Journal articles on the topic 'Austria – Intellectual life – 17th century'

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1

Hanovs, Deniss. "THE ARISTOCRAT BECOMES A COURTIER… FEATURES OF EUROPEAN ARISTOCRATIC CULTURE IN THE 17th CENTURY." Via Latgalica, no. 1 (December 31, 2008): 62. http://dx.doi.org/10.17770/latg2008.1.1590.

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As John Adamson outlined in his voluminous comparative analysis of European court culture, „in the period between 1500 and 1750 a „Versailles model” of a court as a self-sufficient, situated in a free space, architectonically harmonious city-residency remote from the capital city, where the king’s household and administration was located, was an exception.” The Versailles conception and „model” both architectonically and in terms of practical functioning of the court was spread and secured in the 18th century, developing into a model of absolutism which was imitated to different extents. The spectrum of the adoption of the court of Louis XIV by material and intellectual culture reached from the grand ensembles of palaces of Carskoye Selo in Peterhof, Russia, Drottningholm in Sweden and Sanssouci in Germany to several small residences of the German princes’ realms in Weimar, Hanover, and elsewhere in Europe. Analyzing the works of several researchers about the transformation of the French aristocracy into court society, a common conclusion is the assurance of the symbolic autocratic power by Louis XIV to the detriment of the economic and political independence of the aristocracy. In this context, A. de Tocqueville points at the forfeiture of the power of the French aristocracy and its influence and a simultaneous self-isolation of the group, which he defines as a „caste with ideas, habits and barriers that they created in the nation.” Modern research, when revisiting the methods of the resarch on the aristocracy and when expanding the choice of sources, is still occupied with the problem defined in the beginning of the 19th century by A. de Tocqueville: The aristocracy lost its power and influence, and by the end of the 18th century also its economic basis for its dominance in French society. John Levron defines courtiers as functional mediators between the governor and society, calling them a „screen”.1 In turn, Ellery Schalk stated that in the time of Louis XIV the aristocracy was going through an elite identity crisis, when alongside the old aristocracy involved in military professions (noblesse d’épée), the governor allowed a new, so-called administrative aristocracy (noblesse de robe) to hold major positions and titles of honour. Along with the transformation of the traditional aristocratic hierarchy formed in the early Middle Ages, which John Lough described as an anachronism already back in the 17th century, also the status of governor and its symbolic place in the aristocratic hierarchy changed. It shall be noted that it is the question of a governor’s role in the political culture of absolutism by which the ideas of many researches can be distinguished. Norbert Elias thinks that an absolute monarch was a head of a family, which included the whole state and thereby turned into a governor’s „household”. Timothy Blanning, on the other hand, thinks that the court culture of Louis XIV was the expression of the governor’s insecurity and fears. This is a view which the researcher seems to derive from the traumatic experience of the Fronde (the aristocrats’ uprising against the mother of Louis XIV, regent Anna of Austria), which the culturologist K. Hofmane interpreted from a psychoanalytical point of view and defined Louis XIV as a conqueror of chaos and a despotic governor. In the wide spectrum of opinions, it is not the governor’s political principles which are postulated as a unifying element, but scenarios of the representation of power, their aims and various tools that are combined in the concept of court culture. N. Elias names symbolic activities in the court etiquette as the manifestation of power relations, whereas M. Yampolsky identifies a symbolic withdrawal of a governor’s body from the „circulation in society”, when a governor starts to represent himself, thereby alienating himself from society. George Gooch in this way reprimanded Louis XV as he thought this development would deprive the royal representation from the sacred. In turn, Jonathan Dewald in his famous work „European Aristocracy” noted that Louis XIV was not the first to use the phenomenon of the court for securing the personal authority of a governor, and refers to the courts during the late period of the Italian Renaissance as predecessors of French court culture. What role did the monarch’s closest „viewers” – the courtiers – play in this? K. Hofmane by means of comparison with the ancient Greek mythical monster Gorgon comes to conclusion that the court had to provide prey for the Gorgon (the king), who is both scared and fascinated by the terrific sight (of power and glory). The perception of the court as a collective observer implies the presence of the observed and worshiped object, the king. The public life of Louis XIV, which was subjected to the complicated etiquette, provided for the hierarchical access to the king’s public body. Let’s remember the „Memoirs” of Duc de Saint-Simon that gives a detailed description of the symbolic privileges granted to the courtiers, which along the material gifts (pensions, concessions and land plots) were tools for the formation of the identity and the status of a new aristocrat/courtier – along with the right to touch the king’s belongings, his attire, etc. The basis for securing the structure of the court’s hierarchy was provided by the governor’s body along the lines mentioned above, which according to the understanding of representation by M. Yampolsky was withdrawn from society and placed within the borders of the ensemble of the Versailles palace. There, by means of several tools, including dramatic works of art, the governor’s body was separated from its symbolic content and hidden behind the algorithms of ritualized activities. Blanning also speaks about a practice of hiding from the surrounding environment, thereby defining court culture as a hiding-place that a governor created around himself. It was possible to look at a governor and thereby be observed by him not only on particular festivals, when a governor was available mostly for court society, but also in different works of visual art, for example, on triumphal archs, in engravings, or during horse-racings.
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2

Luft, David S. "Austrian Intellectual History and Bohemia." Austrian History Yearbook 38 (January 2007): 108–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0067237800021445.

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This is an essay about the cultural, political, and geographical location of Austrian intellectual history and the special place of Bohemia and Moravia in that history. A great deal has been written about the multinational and supranational quality of Austrian culture and intellectual life. In practice, however, the Austria referred to in such arguments is usually the Habsburg monarchy of the two generations before World War I. Austrian intellectual history has generally been either strongly centered in Vienna or oriented to a very broad concept of Austria that includes the monarchy as a whole in the late nineteenth century. What is lost between the metropolis and the vast monarchy of many peoples is the centuries-long relationship between Austrian and Bohemia that was the basis for Austrian intellectual life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I argue here that we should think of Bohemia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of Austrian intellectual history in a way that other regions and historic lands in the Habsburg monarchy were not.
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3

Marton, Gellért Ernő. "A Life in Service of his Homeland – the Diplomatic Role and Activity of János Rimay." Rocznik Przemyski. Historia 1 (26) (2021): 3–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/24497347rph.21.001.14724.

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The goal of this paper is to summarise the diplomatic and political role of poet and intellectual, János Rimay of Alsósztregova and Rima. Rimay is well-known as the pupil and friend of the great Hungarian poet, Bálint Balassi, and also as a great poet and a representative of stoicism, as well as as a diplomat and statesman who became important in the regional diplomacy in the last decades of the 16th century and the first decades of the 17th century.
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4

Seregina, Anna. "The “Life of Lady Falkland”: a biography or a conversion story?" Adam & Eve. Gender History Review, no. 29 (2021): 265–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.32608/2307-8383-2021-29-265-281.

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The article presents an introduction to a first Russian translation of the “Life of Lady Falkland” written in the mid-17th century by the nuns of the English Benedictine Abbey at Cambrai (the Cary sisters), which told the life of their mother, Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess of Falkland – a translator, poet and polemicist, and also a Catholic convert. It has been argued that the “Life” combines the traits of biography and conversion story, and that the conversions described there – of Lady Falkland and her children fell into the category of the so-called “intellectual conversions” brought about by reading books and debating the fine points of religious doctrines. “Intellectual conversions’ were seen to be reserved to men. However, the Cary sisters used this model to establish their position within the Cambrai religious community, which consisted of many nuns with wide intellectual interests. The authors of the “Life” also demonstrated that intellectual efforts of their mother led to conversions of others to Catholicism, thus making her a Catholic missionary in all but a name.
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5

Grömer, Karina, and Michael Ullermann. "Functional Analysis of Garments in 18th Century Burials from St. Michael’s Crypt in Vienna, Austria." Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Archaeologica, no. 35 (December 30, 2020): 123–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/0208-6034.35.08.

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The Michaelergruft in Vienna (St. Michael’s crypt), Austria, is located near the imperial palace Vienna and has been used between 1560 and 1784 by the local nobility of the city center in Vienna. The inventory of a large number of coffins has been preserved due to favorite environmental conditions, it offers the possibility to study specific details about the funeral customs of the 17th and 18th century in Central Europe. Selected burials dating to the 18th century from the Michaelergruft serve as case studies for developing new theoretical and methodological approaches in investigating the textiles and garments found in the coffins. Garments found in crypts usually are analysed due to costume history, aspects of conservation and preparation. Also textile analysis and modern analytical methods are applied to the material. In discussing the garments from St. Michael’s crypt, questions about the interpretation of the costume arise such as if they are “normal” daily life (or festivy) garments or specific funeral costumes. In the following paper criteria are discussed which enable to distinguish between “functional garments” worn also in daily life, “adapter garments” (daily life clothing that has been re-sewn, cut or altered to be used as garment for the dead), and “funeral costumes” that have been deliberately made.
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Galtsin, Dmitrii D. "Froben Prints and Polemics on Religion in Early Modern Eastern Europe." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. History 67, no. 2 (2022): 578–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.21638/11701/spbu02.2022.216.

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The article explores the Froben prints stored at the Rare Books Department of the Library of the Russian Academy of Science (Biblioteka Akademii Nauk) in Saint Petersburg. For three generations in the 16th century, Basel printers the Frobens influenced European intellectual life like no other publishing establishment, contributing to the spread of early Latin and Greek Christian literature, which determined both the development of theology and the humanities. Some copies of Froben prints are conspicuous for the history of their use which is intrinsically connected with various kinds of religious polemics in 16th and 17th century Eastern Europe. The focus of the article is the copies of Froben’s Opera omnia of St Augustine which underwent censorship in monastic libraries of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th and 17th century. The article traces the history of a number of Froben copies which belonged to notable Polish Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries (Andrzej Trzecieski, Nicholas Radziwill the Black (“Czarny”), Andrzej Dobrzanski). The examination of the connections of Eastern European Protestants, which enabled vigorous exchange of books with Western Europe, bringing, for instance, a book from the library of the great Dutch cartographer Gerhard Mercator to the hands of a provincial Polish pastor, is carried out. Finally, the article addresses the marginalia left by Simeon of Polotsk on one of his books. These marginalia throw some new light on the question of Simeon’s genuine theological views. By examining the history of the copies from the Library of the Russian Academy of Science through the marginalia left in the 16th and 17th centuries by people of various religions, the article assesses Froben copies as a source on confessional and intellectual history of the period.
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7

Shvab, Larysa, and Yulia Tokarska. "Innovations of Socio-Religious Thought in Ukraine in the Early 17th Century." Історико-політичні проблеми сучасного світу, no. 43 (June 15, 2021): 261–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.31861/mhpi2021.43.261-272.

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The article analyzes the polemical socio-religious thought in Ukraine after the Union of Brest and the Union of the Kyiv Metropolitanate with Rome, aimed at finding the lost Orthodox tradition and reviving the idea of “God’s protection” of the city of Kyiv in the Rus Orthodox intellectual tradition of the early 17th century. After-union period in Ukrainian realities is characterized as crisis in the sense of decline of religious life, Rus bourgeoisie and fraternal movement and deviation from the policy of support of the Orthodox princely families. The entire plan of church reform, cultural and national revival of the “Commonwealth of the Rus People” was undermined in its foundations. Therefore, the intellectual religious thought of the early 17th century took into account the memory of the “good old days”, when national (regional) identity based on the Orthodox tradition was searched. However, from the point of view of the continued existence of the Orthodox Church, the defeat was only partial, as Konstiantyn Ostrozkyi and his supporters among the nobility, clergy and burghers managed to preserve the Orthodox church structure. The Cossacks demanded a rethinking of this new reality by intellectuals of the post-Brest era and Ukrainian polemicists were forced to look for an independent base for their socio-religious thought. Completely accepting neither the specific Byzantine coverage of the principles of religious-ecclesiastical ethos, nor Catholic, nor Moscow with its self-confident dogmatism and limited polemics with other confessional world, Rus intellectuals had to delve into the very foundations of a particular ideology and reconsider its value from a domestic and ecclesiastical-legal point of view. There were no winners or losers in this verbal duel. The way out of the crisis was understood by Petro Mohyla, who was ready to recognize the primacy of the Pope in order to preserve the internal independence of the Church.
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8

Shvab, Larysa, and Yulia Tokarska. "Innovations of socio-religious thought in Ukraine at the beginning of the 17th century." History Journal of Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, no. 53 (June 21, 2022): 43–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.31861/hj2021.53.43-53.

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The article analyzes the polemical socio-religious thought in Ukraine after the Union of Brest and the Union of the Kyiv Metropolitanate with Rome, aimed at finding the lost Orthodox tradition and reviving the idea of “God’s protection” of the city of Kyiv in the Russian Orthodox intellectual tradition of the early 17th century. After-union period in Ukrainian realities is characterized as crisis in the sense of decline of religious life, Russian bourgeoisie and fraternal movement and deviation from the policy of support of the Orthodox princely families. The entire plan of church reform, cultural and national revival of the “Commonwealth of the Russian People” was undermined in its foundations. Therefore, the intellectual religious thought of the early 17th century took into account the memory of the “good old days”, when national (regional) identity based on the Orthodox tradition was searched. However, from the point of view of the continued existence of the Orthodox Church, the defeat was only partial, as K. Ostrozkyi and his supporters among the nobility, clergy and burghers managed to preserve the Orthodox Church structure. The Cossacks demanded a rethinking of this new reality by intellectuals of the post-Brest era and Ukrainian polemicists were forced to look for an independent base for their socio-religious thought. The way out of the crisis was understood by Petro Mohyla, who was ready to recognize the primacy of the Pope in order to preserve the internal independence of the Church.
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9

Khruleva, I. Yu. "Western European Intellectual Practices of a New Type in Russian Everyday Life at Early 18th Century (case of Feofan Prokopovich)." MGIMO Review of International Relations 15, no. 6 (December 30, 2022): 166–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.24833/2071-8160-2022-6-87-166-178.

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The focus of this study is the views of Feofan Prokopovich, a unique Orthodox thinker whose world outlook was shaped by an obvious influence of the ideas of the Protestant and Catholic Enlightenment. Talking about the Enlightenment, modern historiography focuses on the versatility of the phenomenon, preferring to talk about the Enlightenment, including the religious or confessional Enlightenment, aimed at rethinking the role of religion and the church. The Religious Enlightenment was a pan-European phenomenon that embraced Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, and Orthodoxy, and grew out of the desire to create an intelligent religion free of superstition and serving society. The intellectual movement of the religious Enlightenment sought to reconcile the natural philosophy of the 17th-18th centuries with a religious worldview, while trying to overcome the extremes of religious fanaticism, on the one hand, and nihilism and godlessness, on the other. The process of forming a new intellectual environment is marked by the coexistence and mutual influence of the most diverse, sometimes poorly compatible traditions, their transformation and modification. Comprehensively arguing the need for unlimited autocracy in Russia, Feofan Prokopovich, nevertheless, actively used the discourse of the Enlightenment in his writings, discussing the problem of the origin of the state, the mode of government, the boundaries of the power of the monarch, the rights and duties of subjects. On the example of Feofan Prokopovich, we can talk about the emergence and rooting of intellectual practices of a new type in Russian everyday life. The integration of Western European ideas and practices into Russian culture was ambiguous, multifaceted and depended on their adaptation to the socio-political space of Russia. Being well acquainted with the works of European authors of the 17th early 18th centuries, he rather took on the formal side of their discussions on socio-political topics, adapted a conceptual glossary that was new for the Russian educated public, which opened up opportunities for talking about politics in a new way.
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Glenn, Justin L. "The intellectual-theological leadership of John Amos Comenius." Perichoresis 16, no. 3 (July 1, 2018): 45–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/perc-2018-0016.

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Abstract John Amos Comenius was a revolutionary leader in both the church and the academy in 17th century Europe. Born and raised in Moravia and firmly grounded in the doctrine of the United Church of the Brethren, Comenius rose from obscurity in what is now the Czech Republic to become recognized around Europe and beyond as an innovative and transformational leader. He contributed to efforts such as advocating for universal education, authoring classroom textbooks (most notably in Latin education), shepherding local churches and his entire denomination, and working for unity and peace among Christians across Europe. Though for many decades after his death he seemed to be lost to time, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in the ideas and methods of Comenius. His life and work can serve as a source of encouragement and inspiration to church and educational leaders today.
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Janowski, Piotr Józef. "From Lugano to Krakow: The Career of Giovanni Battista Trevano as a Royal Architect at the Vasa Court in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth." Arts 11, no. 3 (May 11, 2022): 56. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/arts11030056.

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Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, many builders, artists, and architects living on the shores of Italian lakes decided to settle in Poland. Upon arrival, they pursued brilliant careers in various areas of life. Over time, they became Polonized. This was also the case for Giovanni Battista Trevano, who was active in Krakow in the first half of the 17th century and whose lifetime achievement was to become the royal architect of the Vasa kings. This article presents Trevano’s artistic oeuvre and provides insight into his social, economic, and intellectual status in the new community, including the architect’s offspring, who pursued successful careers in army, church, and state offices throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. These new findings are based on manuscripts that have recently been discovered by the author of the article in both Polish and Swiss archives. They allow for expanding the knowledge of the Trevano family’s genealogy and biography, and correcting some unjustified views in the discourse. On the basis of research on new archival sources, one can conclude that Giovanni Battista Trevano was a prominent architect, who is credited with introducing in Poland the early Baroque style, which soon became dominant in northern European art.
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12

Marczuk-Szwed, Barbara. "L’Illustre philosophe de la sœur de La Chapelle (1663): sainte Catherine ou Hypatie?" Romanica Cracoviensia 22, no. 3 (November 30, 2022): 251–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/20843917rc.22.022.16187.

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L’Illustre philosophe by Sœur de La Chapelle (1663): Saint Catherine or Hypatia? The paper focuses on one of the five tragedies that were dedicated in the 17th century to the character of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, martyred around 307. Some modern scholars dispute the existence of the saint and suggest that her legend was based on the life and murder of Hypatia, a Neoplatonist philosopher from Alexandria, who was massacred by Christians in 415. The author of the article proposes to demonstrate that in the tragedy L’Illustre philosophe the resemblance between these two martyrs – one pagan, the other Christian – becomes particularly flagrant. As a result, Soeur de La Chapelle’s work, while remaining an apology for the saint, also becomes a great plea for women’s access to education and participation in intellectual life.
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Bruyn, J. "Over het 16de en 17de-eeuwse portret in de Nederlanden als memento mori." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 105, no. 4 (1991): 244–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187501791x00146.

