New Formations

New forms, subjects and strategies of resistance have emerged in recent mass protests and insurrections, from the Arab Spring to Spain, Greece, Turkey and Brazil. Insurrections, exodus and democratic experimentation respond to the economic and social landscape of neoliberal capitalism and the biopolitical operation of power. Using historical and recent examples, this essay proposes seven theses on the philosophy of resistance. We have entered a new age of resistance and potentially radical change after fifty years of failures and defeats of the left.

Predictive policing has attracted considerably scholarly attention. Extending the promise of being able to interdict crime prior to its commission, it seemingly promised forms of anticipatory policing that had previously existed only in the realms of science fiction. The aesthetic futurism that attended predictive policing did, however, obscure the important historical vectors from which it emerged. The adulation of technology as a tool for achieving efficiencies in policing was evident from the 1920s in the United States, reaching sustained momentum in the 1960s as the methods of Systems Analysis were applied to policing. Underpinning these efforts resided an imaginary of automated patrol facilitated by computerised command and control systems. The desire to automate police work has extended into the present, and is evident in an emergent platform policing – cloud-based technological architectures that increasingly enfold police work. Policing is consequently datafied, commodified ...

The aim of this article is two-fold. Firstly, it identifies and maps out a new presence in race discourse in the UK arts and higher education, under the heading of 'US Black Critical Thought'. Secondly, it seeks to situate 'US Black Critical Thought' and its growing impact upon intellectual and aesthetic discourses on race in the UK through the lens of the longer-term project of 'Black British Cultural Studies'. The article traces the formation and eventual dissolving of 'Black British Cultural Studies' from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, and suggests that 'US Black Critical Thought' has energised a cohort of younger thinkers and artists in Britain, following a period where the intellectual left side-lined race as a serious category of theoretical or critical analysis.

This essay analyses Nancy Cunard's contribution to the struggle for racial justice in England and her work with the black communities in Liverpool and London (whose histories and experiences differ radically from their counterparts in the United States) in the 1940s. It chronicles for the first time her campaign to safeguard the African collections in the Liverpool Museum and her specific contribution to the archive of black British history. This includes not only the monumental the Negro Anthology (1934) but also the tract, The White Man's Duty (1943) arguing for an end to British imperialism and for race relations legislation. Cunard is situated within a history of the Communist left in Britain and the United States. Her insistence on the primacy of race differentiates her from other white left activists in her day for whom issues of gender and race were or secondary importance compared to those of class (Cunard, 1944). Using unpublished archive material from the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas I show that Cunard's work constitutes one segment in the rich and varied mosaic of black cultural activity in the 1930s and 1940s and discuss how Cunard knew and worked alongside some of the key figures in the black British politics of her day including Una Marson, Learie Constantine, John Carter, Harold Moody, Rudolph Dunbar and Paul Robeson. A prolific writer, publisher and political activist, Cunard presented a white readership with documentation which prompted them to question their own prejudice and rendered problematic the imaging of black people as fixed embodiments of a Eurocentric sense of reality. Cunard's work in the 1930s and 1940s predates the sailing of the Empire Windrush and the accelerated immigration to Britain from the Commonwealth after the Nationality Act of 1948. It adds to our knowledge of earlier black history, narratives, settlements, and anti-racist struggles.

How is it possible to profit from protecting the environment, rather than through deepening its terminal crisis? In recent years, a growing group of investors, economists and governments have answered this question with a range of market-based instruments designed to facilitate the commodification and trade of everything from carbon to wetlands. A popular approach has been to establish ecological credit schemes that allow businesses to destroy a discrete ecosystem in return for the restoration of an ecological site elsewhere. Numerous scholars have already emphasised the questionable spatial politics inherent to such initiatives. Focusing on the UK's emergent biodiversity credit policy regime, this article, by contrast, considers what effect credit schemes have on the temporal dynamics of the ecosystems they capture. Drawing on discussions of financialisation in the social sciences, we show how biodiversity credits rearticulate ecosystems as units of 'derivative ecology'...

