ABSTRACTSome political ads used in the 2016 U.S. election evoked feelings colloquially known as being moved to tears. We conceptualise this phenomenon as a positive social emotion that appraises and motivates communal relations, is accompanied by physical sensations, and often labelled metaphorically. We surveyed U.S. voters in the fortnight before the 2016 U.S. election. Selected ads evoked the emotion completely and reliably, but in a partisan fashion: Clinton voters were moved to tears by three selected Clinton ads, and Trump voters (...) were moved to tears by two Trump ads. Viewers were much less moved by ads of the candidate they did not support. Being moved to tears predicted intention to vote for the candidate depicted. We conclude that some contemporary political advertising is able to move its audience to tears, and thereby motivates support. (shrink)

Feeling moved or touched can be accompanied by tears, goosebumps, and sensations of warmth in the centre of the chest. The experience has been described frequently, but psychological science knows little about it. We propose that labelling one’s feeling as being moved or touched is a component of a social-relational emotion that we term kama muta. We hypothesise that it is caused by appraising an intensification of communal sharing relations. Here, we test this by investigating people’s moment-to-moment reports of feeling (...) moved and touched while watching six short videos. We compare these to six other sets of participants’ moment-to-moment responses watching the same videos: respectively, judgements of closeness, reports of weeping, goosebumps, warmth in the centre of the chest, happiness, and sadness. Our eighth time series is expert ratings of communal sharing. Time series analyses show strong and consistent cross-correlations of feeling moved and touched and closeness with each other and with each of the three physiological variables and expert-rated communal sharing – but distinctiveness from happiness and sadness. These results support our model. (shrink)

When do people say that they are moved, and does this experience constitute a unique emotion? We review theory and empirical research on being moved across psychology and philosophy. We examine feeling labels, elicitors, valence, bodily sensations, and motivations. We find that the English lexeme being moved typically (but not always) refers to a distinct and potent emotion that results in social bonding; often includes tears, piloerection, chills, or a warm feeling in the chest; and is often described as pleasurable, (...) though sometimes as a mixed emotion. While we conclude that it is a distinct emotion, we also recommend studying it in a more comprehensive emotion framework, instead of using the ambiguous vernacular term being moved as a scientific term. (shrink)

