Journal articles on the topic 'Natural Ontological Attitude'

Faced with interminable combat over some piece of philosophical terrain, someone will inevitably suggest that the contested ground is nothing more than a philosophically manufactured mirage that is therefore not worth fighting for. Arthur Fine has long advocated such a response — the ‘Natural Ontological Attitude,’ or NOA — to the realism debate in the philosophy of science. Notwithstanding theprima facieincompatibility between the realist's and anti-realist's positions, Fine suggests that there is in fact enough common ground for NOA to stand on its own as a minimal alternative, one that enjoys the advantage of being free of the philosophical burdens of its overweight contenders.Notwithstanding Fine's claim to have identified a position that is neither realist nor anti-realist, critics charge that NOA, as Fine describes it, is a realist position. I endorse this criticism below, with attention to the relation between NOA and Bas van Fraassen's Constructive Empiricism (CE). I show that Fine's repudiation of the globalism he identifies in realism (and in anti-realism) does not insulate him from that charge.

Since the borders between natural life and death have been blurred by technique, in Western societies discussions and practices regarding death have became infinite. The studies in this area include all the most important topics of psychology, sociology, and philosophy. From a psychological point of view, the research has created many instruments for measuring death anxiety, fear, threat, depression, meaning of life, and among them, the profiles on death attitude are innumerable. This research presents the validation of a new attitude scale, which conjoins psychological dimensions and philosophical ones. This scale may be useful because the ontological idea of death has not yet been considered in research. The hypothesis is that it is different to believe that death is absolute annihilation than to be sure that it is a passage or a transformation of one’s personal identity. The hypothetical difference results in a greater inner suffering caused by the former idea. In order to measure this possibility, we analyzed the correlation between Testoni Death Representation Scale and Beck Hopelessness Scale, Suicide Resilience Inventory-25, and Reasons for Living Inventory. The results confirm the hypothesis, showing that the representation of death as total annihilation is positively correlated to hopelessness and negatively correlated to resilience.

AbstractThe “verbal–nonverbal” distinction is mostly used in everyday language and its “‘naïve-natural’ attitude” (Husserl). It confirms the idea that a word/verb, as a component of human expressivity, is the basic unit of language. Theories of Peirce, Saumjan, and Searle highlight how a different, predominantly “‘non-naïve’-natural attitude” is required to understand the distinction and its position in the semiotic toolkit. To support this conclusion, Husserl unfolds a methodological approach of varying attitudes and attitude-changes, including important diversifications of ontology. A consequence is the need for an interregional ontological approach, which in this article leads to a consideration of social psychology (Lewin) and quantum theory (Bohm) because both underline that words and meanings are forces in fields, and by no means isolated single units. Word and meaning are to be understood as forces, and meaning-making as well as interpretation a matter of force field considerations. Semiotics should thus cherish dynamic features, whereby the “verbal–nonverbal” distinction teaches us at a “non-naïve” attitude level, that a word/verb is always a non-word/verb as well. The greatness of semiotics is in the understanding of such dynamic and continuously creative inversions.

AbstractHusserlian phenomenology has been interpreted as a method of knowledge that can be applied to different domains and which would compete with other methods to give us a better understanding of the “real”, the “man” or “society”. Moreover, “phenomenological idealism” has been presented as an “ontological” or “metaphysical” thesis, in the pre-critical sense of the term. The goal of this study is to suggest that these two theses imply the tacit identification of the natural attitude and the phenomenological one, avoiding the difference between the objects to which these attitudes relate. Therefore, a phenomenological truth does not anticipate any opinion about the “world”.

Arthur Fine presented the Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA) as a third alternative between scientific realism and anti-realism by identifying a core position contained in both and rejecting any philosophical addition to this core. At first, Fine’s proposal was understood as offering a doxastic middle ground between believing in the truth of a theory and believing in its empirical adequacy. In this reading, NOA was widely disregarded after Alan Musgrave’s criticisms of it, which characterized Fine’s proposal as a form of realism. After that, NOA was reinterpreted as a local variety of realism focused in changing the attitude used to settle the scientific realism debate, by rejecting global philosophies with an approach external to science, and by considering only the scientific evidence with a contextualist mood. Although this reading clarifies how to understand NOA, there is still no consensus about what is Fine’s argument to support it. I organize the four main interpretations of Fine’s defense and point their main flaws. Finally, I develop some clarifications about NOA in order to solve the flaws of the preceding interpretations, defending that NOA is based upon a prevalence of the epistemic values actually used in scientific practice.

The aim of this article is to discuss whether it is possible to derive a coherent ontological proposal from the premises of systemic thinking. The author claims that systemic thinking is committed to pluralism both in epistemology and in ontology, because pluralism is a natural consequence of the systemic distinction of objects in different and irreducible levels of observation. Different levels of observation must be adopted when describing different systemic levels (the well-known sub-systems, systems, systems of systems). It is implied that different epistemologies are accepted, each having its own criteria and validation methods suitable for each level, and that there are irreducible ontological differences among entities. The study results are thus committed to ontological and epistemological pluralism. An interesting moral and social consequence of pluralism is a tolerant attitude towards different perspectives and cultures, that can easily be transformed into a general charity principle inspiring the regulation of multicultural societies.

Classical realism describes the notion that the world we inhabit is completely mind-independent, that there is one unique account of the world and that truths about the world are a matter of the absolute correspondence between linguistic terms and their referents in the world. Human geographers have recently employed a form of transcendental realism inspired by the works of R. Bhaskar, A. Giddens and A. Sayer. This form of realism is anti-positivist and based on the dual notions of ontological stratification and emergent powers materialism. Reactions in geography have been both positive and negative indicating that neither classical realism, nor transcendental realism nor anti-realism seem acceptable. As a way of solving this dilemma, pragmatic (or internal) realism proposes the adoption of a natural ontological attitude toward the objects of geographical inquiry.

