When a strange new test of perceptual style called the Rorschach reached the New World in the 1920s, it became almost immediately popular. Developed as a psychoana lytic "X ray" of the psyche, it succeeded because American psychologists wanted and needed it to do so, and to do so as that kind of test. Over a decade later, the MMPI was constructed as a more orthodox personality inventory geared to traditional psychiatric categories While this medical legacy was soon removed or (...) obscured, success was more gradual. After the war, clinical psychologists adopted a professional identity independent of psychiatry. Their personality assessment tools, and what counted as success, came to reflect a reclaimed disciplinary genealogy. Standardized mappings and rule-by-numbers tended to displace a trust in experience and expert Judgment. In this context, "proper" Rorschach use came to be seen as indulgent or sadly mistaken. Supporters of the MMPI were, in contrast, able to claim both science and efficiency on their side and colonized the field. The history of these tests clearly illustrates the process of co-production, of how the right tool can become very wrong as networks dissipate and professional time goes by. (shrink)

On vise à saisir les dynamiques de petits groupes sociaux et de réseaux personnels, de leur formation initiale à leur délitement. Pour cela, depuis 2011, je mène des enquêtes ethnographiques dans trois résidences universitaires en France, aux États-Unis et au Canada. J’effectue ainsi une analyse sur deux niveaux : celui de plusieurs groupes suivis conjointement sur chacun de ces terrains, et celui des relations et des réseaux qui émergent et évoluent. J’articule la représentation graphique des réseaux personnels à des données (...) qualitatives sur ces groupes et ces réseaux. La représentation des liens et des réseaux permet de compléter l’étude des relations affinitaires et de leurs degrés d’intensité. Elle donne aussi à voir l’évolution des réseaux personnels au cours de l’année universitaire. Les descriptions ethnographiques, quant à elles, révèlent la réflexivité des acteurs sur leurs réseaux personnels, et sur leurs évolutions. Cette analyse permet dès lors d’identifier quatre étapes dans le processus de formation et transformation de petits groupes sociaux. Ces quatre temporalités se retrouvent dans l’ensemble des groupes suivis conjointement, malgré la pluralité de leurs compositions. Nous pouvons alors nous demander si dans tout groupe social de ce type se retrouveraient ces quatre temps. En ce sens, cette recherche contribue à compléter les travaux sur les réseaux personnels et les temporalités de leurs évolutions, en apportant une démarche ethnographique et microsociologique. (shrink)

Actual anger response styles during anger encounters may well diverge from self-reported habitual anger response styles, such as anger - in, anger - out, or anger control. Also, the relationship of actual anger response styles to broad personality traits is not well known. We obtained anger self - reports, physiological reactivity (diastolic blood pressure, skin temperature at the forehead, and EMG extensor digitorum), and ratings of facial anger expression, and defined actual anger response style dimensions of “intensity”, “suppression”, “repression”, and (...) “denial” as particular patterns of discrepancies among these responses. A total of 80 female subjects were randomly assigned to a treatment (Tr) and a control (Co) group. Anger was induced through real - life provocations. Compared to Co, Tr subjects showed larger physiological responses and reported more anger. Habitual anger response styles did not predict actual styles, whereas extraversion and neuroticism did. Control subjects scoring low on extraversion or high on neuroticism reacted with high denial, that is, with stronger physiological and behavioural than experiential anger, whereas the opposite pattern of low denial was found for treatment subjects low on extraversion or high on neuroticism. These results suggest that both the particular situation and broad but not narrow personality traits exert an influence on actual anger response styles. (shrink)

Regulation of microtubule (MT) dynamics is essential for many cellular processes, but the machinery that controls MT dynamics remains poorly understood. MT plus‐end tracking proteins (+TIPs) are a set of MT‐associated proteins that dynamically track growing MT ends and are uniquely positioned to govern MT dynamics. +TIPs associate with each other in a complex array of inter‐ and intra‐molecular interactions known as the “+TIP network.” Why do so many +TIPs bind to other +TIPs? Typical answers include the ideas that these (...) interactions localize proteins where they are needed, deliver proteins to the cortex, and/or create regulatory pathways. We propose an additional and more mechanistic hypothesis: that +TIPs bind each other to create a superstructure that promotes MT assembly by constraining the structural fluctuations of the MT tip, thus acting as a polymerization chaperone. (shrink)

