Nomadism in Iran: From Antiquity to the Modern Era. By Daniel T. Potts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xxv + 558, 3 maps, 21 illus., 5 tables. $90 ; $45.

3rd in the thread: between intention & attention.40.6700º N, 73.9400º W.

From the Introduction: "William James and Gilles Deleuze gave two specific definitions of their own ways of thinking: James used the expression “radical empiricism”, whereas Deleuze wrote about “transcendental empiricism”. In both cases, empiricism is brought out as the main feature of their perspective on reality. I will show that both authors share an empiricist background, regarding especially the concept of “pure experience”. [...] Furthermore, I will bring out that Deleuze, even if he shares the same starting point of James’s (...) philosophy, shifts the axis of repetition according to difference: he develops his perspective on pure experience through a redefinition of the transcendental.". (shrink)

The emergence of life in our societies stablishes one of the fundamental dimensions to understand our contemporary world. Biomedicine, biosecurity, biotechnology and bioterrorism are just some of the new concepts that appear due to this phenomenon. In this sense, this article will introduce one of the main current theories that aim to analyse this reconceptualization of life: posthumanism. Specifically, we will work on the proposals made by the Italian-Australian philosopher Rosi Braidotti and the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Simultaneously, a project (...) of radical allokhronía will be proposed towards drift in evolution. This is made in order to overcome the persistence of the anthropocentric view that remains the main problem of both proposals for improvement of humanism. La emergencia de la vida en nuestras sociedades constituye una de las dimensiones prioritarias y fundamentales para comprender nuestra contemporaneidad. Biomedicina, bioseguridad, biotecnología o bioterrorismo, son sólo algunos de los nuevos conceptos que dan cuenta de este fenómeno. En este sentido, el presente artículo abordará una de las principales corrientes teóricas que se propone analizar dicha reconceptualización de lo vivo, a saber, el denominado "posthumanismo". Específicamente, se analizarán las propuestas desarrolladas por la filósofa ítalo-australiana Rosi Braidotti y el pensador alemán Peter Sloterdijk. Simultáneamente, se propondrá un proyecto deallokhroníaradical hacia la deriva de evolución que permita superar el vicio antropocéntrico que continúa siendo el eje prioritario de problematización de ambas propuestas de superación del humanismo. (shrink)

In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, nomadism works as an approach to the creation of concepts that favour space: geophilosophy. Nomadism is the way in which one crosses the plane of immanence and the many becomings; in fact, nomadism exceeds the ancient rhetoric of the subject because its disposition belongs to the multiple and to the environment in which it can unfold. In this sense, the disorientation in the present appears less disturbing; it is rather a (...) shift in perspective, certainly difficult to understand in the time in which the mega-machine of power is becoming more and more persecutory. Lines of flight, movements of slippage, becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-minor refer not only to the exercise of criticism, but also to the production of assemblages that intend to resist the present. (shrink)

This paper forms part of a project to describe and analyse historically and anthropologically nomadic pastoralism. It reflects on mobility, its forms and scale, and more especially on the critique of predominant classical, even banal ideas which assimilate nomadism to mobility. Nomadic pastoral mobility occurs in a context that separates it radically from migratory movement. In fact, nomadic mobility constitutes a strategy that stabilizes resources and populations and whose basic foundation is the appropriation of a territorial base that is (...) established as durably as possible. Just as, and following sedentary settlement, nomadic pastoralism puts an end to migratory mobility. Thus it seems that a single idea of mobility is inappropriate to describe the two fundamentally independent phenomena represented by transcontinental migration, partly arising from the effects of the ice age, and nomadic pastoralism. (shrink)

Solomon Maimon argues that while Kantianism does venture quite a way toward the establishment of an immanent critical project that more satisfyingly addresses real experience, it does not fulfill the aims of its own project. In order to negotiate Maimon’s claim, I utilize the primary metaphorics of the First Critique: homesickness. The Kantian longing for home is an insatiable yearning, a striving for the end of something that cannot end, namely, the end of the search for home (Zuhause). According to (...) Maimon, although home is unattainable, there is a different sense of home: home is the path itself, a sort of nomadism, a roving life of the path that never leads home. The Kant of the first Critique did not fully realize that the project could not reach an actual final resting place; in fact, this realization, that home is a transcendental ideal, might be the very motivation for the third Critique. Thus, in order not merely to justify the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, but also to allow the application of such knowledge to reach the facts themselves, actuality as such, the “well-groundedness” of the critical project requires some re-direction from Maimon. To do this, Maimon renders Kantian transcendental conditions truly genetic. (shrink)

The paper’s purpose consists in pointing out the importance of the notion of “territory”, in its different accepted meanings, for the development of a theory and a practice of subjectivity both in deleuzean and canettian thought. Even though they start from very different perspectives and epistemic levels, they indeed produce similar philosophical effects, which strengthen their “common” view and the model of subjectivity they try to shape. More precisely, the paper focuses on the deleuzean triad of territorialisation, deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation, with (...) regard to the role it plays in the forming of the subject and in connection with the fundamental deleuzean notion of difference; it furthermore concentrates on the characterization of the notion of territory in Canetti’s work, also in the light of the mentioned deleuzean categories and with reference to the crucial canettian concept of transformation. Finally, the paper analyses both the political consequences of the “nomadic subjectivity” Deleuze and Canetti deal with and the critical and problematic aspects it involves. (shrink)

This article examines Nietzsche’s enduring influence on Deleuze by showing how the interpretation advanced in Nietzsche and Philosophy informs Deleuze’s later work with Guattari. I analyse Deleuze’s reading of the will to power as a typology of forces and his interpretation of the Overman as a pinnacle of creative activity with an eye towards demonstrating that these are not merely Deleuzian creations but are also defensible interpretations of Nietzsche; and I suggest how these portions of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche influence (...) his concepts of desiring-production and nomadism, respectively. By analysing Deleuze’s relation to Nietzsche as a longue durée, we can better appreciate how Deleuze’s early reading of Nietzsche is carried forward in his later work. (shrink)

Procuramos mostrar neste breve artigo que o processo de secularização estudado por Max Weber, levou a religião a adaptar-se num ambiente de livre-escolha, conduzindo os sujeitos a uma escolha na qual o indivíduo, diante de inúmeras possibilidades e necessidades, é capaz de optar por aquela que melhor lhe servir. Apesar de a secularização ter perdido sua hegemonia, ela continua a suscitar calorosas discussões e inúmeros debates entre os pesquisadores do fenômeno religioso, particularmente sobre o pluralismo, as mudanças dos papéis sociais (...) das organizações religiosas, a competição entre agências produtoras de sentido, as novas possibilidades de escolhas. Diante desse quadro, procuramos mostrar que o movimento neopentecostal oferece ao indivíduo inúmeras opções de bens religiosos, provocando com isso o trânsito religioso . Esse trânsito tem feito com que os líderes das igrejas neopentecostais, na tentativa de atrair novos adeptos, produzam com maior intensidade “novos” bens religiosos, assim como busquem fidelizar esses novos membros à sua igreja. Como resultado, percebemos dentro do campo religioso brasileiro uma intensa movimentação de fiéis, bens e igrejas produzindo e consumindo religião para o seu próprio deleite e consumo. Palavras-chave: Neopentecostalismo; Secularização; Trânsito Religioso.The purpose of this paper is to show that the process of secularization studied by Max Weber, led religion to adapt itself in an environment of free choice, leading subjects to a personal choice, where the individual, confronted by innumerous possibilities and necessities, can opt for the one that bests suits him. Although secularization has lost its hegemony, it keeps on inspiring discussions and debates among researchers of religious phenomena, particularly on pluralism, the changes on social roles of religious organizations, the competition among agencies producing meaning, the new possibilities of choices.Given the situation, we demonstrate that the neo-pentecostal offers the individual, various options of religious goods, generating what can be called “religious transit”. This flow of people has caused the leaders of the neo-Pentecostal churches, in search of new followers, to produce with greater intensity “new” religious goods in order to attract more people and make them faithful to their churches. As a result of that, we can perceive in the brazilian religious field an intense flow of believers, religious symbols and churches producing and consuming religion for their own pleasure and consumption. Key words : Pentecostalism; Secularisation; Religious Traffic. (shrink)

Digital nomadism is described geographically, technologically, and existentially.