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AbstractThe two sides of the current debate on the nature of 16th- and 17h-century realism are represented by an interpretation based on the recognition of familiar psychological and social factors on the one hand, and one which is averse to all empathy and endcavours to trace the intellectual process that determined function and meaning of images in the past on the other hand. This formulation of the problem also bears on portraiture, to which certain recent interpretations have assigned the significance of sociological documcnts. It is argued here that the portrait, too, had its place in the metaphorically structured and religiously orientated thought that still played a dominant role in the 17th century. Closely linked with the portrait's primary function - which is to perpetuate the memory of the sitter- is the reminder of death and transience cncountered in many (not all!) portraits. In a Family Group painted in 1661 by Jan Mytens in Dublin (fig. 1), the father points to two figurcs on the left who arc obviously deceased (as the papaver comniferum in front of them probably indicates). The piece of paper in his pointing hand is a frequent attribute of sitters in early sixteenth-century portraits, rolled up or folded (fig. 2). Seventeenth-century texts and a large number of vanitas still lifes (fig. 3) suggest that the motif was a symbol of transience: it is in this capacity that it was still being used a century ago in tomb sculpture (together with a skull) (fig. 4). The early sixteenth century saw not only the introduction of the sheet of paper but of a number of other motives which endowed the by now autonomous portrait with a religious meaning and which, together with more familiar symbols such as the skull, hourglass and carnation, alluded to the transience of earthly existcncc and the hope of eternal life. Some of them were only occasionally used, others (like the sheet of papicr) maintained their status as fixed items in the iconographic tradition. They include: - the glove (figs. 5 and 7): a frequently used motif (chiefly, but not exclusively, in male portraits) whose meaning the rejection of the false illusion of eartly existence and the search for truc life in the hereafter becomes only apparent from a relatively late printed source; - the cast shadow (fig. 7), which features in various biblical texts as an image of earthly transience and in the 16th and 17th centuries (in portraits, as well as genre scenes and still lifcs) was clearly understood as such; - musical instruments (fig. 8), which not only suggested the harmony of married life but also, due to their short lived sounds, were used as a vanitas motif in portraits and still lifes; - sumptuous architecture (fig. 8), which recalled the wealth of the rich man in Luke 12 and hence, again, the brief enjoyment of earthly possessions. Used less often, but with similar implications, were: - the butterfly (notes 42-44); - the vase of flowers (fig. 9); - the broken column (fig. 10). The meaning of the frequently occurring intact column, sometimes in combination with a curtain is still unclear. Even quite late in the 17th century a new motif was introduced in portraits to express he old vanitas idea: the waterfall, which notably in works by Jacob van Ruisdael had developed into an accepted vanitas motif (fig. 11).
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Podolskiy, Vadim A. "Philosophy of the social policy in German conservatism of the XIX century." Philosophy Journal 14, no. 3 (2021): 65–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/2072-0726-2021-14-3-65-81.

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The article describes the attitude of the German conservative thinkers of the XIX century towards social policy. Works by Carl von Haller, Adam Muller, Wilhelm von Ketteler and Carl von Vogelsang are studied, the philosophic background of their views, and the im­pact of their arguments for the intellectual history of Germany. Their conservative cri­tique of capitalism and socialism is studied. The paper also analyzes the conception of “sustainable development” understood as an approach towards economy that is focused not on the increase of production, but on maintenance of acceptable level of welfare. The article presents ideas of corporate organization of society that can restore the har­mony of medieval social, political and economical relations. The ideology of aristocratic paternalism is explored together with its philosophical and religious foundations as well as its focus on the preservation of social peace and its concern about the needs of the pop­ulation. The article presents the claims of the conservative thinkers on the value of the nonmaterial components of the social life, which serve as the foundation for social policy, namely respect towards tradition, responsibility, service, trust, justice, frugality, religios­ity. The emergence of the German conservatism is explored in relation to Russian politi­cal philosophy. The article shows that the scientific and public activity of the German conservatives led to the introduction of social laws in Germany and Austria.
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Кryvoruchko, Svitlana. "Blood and Power/ Person and State: Mykola Khvylovyi "Blue November"." Balkanistic Forum 32, no. 1 (January 15, 2023): 28–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.37708/bf.swu.v32i1.2.

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Throughout 2022, the war between Russia and Ukraine continues. From the 17th century Ukraine is trying to get rid of this aggression. And today, in 2022, Ukraine is also resisting and defending its right to own culture, language, traditions, and life. All this is achieved with the blood of Ukrainians. Bloody events, the conflict between the individual and the state, blood and power are depicted in the story "Blue November" by the Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvylovy (1893-1933).The scientific problem is to the interpretation of the author's signs-codes, which reflect modernist aesthetics, which proves the focus of Mykola Khvylovy's Ukrainian identity on European searches at the beginning of of the 20th century, which influ-enced the specificity of artistic images. The aim is to study symbols, repetitions, epi-thets, metaphors, conflicts. It is the reflection on the communist ideology that was introduced in the 1920-s, the irony and ambiguous allusions around it, that form the ideological complex in the story “Blue November”, which is the modernist "quiet" internal reaction of the intellectual resistance humane artist to the bloody challenges and majority’s immorality of that time. Writer reveals the conflict between the individual and the state system, the problems of bloody power, the destruction of humane values. the impossibility of defending Ukrainian identity.
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Becker, Rotraud. "Scipione Gonzaga, Fürst von Bozzolo, kaiserlicher Gesandter in Rom 1634–1641." Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 102, no. 1 (November 1, 2022): 239–307. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/qufiab-2022-0014.

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Abstract In the first half of the 17th century, the image of the imperial embassy in Rome was dominated by the long-standing service of the brothers Paolo and Federico Savelli. In comparison, the period in between, during which Scipione Gonzaga held the office, has left hardly any traces. Yet a closer look at his years of service reveals the political problems of those years and shows the prince of Bozzolo to be a committed diplomat. Furthermore, the circumstances of his life show the envoy’s activity in an unusual context, that of a lower-ranking prince in Imperial Italy who sought to gain stature for the empire in order to maintain the limited power attained by himself and his family, and to improve their overall status by acquiring another ancestral entail that had fallen into other hands. Beyond his personal involvement in the costly office, his brothers and other relatives placed themselves at the service of the empire and also entered a network of influential noble families close to the imperial court through marriage. The Gonzaga reigns in Bozzolo and Mantua ended with the War of the Spanish Succession. However, the social and cultural influence they had accumulated lasted longer. Through their family connections, the relatives of the former imperial envoy contributed to the pervasive adoption of the Italian language and way of life, which had become established among the upper classes of Austria, Bohemia and Hungary and remained dominant throughout the reign of Emperor Leopold I.
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Terentieva, Ekaterina. "The French Court Historical Writing as a Form of Manifestation of the Royal Power (Late 16th — First Half of 17th Century)." ISTORIYA 13, no. 1 (111) (2022): 0. http://dx.doi.org/10.18254/s207987840018884-1.

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The present paper argues that the French historical writing in the late sixteenth and in the first half of the seventeenth century became a form of manifestation of the French royal power. The integrated scientific approach chosen in this research permits the author to draw several new conclusions concerning the multiplicity of forms of publicity of the French absolute monarchy. Three main aspects are in question: the institutional (or socio-political) one, the aspect of publishing specific in early modern Europe, and the substantial aspect of the historical discourse of the epoch. The existence of the court office of the royal historiographer (historiographe du roi) itself was a form of manifestation of the French royal power as it symbolized the special assignment of historical knowledge to the crown. Another visible form of manifestation of the French royal power connected with the historical writing of the epoch was the form of existence of works consecrated to historical subjects, i.e. the peculiarities of design of the editions of historical writings. Finally, the subject area of historical works in question were also related to the manifestation of the strengthening absolute monarchy. The court historical writing in early modern France evolved in tight connection with the erudite intellectual movement. Thus, however diverse the erudite movement had been, its massive current was deeply connected with the crown and its different ambitions — from uniting territories and gaining fidelity of its subjects to glorifying the French kings and controlling all the spheres of political and cultural life in the kingdom.
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Fluda-Krokos, Agnieszka. "The Cultural Heritage of Printing in the 15-18th Centuries as Digital Resources – a Reconnaissance." Perspektywy Kultury 26, no. 3 (October 1, 2019): 169–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.35765/pk.2019.2603.13.

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Digitization as an element of technological development has contributed to the removal of many information barriers related to access to the achievements of writing and printing culture. Thanks to numerous programs of developing and subsidizing work on intellectual property, digital libraries, museums and archives have been created, offering access to their collections online. Digital forms of priceless manuscripts, old prints, documents of social life and other manifestations of culture are not only a way of conservation and preservation of the originals or the presentation of library magazines, but also sources for research. The content of the Digital Library Federation – DLF, which associates 138 data providers, will be used as an example of digitized old prints along with ways of describing, searching, displaying results and special addons that make their use simple and effective. As a result of the research, 38,629 items marked as old prints were found in the database, supplied by 38 institutions, the most numerous being those provided by the Jagiellonian Digital Library and the Lower Silesia Digital Library, with the predominance of 18th and 17th century and Latin and Polish prints.
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Andler, Martin. "Jean Leray. 7 November 1906 — 10 November 1998." Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 52 (January 2006): 137–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2006.0011.

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Jean Leray was one of the major mathematicians of the twentieth century. His primary focus in mathematics came from applications; indeed, a majority of his contributions were in the theory of partial differential equations arising in physics, notably his 1934 paper on the Navier–Stokes equation. World War II, during which he was a prisoner–of–war in Austria for five years, induced him to turn to pure mathematics to avoid helping the German war effort. There he worked in topology, developing two radically new ideas: sheaf theory and spectral sequences. After 1950 he came back to partial differential equations and became interested in complex analysis, writing a remarkable series of papers on the Cauchy problem. Leray remained mathematically active until the end of his life; in the course of his career he wrote 132 papers. His influence on present mathematics is tremendous. On the one hand, sheaf theory and spectral sequences became essential tools in contemporary pure mathematics, reaching far beyond their initial scope in topology. On the other hand, Leray can rightly be considered the intellectual guide of the distinguished French school of applied mathematics.
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Sériot, Patrick. "Is language a system of signs? Lenin, Saussure and the theory of hieroglyphics." Sign Systems Studies 50, no. 1 (June 1, 2022): 143–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/sss.2022.50.1.08.

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This paper strives to pursue two goals at the same time: how can one get to know in depth the intellectual life of the USSR in the 1930s–1950s; and, what can the virulent anti-Saussurean criticism in Russia at that time tell us about the specificity of the Marxist-Leninist theory of signs? We propose the following angle of attack: the recurring theme of this criticism, namely that Saussure’s Cours presents a “theory of hieroglyphics”, therefore a type of “bourgeois idealist” theory that Lenin assailed in his 1909 book Materialism and Empiriocriticism about Ernst Mach. Yet thinking about hieroglyphics is based on much older controversies, dating back to the 17th century and concerning the deciphering of Egyptian writing. The issue which arises here is semiotic in nature: it is the scalar opposition between transparency and opacity of the sign that is at stake. Does the sign hide or reveal? The Soviet discourse on language and signs in the 1930s–1950s seems to be based on an interrogation of the sign/referent, language/ thought, form/content relationship. A part of the history of semiotics can thus be discovered from the critique of the “hieroglyphic theory”, a little-known episode in a debate on the interpretation of Saussurism.
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Moros, Larysa. "Panteleimon Kulish’s Dramaturgy: Historical and Spiritual-Philosophical Features." Слово і Час, no. 10 (October 16, 2019): 44–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.33608/0236-1477.2019.10.44-51.

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The paper explores the ground of the ideas, plots, and schemes of conflicts in ideological dramas by P. Kulish. The two of them are conditionally symbolic while the other three are based on real historical material. The libretto of the musical performance “A Woman from the Farmstead, or Singing Praise to the Bride in front of the Wedding Guests” and multifaceted drama “Herod’s Trouble” show combination of biblical, i. e. international, elements, while the latter also contains traditional folklore features of the Ukrainian Nativity Play. The other group of works makes up the trilogy, although P. Kulish interprets the selected topics in different ways and every time uses special literary techniques. The tragedy “Baida, Prince Vyshnevetskyi” depicts the conflict between the real historical figure, who was the founder of the regular Cossack army and folklore character, and representative of the Cossack poor, therefore between the knightly and lumpen forces. The heroes of the drama “Petro Sahaidachnyi” are prominent figures of the Ukrainian authorities, church, and culture of the 17th century, so the main conflict is determined by the concern for the development of cultural life; it unfolds in intellectual and philosophical sphere. The characters reflect on the problems of confrontation, combination of faith and science, possibility of spiritual or political struggle, etc. The ‘Old Ruthenian’ drama “Tsar Nalyvai” (the action takes place in the hot 1596) is the most dynamic; it has the most elaborate intrigue, but here the focus is rather on the deep symbolic language than on revealing the emotional or intellectual world of the characters. There are also some common features in all the dramas by Kulish. The author interpreted historical events estimated as the most important in a way of ideological conflict, combining historical phenomena and figures with symbolic (biblical and folklore) images and details.
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Nowak, Alicja Z. "Starość nie tylko latami mierzona w ruskiej literaturze żałobnej XVII wiek." Slavica Wratislaviensia 163 (March 17, 2017): 337–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.19195/0137-1150.163.29.

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Senescence counted not only in yearsin Ruthenian mourning literature 17th centuryIn Ukrainian and Belarusian 17th century literature of mourning there is no one common to all the authors vision of old age. It was presented as adifficult state, filled with suffering and even dangerous for those whom mental and bodily weakness prevented the holding of penance-delayed too long. At the same time, this grim vision coexisted with the optimistic picture of the autumn of life active and fruitful in creative activities. Old age was the penalty for sin, but also one way of moving away from him and sourcing selection everlasting. Old age was sometimes synonymous with maturity, wisdom, young people, could be asymbol of duration in sin.Despite that dra ws certain tendency to recognition of the topic related to the fact that these considerations were partly subordinated to panegyric, and above all pastoral goal. Traditional mourning for the composition elements: to show the size of the loss, mourning the dead or solace grief of the living, most often occur as acomponent of moral exhortations and instructions. The explanation of this trend must be sought in an environment of contemporary authors’ funeral compositions. They were mainly representatives of the intellectual elite of clerical: priests, bishops and archimandrites; church reformers at the same time, cultural activists, workers and publisher. So those who took on their shoulders the renewal of religious life and spiritual and cultural life in The Metropolitanate of Kiev, realizing it and by disseminated in mourning texts role models and moral attitude.Старість не тільки роками вилічуванав руській траурній літературі 17 століттяВ українській та білоруській жалобній літературі 17-го століття відсутнє спільне для всіх авторів бачення старості. Вона зображена передусім як складний стан, наповнений стражданням, особливо небезпечний для тих, кому психічна та тілесна слабість не дозволила здійснити надто довго відкладуваного покаяння. Водночас цей похмурий образ співіснував з оптимістичною картиною осени життя — активної і плідної творчою діяльністю. Старість була водночас покаранням за гріх, засобом відходу від нього і здобування доброї вічності. Іноді — синонімом зрілості, мудрості молодих, або символом гріховного існування.Попри ці суперечності у підході до проблеми старості можна простежити певну тенденцію використання теми. Вона пов’язана з фактом часткового її підпорядкування панегіричній та, перш за все, пастирській меті. Традиційні елементи траурних композицій: зазначення розміру втрати, оплакування померлого, заспокоєння душевного болю живих — найчастіше виступають як компоненти моральних настанов та інструкцій.Пояснення цієї тенденції слід шукати в середовищі авторів — в основному представників інтелектуальної еліти, насамперед духовної єпископи, ігумени та архімандрити, в той же час церковних реформаторів, культурних діячів, видавців. Отже, це були подвижники оновлення релігійного та духовно-культурного життя в Київській Митрополії, які реалізували його, між іншим, шляхом поширення в траурних текстах життєвих взірців та зразків моральної поведінки.
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Usenko, Igor. "Viktor Novytsky: an attempt at a scientific biography." Yearly journal of scientific articles “Pravova derzhava”, no. 32 (2021): 119–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.33663/0869-2491-2021-32-119-131.

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Introduction. Victor Izmailovich Novytsky played a significant role in the life of the pre-war Ukrainian Academy, in the development of historical and legal science and archival affairs. He was a researcher of the Commission for the study of Western Russian and Ukrainian law of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and scientist-archivist of the Kyiv Central Archive of Ancient Acts. In 1938, the scientist was shot on falsified charges, and his creative legacy was artificially withdrawn from scientific circulation. It seems that the time has come to restore justice to the scientist and to give a proper assessment of his scientific achievements. The aim of the article. The reconstruction of the scientist's biography, clarification of the composition and evaluation of its scientific heritage. Results. The life and creative activity of V. I. Novytsky, a Kyiv intellectual in the third generation, was markedly influenced by his family and the city environment, his participation in the propaganda work of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party during his high school and university years. He was persecuted by the tsar for participating in the student movement, later became a member of the Ukrainian Central Rada (Central Council of Ukraine). Before the revolution, the researcher, doing science at his own expense, became an author оf a priority work on the history of the nobility of the 16th and 17th centuries. At the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences he prepared a number of problematic works on the history of Ukrainian law, in particular, of historiographical and methodological nature, developed the views of Mykhailo Hrushevsky on the stages of development of the law of the Ukrainian people. As a historian and archivist he was a profound connoisseur of act books, the author of interesting explorations of historical and geographical nature. Conclusion. The life destiny of V. I. Novytsky, a jurist and historian of the first third of the twentieth century, seems quite instructive, and his creative achievements are still not really appreciated. Researchers have yet to return a number of his scientific works to scientific circulation, to fill numerous gaps in the biography of the scientist.
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Silantieva, M. "Diego Velázquez's Kings, Buffoons and Philosophers in the Context of His Religious Paintings: the View from Russia (Philosophical-Anthropological Analysis)." MGIMO Review of International Relations, no. 2(35) (April 28, 2014): 271–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.24833/2071-8160-2014-2-35-271-284.

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The article is dedicated to the analysis of philosophic anthropology of the great Spanish artist of the 17th century Diego Velazquez. This anthropology is considered through the prism of the problems that set the life of contemporary Russia and its "reflections" in the present-day Russian artists' works. At that Velazquez's philosophical anthropology is reconstructed on the basis of his works. As a consequence, significant part of attention is paid to the method that allows performing such reconstruction. The author proceeds from the belief according to which not only written texts can be considered philosophically. The visual "texts" connected with certain world outlook component of art creative work undoubtedly possess definite semantics. Expressed by the language of art, such image lines contain intelligible sense component reconstruction of which can be subjected to strict scientific and philosophical analysis and corrected with its help. At that one should not think that the images are "translated" into "the text of words" - on the contrary, philosophical reconstruction implies not as "verbalization" of visual line as coherent to it logical mastering of the picture's sense (in this case) against the background of historical and historical-philosophical "scenery". The urgency of turning to this problem is brought about by the fact that a number of questions that found vivid and coherent (as philosophical-anthropological research shows) embodiment in Velazquez's creative work are extremely interesting for contemporary thinkers speaking the language of contemporary fine arts. "The topic of mirror" is among such questions and it deals with correlation of intellectual and rational in a person's consciousness, and, finally, there is the issue of the man as a bearer of moral principles. Comparison of attitudes shown by contemporary painting with Velazquez's ideas enables to trace the development of philosophical anthropology and in the area of its most significant categories - the man, society, consciousness, corporality, creative work, etc.
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Kołtan, Jacek, and Anna Sobecka. "Martwa natura Philippa Sauerlanda i narodziny nowoczesnej podmiotowości." Porta Aurea, no. 19 (December 22, 2020): 96–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.26881/porta.2020.19.04.

