Journal articles on the topic 'Arbitrary public announcement logic'

Abstract We study the symbolic model checking problem against public announcement protocol logic (PAPL), featuring protocols with public announcements, arbitrary public announcements and group announcements. Technically, symbolic models are Kripke models whose accessibility relations are presented as programs described in a dynamic logic style with propositional assignments. We highlight the relevance of such symbolic models and show that the symbolic model checking problem against PAPL is A$_{\textrm{pol}}$Exptime-complete as soon as announcement protocols allow for either arbitrary announcements or iteration of public announcements. However, when both options are discarded, the complexity drops to Pspace-complete.

Public announcement logic is an extension of multiagent epistemic logic with dynamic operators to model the informational consequences of announcements to the entire group of agents. We propose an extension of public announcement logic with a dynamic modal operator that expresses what is true after any announcement: ⋄φ expresses that there is a truthful announcement ψ after which φ is true. This logic gives a perspective on Fitch's knowability issues: For which formulas φ, does it hold that φ → ⋄Kφ? We give various semantic results and show completeness for a Hilbert-style axiomatization of this logic. There is a natural generalization to a logic for arbitrary events.

AbstractWe define a Public Announcement Separation Logic (PASL) that allows us to consider epistemic possible worlds as resources that can be shared or separated, in the spirit of separation logics. After studying its semantics and illustrating its interest for modelling systems, we provide a sound and complete tableau calculus that deals with resource, agent and announcement constraints and give also a countermodel extraction method.

AbstractIn van Benthem (2008), van Benthem proposes a dynamic consequence relation defined as ${\psi _1}, \ldots ,{\psi _n}{ \models ^d}\phi \,{\rm{iff}}{ \models ^{pa}}[{\psi _1}] \ldots [{\psi _n}]\phi ,$ where the latter denotes consequence in public announcement logic, a dynamic epistemic logic. In this paper we investigate the structural properties of a conditional dynamic consequence relation $\models _{\rm{\Gamma }}^d$ extending van Benthem’s proposal. It takes into account a set of background conditions Γ, inspired by Makinson (2003) wherein Makinson calls this reasoning ‘modulo’ a set Γ. In the presence of common knowledge, conditional dynamic consequence is definable from (unconditional) dynamic consequence. An open question is whether dynamic consequence is compact. We further investigate a dynamic consequence relation for soft instead of hard announcements. Surprisingly, it shares many properties with (hard) dynamic consequence. Dynamic consequence relations provide a novel perspective on reasoning about protocols in multi-agent systems.

Public announcement logic is a logic that studies epistemic updates. In this paper, we propose a sound and complete labelled natural deduction system for public announcement logic with the common knowledge operator (PAC). The completeness of the proposed system is proved indirectly through a Hilbert calculus for PAC known to be complete and sound. We conclude with several discussions regarding the system including some problems of the system in attaining normalisation and subformula property.

This talk is based on joint work with Rustam Galimullin and Hans van Ditmarsh, published in the German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2018). First I will introduce background and motivation for the work. I will introduce multi-agent Epistemic Logic (EL) for representing knowledge of (idealised) agents, Public Announcement Logic (PAL) for modelling knowledge change after truthful announcements, Group Announcement Logic (GAL) for modelling what kinds of changes in other agents’ knowledge a group of agents can effect, and Coalition Announcement Logic (CAL) which is the main subject of the talk. CAL studies how a group of agents can enforce a certain outcome by making a joint announcement, regardless of any announcements made simultaneously by the opponents. The logic is useful to model imperfect information games with simultaneous moves. It is also useful for devising protocols of announcements that will increase some knowledge of some agents, but also preserve other agents’ ignorance with respect to some information (in other words, preserve privacy of the announcers). The main new technical result in the talk is a model checking algorithm for CAL, that is, an algorithm for evaluating a CAL formula in a given finite model. The model-checking problem for CAL is PSPACE-complete, and the protocol requires polynomial space (but exponential time). DOI: 10.21146/2074-1472-2018-24-2-59-69

We propose a multi-agent epistemic logic of asynchronous announcements, where truthful announcements are publicly sent but individually received by agents, and in the order in which they were sent. Additional to epistemic modalities the logic contains dynamic modalities for making announcements and for receiving them. What an agent believes is a function of her initial uncertainty and of the announcements she has received. Beliefs need not be truthful, because announcements already made may not yet have been received. As announcements are true when sent, certain message sequences can be ruled out, just like inconsistent cuts in distributed computing. We provide a complete axiomatization for this asynchronous announcement logic ( AA ). It is a reduction system that also demonstrates that any formula in AA is equivalent to one without dynamic modalities, just as for public announcement logic. A detailed example modelling message exchanging processes in distributed computing in AA closes our investigation.

Abstract Dynamic epistemic logic is a logic that is aimed at formally expressing how a person’s knowledge changes. We provide a cut-free labelled sequent calculus ($\textbf{GDEL}$) on the background of existing studies of Hilbert-style axiomatization $\textbf{HDEL}$ of dynamic epistemic logic and labelled calculi for public announcement logic. We first show that the $cut$ rule is admissible in $\textbf{GDEL}$ and show that $\textbf{GDEL}$ is sound and complete for Kripke semantics. Moreover, we show that the basis of $\textbf{GDEL}$ is extended from modal logic K to other familiar modal logics including S5 with keeping the admissibility of cut, soundness and completeness.

This paper is a continuation of our previous work in [12]. The results, and some applications, have been described in the announcement [13]; it may be useful to discuss here, a little more fully, the nature and purpose of this work.We are concerned basically with three kinds of algorithmic problem: (1) isomorphism problems, (2) “orbit problems”, and (3) “effective generation”.(1) Isomorphism problems. Here we have a class of algebraic objects of some kind, and ask: is there a uniform algorithm for deciding whether two arbitrary members of are isomorphic? In most cases, the answer is no: no such algorithm exists. Indeed this has been one of the most notable applications of methods of mathematical logic in algebra (see [26, Chapter IV, §4] for the case where is the class of all finitely presented groups). It turns out, however, that when consists of objects which are in a certain sense “finite-dimensional”, then the isomorphism problem is indeed algorithmically soluble. We gave such algorithms in [12] for the following cases: = {finitely generated nilpotent groups}; = {(not necessarily associative) rings whose additive group is finitely generated}; = {finitely Z-generated modules over a fixed finitely generated ring}.Combining the methods of [12] with his own earlier work, Sarkisian has obtained analogous results with the integers replaced by the rationals: in [20] and [21] he solves the isomorphism problem for radicable torsion-free nilpotent groups of finite rank and for finite-dimensional Q-algebras.

We propose a variant of public announcement logic for asynchronous systems. To capture asynchrony, we introduce two different modal operators for sending and receiving messages. The natural approach to defining the semantics leads to a circular definition, but we describe two restricted cases in which we solve this problem. The first case requires the Kripke model representing the initial epistemic situation to be a finite tree, and the second one only allows announcements from the existential fragment. After establishing some validities, we study the model checking problem and the satisfiability problem in cases where the semantics is well-defined, and we provide several complexity results.

The public release of ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence language model, caused wide-spread public interest in its abilities but also concern about the implications of the application on academia, depending on whether it was deemed benevolent (e.g., supporting analysis and simplification of tasks) or malevolent (e.g., assignment writing and academic misconduct). While ChatGPT has been shown to provide answers of sufficient quality to pass some university exams, its capacity to write essays that require an exploration of value concepts is unknown. This paper presents the results of a study where ChatGPT-4 (released May 2023) was tasked with writing a 1500-word essay to discuss the nature of values used in the assessment of cultural heritage significance. Based on an analysis of 36 iterations, ChatGPT wrote essays of limited length with about 50% of the stipulated word count being primarily descriptive and without any depth or complexity. The concepts, which are often flawed and suffer from inverted logic, are presented in an arbitrary sequence with limited coherence and without any defined line of argument. Given that it is a generative language model, ChatGPT often splits concepts and uses one or more words to develop tangential arguments. While ChatGPT provides references as tasked, many are fictitious, albeit with plausible authors and titles. At present, ChatGPT has the ability to critique its own work but seems unable to incorporate that critique in a meaningful way to improve a previous draft. Setting aside conceptual flaws such as inverted logic, several of the essays could possibly pass as a junior high school assignment but fall short of what would be expected in senior school, let alone at a college or university level.

Mediation is a legal institution used in international, supranational, and state disputes. A wide range of legal cases in disputes arise include economic, civil, labour or family matters and it is not a closed catalogue. Mediation can be seen as a set of decision-making processes, of which the mediator’s decision-making process is essential for the outcome of mediation. I propose a study to be carried out on the institution of mediation using a decision-making approach in the light of an interdisciplinary review of the results of research that may be relevant to the project, for example from the perspectives of logic, psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. The research will also include elements related to computer-aided decision making and artificial intelligence, and the issues of confidence and emotion will also be included in order to balance the participation of artificial processes. As a result of the research, an SSM (support, stimulate, manage) strategy will be proposed, taking into account the model course of decision-making in mediation with a focus on the mediator’s decision-making processes. The article provides a preliminary reflection and announcement of the start of work on the topic of decision-making approaches in mediation, with a call for discussion, addressed to the academic and professional community. The research is conducted in the Academic Mediation Centre operating at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (Lublin) and within the research group – Central & Eastern Mediation Research Group.

The Democratic State of Law emerged with the objective of improving everyone’s life, restricting the power of tyrants, who, among other arbitrary acts, unfairly taxed the people. While taxes remain crucial for the State’s upkeep, modern rules prevent individuals from enduring excessive burdens. Although new technologies leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) hold the promise of enhancing lives, the extent of this improvement raises questions. This study delves into the relationship between individuals and the State, specifically exploring the use of AI in tax-related scenarios. Conducting a comprehensive three-stage investigation, the first stage involved surveying the reasons behind State-imposed limitations on taxation. The second stage identified criteria from computer literature addressing potential AI challenges and strategies for achieving explainability. Additionally, a discussion emphasized the importance of technological models aligning with principles that underpin our society. Then, to understand how actions have been carried out in Public Administration, a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) was carried out, analyzing works from the ACM Digital Library, SBC OpenLib (SOL) and the ENAP (National School of Public Administration)’s repository (a Gray Literature repository). On the ENAP website, works relating to the Creativity and Innovation Award from the Federal Revenue of Brazil were specifically consulted. In the end, 10 works that met the inclusion criteria were selected. It was concluded that none of them has an AI explainable model, considering the interpretability criteria of models (Rules and logic, Data visualization, and Model documentation). In light of this, it is recommended that studies addressing the use of AI in Public Administration incorporate a dedicated section discussing the explainability of models.