Reflections on the importance of epistemic nomadism for women and queers in the academy.

This article revisits, analyzes and critiques Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 bestseller, The Songlines,1 more than three decades after its publication. In Songlines, the book primarily responsible for his posthumous celebrity, Chatwin set out to explore the essence of Central and Western Desert Aboriginal Australians’ philosophical beliefs. For many readers globally, Songlines is regarded as a—if not the—definitive entry into the epistemological basis, religion, cosmology and lifeways of classical Western and Central Desert Aboriginal people. It is argued that Chatwin’s fuzzy, ill-defined use (...) of the word-concept “songlines”2 has had the effect of generating more heat than light. Chatwin’s failure to recognize the economic imperative underpinning Australian desert people’s walking praxis is problematic: his own treks through foreign lands were underpropped by socioeconomic privilege. Chatwin’s ethnocentric idée fixe regarding the primacy of “walking” and “nomadism,” central to his Songlines thématique, well and truly preceded his visits to Central Australia. Walking, proclaimed Chatwin, is an elemental part of “Man’s” innate nature. It is argued that this unwavering, preconceived, essentialist belief was a self-serving construal justifying Chatwin’s own “nomadic” adventures of identity. Is it thus reasonable to regard Chatwin as a “rogue author,” an unreliable narrator? And if so, does this matter? Of greatest concern is the book’s continuing majority acceptance as a measured, accurate account of Aboriginal belief systems. With respect to Aboriginal desert people and the barely disguised individuals depicted in Songlines, is Chatwin’s book a “rogue text,” constituting an act of epistemic violence, consistent with Spivak’s usage of that term? (shrink)

The research deals with the issue of genre hybridization in the novel “Silence – Chronicle of a Killer” written by a contemporary Austrian writer Thomas Raab. An examination of the novel's composition and structure, as a text in motion, has been accomplished in the article. The novel “Silence” is an excellent illustration of how the genre of adventure has been adapted to include elements of science fiction. This novel is a love tale, a rural life saga, a formation narrative, and (...) a psychological thriller all in one. As a fictionalized account of the life of a serial murderer with hypersensitive hearing who became a legend for his mental torment and suffering, it serves both as a biography and a thriller. Novelist Raab uses elements from classic horror novels like Frankenstein, German romantics, in particular, G. Kleist, the tale of Casper Hauser, and detective novels like Friedrich Durrenmatt's "Promise" to tell the story of Casper Hauser's disappearance in his book. A new aesthetic experience may be formed at various degrees of identification ranging from naive perception to higher levels of literary reception. Concentration is required for poetic and philosophical substance. Michel Focalut's nomadism, marginality, and authoritarian power rhetoric have been discussed in this article. The novel's ultimate content has been disclosed as the aphesis torment, emotional sublimation, as the birth of an artwork and, at the same time, death of the author, who exposes discourses, accountable for creating texts that are allocated to him. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that by considering Ludwig Wittgenstein's methods, we can better understand and appreciate Jonas Mekas's diary films. Based on Wittgenstein's notion of “aesthetic puzzlement”, I identify the main confusions encountered by the viewer upon watching Mekas's films, such as: 1) fragmentation; 2) persistent repetition; and 3) the importance placed on the everyday. I discuss three films – Walden (1969), Lost Lost Lost (1976), and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) (...) – and demonstrate that the aesthetic puzzlements within them may be dissolved by looking at the format of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953). Mekas's lifelong interest in filming the most mundane and domestic scenes can be understood as a puzzlement in itself: why not just admire the ordinary whilst living in it? Wittgenstein's thought experiment in Culture and Value helps us understand the aesthetic puzzlement of Mekas's interest in filming, remembering and presenting an extensive array of everyday activities, and also explains why the viewer can find the most mundane and domestic activities in his films remarkable. Additionally, I discuss how Mekas's diary films may be regarded as coming close to Wittgenstein's aesthetic ideal of art as being able to represent “life itself”. I aim to show how Mekas's cinematic practice places extreme importance on ordinary acts and offers a mode of thinking which echoes Wittgenstein's own views on philosophy. I conclude with a discussion of “nomadism”, a notion that elucidates the peculiar form of the works of both Wittgenstein and Mekas. (shrink)

Les New Age Travellers, groupe social nomade en Grande-Bretagne, caractérisé à lafois par la contre-culture des années 1970 et les formes de précarisation actuelles, parviennent sous certains aspects à surmonter des situations de risques diversifiées. À partir de trois dimensions qui leur sont spécifiques : le rapport au travail, la solidarité communautaire et le nomadisme, ces individus tentent au quotidien, de façon non conventionnelle, fragile et bricolée, de reconstruire des liens sociaux, de forger de nouveaux supports de reconnaissance sociale en (...) faisant preuve d’inventivité. L’objectif de notre article est double : placer les notions de processus social d’individualisation ou encore de subjectivation au sein d’un mode de vie ou d’une situation qui en semblent très éloignés : la précarité. Dans cette mesure, les populations désaffiliées apparaissent également susceptibles d’action et d’initiative, à condition d’en définir les modalités et les limites qui y sont associées. En outre, l’idée consiste à proposer un nouvel éclairage de ce groupe social et à souligner son intérêt pour saisir, à une échelle microsociologique et sous des aspects particuliers, les transformations du lien social aujourd’hui.The New Age Travellers, a nomadic social group living in Great Britain, characterized by modern expressions of poverty and by a counter-culture inspired by the seventies, manage to overcome various situations of risk. In various domains which may be peculiar to this social group – work, communal solidarity and nomadism –, these individuals attempt, in a fragile, non-conventional and inventive way, to reconstruct social memberships and to forge new bases for social recognition. This paper has two complementary goals : using the notion of social process of individualization or of subjectivation , it first wishes to analyse the New Age Travellers’ way of life or various situations of precariousness which seem very far removed from these notions. In this way, desaffiliated individuals also appear capable of action and initiative, provided one has defined their forms and specified the limits of the process. The paper will then cast new light on this social group, and will demonstrate its importance for the understanding, at a small-scale level and from a particular perspective, of broader transformations in today’s social link. (shrink)

While Spain was conquering new lands in the Americas, foreigners arrived into their own—the Gitanos. Spain imposed a double-standard whereby their crossing into new, occupied, territory was legitimate, but the entry of others into Spanish territory was not. I compare and contrast these historically parallel movements of people using Deleuze and Guattari’s taxonomy of movement. I conclude that the double-standard of movement was due to differences of power between these two groups, understood in terms of material conditions, a prototypical “racial (...) contract,” and differences in the relationship to land and space. This history and analysis of colonial Spain is a critical start for Latin American postcolonial theory; it gives us a framework to study philosophies of migration and nomadism; and finally, it introduces the Gitanos as an important population to complicate critical race theory or theories of ethnicity. (shrink)

Introduction -- By way of nomadism -- Context and generations -- Sexual difference theory -- On the female feminist subject : from "she-self" to "she-other" -- Sexual difference as a nomadic political project -- Organs without bodies -- Images without imagination -- Mothers, monsters, and machines -- Discontinuous becomings : Deleuze and the becoming-woman of philosophy -- Envy and ingratitude: men in feminism -- Conclusion. Geometries of passion : a conversation.

