Our purpose in this essay is to introduce new concepts in a wide and recursive view of the systemic consequences of the following biological facts that I and we have presented that can be resumed as: that as living systems we human beings are molecular autopoietic system; that living systems live only as long as they find themselves in a medium that provides them with all the conditions that make the realization of their living possible, that is, in the continuous (...) conservation of their relation of adaptation to the circumstances in which they find themselves; that as a living system exists only in a relation of adaptation with the medium that operates as its ecological niche, its reproduction necessarily occurs as a process of systemic duplication or multiplication of the ecological organism-niche unity that it integrates; that the worlds of doings that we generate as languaging beings in our conversations, explanations, reflections and theories are part of our ecological niche; and that we human beings as living beings that exist in languaging, are biological–cultural beings in which our cultural and our biological manners of existences can be distinguished but cannot be separated. Of the systemic consequences of these biological facts that we consider in this essay, we wish to mention two as the principal: that the diversification of manners of living produced in biological evolution is the result of differential survival in a changing medium through the conservation of adaptation, and not through competitive survival of the best; and that we in our living as languaging human beings are the epistemological fundament of all that we do and know as such. (shrink)

Dedicated to the Memory of Joseph Goguen.

We present an empirical case study that connects psycholinguistics with the field of cultural evolution, in order to test for the existence of cultural attractors in the evolution of quotations. Such attractors have been proposed as a useful concept for understanding cultural evolution in relation with individual cognition, but their existence has been hard to test. We focus on the transformation of quotations when they are copied from blog to blog or media website: by coding words with (...) a number of well-studied lexical features, we show that the way words are substituted in quotations is consistent with the hypothesis of cultural attractors and with known effects of the word features. In particular, words known to be harder to recall in lists have a higher tendency to be substituted, and words easier to recall are produced instead. Our results support the hypothesis that cultural attractors can result from the combination of individual cognitive biases in the interpretation and reproduction of representations. (shrink)

This is an interesting and charming book—even if not strictly an essay in the history of science. The dissident author studied earth sciences in Romania during the beastly Ceauşescu regime but managed to get out by attending a conference in Newcastle and never returning until after the end of Eastern European communism. Yet he remained a Romanian patriot and is presently a professor honoris causa in Bucharest, while residing with his family in salubrious Glyndebourne.Constantin Roman must, by his account, surely (...) be one of the world's most upwardly mobile earth scientists. Starting in England with only £5 in his pocket, by ability, persistence, and charm, and using Newcastle as a stepping‐stone, he became acquainted with the right people and obtained a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, to do a Ph.D. on the tectonics of the Caucasus and across into Central Asia, using seismic data to identify plate boundaries and movements. On this basis, and studying areas of compression and tension, he proposed the existence of two nonrigid “buffer plates”—Sinkiang and Tibet—between the Indian and Eurasian plates. This was an iconoclastic suggestion in the early 1970s. Later, after getting his doctorate under Edward Bullard, Roman became an oil industry consultant and, I infer, made good money.Primarily, the book is about the madnesses of dictatorships and bureaucracies—and also the lovely life of a research student at Cambridge. When it came to Kafkaesque bureaucracy, the British authorities could be quite as obdurate as their Romanian counterparts: you can't have a work permit unless you have a job; you can't have a job unless you have a work permit. The difference, though, was that Roman could enlist support via his influential Cambridge contacts, and eventually he broke the logjam by getting an acquaintance at the Telegraph to offer him a kind of pseudo‐job . He was tenacious, resourceful, and bright, and seemingly charming to boot. It worked!Roman displayed similar qualities as a researcher. When he was well into his Ph.D. work, Bullard drew his attention to a paper emanating from Peter Molnar and his group at MIT that dealt with the same topic and arrived independently at essentially the same theory. The American paper had been refereed and accepted and was shortly to be published. Bullard warned his student that if this happened before Roman submitted his thesis he could only expect to get an M.A. So with bounce and initiative Roman dashed up to London and persuaded New Scientist to publish the main arguments of his thesis before the MIT paper got into print. This is presented as a coup, and so it was. Roman's Ph.D. was saved. But while that was all very well for the Cambridge “chaps,” one may wonder what the Americans thought about the matter. We're not told.We're not told a few other things either, particularly what happened between Roman and his first supervisor, Dan McKenzie . We are, however, told much about the delightful “lotus eaters” at Cambridge and the life there that is open to all—providing they have the right energy, brains, and charm. Roman got where he did by his ample possession of these qualities.But I wonder about Cambridge. It is the privileged tip of a huge social and economic pyramid, supported by a massive base of taxes, endowments, and, ultimately, the exploitation of third‐world lands and peoples and, formerly , of British workers. Roman knew that his home country was a mad dictatorship. He got out, and into what was then undoubtedly a better place. But what of those nameless ones today who suffocate in containers in their desperate struggle to get into Britain, or the refugees who are now incarcerated in alien detention centers in the Australian deserts? The West welcomes some, but not all. Continental Drift says nothing about such matters, but much about winning supporters through contacts, energy, and persistence. (shrink)