Freedom of speech is in every of its manifestations one the most important rights of human beings. That explains why it is considered as a preferred freedom, and granted protection against any kind of arbitrary interference on the part of public authorities. This concept, that we fully share, infuses the European Court jurisprudence, and it is supposed to permeate any case that comes under its consideration. The judgment in José Luis Gutiérrez v. Spain was a good example in that sense; but the ruling in Otegui v. Spain did not meet the logical expectations. In our opinion, the Court should have regarded Otegui’s announcement as a clear signal of ‘hate speech’, and as such, without the protection of article 10 of the Convention.La libertad de expresión —en todas sus vertientes— es, sin lugar a dudas, uno de los derechos más relevantes con el que cuenta el ser humano, por lo que debe configurarse como un derecho prevalente y su protección estar asegurada frente a cualquier tipo de injerencia arbitraria por parte de las autoridades. Esta línea argumental, cuya esencia compartimos, parece ser la mantenida por el TEDH en su jurisprudencia, y trata de aplicarse a los casos expuestos manteniendo una línea de coherencia con las sentencias dictadas anteriormente por el Tribunal. Así ocurre, desde nuestro punto de vista, en el caso de José Luis Gutiérrez contra España, pero no en el de Otegui contra España. En este último caso, consideramos que el TEDH debió considerar las declaraciones de éste como «discurso del odio» y, por tanto, exentas de protección al amparo del art. 10 del Convenio.

In this paper, we examine the benefits of a more quantifiable way to make decisions that enable senior leaders to better manage disruption of and attacks on the critical infrastructure. Most of the decisions have been made using intuition and in some cases unrelated experiences and have not particularly worked to the benefit of the sectors' performance and stability. Much of this is due to the history of the logic control systems and networks that were fairly isolated and much better protected. Attempts to reduce costs and secure many of the benefits of IP-based environments have unfortunately now also introduced some of the vulnerabilities indicative of IP-based systems into the logic environments. Senior leaders have not been used to these new ‘hybrid' information technology/operational technology (IT/OT) environments which though creating new opportunities also introduce new challenges. The unique nature of the critical infrastructure in which it is over 80%-owned by the private sector, often regulated by the federal government, and serves the interests and demands of the public, creates a non-trivial challenge at many different levels. More trust and cooperation between the three elements of society is surely a desired interest by the key stakeholders, but there are many concerns in terms of over-regulation, costs, and loss of intellectual property that have consistently sustained a level of discomfort between the three communities in terms of the priorities and self-serving interests of each other. The challenges of the low asymmetry entry and attribution within the cyber domain have raised the profile of many actors who would not even have previously registered in the ‘noise' on a trouble or problem scale. Now, the ability to determine those responsible, as well as, almost any actor having the ability to present a challenge to the environment have changed many of the dynamics in terms of how senior leaders must now operate and manage the appropriate systems and networks. Hence, for obvious reasons, senior leaders are much more cautious in their approach to decision making because of the potential consequences. This is especially true because cyber assets, though so valuable can be also so vulnerable. In this study, we will discuss a method that moves decision from a less arbitrary to a more data-centric, quantifiable approach that drives leadership to better and quicker decisions.

Land registration which aims to provide legal certainty for the ownership of a person's land parcel, which is in the form of a certificate of land title, in the issuance of which there may be errors resulting in two certificates or overlapping so that one certificate can be ascertained that it contains administrative defects, in handling the dispute case settlement refers to the Regulation of the Minister of ATR/KaBPN Number 11 of 2016 article 24 paragraph (7).This study aims to determine, land title certificate can be said to be administratively flawed, Implementation of cancellation of land title certificate due to administrative defect errors at the Regional Office of BPN Lampung Province and the Land Office. This research uses empirical normative juridical research method. The research approach uses a statutory, analytical and participatory approach. Data analysis uses primary and secondary data to draw conclusions using inductive logic. The results show that in order to resolve dispute cases with an overlapping typology of land title certificates, it is necessary to cancel one of the certificates issued in the latest year, because it can be ascertained that it contains errors in its issuance so that it becomes an administrative defect. And tthe cancellation of the certificate of land title is carried out on the basis of a public complaint or BPN initiative, with a request submitted by the Land Office, the Land Office carries out data collection activities, analysis accompanied by Case Handling Progress Report to be submitted to the Regional Office, at the Regional Office Assessment, Field Research, Exposure, Case Settlement Reports and the issuance of a Decree on the Cancellation are then submitted to the Land Office for announcement and deletion in the Land Office data base.

Background Singapore’s national digital contact-tracing (DCT) tool—TraceTogether—attained an above 70% uptake by December 2020 after a slew of measures. Sentiment analysis can help policymakers to assess public sentiments on the implementation of new policy measures in a short time, but there is a paucity of sentiment analysis studies on the usage of DCT tools. Objective We sought to understand the public’s knowledge of, concerns with, and sentiments on the use of TraceTogether over time and their preferences for the type of TraceTogether tool. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional survey at a large public hospital in Singapore after the COVID-19 lockdown, from July 2020 through February 2021. In total, 4097 respondents aged 21-80 years were sampled proportionately by sex and 4 age groups. The open-ended responses were processed and analyzed using natural language processing tools. We manually corrected the language and logic errors and replaced phrases with words available in the syuzhet sentiment library without altering the original meaning of the phrases. The sentiment scores were computed by summing the scores of all the tokens (phrases split into smaller units) in the phrase. Stopwords (prepositions and connectors) were removed, followed by implementing the bag-of-words model to calculate the bigram and trigram occurrence in the data set. Demographic and time filters were applied to segment the responses. Results Respondents’ knowledge of and concerns with TraceTogether changed from a focus on contact tracing and Bluetooth activation in July-August 2020 to QR code scanning and location check-ins in January-February 2021. Younger males had the highest TraceTogether uptake (24/40, 60%), while older females had the lowest uptake (8/34, 24%) in the first half of July 2020. This trend was reversed in mid-October after the announcement on mandatory TraceTogether check-ins at public venues. Although their TraceTogether uptake increased over time, older females continued to have lower sentiment scores. The mean sentiment scores were the lowest in January 2021 when the media reported that data collected by TraceTogether were used for criminal investigations. Smartphone apps were initially preferred over tokens, but the preference for the type of TraceTogether tool equalized over time as tokens became accessible to the whole population. The sentiments on token-related comments became more positive as the preference for tokens increased. Conclusions The public’s knowledge of and concerns with the use of a mandatory DCT tool varied with the national regulations and public communications over time with the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic. Effective communications tailored to subpopulations and greater transparency in data handling will help allay public concerns with data misuse and improve trust in the authorities. Having alternative forms of the DCT tool can increase the uptake of and positive sentiments on DCT.

Aim/purpose – The COVID-19 pandemic generated a new communication universe with numerous actors, including conspiracy theory (CT) promoters who spread skepti- cism about the authenticity of the pandemic and the necessity of health emergency regu- lations. This study explores the dissemination of COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Canada to create a model for verifying conspiracy theories, especially in the context of decision making. Design/methodology/approach – The study was transdisciplinary and it was composed of an empirical and a conceptual part. The first part used analysis of websites and social media, observation with participation for data collection, and standard content analysis for data analysis. The conceptual part used a philosophical inquiry and a framework on heuristics in decision making. Findings – The empirical part of the study established three types of conspiracy theory promoters and labeled these as Conspiracy Theory Mill, Busy Gunman, and Hyper Re- lay. The conceptual part of the study created a model for CT verification. The study extends conceptualizing of conspiracy theories by characterizing them as narratives based on arbitrary ontological assumptions, epistemic naïveté and flaws, and contorted and biased logic. These narratives represent a form of folkish storytelling and entertain- ment, which become dangerous in the state of a public health emergency. Research implications/limitations – The study has implications for research on con- spiracy theories and for the theory of decision making. The study’s insight into the Canadian conspiracy theory landscape is limited by the types of social contexts studied. The model for verifying a conspiracy theory, which the study developed, is still incipient in character and needs further validation. The model can be used in decision-making theory. Originality/value/contribution – The study confirms the literature on conspiracy theo- ries originating in the areas of psychology and cultural studies. Beyond just exhibiting characteristics reported in the literature, the discovered three types of conspiracy theory promoters may advance the corresponding typology research. The model for verifying a conspiracy theory may contribute to research on the nature of conspiratorial content as well as to decision-making theory. Practically, the three promoter types and the verifica- tion model can be used as part of a blueprint for identifying and controlling conspiracy theories. Decision-makers at large may benefit, including those in health institutions, government, business as well as lay people. Keywords: COVID-19, conspiracy theory, Canada, decision making. JEL Classification: D7, D8, I1

AbstractWe introduce Arbitrary Public Announcement Logic with Memory (APALM), obtained by adding to the models a ‘memory’ of the initial states, representing the information before any communication took place (“the prior”), and adding to the syntax operators that can access this memory. We show that APALM is recursively axiomatizable (in contrast to the original Arbitrary Public Announcement Logic, for which the corresponding question is still open). We present a complete recursive axiomatization, that includes a natural finitary rule, and study this logic’s expressivity and the appropriate notion of bisimulation. We then examine Group Announcement Logic with Memory (GALM), the extension of APALM obtained by adding to its syntax group announcement operators, and provide a complete finitary axiomatization (again in contrast to the original Group Announcement Logic, for which the only known axiomatization is infinitary). We also show that, in the memory-enhanced context, there is a natural reduction of the so-called coalition announcement modality to group announcements (in contrast to the memory-free case, where this natural translation was shown to be invalid).

Various extensions of public announcement logic have been proposed with quantification over announcements. The best-known extension is called arbitrary public announcement logic, APAL. It contains a primitive language construct Box phi intuitively expressing that "after every public announcement of a formula, formula phi is true". The logic APAL is undecidable and it has an infinitary axiomatization. Now consider restricting the APAL quantification to public announcements of Boolean formulas only, such that Box phi intuitively expresses that "after every public announcement of a Boolean formula, formula phi is true". This logic can therefore called Boolean arbitrary public announcement logic, BAPAL. The logic BAPAL is the subject of this work. Unlike APAL it has a finitary axiomatization. Also, BAPAL is not at least as expressive as APAL. A further claim that BAPAL is decidable is deferred to a companion paper.

AbstractPublic announcement logic (PAL) extends multi-agent epistemic logic with dynamic operators modelling the effects of public communication. Allowing quantification over public announcements lets us reason about the existence of an announcement that reaches a certain epistemic goal. Two notable examples of logics of quantified announcements are arbitrary public announcement logic (APAL) and group announcement logic (GAL). While the notion of common knowledge plays an important role in PAL, and in particular in characterisations of epistemic states that an agent or a group of agents might make come about by performing public announcements, extensions of APAL and GAL with common knowledge still haven’t been studied in detail. That is what we do in this paper. In particular, we consider both conservative extensions, where the semantics of the quantifiers is not changed, as well as extensions where the scope of quantification also includes common knowledge formulas. We compare the expressivity of these extensions relative to each other and other connected logics, and provide sound and complete axiomatisations. Finally, we show how the completeness results can be used for other logics with quantification over information change.