Western philosophy often overlooked the problem of technology. It is a long-standing prejudice of a nominalist or idealist mentality that goes on from ancient Greece up to today. Compared to other contemporary currents of thought, the pragmatist tradition had some interesting ideas because it united in a profound continuum theory and practice, overthrowing any dualism. This move was particularly effective in Peirce's studies on continuity, logical modalities, logic of abduction, and existential graphs as well as in Dewey's approach to logic as an integrated tool of inquiry in which technology is part of the human organism. However, also the pragmatist tradition remained somehow only with a good analysis of synthesis and a good theory of practice but did not complete its drive toward a different vision of syntheticity and technology. The philosophy of gesture that I will propose in this paper wants to complete the unfinished work of this tradition relying heavily on pragmatist phenomenology and semiotics. In the first part, I will sum up the main structure of this philosophy of gesture, as I name it (I). In the second part, I will show the fundamental application of this philosophy to technology (II). At the end, I will illustrate an application for blind people to see a museum that is inspired by the Philosophy of gesture (III).

Herein, I interrogate the phenomenological experience of enchantment as a playful sign process. Arguing against the Weberian notion that we are living in a "disenchanted world," I aim to reveal how the existing contours of enchantment's sign condition have significantly morphed in America, however, given our current distracting media-saturated environments. I begin by discussing enchantment as a form or habit of play, drawing specifically from the works of semiotician, Charles S. Peirce, and cultural historian, Johan Huizinga. We discover that enchantments take primarily two forms depending upon the interpretants we communicatively construct: one is indicative of what Peirce describes as a play of musement and the other is a result of what I call the play of amusement. The former is vital for human learning at higher orders of abstraction, growth, and positive ethical relations with others. The latter typically produces a bad ambiguity that eventually leads to an inability to discriminate or assess the relevance of perceived information and events. This form of play also often jeopardizes our relations with others given its primary focus on the self. Through this interrogation, we discover that our current enchantments or habits of play have serious epistemological consequences for cultural life.

It happens. Overnight, you change from Young Turk to Old Fogy; the former avant-garde becomes rearguard action. In the mythologised Sixties, we used to view the 1930s Marxists, with their class-based obsessions, as quaint; another thirty years pass, and members of the Youth Generation who first lived and later theorised the Postmodern Condition get to see their own ideals grow obsolete. In one's bleaker moments, one recalls how Boulez crowed in 1952 that 'SCHOENBERG IS DEAD', that he had not pushed his own insights far enough, that he had unwittingly perpetuated elements held over from Romanticism. 1 For, the so-called New Musicologists now face charges that our work bears the traces of (horror!) Modernism; that, even if we first introduced concepts such as poststructuralism, deconstruction and Deleuzian rhizomes into the discipline, we ourselves no longer qualify as postmodern. Move over: the genuine standard-bearers have arrived! Well, maybe we had it coming. Milton Babbitt must have felt this way, too, when he got pushed aside. 2 As anyone who has studied history knows, such waves occur on a regular basis: like clockwork, today's cutting edge becomes tomorrow's ancien régime. To be sure, the Sixties generation has always believed it had some kind of trademark lock on the 'new', making it necessary for those coming afterwards to set off bombs under us to clear space for themselves. Since I don't want to be part of the revolution that eats its young, I suppose I should just graciously step aside-and, believe me, I'm very much looking forward to my retirement! In the meantime, I have mostly retreated into writing about early music, albeit inflected to some extent with my own antiquated version of postmodernism, leaving the battle over the present moment to others. And yet, I would like to leave something of a PoMo valediction behind. In Ecclesiastes we read that there is nothing new under the sun, that all pretences to the contrary amount to nothing more than vanity. OK, but things do change, even if only on the meagre basis of two steps forward and one back. Women's movements may not have brought about all the permanent transformations they have sought, but the very fact that I am presenting this paper testifies to some modicum of progress along those fronts, even if my make-up argues that some of our more radical causes have bitten the dust. 3 Similarly, I'd like to think that my generation's contributions to composition and music studies-call them what you like-will have left some lasting traces. In The Wild One, someone asks the Marlon Brando character: 'What are you rebelling against?' To which he replies: 'Waddya got?' Given that each generation feels compelled to rebel against whatever the previous one upheld, the 'post' of 'postmodern' always hauls along with it the particular vision of its predecessor-which actually makes this but one more version of the modernist paradigm, whereby one gets a thrill by identifying with the Moderns against