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The Allegory of Transience by Philipp Sauerland (Gdańsk 1677 – Wrocław 1762), an artist specializing in still life and animal painting, was purchased in 2015 by the National Museum in Gdańsk. The painting allows us to deepen our knowledge of Sauerland’s artistic roots, as well as the interpretation of the painting in the socio-cultural context of the development of Europe in the early 18th century. In the paper a thesis is put forward about the Leiden sources of Sauerland’s work, which are connected with the painting tradition of the so-called fijnschilders, especially the work of Willem van Mieris. In the first decade of the 18th century, Sauerland painted The Young Woman in the Kitchen Interior, surrounded by perfectly rendered victuals, showing a similar gesture as in the famous painting by Van Mieris The Mouse Trap. In the signed painting from a private collection in New York, Sauerland chose historical themes. He presented a rare scene of David Giving Uriah a Letter to Joab. The painting refers to two famous works by Pieter Lastmann, but it is placed in an architectural set design analogous to Van Mieris’s paintings. An important element of the Allegory of Transience, in turn, is the relief visible by sliding down a carpet. This motif is also taken from the work of Van Mieries, but the iconography of the sculptural representation refers to Gerard de Lairesse’s print showing Chronos prevented by Prudence from destroying the statues. Sauerland is therefore close to the artists from Leiden in terms of the choice of themes, motifs, and the way they are painted. He also usually used a similar format of paintings. Like Van Mieris, the artist from Gdańsk signed his works with longer inscriptions. Although references to the Leydians are obvious in Sauerland’s early works, he does not make copies of their works, but focusing on the still life genre, he transforms them in his own style. The second thesis of our essay is related to the transformation of vanitas motifs, which in Sauerland’s work reveal their secularized character. The traditional symbolism of transience, which draws on religion, is replaced by the ideas of rationalism, accompanied by the idea of reason that opens a possibility of overcoming sensual and emotional limitations. The work becomes an expression of emancipatory processes that take place at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries in European culture. Referring to the philosophical work of Baruch Spinoza (notion of knowledge), we interpret Sauerland’s work as an expression of the emerging modern ideal of freedom, which was based on a rationalistic paradigm. It is thanks to wisdom (sapientia) that the subject is able to transcend the reality of the sensual guise. In the last part of the text we point to the important role of practical wisdom (prudentia) and art (ars) in the process of liberalization that accompanied the social changes of the time. Using illusionism, Sauerland proposes an interpretative key to the viewer: the meaning of life is complemented by art: by making art, understanding art, or collecting artworks, the rational man can free himself from the fear of his own finiteness. The function of this still life is not to remind us of death, but to point out that contemplation of art is an intellectual and spiritual exercise that allows us to find the right attitude to life.
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Zimmermann, Reinhard. "Codification: history and present significance of an idea – À propos the recodification of private law in the Czech Republic." European Review of Private Law 3, Issue 1 (March 1, 1995): 95–120. http://dx.doi.org/10.54648/erpl1995004.

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Abstract. In his lecture presented at the opening of a symposium on the recodification of Czech Private Law the author first analyses the characteristic features of a codification. He then examines in which ways and for which reasons the idea of a civil code managed, from the late 17th century onwards, to recast the entire civilian tradition. The author argues that, contrary to a widely held view (‘decodificazione’), even today codification is not an outdated concept. It constitutes an intellectual effort to look at private law as a systematic whole. In view of the increasing particularization of modern legal science and of the hectic activity of the modem legislator, this kind of focus appears to be even more desirable today than ever before. It is, however, important to beware of exaggerated and unrealistic expectations. More particularly, no codification can ever hope to be comprehensive in a narrow sense of that word. It has to be brought to life, and has to be kept in tune with the changing demands of time, by active and imaginative judicial interpretation and doctrinal elaboration. Sensible draftsmen of a code will therefore exercise considerable self-restraint so as to provide the basis not for confrontation but for an alliance between legislation and legal science. They will also acknowledge the limitations of their power imposed upon them by the tradition within which they operate. The author finally turns his attention to how the actual process of recodification of Czech private law may be organized. He suggests, inter alia, that one of the existing European civil codes should serve as a model. Résumé. Dans sa conftrence tenue à l’occasion d’un symposium concemant la nouvelle codification du droit privé tchèque, l’auteur en analyse d’abord les caractéristiques. Ensuite, il continue en examinant de quelle façon et pour quelles raisons la codification des droits, à partir du 17ème siècle, a réorganisé la tradition du droit privé dans toute l’Europe continentale. S’opposant à une opinion répandue (‘decodificazione’), l’auteur pense que l’idée d’une codification est toujours actuelle. Elle représente un effort intellectuel qui consiste à comprendre le droit privé en un tout systématique. La spécialization croissante du droit et l’augmentation ‘fiévreuse’ de activité législative de nos jours exige, selon l’auteur, un effort de codification plus nécessaire que jamais. Cependant, on ne doit pas placer ses espérances trop haut. Notamment, une codification ne peut pas embrasser tous les domaines, elle doit laisser le champ libre à la jurisprudence et la doctrine qui sont tenues de l’adapter perpétuellement à l’évolution des données économiques et sociales. Le nouveau code devra également respecter la tradition juridique dont il fait partie. Enfin, l’auteur porte son attention sur le procès qui est fait actuellement en République tchèque à la recodification du droit privé. Il propose, entre autres, de prendre pour modble le code civil existant de l’un des pays europkens.
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Razumovska, Aīda, Anastasija Cepina, and Ņikita Jefimovs. "“EVERYTHING STARTS HERE…”: REZHITSK–PSKOV ORIGINS OF THECREATIVE PERSONALITY OF YURY TYNIANOV." Via Latgalica, no. 6 (December 31, 2014): 111. http://dx.doi.org/10.17770/latg2014.6.1662.

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<p>Yury Tynyanov is an outstanding scientist, writer, translator, one of the founders of the formal school in literary criticism. The article is devoted to the role of two cities – Rēzekne and Pskov – in the destiny of Tynyanov. These are place, where the writer spent his childhood and youth. Kaverin’s statement refers to both cities: “Tynyanov paid attention to his childhood, which was following him slowly but steadily.”</p><p>Tynyanov’s memoirs, reminiscences of his friends and contemporaries provide an interesting material for analysis. Child’s impressions are reflected in writer’s autobiography. It is connected with daily life of Rezhitsa (Rēzekne) and its inhabitants. Primarily, author’s attention was drawn to people – the representatives of different nationalities and social stratums, who retained their cultural traditions and mode of life: “The town was small, hilly and very different.</p><p>On the hill there were the ruins of Livonian castle, Jewish alleys were below, and beyond the river there was a schismatic skit. At the same time there lived Jews, Belarusians, Great Russians and Latvians, and there were several centuries and countries. Old Believers were like Surikov archers. In the skit there was celebrated a wedding on rabid horses.</p><p>Russian people of the 17th century were walking there; old men were wearing long coats, wide-brimmed hats; beards were like sharp, long icicles. Drunkenness was archaic and often ended up with riding.”</p><p>Tynyanov strived to understand thoughts, characters and essence of people. Drawing portraits of townspeople from memory, the writer noted some details, which are important for understanding human’s nature. These descriptions can be called psychological.</p><p>With such a desire to cognize human’s soul it is no wonder that little Tynyanov mostly was interested in people, who were out of the crowd, standing below the norm not only socially, but also psychologically. Rezhitsa gave him amazing material for observation: “There were a lot of crazy and eccentric people in the town. They amused everyone. One young Jew stamped his feet in front of the photoshop’s showcase which he stared at, yelling: “My dear, look straight at me!” A crazy woman was driving a brood of her children – they grew in number from year to year. Went without Karamazov.”</p><p>Tynyanov described a lot of astonishing people, remembering his hometown. He remembered the names of many of them: Kolia Topolev, who wasted all money on cabs and became a tramp, Mishka Posadskii – terrible, one-handed, looked like a cautious, confident beast of unknown breed, and Crazy Nikolay – so exact that hostess checked on him, whether it is time to start preparing porridge.</p><p>From his childhood’s observations Tynyanov began his way to become one of the most extraordinary researchers and a peerless writer. He had an amazing ability to take the shape of another person like an actor. He could see what he feels, what he is thinking about and what the matters of his behaviour are. He could become this person for a while, whether it is tramp or Pushkin himself or Griboyedov. Taking into consideration the fact, which can be observed in reality or taken from a historical document, Tynyanov was able to go further, to go under the surface, to feel intuitively the condition of a person. He formulated his method this way: “I start where the document ends.”</p><p>The role of Pskov in Tynyanov’s life has also played a significant role, because places had always had a great impact on the writer and had shaped the identity, future, as well as the literary taste of the philologist. In Pskov, during the years of studying at school, Tynyanov gained his first friends, began to learn Russian and foreign literature. Everyday life of the city itself, i. e., its weekdays and holidays influenced the philologist’s future: “Since that time I got to know Russian province.” A particular attention in the autobiography is paid to prisons and convicts, but still the determining factor in the perception of the city is an amazing atmosphere of intellectual and artistic freedom.</p>
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Sulyak, S. G. "V.A. Frantsev and Carpathian Rus." Rusin, no. 64 (2021): 89–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.17223/18572685/64/5.

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Frantsev Vladimir Andreevich (April 4 (16), 1867 – March 19, 1942) – a Russian Slavicist, who authored more than 300 works on Slavic studies. He graduated from a Warsaw grammar school, then studied in the Imperial Warsaw University. In 1893–1895, V. Frantsev made several journeys abroad with the academic pupose. In 1895, he began to prepare for the master’s degree. In 1897, he went abroad and spent three years there. In 1899, V.A. Frantsev made a trip to Ugrian Rus, after which published an article “Review of the most important studies of Ugric Rus” in the Russian Philological Bulletin (1901, Nr. 1–2) in Warsaw. During his trip, V.A. Frantsev met and subsequently maintained contacts with prominent figures in the revival of Ugrian Rus. In 1899, he became Associate Professor of the Department of the History of Slavic Dialects and Literatures of the Imperial Warsaw University, in 1903 – an extraordinary professor, in 1907 – an ordinary professor. In 1900–1921, V.A. Frantsev lectured at the University of Warsaw, which in 1915 moved to Rostov-on-Don in connection with WWI. Teaching actively at the University, he devoted his free time to archival studies, working mainly in the Slavic lands of Austria-Hungary, where he went “for summer vacations” from 1901 to 1914. Sometimes he continued his work during the winter vacations and Easter holidays, as in 1906/07 and in 1907/08, when the university did not function due to student unrest. V.A. Frantsev reported to the “Society of History, Philology and Law” at the University of Warsaw, of which he was an active participant. In 1902–1907, Frantsev published almost all of his major works (except P.Y. Shafarik’s correspondence, published much later). Among them were his master’s thesis “An Essay on the History of the Czech Renaissance” (Warsaw, 1902), doctoral dissertation “Polish Slavic Studies in the late 18th and first quarter of the 19th century” (Prague, 1906), “Czech dramatic works of the 16th – 17th centuries” (Warsaw, 1903), etc. In 1909, during heated discussions on the future structure of Chełm-Podlasie Rus, he published “Maps of the Russian and Orthodox population of Chełm Rus with statistical tables”. In 1913, V.A. Frantsev became a member of the Czech Royal Society of Sciences. Since 1915, he was a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in the Department of Russian Language and Literature. He did not accept the October Revolution, yet never publicly opposed the new government. At the end of 1919, he received an offer from the Council of Professors of the Prague Charles University (Czechoslovakia) to head the Russian branch of the Slavic Seminar. In Czechoslovakia, he became a professor at Charles University. In 1927, he took Czechoslovak citizenship. V.A. Frantsev’s life was associated with the Russian emigration. He was a full member and chairman of the Russian Institute, as well as chairman of the “Russian Academic Group in Czechoslovakia”, deputy chairman of the “Union of Russian Academic Organizations Abroad”, a member of the Commission for the Study of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus. In 1924, the Uzhhorod “A. Dukhnovich Cultural and Educational Society” republished V.A. Frantsev’s From the Renaissance Era of Ugric Rus under the title On the Question of the Literary Language of Subcarpathian Rus and a brief From the History of Writing in Subcarpathian Rus (1929). In 1930, The Carpathian Collection was published in Uzhhorod, with Frantsev “From the history of the struggle for the Russian literary language in Subcarpathian Rus” in the preface. He spent his last years in Czechoslovakia occupied by Nazi Germany. V.A. Frantsev died on March 19, 1942, a few days before his 75th birthday. He is buried in the Olshansk cemetery in Prague.
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Poulsen, Karen Løkkegaard. "Oldsagssamlinger på danske herregårde." Kuml 50, no. 50 (August 1, 2001): 71–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/kuml.v50i50.103118.

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Collections of antiquities on Danish manorsBefore the establishment of the public museum system and during its first phase after 1807, important activity concerning the relics of antiquity was managed by the estates (fig. 3). This resulted in the creation of collections with varied contents, including Danish antiquities. These were either bought or found within the estate district as was the case with the pieces of ”danefæ”, which the peasants found and brought to the manor (according to a decree from 1737, all treasures found in the Danish soil must be handed over to the king or – later – the state. Such finds are called” danefæ”). It is notable that the collection of danefæ took place according to a decentralised structure, as described in King Frederik V’s public notice from 1752, which also stated that a reward is given in return. According to this, the king delegated his right to collect danefæ to counts and barons, who could then again pass it on and cash the reward. The danefæ became the nucleus in many collections (fig. 4). This category of landowners kept their central position to archaeological work for a long time. Their right to collect danefæ lasted until 1853, and the practice of delivering antiquities found on the estate at the manor went on until modern times.The early museum collections, the kunstkammers and collections of curios of the 17th and 18th centuries, are well described in the literature on museum history. However, only little attention has been paid to the collections of the 19th and early 20th centuries. For instance, the collections of Broholm on Fyn (fig. 9), of Nr. Vosbjerg in Western Jutland, of Brattingsborg on Samsø, and of Valbygaard (fig. 1) and Lerchenborg on Sjælland have all been thoroughly described, but only individually (note 5), not as a phenomenon. This article is based on information from a few selected archives supplemented by spot tests involving a number of manors and several museums in areas with many estates (note 14). ln spite of the limitations induced by the source material it is the aim of the article to throw light on as many collections as possible to reach a general view. The article focuses on the manor collections as a phenomenon and on the museum development and museum traditions to which these collections belong , with the emphasis on the 19th and early 20th centuries.The article is based on two archives,Victor Hermansen’s papers in the Royal Library, indicated in the lists I-V with the signature of ”gl. Bib. VH” and the part of the report archive in the National Museum / Danish Prehistory, listed as ”NM, Oldtiden”, which contains the private collections. The material has been described using five time references: Before 1807 (list I); 1807-1848 (list II); 1848-1892 (list III); and finally 1892-1919 and 1919- the present time (both in list IV) (fig. 2). The time divisions were the result of an overall evaluation of the material, the type of collections and the intellectual, mental and social motives behind the collecting activity. Although the types of collections from different periods overlap and late examples of early collection types do occur, it is still obvious that the ideal for collector’s activity changed in the course of time.The review begins with the period 1807-1848, at the start of which the ”Royal Commission to the Safe keeping of Antiquities” was to become the foundation stone of the public museum system.1807-1848: landowners and others put much work into the issue, which the ”Commission” had been appointed to safeguarding. Danish artefacts were collected as never before. A flow of artefacts arrived at the collection in the capital from several landowners on Fyn and elsewhere. As in the beginning of the previous period, the landowners were also taking part in excavations, in protecting relics of antiquity and in publishing archaeological treatises.1848-1892:The public museum services were established. The new keeper of the Danish antiquities, the archaeologist J.J.A. Worsaae travelled the country to collect information, and he specifically contacted the landowners, knowing that these were key figures within archaeological research (fig. 5 and 10). Consequently, the landowners changed the way they dealt with archaeology in line with the development of the profession as initiated by Worsaae, who went in the direction of a more scholarly method and a dissociation of philosophy and history, which had been closely connected to archaeology. King Frederik VII’s (1848-1863) personal interest in archaeology had a positive influence on the development of the profession and contributed to its growing popularity among the landowners and the public.1892-1919: This period began with the Old Nordic Museum changing its name into the National Museum, and Sophus Müller becoming its curator. The landowners continued their archaeological activity, especially on those estates, which had a tradition for this (fig. 6). However, in the correlation between these archaeologically interested and active landowners, the National Museum gained more authority due to its growing expertise. Not only did the museum engage itself in the landowners’ investigations, it also took over the work and continued it on its own terms. But at the same time the museum staff showed appropriate consideration to the landowners, who according to the constitution had the right of owners hip to extensive areas with artefacts and relics of the past. Cooperation was necessary for the growth of the profession. The landowners had unlimited rights to those finds of artefacts and structures that were not danefæ or listed relics. However, the registers of the National Museum from this time show that after the excavation, the landowner often gave the finds to the museum.This period also saw conflicts between the provincial museums and the National Museum, caused by Sophus Müller’s policy of a centralised museum structure, which gave the provincial museums little liberty of action (note 7). We lack a coherent description of the private artefact collectors’ part in this game. A closer examination of some of them, such as Beck on Valbygaard, the private collectors associated with the museum in Odense, and Collet on Lundbygaard suggests that they were sometimes on one, sometimes on the other front in this controversy (note 9 and 47).After 1919: In 1919, the privileges and special duties of the nobility were cancelled, a development parallelled in the rest of Central, East and Northern Europe. The advanced position in the government previously held by this social class had ended to be replaced by the public sector of the democratic society of which the modern museum system forms a part. However, some estates carried on the tradition of building up collections of artefacts even in this period, and a few landowners opened museums on their estates (fig. 7). These are late activities in the long tradition of archaeological activity on the manors. Both in this periods and the previous one, the interest in collecting artefacts spread down the hierarchy of the manors to the employees and to the farmers on the small holdings. Today almost every family holding owns a collection of artefacts found on the property.To throw light on the changing intellectual context of which the artefact collections on the manors formed part, from the collections of the late Renaissance until the present, the article includes the collections of curios and minerals from the 17th and 18th centuries (list I). Most royal and princely courts in Europe had a kunstkammer with a wideranging content. The archive information used for this article has shown that in Denmark in the 19th century, these collections were not exclusively connected to the nobility or the manors. It is a common trait that the collector was a learned person, an academic or a high official or a well- educated nobleman with or without property. To agree with this, both in Denmark and internationally, a well-equipped library was attached to the collection as a fixed element (fig. 8). Some kunstkammers were attached to grammar schools, orphanages and student hostels. Through purchase and sale parts of the collections changed owner and location from time to time, as for instance the collection of Jesper Friis, which can be followed in written so urces from the 17th century through the following centuries and for a couple of items even into the antique collection of the National Museum.Around 1800, the Romantic Movement and the national currents increased the interest in Danish arte facts and relics of the past. Via folk high school education, which was inspired by the Nordic mythology and attached importance to the prehistory and early history of the nation, this interest spread into the population. As opposed to the earlier collections, which formed part of a learned environment characterised by a classical, humanistic education, the many manor collections, which had their prime in the period of c. 1860-1919, formed part of a practical agronomy universe, where demanding farming techniques were pushed into effect and where hunting and outdoor life was an important part of life. At the same time the landowners put much strength into renovating buildings and erecting fine manor complexes, a natural consequence of the wealth that originated from the corn sales. In an era where natural sciences and practical trades were given pride of place, the turn of archaeology away from the old humanistic method and tradition within philology and history towards the exact sciences will have contributed to the populariry of the profession.The private collections of artefacts have a larger professional and intellectual value than what is usually attributed to them. They were made at a time when the creation of rype collections of artefacts, suites, were in fashion. Information on find conditions and contexts are therefore rare. In the 20th century, professional archaeologists valued these collections according to the presence of find information, and so many of them were split through exchange. The fact that many of these artefacts were from the time before the parish accounts (a registering of relics of the past initiated by the National Museum) and thus – when it comes to the local artefacts – told of the relics of the past that had been situated on the estate earlier, but had been demolished in the early, active farming years of the first half of the 19th century. Also, the ethnological value of these collections has been disregarded.The article ends with considerations as to the public / the private. Nowadays these two notions create two separate rooms. ICOM’s ethical rules for museums have a clear definition, stating that a professional museum activiry is in compatible with private collecting activity.The history of the private collections of arte facts throws light on the development from the time before the public sector, when landowners and other private persons were supporting archaeology and the public museum initiative economically, politically and professionally. The profession developed from here and in a continued interaction between the professionals and the private collectors. Even when today there is a clear distinction between public and private, there are some interesting reminiscences left. Without the contribution and support of the public, archaeology would have difficult conditions.Karen Løkkegaard PoulsenMariboTranslated by Annette Lerche Trolle
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Nikitin, Andrii. "Philosophical context in the work of Sergei Zoruk." Research and methodological works of the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture, no. 29 (December 17, 2020): 46–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.33838/naoma.29.2020.46-53.