Literary studies are living a nomadic existence on the margins of the neoliberal university, forced to adapt to the needs of more profitable disciplines and the insidious marketization of higher education to find an intellectual home. By drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory, this article situates the current state of literary studies in the wider networks of power relations that differentially distribute nomadic experiences in the contemporary world. The article begins with an examination of the contradictions of nomadic mobility in (...) the era of globalized capitalism and how these contradictions interrelate with the study of world literature. The second half of the article focuses on the transformation of labor under neoliberalism, charting the rise of cognitive capitalism and its relationship to the university. While the future of literary studies might look precarious in the era of cognitive capitalism, the increasing casualization of intellectual labor creates the conditions for unstructured, unrestrained, and deterritorialized flows of thought that escape the constraints placed on those in the institution. By harnessing literature’s subversive potential, literary studies can use these nomadic flows of thought to resist the operating principles of the neoliberal university and help combat the conditions that create precarious nomadic experiences across the globe. (shrink)

Nomadism as a spatial concept denoting uncharted movements has opened up non-static ways of theorizing the subject in feminist theory and beyond. But it seems that the nomads of the real world and their torturing wanderings today have irrevocably challenged the romance of unregulated movement and force us to radically rethink the very concept of nomadism itself. In this paper I address the aporias that women's entanglement in current mobility assemblages has raised in the ways we understand and (...) imagine the subject of feminism. In doing so, I experiment with the concept of the non-nomad as an emergent figuration that retains the radicalism of nomadic theories, while pointing to their margins, shadows and exclusions. (shrink)

As an epistemological perspective, 'nomadism' is an emerging field of scholarship, offering intersectionality with eco-criticism, feminism, post-colonialism, migration studies, and translation. Much of the scholarship that uses the precepts of nomadism to read cultural texts and phenomena is scattered as separate articles in academic journals or as single chapters in books wherein the primary focus is the intersectional fields. Few book-length publications solely focus on the ramifications of nomadism; Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality fills that void. The (...) fifteen chapters in this volume explore the possibilities offered by the nomadic perspective to explore a wide range of literary and cultural texts; organized into three sections, "Nomadic Assemblages," "Non-Oedipal Cartographies", and "Space-Time Montages", that work as one to negate absorption into the interiority of sovereign territory. These sections are not an attempt at corralling the nomadic spirit into separate enclosures; instead, they are bands of warriors that operate the violence of the hunted animal, dehumanized human others, and earth others. The chapters are in constant multi-vocal conversations with narratives that camp on the turbulent weathers of global transitory spaces. They charter real or intellectual turfs of interstitial/rhizomatic nomadic epistemologies as political resistance to the exclusionary practices of a violently wired world. This book will appeal to post-graduate students, researchers, and faculty in the departments of literature, comparative literary and cultural studies. Researchers in sociology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and migration studies will also find the material applicable to the expanding approaches available in their fields. (shrink)

Granted a certain depth of accuracy in citing an aspect of Spengler as an enactment of an aspect of Wittgenstein's thought, Wittgenstein's difference from Spengler should have depth. One difference can be characterized by saying that in the Investigations Wittgenstein diurnalizes Spengler's vision of the destiny toward exhausted forms, toward nomadism, toward loss of culture, or of home, or community: he depicts our everyday encounters with philosophy, with our ideals, as brushes with skepticism, wherein the ancient task of philosophy, (...) to awaken us, or bring us to our senses, takes the form of returning us to the everyday, the ordinary, every day, diurnally. (shrink)

The discussions about the ethical, political and human implications of the postmodernist condition have been raging for longer than most of us care to remember. They have been especially fierce within feminism. After a brief flirtation with postmodern thinking in the 1980s, mainstream feminist circles seem to have turned their back on the staple notions of poststructuralist philosophy. Metamorphoses takes stock of the situation and attempts to reset priorities within the poststructuralist feminist agenda. Cross-referring in a creative way to Deleuze's (...) and Irigaray's respective philosophies of difference, the book addresses key notions such as embodiment, immanence, sexual difference, nomadism and the materiality of the subject. Metamorphoses also focuses on the implications of these theories for cultural criticism and a redefinition of politics. It provides a vivid overview of contemporary culture, with special emphasis on technology, the monstrous imaginary and the recurrent obsession with 'the flesh' in the age of techno-bodies. This highly original contribution to current debates is written for those who find changes and transformations challenging and necessary. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, feminist theory, gender studies, sociology, social theory and cultural studies. (shrink)

With clarity, precision and economy, Paul Patton synthesizes the full range of Deleuze's work. He interweaves with great dexterity motifs that extend from his early works, such as Nietzsche and Philosophy , to the more recent What is Philosophy? and his key works such as Anti-Oedipus and Difference and Repetition . Throughout, Deleuze and the Political demonstrates Deleuze's relevance to theoretical and practical concerns in a number of disciplines including philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and cultural studies. Paul Patton also (...) presents an outstandingly clear treatment of fundamental concepts in Deleuze's work, such as difference, power, desire, multiplicities, nomadism and the war machine and sets out the importance of Deleuze to poststructuralist political thought. It will be essential reading for anyone studying Deleuze and students of philosophy, politics, sociology, literature and cultural studies. (shrink)

Philosophers, novelists, and intercultural comparisons : Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens /​ Richard Rorty Lifeworlds, modernity, and philosophical praxis : race, ethnicity, and critical social theory /​ Lucius Outlaw Modern China and the postmodern West /​ David L. Hall From Marxism to post-Marxism /​ Svetozar Stojanović Incommensurability and otherness revisited /​ Richard J. Bernstein Incommensurability, truth, and the conversation between Confucians and Aritotelians about the virtues /​ Alasdair MacIntyre The commensurability of Indian epistemological theories /​ Karl H. Potter Pluralism, relativism, and (...) interaction between cultures /​ Bimal K. Matilal The problem of relativism /​ Jiang Tianji. Between relativism and fundamentalism : hermeneutics as Europe’s mainstream political and moral tradition /​ Ferenc Feher Conceptual schemes and linguistic relativism in relation to Chinese /​ A.C. Graham The origins of the question : four traditional Japanese philosophies of language /​ Thomas P. Kasulis Meaning as imaging : Prolegomena to a Confucian epistemelogy /​ Roger T. Ames On the dual nature of traditional Chinese thought and its modernization /​ Li Zhilin A planetary macroethics for humankind : the need, the apparent difficulty, and the eventual possibility /​ Karl-Otto Apel Reasonable challenges and preconditions of adjudication /​ Antonio S. Cua The French Revolution and the Holocaust : can ethics be ahistorical? /​ Hilary Putnam Tradition and moral progress /​ Joel J. Kupperman The shape of artistic pasts, East and West /​ Arthur C. Danto. Surrealistic distortion of landscape and the reason of the milieu /​ Megumi Sakabe Why art changes /​ Richard Wollheim The transcendental in a comparative context /​ Frederick J. Streng Reflections on religious pluralism in the Indian context /​ Margaret Chatterjee Three enduring achievements of Islamic philosophy /​ Lenn E. Goodman Two dimensions of religion : reflections based on Indian spiritual experience and philosophical traditions /​ G.C. Pande Between nationalism and nomadism : wondering about the languages of philosophy /​ Graham Parkes The discourse of cultural authenticity : Islamist revivalism and enlightenment universalism /​ Aziz Al-Azmeh Traditional political values and ideas : an examination of their relevance to developments in contemporary African political order /​ Kwame Gyekye On the interpretation of traditional cultures /​ Maria L. Herrera. The concept of progress and cultural identity /​ Roop Rekha Verma Moses, Hsüan-tsang, and history /​ Agnes Heller Secularism : sacred and profane /​ Daya Krishna Scientific progress and content loss /​ Larry Laudan A dialectical view of scientific rationality and progress /​ Marcello Pera Scientific progress reconsidered /​ Ilkka Niiniluoto Does progress in science lead to truth? /​ Lorenz Krüger. (shrink)

