We live today within a system in which state and corporate power aim to render space flat, transparent, and uniform, for only then can it be truly controlled. The gaze of power and the commodity form are capable of infiltrating even the darkest of corners, and often, we invite them into our most private spaces. We do so as a matter of convenience, but also to placate ourselves and cope with the alienation inherent in our everyday lives. The resulting dominant (...) space can best be termed totalitarian. It is space stripped of uniqueness, deprived of the “spatial aura” necessary for authentic experience. In Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura, Saladdin Ahmed sets out to help us grasp what has been lost before no trace remains. He draws attention to that which we might prefer not to see, but despite the bleakness of this indictment of reality, the book also offers a message of hope. Namely, it is only once we comprehend the magnitude of the threat to our spatial experience and our own complicity in sustaining this system that we can begin to resist the totalizing forces at work. (shrink)

Many studies show that students self-report to having bought, downloaded and ghostwritten essays, as well as to failing to attribute quoted material and other similar actions. These actions are all classified as plagiarism, and based on this classification these students are positioned as cheaters. This study shows that there is reason to critically scrutinize such positioning. Using positioning theory, drawing on data from disciplinary inquiries, we show that such actions may be constituted as acts of complaining, justifying, blaming and the (...) like. Students justify these actions using storylines about ambiguous instructions, failing technology and difficulties distinguishing between plagiarism and autonomous authorship. We find that there are four positions such students try to make available for themselves as they attempt to reposition themselves, those of victim, learner, professional and repentant offender. Being suspected of cheating or plagiarism is a malignant position to be in; however, while students may attempt to reposition themselves in less malignant positions, such as that of victim, such attempts generally fail to lead to exoneration. (shrink)

This is the Introduction to a collected volume.

In this essay I contest the view that evolution can be conceived as a cosmic entity working out a plan of increasing negentropic complexification. The problems associated with this view, characteristic of a great deal of contemporary speculation, are outlined in section I. In section II I go on to further problematise current constructions of technics and machines and provide an alternative ‘machinic’ model of the play of entropy and evolution. In section III I examine the aesthetic praxis of Stelarc (...) as a site in which the ‘meaning’ of post‐human evolution can be productively contested and illuminated. (shrink)

The central question concerning the future of masculinity is whether the current matrix of distributions of roles and status, praxes and practices, will remain intact or whether a shift to a new configuration will occur. This essay briefly examines thinking on masculinity in two French attempts to theorize the future of relations between men and women: that of Auguste Comte, at the beginning of sociology, and Jean Baudrillard at the end of sociology. Both have, in their time, predicted radical gender (...) futures. The essay considers these theories against changes in social structures and the effectivity social movements. (shrink)

: This paper proposes to supplement an American self-identity predicated on a model of absolute difference from the Taliban (good versus evil, etc.) by exploring affinities between their respective ideologies. The place of "woman," within and through the preponderance of sexual exploitation/violence common to both, is the starting point of this analysis. This article reads the two conflicting powers in a Lacanian/Zizekian dyad of the "Law" and its "obscene superego underside.".

This paper proposes to supplement an American self-identity predicated on a model of absolute difference from the Taliban by exploring affinities between their respective ideologies. The place of “woman,” within and through the preponderance of sexual exploitation/violence common to both, is the starting point of this analysis. This article reads the two conflicting powers in a Lacanian/Žižekian dyad of the “Law” and its “obscene superego underside.”.

City-dwellers who are threatened by the risk of natural or social disasters are in search of safer houses. Each attempt to satisfy their need for safety, however, turns into another version of the security problem; so much so that, escaping from risk itself turns into different risks. The film 10 to 11 focuses on the socio-spatial conflict between a stranger and his neighbours who are anxious about a possible earthquake risk in Istanbul. Mithat, the protagonist of the film, is a (...) stranger not only to place but essentially to time. He lives within time and understands place as an essential means loaded by temporal experiences and memories. This paper deals with the multiple dichotomies between time and memory, between risk and fear, between aesthetics and security, and between attachment and profit in the context of urban transformation. The stranger, who is analysed for the first time as a temporal being in this paper, is discussed using Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of uncertainty and liquid modernity, Richard Sennett’s capitalism, Ulrich Beck’s risk society, Frank Furedi’s culture of fear, Stephen Bertman’s hurried culture, Elias Canetti’s death, Giorgio Agamben’s forgotten and gone, Svetlana Boym’s nostalgia, and Halbwachs, Assmann, Connerton, and Arendt’s memory, as well as around the temporal spaces of museums, bibliopoles, antique shops, and cemeteries. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 2 Seiten: 51-61.

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

The following thesis is a work of cultural psychoanalysis in an era properly defined as "post-Holocaust". It begins with an extensive working through of Lacanian concepts, followed by an examination of fantastical appropriations of the trauma of the Holocaust---fantasies that serve as the very frame of our reality, or rather, hyperreality. After a further working through of the relations between the crypt and the unconscious, the thesis then brings in Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard to help further elucidate some of (...) the key arguments. (shrink)