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S. Zoruk was a bright representative of the artistic circle with an original view and individual ap- proach to art. His innovative methodological theories on academic drawing are organically included in the concept of scientific and methodological base of the Department of Drawing NAOMA and drawing school in general. S. Zoruk constantly studied and improved the technique of drawing, built his personal style. It is in the pictorial compositions that his authorial style with an emphatically refined aesthetic and philosophical subtext is most vividly revealed. The line, the stroke, the spot are combined and intertwined, creating elegant images of his paintings. His style of drawing is characterized by a light, free line. It is extremely interesting to see the evolution of the Zoruk artist: "Game-4" (1991), "Breath of the Wind" (1993), diptychs "Farewell to the Hat" (1993) on carnival themes and "Time to scatter stones, time to collect stones" (1993) for biblical motives. They are made in the technique of drawing. Thanks to the compositional techniques of including large sizes of clean planes of paper and the clarity of the line, the artist achieves the effect when the viewer’s imagination continues to paint the plastic life of the image. S. Zoruk’s creative style is characterized by refinement and detail of the image, elegance and lightness of the line and, at the same time, there is a pause, a colon in the story, which gives space for plot fantasizing. An important place in the artist’s creative activity was occupied by his teaching work, which he began in 1989 at the Department of Drawing KDHI. He alternately taught drawing at the Faculty of Architecture, and later at the restoration, theater, and graphic departments. He took a direct part in the forma- tion of the scientific and theoretical basis for the methods of teaching drawing and introduced methodological development, namely "Double productions in the 5th year" in the working program of the drawing. The level of professional qualification of the artist was marked in 1986 by admission to the National Academy of Arts, the rank — Honored Artist of Ukraine (1996), in 2000 the academic rank of associate professor, and since 2003 S. Zoruk held the position of professor. He successfully combined pedagogical and exhibition activities, repeatedly visited and collaborated with art galleries in Suzhou, Wu Xi (PRC). He has about 40 exhibitions in Ukraine and abroad. His works are in the funds of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, the museum "Kachanivka" and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Kaliningrad), in private collections in the Netherlands, Russia, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, USA, China. S. Zoruk’s creative and pedagogical activity were awarded in 2002 by the award of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine "For out- standing merits in the development of culture and art". Philosophical sound in combination with intellectual- ism, together with high professional skill gave S. Zoruk’s works of extraordinary artistic value, made them an important phenomenon of Ukrainian art of the last quarter of the XX — beginning of the XXI century. His works have a sense of the space of the theatrical stage: the images, which is raised up to generalization are united by a certain game moment, the artist slowly unfolds in front of the spectator the dramaturgy of the plot, leaving a field for his own interpretations.
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Monahan, Michael, and Thomas Ricks. "Introduction." Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 2, no. 1 (November 15, 1996): 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.36366/frontiers.v2i1.20.

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Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad continues to seek thought-provoking manuscripts, insightful essays, well-researched papers, and concise book reviews that may provide the profession of study abroad an intellectual charge, document some of the best thinking and innovative programming in the field, create an additional forum for dialogue among colleagues in international education, and ultimately enrich our perspectives and bring greater meaning to our work. In this issue, Frontiers focuses on one of the most compelling themes of interest among international educators: learning outside the home society and culture. Through the researched articles, we hope to engage you in further thinking and discussion about the ways we learn in other societies and cultures; the nature of such learning and the features that make it distinctive from learning in one's home culture; the methods, techniques, and best practices of such learning; and the integration of learning abroad into the broader context of the "internationalization" of the home campus. Brian J. Whalen's lead article in this edition of the journal develops our theme by providing an overview of learning outside the home culture, with particular emphasis on the role that memory plays in this enterprise. Whalen examines the psychological literature and uses case studies to focus on the ways in which students learn about their new society and culture, and about themselves. Hamilton Beck, on the other hand, presents an intriguing study from the life of W. E. B. Du Bois. In examining his Autobiography and Du Bois's three-year stay in Berlin from 1892 to 1894 as a graduate student at the Friedrich Wilhelms-Universitat zu Berlin, Beck uncovers an excellent example of "learning outside one's home society and culture" through the series of social, political, and ideological encounters Du Bois experiences, reflects on, and then remembers. The article ends with several "lessons" learned from late- nineteenth-century Germany that remained with Du Bois for the rest of his life, as shown in his Autobiography and his collection of essays in The Souls of Black Folk. A team of field study and study abroad specialists from Earlham College looks at our theme through the use of ethnography and the techniques of field study for students living and working in Mexico, Austria, and Germany. The article demonstrates through the observations of the students how effective the use of field research methods can be in learning about Mexican social relations and cultural traditions by working in a tortilla factory, or about Austrian social habits and traditions by patronizing a night club and its "intimate society." We are reminded of other methods of strengthening learning outside the home society and culture by the case study of the Canadian students from Ontario who attended a teacher training program at the University of Western Sydney in Australia. Barbara Jo Lantz's review of a recent publication describing the usefulness of an “analytical notebook" in learning outside the home society and culture underscores the importance of journal writing as an integral part of study abroad. While journals have been used before in study abroad learning, Kenneth Wagner and Tony Magistrale's Writing Across Culture points the international educator in new directions and contexts in which journal writing enhances learning. Finally, in our Update section, Wayne Myles examines the uses of technology-including the Internet, homepages, and electronic bulletin boards-as ways of advertising to, networking with, and processing study abroad students and their learning on and off our campuses. Barbara Burn examines the internationalization efforts of our European colleagues through her review of Hans de Wit's edited work Strategies for Internationalisation of Higher Education, while Aaro Ollikainen follows up an earlier article by Hans de Wit (Frontiers, no. 1), with a detailed look at Finland's efforts at internationalization. Joseph R. Stimpfl's thorough annotated bibliography reminds us that there is a legacy of several decades of critical thinking about study abroad and international education to which we are indebted and on which we can build. With this issue, the editorial board is pleased to begin publishing two issues annually of Frontiers. We are interested in interdisciplinary approaches to study abroad as well as critical essays, book reviews, and annotated bibliographies. In building on the work of previous research, and creating a forum for a debate and discussion, we hope that we may begin to define both theoretically and practically the contours of the frontiers of study abroad. Michael Monahan, Macalester College Thomas Ricks, Villanova University
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Krayushkin, N. R. "Феномен «путешествия в поисках знания» в османской культуре." Istoricheskii vestnik, no. 29(2019) part: 29/2019 (October 9, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.35549/hr.2019.2019.47858.

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Abstract In the 16th and 17th centuries Ottoman Turks conquered most countries of the Middle East and North Africa and reached Vienna. As а result, the power of Istanbul was established in the heterogeneous spaces of the Mediterranean. The seized territories in Europe became part of Dar al-Islam, increasing the area of direct spread of the Arab-Muslim spiritual tradition. In this context, the journey in search for knowledge (rihla) acquired special significance it contributed to the intensification of cultural and intellectual life of the Ottoman society and establishment of its ideological unity. The author examines the materials from the treatises of Medina theologian Muhammad Kibrit, Istanbul explorer Evliya Celebi and Damascus Sufi Abd al-Ghani al-Nablusi, who travelled through the territory of the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century, to explore the main pilgrimage routes and cultural centers of the region. The goal of this article is to analyze the content of civilizational exchange and to identify basic characteristics of new Ottoman cultural experience.
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Obladen, Michael. "Exposed and Abandoned. Origins of the Foundling Hospital." Neonatology, December 13, 2022, 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000527837.

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Abandoning undesired newborn infants was a Roman form of family limitation. They were exposed or given to foster mothers. Christianization alleviated their lot when in 374 CE, Emperor Valentinian’s law provided some protection. The Milan Foundling Hospital was established in 787 CE. When the Carolingian Empire fell apart during the 10th century, monastic networks (the Holy Spirit Order and Daughters of Charity) took over social support for the poor, the sick, and the insane. Foundling hospitals proliferated in Italy between the 13th and 15th centuries, in France during the 16th and 17th, and in Germany and Austria in the 18th century. Metropolitan hospices admitted thousands of infants each year. Most were not “found” exposed but were admitted anonymously via a revolving box or registered in an open office. Soon after admission, they were transported for foster care to wet nurses in villages. Sick infants, especially those suspected of suffering from syphilis, were denied the breast, and artificial feeding was tried with little success. Official death statistics were falsified by relating infant deaths not to admissions but to the total number of children cared for. Over 60% died during their first year of life, mostly from pre-admission problems such as malformation, hypothermia, and disease; from poor hygiene in overcrowded wards; and from artificial feeding. Although not intended for that purpose, the hospices became medical research institutions when in late 18th century, physicians and surgeons were employed by maternity and foundling hospitals.
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Tyluś, Urszula. "Kontynuacja myśli pedagogicznej Jana Amosa Komeńskiego w edukacji XXI wieku w kontekście wybranych zagadnień." Siedleckie Zeszyty Komeniologiczne, seria PEDAGIGIKA, no. 8 (November 30, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.34739/szk.2021.08.03.

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John Amos Comenius' views on education do not only have a historical dimension. They belong to the valuable aspects relating to the area of education in the context of the organ-ization of schoolwork, universality of education, arranging the teacher's work with the use of methodologically important teaching principles and working methods, taking into account the intellectual and physical abilities of students. The meaning of the postulated views is humanistic, leaning towards a man and his development possibilities. At the same time, they indicate his a right for a dignified life, which results from the concept of human nature. From the sense and essence of J. A. Comenius' humanistic thinking derives the nature of his timeless ideas, whose message is still valid in the multidimensional education of the 21st century. The aim of the text is to present selected ideas of J. A. Comenius - a scholar from the 17th century, which are still relevant and can be found in contemporary education. In the text, I refer to the selected ideas. I characterize and interpret them, referring to the great works by J. A. Comenius and priority modern educational challenges.
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"French resistance to Weltanschauung." Philosophical Literary Journal Logos 31, no. 5 (2021): 165–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.22394/0869-5377-2021-5-165-186.

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The French have been reluctant to embrace the idea of Weltanschauung. In sharp contrast with the early introduction of the term in Great Britain (both in translation as “worldview” and in German) around the middle of the nineteenth century, there is no evidence that the French used it before 1930. Weltanschauung has often been described as impossible to translate (most notably by Sigmund Freud in his 1932 essay “A Philosophy of Life”). When Weltanschauung was (re)discovered in the 1930s, it was already accompanied by a substantial critical tradition from Austria and Germany by such thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and this framed its reception in France. A striking example is provided by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose comments on the idea of Weltanschauung are directly derived or even quite literally borrowed from Husserl. This chronology also had important political consequences, as Weltanschauung appeared on the French intellectual scene just before Hitler’s takeover and so became inseparable from its Nazi uses and misuses. As a result, even those whose approach to culture came close to the idea of worldview (like the young Albert Camus trying to define a Mediterranean perception of the world) rejected the politically compromised German concept. Last but not least, the in-depth transformation of history as a discipline that took place under the auspices of the Annales school during the same pre-WWII period also contributed to the rejection of Weltanschauung, which could easily appear as a philosophical forerunner of the rising histoire des mentalités and thus dilute its originality and compromise its political integrity.
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Noyce, Diana Christine. "Coffee Palaces in Australia: A Pub with No Beer." M/C Journal 15, no. 2 (May 2, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.464.

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The term “coffee palace” was primarily used in Australia to describe the temperance hotels that were built in the last decades of the 19th century, although there are references to the term also being used to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom (Denby 174). Built in response to the worldwide temperance movement, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s in Australia, coffee palaces were hotels that did not serve alcohol. This was a unique time in Australia’s architectural development as the economic boom fuelled by the gold rush in the 1850s, and the demand for ostentatious display that gathered momentum during the following years, afforded the use of richly ornamental High Victorian architecture and resulted in very majestic structures; hence the term “palace” (Freeland 121). The often multi-storied coffee palaces were found in every capital city as well as regional areas such as Geelong and Broken Hill, and locales as remote as Maria Island on the east coast of Tasmania. Presented as upholding family values and discouraging drunkenness, the coffee palaces were most popular in seaside resorts such as Barwon Heads in Victoria, where they catered to families. Coffee palaces were also constructed on a grand scale to provide accommodation for international and interstate visitors attending the international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888). While the temperance movement lasted well over 100 years, the life of coffee palaces was relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, coffee palaces were very much part of Australia’s cultural landscape. In this article, I examine the rise and demise of coffee palaces associated with the temperance movement and argue that coffee palaces established in the name of abstinence were modelled on the coffee houses that spread throughout Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment—a time when the human mind could be said to have been liberated from inebriation and the dogmatic state of ignorance. The Temperance Movement At a time when newspapers are full of lurid stories about binge-drinking and the alleged ill-effects of the liberalisation of licensing laws, as well as concerns over the growing trend of marketing easy-to-drink products (such as the so-called “alcopops”) to teenagers, it is difficult to think of a period when the total suppression of the alcohol trade was seriously debated in Australia. The cause of temperance has almost completely vanished from view, yet for well over a century—from 1830 to the outbreak of the Second World War—the control or even total abolition of the liquor trade was a major political issue—one that split the country, brought thousands onto the streets in demonstrations, and influenced the outcome of elections. Between 1911 and 1925 referenda to either limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol were held in most States. While moves to bring about abolition failed, Fitzgerald notes that almost one in three Australian voters expressed their support for prohibition of alcohol in their State (145). Today, the temperance movement’s platform has largely been forgotten, killed off by the practical example of the United States, where prohibition of the legal sale of alcohol served only to hand control of the liquor traffic to organised crime. Coffee Houses and the Enlightenment Although tea has long been considered the beverage of sobriety, it was coffee that came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol. When the first coffee house opened in London in the early 1650s, customers were bewildered by this strange new drink from the Middle East—hot, bitter, and black as soot. But those who tried coffee were, reports Ellis, soon won over, and coffee houses were opened across London, Oxford, and Cambridge and, in the following decades, Europe and North America. Tea, equally exotic, entered the English market slightly later than coffee (in 1664), but was more expensive and remained a rarity long after coffee had become ubiquitous in London (Ellis 123-24). The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated. Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. There was also the added benefit that those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert rather than mildly inebriated (Standage 135). It was also thought that coffee had a stimulating effect upon the “nervous system,” so much so that the French called coffee une boisson intellectuelle (an intellectual beverage), because of its stimulating effect on the brain (Muskett 71). In Oxford, the British called their coffee houses “penny universities,” a penny then being the price of a cup of coffee (Standage 158). Coffee houses were, moreover, more than places that sold coffee. Unlike other institutions of the period, rank and birth had no place (Ellis 59). The coffee house became the centre of urban life, creating a distinctive social culture by treating all customers as equals. Egalitarianism, however, did not extend to women—at least not in London. Around its egalitarian (but male) tables, merchants discussed and conducted business, writers and poets held discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments, and philosophers deliberated ideas and reforms. For the price of a cup (or “dish” as it was then known) of coffee, a man could read the latest pamphlets and newsletters, chat with other patrons, strike business deals, keep up with the latest political gossip, find out what other people thought of a new book, or take part in literary or philosophical discussions. Like today’s Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, Europe’s coffee houses functioned as an information network where ideas circulated and spread from coffee house to coffee house. In this way, drinking coffee in the coffee house became a metaphor for people getting together to share ideas in a sober environment, a concept that remains today. According to Standage, this information network fuelled the Enlightenment (133), prompting an explosion of creativity. Coffee houses provided an entirely new environment for political, financial, scientific, and literary change, as people gathered, discussed, and debated issues within their walls. Entrepreneurs and scientists teamed up to form companies to exploit new inventions and discoveries in manufacturing and mining, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution (Standage 163). The stock market and insurance companies also had their birth in the coffee house. As a result, coffee was seen to be the epitome of modernity and progress and, as such, was the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason. By the 19th century, however, the era of coffee houses had passed. Most of them had evolved into exclusive men’s clubs, each geared towards a certain segment of society. Tea was now more affordable and fashionable, and teahouses, which drew clientele from both sexes, began to grow in popularity. Tea, however, had always been Australia’s most popular non-alcoholic drink. Tea (and coffee) along with other alien plants had been part of the cargo unloaded onto Australian shores with the First Fleet in 1788. Coffee, mainly from Brazil and Jamaica, remained a constant import but was taxed more heavily than tea and was, therefore, more expensive. Furthermore, tea was much easier to make than coffee. To brew tea, all that is needed is to add boiling water, coffee, in contrast, required roasting, grinding and brewing. According to Symons, until the 1930s, Australians were the largest consumers of tea in the world (19). In spite of this, and as coffee, since its introduction into Europe, was regarded as the antidote to alcohol, the temperance movement established coffee palaces. In the early 1870s in Britain, the temperance movement had revived the coffee house to provide an alternative to the gin taverns that were so attractive to the working classes of the Industrial Age (Clarke 5). Unlike the earlier coffee house, this revived incarnation provided accommodation and was open to men, women and children. “Cheap and wholesome food,” was available as well as reading rooms supplied with newspapers and periodicals, and games and smoking rooms (Clarke 20). In Australia, coffee palaces did not seek the working classes, as clientele: at least in the cities they were largely for the nouveau riche. Coffee Palaces The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the direction of the Australian economy. An investment boom followed, with an influx of foreign funds and English banks lending freely to colonial speculators. By the 1880s, the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy boomed and land prices were highly inflated. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Spurred on by these positive economic conditions and the newly extended inter-colonial rail network, international exhibitions were held in both Sydney and Melbourne. To celebrate modern technology and design in an industrial age, international exhibitions were phenomena that had spread throughout Europe and much of the world from the mid-19th century. According to Davison, exhibitions were “integral to the culture of nineteenth century industrialising societies” (158). In particular, these exhibitions provided the colonies with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their economic power and achievements in the sciences, the arts and education, as well as to promote their commerce and industry. Massive purpose-built buildings were constructed to house the exhibition halls. In Sydney, the Garden Palace was erected in the Botanic Gardens for the 1879 Exhibition (it burnt down in 1882). In Melbourne, the Royal Exhibition Building, now a World Heritage site, was built in the Carlton Gardens for the 1880 Exhibition and extended for the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. Accommodation was required for the some one million interstate and international visitors who were to pass through the gates of the Garden Palace in Sydney. To meet this need, the temperance movement, keen to provide alternative accommodation to licensed hotels, backed the establishment of Sydney’s coffee palaces. The Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company was formed in 1878 to operate and manage a number of coffee palaces constructed during the 1870s. These were designed to compete with hotels by “offering all the ordinary advantages of those establishments without the allurements of the drink” (Murdoch). Coffee palaces were much more than ordinary hotels—they were often multi-purpose or mixed-use buildings that included a large number of rooms for accommodation as well as ballrooms and other leisure facilities to attract people away from pubs. As the Australian Town and Country Journal reveals, their services included the supply of affordable, wholesome food, either in the form of regular meals or occasional refreshments, cooked in kitchens fitted with the latest in culinary accoutrements. These “culinary temples” also provided smoking rooms, chess and billiard rooms, and rooms where people could read books, periodicals and all the local and national papers for free (121). Similar to the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, the coffee palaces brought businessmen, artists, writers, engineers, and scientists attending the exhibitions together to eat and drink (non-alcoholic), socialise and conduct business. The Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace located in York Street in Sydney produced a practical guide for potential investors and businessmen titled International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney. It included information on the location of government departments, educational institutions, hospitals, charitable organisations, and embassies, as well as a list of the tariffs on goods from food to opium (1–17). Women, particularly the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were a formidable force in the temperance movement (intemperance was generally regarded as a male problem and, more specifically, a husband problem). Murdoch argues, however, that much of the success of the push to establish coffee palaces was due to male politicians with business interests, such as the one-time Victorian premiere James Munro. Considered a stern, moral church-going leader, Munro expanded the temperance movement into a fanatical force with extraordinary power, which is perhaps why the temperance movement had its greatest following in Victoria (Murdoch). Several prestigious hotels were constructed to provide accommodation for visitors to the international exhibitions in Melbourne. Munro was responsible for building many of the city’s coffee palaces, including the Victoria (1880) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888) in Collins Street. After establishing the Grand Coffee Palace Company, Munro took over the Grand Hotel (now the Windsor) in 1886. Munro expanded the hotel to accommodate some of the two million visitors who were to attend the Centenary Exhibition, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence at the official opening (Murdoch). By 1888 there were more than 50 coffee palaces in the city of Melbourne alone and Munro held thousands of shares in coffee palaces, including those in Geelong and Broken Hill. With its opening planned to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Australia and the 1888 International Exhibition, the construction of the Federal Coffee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Australia, was perhaps the greatest monument to the temperance movement. Designed in the French Renaissance style, the façade was embellished with statues, griffins and Venus in a chariot drawn by four seahorses. The building was crowned with an iron-framed domed tower. New passenger elevators—first demonstrated at the Sydney Exhibition—allowed the building to soar to seven storeys. According to the Federal Coffee Palace Visitor’s Guide, which was presented to every visitor, there were three lifts for passengers and others for luggage. Bedrooms were located on the top five floors, while the stately ground and first floors contained majestic dining, lounge, sitting, smoking, writing, and billiard rooms. There were electric service bells, gaslights, and kitchens “fitted with the most approved inventions for aiding proficients [sic] in the culinary arts,” while the luxury brand Pears soap was used in the lavatories and bathrooms (16–17). In 1891, a spectacular financial crash brought the economic boom to an abrupt end. The British economy was in crisis and to meet the predicament, English banks withdrew their funds in Australia. There was a wholesale collapse of building companies, mortgage banks and other financial institutions during 1891 and 1892 and much of the banking system was halted during 1893 (Attard). Meanwhile, however, while the eastern States were in the economic doldrums, gold was discovered in 1892 at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and, within two years, the west of the continent was transformed. As gold poured back to the capital city of Perth, the long dormant settlement hurriedly caught up and began to emulate the rest of Australia, including the construction of ornately detailed coffee palaces (Freeman 130). By 1904, Perth had 20 coffee palaces. When the No. 2 Coffee Palace opened in Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported that coffee palaces were “not only fashionable, but appear to have acquired a permanent footing in Sydney” (121). The coffee palace era, however, was relatively short-lived. Driven more by reformist and economic zeal than by good business sense, many were in financial trouble when the 1890’s Depression hit. Leading figures in the temperance movement were also involved in land speculation and building societies and when these schemes collapsed, many, including Munro, were financially ruined. Many of the palaces closed or were forced to apply for liquor licences in order to stay afloat. Others developed another life after the temperance movement’s influence waned and the coffee palace fad faded, and many were later demolished to make way for more modern buildings. The Federal was licensed in 1923 and traded as the Federal Hotel until its demolition in 1973. The Victoria, however, did not succumb to a liquor licence until 1967. The Sydney Coffee Palace in Woolloomooloo became the Sydney Eye Hospital and, more recently, smart apartments. Some fine examples still survive as reminders of Australia’s social and cultural heritage. The Windsor in Melbourne’s Spring Street and the Broken Hill Hotel, a massive three-story iconic pub in the outback now called simply “The Palace,” are some examples. Tea remained the beverage of choice in Australia until the 1950s when the lifting of government controls on the importation of coffee and the influence of American foodways coincided with the arrival of espresso-loving immigrants. As Australians were introduced to the espresso machine, the short black, the cappuccino, and the café latte and (reminiscent of the Enlightenment), the post-war malaise was shed in favour of the energy and vigour of modernist thought and creativity, fuelled in at least a small part by caffeine and the emergent café culture (Teffer). Although the temperance movement’s attempt to provide an alternative to the ubiquitous pubs failed, coffee has now outstripped the consumption of tea and today’s café culture ensures that wherever coffee is consumed, there is the possibility of a continuation of the Enlightenment’s lively discussions, exchange of news, and dissemination of ideas and information in a sober environment. References Attard, Bernard. “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction.” EH.net Encyclopedia. 5 Feb. (2012) ‹http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/attard.australia›. Blainey, Anna. “The Prohibition and Total Abstinence Movement in Australia 1880–1910.” Food, Power and Community: Essays in the History of Food and Drink. Ed. Robert Dare. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999. 142–52. Boyce, Francis Bertie. “Shall I Vote for No License?” An address delivered at the Convention of the Parramatta Branch of New South Wales Alliance, 3 September 1906. 3rd ed. Parramatta: New South Wales Alliance, 1907. Clarke, James Freeman. Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882. “Coffee Palace, No. 2.” Australian Town and Country Journal. 17 Jul. 1880: 121. Davison, Graeme. “Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions.” Australian Cultural History. Eds. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 158–77. Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Federal Coffee Palace. The Federal Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, Its Suburbs, and Other Parts of the Colony of Victoria: Views of the Principal Public and Commercial Buildings in Melbourne, With a Bird’s Eye View of the City; and History of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, etc. Melbourne: Federal Coffee House Company, 1888. Fitzgerald, Ross, and Trevor Jordan. Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009. Freeland, John. The Australian Pub. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977. Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace. International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney, Restaurant and Temperance Hotel. Sydney: Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace, 1879. Mitchell, Ann M. “Munro, James (1832–1908).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, 2006-12. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-4271/text6905›. Murdoch, Sally. “Coffee Palaces.” Encyclopaedia of Melbourne. Eds. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00371b.htm›. Muskett, Philip E. The Art of Living in Australia. New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1987. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company Limited. Memorandum of Association of the Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company, Ltd. Sydney: Samuel Edward Lees, 1879. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Teffer, Nicola. Coffee Customs. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: Customs House, 2005.
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Provençal, Johanne. "Ghosts in Machines and a Snapshot of Scholarly Journal Publishing in Canada." M/C Journal 11, no. 4 (July 1, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.45.