This article discusses the idea of intra-generational education. Drawing on Braidotti’s nomadic subject and Barad’s conception of agency, we consider what intra-generational education might look like ontologically, in the light of critical posthumanism, in terms of natureculture world, nomadism and a vibrant indeterminacy of knowing subjects. In order to explore the idea of intra-generationalism and its pedagogical implications, we introduce four concepts: homelessness, agelessness, playfulness and wakefulness. These may appear improbable in the context of education policy-making today, but they (...) are born of theorising our practices in the age-transgressive field of Philosophy with Children. We argue that these concepts help to reconfigure intra-generational relations, ways of being and becoming. They express the longing, corporeality and visionary epistemology of nomadic enquiry. These inventions express a non-hierarchical philosophy of immanence. We draw some tentative conclusions about educational practices more generally. (shrink)

This brief text offers a critique of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of nomadism. It is shown that ‘nomadism’ functions as a compilation of unresolved contradictions, such as those of movement and rest, anarchy and order, numeric abstraction and concrete placement. I argue that, in the last instance, this concept bears allegiance to its etymological provenance from the Greek nomos and that it veers on the side of an economy, rather than an ecology, of being.

This essay describes some of the literary, psychological, and historical causes of Russia’s war in Ukraine (2022) based on observations of the national character found in the fiction of Aleksandr Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky and in philosophical and psychological essays of Petr Chaadaev, Sergei Askol’dov, and Sigmund Freud. The political ideology that stands behind the war can be characterized as schizofascism, or schizophrenic fascism that embraces the contradiction between archaic myths, chauvinism, and xenophobia, on the one hand, and corruption and (...) cynicism, on the other. Citing the controversial results of sociological polls indicating both Russians’ aspiration for friendship with Ukraine and their support for the aggressive war, the author explores the deep ambivalence inherent in the psychology of Russians as historical successors of the Golden Horde and the Moscovite State, incorporating the legacy of nomadism, militarism, messianism, and autarky. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the culturological analysis of the new model of the subject in the twenty first century. The methodology of work is based on the wave theory of social development. Modern society enters the state of the "fourth wave". The fourth wave comes in place of the agrarian, industrial and informational societies. This wave is called "new Industrialization" in contemporary economic context. The modern economy needs the revival of the industrial sector with the support of the national (...) state. New industrialization is countering the global control and fragmentation of the world. The national state is changing its concept from unitary to glocal and multi-polar. Consciousness of citizens should also change. The subject of the fourth wave is a cultural nomad. He makes travels to the global world and switches cultural codes in different contexts. The term "altermodern" is the word of curatorial practice of "zero". It means the nomadic consciousness, the ability to cultural wanderings. Nomadic consciousness is based on the model of transculture. Trans-national and trans-cultural view is a synchronization in the human minds of different cultural worlds. Man is at the point of their collision, belongs to all the worlds and does not apply to any one. It accumulates in its consciousness projections of different cultures, their possible alternatives and development. Nomadism, transculture and altermodern - is the gap between globalization and antiglobalism. Globalism causes unification of cultures. Anti-globalism leads to a revenge of fundamentalism and ethnic isolation. Nomadic consciousness of the altmodern balances between the universal and particular principles of human existence. Opposition to ideology is a distinctive feature of transcultural altmodern. The fourth wave is characterized by total radicalization of the world as a result of the revival of the neoliberalism of the right-wing dictatorships on the territory of the Third World countries. "The doctrine of shock" is the source of the formation of neo-totalitarianism. Art liberates him. Psychoanalysis is a means of liberation from ideologies. The procedure for dismissal is based on art therapy in the aesthetic cluster. Altermodern is an era of increasing role of artists in shaping the consciousness of a cultural subject. Art-galleries of the world use techniques of psychoanalytic work with the public. They provide rearrangement of the subject in the direction of an open dynamic consciousness without boundaries and prejudices. (shrink)

The article takes up the novel Sweet Rolls in a Tattoo by a contemporary Slovak writer, Zuska Kepplová, in order to interrogate the issues of migration, nomadism, travel and mobility in the post-Schengen New Europe. This novel, offering a narrative of transcultural mobility, consists of several interconnected stories of young people moving from the post-socialist Europe in order to study, find work, or merely experience adventure in major European cities such as London or Paris. Unlike previous generations, the nomads (...) of New Europe enjoy freedom to travel, but this unprecedented condition requires negotiating new social contracts, even searching for a new language for their new transnational and transcultural experience. (shrink)

RESUMEN Este articulo pretende describir el concepto de subjetividad nómade desarrollado por Rosi Braidotti, teniendo en cuenta su estructura con respecto a la diferencia sexual. Este análisis permite comprender cuál es la configuración del sujeto nómade revisando las implicaciones que tiene asociar tal concepto con la búsqueda de aceptación y representación de esa diferencia en el contexto político. La lectura critica de Braidotti remite directamente a examinar los conceptos originales de Deleuze y Guattari referidos al nomadismo, como singularización, devenir y (...) subjetivación. ABSTRACT This article aims to describe the concept of nomadic subjectivity developed by Rosi Braidotti, while considering its structure with respect to sexual difference. This analysis allows us to understand the configuration of the nomadic subject by reviewing the implications of associating the concept with the search for acceptance and representation of the sexual difference in the political context. A critical reading of Braidotti means to examine the Deleuze and Guattari's original concepts about nomadism, such as singularization, becoming and subjectivation. (shrink)

Remiantis F. Nietzsche’s ir G. Deleuze’o tekstų analize, siekiama parodyti, kad pagal klasikinio mąstymo kanonus ypač problemišku dalyku tampa naujos minties pasirodymo galimybė. Klasikinis mąstymas traktuojamas kaip sėslios egzistencijos tipas ir jam priešinamas klajokliškas, nomadiškas mąstymas. Pasitelkiant Deleuze’s išskirtus atpažinimo ir susitikimo modelius, pirma, siekiama pagrįsti požiūrį, kad ir Nietzsche’s filosofiją galime vadinti nomadišku mąstymu ir atitinkančią susitikimo modelį ir antra, siekiama išryškinti naujybės specifiką ir jos steigties transcendentalines sąlygas. Reikšminiai žodžiai: valia siekti galios, interpretacija, simptomatika, sėslusis mąstymas, nomadizmas, atpažinimo (...) modelis, susitikimo modelis. F. NIETZSCHE AND G. DELEUZE: THE SEDENTARY LIFE SYMPTOMATICS AND NOMADIC THINKING CONFRONTATIONS Arūnas Mickevičius Summary The article deals with F. Nietzsche’s and G. Deleuze’s attitude to classical thought. Nietzsche’s theoretical constructs are based on the principle Wille zur Macht, where he emphatically praised active forces and accused all classical thinking of turning away from life and associating it with reactive, negative forces. Nietzsche’s philosophy denies the exceptionally unique true opinion of the world and offers, instead, a variety of interpretations, i. e. a perspectivist approach to the world. In describing architectural metaphors of classical thinking he shows that it is reactive, life-denying, that its assumed grandeur in fact hides the poverty of life. On the other hand, Nietzsche attempts to release the metaphoric power from the single axiom of Truth, to release creativity, to legitimize a perspective, interpretative view of the world, based on the mentioned “will-to-power” principle and related to assertive powers of active life. Also, there are analyzed two models of knowledge, recognition and encounter, proposed by G. Deleuze. The main aims of the article is to demonstrate first, that Nietzsche’s philosophy can be named as nomadic thinking which corresponds to the model of encounter and, second, reveal the transcendental conditions of innovation. Keywords: will to power, interpretation, symptomatics, sedentary life, nomadism, encounter model, recognition model. (shrink)

