise help to rethink the place of 'identity' across gender and sexuality studies.
Through various cases and instances, this essay opens with the question of biography and the demands of its form: that is, biography's attempt to reduce historical totalities to the page in moments of sudden condensation. It then introduces the figure of Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), a doctor and later hand reader and sexologist, who appears on a diagram, constructed by Walter Benjamin in 1932, to map his life through his 'Urbekanntschaften' (primal acquaintances). It then seeks to transpose Benjamin's diagram into other linear forms, such as a family tree, a diagram of chemical affinity, and an astral chart, to add one: the diagram as a map of the hand. This opens up a number of temporal, historical, and epistemic reductions, or cases of reduction, in Wolff's work and beyond. It concludes with a particular moment in Wolff's biography - her arrest in 1933 and her escape to Paris - as a final instance of the line, as border.
Given the prospect of post-oil futures, this chapter historically situates contemporary Gulf Futurism within cybernetic and logistical aspirations underlying the current global trend of the smartness mandate. Working through the complex visuality that the cybernetic black box animates, the chapter revisits Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping as an allegorical model for the inherent frictions of computational capital. To this end, it discusses Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri's artistic practice that reclaims a right to speculate while condensing material reality and imaginative threads, thereby going beyond a mere gesture of unveiling or mapping.