In this paper, we propose three knowability logics LK, LK−, and LK=. In the single-agent case, LK is equally expressive as arbitrary public announcement logic APAL and public announcement logic PAL, whereas in the multi-agent case, LK is more expressive than PAL. In contrast, both LK− and LK= are equally expressive as classical propositional logic PL. We present the axiomatizations of the three knowability logics and show their soundness and completeness. We show that all three knowability logics possess the properties of Church-Rosser and McKinsey. Although LK is undecidable when at least three agents are involved, LK− and LK= are both decidable.

Abstract Arbitrary public announcement logic (APAL) is a logic of change of knowledge with modalities representing quantification over announcements. We present two rather different versions of APAL wherein this quantification is restricted to formulas only containing a subset of all propositional variables: SAPAL and SCAPAL. Such restrictions are relevant in principle for the specification of multi-agent system dynamics. We also present another version of APAL, quantifying over all announcements implied by or implying a given formula: IPAL. We then determine the relative expressivity of all these logics and APAL. We also present complete axiomatizations of SAPAL and SCAPAL and show undecidability of satisfiability for all logics involved, by arguments nearly identical to those for APAL. We show that the IPAL quantifier, motivated by the satisfaction clause for substructural implication, yields a new substructural dynamic consequence relation.

AbstractIn this paper we present an extension of (bunched) separation logic, Boolean BI, with epistemic and dynamic epistemic modalities. This logic, called action model separation logic ($$\mathrm {AMSL}$$ AMSL ), can be seen as a generalization of public announcement separation logic in which we replace public announcements with action models. Then we not only model public information change (public announcements) but also non-public forms of information change, such as private announcements. In this context the semantics for the connectives $$*$$ ∗ and $$\mathrel {-*}$$ - ∗ from separation logic are epistemic versions of their usual semantics. This is because formulas are interpreted in states, not in resources, and agents may be uncertain between different states representing the same resource. We present the logic $$\mathrm {AMSL}$$ AMSL and its semantics, with a detailed case study that highlights its interest for modeling. We also prove the elimination of the dynamics modalities and discuss some alternative epistemic semantics for the separation connectives.

AbstractIt is common in epistemic modal logic to model the epistemic states of agents via box operators in the normal logic S5. However, this approach treats agents as logically omniscient by requiring their knowledge to be closed under classical logical consequence. A promising way of avoiding logical omniscience consists in extending epistemic models with impossible states, that is states, where complex formulas are not evaluated recursively. However, this approach faces the dual problem of logical ignorance by modeling agents as not even minimally logically competent. In this paper I will outline an epistemic logic that combines impossible states with dynamic realization modalities akin to the dynamic announcement operators from public announcement logic (PAL). I will show that this epistemic logic avoids both the problem of logical omniscience and the problem of logical ignorance. Furthermore, I prove that so-called successful updates in my logic can be characterized in the same way as in PAL and that a similar logic due to Johan van Benthem can be simulated in my logic. Finally, I will compare my epistemic logic with a similar one, which has recently been advanced by JC Bjerring and Mattias Skipper.

Abstract Group announcement logic (GAL) and coalition announcement logic (CAL) allow us to reason about whether it is possible for groups and coalitions of agents to achieve their desired epistemic goals through truthful public communication. The difference between groups and coalitions in such a context is that the latter make their announcements in the presence of possible adversarial counter-announcements. As epistemic goals may involve some agents remaining ignorant, counter-announcements may preclude coalitions from reaching their goals. We study the relative expressivity of GAL and CAL and provide some results involving their more well-known sibling APAL. We also discuss how the presence of memory alters the relationship between groups and coalition.

On 29th January 2023, the National Examination Council of Tanzania (NECTA) stopped announcing the best-performing schools and students. The announcement drew mixed reactions (some applauding or criticising) among education stakeholders. Using a descriptive survey design, this quantitative study specifically identified reasons for the applause or criticism; compared statistically the identified reasons; and the private and public education stakeholders on the announcement. The questionnaires were used to collect data from 500 stakeholders who were selected through a multi-stage sampling technique in Arusha, Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Mbeya, and Dodoma cities. The collected data were analysed using Descriptive Statistics and Independent t-tests. The findings indicate that, the applauding reasons include different study environments; no longer motivation for studying, improved understanding and restoring original logic of schooling. Other reasons are the announcement served no good purpose; the announcement marketed the schools; and it was not fair to compare schools using the British and NECTA systems. Contrarily, the criticism reasons are the Government escapism from under-investment in public schools; denying of information to education researchers; suppressing information and putting society in the dark; removing the incentives for students; cause unforeseen consequences; leader’s in-charge subjectivity/selfishness move and the Council ignores the foundational reason for the announcement. Furthermore, there is a very minimal statistically significant difference between the reasons for applauding (M=3.611, SD=.825) and the reasons for criticising (M=3.645, SD=.829) the announcement. The t-test results portrayed no statistically significant difference between the private and public education stakeholders on the announcement. Therefore, none is more powerful than the other between the applause and criticism of the announcement. The private and public education stakeholders should look for an alternative approach to improving results in the national examinations than depending on the announcement of the best schools and students.

Abstract We propose dynamic extensions to the framework of Social Epistemic Logic introduced in Logic in the Community (Seligman et al., pp. 178–188, 2011). One of them introduces a notion of a semi-public announcement made by an aware agent and only transmitted to this agent’s social connections. Another extension along the epistemic dimension of the framework contains separate ‘sending’ and ‘reading’ modalities that allow for a more realistic asynchronous spreading of messages in a social network. Finally, we briefly discuss an extension along the ‘social’ dimension of the framework, which introduces an operator to break links within an epistemic social network based on information at the agent’s disposal. Completeness and decidability results are provided.

In this master's thesis we present a modal logic for Applied pi which characterises observational equivalence on processes. The motivation is similar to that of Applied pi itself, namely generality: the logic can be adapted to a particular application simply by defining a suitable equational theory on terms.<br /> <br />As a first step towards the logic for Applied pi, a strong version of static equivalence on frames is introduced in which term reductions are observable in addition to equality on terms. We argue that the strong version is meaningful in applications and give two refined definitions based on the notion of cores introduced in work by Boreale et al. for the Spi calculus. The refined definitions are useful because they do not involve universal quantification over arbitrary terms and hence are amenable to a logical characterisation. We show that the refined definitions coincide with the original definition of strong static equivalence under certain general conditions.<br /> <br />A first order logic for frames which characterises strong static equivalence and which yields characteristic formulae is then given based on the refined definitions of strong static equivalence. This logic facilitates direct reasoning about terms in a frame as well as indirect reasoning about knowledge deducible from a frame. The logic for Applied pi is then obtained by adding suitable Hennessy-Milner style modalities to the logic for frames, hence facilitating reasoning about both static and dynamic properties of processes. We finally demonstrate the logic with an application to the analysis of the Needham-Schroeder Public Key Protocol.

Despite pushback from regulatory and non-governmental entities, Meta’s control over the public narrative remains consistent. Using a method of corpus analysis, this study investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (428) responding to Zuckerberg’s 2021 Metaverse announcement. Analysis of how these artifacts respond to issues related to identity, security, and connectivity revealed that the majority amplify Meta’s corporate messaging, empowering its elite discourse and solidifying its socio-technological power. As it relates to user privacy, however, this study uncovered a limited number of artifacts in which journalists challenged rather than repeated Meta’s rhetoric. As an implication of this finding, future tech journalism should consider privacy as a starting point for critiques that also interrogate the underlying logic of surveillance capitalism and user exploitation. Ultimately, this article addresses the rhetorical functions deployed in the circulation of elite discourse while acknowledging the dynamism of sociotechnical imaginaries.

The idea of conserving biodiversity has become central to the very meaning of biological conservation---in the public imagination and for conservation organizations worldwide. Identification of conservation with biodiversity conservation owes extensively to the idea that warrant for biodiversity's conservation is anchored in the empirical thesis that biodiversity causally determines ecosystem functioning, and thereby, somehow, important ecosystem services. This idea has fueled an enormous research program dedicated to producing the requisite causal evidence. This essay first reviews the data that are supposed to constitute direct evidence for biodiversity's causal influence. It proceeds by answering a heretofore unasked, yet foundational, question for causal hypotheses: Do these data meet basic requirements for credibility as causal evidence? By virtue of mistakenly reading causal significance into (i) massive numbers of causally irrelevant data points, (ii) an equation that simply equates a stipulated definition to an algebraically equivalent expression, and (iii) correlations produced by arbitrary computations over previously collected data sets, these data fall well short of meeting these requirements. Mistakes also suffuse the notion that biodiversity's supposed causal influence gives reasons to conserve it. These mistakes are exposed when the conservation argument that was supposed to proceed from the premise of biodiversity's causal influence is clearly spelled out. Once made explicit, each step is seen to rely on a questionable assumption, invalid logic, or both. The essay concludes with implications for conservation, biodiversity research, and scientific inquiry more generally.

In this chapter, I use methods drawn from literary analysis to bear on artificial scarcity and explore how literary and legal storytelling engages in scarcity mongering. I find three particular narrative strategies calculated to compel a conclusion in favor of propertization: the spectacle of need, the diversionary tactic, and the rallying cry. First, I unpack the spectacle of need and its diversionary aspects through several literary accounts of scarcity and starvation. I juxtapose Franz Kafka's “A Hunger Artist,” a story explicitly centered on a wasting body, with J.M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K. Second, to explore how scarcity fables offer diversionary tactics that redirect attention away from actual scarcity, I consider NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. NFTs reflect the arbitrary value scarcity can produce, especially when artificially generated. Yet NFTs offer a spectacle of need that distracts from actual scarcity, riding a wave of expansionist property logic that suggests that more ownership is the answer. Third, to consider the scarcity fable's propertarian rallying cry, I offer an extended close reading of a copyright dispute, Leonard v. Stemtech, involving a pair of microscopic stem cell photographs deemed so scarce they were valued at 100 times their past licensing history. Leonard illustrates how a scarcity fable may look in the context of intellectual property (“IP”). The nature of this chapter is necessarily conceptual and speculative, designed to raise questions rather than attempting conclusively to answer them. Through juxtaposition of literary accounts and one legal case study, fables of scarcity emerge as a genre whose very appearance in certain contexts ought to give scholars and policymakers pause. In copyright litigation, in which expansionist property narratives may be especially harmful to the public domain and subsequent creators, scarcity fables may be made to provide apparent support for potentially dangerous changes. Identifying scarcity fables as such when they appear in copyright cases could trigger review of the asserted scarcity and a more searching inquiry into whether the proposed solution could worsen actual scarcity.