The philosophy and aesthetics of music have been shaped by the philosophy of life since the end of the 18th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, the relationship between the philosophy of music and the philosophy of life changed fundamentally – due to the development and popularization of various related cultural theories. From then on, the philosophy of life, the philosophy of music and cultural criticism formed a complex triangle. Many European and North American intellectuals availed themselves (...) of established concepts of the philosophy of life such as ‘non-rationality’, ‘organicity’ and ‘vitality’ as contrasting foils for their own cultural-pessimistic theories, which revolved around the ‘critique of technology’, ‘pessimism of progress’, ‘posthistoire’, ‘dehumanisation’, ‘the uncontrollable machine’ and the ‘hypertrophy of administration’. At the same time, cultural criticism transformed the philosophy of music having been shaped by the philosophy life. This chapter reconstructs the triangle by means of Theodor W. Adorno’s music philosophy, especially his theoremes on avant-garde music. It demonstrates how, in the middle of the 20th century, cultural-pessimistic and life-philosophical ideas mutually explained and questioned each other in light of the contemporary compositional techniques and the philosophical discourse on them. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 129-135. Introduction Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Successions of words are so agreeable. It is about this. —Gertrude Stein Nachoem Wijnberg (1961) is a Dutch poet and novelist. He also a professor of cultural entrepreneurship and management at the Business School of the University of Amsterdam. Since 1989, he has published thirteen volumes of poetry and four novels, which, in my opinion mark a high point in Dutch contemporary literature. His novels even more than his poetry are (...) criticized for being inaccessible, which I generally take to be a compliment. It would be like saying that Fernando Pessoa is inaccessible, which he is not. Neither is Wijnberg. When we think of the combination economist-poet we are immediately reminded of the American poet Wallace Stevens, who, as the story goes, had two stacks of paper on his desk, one for contracts, one for poems. We also know that Stevens wrote on the economy and that questions of economy and insurance surface at multiple points in his poems. The following text is a very preliminary attempt to point at the intersections between poems, novels, business, and poetry in Wijnberg’s work. On the back cover of his novel De opvolging ( The Succession , 2005), Wijnberg states the following: “[This is] a novel for whomever is interested in the workings of a company as much as in the workings of a poem.” Wijnberg thus claims that the way in which a company “works” may be similar to the way in which a poem “works.” The question is the obvious one, what does this similarity consist in? De opvolging tells the story of company in which bosses and company doctors, secretaries, children, clowns, and beggars have tons of meetings, recite poems, perform plays, tell jokes, and succeed each other, climbing up and down in the company’s hierarchy. De opvolging is a novel in which the career of people follows the career of words. It resonates with Gertrude Stein's sentences, "Grammar. What is it. Who was it" (1975, 50). The words in Wijnberg's poems are like he characters in his novel. And if we keep in mind this allegorical reading of De opvolging , which is obviously only one of the possible readings, we may be able to understand some aspects of Wijnberg’s poetry. A repetition is already a pun. Look, that word is trying it again, as if it is afraid that by not doing it it would give up the hope that it will ever be able to do something. A pun is the opposite of the first word coming to the mind of someone who shouts it when he suddenly discovers something. (104) The repetition, the succession of the same word, is already a pun, a joke. The succession of the father by the son after the revolution is a joke. "Look he's trying it again!" The essence of a joke is a repetition. Archimedes’ “Eureka!” is its opposite. Poems can easily become jokes, depending on the way the words follow and repeat each other. In De opvolging , the careers of the bosses, good and bad secretaries, and company doctors easily become jokes, as they are “afraid that by not doing it [they] would give up the hope that [they] will ever be able to do something.” Not only the repetition, but also the distance and difference between the words in a poem, their cause and effect relations can be read as company relations. This becomes clear when we, for example, read the first lines of the poem “Cause, sign” from Het leven van ( The Life Of , 2009). A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate some- thing only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I would be able to say more about it. (49) Upon reading the first two lines we can already conclude that any word may be cause or sign or both. If a sign is also a cause there is no reason to discriminate it, yet to the poet they are still different. This difference only becomes expressible the moment he would have a secretary. Just like in De opvolging , the secretary introduces a distance; not in a company but in a poem. Hence the difference between “good” and “bad” secretaries in a company, where the good secretary of one boss may be the bad secretary of another one. The more we can say about the bosses of the company, or signifiers of the poem, the greater the distance we introduce between them and us. We should take serious the relation between Wijnberg’s novels and poems. Although they operate on different scales, they explain and converse with each other. Another example may be the novel Politiek en liefde ( Politics and Love , 2002), which deals with the relation, precisely, between politics and love. In the novel, Nicolai, a lieutenant in the Dutch army, is sent to Africa on a military mission. Upon leaving a receives a letter from his father. Dear son, Don’t do anything stupid before your father has advised you to do so. Your mother asked me to write a wise letter. I have been looking for wisdom for half a day and haven’t found much. If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave. What I want to say is that you have to return from Africa in good health, and before you know it the world will be your slave [....] Signed with a kiss from your father. (88) The line, “If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave,” returns as the title of poem in Het leven van: “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” (12-3), which elaborates this theme. So both in the way that these poems are structured and in their subject matter, they refer to the structures of our economy, to the ever-continuing line of CEOs succeeding each other like words, to the distance between them introduced by bureaucracy, and giving and receiving as economical and poetical acts. Poem and economy map onto each other, as in another episode from De opvolging : Edward reads two of the beggar’s poems about presents. Of a holiday nothing remains, except for memories, and if some of them are bad I’d rather forget them all; if I get a present I’d rather get something that’s useful to me for a long time. If I may choose, I choose what I can use longest, long enough to partially forget that this was the present, because it feels bad when nothing is left of it. […] Giving away becomes destruction in the stock destruction economy [ voorraadvernie -tigings-economie ], that is a gift economy [ geschenkeneconomie ], encountering for the first time an economy in which there’s selling and buying on markets. Instead of destroying supplies someone can also quickly say that they aren’t worth anything anymore; if someone wants to take them I’d gladly give him something extra. In a stock destruction economy he is someone who each day wants to work more hours than his colleagues. If around a company there is a gift economy in which someone’s rank is determined and made visible by the gifts someone can give someone else, a company will be more often character- ized by an invisible or unclear system of ranks. (152) Two poems about gifts present two different economical models, described by Wijnberg with the terms “stock destruction economy” and “gift economy.” Here we immediately recall the opposition introduced by George Bataille’s work on the concept of expenditure in The Accursed Share , where a “general economy” would surpass the stock destruction economy based on scarcity (capitalism) and become a gift economy (potlatch) and an egalitarian (communist) society. These claims are made both on the level of the poems and in their discursive explanation. They follow each other and on each other. I would like to finish this introduction to Wijnberg’s writing with a translation from his novel De joden ( The Jews , 1999), which develops the story of Hitler abdicating as chancellor of the Third Reich, appointing philosopher Martin Heidegger as his successor. In a conversation with two Russian actor-spies, sent by Stalin to figure out the situation, philosopher Walter Benjamin describes the abdication scene. Maimon: You were there when Hitler resigned? Benjamin: In the room we’re right now. The desk and the chairs are new. After his resignation Hitler would like to take his furniture to his new house. Martin naturally agrees. It is a sunny day. Martin is very nervous and complains about the heat. Martin is wearing his best dark blue suit, not his professor’s robe. Hitler is wearing his uniform. We enter the room and Hitler gets up and embraces Martin. Martin is not very good at embracing. Hitler shakes his hand. Hitler’s cap is on the desk. The cap has a metal lining. Hitler has strong neck muscles. Hitler says: A man is unclean. He takes a bath. Does he make the bath water unclean? I say: a man is unclean. He steps into a river. A little further a man steps into the river; does he become unclean? Hitler nods. I say: a man is standing in music. Another man hears the music but also sees the first man moving on the beat of the music in a way that he is certain that the music would excite different feelings in him if he wouldn’t to see the first man. Hitler says: a man is clean, listens to music, is suddenly touched and he doesn’t know by what. The conversation ends in the way you know it ends. Hitler picks up his cap from the desk and puts it on Martin’s head. (73-4) Aware of the never ending debate on the question of Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi regime, Wijnberg has the audacity to present the arguments of complicity in the religious terminology of cleanliness and uncleanliness, while at the same time recalling overtones of Hitler’s supposed love for Wagner, suggesting a relation between Benjamin and Hitler, and so on. The space of this introduction is to small to treat a novel like De joden , a reading of which together with passages from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political , Jacques Derrida's Of Spirit , Christopher Fynsk's Heidegger: Thought and Historicity , and Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book would be extremely elucidating and potentially open new avenues in thinking Heidegger's emphasis on poetry after the fall of the Nazi empire. But at this point we will have to curb our curiosity and follow the poet himself. The themes of the relation between business and poetry, but also Chinese landscape painting, love, Indian and Japanese poetry, and Western philosophy are analyzed and assimilated in Wijnberg’s work without ever losing the clarity of expression. It may be that, according to Alain Badiou, the “Age of the Poets” is over, but its end (Paul Celan) has exactly brought a new balance between philosophy and poetry, and it is this playful, but nonetheless serious balance that makes one hope that one day Wijnberg’s complete oeuvre might become available to readers across the planet. Tiranë, Albania February 15, 2011 English translations (all of them translated by David Colmer, who is preparing an English collection of Wijnberg’s poems entitled Advanced Payment ): Poetry International Words Without Borders Green Integer Review from Het leven van ( The Life of ) THE LIFE OF KANT, OF HEGEL As if every day he takes a decision that is as good as when he’d been able to think about it all his life. The life of Kant, of Hegel, the days of the life of, select three or four of them. Tell what he has discovered during those days as if he were the last one who knew so little. Give me something that I can cancel against then I can prepare myself for it. The reward is that I may continue with what I’m doing, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. This has nothing to do with everything remaining the same if I say that I no longer want anything else. I wouldn’t be able to say in which one and the other occur in a way that I if I knew something to cancel that one against it wouldn’t be possible now. The stars above my head and being able to say what belongs to what if I’ve let them in. FOLLOWING MY HEART WITHOUT BREAKING THE RULES Observing the rules without observing the rules by going where the rules no longer apply. I could also observe the rules there by applying them to what at great distance may resemble what the rules are about. But why would I do that, not to confuse someone who is seeing me from a great distance? Behind this morning the morning prepares itself when the rules are everything I have. IF I BORROW ENOUGH MONEY THE BANK BECOMES MY SLAVE A bank lends me money, if I don’t pay it back they tell my boss that he has to pay them my salary. But they have to leave me enough to eat and sleep and an umbrella when it’s raining. They can also empty my house, the furniture isn’t worth a lot, but every little helps. Each morning I leave for work, if I don’t start early they’ll soon get someone else, no bank will lend me money when the sun is shining. My boss has given me a cat to raise as a dog. Of course I know that it won’t work out, but I’ve asked for a week—maybe the cat gets lucky, maybe I get lucky. My hands around a cup of coffee, before I leave for work, warm-empty, cold-empty, as if hidden in the mist over a lawn. What I make when there’s no work left for me, I’m ashamed to say how little it is. Once I’m outside I check it, if they watch out of the window they can see me doing it. Suppose it is so much that I’d stay counting for hours, it’s getting dark and I’m still there. They stay watching for a while once they’ve finished their work, but have to go home, I get that, sure, I could also go home and continue counting there. If it’s too little running back immediately won’t help, because nobody’s there anymore, and if I come back tomorrow I may have spent what’s missing tonight. Going somewhere where it’s warm enough to walk around without clothes during daytime, it helps me to know that something’s more there than here. For someone like me there’s work anywhere, it shouldn’t take a week to find work for me there. Three times work and a home close to work, I may choose one and try for a week whether I want to stay there. If at the end of the week I don’t want to stay I’m back on the next day, then it was a week’s holiday. RULES If that’s against a rule, it’s yet another one that I cannot observe, or only so briefly that I cannot re- member it later. Anyways the rules are only there to help me remember what I need in order to do better what I do. In that respect there’s no difference between the rules that I find in a book and the rules that I think of early in the morning. I know that because I’ve made a rule just now nothing has yet to observe it. CAUSE, SIGN A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate something only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this down myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I could to say more about it. If something is taken away from me I consider how it would be if the opposite had been taken from me. That is what causes or signifies what is farthest away from what is caused or signified by what has been taken away from me. note: For the translations of “The life of Kant, of Hegel” and “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” I was able to consult David Colmer’s wonderful translations. (shrink)