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The ideas put forth here do not fit perfectly or entirely into the genre and form of what has established itself as the scholarly journal article. What is put forth, instead, is a juxtaposition of lines of thinking about the scholarly and popular in publishing, past, present and future. As such it may indeed be quite appropriate to the occasion and the questions raised in the call for papers for this special issue of M/C Journal. The ideas put forth here are intended as pieces of an ever-changing puzzle of the making public of scholarship, which, I hope, may in some way fit with both the work of others in this special issue and in the discourse more broadly. The first line of thinking presented takes the form of an historical overview of publishing as context to consider a second line of thinking about the current status and future of publishing. The historical context serves as reminder (and cause for celebration) that publishing has not yet perished, contrary to continued doomsday sooth-saying that has come with each new medium since the advent of print. Instead, publishing has continued to transform and it is precisely the transformation of print, print culture and reading publics that are the focus of this article, in particular, in relation to the question of the boundaries between the scholarly and the popular. What follows is a juxtaposition that is part of an investigation in progress. Presented first, therefore, is a mapping of shifts in print culture from the time of Gutenberg to the twentieth century; second, is a contemporary snapshot of the editorial mandates of more than one hundred member journals of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ). What such juxtaposition is able to reveal is open to interpretation, of course. And indeed, as I proceed in my investigation of publishing past, present and future, my interpretations are many. The juxtaposition raises a number of issues: of communities of readers and the cultures of reading publics; of privileged and marginalised texts (as well as their authors and their readers); of access and reach (whether in terms of what is quantifiable or in a much more subtle but equally important sense). In Canada, at present, these issues are also intertwined with changes to research funding policies and some attention is given at the end of this article to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and its recent/current shift in funding policy. Curiously, current shifts in funding policies, considered alongside an historical overview of publishing, would suggest that although publishing continues to transform, at the same time, as they say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Republics of Letters and Ghosts in Machines Republics of Letters that formed after the advent of the printing press can be conjured up as distant and almost mythical communities of elite literates, ghosts almost lost in a Gutenberg galaxy that today encompasses (and is embodied in) schools, bookshelves, and digital archives in many places across the globe. Conjuring up ghosts of histories past seems always to reveal ironies, and indeed some of the most interesting ironies of the Gutenberg galaxy involve McLuhanesque reversals or, if not full reversals, then in the least some notably sharp turns. There is a need to define some boundaries (and terms) in the framing of the tracing that follows. Given that the time frame in question spans more than five hundred years (from the advent of Gutenberg’s printing press in the fifteenth century to the turn of the 21st century), the tracing must necessarily be done in broad strokes. With regard to what is meant by the “making public of scholarship” in this paper, by “making public” I refer to accounts historians have given in their attempts to reconstruct a history of what was published either in the periodical press or in books. With regard to scholarship (and the making public of it), as with many things in the history of publishing (or any history), this means different things in different times and in different places. The changing meanings of what can be termed “scholarship” and where and how it historically has been made public are the cornerstones on which this article (and a history of the making public of scholarship) turn. The structure of this paper is loosely chronological and is limited to the print cultures and reading publics in France, Britain, and what would eventually be called the US and Canada, and what follows here is an overview of changes in how scholarly and popular texts and publics are variously defined over the course of history. The Construction of Reading Publics and Print Culture In any consideration of “print culture” and reading publics, historical or contemporary, there are two guiding principles that historians suggest should be kept in mind, and, though these may seem self-evident, they are worth stating explicitly (perhaps precisely because they seem self-evident). The first is a reminder from Adrian Johns that “the very identity of print itself has had to be made” (2 italics in original). Just as the identity of print cultures are made, similarly, a history of reading publics and their identities are made, by looking to and interpreting such variables as numbers and genres of titles published and circulated, dates and locations of collections, and information on readers’ experiences of texts. Elizabeth Eisenstein offers a reminder of the “widely varying circumstances” (92) of the print revolution and an explicit acknowledgement of such circumstances provides the second, seemingly self-evident guiding principle: that the construction of reading publics and print culture must not only be understood as constructed, but also that such constructions ought not be understood as uniform. The purpose of the reconstructions of print cultures and reading publics presented here, therefore, is not to arrive at final conclusions, but rather to identify patterns that prove useful in better understanding the current status (and possible future) of publishing. The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries—Boom, then Busted by State and Church In search of what could be termed “scholarship” following the mid-fifteenth century boom of the early days of print, given the ecclesiastical and state censorship in Britain and France and the popularity of religious texts of the 15th and 16th centuries, arguably the closest to “scholarship” that we can come is through the influence of the Italian Renaissance and the revival and translation (into Latin, and to a far lesser extent, vernacular languages) of the classics and indeed the influence of the Italian Renaissance on the “print revolution” is widely recognised by historians. Historians also recognise, however, that it was not long until “the supply of unpublished texts dried up…[yet for authors] to sell the fruits of their intellect—was not yet common practice before the late 16th century” (Febvre and Martin 160). Although this reference is to the book trade in France, in Britain, and in the regions to become the US and Canada, reading of “pious texts” was similarly predominant in the early days of print. Yet, the humanist shift throughout the 16th century is evidenced by titles produced in Paris in the first century of print: in 1501, in a total of 88 works, 53 can be categorised as religious, with 25 categorised as Latin, Greek, or Humanist authors; as compared to titles produced in 1549, in a total of 332 titles, 56 can be categorised as religious with 204 categorised as Latin, Greek, or Humanist authors (Febvre and Martin 264). The Seventeenth Century—Changes in the Political and Print Landscape In the 17th century, printers discovered that their chances of profitability (and survival) could be improved by targeting and developing a popular readership through the periodical press (its very periodicity and relative low cost both contributed to its accessibility by popular publics) in Europe as well as in North America. It is worthwhile to note, however, that “to the end of the seventeenth century, both literacy and leisure were virtually confined to scholars and ‘gentlemen’” (Steinberg 119) particularly where books were concerned and although literacy rates were still low, through the “exceptionally literate villager” there formed “hearing publics” who would have printed texts read to them (Eisenstein 93). For the literate members of the public interested not only in improving their social positions through learning, but also with intellectual (or spiritual or existential) curiosity piqued by forbidden books, it is not surprising that Descartes “wrote in French to a ‘lay audience … open to new ideas’” (Jacob 41). The 17th century also saw the publication of the first scholarly journals. There is a tension that becomes evident in the seventeenth century that can be seen as a tension characteristic of print culture, past and present: on the one hand, the housing of scholarship in scholarly journals as a genre distinct from the genre of the popular periodicals can be interpreted as a continued pattern of (elitist) divide in publics (as seen earlier between the oral and the written word, between Latin and the vernacular, between classic texts and popular texts); while, on the other hand, some thinkers/scholars of the day had an interest in reaching a wider audience, as printers always had, which led to the construction and fragmentation of audiences (whether the printer’s market for his goods or the scholar’s marketplace of ideas). The Eighteenth Century—Republics of Letters Become Concrete and Visible The 18th century saw ever-increasing literacy rates, early copyright legislation (Statute of Anne in 1709), improved printing technology, and ironically (or perhaps on the contrary, quite predictably) severe censorship that in effect led to an increased demand for forbidden books and a vibrant and international underground book trade (Darnton and Roche 138). Alongside a growing book trade, “the pulpit was ultimately displaced by the periodical press” (Eisenstein 94), which had become an “established institution” (Steinberg 125). One history of the periodical press in France finds that the number of periodicals (to remain in publication for three or more years) available to the reading public in 1745 numbered 15, whereas in 1785 this increased to 82 (Censer 7). With regard to scholarly periodicals, another study shows that between 1790 and 1800 there were 640 scientific-technological periodicals being published in Europe (Kronick 1961). Across the Atlantic, earlier difficulties in cultivating intellectual life—such as haphazard transatlantic exchange and limited institutions for learning—began to give way to a “republic of letters” that was “visible and concrete” (Hall 417). The Nineteenth Century—A Second Boom and the Rise of the Periodical Press By the turn of the 19th century, visible and concrete republics of letters become evident on both sides of the Atlantic in the boom in book publishing and in the periodical press, scholarly and popular. State and church controls on printing/publishing had given way to the press as the “fourth estate” or a free press as powerful force. The legislation of public education brought increased literacy rates among members of successive generations. One study of literacy rates in Britain, for example, shows that in the period from 1840–1870 literacy rates increased by 35–70 per cent; then from 1870–1900, literacy increased by 78–261 per cent (Mitch 76). Further, with the growth and changes in universities, “history, languages and literature and, above all, the sciences, became an established part of higher education for the first time,” which translated into growing markets for book publishers (Feather 117). Similarly the periodical press reached ever-increasing and numerous reading publics: one estimate of the increase finds the publication of nine hundred journals in 1800 jumping to almost sixty thousand in 1901 (Brodman, cited in Kronick 127). Further, the important role of the periodical press in developing communities of readers was recognised by publishers, editors and authors of the time, something equally recognised by present-day historians describing the “generic mélange of the periodical … [that] particularly lent itself to the interpenetration of language and ideas…[and] the verbal and conceptual interconnectedness of science, politics, theology, and literature” (Dawson, Noakes and Topham 30). Scientists recognised popular periodicals as “important platforms for addressing a non-specialist but culturally powerful public … [they were seen as public] performances [that] fulfilled important functions in making the claims of science heard among the ruling élite” (Dawson et al. 11). By contrast, however, the scholarly journals of the time, while also increasing in number, were becoming increasingly specialised along the same disciplinary boundaries being established in the universities, fulfilling a very different function of forming scholarly and discipline-specific discourse communities through public (published) performances of a very different nature. The Twentieth Century—The Tension Between Niche Publics and Mass Publics The long-existing tension in print culture between the differentiation of reading publics on the one hand, and the reach to ever-expanding reading publics on the other, in the twentieth century becomes a tension between what have been termed “niche-marketing” and “mass marketing,” between niche publics and mass publics. What this meant for the making public of scholarship was that the divides between discipline-specific discourse communities (and their corresponding genres) became more firmly established and yet, within each discipline, there was further fragmentation and specialisation. The niche-mass tension also meant that although in earlier print culture, “the lines of demarcation between men of science, men of letters, and scientific popularizers were far from clear, and were constantly being renegotiated” (Dawson et al 28), with the increasing professionalisation of academic work (and careers), lines of demarcation became firmly drawn between scholarly and popular titles and authors, as well as readers, who were described as “men of science,” as “educated men,” or as “casual observers” (Klancher 90). The question remains, however, as one historian of science asks, “To whom did the reading public go in order to learn about the ultimate meaning of modern science, the professionals or the popularizers?” (Lightman 191). By whom and for whom, where and how scholarship has historically been made public, are questions worthy of consideration if contemporary scholars are to better understand the current status (and possible future) for the making public of scholarship. A Snapshot of Scholarly Journals in Canada and Current Changes in Funding Policies The here and now of scholarly journal publishing in Canada (a growing, but relatively modest scholarly journal community, compared to the number of scholarly journals published in Europe and the US) serves as an interesting microcosm through which to consider how scholarly journal publishing has evolved since the early days of print. What follows here is an overview of the membership of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ), in particular: (1) their target readers as identifiable from their editorial mandates; (2) their print/online/open-access policies; and (3) their publishers (all information gathered from the CALJ website, http://www.calj-acrs.ca/). Analysis of the collected data for the 100 member journals of CALJ (English, French and bilingual journals) with available information on the CALJ website is presented in Table 1 (below). A few observations are noteworthy: (1) in terms of readers, although all 100 journals identify a scholarly audience as their target readership, more than 40% of the journal also identify practitioners, policy-makers, or general readers as members of their target audience; (2) more than 25% of the journals publish online as well as or instead of print editions; and (3) almost all journals are published either by a Canadian university or, in one case, a college (60%) or a scholarly or professional society (31%). Table 1: Target Readership, Publishing Model and Publishers, CALJ Members (N=100) Journals with identifiable scholarly target readership 100 Journals with other identifiable target readership: practitioner 35 Journals with other identifiable target readership: general readers 18 Journals with other identifiable target readership: policy-makers/government 10 Total journals with identifiable target readership other than scholarly 43 Journals publishing in print only 56 Journals publishing in print and online 24 Journals publishing in print, online and open access 16 Journals publishing online only and open access 4 Journals published through a Canadian university press, faculty or department 60 Journals published by a scholarly or professional society 31 Journals published by a research institute 5 Journals published by the private sector 4 In the context of the historical overview presented earlier, this data raises a number of questions. The number of journals with target audiences either within or beyond the academy raises issues akin to the situation in the early days of print, when published works were primarily in Latin, with only 22 per cent in vernacular languages (Febvre and Martin 256), thereby strongly limiting access and reach to diverse audiences until the 17th century when Latin declined as the international language (Febvre and Martin 275) and there is a parallel to scholarly journal publishing and their changing readership(s). Diversity in audiences gradually developed in the early days of print, as Febvre and Martin (263) show by comparing the number of churchmen and lawyers with library collections in Paris: from 1480–1500 one lawyer and 24 churchmen had library collections, compared to 1551–1600, when 71 lawyers and 21 churchmen had library collections. Although the distinctions between present-day target audiences of Canadian scholarly journals (shown in Table 1, above) and 16th-century churchmen or lawyers no doubt are considerable, again there is a parallel with regard to changes in reading audiences. Similarly, the 18th-century increase in literacy rates, education, and technological advances finds a parallel in contemporary questions of computer literacy and access to scholarship (see Willinsky, “How,” Access, “Altering,” and If Only). Print culture historians and historians of science, as noted above, recognise that historically, while scholarly periodicals have increasingly specialised and popular periodicals have served as “important platforms for addressing a non-specialist but culturally powerful public…[and] fulfill[ing] important functions in making the claims of science heard among the ruling élite” (Dawson 11), there is adrift in current policies changes (and in the CALJ data above) a blurring of boundaries that harkens back to earlier days of print culture. As Adrian John reminded us earlier, “the very identity of print itself has had to be made” (2, italics in original) and the same applies to identities or cultures of print and the members of that culture: namely, the readers, the audience. The identities of the readers of scholarship are being made and re-made, as editorial mandates extend the scope of journals beyond strict, academic disciplinary boundaries and as increasing numbers of journals publish online (and open access). In Canada, changes in scholarly journal funding by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada (as well as changes in SSHRC funding for research more generally) place increasing focus on impact factors (an international trend) as well as increased attention on the public benefits and value of social sciences and humanities research and scholarship (see SSHRC 2004, 2005, 2006). There is much debate in the scholarly community in Canada about the implications and possibilities of the direction of the changing funding policies, not least among members of the scholarly journal community. As noted in the table above, most scholarly journal publishers in Canada are independently published, which brings advantages of autonomy but also the disadvantage of very limited budgets and there is a great deal of concern about the future of the journals, about their survival amidst the current changes. Although the future is uncertain, it is perhaps worthwhile to be reminded once again that contrary to doomsday sooth-saying that has come time and time again, publishing has not perished, but rather it has continued to transform. I am inclined against making normative statements about what the future of publishing should be, but, looking at the accounts historians have given of the past and looking at the current publishing community I have come to know in my work in publishing, I am confident that the resourcefulness and commitment of the publishing community shall prevail and, indeed, there appears to be a good deal of promise in the transformation of scholarly journals in the ways they reach their audiences and in what reaches those audiences. Perhaps, as is suggested by the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing (CCSP), the future is one of “inventing publishing.” References Canadian Association of Learned Journals. Member Database. 10 June 2008 ‹http://www.calj-acrs.ca/>. Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing. 10 June 2008. ‹http://www.ccsp.sfu.ca/>. Censer, Jack. The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Routledge, 1994. Darnton, Robert, Estienne Roche. Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Dawson, Gowan, Richard Noakes, and Jonathan Topham. Introduction. Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature. Ed. Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, and Jonathan Topham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 1–37. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983 Feather, John. A History of British Publishing. New York: Routledge, 2006. Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800. London: N.L.B., 1979. Jacob, Margaret. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Hall, David, and Hugh Armory. The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987. Kronick, David. A History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals: The Origins and Development of the Scientific and Technological Press, 1665–1790. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1961. ---. "Devant le deluge" and Other Essays on Early Modern Scientific Communication. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Mitch, David. The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private choice and Public Policy. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Granting Council to Knowledge Council: Renewing the Social Sciences and Humanities in Canada, Volume 1, 2004. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Granting Council to Knowledge Council: Renewing the Social Sciences and Humanities in Canada, Volume 3, 2005. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Moving Forward As a Knowledge Council: Canada’s Place in a Competitive World. 2006. Steinberg, Sigfrid. Five Hundred Years of Printing. London: Oak Knoll Press, 1996. Willinsky, John. “How to be More of a Public Intellectual by Making your Intellectual Work More Public.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 3.1 (2006): 92–95. ---. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. ---. “Altering the Material Conditions of Access to the Humanities.” Ed. Peter Trifonas and Michael Peters. Deconstructing Derrida: Tasks for the New Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 118–36. ---. If Only We Knew: Increasing the Public Value of Social-Science Research. New York: Routledge, 2000.
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Hodge, Bob. "The Complexity Revolution." M/C Journal 10, no. 3 (June 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2656.