This essay analyses Nancy Cunard's contribution to the struggle for racial justice in England and her work with the black communities in Liverpool and London (whose histories and experiences differ radically from their counterparts in the United States) in the 1940s. It chronicles for the first time her campaign to safeguard the African collections in the Liverpool Museum and her specific contribution to the archive of black British history. This includes not only the monumental the Negro Anthology (1934) but also the tract, The White Man's Duty (1943) arguing for an end to British imperialism and for race relations legislation. Cunard is situated within a history of the Communist left in Britain and the United States. Her insistence on the primacy of race differentiates her from other white left activists in her day for whom issues of gender and race were or secondary importance compared to those of class (Cunard, 1944). Using unpublished archive material from the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas I show that Cunard's work constitutes one segment in the rich and varied mosaic of black cultural activity in the 1930s and 1940s and discuss how Cunard knew and worked alongside some of the key figures in the black British politics of her day including Una Marson, Learie Constantine, John Carter, Harold Moody, Rudolph Dunbar and Paul Robeson. A prolific writer, publisher and political activist, Cunard presented a white readership with documentation which prompted them to question their own prejudice and rendered problematic the imaging of black people as fixed embodiments of a Eurocentric sense of reality. Cunard's work in the 1930s and 1940s predates the sailing of the Empire Windrush and the accelerated immigration to Britain from the Commonwealth after the Nationality Act of 1948. It adds to our knowledge of earlier black history, narratives, settlements, and anti-racist struggles.

Refering back to the (juridical) cases of Socrates (in Athens) and Thoreau (in Concord), which both discuss dissent, Hannah Arendt’s essay “Civil Disobedience” elaborates on the question of a strict distinction or complicity between a single person’s moral decisions, and its participation, as member of a group, in political decision-making. How to approach the relation between morals and politics, ethics and jurisdiction; or, still otherwise, between Polis and Ethos, both words pointing (in different ways) towards places or sites? Both these topoi turn out to be linguistically determined through and through, constantly haunted by the question of how to speak (or not to speak), of how to listen (in order to obey or disobey, to consent or dissent) to what the laws do have to say (though not speaking at all). At the core of this tense and obscure paralinguistic relation to the (moral and juridical) law, between express and tacit consent (or dissent), silence and speech (or silence as s...

This article focuses on the activism of the Walterton and Elgin Action Group (WEAG) who successfully campaigned against attempts by the UK Conservative government in the 1980's to sell off their council homes to private tenders. Focusing on their inventive and creative actions, and the composition of the group not usually associated with militancy, the article takes the formation of WEAG as an example of affective politics and the cultivation of a housing commons-through-difference. What was foregrounded and became important were the relations of mutual dependence and care that existed and could be mobilised to stir collective action across categories of race, class, gender, disability and age. These relations existed at the nexus of personal histories including those of migration, poverty, displacement, social exclusion, homelessness, neglect and discrimination. These histories were mobilised within an area that had a strong history of community development and activism, and am...

As a consequence of the specific nature of Peirce's philosophical view, the literary text need not be set against semiotic theory; instead, it may be situated in such a way as to prolong the sign and the movement of semiosis. In the first instance, the author investigates the manifestation of the literary object within Peirce's semiotic discourse. Several references to Emerson's famous poem 'The Sphinx' are analyzed. This is followed by an analysis of three recurring literary figures: Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe, and Chevalier Dupin. It becomes obvious that Peirce had a significant knowledge of these figures but, more importantly, this leads to recognizing the a‰nity that exists between such literary projects and Peirce's semeiotic: the latter seemingly feeding o¤ the fictional nature of such literary works in constituting itself as a full-fledged semiotic discourse. In the second part of the article, the author examines two theoretical themes such as they develop within two classical literary works: aspects of Firstness (feelings and potentiality) with regards to the famous 'Madeleine' episode in Proust (Du cô té de chez Swann); and an excess of iconicity such that it inhibits any movement of semiosis in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher.

The perpetually unstable nature of the fe tish in theoretical discourse has been mirrored by a continuing debate on the place of fetishism within the larger realm of perversion. In an article 1. Maurice Heine, "Notes sur un classement psycho-biologique des paresthesies sexuelles," Minotaure, no. 3-4 (Dec. 1933) : 36.