We generally have strong aesthetic feeling to historic sites. This article tries to focus on a topic concerning this kind of emotion from an archetypical perspective. "Entropy" is a core concept of the second law of thermodynamics and a modern response for old thinking about "fire". Difference from tools attitude of natural science, this article takes a kind of perspective of natural theology which united subject and object to explore the ontological and archetypical meaning of "entropy", as well as its reflection on building materials which embodied and recalled the natural process producing aesthetic qualities. This article gives case studies in this kind of building practices, as well as gives us to rethink material recycling and building sustainable development

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to deal with a slightly erroneous claim made in previous research that philosophical phenomenology has shown little interest in the topic of “religion”. The majority of this article deals with the branch of the Movement that I have dubbed Sociological Phenomenology which stems out of the work of Alfred Schutz and Max Scheler and has influenced scholars of religion like Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann and James Spickard. I offer a Husserlian critique of this branch of phenomenology for failing to appreciate the key insights of his later phenomenology’s “ontological turn” where he turned to an analysis on the natural attitude and the life-world. I conclude by showing what a phenomenology or religion consistent with these later insights may look like.

In Xunzi's thought, the noumenon self is the existence which is connected with all things on the basis of Dao. It is the existence of the integrity of emotional desire, intellectual ability, willpower and social behavior ability. Therefore, the pursuit of emotional desire or intellectual rationality can not achieve the real self. The realization of self is the same process as people's understanding of Tao. It is not natural. It needs to eliminate the rudimentary and accumulate the etiquette and righteousness to support emotion. Therefore, Xunzi's negation of the attitude and behavior of only obeying the sexual desire and the emphasis on the hypocrisy of the way of doing Li and Yi by heart are aimed at highlighting the fact that the ontological self remains to be completed and the existence of individual life coexists with emotion and reason.

John Polkinghorne was, undoubtedly, one of the most influential authors in the dialogue between science and religion. His attitude is characterized by a focus on the concept of kenosis in response to the ontological orientation of process philosophy and theology. God’s omnipotence implies the possibility that God created the universe as an evolutionary and autonomous world, which is not predetermined but has been created for openness. According to Polkinghorne, the position of this openness may be in the uncertainty associated with the world of quantum and chaotic phenomena. God’s self-limitation of his own omnipotence can thus be understood as an effort to respect the autonomy of natural processes and human freedom. Such an image of God is compatible with the current state of scientific knowledge, which itself becomes the starting point for thinking about God and his relationship to the world. Thus, despite the problems of some parts of its concept, Polkinghorne creates a comprehensive integrative approach to the dialogue between science and religion.

AbstractThis paper takes a critical look at a number of recent attempts to reconcile religious and scientifi c ways of thinking. Three basic programs of what I call "religious naturalism" are discussed: (1) attempts to synthesize science and religion by defending a combination of (Christian) theism and naturalism by means of the concept of emergence; (2) "demythologized" interpretations of religious statements, allegedly rendering them compatible with science (for example, in John Dewey's pragmatic naturalism or in the religious naturalism inherited from the Chicago School of liberal theology); and (3) a form of naturalism analogous to Arthur Fine's "natural ontological attitude" (NOA), debated in the philosophy of science over the past two decades. I suggest that (1) amounts to a nonreductively naturalist metaphysics, whereas (2) is a nonmetaphysical and (3) a postmetaphysical program in the philosophy of religion. It is argued, among other things, that while the concept of emergence has become increasingly relevant in the philosophy of mind and science, its place in the philosophy of religion remains obscure. Similarly, nonmetaphysical discussions of religious experiences or "the religious" à la Dewey and his followers are difficult to combine with genuinely religious views. Further, it is hard to see how postmetaphysical naturalism (NOA) could be part of a philosophically responsible program at all, because of its diffi culties in accounting for the normativity of ontological commitments. It is proposed that, instead of elaborating on these pseudo-solutions, the problem of the relation between science and religion should be subordinated to a pragmatist re-evaluation.

Practically speaking, the way people understand reality (ontology) cuts across the nexus of their thought pattern, belief system and consequently their general attitude to life. Hence, ontology and cosmology are at the basis of Igbo conception of reality and also the spiritual and physical operations of the human world. It is an established fact that a traditional Igbo would like to hold tenaciously to the already established concepts by the Igbo forebears. Hence, any attempt at a critical analysis of these accepted concepts are quickly waved off with such statements as: it has been so and has to remain so. For the Igbo, it is morally wrong to question the wisdom of the ancestors. The wisdom of the ancestors is to be cherished, preserved and propagated to the future generations and not to be questioned or criticized. But materiality is part of reality. As such, neither the created beings nor the universe in general are static but rather dynamic. Dynamism is the natural condition of existence in the world of the moving and sensible reality. Hence, peoples concepts of reality should be necessarily subjected to constant evaluation and re-evaluation in order to ascertain their validity. Thus, the main purpose of this research is to challenge and encourage Igbo-African scholars to delve into many traditional concepts as to critically evaluate them either to discover the truth hidden in them or to make possible the attainment of certainty. However, the research adopts primarily the method of philosophical appraisal to reach to the goal of the research.