One of the clearest signs that Psychology has impacted popular culture is the public’s familiarity with the Rorschach ink-blot test. An excellent example of the Rorschach in popular culture can be found in Watchmen, the comic/graphic novel written by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. In the mid-20th century Psychology had an especially contentious relationship with comics; some psychologists were very anxious about the impact comics had on young people, whereas others wrote comics to subvert dominant norms about gender and sexuality. (...) Yet historians of Psychology have had almost nothing to say about this popular and critically acclaimed novel. We read Watchmen here for its narratives that most concern the history of Psychology. We focus on such themes as anti-psychiatry, sexual violence, homophobia, lesbian erasure and social psychological research on bystander intervention. We argue it is possible to align Psychology and comics more closely despite their sometimes contentious history. In doing so we demonstrate the active role of the public in the history of the Rorschach, and the public engagement of Psychology via comics, and also reveal what is possible when historians consider comics within their histories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Live or TellDaniel BertholdTwo of the more notoriously elusive authors writing in the first half of the nineteenth century—a century noteworthy on the European continent for producing more than its fair share of elusive authors—are the German idealist Georg Hegel and his posthumous tormentor, the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Their elusiveness is such that to read either of them is much like taking a Rorschach test: what we find (...) tells us as much about ourselves as it does about Kierkegaard or Hegel themselves. But to think through the relationship between the two is a yet more challenging task, perhaps like seeking to align the ink-blotted lenses of a Rorshachian kaleidoscope. Some commentators have found no alignment of the lenses to produce anything resembling a meaningful picture, and have concluded, as Niels Thulstrup puts it in his study of Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel, that, "Hegel and Kierkegaard have in the main nothing in common." 1 With equal forthrightness, Richard Kroner suggests in his essay on "Kierkegaard's Understanding of Hegel" that "Hegel and Kierkegaard are separated from each other by an abyss which no agreement can ever succeed in bridging." 2Such a reading of the Kierkegaard-Hegel relation is in fact made tempting by Kierkegaard's own construction of the relation as one of radical difference. Hegel is the archetypal Other, the perpetual foil whose philosophic values and whole way of thinking and writing Kierkegaard devotes his own authorship to perfectly inverting. If Kierkegaard's Hegel is the philosopher of the "objective spirit" and the champion of reason, more interested in the logical relations between concepts than in the actual reality of existing individuals, Kierkegaard presents himself as the adherent of subjectivity, of faith, of existence.In what follows, I wish to explore one of the most recurring of [End Page 361] Kierkegaard's representations of his difference from Hegel, the contrast between action and thinking about action, existing and contemplating existence, living and philosophizing about living. "In the objective [Hegelian] sense," Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus writes, "thought is understood as being pure thought,... [and] this objective thought has no relation to the existing subject; and while [it is difficult to know] how the existing subject slips into this... pure abstraction,... it is certain that the existing subjectivity tends more and more to evaporate." 3As the contrast gets developed, we will come to focus on Kierkegaard's phrasing of the difference in terms of the role of language. Kierkegaard portrays himself as speaking (writing) in order to act: "to be an author is to act." 4 Hegel, on the other hand, is presented as writing so as to merely speak about acting; hence Hegel is a "mere scribbler" and his philosophy occurs "only on paper" (CUP, p. 176, 375f). In many ways, Kierkegaard understands his contest with Hegel in terms of the ultimatum of the tormented diarist of Jean-Paul Sartre's novella Nausea, Roquentin: "you have to choose: live or tell." 5 Roquentin is doubly cursed, first by a need to write so as to escape his sense of the nausea of existence by distancing himself from the cloying taste of reality, but second, by a recognition that his writing removes him from the possibility of truly existing. His ultimatum, "live or tell," is the constant reminder he carries with him of his inability to reconcile his fear of existence and his self-disgust at his escapism.The contrast between action and thinking leads to a question about the ethics of authorship: how is one to use words, to write, in such a way as to act—and to elicit action from one's reader? I will suggest that a readjustment of Kierkegaard's alignment of the kaleidoscope lenses which display the image of his relation to Hegel allows for a more rewarding dialogue between the two. In this altered image, there is as much telling as living in Kierkegaard as in Hegel (indeed, as we will see, in some respects more so), and as much a choice for living in Hegel as in Kierkegaard. Perhaps most importantly, this reorientation invites us to see the either/or construction of "living... (shrink)

