E-Word? McLuhan, Baudrillard, and Verisimilitude in Preaching

Durkheim, Emile (1858–1917)

The “Right to the City” is a worldwide movement initiated by French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s. The premise of the movement is based on the concept that citizens have an unassailable right to build the city they live in, based on their needs and desires. In parallel the term “placemaking” was established as a response to modernist architecture and urban planning practices. Placemaking is a participatory process that integrates the ideas and skills of people who utilise the space in question and seek ways of improving it for their daily use and needs. The experiences of citizens coming from different social backgrounds and groups vary, however, as do their needs, making it pivotal to provide special attention to some groups during the process of placemaking. In practice, most activities initiated via top-down approaches fail to engage young people in a meaningful way. We have noticed, through our experiences, that there is a lack of understanding of young people’s needs and abilities, not to mention interests. In this chapter, we will discuss different approaches to playing that can help enable and empower young people. We believe these methods promote true engagement and have had a positive impact on their contribution in a placemaking project. In order to do so, we will specifically analyse and evaluate methods that involve playing as a means to encourage young people’s ideas and inspiration. The evaluated methods (three different games) are used in international projects (six different cases). The key aspects were to deal with the unimaginable, to understand what to change and, last but not least, who is going to have which role in the change. When evaluating the different methods, we will also look at the context cases alongside the needs of young people in participatory processes.

Abstract. When simulating social action in modeling efforts, as in socio-hydrology, an issue of obvious importance is how to ensure that social action by human agents is well-represented in the analysis and the model. Generally, human decision-making is either modeled on a yearly basis or lumped together as collective social structures. Both responses are problematic, as human decision-making is more complex and organizations are the result of human agency and cannot be used as explanatory forces. A way out of the dilemma of how to include human agency is to go to the largest societal and environmental clustering possible: society itself and climate, with time steps of years or decades. In the paper, another way out is developed: to face human agency squarely, and direct the modeling approach to the agency of individuals and couple this with the lowest appropriate hydrological level and time step. This approach is supported theoretically by the work of Bruno Latour, the French sociologist and philosopher. We discuss irrigation archaeology, as it is in this discipline that the issues of scale and explanatory force are well discussed. The issue is not just what scale to use: it is what scale matters. We argue that understanding the arrangements that permitted the management of irrigation over centuries requires modeling and understanding the small-scale, day-to-day operations and personal interactions upon which they were built. This effort, however, must be informed by the longer-term dynamics, as these provide the context within which human agency is acted out.

In his influential article “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Bruno Latour, the French philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist, argued that critique as an analytical method had reached a dead end. Pointing at the conspiracy-ridden discourse around global heating as one dangerous contemporary outcome of critique’s drive to question the objective status of scientific knowledge, he called for a truce between humanists, social scientists and scientists in view of the climate crisis. Heather Love, queer studies and literary scholar, responds to this perspective whereby criticism as an intellectual and analytic tradition is considered to have acquired dogmatic and destructive characteristics. As part of this effort, Love looks back at Donna Haraway’s early writings on scientific objectivity, identifying a productive tension between a critical and post-critical position. Love shows how Haraway attacks the ideological notion of scientific objectivity by describing it as a fantasy of external, non-engaged, observation which has no room for either body, class, ethnicity or gender. At the same time, she casts a light on Haraway’s insistence on the construction of empathy, intimacy, and coexistence as values intrinsic to scientific observation. This article looks at the way Love presents Haraway’s work as a neglected, pioneering, model of cultural, textual analysis that incorporates both care and critique. In the intellectual portrait Love sketches, Haraway identified and formulated a variety of discordant meanings of scientific objectivity and knowledge by looking at competing perspectives on scientific analysis and knowledge production. Haraway enables us to think analogically about the complex and evolving nature of critique as both an intellectual tradition and a hermeneutic tool.

The purpose of this article is to discuss and examine consumption as a cultural and social practice established in the daily routine of individuals, especially in regard to western society.We explore certain features of consumption in today’s society, including purposes of consumption such as pleasure and happiness. The study approaches the idea of individuals as consumers and focuses on the dynamics of the social and cultural relationships present in our daily routine. The theoretical background is based mainly on the work of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and French philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky. Examining the social, economic and political phenomena that exist today, the article touches on current culture globalization and discusses the phenomena of consumption that now seems to determine ways of existing and living.