Joaquin Segura. Untitled (fig. 40) . 2007 continent. 1.2 (2011): 117-124. The interview that follows is a dialogue between artist and gallerist with the intent of unearthing the artist’s working strategies for a general public. Joaquin Segura is at once an anomaly in Mexico’s contemporary art scene at the same time as he is one of the most emblematic representatives of a larger shift toward a post-national identity among its youngest generation of artists. If Mexico looks increasingly like a foreclosed (...) home burning to the ground, Segura could likely be the one walking away, charred matchstick between thumb and forefinger and shit-eating grin on his face. His corrosive attacks on institutions, ideologies, and power reflect a deep general distrust of authority, increasingly evident within the work of younger Mexican artists. It is perhaps most directly the result of President Calderon’s deeply unpopular war against the cartels but no doubt equally the product of decades upon decades of rampant corruption and errant policy within Mexico. Brett W Schultz (BWS): A recurring—if not dominant—theme within your current work and investigation explores ideological extremism in reaction to some perceived political and economic disenfranchisement, especially that espoused and practiced by right-wing groups in United States. That's exactly why I thought of you when I was approached to contribute a piece to an issue on the subject of the moraine—taken metaphorically here to signify a certain set of beliefs that have resurfaced within mainstream American culture in the wake of a probably over-exaggerated political sea-change, marked by Obama's election. You're a Mexican artist who now lives and works in Guadalajara, far from the border cities where such concerns would seem more likely to be relevant to a contemporary artist; of course, you're even farther from the culture that birthed this nature of extremism. What interests you so intensely about this movement, if we can call it that? Joaquin Segura (JS): I think there are several seminal points that you touch on in this particular question. There's a very specific set of interests that make me address the socio-political issues I've been dissecting through my practice in the last few years. First of all, I don't really consider myself a 'mexican' artist. As I've made clear in the past, I don't really believe in the notion of 'identity' or the idea of 'nation', which I find totally laughable and heartwarmingly passé. I'm convinced that these are totally outdated models of understanding our differences and similarities, expanding our already immense and irreconcilable cultural abysses instead of bringing them together, thus resulting in their total dispersion among the complex and extremely arbitrary weaving of contemporary social nucleii. Pretty much a frankly bad joke, if I may say so. The fact that I live and work in Mexico is a completely random geographical and temporal factor, which of course affects what I think and what I do, but I've chosen not to be limited by this specific circumstance. In the past, while working abroad, I've taken advantage of this preconception of Mexico—to be more exact, pretty much all of Latin America—as one of the last barbaric bastions of western civilization. Totally amusing, if you ask me about it. I consider my practice to be, among other things, a gonzo strategy of deceit: there are quite a few roles you can adopt in this approach that may actually reveal themselves to be a privileged vantage point. In my experience, the gentle savage is one of the most effective ones to establish my standing position. Thus, I'm a mexican artist if I need it to prove my point. If it's not necessary in a specific circumstance, I'm not. Quite simple, I think. Said in other words, it's just an ace I can play to win a particular match. It has worked so far, at least for me. L: Hey, America… , 2009. R: The Inaugural Address , 2009. I am interested in the nature of power and the rise and fall of totalitarian ideological and political apparatuses nowadays. But I guess, going even further, I'm essentially fascinated by the fissures and contradictions that have made these structures spectacularly crumble to the ground. I do believe extreme ideologies have played a crucial role in the globalization of socio-political crisis. In the end, our world is nothing more than a fading monument to all things gone wrong—the inspiring triumph of failure, in every sense. I see this as an exciting parable. And of course, it is an undeniable fact that the US, through their influence in world economy, international policies and general attitude towards the rest of the planet is the largest structure waiting to collapse. I think we are all secretly awaiting that moment of splendor, even americans. It'll be disastrous and as nasty as it can get, but it will also be liberating and incredibly inspirational. Not just because it’s the US but because it'll prove that absolutely everything is susceptible to fall. And not only that, most importantly, it would confirm that radical change may actually be possible and not just one more of the unfulfilled promises modernity has left us to struggle with on our own. BWS: I want to talk first about two of your works in particular: Hey, America... and The Inaugural Address . I feel like your more recent work has a subtle —or even hidden—sinisterness, but these two works are perfect examples of how brutally confrontational your earlier work has been. When we showed Hey, America... at Mexico City's Zona Maco art fair in 2010, there were at least a couple visitors to our stand who were absolutely ready to punch me in my gringo face for having done so. Certainly the shock value of these works is crucial to their central ideas, but can you tell me more about your intentions and how these works relate to your general oeuvre? JS: So funny. Perhaps we do deserve to be punched in the face. I think that's what I'm sometimes looking for, but I hardly ever get it. I do think of such works as some sort of logical trap, a somewhat perverse ambush waiting for someone to walk into head-on. I think what I tried to do with those two specific works, as well as some other past projects, is just emphasize issues or themes that do disturb or make me uneasy and restless. I consider my essential intention a need to make clear that we do not have to look the other way, ignore or forget. We must address, understand and solve these manifestations of senseless violence and absurdity because if we don't confront them this way, they'll end up consuming us. In other words, I do consider these works as a personal need of coming to terms with the nonsense of the world we all are living in. I don't particularly consider myself to be someone with a clear set of beliefs. Perhaps my only certainty would be that everything is there to be denied, demolished and obliterated—even my supposed unquestionability of that particular 'dogma.' My practice is a reflection of that paradox, and I do think that's how these two pieces relate to a wider body of work. Every democratic system and so-called developed contemporary society is deeply flawed on the inside, and that is because each has swept things under the rug. Of course, there's tolerance, good will and eagerness to make a difference but there's also hatred, pain and fear lingering all around. We must learn to relate to both sides of the spectrum. In a way, I approach the themes behind these particular works in what I think to be a non-biased, somewhat 'neutral' way. I do think there's an encryption process going on in the way I work, some sort of formal refinement of this somewhat outrageous content. A digest of infamy, if we can refer to it that way. It is up to the individual experiencing the work to decide which way these pieces lean. They can easily be seen from both positions and I'm ok with that. If you look closely at these works, there's nothing that establishes an unrelenting position—neither support nor rejection. I don't want my personal political views to directly set an agenda for the spectator as that’s essentially propaganda, which is one of the things I absolutely despise. To sum it up, I strive for the spectator to complete the piece in that sense. The work then becomes a reflection of his or her own contradictions, a playground of the mind. I'm interested in achieving a deadpan and deadlock state in the observer. So, in a way, those visitors threatening to beat the shit out of you unconsciously became that particular issue the work is alluding to. Just blind and senseless reaction to god knows what people feel must be defended, the overwhelming virtue of ambiguity. Beautiful. Perhaps you can also think of my practice as a uber-sophisticated and snobbish version of Punk'd. And you wouldn't be far from what I'm trying to convey. Untitled (Disturbance Scenarios #2) . 2010. BWS: To me, an important transitional marker in the overall trajectory of your work is the series, Disturbance Scenarios , which evokes a similar generalized state of panic, paranoia, and impending doom through its incorporation of sensationalist newspaper headlines, yet also suggests this slyly mysterious meta-narrative via the context in which the newspaper itself is placed. How did you arrive at this series and why did you choose photorealistic painting as the medium for it? JS: I consider this series to be a by-product of the process I follow when making work. I spend an important part of my time just doing research, going through documentation and accumulating visual or historical references for the themes or episodes I'm interested in, in that particular moment. These are, of course, valuable assets that connect among themselves in a mysterious and almost undetectable manner, sometimes a few years between one and the other. I've employed similar production strategies in the past, in ongoing series like Random Moments of Urban Decay , in which I document what I consider to be physical traces of ethnic, religious or ideological violence in the form of text graffiti, invisibly scattered in different cities of the world, mostly in the US. Disturbance Scenarios was started in early 2010, following a particularly intense period of traveling here and there that lasted for most of the year. I've always felt compelled by text, as I find quite intriguing the idea of how words can create equally intense evocations of what I call a mental panorama of uneasiness than those produced by aesthetically-charged imagery; of course, if handled right. I have a close relationship to print media—due