The opening of the fourth session of The Neutral — the course given by Roland Barthes at the Collège de France in 1977–8 — is marked by a dramatic spillage of ink. Rather than take this as an incidental, trivial moment, I read it as one of the many ‘ink blots’ that colour the work of Barthes. Tracing his ‘almost obsessive relation to writing instruments’ and the material act of inscription, this essay relates the ‘ink blots’ to the (...) development of a ‘non-arrogant’, non-expressive, non-idealistic theory of language in The Neutral and other texts by Barthes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 57-60 [Access article in PDF] The Art of Impurity Patsy Hallen I was taken aback when I received a request from the West Australian government to write a response to the question, "What Is The Ethical Foundation For Planning A More Sustainable Future?" My first reaction was: Does not every one want a future? And doesn't this necessarily mean a commitment to sustainability? (...) Would not everyone earnestly want a more sustainable future?To have to ask the question at all shows just how far out of balance our crazy, greed-driven culture is. To ask the question is to imply that many people do not want to live on, or, at least, do not want the next generation to live on. It was like being asked: How can one morally justify a flourishing, joyful life for every being on earth?In a profound sense, there cannot and need not be any moral justification for sustainability because sustainability is the foundation for morality, not the other way around. As the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle cautioned, it shows a lack of education to try and prove everything. You can't prove logic, for example, because logic presupposes proof. Likewise, our ultimate norms such as "Love is better than hate" must be gained by intuition; they can't be proved.No sooner had I received this request than I became ill (no causal connection, I assure you!) and in my fever-induced reveries I penned imaginary responses. I wrote:"The Ethical Foundation of Sustainability is 'Joy' or 'Life' or 'An Ethic of Flourishing'." [End Page 57]'Survival' seemed the most appropriate candidate (especially as the fever escalated), until I settled on Love.Of course, Love.* * *He was huge. He was unbelievably huge. He just kept coming and coming. He was so close.His blue-grey body turned the intensely deep blue depths into a translucent green, like an enormous halo hovering just below the surface.I was drawn into his presence like ink into blotting paper.He blew, rhythmically expelling air. I, too, exhaled and this made me 'come to', returning me to my body. I realized I was wet-by his breath. I had been baptized, the most magnificent baptism one could imagine.In my baptism, luckily, I was spared being hit by a dollop of phlegm.It does happen.His breath smelt... not sweet but not sour-primordial, like the origin of life. I became aware of someone softly counting the breaths: "17... 18... 19..." it seemed everlasting.Then after 19 breaths, he dove, not with a rush, just leisurely, almost seamlessly, like the pulse of life itself, hardly a splash.I hadn't even remembered to be seasick.He is one of the largest animals ever to have lived on earth. His tongue weighs more than an elephant. He measures a length of 26 meters, a weight of around 160 tons.This is the Pygmy Blue Whale, Balaenoptera Brevicanda, hunted close to extinction by the whaling industry, and now slowly returning from the brink. Whoever named him "Pygmy" must have had delusions of grandeur.We were 30 nautical miles off the west end of Rottenest Island (near Perth), on board "Whalesong," a 13-meter catamaran built and sailed by Curt and Mich Jenner, who have been researching whales on the West Australian coast for over 10 years.We were at "the trench," where Pygmies feed. Mich and Curt had spent the summer trying to learn about this Rorqual Whale, before sailing north for the winter to follow Humpbacks on their annual migratory path from their feeding grounds in the southern ocean to their breeding enclaves in the Kimberley.Very little is known about Pygmy Blues. They are a tropical subspecies of the Blue Whale, but might possibly be a new species altogether. No one [End Page 58] knows where they go to mate or to give birth. Very few people have even seen them. Like the Whale Sharks, they are one of the last unfathomable mysteries of the planet.We stayed with this foundational animal for 2 hours, until the last... (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 60-67. At the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being,” presented to the University of Freiburg in 1962, he cautions against, it would seem, the requirement that philosophy make sense, or be necessarily responsible (Stambaugh, 1972). At that time Heidegger's project focused on thinking as thinking and in order to elucidate his ideas he drew comparisons between his project and two paintings by Paul Klee as well with a poem by Georg Trakl. In front of Klee's (...) Saints from the Window and Death of Fire —though we wouldn’t absolutely understand what we were seeing—he writes, “we should want to stand…a long while.” In a similar manner, of Trakl’s poem “Septet of Death”—although it is likely we are unsure in what we hear—Heidegger states that, “we should want to hear…[it] often.” Heidegger further states that in appreciating these, “we “should abandon any claim that [they] be immediately intelligible” (1). So also we must we approach, Heidegger continues, the realm of theoretical physics, in which the difficult work of Werner Heisenberg, be listened to “without protest” and without “any claim that he be immediately understood.” These works, like his own project, merit the time they take to be originally (mis)understood. But this is not necessarily true for philosophy, Heidegger advises, because, “That thinking is supposed to offer ‘worldly wisdom’ and perhaps even a ‘way to a blessed life’” (1). Philosophy is in the unique position of being both abstract (what do we talk about when we talk?) and at the same moment, useful. There are demands that it make sense, that it be, grounded, immediate, and most importantly, rational. Heidegger draws these comparisons between the works of Klee and Trakl and Heisenberg not to claim that philosophy is totally irresponsible. He does not claim that the poet, the painter, nor the physicist have acted irresponsibly. Rather, he would say, they are rising to the highest levels of intelligibility, though it is perhaps an intelligibility that is commonly unavailable to us. In Trakl’s case, as we shall see, mastery is the end result of difficult words. Instead, Heidegger seems be making pleas: for a period of uninterrupted unintelligibility (pure unintelligibility); and that there is a time (that time is now) when, “thinking is…placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom” (1-2). Heidegger argues that philosophy requires a period of time in which, instead of focusing on the practical—or even on the worldly—the discipline draw its “determination” instead from the place of painting and poetry and physics. In doing so, “we should have to abandon any claims to immediate intelligibility” (2). But Heidegger doesn’t offer this as a way out. We still have to turn up, we “still have to listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary” (2). The point for Heidegger, is not to listen to a series of propositions, but instead to “follow the movement of showing” (2). I. … Maybe we're here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most: pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.… Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” There is little more fundamental, preliminary, in the world than language. We use language, in the form of speech, constantly, whether we are saying anything or not. “Man speaks,” Heidegger writes, and goes on to describe in his essay “Language” (2001) the constant speaking that we do. “We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly speaking or listening but are attending to some work or taking a rest” (187). Speaking is expression, an utterance of something internal. It is a recognition of a world. It is a way of communicating thought and it is an activity that we all do, inevitably. Speaking separates the human from the animal world, and despite advances in primatology that seek to give ‘voice’ to primates and other non-human animals, it can safely be said that our form of communication—what we call speech and know as language—is the most advanced, the most complicated. We use it to present and represent the world around us; through actual utterances (vocalization) or through the written word or through ‘unvoiced thoughts’ and dreams. We use language, but more specifically speech—naming—to transmit moods, thoughts, desires, aversions, and feelings. These expressions, mere utterances, nearly always find a source in words, whether spoken or not. Heidegger writes that this common view of language means “that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as the one who speaks that man is—man” (187). Speaking then—utterance—surrounds us constantly, whether in the form of careful thought—in the form of an academic paper, say—or in the half mutterings and forgotten thoughts of a nearly remembered dream. Like scaffolding, the apparatus of speech sustains and explains the world, making, in a sense, the world rational, making it apparent. When we speak, we describe, and in doing so, name the world. We use words, through this process of naming, to interpret and sustain the world we see, and the world we imagine. Like Rilke’s naming of jug, and bridge, and window, and stream, we describe—and inscribe upon—the world through an activity of naming. Are we here, perhaps, to name? Is it possible not to name? Is it possible to regard and to view and to look around without naming what we see? Is it possible to feel—to experience—world without giving utterance to that feeling, that process? Sadness, grief, joy, ecstasy, hunger, thirst. Desk, light, room, pen, book, world. White, black, tomorrow, today. Each of these words is a name given to a thing I see in front of me, or a concept that I imagine (in the case of tomorrow or world). What arises in my mind has already existed. If I imagine it, it is named. The word for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘desk’ and ‘light’ precedes me, and precedes my concept of it. The idea of it is already pre-informed, and I must, in a certain sense, bend my ideas to it. When I imagine a table, I imagine my own table (or I imagine an idea of table) but that imagining must follow certain general rules; while, perhaps, it might not always require four legs and a horizontal surface, it must, at least not be, say, a pool of water, or a pile of excrement. It must have some tableness to it to be a table. It must, with Heidegger, table. Otherwise, speech is reduced to gibberish. For Heidegger however, the discussion of language points to something deeper than its “scientific and analytic” study as a communicative device. Indeed, Heidegger seeks to understand language not in reference to man or woman, not as an utterance of humanity, but in reference to itself. In doing so he abandons the conversation—that is, he casts away the traditional arguments surrounding philosophy of language; that it is