“A collateral victim”[1] of the Spanish flu epidemic: these are the words that Edgar Morin uses to define himself in his “Preamble: One hundred years of vicissitudes” (2020, p. 9), written during the lockdown imposed to stem the spread of Covid-19. Over a handful of pages, the French philosopher and sociologist gives a first-person account of his own personal life in relation to the history of the great crises of the 20th Century. His preamble to the book Let’s change lanes: Lessons of Coronavirus reads as follows: “The reader can now understand why I find it normal to expect the unexpected and to foresee that the unpredictable may happen”[2] (p. 22). Over the course of the text, Morin’s readers are also brought to understand why the author has not “completely lost hope” (ibidem). Hence, the beauty of the words of Morin, as a “transversal thinker” (Montuori, 2019, p. 408), is collateral: his lucid analysis does indeed retrace the catastrophic events that have arisen during the pandemic, underlining human beings’ predisposition to dystopian attitudes, yet it simultaneously highlights key steps towards fostering that humanism necessary to change the path. If aesthetics, according to the definition given by its founder Baumgarten (1750), is the “sensory theory”[3] (Tedesco, 2020, p. 9), perhaps the key to grasping the collateral beauty of adverse events lies in implementing knowledge of sensibilities, i.e. that ability to envisage the unexpected (Morin, 2020, 2001), to understand that pain is part of life (Han, 2020), to “think emotions, feel thoughts”[4] (Mortari, 2017), to listen to the Other because it concerns us (Levinas, 2002). This contribution aims to relate some findings of contemporary Italian pedagogy, which, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, are exploring those sensibilities able to deal with the unexpected, considering the concepts of uncertainty, margin and care from a phenomenological perspective (Mortari & Camerella, 2014). Educational practices, brought to the fore by the academic community in the field of education, become an active surveillance tool to provide a response to current issues that is not only theoretical, but also empirical and “operational”[5] – i.e. “capable of directing and orienting its choices in a strategic way in contexts where highly critical situations occur” (Isidori & Vaccarelli, 2013, pp. 16–17).

The term "civilization" emerged in Europe only at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, but over time, it has been used in diverse approaches that seem contradictory. Initially denoting the opposite of barbarism and a certain level of societal development, it transformed into a global concept unifying various cultures. Among the characteristics of such a global civilization, one can highlight the vector of development and prioritization of values outlined by French philosophers: freedom, rights, and justice. Scholars commonly synonymize and contrast "civilization" and "culture" in their interpretations. In seemingly different approaches by Immanuel Kant and Oswald Spengler, civilization appears as something external, constant, and mechanical against the living, dynamic culture. The approach of local civilizations, represented by scholars like N. Danilevsky, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, S. F. Huntington, etc., remains popular and debatable. It reflects the peculiarities of individual cultures, their interactions, factors, and the cycle of development. The article suggests departing from the usual opposition and synthesizing the global and local approaches to civilization, where global civilization is not cultural unification but a space of cultural interactions with common, universal values. By comprehensively examining the crises faced by society at each of these levels, the interrelatedness of these levels can be traced, revealing factors influencing international security that are not apparent for local problem-solving. In the second part of the work, the context of the history of the Orthodox civilization is provided, emphasizing the importance of a thorough and comprehensive study of the formation of state civilization identity to understand local civilization and its core.

With works by Danish artists Niels Nedergaard (1944-1987) and Peter Nansen Scher- fig (b. 1963) and Vietnamese-Danish artist Danh Vo (b. 1975) as point of departure, the text examines how male homosexuality and the understanding of the gay self has been presented in photographs by Danish gay artists. The text uses archive theory by French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) to examine how the artists have used their sexuality to question and break free from the current sociocultural structures within society. Furthermore, the text uses gay studies by French sociologist and writer Didier Eribon (b. 1953) in the examination of the photographs as expressions of gay life. In addi- tion, the text uses Danish gay history to show how Nedergaard’s photos carry traces of a dialogue-based path in the fight for gay rights and elements of gay activism. Finally, the text raises the question if one can speak of a gay writing, an écriture gay, and discusses how the photographs by Nedergaard, Nansen Scherfig and Vo can be understood as examples of such a praxis.