both to my academic background and to my attraction to its ubiquity and almost unlimited influence, which in the end, is nothing else but power—so I found myself with a growing archive of newspaper headlines snapshots from cities like Melbourne, Auckland, London, and LA. Going through them, I noticed that they had in common a very specific thematic slant: they were all about some sort of conflict: energy crisis, political unrest, local episodes of domestic violence, you name it. So as you very well put it, I felt they all connected through this feeling of anxiety and anguish and I decided to start thinking of them as a body of work. Basically, I felt an interest in creating what I think of as my personal fragmented prefigurements of the end of civilization. There were few elements on the shots that could give away its actual location, geographically speaking, and I liked that. I find this sensation of vagueness and uncertainty quite alluring. The more subtle, the more perverse. The formal resolution of the series—as photo-realistic painting—is linked to my intention of creating distance between me as the artist and the themes I work with. I rarely execute my own work, and that is more a personal choice as I'm more interested in the ideas I mingle with than in the actual outcome of that process, understood as an "art-object" with certain market value. I did some tests with light-jet prints of those snapshots and I found them devoid of that nightmarish, disturbing indistinctness that I felt was so important for them to be able to project the turmoil I experienced upon encountering them and in conceiving of them as a series. So I thought that photorealistic painting would be an interesting resource to play with, as I hardly had worked with that medium before because of my lenient animosity toward painters and their craft. So they were executed like that and I think it turned out to be just right. Homemade (Napalm #2) . 2010. BWS: Though Disturbance Scenarios remains ongoing, it's an interesting contrast to another series of yours, Homemade, which are these beautifully banal photographs of the ingredients used to make improvised explosives. Whereas Disturbance Scenarios still confronts the viewer aggressively with its visual emphasis on loaded texts, in Homemade , you've dropped the surface-level bravado entirely. They're pieces that require explanation to someone not already versed in the fine art of amateur explosive-making. You weren't known for subtlety in your past work; why this change in direction? JS: I'm personally convinced that these are just two angles of the same conceptual preoccupation. I mentioned before my obsession with the idea of encryption. I'm quite enticed by how these processes of translation can politically and semantically alter and deviate purportedly subversive materials such as the ones these works allude to. I do think subversion is futile. I was really troubled by that thought for some time, but I think now I understand that it's not really that important. What is really significant is to elaborate on these alternate views, to envision and refine possible escape routes. It doesn't really matter if they go nowhere, but that is because nothing really matters. A "mute" artwork is a notion that captivates me. When you look at the works you mention, you know there's something off, but it's not fully clear how and why that is. I rely on that insecurity—on that moment of hesitation. And that can also be achieved through an approach like the one I'm now interested in. Let's just call it a smoke screen, a surrogate ruse to get to the same point: to talk about impotence and defeat in contemporary life. The notion that readily accessible information is actually a weapon is a double-edged fallacy: sure, you can make use of whatever resources you can lay your hands on, but that doesn't set you free because freedom is impossible. Still, that doesn't mean you can't blow up stuff during the process, metaphorically or not. I didn't understand the nature of subtlety before. I used to think that you needed to be loud and manifest anger and unconformity in the most aggressive manner possible. Then I finally realized that you can actually permeate and rarify a battleground—because after all, this is low-intensity war—if you actually aim at silently building up the contradictions and making the symbolic value of ideas and acts clash within themselves. Or perhaps it is that I am just getting old. I guess I used to be an angry kid until recently. Now I think of myself as a disenchanted post-teenager, and of course that reflects in my work and my approach to art-making. Kind of a rite of passage and I laugh at it because, overall, it has been overwhelmingly fun. And that doesn't mean that I'm not ready to stick it in someone or something's face again if I feel like it. BWS: You're now taking the subtlety of the Homemade series even further with your newest series, Definitive Reader For a Botched Revolution , in which you photograph a series of politically-charged books side-on, negating their content entirely—essentially reducing them to purely aesthetic objects in which the subject matter is only revealed in the title of the work. Can you talk about the ideas behind this series? Furthermore, is your recent interest in this idea of the "botched revolution" an indication of a general attitudinal or philosophical shift you've since adopted? JS: This new series of works is the logical outcome of a brief period I went through. Probably the last couple years, in which due to a number of circumstances that don't really have to do with my art-making, I was forced to renegotiate my ideas, my beliefs and practically everything that surrounds me. It was quite distressful and turbulent, but in the end, I think it was also almost epiphanic. I came to terms with myself and now I'm calm and serene. That is, of course, my personal take on it but I mention it because I do think it's important to address this shift you mention. The idea of an artwork as a container for latent revelations enthralls me quite a bit. That's how I see these particular works: art as an incendiary agent. It's up to the artist and the spectator to do whatever they please with it. I think the detachment and almost surgical cleanliness from the Definitive Reader series is also my take at poking fun of the way some art is totally innocuous and uncompromising. These images may be pleasing to the eye, but there's something twisted and rotten within them, well hidden beneath. You'll either see it or not, but without a doubt, it will not cancel its presence. This series is intrinsically linked to Homemade . I'm pretty much horsing around with similar ideas and statements here. And well, yes, I do think any revolution is a botched one. There's nothing too heavy about their own downfall. Decay and breakdown are here and will not go away. Perhaps we must learn to embrace them in one way or another, for our own sake. L: Untitled (T.A.Z.). R: Untitled (United States Marine Guidebook of Essential Subjects) . 2011. BWS: Finally, let's discuss the near future. You've got an upcoming solo show at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros [SAPS] in Mexico City this summer. What can we expect from that? What else do you have planned? JS: I'll go and get seafood as soon as I'm done with this interview. It's pretty good here in Guadalajara. That's my top priority at this very moment. About my solo project at SAPS, it's due to open in late July. I'm quite looking forward to it. I'm still closely working with the curator on the general feel for the show but I can say that it'll be more of a revision of past works that have not been shown in Mexico City except for a couple pieces. It definitely won't be a showcase for new projects, although we may include one or two previously unseen works. What you can expect is a rereading of what I've been working on during the past few years. In a way, that's exciting to me because for some reason I don't really care about, I'm not that active in Mexico City even though that's where I lived and work for years. I've hardly shown there after my solo project at Yautepec in February of 2010. It'll be nice to see how it all comes together and I'm more thrilled about it because I totally love the space and I think they're doing an excellent job with their programming and its direction. And in a certain way it feels like going back home. About everything else, I need a period to reflect and fully understand what I've been thinking and working on. I've got a few group shows here and there: New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne are the ones happening soon. I will present my censored project Untitled ( Gringo Loco ) as part of the programming of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, two years after being escorted at gunpoint from the installation site by police sent by the extreme right-wing mayor of the city, which I found pretty amusing for an otherwise typical Saturday afternoon. I'm also involved in a couple "curatorial" projects. In my case, "curatorial" means that I help put together stuff I like and I'm interested in. One of them will open in late September of 2011 at Arena Mexico Arte Contemporaneo, and I will work with three of whom I consider to be some of the best artists in a lively and active scene such as the one here in Guadalajara. But most importantly, I've been doing heavy research so there are also a number of projects that I've yet to finalize. That'll be my main focus during the rest of the year, even though I really enjoy procrastination. There'll be time for that later. Or maybe not. We'll see. About Joaquin Segura The action, installation, intervention and photographic work of Joaquin Segura (b. Mexico City, 1980) has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some spaces that have featured his work include La Panaderia, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Centro de la Imagen and Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City; El Museo del Barrio and apexart, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; and Palace Adria in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2008 and 2009, Segura was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, NY and at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. He is represented YAUTEPEC in Mexico City and by Arena Mexico Arte Contemporáneo in Guadalajara. Further Reading Joaquin Segura’s website YAUTEPEC artist page for Joaquin Segura Capps, Kriston. “ID-ENTITY: Washington, DC.” ART PAPERS . 2009. (shrink)