a means of expression; that it is a human activity; and that it is somehow a representation of something that is—in order to seek to understand language as language, on its own terms. Heidegger is not a philosopher of language, but a philosopher of world, of being. Despite these “correct ideas” holding sway “over the whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language…they ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language” (191). What is this “oldest natural cast of language? It is the act of language itself. Language is language and language speaks. “Most often,” Heidegger writes, “and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past” (195). Speech, as we normally encounter it, is like Echo herself calling out to Narcissus, doomed to repeat what has already been said, a mere remnant of what was once language, a trace left behind in the gathering silence of becoming. In both the essay “Language” and in his three lecture course “The Nature of Language” (1982), Heidegger attempts to unpack the seeming tautology of language as language. In each, he focuses on poetry as a way out, or into, a true discussion of the oldest natural cast of language. Poetry is pure speech. In poetry, language is brought to language and language speaks ( Die Sprach spricht ). In the act of poetry, the act of pure speech, the poet names (on the surface not different from how I name this table, this computer) but in the poet naming, the naming does not “hand out titles,” “apply terms,” but rather the naming is a call, a calling forth of entities that bring them into their own, allow them to take their place purely, without compromise. This calling, Heidegger (2001) states, “here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefor always here and there—here into presence, there into absence” (196). II. Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine. Georg Trakl “A Winter Evening” Heidegger is often given short shrift as an abysmally difficult writer, as one that makes no sense and is needlessly difficult. In doing this though, we forget sometimes his eloquence, his simple beauty in writing. Of the above opening stanza, “Window with falling snow is arrayed/ Long tolls the vesper bell.” he writes (2001), This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197). The speaking names the winter evening time. It is almost impossible to comment on that one line by Heidegger. It is as though it must exist on its own completely, without elucidation—as though in front of it we must stand as we do in front of a painting by Klee, that is, we must abandon any claim . Silent and devoted. The speaking of the poem here is not clearly different from common speech ( rede ) yet there is, via Heidegger, an invitation to experience that auracular quality of light and stillness that a gentle, dusk tinged snowfall gives; words evoking a quality so clear, so poignant that, in a sense, Heidegger’s work, at this moment, has been done. But what does this naming accomplish? What does the call call? Remember, it is not the poet that calls, but the naming which calls. The poet has only brought the words forward; it is now the words— snow, vesper bell, window— that take new life in the pure language of the poem. Entities are called forth into presence, like the speaking that names the winter evening time. Not to be present amongst us now, however; naming ‘table’ in the poem does not place it in front of us in this room. Rather, the naming places entities into a gathering which is also a sheltering. The naming brings them to be. In an act of appropriation, things come to be purely as their own, unimpeded by a predetermined expectation. They are called to themselves into an arrival. In Being and Time (1962), Heidegger famously describes the movement between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand in his analysis of the hammer, and of equipment in general. This analysis is already known, if not always clear, to most readers of Heidegger. Briefly, a hammer is ordinarily zuhanden or ready-to-hand; it is part of the background of the world, equipment used and never thought about, like this desk, this sheet of paper, this room. Our interaction with it is temporary and it is historically different for each entity and each relation. We need a hammer, we use a hammer. If all goes according to plan, the hammer remains ready-to-hand; it remains, in a sense, undisclosed and certainly unobtrusive. Our world is undisturbed by the hammer. Only when the hammer or the car or the computer is broken (or sometimes unused or unrecognized or missing) does it intrude into our world, become conspicuous as an object present-at-hand, or vorhanden . In this case, we reach for the hammer, it is broken and we suddenly notice it’s being, broken though it is. The thing which was always ready to hand—handy—is suddenly abstract, something to be examined, if only in its absence or disfunction. This can be exhibited for all entities, and it is important to note that in this analysis the zuhanden / vorhanden split is not restricted to a specific form of constructed material; zuhanden does not refer to the car, and vorhanden the sunset. No entity is ever exclusively ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; they are instead, interpenetrated with each others mode of being, one informing the other in a way that both brings things forth into the world—discloses is the word Heidegger chooses—and at the same time conceals them. As one mode is coming to be so another mode is withdrawing. This flux and movement between modes is precisely what brings the world forward, and what makes it manifest. It exists beyond where we tread and before man took dubious control of the world. We go to find a book or turn on the computer and it is missing or broken and we become aware of the object, as though for the first time. We walk to the water to glimpse the sunset and miss it, or it is less than stellar; in the sunset’s grayness, we become aware of it’s being sunset. The thing is disclosed in its withdrawal. Echoing Heraclitus, we can say that as something is coming to be, it is already becoming something other. Of similar importance to the fact that things are never all of one, or all of the other, they are also never alone. The hammer is never a single object, but is in relation always to the whole. Heidegger (1962) states, Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves…What we encounter as closest to us…is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical, spatial sense, but as equipment for residing…it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before its does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (97). Equipment resides—dwells—in its relations, in its proximal being to other beings. Within the structure of totality, a series of relations is always occurring. The hammer is on the workbench in the carpenter’s hand in the workshop in the village under the sky and under the sun. It doesn’t stop there. Equipment surrounds us and the focus is not on what it does, or what one does with it—the carpenter with the hammer, the writer with laptop—but with the fact that it is. Equipment occurs in relation and is always occurring around us overhead, underfoot, by the stream and in the city. There is a constant exchange of relations happening, and as this occurs, so the world occurs, so the world both discloses and withdraws, into and out of itself. In a very real sense, language is also equipment. It is the thing that we use most often without thought, it is ready-to-hand (except when it’s not.) As we re- cognize the world around us, as we offer names for things and make lists, we are using language much like we might use a hammer, that is, bluntly. Most of the time it is invisible and we draw on it without wondering how we are going to say something. When language does intrude, it does so in an awkward moment, that moment when we can’t remember the right word, when we forget a phrase. At that second, it “speaks itself as language,” it reveals itself as malfunctioning equipment, and we “undergo” an experience with language, in Heidegger’s famous formulation. Language is not a tool anymore that we use to bludgeon an object, but something instead that we submit to, that we experience. In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger (1982) writes, But when does language speak to us as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it a thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being (59). The poet’s words become themselves, become appropriate, only when they no longer function in the prosaic world; they instead intrude as they come to be. Language itself brings itself to language. Names, like the entities they indicate, are always becoming something else. As noted above, language, through the poet, has brought forth entities from words previously “known.” I thought that I knew snow, but through Trakl’s re- presentation of the word, language calls forth a new image of snow, indeed calls forth snow itself. The vesper bell tolls longer, the table is for many laid. In bringing forth things , language has brought the world to presence. In everyday naming, word occludes world, preventing, in its everydayness, its coming forth, its disclosing. But what is this world that word has been brought forth into? In the same way that language speaks, world worlds. World, left alone, un-interfered with, comes into itself. It worlds. Again, this sounds like a tautology, but it is essential to Heidegger’s thought (and in my mind is more of a “god killer” than Nietzsche.) One of the most overlooked (and under-appreciated) aspects of Heidegger is his later examination and enthusiasm for the “fourfold,” or the system through which things come to be, through which things thing in a world worlding. The fourfold is the interaction of earth and sky, mortals and gods. Things come to be in the interstices and gathering of the fourfold. The fourfold provides both a place of being, and a sheltering, a place to dwell. Heidegger writes that “the things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The four are united primally in being toward one another, a fourfold.” The poet has called, through the act of pure naming, things to come forth. In the purity of the fourfold—that is, when that is all that there is, when there are no other distractions, definitions, things—entities themselves can come to be. It is important to note that Heidegger is not saying that there are four formal things in the world, autonomous entities unto themselves. He is not evoking a pre-Socratic formula as to what makes up the world; instead, the four mirror each other constantly. (Heidegger calls this the ‘mirror-play.’) They interpenetrate in the same way that the modes of being of things interpenetrate themselves. There is no discrete exclusivity in being or the fourfold. What makes up things is not a precise recipe of the four main components; what makes up things is the action of the fourfold coming together, the movement of the fourfold which is a becoming. Heidegger (2001) writes that “this gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things.” And he later adds that “thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture—gestate—world” (197). Language brings the world to be. It works not again as a recipe added to things, but instead it is a bridge, or more precisely, a relation. Language relates world to thing, brings world to thing. In a sense, it does not say anything; rather it allows, or calls in its movement. Heidegger (2001) writes that, The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference (199). It is in this inter that language prevails. Language is difference, it is the differential aspect between world and thing that brings world to thing. In the final stanza of Trakl’s poem “The Winter Evening,” Trakl evokes this difference in the second line when he writes, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.” Christopher Fynsk, in his essay “Noise at the Threshold,” draws attention to this point when he writes “it is the figure of the threshold that is language itself, inasmuch as language is defined as the articulation of difference by which difference comes about” (25). Language, as used in the pure language of the poem, draws together world and thing, bridging relation between entity and world. The calling of language calls world to thing, world to being. Heidegger (2001) describes this difference as unique; “of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things are at one with each other” (200). III. Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking—and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone (99). Maurice Blanchot The Writing of Disaster So far, we have allowed Heidegger to put forward what language does, how it functions as a relation and how it operates as a threshold, as a bridge. What interests me is what happens beyond language, beyond the relation. What happens to the thing without the naming, without the poet, or even without the everyday chatter—Fynsk calls this ‘noise’—intruding on being? If language allows things to become by bringing thing to world, what happens when we remove this bringing, this threshold turned to pain? In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger examines the work of the poet Stefan George, specifically “The Word”: Wonder or dream from distant land I carried to my county’s strand And waited till the twilight norn Had found the name within her bourn— Then I could grasp it close and strong It blooms and shines now the front along… Once I returned from happy sail, I had a prize so rich and frail, She sought for long and tidings told: “No like of these depths unfold.” And straight it vanished from my hand, The treasure never graced my land… So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be. That final line, “Where word breaks off no thing may be” is evoked on nearly every page of Heidegger’s essay. It is the line to which he returns over and over and bears repeating. Where word breaks off no thing may be. Where naming ends, no thing. We can interpret this in two ways (at least.) Where word—naming—breaks off, then there is nothing . Or, as I choose to read it, where word breaks off no thing may be. In this I see a hint forward, a marker left behind by Heidegger. What could this look like? What does no thing look like? Like a zen koan ( there is no mirror ) it is as thrilling and horrifying as contemplating what preceded the Big Bang. Because language as naming wasn’t always here; we weren’t always here. One or maybe two aspects of the fourfold (depending on your view of gods) were not always here, and there is no guarantee that we will always be around. What then? Heidegger (1982) describes the landscape that the poet finds, “It names the realm into which the renunciation must enter: it names the call to enter into that relation between thing and word which has now been experienced” (65). The poet, in renouncing, allows for the “may be” of “where word breaks off no thing may be.” This “may be” becomes “a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it from then on.” No thing is lacking. Where word breaks off, there may be, a totality, a completion. If we place the emphasis on may be , we make it affirmative, make it positive. One allows it. No thing is where the word, that is the name, is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where no thing may blossom, enrich, belong, become. What is no thing? Heidegger writes that “thing is anything that in any way is.” And just after this he writes that the “world alone gives being to the thing.” But what happens if there is no word? Word, in this formulation can be seen as an enframing, a challenging of language. By naming, by drawing a perimeter around an object, we hold it, by its definition (that is a brick) to an ordered future. If we borrow from Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1993) the idea of this standing-reserve of an ordered future, we see that “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (322). What happens if there is no naming of the thing? Silence perhaps. Stillness. We can name—and do name—that which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name of something. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing, not as thing thinging in the fourfold, but as blunt object apparent. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills its destiny, its being, its brickness, it bricks . But what happens when we remove the name for this brick. We no longer know what to call this no-thing (if indeed we can even arrive at the point of uncalled calling.) In fact the it (this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not naming—by removing the name—it still occupies the same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. It simply is , un-reliant, un- needed by me. By removing the subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the object—or at least the duality objectifying it? Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed any thing , per se . The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the word (the bridge, according to Heidegger) and in this (again, if this is even possible) there is something vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. Like the poet who calls the thing forward, by refusing to name, by avoiding any thing that demands me to name it, I release the thing into the fourfold. I am no longer challenging the thing to be there for me ; I do not en frame it through language. Rather I, in an act of extreme responsibility, am refusing the challenge. By refusing the name (refusing to name) one allows, (or no one allows no thing) the brick to be all things , to manifest its manifold being, to incorporate all things into its thinging . It becomes, quite literally, every thing . Because, in its infinite manifestness, it incorporates everything; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud, the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again, water and sun and stars and universe in an endless, infinite cycle of coming to be some thing (else). Perhaps this is what Heidegger is suggesting when he talks about the stillness at the end of his essay, “Language” (2001): The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the dif-ference is itself the stillness (206). It is in this stillness that I can imagine a gellasenheit (here I mean both “releasement in the Heideggarean sense, as well as Meister Eckhart’s use of the term meaning “letting the world go and giving oneself to God”) of thing and world, a releasing into the stillness and silence of no thing beyond where word breaks off. It is here where I may no longer be, and yet no thing is, but may be. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Front NICOLAS ALIFERIS (Translated by Avi Sharon) The poems in Nicolas Aliferis’s 1998 collection “From the Front” offer a panorama of postcard views and epistolary voices from across the Greek oikoumene during the years 1897 through 1922. While the title has military tones, they are not all soldier’s letters. In point of fact, this was a period when the territorial limits of Greece, “the Front,” were undergoing (...) near constant alteration—“like the ink drunk in by blotting paper” as Seferis wrote in a poem about Europe at the beginning of the Second World War. The front, therefore, could be almost anywhere during this period, and certainly in the minds of almost every Greek. The Greco-Turkish War of 1897, stemming from irredentist forces in Crete, was the earliest outbreak, and put that island on a path toward union with the mainland. After that came the string of Balkan conflagrations before, during, and after ww i, that would more than double the land mass and population of Greece. The sequence of Treaties that, one by one, concluded each stage in these disputes (from that of Constantinople in 1897, to Sevres in 1920) brought Crete, Epirus, much of Macedonia, and then Thrace and the Dodecanese islands within the limits of Greece proper. The “front” was therefore more an idea than a line on a map, and the experience of it was not limited to actual soldiers in real trenches. The distinct personae that animate each poem range from conscripts in training camps to villagers turned mercenaries to city-bound merchants and other figures, high and low. The poems themselves are drawn from various sources: some were personal letters in the poet’s own family archive, others were drawn from written history arion 28.2 fall 2020 124 from the front and newspaper scraps, while some are more purely hypothetical. They present an imaginary memento of the experiences and voices of that period, and the struggle, personal and national, that helped inform the shape and meaning of what Greece is today. Nicolas Aliferis 125 the death of chakalarov We did away with Chakalarov and Popov, those terrors to the villages. They’d collect our lira then make their way to the north. When word reached Macedonia it was a huge relief. Now we’re in the mountains, all sixteen of us, walking the trails covered in fog, holed up in the rocks, always on lookout. The cold is fierce: ice, snow, gnashing teeth. Our enemies raging and the Bulgarians wild as bears. So much blood, deep red. Beyond to the east, gleaming peacefully, the lakes, Ostrovou and Sorovitz. 126 from the front dombro betser I received your letter. With so much happening here there was little time to write. But we haven’t forgotten you; every day there’s some mention of your name. How are you finding Macedonia— her mountains, her rivers? You were not joking with our neighbors, I see. Where will this story end for us? The teacher from the Monastery, she asks about you: “And Mr. Pelopidas...” she begins, then lowers her eyes. Here the knives are out. Oh Lord, will we ever get over it? Nicolas Aliferis 127 adrianople 1920 I am well and wish you the same. Living is cheap here— a chicken costs just two and a half drachmas. Lately I’ve gotten to know all the upper level subordinates and quite a few merchants, Turks and Jews. In the evening there’s either study or cards. As for what you write: I say we should learn from the Belgians, Pantelis, just a little. Otherwise, I’m afraid, our race is finished! 128 from the front training camp, 1918 I’ve sent three letters and received none. Only yesterday I heard news from the trenches: the deeds of Yanni and Bicha, how they died. It rained today and is raining still. I sit alone (it’s been a while...) and write you. My comrades are outside, their eyes glued to the open spaces. How necessary for the soul— amid this solitude— to feel human. The need to hear the breath of a comrade, to stand above his gaze, to half close your... (shrink)