Over half a century ago, George Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to be older. Corpus studies since then have confirmed this pattern, with more frequent words being replaced and regularized less often than less frequent words. Two main hypotheses have been proposed to explain this: that frequent words change less because selection against innovation is stronger at higher frequencies, or that they change less because stochastic drift is stronger at lower frequencies. Here, we report the first experimental (...) test of these hypotheses. Participants were tasked with learning a miniature language consisting of two nouns and two plural markers. Nouns occurred at different frequencies and were subjected to treatments that varied drift and selection. Using a model that accounts for participant heterogeneity, we measured the rate of noun regularization, the strength of selection, and the strength of drift in participant responses. Results suggest that drift alone is sufficient to generate the elevated rate of regularization we observed in low‐frequency nouns, adding to a growing body of evidence that drift may be a major driver of language change. (shrink)

In today’s neo-liberalist world, Islamic financial institutions face many difficulties combining contemporary financial thinking with Islamic, faith-based principles, on which their day-to-day operations ought to be based. Hence, IFI are likely to experience shifts/changes in organizational and ethical identity due to tensions that the combination of these principles invokes. We present an in-depth case study that focuses on these shifts in a major European based IFI across a 14-year period. We conceptualize identity change as drift, highlighting the multivocal nature (...) of identity construction. The ethico-faith principles that were meant to serve as living codes of ethics guiding the IFI’s organizational culture, operational processes, and strategy formation turned out to mainly have been discursively rationalized to respond to regulatory, market and institutional imperatives. The company is aware that it needs to engage in a continuous dialogue with those who set these requirements. Its ethico-faith principles may consequently be adapted quite radically, especially in periods of turmoil and takeover, as we show across the analysed time period. The paper provides valuable insights for faith-inspired organizations to reflect on the extent to which they wish to engage in the discursive justification and legitimization of current market hegemonies, whilst they actively encourage their managers to behave ethically as well. (shrink)

The term “psychopath” has enjoyed wide currency both in popular culture and among specialists in forensic psychiatry. Historians, however, have generally neglected the subject. This essay examines the history of psychopathy in the country that first coined the term, developed the concept, and debated its treatment: Germany. While the notion can be traced to nineteenth-century psychiatric ideas about abnormal, yet not completely pathological, character traits, the figure of the psychopath emerged out of distinctly twentieth-century preoccupations and institutions. The vagueness and (...) plasticity of the diagnosis of psychopathy proved to be one of the keys to its success, as it was embraced and employed by clinicians, researchers, and the mass media, despite attempts by some to curb its use. Within the span of a few decades, the image of the psychopath became one of a perpetual troublemaker, an individual who could not be managed within any institutional setting. By midcentury, psychopaths were no longer seen as simply nosological curiosities; rather, they were spatial problems, individuals whose defiance of institutional routine and attempts at social redemption stood in for an attributed mental status. The history of psychopathy therefore reveals how public dangers and risks can be shaped and defined by institutional limitations. (shrink)