This study aims, first, to delimit the seemingly synonymous concepts of “phenomenon” and “appearance” and second, to trace the functions of each in Kant’s philosophy and the phenomenological tradition. The analy­sis is based on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the central works of Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink. Kant does not explicitly distinguish the two terms and only speaks about phenomena when he deals with the categorial application of reason. With Husserl, appearance is linked with the area of the natural attitude while the phenomenon is absolute. Fink’s position is interesting in that it differs from the views of the main representatives of transcendental philosophy, Kant and Husserl. According to Fink, appearing is the foundation of the fact that what exists is and that appearing is being. Fink takes a different approach to the meanings of appearance as opposing the thing in itself which possesses true but unknowable being (Kant) and appearance as taking place in the “relative” sphere of the natural attitude (Husserl): with Fink, appearance (or, as Fink constantly writes, “appearing”) turns out to be the condition of the existence of objects. Appearance, understood through the prism of the human being which perceives something as Vorschein, implies an inherently open world. Following Fink, I analyse these provisions and examine, first, light as the metaphysical source of cognition, second, the human being as a special kind of being, third, the pre-Socratic treatment of being and, fourth, the formation of a distinct phenomenological idiom. I come to the conclusion that the metaphysical-ontological method of phenomenological analysis of appearance proposed by Fink affords a new insight into the a priori principle and the nature of Kant’s “thing in itself” and proposes a new grounding of Husserl’s thesis which questions Kant’s agnosticism.

Introduction. The 2020 viral pandemic put humanity in a forced isolation environment. This crisis situation provoked the total inclusion of technology in the modern dialogue at different levels of connections and relationships. This phenomenon does not only demonstrate the enormous importance of technology in the modern world, but also raises the question of the essence of such a “mandatory” dialogue partner. The aim of the study is to raise a question about ontological essence of technology, formulating a hypothesis about the involvement of the “technical” in the symbolic world. The authors use the phenomenological approach that makes it possible to see behind an array of diverse human experience interacting with the “technical” — the anonymity of the essence of technology. The usual attitude to engineering and technology as a tool that performs certain initially laid down tasks is unsatisfactory, since the importance of technology in modern civilization is much wider. In addition, the authors use the analytical approach that makes it possible to see behind scientific theories and facts a certain “logic of behavior” of science and technology aimed at overcoming the nature of things. Symbolic technology passes all natural and cultural boundaries.

The Problem of the value of truth came before us – or was it we who came before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks.– NietzscheArthur Fine, in his defense of the Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA), has argued that any attempt to analyze truth will fail because any such analysis presupposes an untenable essentialism. In particular, he asserts that the anti-realist analysis of truth commits itself to there being an essential property which all true statements possess, qua true statements. It is this commitment which he castigates. For the concept of truth is the fundamental semantical concept. Its uses, history, logic, and grammar are sufficiently definite to be partially catalogued, at least for a time. But it cannot be “explained” or given an “account of” without circularity. Nor does it require anything of the sort. The concept of truth is open-ended, growing with the growth of science …. Thus there is no projectible sketch now of what truth signifies, nor of what areas of science truth is exempt from - nor will there ever be.

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the intrinsically technical nature of visual perception and pictorial performance through their common anchorage in the corporeity that brings them into existence. As with any other artistic technique, painting reveals itself to be the natural extension of a technological attitude already rooted in the sensorimotor devices of the body in action; painting is led to inhabit a world that is of the same nature as corporeal agents, because the objects that populate it share with it the ontological element of the “flesh”. Through Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of Cezanne’s pictorial works, I demonstrate that the main purpose of painting is, analogically with the descriptive analyses made possible by the phenomenological reduction, to render intersubjectively evident the hidden work of vision before its sedimentation in an accomplished perceptual scene. As the experiments of contemporary neuroscience also demonstrate, perception is by and large a reconstructive process of “image-making” rather than an allegedly accurate reproduction of the spectacle of the world. Painting, on the other hand, both in terms of creation and for the observer, employs the same sensorimotor resources as instruments.

<p>The subject of scientific reflection is the contemplation and action as ways of the human attitude to the world, existence, substantiated and accomplished in the ontology of human life by I.&nbsp;S.&nbsp;Turgenev, thinker and artist. The presence of a &ldquo;thought&rdquo; and &ldquo;will&rdquo;, consciousness and action, knowledge and transformation is considered by the writer as a fundamental characteristic of the human way of existence, which becomes the semantic core of the philosophical and anthropological concept of the article-speech &ldquo;Hamlet and Don Quixote&rdquo; (1860), fundamental for the research on Turgenev's creative work at the level of historical poetics. The activity approach to the person, strengthened at the turn of the classical and non-classical stages of development of philosophical thought,&nbsp;&mdash; the time of formation of Turgenev&rsquo;s world outlook, explains converging of the points of opposite &ldquo;native types&rdquo;, their transition from the ideal existence into the real one, their equally weighted opposition to the &ldquo;evil and lies&rdquo;. As a result, according to Turgenev's view the images of Hamlet and Don Quixote come together on the ground of &ldquo;worship to the Truth&rdquo; and the &ldquo;idea of high merits&rdquo; of the individual, in which the human &ldquo;nature&rdquo; and &ldquo;quintessence&rdquo; are objectified. Therefore, the analysis of the hamletian and don-quijotian types could be carried out by Turgenev just within the universal socio-cosmic lay of the interrelation of the opposites inherent in centripetal and centrifugal natural forces and their tendency to synthesis. The &ldquo;tragic aspect of human life&rdquo; engendered by the inaccessibility of such synthesis may be overcome by means of comprehension of the Truth, the &ldquo;true meaning of nature&rdquo;. Moreover, Turgenev&rsquo;s ontological idea of the &ldquo;Conciliation and absorbtion of everything existing in the other&rdquo;, argued at the attitudinal and aesthetic levels, is the basis for the definition of the meaning of human life. This meaning is found in the balance between the content of all human life and the world, society, other people in the name of the &ldquo;ideal&rdquo;, establishment of the truth and justice. Hence, contemplation and action as forms of a morally responsible attitude to life in Turgenev&rsquo;s artistic ontology are directly related to the problem of &ldquo;high levels&rdquo; and quality of human existence.</p>