TES,34, 2004 TES,34, 2004 277 277 For many working within the field of children's literature,this book will come as a welcome addition to an expanding corpus. But it will do so precisely to the extent that this field continues to welcome what is essentiallythe same old critical methodology as if it were something new and radical. The claim that such work is 'informed by theorists'is not one that should be made lightly and it should be seriouslychallenged. Tacking odd 'poststructural' terms piecemeal onto a discourse that is structurallyuntouched by anything like 'poststructuralism' does nothing to advance either traditionalliterarycriticismor theory, but serves to confuse both. UNIVERSITY OFREADING STEPHEN THOMSON Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion andInteractivity inLiterature andElectronic Media.By MARIE-LAURE RYAN.(Parallax:Re-Visions of Culture and Society) Baltimore, MD, and London:Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. xiii + 399 pp. ?31. ISBN: 0-8018-6487-9. Narrative as Virtual Reality examines the cultureof immersionand interactivitywithin the realm of the virtual and virtuality. Marie-Laure Ryan, like many writers of cyberculture,draws upon a multitude of disciplinesto present a pre/trans/ history of tomorrow. Part I introduces the idea of the 'virtual'as an 'optical sense, which carries the negative connotations of double illusions'and the other which suggests'productivity , openness, and diversity'(p. 27).Ryan discusseseach as 'the virtualas fake'using Jean Baudrillard'stheories and Pierre Levy's interpretationof the 'the virtual as potential'. The term 'virtual'extends into the 'real' itself. Everything from automated teller machines that fulfil the function of a bank teller in a virtualmode, to phone sex, email, and shopping online- has been dubbed 'virtual'.The interplay between the real and the virtualis extended to our minds and bodies as Ryan interprets virtual reality as 'an active system of simulation'(p. 62) through its presence, immersion, and interactivity. PartII deals with the poetics of immersionas the apotheosisof virtualculture.In a way VR is refashioning the computer into a processor of perceptions. Virtual realityprovidesa phenomenology to go along with the epistemologyof autopoiesis. The idea of immersion is not restrictedto the computer age but to literaryauthors such as Charlotte Bronte, Conrad, Calvino among others, who set the stage for a sustainedexploration of the problems and possibilitiesof engagement within artificial , simulatedenvironments.Ryan discusseswhat it means in semantic and logical terms to be transportedinto the virtual reality of a textual world. She goes on to explain how they are tied to an ontological model that acknowledgesa pluralityof possible worlds inspired by the pioneering work of Umberto Eco, Thomas Pavel, and Lubomir Dolezel. What intrigued me the most was Ryan's descriptionof the emotional aspect of immersionwhich entailsthe contemplationof purelyimaginary states of affairsas an evolutionaryasset that works towardsthe preservationof the species (p. I56). This interplayof immersive and interactiveenvironmentsis clearly defined by Ryan in the use of computer-game culture and hypertext. Gamers are co-authors who take part in the experience as virtual communities that exist as playing fields for social interaction. Players can enjoy true social interaction with other participants in real time - form adventuring parties, engage in battle with other players, take on perilous quests, or chat in a tavern over a goblet of virtual wine. The proliferation of simulations into all walks of life has For many working within the field of children's literature,this book will come as a welcome addition to an expanding corpus. But it will do so precisely to the extent that this field continues to welcome what is essentiallythe same old critical methodology as if it were something new and radical. The claim that such work is 'informed by theorists'is not one that should be made lightly and it should be seriouslychallenged. Tacking odd 'poststructural' terms piecemeal onto a discourse that is structurallyuntouched by anything like 'poststructuralism' does nothing to advance either traditionalliterarycriticismor theory, but serves to confuse both. UNIVERSITY OFREADING STEPHEN THOMSON Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion andInteractivity inLiterature andElectronic Media.By MARIE-LAURE RYAN.(Parallax:Re-Visions of Culture and Society) Baltimore, MD, and London:Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. xiii + 399 pp. ?31. ISBN: 0-8018-6487-9. Narrative as Virtual Reality examines the cultureof immersionand interactivitywithin the realm of the virtual and...

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) was a literary critic known for his media theory that emphasized how communication technology extended and transformed the capabilities of the embodied human subject and how changes in dominant media led to dramatic changes in society. His early work explored the revolutionary effect that moveable type and the printing press had on an orality‐based world. In the 1960s, McLuhan became internationally famous for his prophetic claims about how electronic media was in the process of creating a new interconnected and globally oriented society. Although McLuhan's cultural and academic influence waned in the 1970s and 1980s as he became a popular example of technological determinism, the emergence of the Internet and new media has revived both popular and critical interest in his work.

Philosophe français aussi hétérodoxe que capital, Jean Baudrillard n’a pu développer son écriture qu’avec la confrontation théorique des plus grands esprits de son temps. Ainsi, aux sources de l’écriture de Baudrillard se trouve avant tout la vie d’un lecteur. Et c’est au travers de l’analyse de sa bibliothèque qu’une généalogie objective de la pensée de Baudrillard devient possible, en faisant retour sur ses analyses critiques des textes littéraires, philosophiques, anthropologiques, etc. J’essaierai de montrer dans cet article les premiers éléments d’un travail d’archives inédit, qui dévoile la pratique d’un philosophe dans son atelier textuel.

The purpose of this study is to identify how Cimahi batik is a form of cultural identity. So that the younger generation, especially the people of Cimahi City, can know and appreciate the form of cultural heritage in the form of one of the city's identities. The research method used is a qualitative method by analyzing the data found. This study uses a literature/library study approach in which the data comes from various literatures, both in print and electronic media related to cultural identity in the form of urban batik in the view of anthropology. This is motivated by the swift currents of globalization which can cause cultural shifts. Even the cultural identity of an area can be lost if it is not preserved. So this research is expected to increase the sense of respect and pride in the existing cultural identity.