The elevation of aesthetic experience in the Enlightenment, most extensively developed in Kant's analysis of disinterested contemplation, to compensate for the loss of putatively objective standards of beauty had several problematic implications. One was the privileging of the subject who had the experience over the object that stimulated it. Another was the potential extension of that experience to objects that were never intended to be works of art, not merely to ones given in nature, but also to political, social and (...) cultural phenomena whose ethical or cognitive dimensions were concomitantly suppressed or marginalized. The aestheticization of the commonplace could thus countenance an inappropriate imperialism of the aesthetic sub-system of modernity over alternative sub-systems. Although the pragmatist aesthetics of John Dewey, recently revived in the work of Richard Shusterman, has acknowledged a need to revitalize the role of the art object, it may too quickly postulate a notion of aesthetic experience in which the equiprimordiality of subject and object is assumed. It is perhaps better to hold on to a tense constellation between art objects and the experience they generate in subjects in order to avoid a premature sublation of what remains still unreconciled in the larger culture. (shrink)

Freud's anthropology is in fact little more than an amplified psychiatry. For Freud, the human being is in essence a sick animal. In this paper the author discusses why Freud made this so-called 'anthropological turn'. First it is shown that Freud wanted his psychoanalytic theory to be a 'Philosophy of Man'. Secondly it is argued that this can only be the case if the determinants of pathology, that psychoanalysis claimed to have discovered, are constitutive of human subjectivity. This means that (...) the defensemechanisms and the partial sexual instincts interact in each of us and do so necessarily. Although Freud usually merely postulates the necessary character of this interaction, which always produces symptoms, one can nevertheless find some argumentation for this relation distributed in his work. The third part of this paper consists in an enumeration and explanation of the reasons Freud gives for the fact that we can never satisfy our sexual instincts and always have to rely on the substitutes he calls symptoms. Some of these reasons can be led back to the conflict between sexuality and culture, but most of them are determined in an organic way. If this Freudian intuition is true, the 'Philosophy of Man' should be replaced by the 'Philosophy of Psychopathology'. (shrink)

The introductory essay to this collection correctly observes that there are many “challenges for rapprochement” between anthropology and (the rest of) cognitive science. Still, the possibilities of fruitful interchanges provide some hope for the parties getting back together, at least on an intermittent basis. This response offers some views concerning the “incompatibility” of psychology and anthropology, reviews why cognitive anthropology drifted away from cognitive science, and notes two areas of contemporary interest within cognitive anthropology that may lead to a re-engagement.

Various disciplines, including evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, and psychology, have studied the evolution of rituals. Archaeologists have typically argued that burial practices are one of the most prominent manifestations of ritual practices in the past and have explored various aspects of burial practices, including burial directions. One of the important hypotheses on the cultural evolution of burial practices in Japan is the kitamakura hypothesis, which claims that burial directions (including Kofuns and current burials) were intended to be oriented toward (...) the north after the Kofun period under the influence of Confucianism or Buddhism. This hypothesis would be more plausible if burial directions were not oriented northward before the Kofun period. This research focused on the burial directions in the northern Kyūshū area of the Yayoi period, i.e., the directions of the kamekan jar burials. The results are almost consistent with the hypothesis, although one notable exception is found, and its possible interpretations and implications are discussed. (shrink)

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is therefore commonly thought that elements of culture evolve through natural selection. However, natural selection was proposed to explain how change accumulates despite lack of inheritance of acquired traits, as occurs with template-mediated replication. It cannot accommodate a process with significant retention of acquired or horizontally (e.g. (...) socially) transmitted traits. Moreover, elements of culture cannot be treated as discrete lineages because they constantly interact and influence one another. It is proposed that what evolves through culture is the mind; ideas and artifacts are merely reflections of its current evolved state. Interacting minds transform (in part) through through a non-Darwinian autopoietic process similar to that by which early life evolved, involving not survival of the fittest but actualization of their potential. (shrink)