Abstract This article examines how Reformed scholasticism can be relevant for systematic theology today. ‘Reformed Scholasticism’ denotes the academic practice in which the doctrines of the Reformation are expounded, explained, and defended. It is primarily a method and attitude in search of the truth, based on a careful reading of Scripture, drawing on patristic and medieval traditions, and interacting with philosophy and other academic disciplines. In addition to these methodological features, important contributions on various doctrinal topics can be discovered. The doctrine of God has a foundational role in the sense that God is the primary subject of the other topics (creation, salvation, etc.). Reformed scholastic theology not only examines God’s inner essence, but also the concrete relation and operation of God toward his world. In a Trinitarian understanding of God’s essence, a distinction is maintained between God’s immanent relatedness as three divine Persons, and his outward relation to created reality. The doctrines of creation and providence gave occasion for Reformed scholastics to engage in debates with the emerging natural sciences, and also articulated important theological insights concerning the involvement of God in creaturely affairs. In Christology, the Reformed orthodox maintained the classic doctrine of the two natures of Jesus Christ, against Socinians and other opponents. These ontological statements are the necessary conditions for a proper understanding of the salvation by Christ. While the doctrinal positions of Reformed scholastic theology cannot be automatically transmitted to contemporary discussions, we can profit from this tradition on several levels of method and content.

La siguiente investigación solo tiene pretensiones exploratorias frente a problemas iniciales, pero no poco importantes, que deben sobrellevar antropólogos, etnólogos, etnógrafos o meros observadores que van en búsqueda de la alteridad. Durante el devenir histórico de la etnografía, entendiendo esta última como una disciplina que se ha configurado desde el siglo XVIII hasta nuestros días, la intención de conocer a “los otros” mediante nuestra propia experiencia presenta dificultades epistemológicas y ontológicas que intentaremos reconocer de forma exploratoria, utilizando como hilo conductor los conceptos operatorios de la fenomenología de Edmundo Husserl, siguiendo una revisión histórica del origen del concepto de etnografía y examinando algunas definiciones actuales de la disciplina etnográfica.Ethnography and empiricismAbstractThe following research is aimed at exploring initial problems, not unimportant, faced by anthropologists, ethnologists, ethnographers or mere observers in search of otherness. During the historical evolution of ethnography and understanding the latter as a discipline configured since the Eighteenth Century until today, the search to know “others” through our own experience presents epistemological and ontological difficulties that we will try to recognize in an exploratory form, using the operational concepts of Edmundo Husserl’s phenomenology as a thread and following a historical review of the origin of the concept of ethnography and some current definitions of the ethnographic discipline.Keywords: Natural attitude, empiricism, epistemology, ethnography, phenomenology.Etnografia e empirismoResumoA seguinte pesquisa só tem pretensões exploratórias perante problemas iniciais, mas não pouco importantes, com que devem lidar antropólogos, etnólogos, etnógrafos ou meros observadores que vão à procura da alteridade. Durante o devir histórico da etnografia, entendendo esta última como uma disciplina que se tem configurado desde o século XVIII até nossos dias, a procura de conhecer “os outros” através de nossa própria experiência, apresenta dificuldades epistemológicas e ontológicas que tentaremos reconhecer de forma exploratória, utilizando como fio condutor os conceitos operatórios da fenomenologia de Edmundo Husserl, seguindo uma revisão histórica da origem do conceito de etnografia e algumas definições atuais da disciplina etnográfica.Palavras-chave: atitude natural, empirismo, epistemologia, etnografia,fenomenologia.

The paper studies the legal nature of defects in medical care and defines criteria for their legal classification. A retrospective analysis of the development of the institution of legal responsibility for improper medical treatment is carried out. The concept of a defect in medical care and related categories, their natural ontological characteristics and classifying legal features are investigated, doctrinal approaches to the legal assessment of defects in medical care are considered. It is noted that, despite the noticeable evolution that the question of the responsibility of doctors has undergone in the history of law, there is still no single approach to understanding the legal nature of defects in medical care in jurisprudence. In modern Russian legislation, as in the criminal laws of most foreign countries, there are no special standards for such defects classification. At the same time, in the interests of optimal legal regulation of relations in the field of medicine, today it is the legal definition and systematization of basic concepts and criteria for the legal classification of various medical incidents that matters and not the introduction into the law of special articles establishing criminal liability for improper provision of medical care. Thus, by combining all adverse events in medical practice under the general term "medical incidents", one can use the concept of "medical care defect" to distinguish incidents caused by inappropriate provision of medical services. The author proposes his own classification of defects in medical care dividing them into medical torts (offenses) and medical incidents (accidents and medical errors) based on the nature of the attitude of the subject of medical activity to their professional duties. A conceptual approach to the legal classification of medical care defects has been formulated.