This essay aims at an elucidation of the performative relation connecting artistic mimesis with the living body. Encompassing art theory and phenomenology of the body, the scope is to evince a crucial link between aesthetic interpretation, body motion, and mimetic creativity, with general implications for reflection on the body, as well as a deeper understanding of a major element of ancient Chinese culture. By mainly analyzing Chinese texts on ink brush writing, as well as some testimony taken from 20th century (...) European philosophy, this essay, from a transcultural stance, tries to show how ink brush writing may be interpreted as a type of regulated body movement and body exercise. What appears as responsiveness within this phenomenal field is a specific form of mimesis, namely body mimesis. As a sort of imitative action, body mimesis runs through the bodily self, beyond consciousness, transforming it and shaping its behavior. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Knowing the Difference Between One's Ass and First Base Self‐Important Dork Personal Ethics and Professional Ethics The Philosophical Foundations of Bioethics Clinical Bioethics and Some Major Players Risk Versus Benefit Autonomy Inside the Outside Influences of Your Ink Memory Remodeling.

These interviews with Hélène Cixous offer invaluable insight into her philosophy and criticism. Culled from newspapers, journals, and books, _White Ink_ collects the best of these conversations, which address the major concerns of Cixous's critical work and features two dialogues with twentieth-century intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The interviews in _White Ink_ span more than three decades and include a new conversation with Susan Sellers, the book's editor and a leading Cixous scholar and translator. Cixous discusses her work and (...) writing process. She shares her views on literature, feminism, theater, autobiography, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, religion, ethics, and human relations, and she reflects on her roles as poet, playwright, professor, woman, Jew, and, her most famous, "French feminist theorist." Sellers organizes _White Ink_ in such a way that readers can grasp the development of Cixous's commentary on a series of vital questions. Taken together, the revealing performances in _White Ink_ provide an excellent introduction this thinker's brave and vital work—each one an event in language and thought that epitomizes Cixous's intellectual and poetic force. (shrink)