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‘Complex(ity)’ is currently fashionable in the humanities. Fashions come and go, but in this article I argue that the interest in complexity connects with something deeper, an intellectual revolution that began before complexity became trendy, and will continue after the spotlight passes on. Yet to make this case, and understand and advance this revolution, we need a better take on ‘complexity’. ‘Complex’ is of course complex. In common use it refers to something ‘composed of many interrelated parts’, or problems ‘so complicated or intricate as to be hard to deal with’. I will call this popular meaning, with its positive and negative values, complexity-1. In science it has a more negative sense, complexity-2, referring to the presenting complexity of problems, which science will strip down to underlying simplicity. But recently it has developed positive meanings in both science and humanities. Complexity-3 marks a revolutionarily more positive attitude to complexity in science that does seek to be reductive. Humanities-style complexity-4, which acknowledges and celebrates the inherent complexity of texts and meanings, is basic in contemporary Media and Cultural studies (MaC for short). The underlying root of complex is plico bend or fold, plus con- together, via complector grasp (something), encompass an idea, or person. The double of ‘complex’ is ‘simple’, from Latin simplex, which less obviously also comes from plico, plus semel once, at the same time. ‘Simple’ and ‘complex’ are closer than people think: only a fold or two apart. A key idea is that these elements are interdependent, parts of a single underlying form. ‘Simple(x)’ is another modality of ‘complex’, dialectically related, different in degree not kind, not absolutely opposite. The idea of ‘holding together’ is stronger in Latin complex, the idea of difficulty more prominent in modern usage, yet the term still includes both. The concept ‘complex’ is untenable apart from ‘simple’. This figure maps the basic structures in ‘complexity’. This complexity contains both positive and negative values, science and non-science, academic and popular meanings, with folds/differences and relationships so dynamically related that no aspect is totally independent. This complex field is the minimum context in which to explore claims about a ‘complexity revolution’. Complexity in Science and Humanities In spite of the apparent similarities between Complexity-3 (sciences) and 4 (humanities), in practice a gulf separates them, policed from both sides. If these sides do not talk to each other, as they often do not, the result is not a complex meaning for ‘complex’, but a semantic war-zone. These two forms of complexity connect and collide because they reach into a new space where discourses of science and non-science are interacting more than they have for many years. For many, in both academic communities, a strong, taken-for-granted mindset declares the difference between them is absolute. They assume that if ‘complexity’ exists in science, it must mean something completely different from what it means in humanities or everyday discourse, so different as to be incomprehensible or unusable by humanists. This terrified defence of the traditional gulf between sciences and humanities is not the clinching argument these critics think. On the contrary, it symptomises what needs to be challenged, via the concept complex. One influential critic of this split was Lord Snow, who talked of ‘two cultures’. Writing in class-conscious post-war Britain he regretted the ignorance of humanities-trained ruling elites about basic science, and scientists’ ignorance of humanities. No-one then or now doubts there is a problem. Most MaC students have a science-light education, and feel vulnerable to critiques which say they do not need to know any science or maths, including complexity science, and could not understand it anyway. To understand how this has happened I go back to the 17th century rise of ‘modern science’. The Royal Society then included the poet Dryden as well as the scientist Newton, but already the fissure between science and humanities was emerging in the elite, re-enforcing existing gaps between both these and technology. The three forms of knowledge and their communities continued to develop over the next 400 years, producing the education system which formed most of us, the structure of academic knowledges in which culture, technology and science form distinct fields. Complexity has been implicated in this three-way split. Influenced by Newton’s wonderful achievement, explaining so much (movements of earthly and heavenly bodies) with so little (three elegant laws of motion, one brief formula), science defined itself as a reductive practice, in which complexity was a challenge. Simplicity was the sign of a successful solution, altering the older reciprocity between simplicity and complexity. The paradox was ignored that proof involved highly complex mathematics, as anyone who reads Newton knows. What science held onto was the outcome, a simplicity then retrospectively attributed to the universe itself, as its true nature. Simplicity became a core quality in the ontology of science, with complexity-2 the imperfection which challenged and provoked science to eliminate it. Humanities remained a refuge for a complexity ontology, in which both problems and solutions were irreducibly complex. Because of the dominance of science as a form of knowing, the social sciences developed a reductivist approach opposing traditional humanities. They also waged bitter struggles against anti-reductionists who emerged in what was called ‘social theory’. Complexity-4 in humanities is often associated with ‘post-structuralism’, as in Derrida, who emphasises the irreducible complexity of every text and process of meaning, or ‘postmodernism’, as in Lyotard’s controversial, influential polemic. Lyotard attempted to take the pulse of contemporary Western thought. Among trends he noted were new forms of science, new relationships between science and humanities, and a new kind of logic pervading all branches of knowledge. Not all Lyotard’s claims have worn well, but his claim that something really important is happening in the relationship between kinds and institutions of knowledge, especially between sciences and humanities, is worth serious attention. Even classic sociologists like Durkheim recognised that the modern world is highly complex. Contemporary sociologists agree that ‘globalisation’ introduces new levels of complexity in its root sense, interconnections on a scale never seen before. Urry argues that the hyper-complexity of the global world requires a complexity approach, combining complexity-3 and 4. Lyotard’s ‘postmodernism’ has too much baggage, including dogmatic hostility to science. Humanities complexity-4 has lost touch with the sceptical side of popular complexity-1, and lacks a dialectic relationship with simplicity. ‘Complexity’, incorporating Complexity-1 and 3, popular and scientific, made more complex by incorporating humanities complexity-4, may prove a better concept for thinking creatively and productively about these momentous changes. Only complex complexity in the approach, flexible and interdisciplinary, can comprehend these highly complex new objects of knowledge. Complexity and the New Condition of Science Some important changes in the way science is done are driven not from above, by new theories or discoveries, but by new developments in social contexts. Gibbons and Nowottny identify new forms of knowledge and practice, which they call ‘mode-2 knowledge’, emerging alongside older forms. Mode-1 is traditional academic knowledge, based in universities, organised in disciplines, relating to real-life problems at one remove, as experts to clients or consultants to employers. Mode-2 is orientated to real life problems, interdisciplinary and collaborative, producing provisional, emergent knowledge. Gibbons and Nowottny do not reference postmodernism but are looking at Lyotard’s trends as they were emerging in practice 10 years later. They do not emphasise complexity, but the new objects of knowledge they address are fluid, dynamic and highly complex. They emphasise a new scale of interdisciplinarity, in collaborations between academics across all disciplines, in science, technology, social sciences and humanities, though they do not see a strong role for humanities. This approach confronts and welcomes irreducible complexity in object and methods. It takes for granted that real-life problems will always be too complex (with too many factors, interrelated in too many ways) to be reduced to the sort of problem that isolated disciplines could handle. The complexity of objects requires equivalent complexity in responses; teamwork, using networks, drawing on relevant knowledge wherever it is to be found. Lyotard famously and foolishly predicted the death of the ‘grand narrative’ of science, but Gibbons and Nowottny offer a more complex picture in which modes-1 and 2 will continue alongside each other in productive dialectic. The linear form of science Lyotard attacked is stronger than ever in some ways, as ‘Big Science’, which delivers wealth and prestige to disciplinary scientists, accessing huge funds to solve highly complex problems with a reductionist mindset. But governments also like the idea of mode-2 knowledge, under whatever name, and try to fund it despite resistance from powerful mode-1 academics. Moreover, non-reductionist science in practice has always been more common than the dominant ideology allowed, whether or not its exponents, some of them eminent scientists, chose to call it ‘complexity’ science. Quantum physics, called ‘the new physics’, consciously departed from the linear, reductionist assumptions of Newtonian physics to project an irreducibly complex picture of the quantum world. Different movements, labelled ‘catastrophe theory’, ‘chaos theory’ and ‘complexity science’, emerged, not a single coherent movement replacing the older reductionist model, but loosely linked by new attitudes to complexity. Instead of seeing chaos and complexity as problems to be removed by analysis, chaos and complexity play a more ambiguous role, as ontologically primary. Disorder and complexity are not later regrettable lapses from underlying essential simplicity and order, but potentially creative resources, to be understood and harnessed, not feared, controlled, eliminated. As a taste of exciting ideas on complexity, barred from humanities MaC students by the general prohibition on ‘consorting with the enemy’ (science), I will outline three ideas, originally developed in complexity-3, which can be described in ways requiring no specialist knowledge or vocabulary, beyond a Mode-2 openness to dynamic, interdisciplinary engagement. Fractals, a term coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, are so popular as striking shapes produced by computer-graphics, circulated on T-shirts, that they may seem superficial, unscientific, trendy. They exist at an intersection between science, media and culture, and their complexity includes transactions across that folded space. The name comes from Latin fractus, broken: irregular shapes like broken shards, which however have their own pattern. Mandelbrot claims that in nature, many such patterns partly repeat on different scales. When this happens, he says, objects on any one scale will have equivalent complexity. Part of this idea is contained in Blake’s famous line: ‘To see the world in a grain of sand’. The importance of the principle is that it fundamentally challenges reductiveness. Nor is it as unscientific as it may sound. Geologists indeed see grains of sand under a microscope as highly complex. In sociology, instead of individuals (literal meaning ‘cannot be divided’) being the minimally simple unit of analysis, individuals can be understood to be as complex (e.g. with multiple identities, linked with many other social beings) as groups, classes or nations. There is no level where complexity disappears. A second concept is ‘fuzzy logic’, invented by an engineer, Zadeh. The basic idea is not unlike the literary critic Empson’s ‘ambiguity’, the sometimes inexhaustible complexity of meanings in great literature. Zadeh’s contribution was to praise the inherent ambiguity and ambiguity of natural languages as a resource for scientists and engineers, making them better, not worse, for programming control systems. Across this apparently simple bridge have flowed many fuzzy machines, more effective than their over-precise brothers. Zadeh crystallised this wisdom in his ‘Principle of incompatibility’: As the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behaviour decreases until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics (28) Something along these lines is common wisdom in complexity-1. For instance, under the headline “Law is too complex for juries to understand, says judge” (Dick 4), the Chief Justice of Australia, Murray Gleeson, noted a paradox of complexity, that attempts to improve a system by increasing its complexity make it worse (meaningless or irrelevant, as Zadeh said). The system loses its complexity in another sense, that it no longer holds together. My third concept is the ‘Butterfly Effect’, a name coined by Lorenz. The butterfly was this scientist’s poetic fantasy, an imagined butterfly that flaps its wings somewhere on the Andes, and introduces a small change in the weather system that triggers a hurricane in Montana, or Beijing. This idea is another riff on the idea that complex situations are not reducible to component elements. Every cause is so complex that we can never know in advance just what factor will operate in a given situation, or what its effects might be across a highly complex system. Travels in Complexity I will now explore these issues with reference to a single example, or rather, a nested set of examples, each (as in fractal theory) equivalently complex, yet none identical at any scale. I was travelling in a train from Penrith to Sydney in New South Wales in early 2006 when I read a publicity text from NSW State Rail which asked me: ‘Did you know that delays at Sydenham affect trains to Parramatta? Or that a sick passenger on a train at Berowra can affect trains to Penrith?’ No, I did not know that. As a typical commuter I was impressed, and even more so as an untypical commuter who knows about complexity science. Without ostentatious reference to sources in popular science, NSW Rail was illustrating Lorenz’s ‘butterfly effect’. A sick passenger is prosaic, a realistic illustration of the basic point, that in a highly complex system, a small change in one part, so small that no-one could predict it would matter, can produce a massive, apparently unrelated change in another part. This text was part of a publicity campaign with a scientific complexity-3 subtext, which ran in a variety of forms, in their website, in notices in carriages, on the back of tickets. I will use a complexity framework to suggest different kinds of analysis and project which might interest MaC students, applicable to objects that may not refer to be complexity-3. The text does two distinct things. It describes a planning process, and is part of a publicity program. The first, simplifying movement of Mode-1 analysis would see this difference as projecting two separate objects for two different specialists: a transport expert for the planning, a MaC analyst for the publicity, including the image. Unfortunately, as Zadeh warned, in complex conditions simplification carries an explanatory cost, producing descriptions that are meaningless or irrelevant, even though common sense (complexity-1) says otherwise. What do MaC specialists know about rail systems? What do engineers know about publicity? But collaboration in a mode-2 framework does not need extensive specialist knowledge, only enough to communicate with others. MaC specialists have a fuzzy knowledge of their own and other areas of knowledge, attuned by Humanities complexity-4 to tolerate uncertainty. According to the butterfly principle it would be foolish to wish our University education had equipped us with the necessary other knowledges. We could never predict what precise items of knowledge would be handy from our formal and informal education. The complexity of most mode-2 problems is so great that we cannot predict in advance what we will need to know. MaC is already a complex field, in which ‘Media’ and ‘Culture’ are fuzzy terms which interact in different ways. Media and other organisations we might work with are often imbued with linear forms of thought (complexity-2), and want simple answers to simple questions about complex systems. For instance, MaC researchers might be asked as consultants to determine the effect of this message on typical commuters. That form of analysis is no longer respectable in complexity-4 MaC studies. Old-style (complexity-2) effects-research modelled Senders, Messages and Receivers to measure effects. Standard research methods of complexity-2 social sciences might test effects of the message by a survey instrument, with a large sample to allow statistically significant results. Using this, researchers could claim to know whether the publicity campaign had its desired effect on its targeted demographic: presumably inspiring confidence in NSW Rail. However, each of these elements is complex, and interactions between them, and others that don’t enter into the analysis, create further levels of complexity. To manage this complexity, MaC analysts often draw on Foucault’s authority to use ‘discourse’ to simplify analysis. This does not betray the principle of complexity. Complexity-4 needs a simplicity-complexity dialectic. In this case I propose a ‘complexity discourse’ to encapsulate the complex relations between Senders, Receivers and Messages into a single word, which can then be related to other such elements (e.g. ‘publicity discourse’). In this case complexity-3 can also be produced by attending to details of elements in the S-M-R chain, combining Derridean ‘deconstruction’ with expert knowledge of the situation. This Sender may be some combination of engineers and planners, managers who commissioned the advertisement, media professionals who carried it out. The message likewise loses its unity as its different parts decompose into separate messages, leaving the transaction a fraught, unpredictable encounter between multiple messages and many kinds of reader and sender. Alongside its celebration of complexity-3, this short text runs another message: ‘untangling our complex rail network’. This is complexity-2 from science and engineering, where complexity is only a problem to be removed. A fuller text on the web-site expands this second strand, using bullet points and other signals of a linear approach. In this text, there are 5 uses of ‘reliable’, 6 uses of words for problems of complexity (‘bottlenecks’, ‘delays’, ‘congestion’), and 6 uses of words for the new system (‘simpler’, ‘independent’). ‘Complex’ is used twice, both times negatively. In spite of the impression given by references to complexity-3, this text mostly has a reductionist attitude to complexity. Complexity is the enemy. Then there is the image. Each line is a different colour, and they loop in an attractive way, seeming to celebrate graceful complexity-2. Yet this part of the image is what is going to be eliminated by the new program’s complexity-2. The interesting complexity of the upper part of the image is what the text declares is the problem. What are commuters meant to think? And Railcorp? This media analysis identifies a fissure in the message, which reflects a fissure in the Sender-complex. It also throws up a problem in the culture that produced such interesting allusions to complexity science, but has linear, reductionist attitudes to complexity in its practice. We can ask: where does this cultural problem go, in the organisation, in the interconnected system and bureaucracy it manages? Is this culture implicated in the problems the program is meant to address? These questions are more productive if asked in a collaborative mode-2 framework, with an organisation open to such questions, with complex researchers able to move between different identities, as media analyst, cultural analyst, and commuter, interested in issues of organisation and logistics, engaged with complexity in all senses. I will continue my imaginary mode-2 collaboration with Railcorp by offering them another example of fractal analysis, looking at another instant, captured in a brief media text. On Wednesday 14 March, 2007, two weeks before a State government election, a very small cause triggered a systems failure in the Sydney network. A small carbon strip worth $44 which was not properly attached properly threw Sydney’s transport network into chaos on Wednesday night, causing thousands of commuters to be trapped in trains for hours. (Baker and Davies 7) This is an excellent example of a butterfly effect, but it is not labelled as such, nor regarded positively in this complexity-1 framework. ‘Chaos’ signifies something no-one wants in a transport system. This is popular not scientific reductionism. The article goes on to tell the story of one passenger, Mark MacCauley, a quadriplegic left without power or electricity in a train because the lift was not working. He rang City Rail, and was told that “someone would be in touch in 3 to 5 days” (Baker and Davies 7). He then rang emergency OOO, and was finally rescued by contractors “who happened to be installing a lift at North Sydney” (Baker and Davies 7). My new friends at NSW Rail would be very unhappy with this story. It would not help much to tell them that this is a standard ‘human interest’ article, nor that it is more complex than it looks. For instance, MacCauley is not typical of standard passengers who usually concern complexity-2 planners of rail networks. He is another butterfly, whose specific needs would be hard to predict or cater for. His rescue is similarly unpredictable. Who would have predicted that these contractors, with their specialist equipment, would be in the right place at the right time to rescue him? Complexity provided both problem and solution. The media’s double attitude to complexity, positive and negative, complexity-1 with a touch of complexity-3, is a resource which NSW Rail might learn to use, even though it is presented with such hostility here. One lesson of the complexity is that a tight, linear framing of systems and problems creates or exacerbates problems, and closes off possible solutions. In the problem, different systems didn’t connect: social and material systems, road and rail, which are all ‘media’ in McLuhan’s highly fuzzy sense. NSW Rail communication systems were cumbrously linear, slow (3 to 5 days) and narrow. In the solution, communication cut across institutional divisions, mediated by responsive, fuzzy complex humans. If the problem came from a highly complex system, the solution is a complex response on many fronts: planning, engineering, social and communication systems open to unpredictable input from other surrounding systems. As NSW Rail would have been well aware, the story responded to another context. The page was headed ‘Battle for NSW’, referring to an election in 2 weeks, in which this newspaper editorialised that the incumbent government should be thrown out. This political context is clearly part of the complexity of the newspaper message, which tries to link not just the carbon strip and ‘chaos’, but science and politics, this strip and the government’s credibility. Yet the government was returned with a substantial though reduced majority, not the swingeing defeat that might have been predicted by linear logic (rail chaos = electoral defeat) or by some interpretations of the butterfly effect. But complexity-3 does not say that every small cause produces catastrophic effects. On the contrary, it says that causal situations can be so complex that we can never be entirely sure what effects will follow from any given case. The political situation in all its complexity is an inseparable part of the minimal complex situation which NSW Rail must take into account as it considers how to reform its operations. It must make complexity in all its senses a friend and ally, not just a source of nasty surprises. My relationship with NSW Rail at the moment is purely imaginary, but illustrates positive and negative aspects of complexity as an organising principle for MaC researchers today. The unlimited complexity of Humanities’ complexity-4, Derridean and Foucauldian, can be liberating alongside the sometimes excessive scepticism of Complexity-2, but needs to keep in touch with the ambivalence of popular complexity-1. Complexity-3 connects with complexity-2 and 4 to hold the bundle together, in a more complex, cohesive, yet still unstable dynamic structure. It is this total sprawling, inchoate, contradictory (‘complex’) brand of complexity that I believe will play a key role in the up-coming intellectual revolution. But only time will tell. References Baker, Jordan, and Anne Davies. “Carbon Strip Caused Train Chaos.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Mar. 2007: 7. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976. Dick, Tim. “Law Is Now Too Complex for Juries to Understand, Says Judge.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 Mar. 2007: 4. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” In Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. Gibbons, Michael. The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage, 1994. Lorenz, Edward. The Essence of Chaos. London: University College, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London: Routledge, 1964. Mandelbrot, Benoit. “The Fractal Geometry of Nature.” In Nina Hall, ed. The New Scientist Guide to Chaos. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Nowottny, Henry. Rethinking Science. London: Polity, 2001. Snow, Charles Percy. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Faber 1959. Urry, John. Global Complexity. London: Sage, 2003. Zadeh, Lotfi Asker. “Outline of a New Approach to the Analysis of Complex Systems and Decision Processes.” ILEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 3.1 (1973): 28-44. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hodge, Bob. "The Complexity Revolution." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>. APA Style Hodge, B. (Jun. 2007) "The Complexity Revolution," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>.
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"Buchbesprechungen." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung: Volume 48, Issue 4 48, no. 4 (October 1, 2021): 727–840. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.48.4.727.