Abstract It can be observed that changing attitude towards the environment and fellow human beings manifests itself as a socially unsustainable relationship, which in different ways and at different levels manifests itself in social exclusion. Social exclusion is increasingly emerging as a phenomenon that is complex in nature and its solutions must be sought in the wicked problem approach, which is characteristic of complex problems and has significant ontological roots. At present, ontology should consider the much more complicated problem of what types of being are formed by both the natural and the cultural evolutionary processes. It can be argued that evolutionary ontology attempts to create a new image of the world and of humans – a new non-anthropocentric cosmology, i.e., a consistently philosophical culturological cosmology that takes into account reality in its real structure as a conflict between the spontaneous activity of nature and the socio-cultural activity of humans (Šmajs, 2008, p. 96). The reasons for social exclusion can be different, and its specific manifestations are various, and the same can be said about the phenomenon of social inclusion, which is the expression of the quality of other relationships and attitudes. Externally observable signs of social exclusion are more closely related to the concept of families at risk. A social risk family can be defined as a family that experiences difficult problems and has limited opportunities to provide favorable living conditions for the comprehensive development of all family members. More and more often it is associated with unsustainable cultural or non-cultural contexts, mainly related to non-ecological culture prosperity in the consumer society. It can be noted that this context in its current form (which includes manufacturing, consumption, material culture, and technology, and both the social, intellectual, and material life of humans) is quite anti-natural oriented in its principle. Unfortunately, the aggressive anti-natural sociocultural strategy permeated also the field of human upbringing and education (Šmajs, 2008, p. 194). At the beginning of the 21st century, it has emerged as the Anthropocene era in a broader sense, in which the geological characterization of the era is complemented by the characterization of the sustainability of public relations in a broader holistic perspective. The aim of the article is to consider a number of real cases in a broader perspective from the point of view of foster family pedagogy, identify the choice of foster care approaches and evaluate the results obtained. From the perspective of foster family pedagogy, foster parents and foster children are participants in the lifelong learning process, where the mutual influence and interaction of foster parents and foster children are studied. The authors evaluated real situations from the perspective of foster family pedagogy and children’s involvement in the family structure. The article also examines the influence of the foster family and its readiness to overcome the effects of Anthropocene unsustainability.

The article discusses creativity as an ontological principle as it is presented in scientific-philosophical attitudes of a Nobel Prize winner for chemistry Ilya Prigogine and Werner Heisenberg’s pupil and a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics Hans-Peter Dürr. These attitudes are assessed in the light of Heideggerian notions of Being, subiectum, ousia and time and thus they themselves shed light on the potentiality of Heideggerian mode of thinking on the conception of the creative in the postmodern society and science. Bergsonian notion of creativity is also invoked. It is presented as a philosophical basis of the postmodern techno-scientific creativity and is discussed in terms of Heideggerian ecstatic temporality. The juxtaposition of the notions presented by Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger provides the clue to compare and assess the science-based attitudes of Prigogine and Dürr.

The anthropomorphic depiction of animals bearing allegorical meanings is the well-represented and actively demanded bestiary of world literature. It reflects the mythological thinking of writers and is an integral part of the worldview basis on which literary works are based. Bestiary images in the artistic text acquire the status of universal representative symbols. This study discusses bestiary images in novelistic works of Austrian writers, Franz Werfel (1890-1945) and Elias Canetti (1905-1994). Using the semiotic approach, the researchers define a range of images and meanings that are related to these two writers as representatives of the era of historical upheavals and individual authorial purposes that reflect the basis of the worldview of each of them. A bestiary image in a literary text can function as an iconic sign, which, on the one hand, reflects the material object in its materiality, and on the other hand, contributes to the emerging of "new", constructed by analogy, aesthetic reality. The similarity to the referent, in this case, is included in the overall system of ontological values. An iconic sign, after Ch.S. Pierce, refers to a simple sign based on the similarity to a thing and participating in the creation of symptoms of a higher order – symbols. Bestiary images in a literary text acquire the status of universal representative characters. The functioning of animal images in the text, their nomination, combinatorics, communication with the elements, time periods, and behavioural patterns are the way of the study of the philosophical foundations of the author's world picture. Canetti’s bestiary is represented by metaphorical images of a monkey, a cat, a pig, and a tortoise, which are used as a tool for analysing various psychic and psychological states of the characters of the novel "Blinding" (Die Blendung, 1931-1932). Multiple forms of anthropopathy and zoomorphism are based on the writer's attitude towards the initial "equality" of man and animal. The study of zoopoetics (the term of J. Lacan) of Werfel’s novel "Barbara, or Piety" (Barbara oder die Frömigkeit, 1929) helps to reveal the axiological foundation upon which the writer constructs his novels. The functioning of images of animals, a horse, for example, is related to the semantics of sacrifice that is rethought and acquiring new meanings in a new historical context. Composite images connecting different characteristics and associated with various natural elements are important. It is apparent that the study of the works by Werfel and Canetti, given the iconic nature of bestiary images, seems relevant to detect common patterns of development of European literature and culture of the first third of the 20th Century.

The relevance of research. The music of leading contemporary composers, representing the style of «new simplicity», becomes a manifestation of a certain attitude associated with a «new» approach to the technique of musical composition, in a wide sense – to the ontological foundations of music as a specific form of art and culture. Accordingly, the concept of «new» acquires special significance, which contains the essence of the novelty of the composer's understanding of music as an object of its creative realization and a way of communication with the listener. This issue is not often discussed in native researches of contemporary music (as well as the «new simplicity» in general), it is not presented as a special subject of musicological studies. The purpose of the research is to determine the conceptual foundations of the «new simplicity» as a phenomenon of contemporary musical art in the context of the semantic content of the concept of «new music». The methodological basis of the research is the systemic method, the method of comparative studies, as well as the methods of historical musicology and genre-style analysis. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the theoretical development of the «new simplicity» as a genre and stylistic phenomenon of musical art in the context of the artistic and aesthetic foundations of contemporary composer's creativity. Main results. The conceptual meaning of «new music» as a phenomenon of professional musical art of the 20th century had a straight influence on the development of the aesthetic idea of the «new simplicity» and its creative implementation in individual composer’s styles at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The essence of the «new» in the «new simplicity» consists of the fundamental rejection of the need to constantly changing the norms of the musical language and its total individualization, as well as in the return to a more accessible («simple») musical style. The return of the «new simplicity» to triad and consonance as the main constructive elements of the musical language represents a fundamentally different approach of modern composers to the technique of musical composition in the context of the «ban on consonance» proclaimed by the Western European musical avant-garde. «New» in this case is the understanding of the basic function of triad and consonance: it is associated not with the functional side of tonality, but with the phonic image of music – the factor that ensures its harmony in terms of auditory perception and the possibility of an emotional response. Conclusion. Musicological development of the conceptual aspect of the «new simplicity» opens up opportunities for studying this phenomenon of contemporary musical art in a wide historical perspective and understanding it as a natural link in the evolution of European academic music.