In the article the author reflects on the meaning of politics in a newmaterialist framework. She concentrates predominantly on two political dimentions – space and time. With reference to that, the author develops the concept of politics of squatting. Its spatial aspect is investigated along the lines of the notion of heterotopia, coined by Michel Foucault, and its temporal aspect is analyzed through the concept of heterochrony and Darwinian evolution as interpreted by Elizabeth Grosz. The concept of politics of squatting (...) is then juxtaposed with nomadism. Finally, the author provides a case study by elaborating on the anti-gender campaign that began in 2012-2013 in Poland from the perspective of politics of squatting. (shrink)

This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own limitations. The bound feet not merely illustrate a lack of freedom through an image of disabled mobility. They also situate freedom within global and gendered frameworks. Via a reading of the image and its contexts, we see that European freedom-as-movement emerged on the backdrop of (...) two imperial contrasts: images of nomadism, which are only marginally considered in this paper, and an assumed stagnation, that presumably prevailed in the East. Yet surprisingly, the image was often evoked to say something about Europe itself, rather than about its “others.” Therefore, it also reveals the corporeal dimensions of a concept of freedom that has underlaid a long liberal tradition. The crushed and squeezed feet of girls in China thus marked both a gendered and an imperial divide between those who can move freely, and therefore rule, and those who cannot rule because of their lack of mobility; yet at the same time, it undid this division by allowing the East and its stationariness to permeate Europe through a multiply foreign body: feminized, racially alien, and geographically distanced. (shrink)

Blanchot’s rejection of vision as the fundamental philosophical metaphor is well known: “Seeing is not speaking” (The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 25). Furthermore, his central idea of the limit-experience (borrowed from Bataille) is a “detour from everything visible and invisible” (210). As part of his Heideggerian heritage, the increased importance of hearing (and aurality in general) lacks the critical appraisal it deserves. Pari passu for voice. Blanchot’s investigation of voice, spoken, interior, literary, is extensive. Various works (...) of fiction, notably The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, explore the meme, which is intensified in critical essays on Hölderlin, Kafka, Rilke, and Valéry, where the voice’s musicality is given to performance. The studies exemplify the operation of “pure voice,” voice no longer in relation to and under the constraints of the interlocutor: its rhythm, tempo, and melody. His clearest, though lapidary, remarks on voice appear in discussion of the Narcissus mythomeme. There, voice is related not only to Narcissus’ love of an (unrecognized) self but also to the intrigue of Echo and her mimetic reproduction of voice. I give a close reading of Blanchot’s rendition of Ovid’s story to show the central role that voice plays in his “great refusal” of philosophy and concomitant opening to the outside, the “beyond being,” its nomadism and messianism. (shrink)

Among the reasons that Whitehead is such an interesting philosopher is that his work resonates across philosophical traditions. This collection develops connections between Whiteheadian concepts and recent European thinkers. The purpose is not simply to compare, however, but, as editor Jeremy Fackenthal suggests, to develop a Whiteheadian thinking “in tandem” with European philosophers in order to create disruptions or “dislocations” in thought that can engender creative approaches to contemporary problems.One general feature of the book deserves mention at the outset, though (...) I will return to it later in the review: although phenomenology and hermeneutics are each represented in the volume, roughly half of the essays focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze (if we group these together with essays focused on “new materialism,” which is connected with Deleuze, the proportion is more like two-thirds). This will be no surprise, since Deleuze is the European philosopher who was most appreciative of Whitehead. And yet, the result is that the conversation with “continental philosophy” is highly selective.The book is organized into three parts, each comprised of three essays. In part 1, “Technological and Systematic Dislocations,” William S. Hamrick brings Whitehead into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of “the flesh” to suggest an ecological ontology capable of overcoming the instrumentalization of nature. Hamrick's strategy is to read Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty as contributing to an “ontological foundation” for a sustainable civilization (18). Bo Eberle writes about the “quantified self” suggested in new, wearable self-monitoring technologies. Drawing on Whitehead's notion of causal efficacy, Eberle argues that devices such as Fitbit give us access to bodily states that bypasses the standard ways we are aware of ourselves (i.e., through consciousness). He goes further to argue that, like all ways of knowing, wearable technologies are selective, and that the selection reflects the interests of the manufacturers and promotes a certain kind of subjectivity (in the case of Fitbit, a subjectivity that is oriented toward “getting your steps in”). Whitehead's epistemology thus enables the critic of wearable technologies to understand how contemporary experience and self-understanding is shaped not simply by recent technological mediations but by the material interests embedded in them. J.R. Hustwit and Carl Dyke take on what they call “activist” uses of Whitehead that naively (in their judgment) suggest that a non-relational substance metaphysics is to blame for most of our social ills. They employ the theory of complex adaptive systems in conversation with Whitehead and Antonio Gramsci to show that, in fact, achieving significant social change is far more difficult and even unpredictable than mere insertion of better ideas into public discourse. Dominant hegemonies have ways of adapting and absorbing attempts to undermine them. Here Hustwit and Dyke draw on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur to suggest that resistance to the dominant hegemony is nevertheless always possible because of the vagueness of discourse, allowing a plurality of competing interpretations and thus fractures in the dominant hegemony. However, even this kind of resistance is impossible to control and its effects incapable of being entirely predicted. To the essay's titular question, “Can Whitehead save the world?” the authors answer, “No.”In part 2, “Animal/Human Dislocations,” Jeremy Fackenthal draws on the new materialism of Rosi Braidotti (and Deleuze) along with Whitehead to argue for a “process-relational” nomadism that culminates in a “becoming-imperceptible.” His reading together of Whitehead and Braidotti creates the opportunity to recast the former's concept of objective immortality in such a way that it does not refer to death so much as to being diffused into a relational network. The satisfaction of an actual occasion may be taken as its translation into its effects among its relations. Fackenthal argues that this becoming-imperceptible makes possible a sustainable presence within a fragile network of life. Deena M. Lin uses Whitehead, Braidotti, and Judith Butler to lay out a vision of human life as precarious and deserving attention, care, and solidarity. She presses this vision as a direct moral assault on US (Trump's) policy toward Syrian refugees. Going further, she draws on Braidotti's posthuman account of zoe to argue for universal connection and solidarity with all life that should foster, as the title of her essay puts it, “Welcoming of Syrian Life.” Tano Posteraro offers an intriguing essay drawing on Jakob von Uexküll's account of animal experience. Posteraro argues that Uexküll's notion of an animal's Umwelt, shaped by its distinctive perceptual apparatus, needs to be supplemented by Whitehead's notion of prehension to account for the active dimension of animal perception. Rather than a passive registering of animal environments, Posteraro argues that the latter are constructed, and that concepts (or conceptual prehensions) should be understood as tools with which such environments are constructed.In part 3, “Time, the World, and Abstraction,” three essays probe ways that Whiteheadian and Deleuzian themes may resonate critically and constructively. Kris Klotz brings the thought of Whitehead and Deleuze together to inquire about how alternatives to present social forms are envisioned. He argues that, for Whitehead, every actual occasion involves a selection of some features of the past, and, further, that every selection is also an abstraction from the concrete welter of influences impinging on it. For Whitehead, then, to envision alternatives involves a critique of abstractions, a reinstatement of the concrete plurality of possibilities. This, for Whitehead, is what rationality does: it works at restoring the concrete, and, with it, a series of alternatives that have been eclipsed. To this Whiteheadian analysis, Klotz adds Deleuze and Guattari's critique of “opinion.” For Deleuze and Guattari, opinion is not an idiosyncrasy but a consensus to which differences of experience are subjected. Philosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari, must always struggle against opinion in order to bring alternatives to light. These conceptions of reason/philosophy, Klotz argues, represent useful ways to critique inequalities and other social wrongs that are embedded in the social forms that are routinely taken for granted. Elijah Prewitt-Davis uses a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, along with philosophical innovations of Foucault, Deleuze, and Whitehead, to offer a distinctive account of power. Prewitt-Davis calls attention to Deleuze's important book on Leibniz, The Fold, and to how Whitehead's concept of prehension lies at its center. The upshot is that power is not reduced to dominance but, instead, is at work wherever any occasion of experience persists amid the onslaught of the influence of other occasions. Power, as Deleuze wrote, is the capacity to be affected—and to decide how to constitute oneself anew. Keith Robinson offers a detailed account of Whitehead's epistemology along with a reading of Deleuze's analysis of temporality to suggest that there is a common trajectory that seeks to undermine what the title of the essay describes as the “Bifurcation of Nature” (i.e., the separation of natural phenomena and human experience) within the dominant Western philosophical tradition.There is much of value in the volume as a whole. Aside from staging what Spinoza might have called good encounters between Whitehead and a number of continental philosophers, enhancing the conceptual power of each, the contributors are able to make a case that these philosophical trajectories, when read together, have much to contribute to our understanding of and response to the pressing issues of the day. In addition, readers who are interested in the relationship between Whitehead and the new materialism will find this volume to be a helpful resource, stocked with fine examples of how to sharpen new materialist thinking with Whitehead and how to read contemporary contexts through these lenses. On the other hand, this book is not a handbook nor a comprehensive reference. The organizational logic behind its division into sections is murky and the amount of attention given to particular continental philosophers as opposed to others appears somewhat arbitrary: there are recent continental philosophers who get little to no attention at (Derrida, Malabou, Žižek, Agamben, Latour, Nancy, for example), several of whom might prove to be quite interesting to read “in tandem” with Whitehead. Perhaps that is just to say that there are many more essays to be written. (shrink)