Joanna Zylinska's Bioethics in the age of new media is neither an applied ethics textbook for new media practitioners nor a new media textbook for bioethicists. Its project is rather more ambitious, and its audience somewhat more diffuse than the title might lead casual browsers to imagine. In this book, Zylinska sets out to do nothing less than to develop a "different framework for thinking about ethics and life in the age of new technologies and new media." She expresses her intention to make a case for an ethics of life rooted in the philosophy of alterity, with life studied in both its molecular and social aspects, and attempts to outline what she calls a "nonsystemic bioethics of relations," to facilitate the exploration of kinship between humans and non-humans (such as animals and machines). She aligns her project with those of others working at the intersections of the media and the biosciences who seek to "dethrone human-centered moral philosophy from its position of an arbitrator over the value of life" (p. 29) and writes in dialogue with continental philosophy as well as with feminist social and cultural theory. The book will find a ready audience in those who are engaged in theorizing the "posthuman," and tracking its traces through contemporary culture, but may prove somewhat frustrating to those who seek a more pragmatic approach to what is to be done in the face of the convergence of new bio-and media technologies. The book is divided into two sections: 'Theorizing Bioethics' and 'Bioethics in Action.' In 'Theorizing Bioethics' Zylinska conducts a genealogy of contemporary bioethics and points to a path not taken which would have been less humancentered and more focused on the network of relations between the human, technology and the environment. She goes on to develop her own framework for bioethics which departs from Levinas's focus on the requirement to address and respond to the other in his/her infinite alterity, and extends this address to the non-human other absent from Levinas's philosophy. This requirement is inflected through Derrida's emphasis on the relational quality of this address and Stiegler's position that the human is "always already technological." One of her most striking claims is that as soon as she starts "asking questions about the general applicability and universal validity of this ethics" she is moving from ethics into politics. The final chapter in this section appropriately then explores 'Biopolitics Today'-"a political regime under which bodies and

This essay seeks to account for the sources and consequences of Arendt's conception of ruin as the 'natural' and 'normal' character of human affairs-a view she expressed most famously in The Human Condition and perhaps most powerfully in her reflections on the work of Franz Kafka. Beginning with an analysis of Heidegger's use of the term 'ruination' in his early Marburg lectures, the essay shows how Arendt absorbs Heidegger's insight while completely altering its critical function. As a German Jew, Arendt was acutely aware of the temptations and dangers of the cult of Bildung (culture, self-development), especially as a result of her intense engagement with Rachel Varnhagen, who saw in Bildung a way out of her impossible socio-political position. For Arendt, who follows Kafka in this regard, any process that operates on its own, including that of Bildung, tends toward ruin, and she understood her work, in large part, as an uncovering of the counter-movement to ruination in the form of action. The essay concludes by showing the degree to which Arendt's reflections on ruin underlie her analysis of Eichmann's crimes and considers the ways in which her critical engagement with Kafka prepared her for her 'report' on his trial.

At various strata of the debate, the sense that arguments surrounding euthanasia are no longer making significant advances has provoked a variety of attempts to find alternative ethical approaches that might break with standard deadlocks. In this essay, we will trail one such move by giving a new account of what the ethical stance of Emmanuel Levinas might contribute towards the twin questions of the ethical justification and legalisation of euthanasia. Interpreting our fundamental relationship with the other in terms of the Biblical injunction 'Thou shalt not kill' and refusing to draw any distinction between murder and other forms of killing, Levinas is commonly taken to have offered an ethical stance that is strongly opposed to euthanasia. Without disagreeing with this interpretation, we will offer an account of a further twist on this perspective that renders euthanasia ambiguously the exemplary ethical failure and the supreme culmination of ethics, simultaneously separating this ethical question entirely from legality.

This article explores the gendered dimensions of the populist radical right discourse and policy by considering the Front national in France. The article shows how the Front national has progressively moved from a 'traditional' to a 'modern traditional' approach to issues of gender, women's work, and the family. The core of the Front national policy and ideology has remained stable over time, with regard to the interconnected issues of gender and of immigration. However, there is a significant move from the celebration of women as 'mothers of the nation', prevalent in the party until the 1990s, to an emphasis on 'working mothers' in Marine Le Pen's discourse. The article also analyses the ambivalence of Marine Le Pen's party discourse on gender, as well as the discrepancies between the party discourse and its political programme. This ambivalence mirrors the internal conflicts between the leadership and the conservative Catholic faction. This evolution of the Front national discourse on gender is linked to the party history and internal politics as well as to broader long-term social changes in French society.