The article discusses human dignity in the aspect of modern challenges of technological civilization, which has entered a new stage of its development. Human dignity as a category of ethics remains underestimated, since in the first row of ethical values humanitarians, as a rule, put the categories of freedom and justice. Today, “dignity” acquires a special and higher status, the concept of human dignity is being rethought, going beyond the ethical category itself as a virtue. In the global world, human dignity is a response to such contemporary challenges as the formation of a communicative world community with a focus on digital civilization, the anthropological problem of the future of humanity, the ecological situation on a global scale, the reorientation of the ethical and legal relations of a globalizing world. Human dignity is a problem of national-ethnic and national-state relations in the transition to transnational regulatory interactions. In the interpretation of the nation, the authors do not share the well-known two approaches to understanding the nation, on the one hand ethnocultural, and on the other - national-civil. Both approaches lead, whenever possible or necessary, to the transnational posing of the question, when human dignity becomes a priority regardless of nationality. In this connection, the utopian idea of the possibility of a global ethos is touched upon. The authors focus on the anthropoxy-axiological approach to the understanding of human dignity, where the cosmological principle of human existence is determined by his creative power. The urgency of the problem of human dignity is due to the fact that, as it were, in the modern life world a person did not put the economy above morality, the basis of human dignity in its being is a value moral consciousness, in the depth of which basic human values of transnational nature “work”, contradicting values consumer society driven by practical interests. Human dignity in this regard should be interpreted as an absolute value and at the same time one should take into account the multidimensionality of the problem of dignity in the context of modern globalization processes. Based on the ontological understanding of globalization as megatrends in the self-movement of the natural historical process, the authors substantiate the anthropological value of human dignity, which has universal, transcultural significance. The use of an anthropoxy-axiological approach and interdisciplinary methods reveals the universal value of virtue, based on the anthropo-social moral nature and the creative value of man. The creative transformational activity itself will not be worthy in quality without moral responsibility. The modern concept of human dignity is addressed to the ethics of responsibility, which means responsibility, which highlights the moral and axiological attitude to life, the adoption of responsible decisions in modern conditions of sociocultural interactions. In the context of globalization, the philosophy of human dignity becomes the dominant of all conscious-volitional activities, the core of the moral rethinking of the transnational and national ratio in the light of tolerance, the ability to non-violence. At the same time, the authors indicate in the formulation of the main issue of the philosophy of human dignity the possibility of going beyond the ethical category of human dignity, since the unchanging core of the universal human values of goodness-beauty-truth does not lose its meaning in the global, changing world.

1. Nature has its own logic, which does not follow the human will. Nature is itself; it exists, moves, changes, and evolves according to its own intrinsic ways. Human and human society, as a product of a specific stage of natural development, can only be a concrete manifestation of the logic of nature. 2. In the broad sense, nature refers to all, both phenomena and processes, in the universe. It includes human society spiritual phenomena. In a narrow sense, nature refers to the world outside the society and opposed to society as well, or refers to the research objects of natural sciences 3. The narrow natural philosophy is in the intermediary position between the natural sciences and the overall philosophy (the supreme philosophy, an advocation of Kun Wu’s philosophy of information. For further detail, please refer to the subscript in the following.). Furthermore, it is an independent sub-level philosophical discipline; the broad natural philosophy is a meta-philosophy or supreme philosophy, stipulating the entire world from the dimensions of nature itself. 4. Natural philosophy reveals the laws of nature’s own existence, movement, change, and evolution. This determines that the way of expressing natural philosophy is necessarily natural ontology. The construction of the theoretical system of natural philosophy is inevitably a process of abandoning cognitive mediums of human beings through reflection. It is necessary for us to conclude that natural philosophy is the stipulation of nature itself, which comes out of the nature itself. So, we must explain the nature from the standpoint of the nature itself. 5. The true philosophy should move from the human world to the nature, finding back Husserl’s suspended things, and establish a brand-new philosophy in which man and nature, substance, information, and spirit are united. This kind of philosophy is able to provide contemporary ecological civilization with a reasonable philosophical foundation, rebuilding natural philosophy in a new era, which is a very urgent task for contemporary philosophers. 6. The unity of philosophy and science cannot be seen merely as an external convergence, but also as an intrinsic fusion; a true philosophy should have a scientific character, and science itself must have a philosophical basis. The unity of such an intrinsic fusion of science and philosophy can be fully demonstrated by the practical relationship of development between human philosophy and science. 7. In addition to the narrow path along epistemology, linguistics, and phenomenology, the development of human philosophy has another path. This is the development of philosophy itself that has been nurtured and demonstrated during the development of general science: On the one hand, the construction of scientific rationality requires philosophical thinking and exploration; On the other hand, the progress of science opens the way for the development of philosophy. 8. In the real process of the development of human knowledge, science and philosophy are regulated, contained, and merged with each other in the process of interaction. The two are inlaid together internally to form an interactive dynamic feedback loop. The unified relationship of mutual influence, regulation, promotion and transformation presented in the intrinsic interplay of interaction between science and philosophy profoundly breeds and demonstrates the general way of human knowledge development: the philosophicalization (a term used in Kun Wu’s philosophy of information. For more details please see in Kun Wu, 2016, The Interaction and Convergence of the Philosophy and Science of Information, https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies1030228) of science and scientification (a term used in Kun Wu’s philosophy of information. For more detail, please see in Kun Wu, 2016, The Interaction and Convergence of the Philosophy and Science of Information, https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies1030228) of philosophy. 9. We face two types of dogmatism: one is the dogmatism of naturalism, and the other is the dogmatism of the philosophy of consciousness. One of the best ways to overcome these tendencies of dogmatism is to unite natural ontology, and epistemic constructivism. The crisis of contemporary philosophy induced by the western consciousness philosophy seems like belonging to the field of epistemology, but the root of this crisis is deeply buried in the ontology. The key to solving the crisis of contemporary philosophy lies precisely in the reconstruction of the doctrine of natural philosophy centering to the nature itself and excluding God. The task to be accomplished by this new natural philosophy is how to regain the natural foundation of human consciousness after the God has left the field. 10. Since the 1980s, the philosophy of information established and developed in China has proposed a theory of objective information, as well as the dual existence and dual evolution of matter and information (a key advocation in the ontological theory of Kun Wu’s philosophy of information). It is this theory that has made up for the vacancy existing between matter and mind, which apparently exists in Cartesian dualism, after the withdrawal of the God’s from the field. Philosophy of information in China is first and foremost a natural philosophy that adheres to naturalistic attitudes. Second, this natural philosophy explains the human, human mind and human society in the interpretation of the process and mechanism of natural evolution. In this connection, philosophy of information (a key advocation of Kun Wu’s philosophy of information) in China is a system of meta-philosophy or supreme philosophy. This system undoubtedly has the nature of a new natural philosophy. At the same time, this philosophy can better reflect the philosophical spirit of the information age.