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(Michael Maurer, Jena) Detering, Nicolas / Clementina Marsico / Isabella Walser-Bürgler (Hrsg.), Contesting Europe. Comparative Perspectives on Early Modern Discourses on Europe, 1400 – 1800 (Intersections, 67), Leiden / Boston 2020, Brill, XVIII u. 386 S. / Abb., € 115,00. (Theo Jung, Freiburg i. Br.) Giannini, Giulia / Mordechai Feingold (Hrsg.), The Institutionalization of Science in Early Modern Europe (Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, 27), Leiden / Boston 2020, Brill, XII u. 301 S., € 115,00. (Sebastian Kühn, Berlin) Wilkinson, Alexander S. / Graeme J. Kemp (Hrsg.), Negotiating Conflict and Controversy in the Early Modern Book World (Library of the Written Word, 73; The Handpress World, 56), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XIII u. 287 S. / Abb., € 126,00. (Johannes Frimmel, München) Dinges, Martin / Pierre Pfütsch (Hrsg.), Männlichkeiten in der Frühmoderne. 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Hof und Dynastie, Kaiser und Reich, Zentralverwaltungen, Kriegswesen und landesfürstliches Finanzwesen, 2 Teilbde. (Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Ergänzungsband 62), Wien 2019, Böhlau, 1308 S., € 150,00. (William D. Godsey, Wien) Kustatscher, Erika, Die Innsbrucker Linie der Thurn und Taxis – Die Post in Tirol und den Vorlanden (1490 – 1769) (Schlern-Schriften, 371), Innsbruck 2018, Universitätsverlag Wagner, 489 S. / Abb., € 39,90. (Wolfgang Behringer, Saarbrücken) Kurelić, Robert, Daily Life on the Istrian Frontier. Living on a Borderland in the Sixteenth Century (Studies in the History of Daily Life [800 – 1600], 7), Turnhout 2019, Brepols, 230 S. / Karten, € 75,00. (Stephan Steiner, Wien) Neumann, Franziska, Die Ordnung des Berges. Formalisierung und Systemvertrauen in der sächsischen Bergverwaltung (1470 – 1600) (Norm und Struktur, 52), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2021, Böhlau, 411 S., € 70,00. (Tobias Schenk, Wien) Mattox, Mickey L. / Richard J. Serina / Jonathan Mumme (Hrsg.), Luther at Leipzig. Martin Luther, the Leipzig Debate, and the Sixteenth-Century Reformations (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 218), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XIV u. 348 S., € 129,00. (Thomas Fuchs, Leipzig) Brewer, Brian C. / David M. Whitford (Hrsg.), Calvin and the Early Reformation (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 219), Leiden / Boston 2020, Brill, XIV u. 231 S., € 99,00. (Volker Reinhardt, Fribourg) Nicholls, Sophie, Political Thought in the French Wars of Religion (Ideas in Context), Cambridge [u. a.] 2021, Cambridge University Press, XIII u. 269 S., £ 75,00. (Ronald G. Asch, Freiburg i. Br.) Vadi, Valentina, War and Peace. Alberico Gentili and the Early Modern Law of Nations (Legal History Library, 37; Studies in the History of International Law, 14), Leiden / Boston 2020, Brill Nijhoff, XXVI u. 566 S. / Abb., € 160,00. (Miloš Vec, Wien) Schmidt, Ariadne, Prosecuting Women. 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Der Einfluss französischer und preußischer Agrarreformen zwischen 1794 und 1850 auf die bäuerlichen Rechtsverhältnisse im Rheinland (Forschungen zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, 32), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2020, Böhlau, 270 S. / Abb., € 70,00. (Werner Troßbach, Fulda)
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"Buchbesprechungen." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung: Volume 46, Issue 2 46, no. 2 (April 1, 2019): 289–406. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.46.2.289.

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(Gudrun Emberger, Berlin) Buchet, Christian / Gérard Le Bouëdec (Hrsg.), The Sea in History / La mer dans l’histoire, [Bd. 3:] The Early Modern World / La période moderne, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge / Rochester 2017, The Boydell Press, XXVI u. 1072 S., £ 125,00. (Jann M. Witt, Laboe) Broomhall, Susan (Hrsg.), Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction (Early Modern Themes), London / New York 2017, Routledge, XXXVIII u. 386 S. / Abb., £ 36,99. (Hannes Ziegler, London) Faini, Marco / Alessia Meneghin (Hrsg.), Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Intersections, 59.2), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XXII u. 356 S. / Abb., € 154,00. (Volker Leppin, Tübingen) Richardson, Catherine / Tara Hamling / David Gaimster (Hrsg.), The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (The Routledge History Handbook), London / New York 2017, Routledge, XIX u. 485 S. / Abb. £ 105,00. 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The Experience of the Spanish Infantry during the Italian Wars, 1494 – 1559 (History of Warfare, 114), Leiden / Boston 2017, Brill, VIII u. 289 S. / Abb., € 120,00. (Heinrich Lang, Leipzig) Abela, Joan, Hospitaller Malta and the Mediterranean Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Woodbridge 2018, The Boydell Press, XXVI u. 263 S. / Abb., £ 75,00. (Magnus Ressel, Frankfurt a. M.) Bünz, Enno / Werner Greiling / Uwe Schirmer (Hrsg.), Thüringische Klöster und Stifte in vor- und frühreformatorischer Zeit (Quellen und Forschungen zu Thüringen im Zeitalter der Reformation, 6), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 461 S., € 60,00. (Ingrid Würth, Halle a. d. S.) Witt, Christian V., Martin Luthers Reformation der Ehe. Sein theologisches Eheverständnis vor dessen augustinisch-mittelalterlichem Hintergrund (Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation, 95), Tübingen 2017, Mohr Siebeck, XIV u. 346 S., € 99,00. 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Fürstbischof Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn (1573 – 1617) und die Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Würzburg (Hexenforschung, 16), Bielefeld 2017, Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 252 S. / Abb., € 24,00. (Rainer Walz, Bochum) Sidler, Daniel, Heiligkeit aushandeln. Katholische Reform und lokale Glaubenspraxis in der Eidgenossenschaft (1560 – 1790) (Campus Historische Studien, 75), Frankfurt a. M. / New York 2017, Campus, 593 S. / Abb., € 58,00. (Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Bern) Moring, Beatrice / Richard Wall, Widows in European Economy and Society, 1600 – 1920, Woodbridge / Rochester 2017, The Boydell Press, XIII u. 327 S. / Abb., £ 75,00. (Margareth Lanzinger, Wien) Katsiardi-Hering, Olga / Maria A. Stassinopoulou (Hrsg.), Across the Danube. Southeastern Europeans and Their Travelling Identities (17th–19th C.) (Studies in Global Social History, 27; Studies in Global Migration History, 9), Leiden / Boston 2017, Brill, VIII u. 330 S. / Abb., € 110,00. 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Konfessionelle Memoria und internationale Politik im Zeitalter Ludwigs XIV. (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für europäische Geschichte Mainz, 250), Göttingen 2018, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 587 S., € 85,00. (Cornel Zwierlein, Bamberg) Dietz, Bettina, Das System der Natur. Die kollaborative Wissenskultur der Botanik im 18. Jahrhundert, Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 216 S., € 35,00. (Flemming Schock, Leipzig) Friedrich, Markus / Alexander Schunka (Hrsg.), Reporting Christian Missions in the Eighteenth Century. Communication, Culture of Knowledge and Regular Publication in a Cross-Confessional Perspective (Jabloniana, 8), Wiesbaden 2017, Harrassowitz, 196 S., € 52,00. (Nadine Amsler, Frankfurt a. M.) Berkovich, Ilya, Motivation in War. The Experience of Common Soldiers in Old-Regime Europe, Cambridge / New York 2017, Cambridge University Press, XII u. 280 S. / graph. Darst., £ 22,99. (Marian Füssel, Göttingen) Stöckl, Alexandra, Der Principalkommissar. 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Kuang, Lanlan. "Staging the Silk Road Journey Abroad: The Case of Dunhuang Performative Arts." M/C Journal 19, no. 5 (October 13, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1155.

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The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). They are sociocultural phenomena that emerge through interactions and negotiations among multiple actors and institutions to envision and enact a Chinese imagination of “journeying abroad” from and to the country.ReferencesBakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1982.Bohlman, Philip V. “World Music at the ‘End of History’.” Ethnomusicology 46 (2002): 1–32.Davis, Sara L.M. Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.Duan, Wenjie. “The History of Conservation of Mogao Grottoes.” International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property: The Conservation of Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes and the Related Studies. Eds. Kuchitsu and Nobuaki. Tokyo: Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, 1997. 1–8.Faxian. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. Translated by James Legge. New York: Dover Publications, 1991.Herzfeld, Michael. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.Kuang, Lanlan. Dunhuang bi hua yue wu: "Zhongguo jing guan" zai guo ji yu jing zhong de jian gou, chuan bo yu yi yi (Dunhuang Performing Arts: The Construction and Transmission of “China-scape” in the Global Context). Beijing: She hui ke xue wen xian chu ban she, 2016.Lam, Joseph S.C. State Sacrifice and Music in Ming China: Orthodoxy, Creativity and Expressiveness. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.Mair, Victor. T’ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1989.Pollack, Barbara. “China’s Desert Treasure.” ARTnews, December 2013. Sep. 2016 <http://www.artnews.com/2013/12/24/chinas-desert-treasure/>.Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. Translated by Ronald Latham. Penguin Classics, 1958.Rees, Helen. Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. “‘Historical Ethnomusicology’: Reconstructing Falasha Liturgical History.” Ethnomusicology 24 (1980): 233–258.Shi, Weixiang. Dunhuang lishi yu mogaoku yishu yanjiu (Dunhuang History and Research on Mogao Grotto Art). Lanzhou: Gansu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002.Sima, Guang 司马光 (1019–1086) et al., comps. Zizhi tongjian 资治通鉴 (Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government). Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1957.Sima, Qian 司马迁 (145-86? B.C.E.) et al., comps. Shiji: Dayuan liezhuan 史记: 大宛列传 (Record of the Grand Historian: The Collective Biographies of Dayuan). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.Sivak, Alexandria and Amy Hood. “The Getty to Present: Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road Organised in Collaboration with the Dunhuang Academy and the Dunhuang Foundation.” Getty Press Release. Sep. 2016 <http://news.getty.edu/press-materials/press-releases/cave-temples-dunhuang-buddhist-art-chinas-silk-road>.Stromberg, Joseph. “Video: Take a Virtual 3D Journey to Visit China's Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.” Smithsonian, December 2012. Sep. 2016 <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/video-take-a-virtual-3d-journey-to-visit-chinas-caves-of-the-thousand-buddhas-150897910/?no-ist>.Tian, Qing. “Recent Trends in Buddhist Music Research in China.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 3 (1994): 63–72.Tuohy, Sue M.C. “Imagining the Chinese Tradition: The Case of Hua’er Songs, Festivals, and Scholarship.” Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, Bloomington, 1988.Wade, Bonnie C. Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.Wong, Isabel K.F. “From Reaction to Synthesis: Chinese Musicology in the Twentieth Century.” Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology. Eds. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 37–55.Wu, Chengen. Journey to the West. Tranlsated by W.J.F. Jenner. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2003.Wu, David Y.H. “Chinese National Dance and the Discourse of Nationalization in Chinese Anthropology.” The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia. Eds. Shinji Yamashita, Joseph Bosco, and J.S. Eades. New York: Berghahn, 2004. 198–207.Xuanzang. The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. Hamburg: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research, 1997.Yung, Bell, Evelyn S. Rawski, and Rubie S. Watson, eds. Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
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Wark, McKenzie. "Toywars." M/C Journal 6, no. 3 (June 1, 2003). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2179.