Young songbirds draw the source material for their learned songs from parents, peers, and unrelated adults, as well as from innovation. These learned songs are used for intraspecific communication, and have well-documented roles for such functions as territory maintenance and mate attraction. The songs of wild populations differ, forming local “dialects” that may shift over time, suggesting that cultural evolution is at work. Recent work has focused on the mechanisms responsible for the cultural evolution of bird songs within (...) a population, including drift, learning biases, and selection. In many songs or song repertoires, variability is partitioned, with some songs or song segments being stable and consistent, while others vary within the population and across time, and still others undergo population-wide transitions over time. This review explores the different mechanisms that shape the cultural evolution of songs in wild populations, with specific reference to a long-term investigation of a single population of philopatric Savannah sparrows. Males learn a single four-segment song during their 1st year and sing the same song thereafter. Within this song, the buzz segment is a population marker, and may be stable for decades – variant forms occur but eventually disappear. In contrast, the middle segment is highly variable both within the population and over time; changes in relative prevalence of different forms may be due to cultural drift or a rare-form learning bias. Within the introductory segment, a high note cluster was replaced by a click train between 1982 and 2010, following an S-shaped trajectory characteristic of both selective sweeps in population genetics and the replacement of one form by another in human language. In the case of the Savannah sparrows, this replacement may have been due to sexual selection. In subsequent generations, the number of clicks within trains increased, a form of cultural directional selection. In contrast to the narrowing of a trait's range during directional selection in genetic systems, variation in the number of clicks in a train increased as the mean value shifted because improvisation during song learning allowed the range of the trait to expand. Thus, in the single short song of the Savannah sparrow, at least four different mechanisms appear to contribute to three different types of cultural evolutionary outcomes. In the future, it will be import to explore the conditions that favor the application of specific learning rules, and studies such as the ongoing song seeding experiment in the Kent Island Savannah sparrow population will help in understanding the mechanisms that promote or repress changes in a population's song. (shrink)

Comme l'a écrit Jean Claude Passeron, quand la sociologie française s'attaque à la notion de populaire, «la morale s'en mêle»: le populaire conduit aux deux dérives symétriques et opposées du populisme et du légitimisme. Cette formulation du débat sur le populaire apparaît être spécifique à la France, et en partie due au fait que les échanges avec les sociologies de la culture anglo-saxonne sont restés faibles. À partir de quelques publications-clés dans chacune des traditions, cet article examine les divergences entre (...) les travaux en sociologie de la culture française, l'école anglaise des Cultural Studies, et les recherches américaines inspirées par l'interactionnisme. Il propose aussi de relier le parcours des recherches en sociologie des médias en France à travers cette histoire plus générale du sous-traitement de la catégorie du populaire dans la sociologie de la culture hexagonale.As Jean Claude Fasseron wrote, when French sociology tackles the concept of popular, "morals interferes himself: the popular one led to the two symmetrical and opposed drifts populism and legitimism. This formulation of the debate on the popular one appears being specific to France, and partly due to the fact that the exchanges with sociologies of the Anglo-Saxon culture remained weak. From some key publications in each tradition, this article examines the divergences between work in sociology of the French culture, the English school of Cultural Studies, and the American researches inspired by interactionnism. It also proposes to connect the map of research in sociology of media in France through this more general history of the under-processing of the category of popular in sociology of the hexagonal culture. (shrink)