This article introduces a collection of studies of biological concepts crossing over to other disciplines and nonscholarly discourses. The introduction discusses the notion of nomadic concepts as introduced by Isabelle Stengers and explores its usability for conceptual history. Compared to traveling and interdisciplinary concepts, the idea of nomadism shifts the attention from concepts themselves toward the mobility of a concept and its effects. The metaphor of nomadism, as outlined in the introduction, helps also to question the relation between (...) concepts' movement and the production of boundaries. In this way conceptual history can profit from interaction with translation studies, where similar processes were recently discussed under the notion of cultural translation. (shrink)

En el marco del debate sobre los lineamientos fundamentales de la ética de Deleuze, diversos autores han reparado en nociones destacadas de su obra: el deseo, el devenir, la afirmación, el nomadismo. Mi propuesta en este artículo es desarrollar una vía poco estudiada, que gira alrededor de la idea de prudencia práctica experimental. Según mi hipótesis, este concepto reúne perspectivas relevantes de la producción deleuzeana posterior a L'Anti-Œdipe, en particular su orientación vitalista, su opción por la desubjetivación y su apelación (...) a una dimensión ascética vinculada con el deseo como impulsor de la experimentación. Within the realm of debate on fundamental layouts of Deleuze's ethics, several authors have concentrated on significant notions in his work: desire, becoming, affirmation, nomadism. In this article my proposal is to develop a road, scarcely studied yet, in connection with the idea of experimental practical prudence. Respect to my hypothesis, this concept assembles relevant perspectives of Deleuze's post L'Anti-Œdipe production, especially his orientation towards vitalism, his choice for desubjectivation and his appeal to an ascetic dimension linked to desire as motor to experimentation. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * The gaze drifts where the stare dares not. The gaze is attentive while the stare is intent. Dériver : Equally to drift and/or to derive. —When drifting then, something must be taken along. Something must be derived from the drift. Something of oneself must always become other. Incorporating the other, incorporating oneself as other. Je est un autre , Rimbaud disait; 1 this in his last letter to Georges Izambard, a final correspondence to a former mentor and friend, from whom he was drifting away, having derived much. The drift is a control incomplete. To drift is to come closer and closer, but to always be turning away, pulling apart, pulling oneself apart. It is parabolic in the sense that it is always eluding a formerly established intent. Of all axes, it never finds room to rest. Filling new spaces, always changing places, ever escaping the Cartesian; the indubitable pinpointing of position. It is never pinned down. Love together what we will be apart. Once together, we will drift apart. Il le faut . Attention is held; it traces the path. It follows each point which traces the arc, the line, the swerve. It is not concerned with the figure being drawn, but rather the movement between one point and the next. The smallest movement. The clinamen of De Rerum Natura is the smallest of swerves, it is nothing more than the minimum — nec plus quam minimum . Michel Serres says of the clinamen , that it is an absurdity — a logical, geometrical, mechanical, physical absurdity. 'The clinamen, from here (its state of absurdity), finds refuge in subjectivity; it passes from the world to the soul, from the physical to the metaphysical, from the theory of inert bodies in freefall to the theory of the free movements of the living.' 2 So this swerve is something of the mind and something of the body, both in action, rather than a body which is merely acted upon. Swerve, however, has a connotation of suddenness. It is a movement which is made to avoid an otherwise inevitable impact. Drift, on the other hand, is the unleashing of something which is then allowed to follow a more complex series of forces. These forces now come from within as well as without. It is no longer tethered; now following tides, winds, flows or pitched slopes, now acting on its own. We are not atoms in freefall. Our attention long ago pulled us from this precipitous descent. We now live, ourselves, as one of the many forces. In the drift, as with the gaze, there is an ease. ‘Ease is the proper name of this unrepresentable space.’ It is the space nearest, the next, the neighboring space. To occupy this space requires a turn, a shift or a drift. It cannot be reached by proceeding straight ahead. ‘..the space adjacent, the empty place where each can move freely, in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity borders on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct relation.’ 3 Intention always seeks to straighten this line, to make it less complex, to isolate the point of departure and the desired destination. It believes there can be two points and, between them, there must be a straight line. Can there be? Maybe. Must there be? Never. Straight lines may exist, but they can never be followed to the finish. After leaving this point, we will never reach that one without being buffeted at least a little — at least the least. One foot in front of the other, this is a very restrictive dance, less even than a two-step. Straight lines lead only to lost intentions, being the shortest and quickest way to get there. When attention drifts it slowly turns away from the intended target, leaving it for something which pulls the attention away. Now we are for a moment free; all at once we can pivot, now we can waltz. Drifting along the page, deriving from what is seen. Reading is seeing; the movement of the eyes as they drift. Reading in the eyes what has been seen, what has been derived from the act of reading. Reading eyes drift back and forth down the page, now and then jump back and forth, up to the top, one word, back down, quickly a few pages back, now gaze out towards the horizon. When attention drifts it is the gaze that follows. Our attention is not restricted to the path the words follow, but links them together; deriving what is to be seen, rather than read. La philosophie fait voir . ‘Thus, philosophers speak through proverbs, and demonstrate. They connect their imaginations with foreign rings, flown into famous tombs.’ 4 Now drifting off to sleep, dreams come as unintended visions. To dream is pure drift, vision without an object, gazing into the dark, reading the unknown of the night. NOTES: Arthur Rimbaud, Poésies (Paris: Bibliothéque de Cluny, 1958), 57. Michel Serres, La Naissance de la Physique (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977), 10. Translation courtesy of R.H. Jackson. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), 25. Louis Aragon, Une Vague des Rêves (Paris: Editions Seghers, 2006), 10. Translation courtesy of R.H. Jackson.  . (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * Australia, Summer, 2012. …. essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How shall we state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is abidingness.” 1 On return to birthplace I write. Caught between jetlag and surprise, a relentless sun cracks my skin. Upright words fall under cockatoo roars. The attempt to settle, to be attentive, is shaken. Some kind of Dreaming surrounds and elements intrude without consent. Homeless at home. Exhausted, I fight sleep’s hard currents. Their victory would confuse the body clock, so the in-between wins. Half-there — half-awake — here in this place — I am driftwood. Driftwood: wood floating in or washed ashore by a body of water. A severed limb set adrift from the birthing body. Tossed from home it’s cast into processes of wind, water, sand, bacteria, decay and movement. Driftwood is orphaned members at the mercy and agency of weather, currents, submersion, and being thrown into dry world. Driftwood — singular plural. White man got no dreaming. Him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different Him got road belong himself. 2 photo: Bronwyn Lay The old man comes from the northern rivers. A while ago, he could no longer pay attention to wage slavery, so retreated north to be with dead redgum that lay abandoned in dry riverbeds. Derived from driftwood peoples tossed here by the sea, he followed the fragile river veins of his birth. He walked along water bodies and through country’s lungs. Some kind of displaced ancestral song compelled his leathered hands to pick up centuries old driftwood from flood plains. It emerged from under muddy creeks, was flung up by salt soaked coves, pushed underground by cracks in the claypan and lay embedded in mud and salinized soil. Smoothed and grooved in equal measure, the branches were marked by an organic alphabet that preceded him. As he held the wood, he touched decomposing circles that started with a blast and never ceased writing into abandoned flesh. When the ute was full the old man returned home having been away with the stuff that ‘growed him up’. His shed filled with red sawdust and the sound of tools at labour. His hands sculptured driftwood. History carved into itinerant skin. I sit opposite the old man. His body no longer holds the repetition of carpentry. He can no longer gift driftwood its detail. Outside redgum bits lie scattered around the fence line and beside the dam. He crouches over an unreliable computer researching the massacres of indigenous peoples that occurred along the same river veins that ‘growed him up’ long ago. Staring into the remnants of frontier resistance that he and I inherit, his eyes nurture fire. He discovers severed limbs and the slicing of tribes. In the ashes of sentences he sifts the lies that smoulder into our histories. In the 30’s the anthropologist Stanner said that due to certain factors — lack of change and isolation — the ideal and real come very close together in indigenous Dreaming. They are a people who were able to defeat history. 