Introduction: The number of children taken into care by German youth welfare offices has been increasing for years as a result of changes in the law according to publicly known endangerments to child welfare. Due to an increase in petitions from non-German parents to the European Parliament's Petitions Committee against administrative acts that they felt to be arbitrary (e.g. taking into care), the European Parliament repeatedly (2007, 2018, 2022, 2023) dealt with the processes in the German Youth Welfare Office. Material and Methods: Compilation of the documents of the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament in 2007, 2018, 2022, and 2023 on the German Youth Welfare Office. Additional searches in Pubmed, google scholar, and google under the keywords child welfare, the best interest of the child, damage to health through taking into care, harm to children through taking into care, the impact of financial threats to parents to youth welfare, psychological trauma through taking into care by the youth welfare office. Reproduction of the essential questions of the member European Parliament (MEPs) and answers of German authorities and family courts. Structure in: The principle “In the best children’s interest” and “child wellbeing (welfare)”, legal duties of the youth office, taking into care by youth office, the power of youth office, relationship court youth office, control of the German youth office, costs of the proceedings, guardian ad litem, duties and functions of the court. The answers of the German authorities are summarized in the respective sections, supplemented by relevant literature and personal communications. Results: For years, the German youth welfare office has been criticized for either failing to protect the welfare of the child or protecting it too late. Over the past 20 years or so, changes in the law have led to increasing numbers of childcare takings based on undefined norms of the child's best interests and child welfare. In short: the guardian state is increasingly intervening in the family, which is protected by Article 6 of the Basic Law, with the unclear justification that the parents are overburdened or lacking (proof of) the ability to bring up children, precisely regarding Article 6 invoking the guardian state, and is separating parents from their children without having sufficient scientific knowledge about the consequences of taking the children into care. The families receive high bills for this, disregarding proportionality and exclusion criteria. The possibility of changing something by complaining is small. The responsible community decides on the complaint itself. Transparency is reduced with the exclusion of the public and the rejection of requests to inspect files. This led to the expressed suspicion of arbitrary measures and an increase in petitions to the European Petitions Committee, which has been dealing with the youth welfare office since 2007 and even came to Germany for a "fact-finding visit" in 2022. The questions from the MEPs on the above areas were partly answered incompletely or not at all or contradicted the literature and the evidence. The answers of the German community of responsibility prompted the MEPs to ask further questions (Amendments 2023). Conclusion: It cannot be denied that the answers of the youth welfare office were not very convincing for the MEPs of the petition committee, taking into account the scientific literature and known documents. The lack of transparency (e.g., refusal to inspect files) and agreements reinforced the MEPs' negative impression of the youth welfare office (shadow body, where there is smoke, there is fire), and led to the announcement of further controls by the MEPs.

“I’m saying let’s make it 84 percent turnout in two years, and then see what happens!” …“Oh, yes! Vote! Dress yourself up, and vote! Even if you only go into the voting booth and pray. Do that!” Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toni Morrison on the 2000 Presidential election in June Jordan’s essay, “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage” (2001) On September 17, 2003, Citizenship Day, the United States was to adopt a new version of its Oath of Allegiance. The updated version would modernize the oath by removing cumbersome words like “abjure” and dropping anachronistic references like “potentate.” Thus the oral recitation marking the entrance into citizenship would become more meaningful—and more manageable—for the millions of immigrants eligible for naturalization. The revised version, however, was quickly canned after conservative organizations, senators, and other loud political leaders decried what they saw as an attack on a timeless document and a weakening of the military obligation foundational to entrance into the American citizenry. The Heritage Foundation, one such organization opposing the perceived attack on citizenship, issued an executive statement decrying “the Department of Homeland Security's misguided attempts to make U.S. citizenship more ‘user-friendly’ for those who want the benefits of our country, but don't care to accept the responsibility” (n.pag.). Indeed, the thwarted attempt to make citizenship procedures more welcoming arose at a curious time. Though the proposed changes arose from a long, rather mundane administrative initiative to reconsider various procedural issues, the debate over the Oath of Allegiance politicized the issue within the context of the war on terror and the constriction of entrances into the national turf. The Bush administration responded to events referred to as 9/11 with vigorous efforts to shore up national borders within a language of terrorism, evildoers, and the dire need for domestic security. The infamous Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) became the consumerist, welcome-sounding Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services when it was placed it under the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. The consolidation of citizenship services and disparate border policing programs further bolsters the longstanding scrutiny of immigrants—especially those considered not-white—for their ideological commitment and adherence to current national ideals. Naturalization requires a uniform recitation of unhesitant adherence to official doctrines—and a stated commitment to fight and die for those ideals. War, it seems, and its necessary division of friends and foes (“evildoers”), occupies the dead center of official ceremonies of citizenship. Naturalization procedures demonstrate how the figure of the immigrant undergoes rigorous scrutiny and thus defines the bounds of American citizenship. However, as immigration scholars like Bonnie Honig, Mai Ngai, Linda Bosniak, and Judith Shklar have shown, the specter of the immigrant also serves as an exculpatory device for preexisting inequities by obscuring internal division. While immigrants perform allegiance publicly to obtain citizenship status, birth-right citizens are presumed to have been born with a natural allegiance that precludes multiple allegiances to ideologies, projects, or potentates outside national borders. Ideas about the necessity of pairing exclusive ideological commitment with citizenship are as old as the American nation, notwithstanding the tremendous volume of announcements of a new world order in the wake of 9/11. In all incarnations of the citizenship oath, full membership in the nation-state via naturalization requires a simultaneous oath of allegiance and renunciation. Entrance into the nation-state requires exit—from ideological turf more than geographic turf—from the newly naturalized citizen’s former home country. Though scholars of diasporic and cosmopolitan identities like Aihwa Ong, Phengh Cheah, Bruce Robbins, and Brent Edwards have questioned the viability of the nation-state in postmodernity, official American articulations of citizenship adhere to a longstanding phenomenon whereby inclusion within the polity requires a simultaneous exclusion or renunciation. Or, in the realm of rhetoric, any articulation of a “we” requires a simultaneous citation of a “not-we.” At the heart of citizenship is a cleavage: a coming together made possible by a splitting apart. It is not mere historical curiosity that the notorious utterance of “We” in the Action of the Second Continental Congress popularly known as the Declaration of Independence is forged in direct opposition to a “He” (King George III)—repeated no less than nineteen times in the short document. In contrast, “we” appears only eleven times. What the Declaration shows, and what the Oath of Allegiance insists, is that the constitution of a bounded polity in America emphasizes external difference in order to create the semblance of an internally homogeneous “we.” Thus arises the potency of national documents that announce equality amidst a decidedly unequal social order. These documents provide the ring of broad inclusion for what Rogers M. Smith has described as “civic myths”: ideals of full equality that politicians cite enthusiastically without worrying about their veracity in the everyday lives of the citizenry. Yet American archives and literary histories teem with protest writing that makes visible the internal divisions of American publics. In these literatures arises a figure that threatens the fragile story of a finished “we” based on uniform allegiance: the partial citizen speaking. The partial citizen speaking—from experience, on behalf of others—and addressing the real divisions within a national audience is situated at a strategic site at which to simultaneously claim and critique the inclusive pronouncements of the American Republic in order to make them real. The best example is Frederick Douglass who, having been invited to celebrate the nation in 1848, capitalized on his tenuous claim to citizenship status and delivered the speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In the speech, Douglass excoriates his audience in Rochester, New York on behalf of the slaves absent from Corinthian Hall because they are toiling on Southern plantations. To his “fellow-citizens” Douglass cries, “This Fourth of July is yours not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (116). In contradistinction to leaders’ duplicitous uses of civic myths eschewed by Smith, protesters like Douglass use their partial citizenship to gain a toehold on the viable, but unfinished project of full democracy for all. By claiming the essential American-ness of their projects, protesters like Douglass position their present projects as the fulfillment of previous national promises. In her study of foreigners’ critiques of America, Bonnie Honig shows how “[Foreigners] make room for themselves by staging nonexistent rights, and by way of such stagings, sometimes, new rights, powers, and visions come into being” (101). In the wake of 9/11, we must be interested in the rhetorical means of similar stagings by those already inside presumed national borders who have been denied full access to, or enjoyment of civic, economic, and/or social rights. These partial citizens speaking and writing stage heretofore nonexistent rights by claiming preexisting civic myths by, for, and on behalf of voices that were never meant to speak such civic myths as truths. Sometime after 9/11, President George W. Bush took the virtually unprecedented step of labeling U.S. citizens like Yasir Hamdi and José Padilla “enemy combatants” in order to circumvent the guaranteed legal rights to counsel and trial afforded to all U.S. citizens. The arbitrary nullification of Hamdi’s and Padilla’s citizenship rights was not entirely new given that protest has often been seen as forfeiture of citizenship. In addition to the obvious example of the allegiance-renunciation pairing in the citizenship oath, we can turn to Emma Goldman’s deportation to Russia in 1919, or to the odd favor with which the exit plans of Garveyites and their predecessors have been received. Or, squarely within American borders, Henry David Thoreau’s blueprint of civil disobedience pairs protest with the withdrawal from collectivity (his refusal to pay poll taxes in protest of the Mexican War), a move which bolsters the notion that dissent necessitates a retraction from participation in the public sphere. However, there is another option: collectivity in the face of division. Protesters like Douglass occupy the outposts of real publics that can deliver the ineffable social equality of the modern democratic state. Here, those whose very citizenship is in question are the ones to sift through the promises of the nation-state and to hold them against the evidence of experience—their own and that of others for whom they speak. Participation in the state is more than adherence and renunciation. If Toni Morrison would just as soon have us enter a polling station to pray as to vote; so, too, protesters like Douglass demand hope amidst despairing situations of inequality—often state-sponsored. Their projects are never to simply unveil inconsistency between state promises and the experiences of subsets of its citizenry. Squarely within the circuitous myths that enshroud the state’s turf, these protesters stake claims to the very national myths that threaten their existence. Works Cited Bosniak, Linda. “Citizenship.” The Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies. Eds. Peter Can & MarkTushnet. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 183-201. Cheah, Phengh, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Douglass, Frederick. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” 1848. Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 108-30. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Govindarajan, Shweta. “Criticism Puts Citizenship Oath Revision on Hold; Conservatives Pan Immigration Officials’ Modernization of the Long-Used Pledge.” Los Angeles Times 19 Sep. 2003, sect. 1:13. The Heritage Foundation. First They Attacked the Pledge, Now the Oath. 10 Sep. 2003. <http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/meeseletter.cfm>. Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Jordan, June. “The Invisible People: An Unsolicited Report on Black Rage.” Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan. New York: Basic Books, 2001. 16-19. Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship and the Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Websites Department of Homeland Security: www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Norman, Brian J. "Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/04-allegiance.php>. APA Style Norman, B. (2004, Mar17). Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/04-allegiance.php>

IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, thus extending the life of embodied assemblies. In the mothers’ protest video, women carrying babies in body-wraps and strollers walk across the intersection leading to the Parliament Palace, while police direct traffic and ensure their safety (“Civil Disobedience”). This was an unusual scene for many reasons. Walkers met at the entrance to the Parliament Palace, an area most emblematic of the former regime. Built by Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu and inspired by Kim Il-sung’s North Korean architecture, the current Parliament building and its surrounding plaza remain, in the words of Renata Salecl, “one of the most traumatic remnants of the communist regime” (90). The construction is the second largest administrative building in the world, after the Pentagon, a size matching the ambitions of the dictator. It bears witness to the personal and cultural sacrifices the construction and its surrounded plaza required: the displacement of some 40,000 people from old neighbourhood Uranus, the death of reportedly thousands of workers, and the flattening of churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools (Parliament Palace). This arbitrary construction carved out of the old city remains a symbol of an authoritarian relation with the nation. As Salecl puts it, Ceaușescu’s project tried to realise the utopia of a new communist “centre” and created an artificial space as removed from the rest of the city as the leader himself was from the needs of his people. Twenty-nine years after the fall of communism, the plaza of the Parliament Palace remains as suspended from the life of the city as it was during the 1980s. The trees lining the boulevard have grown slightly and bike lanes are painted over decaying stones. Still, only few people walk by the neo-classical apartment buildings now discoloured and stained by weather and time. Salecl remarks on the panoptic experience of the Parliament Palace: “observed from the avenue, [the palace] appears to have no entrance; there are only numerous windows, which give the impression of an omnipresent gaze” (95). The building embodies, for Salecl, the logic of surveillance of the communist regime, which “created the impression of omnipresence” through a secret police that rallied members among regular citizens and inspired fear by striking randomly (95).Against this geography steeped in collective memories of fear and exposure to the gaze of the state, women turn their children’s bodies and their own into performances of resistance that draw on the rhetorical force of communist gender politics. Both motherhood and childhood were heavily regulated roles under Ceaușescu’s nationalist-socialist politics of forced birth, despite the official idealisation of both. Producing children for the nationalist-communist state was women’s mandated expression of citizenship. Declaring the foetus “the socialist property of the whole society”, in 1966 Ceaușescu criminalised abortion for women of reproductive ages who had fewer than four children, and, starting 1985, less than five children (Ceaușescu qtd. in Verdery). What followed was “a national tragedy”: illegal abortions became the leading cause of death for fertile women, children were abandoned into inhumane conditions in the infamous orphanages, and mothers experienced the everyday drama of caring for families in an economy of shortages (Kligman 364). The communist politicisation of natality during communist Romania exemplifies one of the worst manifestations of the political as biopolitical. The current maternal bodies and children’s bodies circulating in the communist-iconic plaza articulate past and present for Romanians, redeploying a traumatic collective memory to challenge increasingly authoritarian ambitions of the governing Social Democratic Party. The images of caring mothers walking in protest with their babies furthers the claims that anti-corruption publics have made in other venues: that the government, in their indifference and corruption, is driving millions of people, usually young, out of the country, in a braindrain of unprecedented proportions (Ursu; Deletant; #vavedemdinSibiu). In their determination to walk during the gruelling temperatures of mid-July, in their youth and their babies’ youth, the mothers’ walk performs the contrast between their generation of engaged, persistent, and caring citizens and the docile abused subject of a past indexed by the Ceaușescu-era architecture. In addition to performing a new caring imagined community (Anderson), women’s silent, resolute walk on the crosswalk turns a lifeless geography, heavy with the architectural traces of authoritarian history, into a public space that holds democratic protest. By inhabiting the cultural role of mothers, protestors disarmed state authorities: instead of the militarised gendarmerie usually policing protestors the Victoriei Square, only traffic police were called for the mothers’ protest. The police choreographed cars and people, as protestors walked across the intersection leading to the Parliament. Drivers, usually aggressive and insouciant, now moved in concert with the protestors. The mothers’ walk, immediately modeled by people in other cities (Cluj-Napoca), reconfigured a car-dominated geography and an unreliable, driver-friendly police, into a civic space that is struggling to facilitate the citizens’ peaceful disobedience. The walkers’ assembly thus begins to constitute the civic character of the plaza, collecting “the space itself […] the pavement and […] the architecture [to produce] the public character of that material environment” (Butler 71). It demonstrates the possibility of a new imagined community of caring and persistent citizens, one significantly different from the cynical, disconnected, and survivalist subjects that the nomenklatura politicians, nested in the Panoptic Parliament nearby, would prefer.Persisting in the Victoriei Square In addition to strenuous physical walking to reclaim city spaces, such as the mothers’ walking, the anti-corruption public also practices walking and gathering in less taxing environments. The Victoriei Square is such a place, a central plaza that connects major boulevards with large sidewalks, functional bike lanes, and old trees. The square is the architectural meeting point of old and new, where communist apartments meet late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, in a privileged neighbourhood of villas, museums, and foreign consulates. One of these 1930s constructions is the Government building, hosting the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Demonstrators gathered here during the major protests of 2015 and 2017, and have walked, stood, and wandered in the square almost weekly since (“Past Events”). On 24 June 2018, I arrive in the Victoriei Square to participate in the protest announced on social media by Corruption Kills. There is room to move, to pause, and rest. In some pockets, people assemble to pay attention to impromptu speakers who come onto a small platform to share their ideas. Occasionally someone starts chanting “We See You!” and “Down with Corruption!” and almost everyone joins the chant. A few young people circulate petitions. But there is little exultation in the group as a whole, shared mostly among those taking up the stage or waving flags. Throughout the square, groups of familiars stop to chat. Couples and families walk their bikes, strolling slowly through the crowds, seemingly heading to or coming from the nearby park on a summer evening. Small kids play together, drawing with chalk on the pavement, or greeting dogs while parents greet each other. Older children race one another, picking up on the sense of freedom and de-centred but still purposeful engagement. The openness of the space allows one to meander and observe all these groups, performing the function of the Ancient agora: making visible the strangers who are part of the polis. The overwhelming feeling is one of solidarity. This comes partly from the possibilities of collective agency and the feeling of comfortably taking up space and having your embodiment respected, otherwise hard to come by in other spaces of the city. Everyday walking in the streets of Romanian cities is usually an exercise in hypervigilant physical prowess and self-preserving numbness. You keep your eyes on the ground to not stumble on broken pavement. You watch ahead for unmarked construction work. You live with other people’s sweat on the hot buses. You hop among cars parked on sidewalks and listen keenly for when others may zoom by. In one of the last post-socialist states to join the European Union, living with generalised poverty means walking in cities where your senses must be dulled to manage the heat, the dust, the smells, and the waiting, irresponsive to beauty and to amiable sociality. The euphemistic vocabulary of neoliberalism may describe everyday walking through individualistic terms such as “grit” or “resilience.” And while people are called to effort, creativity, and endurance not needed in more functional states, what one experiences is the gradual diminution of one’s lives under a political regime where illiberalism keeps a citizen-serving democracy at bay. By contrast, the Victoriei Square holds bodies whose comfort in each other’s presence allow us to imagine a political community where survivalism, or what Lauren Berlant calls “lateral agency”, are no longer the norm. In “showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still […] an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics” is enacted (Butler 18). In arriving to Victoriei Square repeatedly, Romanians demonstrate that there is room to breathe more easily, to engage with civility, and to trust the strangers in their country. They assert that they are not disposable, even if a neoliberal corrupt post-communist regime would have them otherwise.ConclusionBecoming a public, as Michael Warner proposes, is an ongoing process of attention to an issue, through the circulation of discourse and self-organisation with strangers. For the anti-corruption public of Romania’s past years, such ongoing work is accompanied by persistent, civil, embodied collective assembly, in an articulation of claims, bodies, and spaces that promotes a material agency that reconfigures the city and the imagined Romanian community into a more democratic one. The Romanian citizenship of the streets is particularly significant in the current geopolitical and ideological moment. In the region, increasing authoritarianism meets the alienating logics of neoliberalism, both trying to reduce citizens to disposable, self-reliant, and disconnected market actors. Populist autocrats—Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Peace and Justice Party in Poland, and recently E.U.-penalized Victor Orban, in Hungary—are dismantling the system of checks and balances, and posing threats to a European Union already challenged by refugee debates and Donald Trump’s unreliable alliance against authoritarianism. In such a moment, the Romanian anti-corruption public performs within the geographies of their city solidarity and commitment to democracy, demonstrating an alternative to the submissive and disconnected subjects preferred by authoritarianism and neoliberalism.Author's NoteIn addition to the anonymous reviewers, the author would like to thank Mary Tuominen and Jesse Schlotterbeck for their helpful comments on this essay.ReferencesAnderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33.4 (2007): 754-80. Bilefsky, Dan. “Medical Care in Romania Comes at an Extra Cost.” New York Times, 8 Mar. 2009. 1 Sep. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/europe/09bribery.html>.Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism Poisons Everything: How Free Market Mania Threatens Education — and Democracy.” Interview by Elias Isquith. Salon, 15 June 2015. 20 May 2016 <https://www.salon.com/2015/06/15/democracy_cannot_survive_why_the_neoliberal_revolution_has_freedom_on_the_ropes/>.Bruce, Caitlin. “The Balaclava as Affect Generator: Free Pussy Riot Protests and Transnational Iconicity.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12.1 (2015): 42-62. Butler, Judith. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015.Calhoun, Craig J. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992. Cisneros, Josue David. “(Re)bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97.1 (2011): 26-49. “Civil Disobedience, Corruption Kills.” Facebook, 11 July 2018. 12 July 2018 <https://www.facebook.com/coruptia.ucide/videos/852289114959995/>. “Cluj-Napoca. Civil Disobedience.” Corruption Kills. 9 Sep. 2018 <https://www.facebook.com/coruptia.ucide/videos/847309685457938/>.Commander, Emily. “European Personality of the Year: Florin Badita, Founder of Corruption Kills.” Euronews, 31 May 2018. 12 Sep. 2018 <http://www.euronews.com/2018/05/31/european-personality-of-the-year-florin-badita-founder-of-corruption-kills>.“Corruption Perceptions Index 2017.” Transparency International, 21 Feb. 2018. 20 July 2018 <https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017>. Deletant, Dennis. “Romania’s Protests and the PSD: Understanding the Deep Malaise That Now Exists in Romanian Society.” London School of Economics and Political Science, 31 Aug. 2018. 10 Sep. 2018 <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2018/08/31/romanias-protests-and-the-psd-understanding-the-deep-malaise-that-now-exists-in-romanian-society/>. Delicath, John W., and Kevin Michael DeLuca. “Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Groups.” Argumentation 17 (2003): 315-33. Dewey, John. “Creative Democracy—the Task before Us.” The Later Works, 1925–1953. Volume 14: 1939–1941. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 227. “Education and Training Monitor 2017 Romania.” European Commission. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2017. 8 Sep. 2018 <https://ec.europa.eu/education/sites/education/files/monitor2017-ro_en.pdf>.Fabj, Valeria. “Motherhood as Political Voice: The Rhetoric of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.” Communication Studies 44.1 (1993): 1-18. Foss, Karen A., and Kathy L. Domenici. “Haunting Argentina: Synecdoche in the Protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87.3 (2001): 237-58. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. 109-42.Gubernat, Ruxandra, and Henry P. Rammelt. “Recreative Activism in Romania How Cultural Affiliation and Lifestyle Yield Political Engagement.” Socio.hu (2017): 143–63. 20 June 2018 <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01689629/document>.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. 1962. Trans. T. Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989.Harold, Christine, and Kevin Michael DeLuca. “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8.2 (2005): 263-86. Hauser, Gerard A. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia: U of South Carolina, 1999. Holmes, Leslie. Corruption: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Kligman, Gail. “The Politics of Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania: A Case Study in Political Culture.” East European Politics and Societies 6.3 (1992): 364–418. Lewis, Tiffany. “The Mountaineering and Wilderness Rhetorics of Washington Woman Suffragists.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 21. 2 (2018): 279 -315.Marin, Iulia. “Survival Strategies for Middle-Class Romanians.” PressOne, 28 Nov. 2016. 24 July 2018 <https://pressone.ro/strategii-de-supravietuire-in-clasa-de-mijloc-a-romaniei/>. McKinnon, Sara L., Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard. Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2016. Miroiu, Mihaela. Societatea Retro. București: Editura Trei, 1999.Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999.Olteanu, Tina, and Shaazka Beyerle. “The Romanian People versus Corruption: A Paradoxical Nexus of Protest and Adaptation.” Partecipazione e Conflitto 10.3 (2017): 797-825. 20 June 2018 <http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/paco/article/view/18551>.Parliament Palace Visitor Tour. Communication during group tour on 20 June 2018. “Past Events: Coruptia Ucide.” Facebook, n.d. 9 Aug. 2018 <https://www.facebook.com/pg/coruptia.ucide/events/?ref=page_internal>. Pezzullo, Phaedra C. “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89.4 (2003): 345-65. Preoteasa, Isabela. “Intellectuals and the Public Sphere in Post-Communist Romania: A Discourse Analytical Perspective.” Discourse & Society 13 (2002): 269-292. Rai, Candice. Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2016.“Romania Corruption Report.” GAN Business Anticorruption Portal, Apr. 2017. 9 Sep. 2018 <https://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/romania/>.Salecl, Renata. (Per)versions of Love and Hate. London: Verso, 2000.Sennett, Richard. The Spaces of Democracy. Ann Arbor: Goetzcraft Printers, 1998. <https://taubmancollege.umich.edu/pdfs/publications/map/wallenberg1998_richardsennett.pdf>. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Granta, 2014.Szacki, Jerzy. 1995. Liberalism after Communism. Budapest: Central European UP. Tabako, Tomasz. “Irony as a Pro-Democracy Trope: Europe’s Last Comic Revolution.” Controversia 5.2 (2007): 23-53. Ursu, Ramona. Va Vedem (We See You). Bucharest: Humanitas, 2018.“#vavedemdinSibiu. Aproape 700 de sibieni, cu bagajele în fața sediului PSD.” Turnul Sfatului, 17 Dec. 2017. 10 Sep. 2018 <http://www.turnulsfatului.ro/2017/12/17/foto-protestele-vavedemdinsibiu-aproape-700-de-sibieni-cu-bagajele-fata-sediului-psd/>.Verdery, Katherine. “From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe.” East European Politics and Societies 8.2 (1994): 225–255. Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics (Abbreviated Version).” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88.4 (2002): 413–25. Zaharia, Diana. “Poverty in Statistics.” Profit.ro. 8 Aug. 2016. 1 Sep. 2018 <https://www.profit.ro/stiri/economie/saracia-din-statistici-aproape-jumatate-dintre-salariatii-romani-raman-cu-cel-mult-1-000-lei-in-mana-dupa-taxare-15540558>.