This article examines psychoanalysis’s relation- ship to collective affiliation and group identity via its asso- ciation with two foundational figures, that of the Woman and the Jew. It begins by exploring reportage on the war in Ukraine as it has touched on these figures (often with conflicting and self-contradictory messaging), and it argues that we need psychoanalysis to approach these problematics. It then goes on to explore psychoanalysis’s historical relationship to both femininity and Jewishness, and it suggests that reexamining psychoanalysis both as a Jewish science and as a discourse that takes feminin- ity distinctively seriously, via the frame of the conflict in Ukraine, might do something for our vantage on psychoanalysis itself as a historical, political, and ethical development. Ultimately, its claim is that the mutual imbrication of psychoanalysis, Jewishness, and feminin- ity suggests a model of affiliation and relation based on the critical category of the navel, whose mechanics might offer new ways of imagining the collective life of psychoanalysis itself.

This Derridean and biosemiotic reading of Yamen Manai's novel L'Amas ardent illustrates that many other animals are capable of responding to a plethora of challenges through the transmission of signs that are laden with meaning. Dismissing outdated linguistic and philosophical models that have relegated all other organisms to the status of automata that are unable to communicate anything significant at all, Derrida and Manai implore us to take a closer look at other-than-human semiosis. In the Anthropocene epoch, both authors suggest that the stakes of having a more nuanced and rigorous discussion about other-than-human communication have never been greater.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the philosophical and linguistic implications of the French philosopher Edgar Morin's "complex thought." In stark contrast to standard communicative models which profess that Homo sapiens are the only organisms that are capable of engaging in semiosis, Morin unequivocally proves that other-than-human communication is laden with significance and purpose. Living on an imperiled planet that is increasingly defined by an anthropogenic, ecological calamity that is spiraling further out of control with each passing day, Morin persuasively argues that we must transcend our myopic, anthropocentric frame of reference and adopt a more ecocentric view of communication.

Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'Université de Montréal, l'Université Laval et l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Pour communiquer avec les responsables d'Érudit:

In the last few years, we have witnessed a perplexing new trend. Following an extended period in which few high-profile women were willing to identify publicly with feminism, all of a sudden-or so it appeared-many well-known women were loudly declaring themselves feminists, one after the other: from the former president of Barnard College, Debora Spar and the current UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, through internationally popular music celebrities Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé to right-wing populists like Marine Le Pen in France. 1 Indeed, Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign was strongly endorsed by liberal feminist organisations, and marked one of the high points of a resurgent feminist agenda in the United States with resonances across the western world. Despite her ultimate defeat, Clinton was nevertheless the first woman in US history to be nominated as a presidential candidate by a major national party. Feminism, it seemed, had finally become legitimate in the popular imagination in ways that it simply never had been before. These public feminist declarations were not the only ways in which a revived feminist discourse began circulating, however. Rather, since 2012-in both the anglophone world as well as in the west more generallythere has been a virtual explosion of feminist discussion in both popular and mainstream media: from internationally bestselling books, through widely read articles in the mainstream print media to popular television shows. These discussions, framed as inspired by feminism, have been diverse and occasionally contentious, including, for example, how egg-freezing technologies could potentially render talk of women's biological clock anachronistic and whether the casual 'hook-up' culture among women undergraduates on university and college campuses should be considered part of feminism's emancipatory legacy. 2 One particularly influential site for the dissemination of this popular feminism has been a new form of feminist manifesto. Two of these-former Princeton University professor Anne-Marie Slaughter's 'Why Women Still Can't Have It All', and Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg's best-selling Lean in: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (2013)-might well be said to have initiated the trend of high-power women publicly 'coming out' as feminists, while serving as a springboard for reenergised feminist debates in the Anglo-American world, mostly around the question of why well-educated middle-class women are still struggling to cultivate careers and raise children at the same time. The success of these manifestos has, in turn, more recently stimulated a publication boom of advice-oriented memoirs and 'having it all' self-help guides for women. In the last two years alone, former Fox anchorwoman Megyn Kelly's Settle for More, Ivanka Trump's Women Who Work, and 1. Asked if she identifies herself as a feminist, Le Pen said that she could consider herself as such to the extent that she defends women's rights, which are threatened by Islam. F. Scrinzi, 'A new French National Front?', forthcoming.