3 “If the Ideal and the Real drift too far away from one another (as they did at the end of the middle ages and seem increasingly to do this century) men face some difficult options. They have to change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in-between.” 4 Stanner says Indigenous Dreaming is blackfella thinking. 5 Dreamtime is not ethereal, not utopic, or otherworldly. It’s fused with the real and it’s not mine. I might never understand, but it’s the substance of my home. This here place ‘growed me up’. Is driftwood the unhappy in-between? Is it a radical itinerant written upon by currents? Where are we? The settler restless? photo: Alison Pouliot I return to the bush late one night, tired from high talk in city cafes, to find the old man at his computer. He’s either researching his white farming ancestors, or tracing unrecorded massacres of blackfellas. I laugh, “You know Dad, if you were indigenous you might go out by the dam and sing up your ancestors rather than try find them on a screen.” He peers over his glasses. His stare delivers an ancestral scold. He’s white man. Of course he archives. This is our way. One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able to transcend himself. With the metaphysician goes a mood and spirit, which I can only call a mood or spirit of assent, neither despair nor resignation, optimism not pessimism, quietism nor indifference. The mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place in a world in which the renaissance has triumphed only to be perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism and science challenge their own hopes, indeed their beginnings.” 6 The clinamen sometimes comes abstract — the rarefied swerve of possibility. But in the place we gather &mdash where this text has landed — in the heart of settler colony denial — the clinamen reminds of familiar violence and goes maximum. The earth’s swerve. Topography’s tip. Physics gone violent. Here, drift is initiated by the tear of flesh, scurvy voyages, frontier blood and the deracination from belonging. Here, war precedes drift. We all got tossed. Here. Pay attention. The country has its own gaze. ‘Lest we forget’. The seasonal turn on aborescent substances starts with a fall, an upwards rupture, a drop, a cut, a storm, a violence, a loss, forced migration, refugees, agricultural imperialism, settler wheat and poisoned rations. Pay attention to aftermath debris. Don’t drift too far from the real. History hasn’t settled into the water. It still tosses limbs back and forth. Surrounded by the backdrop of Dreaming country the old man archives and dreams. Both ways of settling into the real. But lest we forget, time, in this place, has no textual tick — tock. Our bodies know this, even though we persist with shipwreck illusions. It’s difficult being here. Here. Pay inattention. I walk through eucalyptus, over dried out clay pans and under kookaburras. It’s been two years in-between. This time country speaks strong underfoot. Forget books, forget texts, forget other lands and times, beginning and end. Be here. All falls raw. Leaves drop and refuse to compost. Bark untethers quick. Light denudes worlds. The heated horizon melts monoliths. It’s enough to make Cartesians shiver. Awake. Refuse the temptation to run. Have enough courage to drift into here. Love with a gum tree. Stand with her whole and dissolving. She moves light between our limbs, tossing them to wind. She — the original romance — is the dream that dares touch flesh and reaches over nightmares with elemental desire. I gaze and lose me. There’s no distance. The land that ‘growed me up’ speaks with symbiotic breath. There’s no division, no separation, no other. The gum is plastic arborescence. You be my body for me, always were. …..but I wake to driftwood histories and recall slaughters. Drifted, wicked fellow citizen — the other is someone else’s blind sleep. Betrayal maintains the other as mine. Archives reveal this place doesn’t belong to me. Body articulates that it became here. Gumtree cares not………her arms take me in anyway. “Like all men he is a philosopher in being able to use his power of abstract reason. His genius, his metier, and in some sense — his fate is that because of endowment and circumstance this power has channelled itself mainly into one activity, making sense out of social relations among men living together.” 7 The old man excavates seven generations of settler ancestors. They’re an ordinary lot with written-upon skin. He records genocides that occurred alongside his peoples fertility. Bodies rise from riverbeds like sovereign sacrifices. It hurts. It disrupts. He labours at the past with gestures that might go unnoticed in a country suffocated by rich amnesia. Inside walls, he seems attentive to historical details. Outside he seems inattentive to time, lost to us and embedded in a family of active matter — the bush. His driftwood skin appears around my eyes - grooves of experience, the rush of cruel sun, the push of blind winds, and the love of everything. The sovereign’s reluctant children are thrown here by, with and through blood, but country gets in and sculpts us here. photo: Chris Corrigan “But his abstractions do not put him at war with himself.” 8 The kangaroo family appears at dusk. When the sun is soft I follow the old man into the back paddock. Children skip behind us. In-between generations, I step into the old man’s driftwood leanings. My feet find traces of his understanding – the archivist that reads trees. Here, on home dirt, inattention and attention collapse as we wander into where we are. The roo family gaze at us. Through the grass the old man’s wooden finger articulates kin’s details. He points to the head male, the mother holding a joey in pouch and the young warriors side by side. My children, quieter than ever, meet the laser - eyed silence of another family. In half-light Dad, me, and the kids mirror the kangaroo constellation and stand gentle together. At the bushblock’s limit we encounter ancestral desires. White peoples are subject to driftwood histories. We’re severed limbs attempting to fuse here now, with what was, only to discover our skin becomes racked and embedded with the weather. Into the shelter and fissures of this difficult and ambiguous inheritance, I fall into dream light until balance saturates. Light breaks when the kangaroos move. They bounce someplace else without effort or impact. We turn and tread through the dark towards home. It’s time to sleep. Driftwood skin covers the country. Dreaming is still. photo: Bronwyn Lay NOTES W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays , (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 72. Ibid., 56. Stanner is recalling one intelligent old man who said to him, “with a cadence almost as though he had been speaking in verse.” Ibid., 60. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 59.  . 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Resumen: El propósito de este artículo es explorar en el contexto de Shanghái la manera en que se revelan, definen y cuestionan las distancias y las cercanías entre las culturas china y española a través de los lienzos pictóricos de Juan Antonio Baños. Su nomadismo o condición de extranjero va a plantear algunas dudas sobre la identidad y el lugar que el artista ocupa en el mundo contemporáneo, además de sugerir algunos patrones según los cuales las fronteras desaparecen, mientras que (...) otras nuevas son erigidas. El mero gesto de Baños de traducir los trazos encontrados en la ciudad de Shanghái por medio de un tejido de dislocaciones y citaciones incita una sinfonía heterogénea de espacios y tiempos variados que amplifican las posibilidades de conocimiento artístico entre Oriente y Occidente. Ante el análisis de un panorama poscolonial contemporáneo que va del hiperrealismo barroco a una epistemología retro futurista de la ciudad, pasando por el arte pop kitsch, el artículo muestra como este itinerario de traducción transcultural nos desplaza hacia un periodo post-paradigmático.: The purpose of this article is to explore in the context of Shanghai in regards to the distances and closeness between Chinese and Spanish cultures are revealed, defined and questioned, through the pictorial canvases of Juan Antonio Baños. His nomadism or status as a foreigner will raise some doubts about the identity and the place that the artist occupies in the contemporary world. In addition, the contemporaneity of his work suggests some effects according to which the borders disappear, while new ones are erected. The mere gesture of Baños´ artwork in attempting to translate the traces of Shanghai by means of a world of dislocations and citations incites a heterogeneous symphony of varied spaces and times that amplify the possibilities of artistic knowledge between East and West. Drawing from the analysis of a postcolonial framework that stretches from baroque hyperrealism to retro-futurist epistemologies of the city, right up to a kitsch pop art, the article claims that this translatable cultural itinerary displaces the ways of understanding contemporary art in China towards a post-paradigmatic period. (shrink)