"One of the most important philosophy titles published in the twentieth century, Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture is more significant, even more crucial, today than it was when it first appeared more than fifty years ago. This special new edition now also includes his little work The Philosophical Act. Leisure is an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world. Pieper shows that the Greeks and (...) medieval Europeans, understood the great value and importance of leisure. He also points out that religion can be born only in leisure; a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture. Pieper maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture; and ourselves. Pieper's message for us is plain. The idolatry of the machine, the worship of mindless know-how, the infantile cult of youth and the common mind; all this points to our peculiar leadership in the drift toward the slave society. Pieper's profound insights are impressive and even formidable. Pieper has subjects involved in everyone's life; he has theses that are so counter to the prevailing trends as to be sensational; and he has a style that is memorably clear and direct." --Publisher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Aesthetics of Cultural StudiesPaul DuncumThe Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, edited by Michael Bérube. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, 208 pp., $26.95 paper, $67.95 cloth.This new anthology of ten chapters and a chapter-length introduction by the editor is primarily intended to act as a corrective to the view that cultural studies is uninterested in aesthetics. Contributors argue that while some cultural studies scholars have given (...) this impression, either abandoning the term "aesthetics" or explicitly rejecting the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, cultural studies has been, from its origins in England in the early 1960s, deeply concerned with aesthetic issues. Cultural studies is properly understood, contributors argue, as being born out of a desire to extend aesthetic considerations to a wider range of artifacts and experiences than had hitherto been allowable within the modernist philosophical tradition of aesthetics derived from Kant. Contributors deal with many debates within the field of cultural studies—unsurprisingly mostly to do with turf wars within universities—but I will focus here specifically on what they have to say about aesthetics, though I cannot do justice to the multiplicity of views developed by different authors.Since contributors are primarily from North America, where cultural studies has mainly taken root in the English departments of universities, the cultural form most commonly discussed is literature. Exceptions include David Sanjek's chapter, which focuses on popular music, and Steven Rubio's chapter, which deals playfully with phenomenological intertextuality between classical music and popular cartoons. Most of the issues addressed by contributors also apply to other traditional arts, though not, I will argue below, to many contemporary forms of popular cultural experience.Contributors are especially concerned to defend themselves against charges that, in Rorty's view, cultural studies equates to "expressions of political resentment clothed in jargon," or in George Levine's characterization of this position, as "seeing the text as a kind of enemy to be arrested," where the text is reduced to context and the truth of art is denied in favor of the truth of politics (as cited in Rita Felski's chapter). For such critics, cultural studies equates with ideology critique and represents the death of aesthetics. Not so, according to each of these authors. John Frow, for example, argues that from its inception it was not aesthetics per se that cultural studies objected to but the then normative discourse of aesthetics that was positioned above politics.Several authors are concerned to establish the credentials of cultural studies as a unique way of approaching culture and not just any running together of culture and politics. Felski complains of a "semantic drift," which sees cultural studies mischaracterized and condemned for sins that rightly belong to other fields.Complicating a search for the uniqueness of cultural studies, however, is Jonathan Sterne's contribution in what seems a significantly revisionist position. He claims that in cultural studies culture has had to carry too heavy a burden. Culture has been a conduit to politics, he argues; studying culture has been a way of studying politics by other means, and he suggests that sometimes culture can simply be enjoyed for its own sake and not subject to analysis. David Shumway, too, at times just wants to enjoy culture. In the everyday course of living this is surely right, though it is hardly at the center of the scholarly cultural studies' enterprise. As other contributors argue, cultural studies has always seen the need for striking a balance between aesthetics and [End Page 113] ideology. Sterne's unease with cultural studies for seeing aesthetics primarily in instrumental terms—a way of getting at politics—nevertheless serves as a corrective to the idea that cultural studies scholars have a hard time understanding pleasure.Most contributors acknowledge the influence of Raymond Williams—as well they might—and several cite, even at length, from the chapter "Aesthetic and Other Situations" from his 1977 book Marxism and Literature.1 Here Williams succinctly laid out the theoretical framework for many of the authors of this anthology. It is worth considering some of the key threads of Bérube's book through the prism of this chapter.Williams begins by making aesthetics problematic... (shrink)

No ASPECT of Marx’s work has more profoundly affected the modern mind than his critique of ideology. Friends and foes alike have, often unwittingly, spoken Marx’s language in interpreting arts and letters and adopted his standards in judging the overall drift of our culture. The critique of bourgeois ideology has united Marxists of contrary persuasions in a rare unanimity. While Marx’s economic projections may have lost much of their credibility after having been repeatedly adjusted to ever new recoveries of (...) the capitalist economy on its purported road to decline, his evaluation of the bourgeois superstructure has gained ever greater acceptance. In fact, there seems to be a direct proportion between one and the other. The less the economic development of bourgeois society followed the course of Marx’s predictions, the more its cultural attitudes seemed to justify his critical judgment; the less people were inclined to dispense with the benefits of a capitalist economy, the more they found its culture "alienating." Thus Marx’s critique of economy was more and more converted into a critique of capitalist ideology. This development is all the more striking in that the concept of ideology has for the most part remained undefinably vague and has left countless contrary interpretations in its wake. (shrink)