This paper starts with the study of realistic three-dimensional models, from the two aspects of ink art style simulation model and three-dimensional display technology, explores the three-dimensional display model of three-dimensional model ink style, and conducts experiments through the software development platform and auxiliary software. The feasibility of the model is verified. Aiming at the problem of real-time rendering of large-scale 3D scenes in the model, efficient visibility rejection method and a multiresolution fast rendering method were designed to realize the (...) rapid construction and rendering of ink art 3D virtual reality scenes in a big data environment. A two-dimensional cellular automaton is used to simulate a brushstroke model with ink and wash style, and outlines are drawn along the path of the brushstroke to obtain an effect close to the artistic style of ink and wash painting. Set the surface of the model with ink style brushstroke texture patterns, refer to the depth map, normal map, and curvature map information of the model, and simulate the drawing effect of the method by procedural texture mapping. Example verification shows that the rapid visualization analysis model of ink art big data designed in this paper is in line with the prediction requirements of ink art big data three-dimensional display indicators. The fast visibility removal method is used to deal with large-scale three-dimensional ink art in a big data environment. High efficiency is achieved in virtual reality scenes, and the multiresolution fast rendering method better maintains the appearance of the prediction model without major deformation. (shrink)

Edwin Southern developed a blotting technique for DNA in 1973, thereby creating a staple of molecular biology laboratory procedures still used after several decades. It became a seminal technology for studying the structure of DNA. The story of the creation and dissemination of this technology, which was not patented and was freely distributed throughout the scientific community, stands as a case study in open science. The Southern blot was developed at a time when attitudes about commercial intrusion into health research (...) were beginning to change and the practical value of molecular genetics was becoming apparent to industry. Interest from industry in fundamental molecular biological techniques meant that scientists began to think about commercial uses of their work even in otherwise "basic" research. The unpatented Southern blot is contrasted with later patented technologies, particularly microarray methods, which were created in the same environment by many of the same people, but which followed significant changes to UK policies encouraging commercialization of academic research and a norm shift friendlier to such commercialization within academic molecular biology. Professor Southern's personal experience illuminates how the technologies evolved, and his views provide insight into how scientists' attitudes about commercialization have changed. (shrink)

Helene Cixous is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential feminist writers and thinkers. "White Ink" brings together her most revealing interviews, available in English for the first time. Spanning over four decades and including a new interview with the editor Susan Sellers, this collection presents a brilliant, running commentary on the subjects at the heart of Cixous' writing. Here, Cixous discusses her books and her creative process, her views on and insights into literature, philosophy, theatre, politics, aesthetics, (...) faith and ethics, human relations and the state of the world.As she responds to interviewers' questions, Cixous is prompted to reflect on her roles and activities as poet, playwright, feminist theorist, professor of literature, philosopher, woman, Jew. Each interview is a remarkable performance, an event in language and thought where Cixous' celebrated intellectual and poetic force can be witnessed 'in action'. The accessibility of the interview format provides an excellent starting-point for readers new to Cixous, while those already familiar with her work will find unexpected insights and fresh elucidations of her thought. (shrink)

Helene Cixous is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential feminist writers and thinkers. "White Ink" brings together her most revealing interviews, available in English for the first time. Spanning over four decades and including a new interview with the editor Susan Sellers, this collection presents a brilliant, running commentary on the subjects at the heart of Cixous' writing.Here, Cixous discusses her books and her creative process, her views on and insights into literature, philosophy, theatre, politics, aesthetics, faith (...) and ethics, human relations and the state of the world. As she responds to interviewers' questions, Cixous is prompted to reflect on her roles and activities as poet, playwright, feminist theorist, professor of literature, philosopher, woman, Jew. Each interview is a remarkable performance, an event in language and thought where Cixous' celebrated intellectual and poetic force can be witnessed 'in action'. The accessibility of the interview format provides an excellent starting-point for readers new to Cixous, while those already familiar with her work will find unexpected insights and fresh elucidations of her thought. (shrink)

The true story of ten tough and tattooed bikers who rescue animals in danger Using their combined 1700 pounds of muscle, Joe, Johnny O, Batso, Big Ant, G, Angel, Eric, Des, Bruce and Robert stop at nothing within the bounds of the law to save animals, be they furred, feathered, or scaled, from life-or-death situations throughout the New York City metropolitan area. Working from tips from concerned neighbors and anonymous sources, they have rescued countless animals, including a dognapped bulldog and (...) 180 cats from the home of a hoarder. In between rescues, they've protested the barbaric practices of a horse slaughterhouse, visited schools to educate children about animal kindness and that "abusers are losers," and participated in Puppy Mill Awareness Day in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Former Newsday writer Denise Flaim chronicles their adventurous tales, detailing just what these brawny bikers, who will stop at nothing within the bounds of the law, can teach us all about respecting the creatures in our midst. (shrink)