Drawing on my recent experience of working in collaboration with the artist-led project, Open City, I want to explore the potential of an active and resistant - rather than passive and acquiescent – form of stillness that can be activated strategically within a performance-based practice. The article examines how stillness and other forms of non-productive or non-teleological activity might contribute towards the production of a radically dissenting – yet affirmative – model of contemporary subjectivity. It will investigate how the performance of stillness within an artistic practice could offer a pragmatic model through which to approach certain philosophical concepts in relation to the construction of subjectivity, by proposing a practical application of the various ideas explored therein. Stillness is often presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed and supposed freedom proposed by new technologies and the various accelerated modes by which we are encouraged to engage with the world. In one sense, stillness and slowness have been deemed outmoded or anachronistic forms of temporality, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged terms. Alternatively, stillness has been reclaimed as part of a resistant – or at least reactive – “counter-culture” for challenging the enforced and increased pace at which we are required to perform. The intent, however, is not to focus on the transcendent possibilities – or even nostalgic dimension – of stillness, where it could be seen as a form of escape from the accelerated temporalities of contemporary capitalism, a move towards a slower, more spiritual or meditative existence by the removal of or self-imposed isolation from contemporary societal pressures. Instead, this article attempts to explore the potential within those forms of stillness specifically produced in and by contemporary capitalism, by reflecting on how they might be (re)inhabited – or appropriated through an artistic practice – as sites of critical action. The article will suggest ways in which habitually resented, oppressive or otherwise tedious forms of stillness, inaction or immobility can be turned into active or resistant strategies for producing the self differently to dominant ideological expectations or pressures. With reference to selected theoretical ideas primarily within the writing of Gilles Deleuze – especially in relation to Spinoza’s Ethics – I want to explore how the collective performance of stillness in the public realm produces an affect that both reveals and disrupts habitual patterns of behaviour. Stillness presents a break or pause in the flow of events, illuminating temporal gaps and fissures in which alternative or unexpected possibilities – for life – might be encountered and encouraged. The act of collective stillness can be understood as a mode of playful resistance to, or refusal of, societal norms, a wilful and collaborative attempt to break or rupture habitual flows. However, collective stillness also has the capacity to exceed or move beyond resistance by producing germinal conditions for a nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol; a model of “communitas” emerging from the shared act of being still. The focus then, is to reflect on how the gesture of stillness performed within the context of an artistic practice – such as that of Open City – might offer an exemplar for the production of an affirmative form of subjectivity, by arguing how the practice of stillness paradoxically has the potential for increasing an individual’s capacity to act. Open City is an investigation-led artistic project – led by Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday – that explores how public space is conceptualised and organised by interrogating the ways in which our daily actions and behaviours are conditioned and controlled. Their research activity involves inviting, instructing or working with members of the public to create discreet interventions and performances, which put into question or destabilise habitual patterns or conventions of public behaviour, through the use of invitations, propositions, site-specific actions and performative events. The practical and theoretical research phase of the Open City project was initiated in 2006 in collaboration with artist/performer Simone Kenyon. During this phase of research Open City worked with teachers of the Alexander Technique deconstructing the mechanics of walking, and observed patterns of group behaviour and ‘everyday’ movements in public spaces. This speculative phase of research was expanded upon through a pilot project where the artists worked with members of the public, inviting them to attempt to get lost in the city, to consider codes of conduct through observation and mimicry, to explore behavioural patterns in the public realm as a form of choreography, and to approach the spaces of the city as an amphitheatre or stage upon which to perform. This culminated in a series of public performances and propositional/instructive works as part of the nottdance festival in Nottingham (2007) where audiences were invited to participate in choreographed events, creating a number of fleeting and partially visible performances throughout the city. Members of the public were issued specific time-based invitations for collective and individual actions such as ‘Day or night – take a walk in which you notice and deliberately avoid CCTV cameras’ or ‘On the high street during rush hour … suddenly and without warning, stop and remain still for five minutes … then carry on walking as before.’ Image 1: Open City, documentation of publicly-sited postcards. As part of this phase of activity, I was invited by Open City to produce a piece of writing in response to their work – to be serialised over a number of publicly distributed postcards – which would attempt to critically contextualise the various issues and concerns emerging from the investigation-led research that the project had been developing in the public realm. The postcards included an instruction written by Open City on one side, and my serialised text on the other. I have since worked more collaboratively with Open City on new research investigating how the different temporalities within the public realm might be harnessed or activated creatively; how movement and mobility affect the way in which place and locality are encountered or understood. My involvement with the project has specifically been in exploring the use of text-based elements, instructions and propositions and has included further publicly-sited postcard texts and the development of sound-based works using iPod technology to create synchronised actions. In 2008, I successfully secured Arts Council of England funding for a practice-based research trip to Japan with Open City in which we initiated our specific investigations around stillness, slowness, obstruction, and blockage. During this phase of research we became interested in how speed and slowness can be utilised within a performance practice to create points of anchor and location within the urban environment, or in order to affect a psychological shift in the way that space is encountered and understood. Image 2: Open City, research investigations, Japan, 2008.On one level, Open City can be located within a tradition of publicly-sited performance practices. This genealogy of politically – and more often playfully – resistant actions, interventions and models of spatial occupation or navigation can be traced back to the ludic practice of Surrealist errance or aimless wandering into and through the Situationists’ deployment of the dérive and conceptualisation of “psychogeography” during the 1950s and 60s. In its focus on collective action and inhabitation of the everyday as a site of practice, Open City is also part of a trajectory of artistic activity – epitomised perhaps by Allan Kaprow’s Happenings – intent on blurring the line between art and life, or in drawing attention to those aspects of reality marginalised by dominant discourses and ideologies. Performed as part of an artistic practice, non-habitual or even habitually discouraged actions such as aimless wandering, standing still, even the (non)event of 'doing nothing' operate as subtle methods through which to protest against increasingly legislated conditions of existence, by proposing alternative modes of behaviour or suggesting flexibility therein. Artistic practice can be seen as a site of investigation for questioning and dismantling the dominant order – or “major” language – through acts of minor rebellion that – whilst predominantly impotent or ineffective – might still remind us that we have some agency and do not always need to wholly and passively acquiesce. Life itself becomes the material for a work of art, and it is through such an encounter that we might be encouraged to conceive other possibilities for life. Through art, life is rendered plastic and capable of being actively shaped or made into something different to how it might habitually be. However the notion of ‘life as a work of art’ is not exclusive to artistic practice. Various theorists and philosophers – including Nietzsche, Foucault, Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari – have advocated the necessity of viewing life as a kind of project or mode of invention, suggesting ways in which one’s “style of life” or way of existing might be produced or constructed differently. They urge us to consider how we might actively and consciously attend to the full possibilities of life in order to become more human, by increasing our “affective capacity,” that is, our capacity to affect and be affected in affirming or “augmentative terms” (Deleuze, Spinoza and Us 124). In one sense, Spinoza’s Ethics offers a pragmatic model – or guide to living – through which to attempt to increase one’s potential capacity for being, by maximising the possibility of augmentative experiences or joyful encounters. Here, Spinoza formulates a plan or model through which one might attempt to move from the “inadequate” realm of signs and effects – the first order of knowledge in which the body is simply subject to external forces and random encounters of which it remains ignorant – towards a second order of knowledge. Here, the individual body is able to construct concepts of causes or “common notions” with other “bodies in agreement.” The “common notions” of the second order are produced at the point where the individual is able to rise above the condition of simply experiencing effects and signs in order to form agreements or joyful encounters with other bodies. These harmonious synchronicities with other bodies harness life-affirming affects whilst repelling those that threaten to absorb or deplete power. It is only through the construction of “concepts” – an understanding of causality – that it is possible to move from the realm of inadequate ideas towards the production of “adequate ideas from which true actions ensue” (Deleuze, Spinoza and the Three Ethics 143). According to Spinoza’s Ethics, the challenge is to attempt to move from a state in which existence is passively experienced – or suffered blindly – as a series of effects upon the body, towards understanding – and working harmoniously with – the causes themselves. In his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Gilles Deleuze suggests that this shift occurs through consciously selecting those affects that offer the possibilities of augmentation (an increase in power through joy) rather than diminution (the decrease of power through sadness). Whilst Spinoza appears to denounce affects as simply inadequate ideas that should be avoided, Deleuze argues that there are certain life-affirming or joyful affects that can be seen as the “dark precursors” of the notions (The Three Ethics 144). According to Deleuze, whilst such “signs of augmentation remain passions and the ideas that they presuppose remain inadequate,” they alone have the capacity to enable the individual to increase in power, for the “selection” of affect is in itself the “condition of leaving the first kind of knowledge, and for attaining the concept” (The Three Ethics 144). For Deleuze-Spinoza, the production of subjectivity is a form of endeavour or “passional struggle,” whereby the individual attempts to increase his or her capacity for turning affects or signs into common notions or concepts (The Three Ethics 145). Deleuze argues that the “common notions are an Art, the art of Ethics itself: organising good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting” (Spinoza and Us 119). This is then a life-long project or practice – the making of life into a work of art – focused on increasing one’s potential to affect and be affected by signs that increase power, whilst simultaneously reducing or minimising one’s threshold of affectivity towards those which diminish or reduce it. I am interested in the role that the artist or artist collective could have in the production of this Spinozist model of subjectivity; how they might function as an intermediary or catalyst, creating conditions or events in which augmentative affects – such as those made possible through a dynamic or active form of stillness – are increased and their energies harnessed. Here perhaps, the affective potential of an art practice is in itself the “dark precursor” of common notions, drawing together bodies in agreement by calling into being an audience or community of experience. On one level, the artist performs an analogous role to Spinoza’s “scholia” – the intermittent sequence of polemical notations “inserted into the demonstrative chain” of propositions – within the Ethics, which according to Deleuze:Operate in the shadows, trying to distinguish between what prevents us from reaching our common notions and what, on the contrary, allows us to do so, what diminishes and what augments our power, the sad signs of our servitude and the joyous signs of our liberations (The Three Ethics 146).Certainly