This article discusses Heidegger's thesis that one cannot talk about Hegel's essential advancement from the inherited notion of time. Due to the ambivalent interpretation - according to which Hegel's notion of time was both not respected enough, but also vulgar; that from him one should not learn about temporality, but that his standpoint can still serve as a proper example of everyday time - Heidegger opted for the reciprocal historical-philosophical reflection with the goal to show the direct interdependence between Aristotle's and Hegel's understanding of time. The problematic assumption in that interpretation consists of Heidegger's emphasis on the constructive, and thus pronouncedly controversial link between history and spirit, which tries to deny the unique, historical movement of the spirit. Heidegger's diagnosis might not be problematic if his interpretation of Hegel's philosophy were not directed to a concrete perspective of thought, focused on the mechanism which in a way completes the spirit of the new-age ontology. Moreover, historical fulfillment of the epoch-making model of ontology is closely related to the dominance of the natural understanding of time which also reached its peak in Hegel. In other words, regardless of the issue about its foundedness, Heidegger's conviction that Hegel indicates a peak in the vulgar interpretation of time implies nothing else but the idea of the historical development of spirit. With misunderstandings which inevitably follow when the interpretation of natural time of finite beings is proclaimed to be a ?natural?, i.e. everyday and philosophically irrelevant attitude to time - one should recognize why Hegel's phenomenology of time is being fundamentally-ontologically deformed with Heidegger.

RESUMOO presente ensaio, valendo-se da ‘Ética’2 e do ‘Tratado teológico-político’3 , ambos de Spinoza e, subsidiariamente, do ‘Tratado Político’4 e de seu ‘Epístolário’ (SPINOZA, 1966, p.108)5 , para mencionar as relevantes aos fins aqui propostos, tem como objeto refletir acerca da apropriação que Spinoza faz acerca da idéia de um ‘direito natural’, indagando, enquanto problema de pesquisa se sua abordagem é descritiva do que o direito é para contrapor, prescritivamente, como ele deveria ser. Nossa hipótese inclina-se pelo reconhecimento da relevância da atitude prescritiva na medida em que, descrevendo a vida ética Spinoza pretendeu no ‘TTP’ apresentar como deveria ser um estado laico. Trata-se, quanto ao método como se pode defluir do exposto, de uma pesquisa puramente bibliográfica.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Spinoza; Ontologia; Ética; Teologia; Política; Descrição; Prescrição. ABSTRACTThis essay, drawing on the 'Ethics' and the 'Theological-Political Treaty', both by Spinoza and, in the alternative, the 'Political Treaty' and its 'Epistolary' (SPINOZA, 1966, p.108), to mention relevant to the purposes proposed here, has as its object to reflect on Spinoza's appropriation of the idea of a 'natural right', asking, as a research problem, whether his approach is descriptive of what the law is to counteract, prescriptively, as it is. should be. Our hypothesis is inclined to recognize the relevance of the prescriptive attitude in that, describing the ethical life Spinoza intended in the 'TTP' to present what a secular state should be like. It is, as to the method how it can be derived from the above, a purely bibliographical research. KEYWORDS: Spinoza; Ontology; Ethic; Theology; Politics; Description; Prescription.

The article poses the question of which science, revolutionary or normal, is more in line with the concept of modernity. We consider the claims to the modernity of both types of sciences and substantiate the conclusion that revolutionary science can be understood as a situational response of scientists to the state of crisis of normal science. The author argues that revolutionary (at some given point in time) science again brings us back to the forgotten question of truth and refer­ence. At first glance, it looks like a turn from technique and calculations, formal­ization and simplification to the world in itself, ontologically unified and inde­pendent of its presentations in certain paradigms. However, revolutionary science in its claim to turn from language to referent turns out to be a reminis­cence of the archaic “Pythagorean attitude” (to “the discovery of true truth, the true being, and design of God” in the sense of M. Weber) and, in turn, does not relieve us of excessive abstractness, loss of connection with reality, and in this sense does not correspond to the concept of modernity. Science is technicized, formalized, quantified, digitalized, and receives an increasingly complex concep­tual description, almost unrelated to natural “life-world” ontologies and realities.