The University of Pittsburgh policy for procuring organs from non-heart-beating cadaver donors recognizes the potential for conflicts of interest between caring for a "hopelessly ill" patient who has forgone life-sustaining treatment and caring for a potential organ donor. The policy calls for a separation between those medical personnel who care for the gravely ill patient and those involved with the care of transplant recipients. While such a separation is possible in theory, it is difficult or impossible to attain in practice. (...) However, such a separation of duties would be unnecessary if an arbitrator were appointed to monitor the proceedings as they take place on a case-by-case basis. In this way, the biases—real or potential—of the individuals involved could be identified, and the harmful effects of the unavoidable conflicts of interest could be minimized. (shrink)

Since neither of these two inordinately long responses deals seriously with what I said in “An Ideology of Difference” , both the Boyarins and Griffin are made even more absurd by actual events occurring as they wrote. The Israeli army has by now been in direct and brutal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for twenty-one years; the intifadah, surely the most impressive and disciplined anticolonial insurrection in this century, is now in its eleventh month. The daily killings (...) of unarmed Palestinians by armed Israelis, soldiers and settlers, numbers several hundred; yesterday two more Palestinians were killed, the day before four were killed. The beatings, expulsions, wholesale collective punishments, the closure of schools and universities, as well as the imprisonment of dozens of thousands in places like Ansar III, a concentration camp, continue. A V sign flashed by a young Palestinian carries with six months in jail; a Palestinian flag can get you up to ten years; you risk burial alive by zealous Israel Defense Forces soldiers; if you are a member of a popular committee you are liable to arrest, and all professional, syndical, or community associations are now illegal. Any Palestinian can be put in jail without charge or trial for up to six months, renewable, for any offense, which needn’t be revealed to him or her. For non-Jews, approximately 1.5 million people on the West Bank and Gaza, there are thus no rights whatever. On the other hand, Jews are protected by Israeli law on the Occupied Territories. In such a state of apartheid—so named by most honest Israelis—the intifadah continues, as does the ideology of difference vainly attempting to repress and willfully misinterpret its significance. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors”. (shrink)

The following essay investigates the animating force of jester-humour and trickster-critique as necessary components of prophetic consciousness and social movement. Climate change devastation coupled with racialised socio-economic predation today faces social movement with a stark demand. The root-work necessary enjoins challenge of human presumption about the meaning of life at the most basic level. The locus from which such a depth-exploration will be elaborated here is postindustrial Detroit, on the part of a poet-activist-educator who will insist that ‘jesterism’ as ‘prophetic (...) animation’ cannot merely be ‘talked about’, but begs performance and embodiment – even in the process of writing and theorising. Indigenous wisdom and folk spirituality will supply historical perspective in asserting laughter as both antidote to trauma and tactic of critique – whether looking at traditional African practices of tricksterism reincarnate in everyday street life in Detroit, medieval Christian celebrations of the Feast of Fools subverting official Church orthodoxies in feudal Europe, or the postmodern insurgence of hip-hop beats and tags in challenging corporate gentrification and church capitulation at the emblematic heart of de-industrialisation. (shrink)

Richard McCormick examines the concepts of postmodernity and postmodernism as they apply to West Germany, discussing them against the background of cultural and political upheaval in that country since the 1960s, rather than exclusively in the more familiar setting of intellectual history. Considering six literary and cinematic texts that are marked by a preoccupation with the self and subjectivity, he underscores the crucial influence of feminism on writers and filmmakers--and on the "postmodern." In a broad international context he describes the (...) conflicting forces that affected the West German student movementthe rationalistic tradition of the Weimar Left and more "irrational" influences such as French existentialism and surrealism (as well as the American "Beat" movement and rock & roll)--and shows how these forces played themselves out so that dogmatic Marxist Leninism was repudiated in favor of a "New Subjectivity.". At the center of the discussion are the novels Lenz by Peter Schneider, Class Love (Klassenliebe) by Karin Struck, and Devotion by Botho Strauss, and the films Wrong Move written by Peter Handke and directed by Wim Wenders, Germany, Pale Mother by Helma Sanders-Brahms, and The Subjective Factor by Helke Sander. The author shows how ongoing attempts to attack the separation of emotion from reason, life from art, the private from the public, and the personal from the political brought about changes in outlook, from the 1960s to the early 1980s, that are related to the rise of new political movements--ecology, nuclear disarmament, and feminism. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