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I first came across etoy in Linz, Austria in 1995. They turned up at Ars Electronica with their shaved heads, in their matching orange bomber jackets. They were not invited. The next year they would not have to crash the party. In 1996 they were awarded Arts Electronica’s prestigious Golden Nica for web art, and were on their way to fame and bitterness – the just rewards for their art of self-regard. As founding member Agent.ZAI says: “All of us were extremely greedy – for excitement, for drugs, for success.” (Wishart & Boschler: 16) The etoy story starts on the fringes of the squatters’ movement in Zurich. Disenchanted with the hard left rhetorics that permeate the movement in the 1980s, a small group look for another way of existing within a commodified world, without the fantasy of an ‘outside’ from which to critique it. What Antonio Negri and friends call the ‘real subsumption’ of life under the rule of commodification is something etoy grasps intuitively. The group would draw on a number of sources: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Manchester rave scene, European Amiga art, rumors of the historic avant gardes from Dada to Fluxus. They came together in 1994, at a meeting in the Swiss resort town of Weggis on Lake Lucerne. While the staging of the founding meeting looks like a rerun of the origins of the Situationist International, the wording of the invitation might suggest the founding of a pop music boy band: “fun, money and the new world?” One of the – many – stories about the origins of the name Dada has it being chosen at random from a bilingual dictionary. The name etoy, in an update on that procedure, was spat out by a computer program designed to make four letter words at random. Ironically, both Dada and etoy, so casually chosen, would inspire furious struggles over the ownership of these chancey 4-bit words. The group decided to make money by servicing the growing rave scene. Being based in Vienna and Zurich, the group needed a way to communicate, and chose to use the internet. This was a far from obvious thing to do in 1994. Connections were slow and unreliable. Sometimes it was easier to tape a hard drive full of clubland graphics to the underside of a seat on the express train from Zurich to Vienna and simply email instructions to meet the train and retrieve it. The web was a primitive instrument in 1995 when etoy built its first website. They launched it with a party called etoy.FASTLANE, an optimistic title when the web was anything but. Coco, a transsexual model and tabloid sensation, sang a Japanese song while suspended in the air. She brought media interest, and was anointed etoy’s lifestyle angel. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “it was as if the Seven Dwarfs had discovered their Snow White.” (Wishart & Boschler: 33) The launch didn’t lead to much in the way of a music deal or television exposure. The old media were not so keen to validate the etoy dream of lifting themselves into fame and fortune by their bootstraps. And so etoy decided to be stars of the new media. The slogan was suitably revised: “etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 34) The etoy boys were more than net.artists, they were artists of the brand. The brand was achieving a new prominence in the mid-90s. (Klein: 35) This was a time when capitalism was hollowing itself out in the overdeveloped world, shedding parts of its manufacturing base. Control of the circuits of commodification would rest less on the ownership of the means of production and more on maintaining a monopoly on the flows of information. The leading edge of the ruling class was becoming self-consciously vectoral. It controlled the flow of information about what to produce – the details of design, the underlying patents. It controlled the flows of information about what is produced – the brands and logos, the slogans and images. The capitalist class is supplanted by a vectoral class, controlling the commodity circuit through the vectors of information. (Wark) The genius of etoy was to grasp the aesthetic dimension of this new stage of commodification. The etoy boys styled themselves not so much as a parody of corporate branding and management groupthink, but as logical extension of it. They adopted matching uniforms and called themselves agents. In the dada-punk-hiphop tradition, they launched themselves on the world as brand new, self-created, self-named subjects: Agents Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein. The etoy.com website was registered in 1995 with Network Solutions for a $100 fee. The homepage for this etoy.TANKSYSTEM was designed like a flow chart. As Gramazio says: “We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.” (Wishart & Boschler: 51) One tank was a cybermotel, with Coco the first guest. Another tank showed you your IP number, with a big-brother eye looking on. A supermarket tank offered sunglasses and laughing gas for sale, but which may or may not be delivered. The underground tank included hardcore photos of a sensationalist kind. A picture of the Federal Building in Oklamoma City after the bombing was captioned in deadpan post-situ style “such work needs a lot of training.” (Wishart & Boschler: 52) The etoy agents were by now thoroughly invested in the etoy brand and the constellation of images they had built around it, on their website. Their slogan became “etoy: leaving reality behind.” (Wishart & Boschler: 53) They were not the first artists fascinated by commodification. It was Warhol who said “good art is good business.”(Warhol ) But etoy reversed the equation: good business is good art. And good business, in this vectoral age, is in its most desirable form an essentially conceptual matter of creating a brand at the center of a constellation of signifiers. Late in 1995, etoy held another group meeting, at the Zurich youth center Dynamo. The problem was that while they had build a hardcore website, nobody was visiting it. Agents Gooldstein and Udatny thought that there might be a way of using the new search engines to steer visitors to the site. Zai and Brainhard helped secure a place at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts where Udatny could use the computer lab to implement this idea. Udatny’s first step was to create a program that would go out and gather email addresses from the web. These addresses would form the lists for the early examples of art-spam that etoy would perpetrate. Udatny’s second idea was a bit more interesting. He worked out how to get the etoy.TANKSYSTEM page listed in search engines. Most search engines ranked pages by the frequency of the search term in the pages it had indexed, so etoy.TANKSYSTEM would contain pages of selected keywords. Porn sites were also discovering this method of creating free publicity. The difference was that etoy chose a very carefully curated list of 350 search terms, including: art, bondage, cyberspace, Doom, Elvis, Fidel, genx, heroin, internet, jungle and Kant. Users of search engines who searched for these terms would find dummy pages listed prominently in their search results that directed them, unsuspectingly, to etoy.com. They called this project Digital Hijack. To give the project a slightly political aura, the pages the user was directed to contained an appeal for the release of convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick. This was the project that won them a Golden Nica statuette at Ars Electronica in 1996, which Gramazio allegedly lost the same night playing roulette. It would also, briefly, require that they explain themselves to the police. Digital Hijack also led to the first splits in the group, under the intense pressure of organizing it on a notionally collective basis, but with the zealous Agent Zai acting as de facto leader. When Udatny was expelled, Zai and Brainhard even repossessed his Toshiba laptop, bought with etoy funds. As Udatny recalls, “It was the lowest point in my life ever. There was nothing left; I could not rely on etoy any more. I did not even have clothes, apart from the etoy uniform.” (Wishart & Boschler: 104) Here the etoy story repeats a common theme from the history of the avant gardes as forms of collective subjectivity. After Digital Hijack, etoy went into a bit of a slump. It’s something of a problem for a group so dependent on recognition from the other of the media, that without a buzz around them, etoy would tend to collapse in on itself like a fading supernova. Zai spend the early part of 1997 working up a series of management documents, in which he appeared as the group’s managing director. Zai employed the current management theory rhetoric of employee ‘empowerment’ while centralizing control. Like any other corporate-Trotskyite, his line was that “We have to get used to reworking the company structure constantly.” (Wishart & Boschler: 132) The plan was for each member of etoy to register the etoy trademark in a different territory, linking identity to information via ownership. As Zai wrote “If another company uses our name in a grand way, I’ll probably shoot myself. And that would not be cool.” (Wishart & Boschler:: 132) As it turned out, another company was interested – the company that would become eToys.com. Zai received an email offering “a reasonable sum” for the etoy.com domain name. Zai was not amused. “Damned Americans, they think they can take our hunting grounds for a handful of glass pearls….”. (Wishart & Boschler: 133) On an invitation from Suzy Meszoly of C3, the etoy boys traveled to Budapest to work on “protected by etoy”, a work exploring internet security. They spent most of their time – and C3’s grant money – producing a glossy corporate brochure. The folder sported a blurb from Bjork: “etoy: immature priests from another world” – which was of course completely fabricated. When Artothek, the official art collection of the Austrian Chancellor, approached etoy wanting to buy work, the group had to confront the problem of how to actually turn their brand into a product. The idea was always that the brand was the product, but this doesn’t quite resolve the question of how to produce the kind of unique artifacts that the art world requires. Certainly the old Conceptual Art strategy of selling ‘documentation’ would not do. The solution was as brilliant as it was simple – to sell etoy shares. The ‘works’ would be ‘share certificates’ – unique objects, whose only value, on the face of it, would be that they referred back to the value of the brand. The inspiration, according to Wishart & Boschsler, was David Bowie, ‘the man who sold the world’, who had announced the first rock and roll bond on the London financial markets, backed by future earnings of his back catalogue and publishing rights. Gramazio would end up presenting Chancellor Viktor Klima with the first ‘shares’ at a press conference. “It was a great start for the project”, he said, “A real hack.” (Wishart & Boschler: 142) For this vectoral age, etoy would create the perfect vectoral art. Zai and Brainhard took off next for Pasadena, where they got the idea of reverse-engineering the online etoy.TANKSYSTEM by building an actual tank in an orange shipping container, which would become etoy.TANK 17. This premiered at the San Francisco gallery Blasthaus in June 1998. Instant stars in the small world of San Francisco art, the group began once again to disintegrate. Brainhard and Esposito resigned. Back in Europe in late 1998, Zai was preparing to graduate from the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. His final project would recapitulate the life and death of etoy. It would exist from here on only as an online archive, a digital mausoleum. As Kubli says “there was no possibility to earn our living with etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 192) Zai emailed eToys.com and asked them if them if they would like to place a banner ad on etoy.com, to redirect any errant web traffic. Lawyers for eToys.com offered etoy $30,000 for the etoy.com domain name, which the remaining members of etoy – Zai, Gramazio, Kubli – refused. The offer went up to $100,000, which they also refused. Through their lawyer Peter Wild they demanded $750,000. In September 1999, while etoy were making a business presentation as their contribution to Ars Electronica, eToys.com lodged a complaint against etoy in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The company hired Bruce Wessel, of the heavyweight LA law firm Irell & Manella, who specialized in trademark, copyright and other intellectual property litigation. The complaint Wessel drafted alleged that etoy had infringed and diluted the eToys trademark, were practicing unfair competition and had committed “intentional interference with prospective economic damage.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) Wessel demanded an injunction that would oblige etoy to cease using its trademark and take down its etoy.com website. The complaint also sought to prevent etoy from selling shares, and demanded punitive damages. Displaying the aggressive lawyering for which he was so handsomely paid, Wessel invoked the California Unfair Competition Act, which was meant to protect citizens from fraudulent business scams. Meant as a piece of consumer protection legislation, its sweeping scope made it available for inventive suits such as Wessel’s against etoy. Wessel was able to use pretty much everything from the archive etoy built against it. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “The court papers were like a delicately curated catalogue of its practices.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) And indeed, legal documents in copyright and trademark cases may be the most perfect literature of the vectoral age. The Unfair Competition claim was probably aimed at getting the suit heard in a Californian rather than a Federal court in which intellectual property issues were less frequently litigated. The central aim of the eToys suit was the trademark infringement, but on that head their claims were not all that strong. According to the 1946 Lanham Act, similar trademarks do not infringe upon each other if there they are for different kinds of business or in different geographical areas. The Act also says that the right to own a trademark depends on its use. So while etoy had not registered their trademark and eToys had, etoy were actually up and running before eToys, and could base their trademark claim on this fact. The eToys case rested on a somewhat selective reading of the facts. Wessel claimed that etoy was not using its trademark in the US when eToys was registered in 1997. Wessel did not dispute the fact that etoy existed in Europe prior to that time. He asserted that owning the etoy.com domain name was not sufficient to establish a right to the trademark. If the intention of the suit was to bully etoy into giving in, it had quite the opposite effect. It pissed them off. “They felt again like the teenage punks they had once been”, as Wishart & Bochsler put it. Their art imploded in on itself for lack of attention, but called upon by another, it flourished. Wessel and eToys.com unintentionally triggered a dialectic that worked in quite the opposite way to what they intended. The more pressure they put on etoy, the more valued – and valuable – they felt etoy to be. Conceptual business, like conceptual art, is about nothing but the management of signs within the constraints of given institutional forms of market. That this conflict was about nothing made it a conflict about everything. It was a perfectly vectoral struggle. Zai and Gramazio flew to the US to fire up enthusiasm for their cause. They asked Wolfgang Staehle of The Thing to register the domain toywar.com, as a space for anti-eToys activities at some remove from etoy.com, and as a safe haven should eToys prevail with their injunction in having etoy.com taken down. The etoy defense was handled by Marcia Ballard in New York and Robert Freimuth in Los Angeles. In their defense, they argued that etoy had existed since 1994, had registered its globally accessible domain in 1995, and won an international art prize in 1996. To counter a claim by eToys that they had a prior trademark claim because they had bought a trademark from another company that went back to 1990, Ballard and Freimuth argued that this particular trademark only applied to the importation of toys from the previous owner’s New York base and thus had no relevance. They capped their argument by charging that eToys had not shown that its customers were really confused by the existence of etoy. With Christmas looming, eToys wanted a quick settlement, so they offered Zurich-based etoy lawyer Peter Wild $160,000 in shares and cash for the etoy domain. Kubli was prepared to negotiate, but Zai and Gramazio wanted to gamble – and raise the stakes. As Zai recalls: “We did not want to be just the victims; that would have been cheap. We wanted to be giants too.” (Wishart & Boschler: 207) They refused the offer. The case was heard in November 1999 before Judge Rafeedie in the Federal Court. Freimuth, for etoy, argued that federal Court was the right place for what was essentially a trademark matter. Robert Kleiger, for eToys, countered that it should stay where it was because of the claims under the California Unfair Competition act. Judge Rafeedie took little time in agreeing with the eToys lawyer. Wessel’s strategy paid off and eToys won the first skirmish. The first round of a quite different kind of conflict opened when etoy sent out their first ‘toywar’ mass mailing, drawing the attention of the net.art, activism and theory crowd to these events. This drew a report from Felix Stalder in Telepolis: “Fences are going up everywhere, molding what once seemed infinite space into an overcrowded and tightly controlled strip mall.” (Stalder ) The positive feedback from the net only emboldened etoy. For the Los Angeles court, lawyers for etoy filed papers arguing that the sale of ‘shares’ in etoy was not really a stock offering. “The etoy.com website is not about commerce per se, it is about artist and social protest”, they argued. (Wishart & Boschler: 209) They were obliged, in other words, to assert a difference that the art itself had intended to blur in order to escape eToy’s claims under the Unfair Competition Act. Moreover, etoy argued that there was no evidence of a victim. Nobody was claiming to have been fooled by etoy into buying something under false pretences. Ironically enough, art would turn out in hindsight to be a more straightforward transaction here, involving less simulation or dissimulation, than investing in a dot.com. Perhaps we have reached the age when art makes more, not less, claim than business to the rhetorical figure of ‘reality’. Having defended what appeared to be the vulnerable point under the Unfair Competition law, etoy went on the attack. It was the failure of eToys to do a proper search for other trademarks that created the problem in the first place. Meanwhile, in Federal Court, lawyers for etoy launched a counter-suit that reversed the claims against them made by eToys on the trademark question. While the suits and counter suits flew, eToys.com upped their offer to settle to a package of cash and shares worth $400,000. This rather puzzled the etoy lawyers. Those choosing to sue don’t usually try at the same time to settle. Lawyer Peter Wild advised his clients to take the money, but the parallel tactics of eToys.com only encouraged them to dig in their heels. “We felt that this was a tremendous final project for etoy”, says Gramazio. As Zai says, “eToys was our ideal enemy – we were its worst enemy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 210) Zai reported the offer to the net in another mass mail. Most people advised them to take the money, including Doug Rushkoff and Heath Bunting. Paul Garrin counseled fighting on. The etoy agents offered to settle for $750,000. The case came to court in late November 1999 before Judge Shook. The Judge accepted the plausibility of the eToys version of the facts on the trademark issue, which included the purchase of a registered trademark from another company that went back to 1990. He issued an injunction on their behalf, and added in his statement that he was worried about “the great danger of children being exposed to profane and hardcore pornographic issues on the computer.” (Wishart & Boschler: 222) The injunction was all eToys needed to get Network Solutions to shut down the etoy.com domain. Zai sent out a press release in early December, which percolated through Slashdot, rhizome, nettime (Staehle) and many other networks, and catalyzed the net community into action. A debate of sorts started on investor websites such as fool.com. The eToys stock price started to slide, and etoy ‘warriors’ felt free to take the credit for it. The story made the New York Times on 9th December, Washington Post on the 10th, Wired News on the 11th. Network Solutions finally removed the etoy.com domain on the 10th December. Zai responded with a press release: “this is robbery of digital territory, American imperialism, corporate destruction and bulldozing in the way of the 19th century.” (Wishart & Boschler: 237) RTMark set up a campaign fund for toywar, managed by Survival Research Laboratories’ Mark Pauline. The RTMark press release promised a “new internet ‘game’ designed to destroy eToys.com.” (Wishart & Boschler: 239) The RTMark press release grabbed the attention of the Associated Press newswire. The eToys.com share price actually rose on December 13th. Goldman Sachs’ e-commerce analyst Anthony Noto argued that the previous declines in the Etoys share price made it a good buy. Goldman Sachs was the lead underwriter of the eToys IPO. Noto’s writings may have been nothing more than the usual ‘IPOetry’ of the time, but the crash of the internet bubble was some months away yet. The RTMark campaign was called ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. It used the Floodnet technique that Ricardo Dominguez used in support of the Zapatistas. As Dominguez said, “this hysterical power-play perfectly demonstrates the intensions of the new net elite; to turn the World Wide Web into their own private home-shopping network.” (Wishart & Boschler: 242) The Floodnet attack may have slowed the eToys.com server down a bit, but it was robust and didn’t crash. Ironically, it ran on open source software. Dominguez claims that the ‘Twelve Days’ campaign, which relied on individuals manually launching Floodnet from their own computers, was not designed to destroy the eToys site, but to make a protest felt. “We had a single-bullet script that could have taken down eToys – a tactical nuke, if you will. But we felt this script did not represent the presence of a global group of people gathered to bear witness to a wrong.” (Wishart & Boschler: 245) While the eToys engineers did what they could to keep the site going, eToys also approached universities and businesses whose systems were being used to host Floodnet attacks. The Thing, which hosted Dominguez’s eToys Floodnet site was taken offline by The Thing’s ISP, Verio. After taking down the Floodnet scripts, The Thing was back up, restoring service to the 200 odd websites that The Thing hosted besides the offending Floodnet site. About 200 people gathered on December 20th at a demonstration against eToys outside the Museum of Modern Art. Among the crowd were Santas bearing signs that said ‘Coal for eToys’. The rally, inside the Museum, was led by the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping: “We are drowning in a sea of identical details”, he said. (Wishart & Boschler: 249-250) Meanwhile etoy worked on the Toywar Platform, an online agitpop theater spectacle, in which participants could act as soldiers in the toywar. This would take some time to complete – ironically the dispute threatened to end before this last etoy artwork was ready, giving etoy further incentives to keep the dispute alive. The etoy agents had a new lawyer, Chris Truax, who was attracted to the case by the publicity it was generating. Through Truax, etoy offered to sell the etoy domain and trademark for $3.7 million. This may sound like an insane sum, but to put it in perspective, the business.com site changed hands for $7.5 million around this time. On December 29th, Wessel signaled that eToys was prepared to compromise. The problem was, the Toywar Platform was not quite ready, so etoy did what it could to drag out the negotiations. The site went live just before the scheduled court hearings, January 10th 2000. “TOYWAR.com is a place where all servers and all involved people melt and build a living system. In our eyes it is the best way to express and document what’s going on at the moment: people start to about new ways to fight for their ideas, their lifestyle, contemporary culture and power relations.” (Wishart & Boschler: 263) Meanwhile, in a California courtroom, Truax demanded that Network Solutions restore the etoy domain, that eToys pay the etoy legal expenses, and that the case be dropped without prejudice. No settlement was reached. Negotiations dragged on for another two weeks, with the etoy agents’ attention somewhat divided between two horizons – art and law. The dispute was settled on 25th January. Both parties dismissed their complaints without prejudice. The eToys company would pay the etoy artists $40,000 for legal costs, and contact Network Solutions to reinstate the etoy domain. “It was a pleasure doing business with one of the biggest e-commerce giants in the world” ran the etoy press release. (Wishart & Boschler: 265) That would make a charming end to the story. But what goes around comes around. Brainhard, still pissed off with Zai after leaving the group in San Francisco, filed for the etoy trademark in Austria. After that the internal etoy wranglings just gets boring. But it was fun while it lasted. What etoy grasped intuitively was the nexus between the internet as a cultural space and the transformation of the commodity economy in a yet-more abstract direction – its becoming-vectoral. They zeroed in on the heart of the new era of conceptual business – the brand. As Wittgenstein says of language, what gives words meaning is other words, so too for brands. What gives brands meaning is other brands. There is a syntax for brands as there is for words. What etoy discovered is how to insert a new brand into that syntax. The place of eToys as a brand depended on their business competition with other brands – with Toys ‘R’ Us, for example. For etoy, the syntax they discovered for relating their brand to another one was a legal opposition. What made etoy interesting was their lack of moral posturing. Their abandonment of leftist rhetorics opened them up to exploring the territory where media and business meet, but it also made them vulnerable to being consumed by the very dialectic that created the possibility of staging etoy in the first place. By abandoning obsolete political strategies, they discovered a media tactic, which collapsed for want of a new strategy, for the new vectoral terrain on which we find ourselves. Works Cited Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Continuum, London, 2003. Warhol, Andy. From A to B and Back Again. Picador, New York, 1984. Stalder, Felix. ‘Fences in Cyberspace: Recent events in the battle over domain names’. 19 Jun 2003. <http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.php>. Wark, McKenzie. ‘A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]’ 19 Jun 2003. http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. Harper Collins, London, 2000. Wishart, Adam & Regula Bochsler. Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspace Ecco Books, 2003. Staehle, Wolfgang. ‘<nettime> etoy.com shut down by US court.’ 19 Jun 2003. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.html Links http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.htm http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.html http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wark, McKenzie. "Toywars" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>. APA Style Wark, M. (2003, Jun 19). Toywars. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>
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