A negação por conceitos sólidos, flexibilidade, neotribalismos e nomadismo são aspectos que influenciam na formação dos sujeitos e das instituições em tempos líquido-modernos. Os sujeitos são estimulados a buscar constantemente o novo e isso impacta na formação de vínculos. Como decorrência da tendência de isolamento social e a demanda pela formação identitária, os indivíduos criaram mecanismos para suprir as necessidades de pertencimento. Um destes mecanismos são as neotribos, agrupamentos de indivíduos, em grande medida jovens, que se reúnem a partir de (...) objetivos e interesses compartilhados. Os jovens, de modo predominante, ocupam os espaços nas universidades, cujos padrões estáveis, fixos e duros também têm se colocado à prova. Os alunos buscam uma formação ágil, conectada com o mundo e personalizada. Para dar conta de tal demanda, um dos caminhos aligeirados propostos pelo mercado é a desagregação. Estes movimentos propiciam o surgimento de características segmentadas e frágeis nas universidades. A forma como se comunicam, a maneira como abordam suas funções, o modo como valorizam as pessoas, são indicadores dos aspectos da cultura acadêmica. Assim, propõe-se debater como a universidade, que tem sua anatomia fundada na solidez moderna, reage a não solidez da cultura contemporânea. Palavras-chave: Universidade, Sociabilidade, Modernidade líquida, Neotribalismo, Culturas Acadêmicas Contemporary University: Pressures of Liquid Modernity Abstract: The denial of solid concepts, flexibility, neotribalism and nomadism are aspects that influence the formation of subjects and institutions in liquid-modern times. The subjects are encouraged to constantly search for the new and this has an impact on the formation of social ties. As a result of the tendency of social isolation and the demand for identity formation, individuals created mechanisms to supply the needs of belonging. One of these mechanisms is the neotribes, groups of individuals, largely young, who come together based on shared goals and interests. Young people, predominantly, occupy spaces in universities, whose stable, fixed and hard standards have also been put to the test. Students seek agile training, connected with the world and personalized. To achieve with such demand, one of the easiest paths proposed by the market is the unbundling. These movements lead to the emergence of segmented and fragile characteristics in universities. The way they communicate, the way they approach their functions, the way they value people, are indicators of aspects of academic culture. Thus, it is proposed to debate how the university, which has its anatomy based on modern solidity, reacts to the non-solidity of contemporary culture. Keywords: University, Sociability, Liquid modernity, Neotribalism, Academic Cultures Universidad Contemporánea: Presiones de la Modernidad Líquida Resumen: La negación de conceptos sólidos, la flexibilidad, el neotribalismo y el nomadismo son aspectos que influyen en la formación de sujetos e instituciones en la época líquida-moderna. Se anima a los sujetos a buscar constantemente lo nuevo y esto repercute en la formación de vínculos. Como resultado de la tendencia al aislamiento social y la demanda de formación de identidad, los individuos crearon mecanismos para suplir las necesidades de pertenencia. Uno de estos son los neotribus, grupos de indivíduos que se unen en base a objetivos e intereses compartidos. Ellos ocupan espacios en las universidades, cuyos estándares estables, fijos y duros también se han puesto a prueba. Los estudiantes buscan una formación ágil, conectada con el mundo y personalizada. Para hacer frente a tal demanda, uno de los caminos más fáciles que propone el mercado es la desagregación. Estos movimientos conducen al surgimiento de características segmentadas y frágiles en las universidades. La forma en que se comunican, la forma en que valoran a las personas, son indicadores de aspectos de la cultura académica. Así, se propone debatir cómo la universidad, que tiene su anatomía basada en la solidez moderna, reacciona a la no solidez de la cultura contemporánea. Palabras clave: Universidad, Sociabilidad, Modernidad líquida, Neotribalismo, Culturas académicas Data de registro: 20/03/2021 Data de aceite: 17/05/2022. (shrink)