A complement clause is used instead of a noun phrase; for example one can say either I heard [the result] or I heard [that England beat France]. Languages differ in the grammatical properties of complement clauses, and the types of verbs which take them. Some languages lack a complement clause construction but instead employ other construction types to achieve similar ends; these are called complementation strategies. The book explores the variety of types of complementation found across the languages of (...) the world, their grammatical properties and meanings. Detailed studies of particular languages, including Akkadian, Israeli, Jarawara, and Pennsylvania German, are framed by R. M. W. Dixon's introduction, which sets out the range of issues, and his conclusion, which draws together the evidence and the arguments. This book will interest scholars of typology, language universals, syntax, information structure, and language contact in departments of linguistics and anthropology, as well as advanced and graduate students taking courses in these subjects. (shrink)

This issue investigates the meaning of photographic image for contemporary art. In Malraux' dream, photography offers the ultimate guarantee for a coherent presentation of art. However, as Douglas Crimp has stated, the appearance and enhancement of photography as a form of art among other art forms disrupted the center of the art world. What does this mean for art and philosophy in our time? Various artists and theorists will delve into that question: Christian Boltanski, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Jean-François Chevrier, Douglas (...) Crimp, Jos de Mul, Mirjam de Zeeuw, Rineke Dijkstra, Michael Gibbs, Rodney Graham, Gerald van der Kaap, Karen Knorr, Zoe Leonard, Ken Lum, Hermann Pitz, Liza-May Post, John Roberts, Allan Sekula, Andres Serrano, Jan Simons, Beat Streuli, John M. Swinnen, Renée van de Vall, Hilde van Gelder, Hripsimé Visser, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace and Herta Wolf. (shrink)

We were not surprised by the opinion piece written for the Cambridge Quarterly by George J. Agich, Ph.D., who chairs the Cleveland Clinic Foundation's bioethics department. Dr. Agich uses the article to attack those who criticized his institution's proposed non-heart-beating organ donor protocol. Because we reported on this controversy for 60 Minutes in April 1997, we wanted to set the record straight.

Ben Saunders claims that actual consent is not necessary for organ donation due to ‘normative consent’, a concept he borrows from David Estlund. Combining normative consent with Peter Singer's ‘greater moral evil principle’, Saunders argues that it is immoral for an individual to refuse consent to donate his or her organs. If a presumed consent policy were thus adopted, it would be morally legitimate to remove organs from individuals whose wishes concerning donation are not known. This paper disputes Saunders' arguments. (...) First, if death caused by the absence of organ transplant is the operational premise, then, there is nothing of comparable moral precedence under which a person is not obligated to donate. Saunders' use of Singer's principle produces a duty to donate in almost all circumstances. However, this premise is based on a flawed interpretation of cause and effect between organ availability and death. Second, given growing moral and scientific agreement that the organ donors in heart-beating and non-heart-beating procurement protocols are not dead when their organs are surgically removed, it is not at all clear that people have a duty to consent to their lives being taken for their organs. Third, Saunders' claim that there can be good reasons for refusing consent clashes with his claim that there is a moral obligation for everyone to donate their organs. Saunders' argument is more consistent with a conclusion of ‘mandatory consent’. Finally, it is argued that Saunders' policy, if put into place, would be totalitarian in scope and would therefore be inconsistent with the freedom required for a democratic society. (shrink)

In the history of thermodynamics, two dates stand out as especially important: 1824, when Sadi Carnot's brilliant memoirRéflexions sur la puissance motrice du feuappeared in print; and 1850, when Rudolf Clausius published his similarly titled paper ‘Ueber die bewegende Kraft der Wärme’. In this paper Clausius narrowly beat the Scottish physicist William Thomson to the solution of a puzzle which had been highlighted in the latter's recent publications: how could Carnot's theory, with all its intellectual attractions, be reconciled with (...) the newly discovered principle of the inter-convertibility of heat and work? Clausius's solution (as is well known) was to replace Carnot's axiom of heat conservation, with the axiom now known as the second law of thermodynamics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Alcaics In Exile: W. H. Auden’s “In Memory Of Sigmund Freud”Rosanna WarrenOn September 23, 1939, Sigmund Freud died in exile in London, a refugee from Nazi Austria. Within a month, Auden, who had been living in the United States since January of that year, wrote a friend in England that he was working on an elegy for Freud. 1 The poem appeared in The Kenyon Review early in 1940. (...) A stately public ode, the poem mourns not only the death of a publicly significant individual, but the collapse of a world. Hitler had overrun Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland; assaults on Jews had intensified; England and France had just declared war on Germany. There would be, indeed, many who would have to be mourned:When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish,of whom shall we speak?...Someone encountering this poem for the first time, on the page or in the ear, might be pardoned for puzzling over its form. It sounds prosy. It seems to have some recognizable English cadences, pentameters (“[inline-graphic 01]”), tetrameters (“ ”), and even trimeters (“ ”). But the pattern seems unruly, with some [End Page 111] lines stretching out beyond five traditional beats, and ignoring any iambic order: “turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he.” Groping for a more satisfactory principle of organization, a reader with some knowledge of versification may be moved to count syllables. Such a reader will discover that the poem is indeed organized syllabically in lines of 11, 11, 9, and 10 syllables. “Aha,” says the reader, alert to Auden’s intimacy with Classical civilization: “A Horatian ode. Not inappropriate for a formal elegy.” Reflecting further, and leafing through the pages of Horace, that reader will find, or remember, that two thirds of Horace’s odes are in these quatrains, the alcaic stanza. Auden, it appears, has composed his elegy in some version of the meter of Alcaeus, the 7th century b.c.e. Greek poet whose stanza became second nature to Horace. And we cannot enter the world of Auden’s poem without asking, why alcaics? And how do they work here?“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” is sometimes said to be Auden’s first syllabic poem. 2 Others demur, proposing both earlier and later examples. 3 Whatever the spats about dating Auden’s early syllabic practice, scholars conventionally agree that his turn toward syllabic composition reflects his evolving interest in a discursive poetry; in the poet as a private intelligence with a public voice; and in the work, respectively, of Horace and Marianne Moore. Having identified the poem as syllabic, many critics move on to heftier topics like psychoanalysis versus Marxism, Auden more than most poets having laid himself open to an overridingly thematic criticism of Big Ideas. But if, having acknowledged the influence of Horace and Moore in Auden’s refusal of English iambic lyricism here, we stay with the question of meter, we are led back to the older progenitor, Alcaeus, a great poet of exile, whose stanza Auden adopts and adapts. I shall ask how it affects our reading to observe that the stanza itself has a genealogy, and brings its expressive burden to bear on Auden’s poem.“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” relies on a counterpoint of two metrical systems, the largely iambic accentual/syllabic system, traditional in English since Wyatt, and a flattened version of Greek quantitative meter, which was a musical notation of syllable length. For Auden, whose great prosodic facility was almost a handicap, the problem was, “not how to write in iambics but how not to write in them from automatic habit.” 4 Throughout his poetic life, he reached for cadences to interrupt the “natural” iambics, sometimes recalling the Old English alliterative beat, and often turning to ballads and popular tunes for rhythmical variation. By the late thirties, he was not only disillusioned [End Page 112] with the Spanish Civil War and his role as quasi-Socialist bard, but was seeking new compositional principles as well. Free verse was not an alternative: his ear required an evident... (shrink)