This paper examines the email discursive practices of particular speakers of two different languages, namely Peninsular Spanish and British English. More specifically, our study focuses on (in)formality and (in)directness therein, for these lie at the heart of considerable scholarly debate regarding, respectively (i) the general stylistic drift towards orality and informality in technology-mediated communication, and (ii) the degree of communicative (in)directness - within broader politeness orientations - of speakers of different languages, specifically an orientation towards directness in Peninsular Spanish (...) vis-à-vis indirectness in British English. The aim of this paper is thus to investigate the role of (in)formality and (in)directness in email messages sent by members of two groups of undergraduate students to their university lecturers. To this end, a corpus of 100 impromptu emails was compiled and analysed. Results revealed complex, fluctuating patterns regarding levels of (in)formality and (in)directness that underlined cross-cultural variation in the way that different sociopragmatic principles found expression in a specific computer-mediated communicative situation. (shrink)

The discussion over the roles of genes and environment on the phenotypical specification of organisms has held a central role in science philosophy since the late 19th century and has re‐emerged in today's debate over genetic determinism and developmental plasticity. In fin‐de‐siecle Vienna, this debate coincided with a philosophical debate over empiricism/materialism versus idealism/vitalism. Turn‐of‐the‐century Vienna's highly interdisciplinary environment was also the birthplace for the model system of the un‐opposed molar. The un‐opposed molar system features new tissue formation at the (...) roots of teeth and tooth drift once opposing teeth are lost. The un‐opposed molar model system was revived by a group of Viennese scientists who left Vienna during the Nazi period to address Vienna's questions about evolution and heredity and about genes and environment in Chicago's post‐WWII scientific exile community. Here we are using the colorful history of the un‐opposed molar to investigate the role of culture and method in the scientific evolution of a model system. BioEssays 29:819–830, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Sylvia Wynter discusses Eurocentric thought as a closed cognitive order. In this article, Mijke van der Drift interrogates this cognitive closure as a style of thought that is intertwined with institutions. By inverting the attention Foucault gives to the subjects under scrutiny, van der Drift shows that the focus on those that maintain the institution, the managerial class, reveals how power and knowledge configure this contraction of perception. Van der Drift argues that institutions are central to this (...) process because it offers alignment of purpose and understanding by means of rights and discipline. Consequently, this alignment leads to an indifference to other ways of worlding that Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving describe as “smug ignorance.” Van der Drift argues that this finds root in the institution, rather than being a harmful side effect that needs to be addressed. To contrast institutional alignment, the author sketches a pluralist ethics that offers an alternative mode of relationality and collective organization. (shrink)

The Soul of a Nation is a series of essays on American society’s culture, morality, law, education, and faith: subjects that confront our society and will be of interest to citizens and scholars who have studied its political drift in recent years.

The Soul of a Nation is a series of essays on American society’s culture, morality, law, education, and faith: subjects that confront our society and will be of interest to citizens and scholars who have studied its political drift in recent years.

The loss of life that resulted from the sinking of the fisheries training vessel EhimeMaru by the nuclear submarine USSGreeneville off Hawaii in February 2001 exemplifies the risks to United States–Japan alliance relations posed by US global military deployments. Following a pattern of incidents involving the US military in Japan itself, the collision violated Japanese expectations of benevolence from its stronger partner and put considerable pressure on the government to seek public apology and reassurance. This article examines the interplay of (...) culture, national security interests and domestic politics in framing both perceptions and diplomacy during the crisis. While differences at both the cultural and security levels complicated diplomacy, asymmetry in the respective domestic political stakes, combined with overriding and largely congruent security interests, helped the United States to provide Japan with the requisite reassurance. After a decade of alliance drift, both Japan and the United States were determined to forestall defection by their alliance partner. (shrink)

We would like to open some questions here about the institutional and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism require: a more international model of cultural studies than the dominant Anglo-American versions; renewed attention to the (...) institutional environments of cultural studies; and a questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity politics. We seek less to “fix” these problems than to provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose experience the following section is largely based. The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field, Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban, Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou. (shrink)

Qu’est-ce donc que la musique des aliens ou pour les aliens? Des cinq notes de la mélodie de Rencontres du troisième type aux explorations sonores de Sun Ra ou des intelligents dansants de l’électro, elle n’est peut-être que l’expression la plus accomplie d’une tendance très humaine à projeter sur l’extraterrestre certains reflets plus ou moins déformés de soi, surjouant quelque insaisissable mystère, révélation ou écart incompressible venu de l’ailleurs pour retrouver finalement, tout là-bas, une bribe d’ici.