The Vienna Method of Picture Statistics, also known as Isotype, has become a means for historians and theorists of modern culture to directly link visual modernism with modern social science and philosophy, specifically with logical positivism and Taylorism/Fordism. Isotype has been described in terms of Taylorist standardization, rationalism, 'transparent construction' and functionalism. By delineating the understanding of these terms held by Isotype's inventor Otto Neurath and his friends and colleagues, and contextualising Isotype in relation to recent reassessments of Neurath's other work, I suggest that Isotype participated in a modernism that was understood by its proponents in ways that were more plural, and pluralist, than we now give them credit.

Our case study looks at the events surrounding the sacking of Google engineer James Damore who was fired for authoring a memo which stated that women are biologically less suited to high-stress, high-status technical employment than men. Damore, asserting that his document 'was absolutely consistent with what he'd seen online', instantly became an ambivalent hero of the alt-right. Like the men who own and run the companies of Silicon Valley, the software engineer subscribes to the idea that the world can be understood and altered through the rigorous application of the scientific method. And as he draws on bodies of knowledge from evolutionary psychology and mathematical biology, we see how the core belief structures of Silicon Valley, when transferred from the technical to the cultural and social domain, can reproduce the sort of misogynistic 'rationalism' that fuels the alt-right. We argue that Damore's memo is in line with Google's ideology of 'dat...

In this essay I reflect on a sample of a relatively new literature that has emerged in recent years on the growth of 'womenomics' and what Adrienne Roberts has called 'transnational business feminism'. Are these developments a triumph for the influence of feminist activists around the globe? Or do we see them as yet another classic attempt by the agents of capitalist globalisation to contain the energies of women and turn them to the advantage of the bottom line? I look at some examples of TBF on the part of Goldman Sachs, Unilever, Levi-Strauss, and the Nike Foundation; at the debate among feminist scholars over whether neoliberal feminism is 'really' feminism; at the rise of the concept of 'empowerment;' and finally, at some elements that TBF leaves out of the picture, including the neoliberal assault on social reproduction; the extreme exploitation of women workers, from Walmart to Export Processing Zones; the retreat from class analysis under neoliberalism; and the continuing effects of 'structural adjustment' on countries in the North like Greece subject to the ravages of the international financial order. I conclude with a call to the international male left to be as welcoming and as creative toward the ideas and the activism of the international women's movement as their corporate adversaries.

As an alternative to Utilitarianism, animal ethics turned to the Continental philosophies of Levinas and Derrida that welcome and revere Otherness. While Utilitarianism relies on a 'closed' system of ethical calculations, the Levinasian model remains open-ended. This essay argues for a revised approach to animal ethics that combines Levinasian immeasurability, what Matthew Calarco called 'ethical agnosticism', with a closed approach that sees ethics as issuing from particular modes of practice. Highlighting some of the problems inherent in the Levinasian ethics of love as well as Agamben's biopolitical critique of law, I propose a corrective, 'between love and law', that avoids predetermining the limits of moral consideration yet insists on the social and normative dimensions of ethical responsiveness. I take the practice of veganism-broadly conceived beyond the strictly dietary-as the heart of animal ethics and consider some of the philosophical and theological dimensions of veganism as neither naïve nor as utopian but on the contrary, as a worldly mode of engagement that acknowledges the realities of violence.

The Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award was established at the annual meeting of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) in 2014, in conjunction with Springer and Biosemiotics. It seeks to recognize papers published in the journal that present novel and potentially important contributions to biosemiotic research, its scientific impact and its future prospects. Here the winner of the Biosemiotic Achievement Award for 2020 is announced: The award goes to Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen and Majid D. Beni for their article "Active Inference and Abduction".

This essay pursues the processes and obstacles involved in making food out of an animal. Taking kangaroos and roo meat as the object of investigation, the essay follows roo through environmentalist arguments, promotional campaigns, animal activists and decades of Skippy. Following kangaroo entails tracking the interconnections and disconnections between assessments of environmental sustainability and the sentiment that the kangaroo is a 'friend'; between the association of roo meat as pet food and the attempt to produce a cuisine around it. It also means following roo from Australia to Russia and the Czech Republic. Based on the assumption that food is intractably and simultaneously both cultural and 'beyond-cultural' (agricultural, metabolic, biological and so on) the essay argues for a complex description of its phenomenal forms.