The Brain Death Reconsidered – Is It a Tenable Concept? Since 1968 it has been recognized in the medical practice that irreversible coma connected with apnea can serve as a criterion of human death. This approach was first introduced in the so called Harvard Protocol. As a result of the work of this commission, the brain-based criteria of human death were quickly legally introduced in America and in most countries in the world. The only symptom on which death can be (...) pronounced is, according to this new definition, the absence of spontaneous brain function. However, the acceptance of the new definition of death did not eliminate the old one completely. In many states both old and new definitions of death are legally valid. Practically, in these countries the alternative definition of death functions alongside the old one and diagnosis of death can be based both on the cardiac/respiratory and brain symptoms. One of the few exceptions proved to be Japan. The law in this country does not provide a uniform answer to the question of what human death is. Instead, it allows people to choose between traditional death and brain death. The law states that if a person wants to be an organ donor after brain death has occurred, he or she must record that intention on a donor card or label beforehand. Those who object to brain death and transplantation do not need donor cards. They are considered to be alive until the heart stops beating. In this way the Japanese law respects the opinion of 20-40% of the society who do not believe in the brain death. The opinion of the same percentage of people in Western societies who oppose BD is ignored by their legal systems. Initially the concept of BD did not cause a lot of controversy but this situation changed in the nineties of the last century. Since then many authors have criticized the validity of the brain-based criteria of death. They maintain that it is impossible to declare the absence of all the functions of the whole brain on the basis of the clinical tests supposed to detect it. There may be present some level of consciousness in brain death (BD) patients and therefore, they may feel pain. It is significant that 27% of the members of the teams which perform the excision of the heart for transplantation think that they are killing a living person and that in many countries during this operation a normal general anesthesia is required because of the vivid reaction of the body of the patient. The opponents of the brain death theory stress that the accurate examination of the so-called brain dead persons shows the persistence of the functions of significant parts of their brains. There are EEG waves recorded in 20-40% of BD patients. Event related potentials (ERP) show the reaction to verbal and non-verbal stimuli and the hormone production by the brain tissue can be detected in many BD people. The proper treatment could not only significantly prolong lives of the BD patients, but around 60% of possible donors with the lowest result of 3 in Glasgow Coma Scale could be restored to normal life if their brain edema is properly treated. This treatment should be based on the therapeutic hypothermia connected with the application of the thyroid hormones, whose level is usually too low in the patients with the brain injury. There is a growing lack of consensus regarding the issue of brain death, especially among physicians. Some regard brain death as a biological one, some as the death of the person but not of the human body, and the rest, as a definition accepted by the society, which doesn’t require other legitimacy than the freely chosen criteria. The brain death concept is also criticized from the philosophical point of view. The strength of the brain death theory was based on the premise that the brain is the integrating center of the body. According to this argument, the death of the brain means that the organism ceases to exist for it is no longer a functioning whole. To this argument the opponents of the brain death concept say that this question is not a question a priori but an empirical one and that the empirical data validate the opposite opinion, which says that the bodies of brain dead patients are alive. Some widely known cases show that even the real death of the entire brain means the death of the body and, therefore, may not signify the death of a human person. The integration of the body is the function of the organism as a whole and not of a single organ, even if this organ is the brain. This point of view can be confirmed by the opinion of St. Thomas Aquinas who says that the soul is primarily and per se connected with the body as a whole as the proportionate perfectible and only secondarily with the parts of the body, according to their ordination to the whole. So, the death of any single organ does not preclude the union of the soul with the rest of the body as a living whole. Moreover, the terms such as “consciousness” and “person” should not be identified. The term such as “human living nonpersons”, proposed by some bioethicists and referring to the people without consciousness has not been accepted in the official documents concerning BD. Bodies of the BD people are alive, therefore, it is not right to use the term “brain death” to describe the state of these patients, but rather the term “brain failure” should be used. As the result, according to some authors, the dead donor rule should be abolished. The Catholic Church stresses the sacredness of the human life from the beginning to the end. Therefore She requires that there be no doubts that the donor in BD is really dead. Because of the lack of consensus among physicians, philosophers and theologians, the popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI decided to continue the scientific research and discussion concerning BD between the representatives of various disciplines. Keywords: brain death, brain edema, global ischemic penumbra, therapeutic hypothermia, consciousness, person, substantial form. (shrink)