the project, Open City, attempts to draw attention to the habitually endured –or suffered – signs and affects of contemporary experience; striving to remedy the sad affects of capitalism through the production of playful, disruptive or even joyful interventions, events and encounters between bodies in agreement. The disempowering experience or affect of being controlled – blocked, stopped or restricted – by societal or moral codes and civic laws, is replaced by a minor logic of ambiguous, arbitrary and optional rules. Such rules foreground experimentation and request an ethical rather than obedient engagement that in turn serves to liberate the individual from habitual passivity. Open City attempts to reveal – and then resist or refuse – the hidden rules that determine how to operate or perform within contemporary capitalism, the coded orders on how to behave, move and interact. It exposes such insidious legislation as constructs whose logic has been put in place or brought into effect over time, and which in turn might be revoked, dislocated or challenged. For Open City, the performance of stillness can be used as a gesture through which to break from or rupture the orchestrated and controlled flow of capitalist behaviours and its sad affects. Image 3: Open City, documentation of performance, Nottingham, 2008. Random acts of stillness produce moments of friction within the smooth, regulated flows of contemporary capitalism; singularised or inconsistent glitches or jolts that call to attention its unnoticed rhythms and temporal speeds, by becoming its counter-point or by appropriating its “language” for “strange and minor uses” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). Dawdling or meandering reveals the fierceness of the city’s unspoken bylaws, whilst the societal pressure towards speed and efficiency is thwarted by moments of deliberate non-production, inaction and the act of doing nothing. In one example of collective action – at noon on a shopping street – around fifty pedestrians, suddenly and without warning, stop still in their tracks and remain like this for five minutes before resuming their daily activity. In another, a group of individuals draw to a standstill and slowly sway from side to side; their stillness becomes a device for affecting a block or obstacle that limits or modifies others’ behaviour, creating an infinitely imaginable ricochet of further breaks and amendments to routine journeys and directional flows. Open City often mimics or misuses familiar behavioural patterns witnessed in the public realm, inhabiting their language or codes in a way that playfully transforms their use or proposes elasticity or flexibility therein. Habitual or routine actions are isolated and disinvested of their function or purpose, or become repeated until all sense of teleological imperative is wholly evacuated or rendered absurd. For example, a lone person stops still and holds their hand out to check for rain. Over and over, the same action is repeated but by different individuals; the authenticity of the original gesture shattered and separated from any causal motivation by the reverberations of its uncanny echo. Such performed actions remove or distance the response or reaction from its originary stimulus or excitation, creating an affective gap between – a no longer known or present – cause and its effect. This however, is not to return action back to realm of Spinoza’s first order of knowledge – where the body only experiences effects and remains ignorance of their cause – but rather an attempt to create a gap or space of “hesitancy” in which a form of creativity might emerge. Within the act of stillness, habitually imperceptible rhythms and speeds become visible. By being still it is possible to witness or attend to the presence of different or heterogeneous temporal “refrains” or durations operating beneath and within the surface appearance of capitalism’s homogeneous flow.Open City attempts to recuperate the creative potential within those moments of stillness generated through the accelerated technologies of contemporary capitalism: the situational ennui endured whilst waiting or queuing; the moments of collective and synchronised impasse controlled by technologies such as traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, and even – though perhaps more abstractly – the nebulous experience of paralysis and impotency induced by fear, anxiety and uncertainty. Performances attempt to neutralise these various diminutive affects by re-inhabiting or re-framing them; ‘turning’ their stillness towards a form of memorial, protest or social gathering, or alternatively rendering it seemingly empty, unreadable or absurd. This emptiness can also be understood as a form of disinterestedness that refuses to react to immediate stimulus – or lack of – and rather remains open to other possibilities of existence or inhabitation. Stillness is curiously equivocal, an “ambiguous or fluctuating sign” that has the capacity to “affect us with joy and sadness at the same time” (Deleuze The Three Ethics 140). The external appearance of stillness is ultimately blank, its “event” able to affect a “vectorial passage” of contradictory directions, towards an “increase or decrease, growth or decline, joy or sadness” (Deleuze, The Three Ethics 140). Open City attempts to transform the – potentially – diminutive affects of stillness into “augmentative powers” by occupying the stillness of contemporary capitalism as a disguise or camouflage for producing invisible performances that hijack a familiar language in order to misuse its terms. More recently Open City have adapted or occupied the moments of stillness made possible or enabled by everyday technologies: the inconsistent rhythm patterns of stopping, pausing or circling about on the spot exhibited by someone absorbed in a mobile-phone call, text messaging or changing a track on their MP3 player. Here, certain technologies allow, legitimate or even give permission for the disruption of the flow of movement within the city, or are used as a device through which to explore and exploit the potential of collective synchronised action through the use of recorded instructions.Image 4: Open City, public performance from the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008).The alienating and atomising affects of such personal technologies – which are habitually used and isolate the individual from their immediate surroundings and from others around them – are transformed into tools for producing collective action. In one sense, Open City’s performances operate as a form of “minor art” as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, where a major language – the dominant order of capitalism and control – is neutralised or deterritorialised before being “appropriated for strange and minor uses” (17). For Deleuze and Guattari a minor practice is always political and collective, signalling the “movement from the individual to a ‘collective multiplicity’” where there is no longer an individual subject as such but “only collective assemblages of enunciation”(18). The minor always operates within the terms of the major but functions as a destabilising agent where it attempts – according to Simon O’Sullivan – to “stammer and stutter the commodity form, disassembling those already existing forms of capital and indeed moving beyond the latter’s very logic” (73). However, as with all acts of deterritorialisation there is always the potential that they will in turn become reterritorialised; assimilated or absorbed back into the language of the “major”. This can be seen, for example, in the way that the proposed radical potential of the flash-mob phenomenon has been swiftly recuperated through the language of the corporate publicity campaigns of high-profile companies – specifically telecommunication multi-nationals - for whom the terms ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’ are developed as Unique Selling Points for further capitalist gain.By contrast, the intent of Open City is to create an event that operates not only as a visible rupture, but which also has the capacity to transform or radicalise the subjectivities of those involved beyond the duration of the event itself. Open City encourage the movement from the individual to a “collective multiplicity,” through performances that produce synchronised action where individuals become temporally united by a rule or instruction that they are collectively adhering to. Publicly distributed postcards have been used to invite or instruct as-yet-unknown publics to participate in collective action, setting the terms for the possibility of imagined or future assemblies. Or more recently, recorded spoken word instructions listened to using MP3 player technology have been used to harmonise the speeds, stillness and slowness of individual bodies to produce the possibility of a new collective rhythm or “refrain” (Guattari, Subjectivities). For example, within the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008) a group of individuals were led on a guided walk in which they engaged with a series of spoken instructions listened to using MP3 player technology. The instructions invited a number of discreet performances culminating in a collective moment of stillness that was at once a public spectacle and a space of self-contained or private reflection. Image 5: Open City, public performance from the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008). Once still, the individuals listened to a further spoken text which interrogated how the act of ‘being still’ might shift in meaning moving from or between different positions. For example, stillness can be experienced as a controlling or restrictive mode of enforced waiting, as an act of resistant refusal or protest, or alternatively as a model of quiet contemplation or idle daydreaming. For Spinoza, a body is defined by its speeds and slowness – by the relationship between motion and rest – and by its capacity to affect and be affected. In attempting to synchronise the speeds and affectivity of individuals through group action, Open City create the conditions for the production of Spinoza’s “common notions” – or second kind of knowledge – through the organisation of a collective or shared understanding of causality by bodies in agreement. Acts of collective stillness also function in an analogous manner to the transitional or liminal phase within ritual performance by producing the possibility of “communitas,” the transient experience of togetherness or even of collective subjectivity. In From Ritual to Theatre, The Human Seriousness of Play, anthropologist Victor Turner identifies a form of “existential or spontaneous communitas” – an acute experience of community – experienced by individuals immersed in the "no longer/not yet" liminal space of a given ritualistic process, in which “the past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (44). Stillness is presented as pure disinterestedness, a non-teleological event enabling nothing but the possibility of a community of experience to come into being.Within Open City then, the gesture of stillness recurs as a device or “event-encounter” for simultaneously producing a break or hiatus in an already existing formulation of experience, at the same time as creating a gap or space of possibility in which to imagine or affirm an alternative mode of being. Referring to the Deleuzian notion of encounter, O’Sullivan reflects on the dual presence of rupture and affirmation within the moment of encounter itself whereby “our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted” (Sullivan,xxiv). He argues that the encounter:Operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However … the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently (Sullivan, xxv).Open City attempts to create the conditions for these dual possibilities – of rupture and affirmation – through the production of joyful encounters between bodies within the event of performed stillness. Stillness operates as a double gesture where it creates a stop or block – a break with the already existing or with the events of the past – and also a moment of pause, the liminal space of projection; a future-oriented or preparatory zone of pure potentiality. Stillness thus offers the simultaneous possibility of termination and of a new beginning, within which it becomes possible to move from a paradigm of resistance – to the present conditions of existence – towards one of augmentative refusal or proposal that invites reflection on a still future-possible way of life. Poised at a point of anticipation or as a prophetic mode of waiting, stillness offers the promise of as-yet-undecided possibilities where options for future action or existence remain momentarily open, not yet known. Collective stillness thus always has a quality of “futurity” by creating the transitional conditions of communitas or the possibility of a community emerging outside or beyond the temporal frame of capitalism: a community that is still in waiting. ReferencesBergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari.“What Is a Minor Literature.” Kafka toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.Deleuze, Gilles. “Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics’.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco. London: Verso, 1998.———. “Life as a Work of Art.” Negotiations: 1972-1990. New York: Columbia U P, 1995.———. “Spinoza and Us.” Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Guattari, Felix. “Subjectivities: For Better and for Worse.” The Guattari Reader. Ed. G. Genosko. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996.Foucault, Michel. “An Aesthetics of Existence.” Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. L. Kritzman. London: Routledge, 1990.O’Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics. Trans. A Boyle. London: Everyman, 1989. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.