Enlightenment Cybernetics: Communications and Control in the Man-Machine Allison Muri (bio) A scientific commonplace is that the human organism is a complex communications system. Within the body, the network of nervous system and brain communicates or transmits information through a series of electrical channels compared to telephone wires or computer processors.1 Such comparisons have resonated with portrayals of networked communications technologies as an “extension” of the human nervous system in certain strands of media theory and cultural studies. Following Marshall McLuhan’s decades-old pronouncement of a new “global consciousness,” the imagined melding of individual subjectivity with the network of electric and electronic communications media has symbolized the evolution to a new technological identity frequently identified as the posthuman or the cyborg. And for many writers theorizing this new identity, the cyborg has signified either a more democratic future or an imminent disintegration of morals and community engagement. These predictions, however, are contingent upon a history of metaphors, and their apparent certainty has been reinforced by a discursive tradition that has defined the laws of matter and motion since at least the early modern period when the human body was first imagined as a machine. The “posthuman cyborg” is a descendent of the man-machine, not merely because the mechanistic philosophy made simplistic and ultimately unsatisfactory comparisons of clockwork mechanisms to organic ones. Most particularly, we should understand the cyborg and its historical counterpart in the early modern man-machine as steered organisms, whose functions depend upon the transmission of messages. The speculations upon the government of cyborg individuals and cyborg society that were especially common in the 1980s and 1990s have a lexical history in early modern representations of the man-machine’s knowledge, judgment, and will as a function of control and communications. In 1948, when Norbert Wiener coined the term that would describe the study of control and communications in the human nervous system and automatic [End Page 141] machines, he based it upon an analogy of steering ships or machine governors: We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name cybernetics, which we form from the Greek χυβερνήτης [sic ] or steersman. In choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on feed-back mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published by Clerk Maxwell in 1868, and that governor is derived from a Latin corruption of χυβερνήτης [sic ]. We also wish to refer to the fact that the steering engines of a ship are indeed one of the earliest and best developed forms of feed-back mechanisms.2 The cybernetic organism is steered, or governed, and it is a communications system. The equation of cybernetic human and machine in mathematically based analogies eventually would be posed in media and cultural studies as an actual synthesis of human being into cybernetic organism—a new being both human and machine. By the end of the twentieth century the cyborg, a self “situated beyond the skin,” was frequently imagined as a substantiated certainty of the radical evolution to posthumanity, where “what it means to be human is no longer being immersed in genetic memory but in being re-configured in the electromagnetic field of the circuit.”3 Such pronouncements of radical change are seemingly unaware of their congruence with three-hundred-year-old metaphors for human consciousness or identity as pilot, steersman, or monarch in the brain communicating via material mechanisms with body systems and external environment. What has in part inspired this investigation into what we might call the “Enlightenment cyborg” is the confidence that networked communications mean inevitable and profound changes to the physiology of consciousness and the government of the body politic. The image of a dominant mechanism (steersman, pilot, sovereign, or governor) controlling the individual body, the applicability of machine mechanisms to the workings of the human machine, and the supposed reconstitution of body and body politic due to ungoverned or networked communications systems are dominant metaphors in late twentieth-century theories of postmodern transformations, and yet these are all to some extent constructs reminiscent of early modern tropes for the human-machine. Government of...

The Networked Diaspora: Bulgarian Migrants on Facebook

he introductory article of the book examines the personalities of libraries, the insights of the philosophy of personalism and the philosophical understanding of a fragment, trying to connect three concepts: personality, library, fragment. Personality is an individuality that is always in constant internal change. At the beginning of the 20th century, the philosophers of personalism were connected by the principle of the action of substances and the active, and self-sufficient and willing beginning of man. The first Latvian academic philosopher Jēkabs Osis was influenced by the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. A personality, like a monad, is a living, functioning being that imagines itself, as well as the universe and the world from its own point of view. The views of Emmanuel Mounier, the founder of French personalism, were also influenced by Leibniz’s philosophy. Mounier developed ‘integral personalism’, which combines the three values of personality: being, thinking and acting. These characteristics also refer to library personalities in the world and in Latvia. In opposition to philosophy of personalism, French postmodern philosophers (Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes) write about the structural man. A structural human divides reality into fragments and then puts them back together, but when the fragments are put back together, a completely different object is formed than it was originally. A new reality is a modelled reality in which the human sometimes even remains in the status of a fragment. A fragment is a part of a whole, and it can be an article in a volume, a book on a library shelf, and even a person’s life in the world scene.