W. H. Auden, the sometimes Greta Garbo of twentieth-century poetry, once told Stephen Spender that he liked America better than England because in America one could be alone. Further, in his introduction to The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse Auden remarked that while in England poets are considered members of a “clerkly caste,” in America they are an “aristocracy of one.” Certainly it does seem to be the individual poet—Whitman, Williams, Olson, Plath, O’Hara, Ginsberg—who has altered the landscape of (...) American poetry and prosody, not the group. And most American literary “movements,” as Robert Creeley has pointed out, are simply comprised of a few people who on occasion drink together, and who are as likely as not to end the evening in violent argument over an aesthetic or political point. Yet the notion of schools or movements remains, in mainstream historical criticism at least, a vital one. How many introductions to anthologies of American poetry, for example, continue to use such rubrics as the Transcendentals, the Populists, the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the New York group? And while established poets often rebel from any sense that they are part of a larger community, which by definition is self-limiting, they are often complicit in their initial categorization. For poets as well as critics the idea of a school is often a useful fiction serving as both a kind of protective hothouse and a platform for getting a hearing.The most recent “group” of American poets—the first since the anthology wars of the early sixties really to be of more than passing interest and perhaps to be actually capable of bringing about a major shift of attention in American poetry and poetics—is the so-called “Language” school. Individual volumes by poets often considered part of this group number well into three figures now and there have been important journals and anthologies produced in a serious and sustained fashion by these writers. Yet in part because of what seems the essentially hermetic character of the project , there has been little notice of this activity by academic critics or reviewers.1 What I’d like to do here is briefly map a few major aspects of the territory, describing some of the practical and theoretical questions which seem to occupy many of these writers in their ongoing critique of the “workshop poem.” 1. Two important exceptions are discussions of some of this work in Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse and Marjorie Perloff’s review “The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties,” American Poetry Review 13 : 15-22. All further references to Perloff’s article, abbreviated “WS,” will be included in the text. For a discussion of the various Language poetry journals and anthologies, see my chapter “American Poetry, 1940s to the Present” in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual/1983, ed. Warren French , pp. 349-74. Lee Bartlett, an associate professor of English, has directed the University of New Mexico’s creative writing program for five years. Coeditor of the critical journal American Poetry, his Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets will be published this fall. Currently he is writing a biography of William Everson. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Playing the Dummy:Maugham, Smartphones, and the End of EleganceEric BronsonIOn the Russian Trans-Siberian train from Vladivostok to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), an American businessman won't stop talking for the entire ten-day journey. In his story, "A Chance Acquaintance," W. Somerset Maugham describes this 1917 meeting between Ashenden, a British character loosely based on himself, and the chatty American, named Harrington. The two passengers are blissfully unmoved by the revolution (...) unfolding all around them. Ashenden casually suggests the two of them try and find another pair to pass the time playing bridge. Harrington refuses. "It beats me how an intelligent man can waste his time card-playing," Harrington asserts, "and of all the unintellectual pursuits I have ever seen it seems to me that solitaire is the worst. It kills conversation. Man is a social animal and he exercises the highest part of his nature when he takes part in social intercourse."1 Ashenden doesn't understand the American's distaste for playing cards, especially bridge. "'There is a certain elegance in wasting time,' said Ashenden. … 'Besides,' he added with bitterness, 'you can still talk.'" [End Page 477]Like many of his fictional characters, Maugham enjoyed eloquent, "time-wasting" games like bridge. Unlike solitaire, bridge encourages social interaction. Once, when his confounded bridge partner confronted Maugham with evidence that his high-class opponents were cheating, Maugham was nonplussed. "They gave us double Martinis to start with," he noted, "a slap-up lunch with a particularly good bottle of white Burgundy and old brandy with our coffee."2 The dishonesty was irrelevant. For Maugham, a good bridge game, like the attendant conversation, should help temper one's moral outrage and skim over the unruly passions that so often plague our public and private lives. Elegance, for Maugham, meant presenting the appearance of calm and respectability, especially when such presentations conflicted with one's more turbulent emotions.In Maugham's short story "The Three Fat Women of Antibes," the women around the bridge table desperately try to keep up appearances, both physically and emotionally. When passionate arguments inevitably threaten to undo the air of genteel conversation, Lena, the newest addition to the table, states, "I think it's such a pity to quarrel over bridge. … After all, it's only a game."3 But while it might be true that bridge is "only a game," Maugham took games seriously. Parlor games like bridge were spaces to practice and perfect the social mores on which colonial hierarchies were solidified. In Maugham's England, the game of life required an elegant performance of the many roles the genteel class was expected to play. That performance was predicated on a relentless effort to keep up ordinary appearances by regulating emotional displays. As Maugham wrote in a 1944 article for Good Housekeeping, a good bridge game rewards people who are "truthful, clearheaded, and considerate," characteristics essential "for playing the more important game of life."4More than any other card game, bridge is built on conventions. Etiquette dictates how cards are shuffled, passed, and played. While there is always some room for surprise and risk, everyone around the table needs to know the bidding and playing conventions to ensure the best possible game. In every hand a silent partner, known as the dummy, lays their cards face up, thereby taking themself out of the action.The persistence of such conventions is a holdover from the game of whist, the predecessor of bridge. In an early-nineteenth-century story, "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," essayist Charles Lamb describes an elderly whist player who enjoys the elegant waste of time that such long card games encourage. While dances and parties help build social skills around untrustworthy passions, card games like whist, and later bridge, [End Page 478] were more like "a long meal; not like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might co-extend in duration with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships." This kind of congeniality mattered to serious people like Mrs. Battle, people who "despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things."5The game of bridge... (shrink)

This begins before 1896. This begins before Arkansas. But “this can't be right grandmother. who are our Ancestors! she said, shit gal, i don't know”. One of my ancestors walks toward me. She be Gertrude. Gertrude Grant. I have no pictures of her. I have no living memories of her. Yet I remember. Her. My Nana's mama, born around 1890 in the lumber town of Canfield in southern Arkansas.Canfield, Arkansas, 1896We're childrenBabies reallywhen the fires startA mob is always ready to (...) takeour wagesRun us awayAlways ready to lynch usWhen a volley of shotsbe my lullabiesI won't live to see 36I learn about the Canfield Race War of 1896 through online searches, old newspaper clippings, doctoral dissertations. Great-Grandma Gertrude would have been around six when the rioting happened, when white laborers became jealous of Black laborers and tried to push them, beat them, burn them out of town. Free library access to census documents and land deeds tells me that Gertrude's daddy, James W. Grant, purchased eighty acres of land in Canfield on February 1, 1893, perhaps thanks to the Southern Homestead Act, which made millions of acres of land available to homesteaders, including migrating and free Negroes. James and his wife, Susie A. Lewis, raised their children on their land in Canfield. How did the riots affect them, their land, their kin, their safety, their daily lives? I ask all the questions. I was raised with the permission to ask all the questions. I ask all the questions before I'm trained in the academy to ask all the questions. (shrink)

The Language of Atoms argues that Epicurean writing, specifically Lucretius', offers a theory of performative language, of how language acts rather than describes.

The rhetoric of 'needs' has been used to legitimate all major turns in UK health policy since 1936. This study identifies the ethical, policy and technical issues arising from the concept of needs. In the first part a theory of needs is developed, which takes into account both the philosophical traditions and the practical problems arising in daily health care. In a second part, health systems throughout the world are described and compared, addressing ethical as well as economical questions. Its (...) interdisciplinary approach will make The Need for Healthcare important reading not only for those interested in or employed in the health care sector but also for students of philosophy. (shrink)

Vor 50 Jahren veröffentlichten Gretel Adorno und Rolf Tiedemann erstmals eine aus dem Nachlass edierte Ausgabe von Theodor W. Adornos Ästhetischer Theorie. Obgleich das von Adorno selbst als opus magnum verstandene Werk unvollendet blieb und nur als posthumes Kompilat erschien, entfaltete es in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhundert eine enorme Wirkung, die weit über den Bereich der philosophischen Ästhetik hinausging. Renommierte Autoren und Autorinnen unterschiedlicher Disziplinen nehmen das Jubiläum des erstmaligen Erscheinens der Ästhetischen Theorie zum Anlass, diesen Klassiker aus (...) verschiedenen Perspektiven noch einmal neu in den Blick zu nehmen. Neben Essays zur Relevanz und Aktualität der Ästhetischen Theorie für die philosophische Ästhetik im 21. Jahrhundert stehen persönliche Texte, die die Bedeutung des Buches für das je eigene Denken schildern. Darüber hinaus finden sich Beiträge, die der Frage nachgehen, in welcher Weise einetextkritische Neuedition zu einer Relektüre dieses kanonisch gewordenen Textes führen und die Rezeption verändern könnte. Zu den Autor/innen gehören unter anderen Horst Bredekamp, Bazon Brock, Eva Geulen, Lydia Goehr, Robert Pippin, Martin Saar, Martin Seel und Beat Wyss. (shrink)

The rhetoric of 'needs' has been used to legitimate all major turns in UK health policy since 1936. This study identifies the ethical, policy and technical issues arising from the concept of needs. In the first part a theory of needs is developed, which takes into account both the philosophical traditions and the practical problems arising in daily health care. In a second part, health systems throughout the world are described and compared, addressing ethical as well as economical questions. Its (...) interdisciplinary approach will make _The Need for Healthcare_ important reading not only for those interested in or employed in the health care sector but also for students of philosophy. (shrink)