This essay examines philosopher of technology and media Bernard Stiegler's propositions concerning the nature and effects of the automation of social existence through computational processes deployed in online media. It argues for the critical pertinence of Stiegler's approach to this widespread and now increasingly apparent deployment. I centre my examination on Stiegler's adoption and critical re-reading of Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns' concept of 'algorithmic governmentality'. This concept characterises the realtime deployment of these automated processes as a significant transformation from the pre-digital era's application of statistical methods of analysis and prediction of social phenomena, a transformation driven above all by the strategic development and application of recent advances in AI and machine learning. Drawing on Michel Foucault's influential analysis of governmentality and his work on the interconnections of power, knowledg...

Dr Jack Boulton Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA) Edges of the State may be short, but to misquote Hobbes' Leviathan this well-formed text is certainly not solitary, poor, nasty or brutish. The thesis of the text is a simple one: that where the state is not, rather than violence there is not necessarily peace but prosociality. In chapter one, Protevi uses a well-known latter day example: hurricane Katrina, or rather the disaster it caused in and around New Orleans in August 2005. Protevi points out that the overtly empathic response to

This text is a conversation among practitioners of independent political media, focusing on the diverse materialities of independent publishing associated with the new media environment. The conversation concentrates on the publishing projects with which the participants are involved: the online archive and conversation platform AAAAARG, the print and digital publications of artist and activist group Chto Delat?, the blog I Cite, and the hybrid print/digital magazines Mute and Neural. Approaching independent media as sites of political and aesthetic intervention, association, and experimentation, the conversation ranges across a number of themes, including: the technical structures of new media publishing; financial constraints in independent publishing; independence and institutions; the sensory properties of paper and the book; the politics of writing; design and the aesthetics of publishing; the relation between social media and communicative capitalism; publishing as art; publishing as self-education; and post-digital print. Keywords independent publishing, art publishing, activist publishing, digital archive, blog, magazine, newspaper BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND ACT Nicholas Thoburn (NT) In one way or another all of you have an investment in publishing as a political practice, where publishing might be understood loosely as a political 'gesture' located 'between the realm of discourse and the material act'. 1 And in large measure, this takes the path of critical intervention in the form of the media with which you work-newspaper, blog, magazine, and digital archive. That is, media come forward in your publishing practice and writing as complex sets of materials, capacities, and effects, and as sites of political intervention and critical reflection. The aim of this conversation is to concentrate on these materials, capacities, and effects of independent media (a term, 'independent media', that I use advisedly, given its somewhat pre-digital associations and a nagging feeling that it lacks purchase on the complexity of convergent media environments). I'm keen as much as possible to keep each of your specific

Nonhuman Photography is an invigorating and passionate call to reclaim photography's essence and to rethink its ontology and is a much needed addition to critical thinking about photography. At a time when the practices of what we still continue to designate under the

This essay seeks to account for the sources and consequences of Arendt's conception of ruin as the 'natural' and 'normal' character of human affairs-a view she expressed most famously in The Human Condition and perhaps most powerfully in her reflections on the work of Franz Kafka. Beginning with an analysis of Heidegger's use of the term 'ruination' in his early Marburg lectures, the essay shows how Arendt absorbs Heidegger's insight while completely altering its critical function. As a German Jew, Arendt was acutely aware of the temptations and dangers of the cult of Bildung (culture, self-development), especially as a result of her intense engagement with Rachel Varnhagen, who saw in Bildung a way out of her impossible socio-political position. For Arendt, who follows Kafka in this regard, any process that operates on its own, including that of Bildung, tends toward ruin, and she understood her work, in large part, as an uncovering of the counter-movement to ruination in the form of action. The essay concludes by showing the degree to which Arendt's reflections on ruin underlie her analysis of Eichmann's crimes and considers the ways in which her critical engagement with Kafka prepared her for her 'report' on his trial.

This report examines the relationship between SF and innovation, defined as one of mutual engagement and even co-constitution. It develops a framework for tracing the relationships between real world science and technology and innovation and science fiction/speculative fiction involving processes of transformation, central to which are questions of influence, persuasion, and desire. This is contrasted with the more commonplace assumption of direct linear transmission, SF providing the inventive seed for innovation– instances of which are the exception rather than the rule. The model of influence is developed through an investigation of the nature and evolution of genre, the various effects/appeals of different forms of expression, and the ways in which SF may be appropriated by its various audiences. This is undertaken (i) via an interdisciplinary survey of work on SF, and a consideration the historical construction of genre and its on-going importance, (ii) through the development ...