In response to globalization, is there to be a single, homogeneous set of aesthetic values governing the production and consumption of art? I focus on a newcomer to globalized contemporary art, China, and argue that artworld art is far from the only art currently being produced. I describe four connected kinds of art currently made in China: Modernist, traditional, and avant-garde, which are artworld art, and mass commercial, which is not. Practices in all four conform to expectations globally that Chinese (...) art of all kinds should exemplify imitation, emulation, and copying. Such conformity entails what Winnie Wong has termed ‘staging Chineseness’. I conclude with an examination of this process in two recent exhibitions before proposing that a proliferation of a variety of values is unavoidable while contemporary artworld practitioners continue to introduce local concerns, and while the self-claimed high status of artworld art is progressively challenged by the vitality worldwide of non-artworld art. While some of these values are resistant to Western globalizing homogenization, others conform to it. (shrink)

This essay offers an overview of the reasons why tattoos are philosophically interesting. Considered here will be a partial survey of potential areas of philosophical interest with respect to tattoos, fortified by a little historical context. Claims about the ethical significance of tattoos and about the significance of tattoos for self-expression and as expressions of identity will be canvassed in the first two sections, as will questions about what they express or signify, how they might do so, and whose expression (...) we might take it to be. The final sections will address the contention that at least some tattoos are art and will raise various considerations about their closest analogs as well as their authorship. Although it will be argued that analogs can be found between tattoos and works recognized as art, it will also be maintained that tattoos raise unique aesthetic issues for consideration. (shrink)

This article considers current advances in tattooing that are challenging community-held views of authorship and ownership, and the need to address this tension. The key challenge is from AI-generated artworks being used as tattoo designs, but the authorial role of the tattooist is also challenged by body art projects such as tattoo collection. Legal clarity for tattooing is lacking, and in addressing this, this article advocates for an open, community-based form of shared copyright ownership and authorship for projects as tattoo (...) collecting, drawing on Dusollier’s and Mendis’ work. This article contributes to both copyright and cultural heritage legal scholarship, and to tattooing scholarship and the tattooing community. AI-generated art being tattooed on people has not been explored in the literature to date, and this article fills this gap. Furthermore, this article contributes a pilot study of the tattoo community’s views on AI-generated tattoos, which is currently lacking from the scholarly debate on AI-generated art. This article argues that the debate within the tattoo community about AI-generated art being used in tattoos needs to be addressed within the community through agreed extra-legal norms, which may well depart from how copyright law decides to approach AI-generated art globally. This article also asserts that AI should _not_ be regarded as the “author” of tattoo works in the traditional copyright sense, as only a human tattooist can draw from a number of cultural, textual, audiovisual and visual, cultural folklore, history and mythical references in creating their tattoo designs, as well as drawing on the client’s personal stories. This article explores the following: (i) an understanding of tattooing as an artform; (ii) tattoos in UK copyright law; (iii) an exploration of the authorial role of the tattooist within tattooing; (iv) the authorial role of the tattooist within tattoo collecting; (v) AI-generated tattoos—perspectives from the tattoo community, through a pilot study of YouTube videos and viewer comments about this; and (vi) a consideration of whether copyright legal reform is the solution for the tattooing community. (shrink)

There are three ways to control our future conduct: by causing it, by manipulating our future selves, or by taking future-directed decisions. I show that the standard accounts of future-directed decisions fail to do justice to their distinctive contribution in intentional diachronic agency. The standard accounts can be divided in two categories: First, those that conflate the operation of decisions with that of devices for either physical constraint or manipulative self-management. Second, accounts that, although they acknowledge the non-manipulative nature of (...) decisions, offer too restrictive a view of source of their effectiveness over time. I argue that a comprehensive view of decisions must acknowledge that there is a variety of ways in which they can be effective, which range from the exercise of rational authority to the reliance on sub-agential psychological propensities. What keeps all of these mechanisms together as possible explanations of the role of decisions in supporting diachronic intentional agency is that these mechanisms operate under a common regulative ideal of diachronic agency: the agent’s reliance on the continuous sense of the stability of the choiceworthiness of the action, regardless of her prior decision to perform it. In light of this regulative ideal, the contribution of effective decisions to diachronic agency is thus in principle dispensable although usually necessary for limited beings like us. (shrink)

Is there something that lies beneath the surface of our ordinary ways of speaking? Philosophy sometimes encourages the all-too-human thought that reality lies just outside our ordinary grasp, hidden beneath the surface of our experience and language. The present discussion concentrates initially on a few connected paragraphs of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein leads the reader to the view that meaning is there in the surface of the expression. Yet how adequate is Wittgenstein’s treatment of the sounds and ink-marks, the materiality (...) of the sign? With some reference to Emerson, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Derrida, my discussion explores how far a more adequate account of the sign can coincide with the claim that nothing is hidden. It exposes phony obsessions with transparency, which in a culture of accountability have had a distorting effect on education and the wider social field. It endorses confidence in the reality of ordinary words. (shrink)

Prior interpretations of the tattoos of nonhuman animals etched upon the preserved human bodies from the Pazyryk archaeological culture of Inner Asia have focused on solely human-generated meanings. This article utilizes an ethnoarchaeological approach to reassess these tattoos, by analogizing the nature and possibilities of human-ridden horse intersubjectivities in the present with those of the past. As enlightened by people who live with horses, including the author, the process of learning to ride can be seen as an interspecies apprenticeship process, (...) where both humans and horses pass along social knowledge as thoughtful actors with defined roles. From this perspective, the horse tattoos are presented as polysemic materializations of the bonds between particular Pazyryk horses and people, of blended identities, and of cosmological values related to time, memory, and belonging. The article concludes that exploring smaller-scale human-nonhuman animal interactions in the present allows for fresh interpretations of similar interactions in the past and provides a means for archaeology to move beyond the objectification of animals as sets of resources or symbols. (shrink)

The article discuss the interpretation of modernity in Bruno Latours 'The end of modernity'. On the one hand, it argues that the notion of modernity should be modified as nobody can be only modern. On the other hand, it argues that the notion of modernity changes over the ages and that we are in the middle of a process best understood as a new modernization of modernity.