In an article entitled "Palming the Planet", Ron Jasper, a marketing executive, is quoted describing his car trip from Seattle to Vancouver: "'The whole way up,' he says with glee ... 'I had my laptop [wirelessly connected to the office]. I was reading my e-mail. At the same time I checked my stock on this' -- he waves a new smart phone, sleek and easily palmed. 'At one point, I was talking on the phone, checking my stock on the laptop and steering with my knee'", he confided, "slightly embarrassed" by his admission. He concludes with the observation: "'These devices are making it possible for everyone to work in ways they never imagined before'". Leaving aside the obvious concerns over highway safety, I want to register the observation that Jasper's enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by his new phone and his elation over his ability to get more work done faster, are not in fact 'never-imagined' ways of working. Visions of efficiency and connectivity have been integral to the representations of communication technologies, especially the telephone, since the beginning of the twentieth century. Looking back on the images and descriptions of the telephone in the early 1900s reveals a similar fascination with the ability to transcend the mundane realities of time and space. The idea that 'faster is better' is not one born of our times, it is one that emerged and evolved out of the preoccupations of an earlier era. The contemporary obsession with faster connections and multiple function technologies is an amplification of a century-old preoccupation with speed and efficiency; just as the passion for "multi-tasking" is today's version of what a 1909 AT&T advertisement referred to as "the multiplication of power". The recurrence of similar utopic and dystopic themes seems to suggest that our hopes and fears about the possibilities of telephonic communication are regenerated with each technological advance. In this paper I explore some of the concepts which inform these representations and suggest that they function simultaneously as a critique and a celebration of the renewal of capitalism that seems to accompany technological progress. Capitalist Reveries In a speech to the New York Electric Club in 1889, Erastus Wiman, president of the Canadian telegraph system remarked: "if to accomplish things quickly, close transactions promptly, and generally to get through with things is a step toward a business man's millennium, then we must be nearing that heavenly expectation". He praises electricity, the telegraph, and the "most marvelous" telephone for making the businessman "almost divine in what he can achieve". Throughout the twentieth century, technology and technological developments have been embraced because they provided the means to radically improve speed, efficiency, and connectivity. As Wiman makes clear though, these attributes were not, and are not now, neutral or arbitrary values. Their worth is located in their application to the flow of goods, information, and ultimately to the circulation of capital. They are valuable because they facilitate a renewal of capitalism itself: the tremendous expansion of both capital and markets occurring at the end of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is not unrelated to the technological developments of these eras. In the Grundrisse, Marx writes that "Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange -- of the means of communication and transport -- the annihilation of space by time -- becomes an extraordinary necessity for it". Improvements in the speed and flexibility of communication 'renew' capitalism because they overcome the temporal disadvantages associated with distance and facilitate the expansion of markets in geographic space. Perhaps more than any other communication technology, the telephone has encouraged and anticipated capitalism's utopic fantasies. It is no coincidence that in early advertisements, its promoters referred to the telephone as the "annihilator of time and space". Whatever other benefits the telephone came to be seen as offering, its ability to instantaneously transfer information and credit was perceived and promoted as its most perfect attribute. Linking together buyers and sellers in cities all across the country, the telephone re-organised the 'playing field' of capitalism. By making distance an increasingly irrelevant factor in the transaction of business, the telephone rearranged space and distance "to fit the rather strict temporal requirements of the circulation of capital". Time and Money According to Marx, "economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself". Wiman's celebration of the telegraph and the telephone at the New York Electric Club in 1889 is not much different than Jasper's delight with his smart phone and laptop computer as he careens down the highway towards Vancouver. Simply understood, the ability to save time translates into a saving of money but the relationship between time and money is not a straightforward one. Time and money appear as commensurate albeit inverse values because of the effect of the velocity of circulation on the accumulation of capital. They had come to be linked with the rise of wage labour and the practice of paying workers by the hour and in this sense, "money appears as measure". When in the mid-1700s Benjamin Franklin proclaimed that "time is money", and went on to explain their enigmatic relationship, he was describing more than a simple ratio. He that can earn ten shillings in a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversions or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. Franklin not only equates time spent working with money, but also proposes a conception of unproductive time as a negative cost, a tangible loss against potential profit. Following the logic of his formula, if misspent time is perceived as a deficit, time saved can be counted as a profit. This way of thinking counts all time as potentially profitable in an economic sense and confers a speculative value on time. Telephone advertising in the first decades of the twentieth century made explicit use of this formula and, in so doing, not only asserted the value of the instrument but also provided a way of imagining time in terms of its market value. The text of a 1909 advertisement reads: The mere item of time actually saved by those who use the telephone means an immense increase in the production of the nation's wealth every working day in the year ... just counting the time alone, over $3,000,000 a day is saved by the users of the telephone! Which means adding $3,000,000 a day to the nation's wealth. (Italics in original) Contemporary representations of the telephone continue to employ the idea that savings of transaction time can be accumulated and converted into working capital. In a 1990 article on mobile offices in the financial magazine Money, a Los Angeles attorney is quoted as saying that his cell phone and mobile fax machine have "added two hours to my day and 25% to my annual gross". A 1993 survey of cell phone users by Motorola reported its findings in similar terms. Those canvassed claimed that a cellular phone "added 0.92 hours to their productive working day [and] increased their own or their company's revenues by 19 percent". This kind of temporal accounting involves two basic conceptual manoeuvres which can only occur if time is 'emptied' of its social value or meaning, leaving it available to take on a new and purely economic significance. First, in order to calculate time in terms of both its actual and speculative monetary value, it must be conceived in abstract terms, the value of each minute standardised and conceived as a unit of measurement. Second, and following from the first, because now each minute of the day has the same relative monetary value, the entire 24-hour day, not just the traditional 8-hour workday, comes to be imagined as zone for commercial activity. Prior to the telephone, the partition of the day into work and family time was safeguarded by the physical separation of the business and the domestic spheres. Even the telegraph, because its use was largely restricted to the workplace, did little to challenge the partition between public and private domains. The telephone, as it became increasingly ubiquitous in both offices and homes, disturbed these boundaries and expropriated time previously reserved for rest, relaxation and social activities for all manner of commercial uses. AT&T's declaration in an ad entitled "The Always-on-Duty Telephone" (1910) that "the whole Bell System is on duty 1440 minutes a day" also must have stirred anxiety with its conclusion that "if any of these minutes are not used, their earning power is irrevocably lost". As the "1440 minute" day expanded the potential for profit, it also increased competition and established new expectations. Social Anxieties The logic of capital's never-ending drive to renew itself dictates that time saved by technology is perceived not as "free time" but as potential profit, which must be reinvested or lost. Booster though he was of modern communication technologies, Wiman could not help but observe: One would think that the ability ... to talk freely over the telephone would so facilitate business pursuits and close up transactions so quickly that it would beget leisure, rest and quiet, but such is not the case. The thirst for achievement is so great ... that the more we do, the more we seek to do. We are no more encouraged to use the extra two or .92 hours gained by the cellphone for play or relaxation than we were when the telephone first began to speed up the tempo of our lives. Anxieties about the social effects of communications technologies are not new although they rarely manifest themselves in business discourse. Today, as business and technology publications celebrate each new communications innovation, general interest and women's magazines are more often questioning the impact of cell phones, pagers, palm pilots, and portable computers on family life and mental health. It is somehow both ironic and appropriate that during both periods, concerns about the social effects of telephone -- a medium of disembodied communication -- should manifest as anxieties about its negative corporeal effects. In 1889, an account in the British Medical Journal reported a new medical condition called "aural overpressure", an affliction suffered by those who used the telephone for extended periods of the work day. The "constant strain of the auditory apparatus" by prolonged telephone use was said to be responsible for "nervous excitability, buzzing in the ear, giddiness, and neuralgic pains". The Electrical Review recounted cautionary tales of individuals driven mad by the telephone's "constant ringing". In 2000, we find Scientific American and Time investigating the possible links between cellphone use and brain tumors. Despite the consistently inconclusive findings of multiple scientific studies, the British government ruled that cellphones sold in the United Kingdom must carry health notices that warn "people to be careful about where and how long they use them", and American cellphone retailers have voluntarily begun to include "a one page health-and-safety bulletin" with all cellphones they sell. Warren Susman suggests that examining the anxieties associated with any given technology can provide useful insight into the cultural values at stake for its users. According to the scientific experts of their day, both "aural overpressure" and brain tumors are avoided by reducing the amount of time spent on the telephone, perhaps less time working and possibly more time in the pursuit of other more socially oriented activity. It is possible to look at these panics around physical and mental well-being as a reassertion of the social, of the body, a sort of return of the repressed, at those historical moments the alienating effects of capitalism are being exacerbated by the uses to which we put technology. If, as Marx writes, the "circulation of capital constantly ignites itself anew" then it seems logical that the discourses which circulate around the telephone and communications technologies will continue to renew themselves at key historical moments. Advances in telecommunications at the end of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have inspired similar desires and elicited comparable anxieties because they have been driven by a common motive: the search for the competitive advantage that drives both capital and technological development alike. References Adam, B. Time and Social Theory. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Harvey, D. The Urbanization of Capital. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1985. Marvin, C. When the Old Technologies Were New. Oxford UP, 1988. Marx, K. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Vintage Press, 1973. Susman, W. I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Janin Hadlaw. "Plus Que Ça Change: The Telephone and the History of the Future." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/plus.php>. Chicago style: Janin Hadlaw, "Plus Que Ça Change: The Telephone and the History of the Future," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/plus.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Janin Hadlaw. (2000) Plus que ça change: the telephone and the history of the future. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/plus.php> ([your date of access]).