In the modern Russian philosophy, discussions about the phenomenon of computer simulations in the scientific research practice of conducting experiments are just beginning to pass the stage of initiation in small interdisciplinary groups studying this new direction for the philosophy of science. At the same time, in Western philosophy by the current moment there have been formed entire directions for the study of computer simulations. Different groups of researchers in different ways form ideas about the basic characteristics of simulations: from skeptical views on their nature, which are of no philosophical interest, to extremely revolutionary attitudes that assign simulations to the main role in the next expected turn of philosophy, comparable in its power to the linguistic turn in early XX century. One of the main controversial issues in Western philosophical thought was the search for relevant criteria and signs of simulations that could create a solid basis for formulating a rigorous definition of this phenomenon. Thus, through the definition, researchers first of all try, on the one hand, to solve the taxonomic problem of the correlation and interconnection of simulations with other types of experiment: natural, laboratory, mental, mathematical. On the other hand, to reveal for philosophy ontological and epistemological foundations of simulations, which carry the potential of new philosophical knowledge. This article is devoted to a brief review of the existing concepts of representatives of Western schools of thought on the phenomenon of computer simulations in the context of the philosophy of science. The structure of the review is built on three basic conceptual directions: 1) definition of the term "computer simulation"; 2) computer simulations as an experiment; 3) the epistemic value of simulations. Such a review can become the subject of discussion for Russian researchers interested in the impact of computer simulations on science and philosophy.

Purpose: The aim of the paper is to discuss assumptions that stand behind the idea that, in order to analyze a way in which organizations are willing to respond to environmental challenges, it is necessary to consider how the diffusion of knowledge related to sustainable management practices can impact on decision making dependent on managers’ cognitive frames. The analysis is focused on the sensemaking process initiated by a necessity to make a decision on whether to engage in a sustainability project involving steps to be made to protect natural environment. The attention is paid to its possible realization dependent on cognitive frames used by decision makers. This way of analysis allows for better understanding of factors which may hinder enterprises from implementing sustainability idea. In the paper current literature related to the topic is reviewed and next selected issues considered as critical for understanding the matter are described and discussed. Design/methodology/approach: Theoretical analysis is conducted and the key assumptions of critical realism related to ontological and epistemological dimensions are implemented. The importance of abductive way of thinking is outlined. Findings: In general, it is argued that managers who are more likely to accept paradoxical nature of challenges related to the implementation of sustainability tools should find it more useful to follow multidimensional paths through which they may reach stakeholders. It is also presented that in order to show how decisions as to implement the sustainability idea can be made, it is necessary to take into account consequences that are to arise from the fact that attitudes towards sustainability management are influenced by historical conditions. Because of the wide array of actors who may contribute to the successful implementation of the sustainability idea, it is predicted that different cognitive approaches should be used. The arguments that are provided appear to also prove that it is useful to consider deeply relations among sensemaking process and cognitive frames used by managers. Originality/value: The paper includes an authorial analysis in which conclusions are inferred based on hitherto conducted research and formulated research propositions related to sensemaking process, cognitive aspects of making decisions as well as to issues of building legitimacy in the light of environmental challenges which modern enterprises need to deal with. The analysis can provide decision makers with some new insights as to why they make decisions as they used to, which next should allow them to change their habits

The article focuses on linguistic and cognitive peculiarities of the information and psychological warfare and its manifestation in the Ukrainian and Russian languages with the help of innovative verbal means. The paper analyses Russia’s information campaign against Ukraine, covering the period from the Euromaidan (2014) until 2020. It is stated that Russia’s information campaign is to be analysed in the context of the strategic narrative of the Russian government, reflected in pro-Russian mass media. It has been revealed that Russia’s information campaign was related to Russia’s military operations in Ukraine. Russia has demonstrated that in the current and continually evolving information environment, power and control can be easily gained by manipulating information to influence societal perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. The Russian narrative includes several dominant themes: promoting the Russian World which unites the Eastern Slavs, implies that Russians and Ukrainians are one nation, and recognizes the natural supremacy of Russia; portraying Ukrainians as a pseudo-nation who are unable to administer their own country and sustain their statehood, and labelling the Euromaidan protesters as nationalists, Nazis and fascists posing a threat to the ethnically Russian part of the Ukraine’s population. Narratives are supported by utilising so-called thematic communication frames. The thematic frames are a way of associating a particular impression or opinion with an object or a subject. The characteristics of thematic frames are their close relationships within a particular context and interpretation. Thematic framing can be applied to an individual, to a group of people (the inhabitants of Western Ukraine are followers of Bandera and neo-Nazis), or to a process, event or particular place in time and space. The creation of thematic frames is related to the human desire to simplify the outside world and to easily distinguish friends from foes. Thematic framing can be used to manipulate audiences. It has been proved that the means of verbalization of the information and psychological warfare reflect the perception of reality in the light of a certain ideology and mentality. The conceptualization of conflicting parties takes place in terms of such eternal values as the Good and the Evil which is here based on the dichotomy ONE’S OWN / ALIEN (Ukraine / Russia), reflecting the opposition between western and eastern civilizations. The paper determines ontological features of the dichotomy ONE’S OWN / ALIEN, introduces its model, exposes semantic structure of the key lexemes that denote ONE’S OWN / ALIEN. The investigation of neologisms allows revealing the ways and means of languages enrichment. It also exposes the semantic properties of innovations and highlights the phenomenon of the war of linguistic signs which includes the war of form and the war of meaning.

IntroductionAccording to modern scholars (N. Maslova, B. Astafiev), one of the important reasons for the global planetary crisis, including modern educational system in particular, is violation of the conformity of nature principles in the process of perception and cognition of the world, which is conditioned by the advantages of the development of logical and rational thinking and insufficient development of figurative, spiritual-intuitive thinking in the contemporary school of all levels.The modern system of education at all levels (school, higher education, postgraduate studies, and doctorate) is aimed primarily at the development of mechanisms of the left hemisphere that are rational, logical thinking, and analytical perception of reality.Such a one-way orientation leads to inhibition of right-sided processes, does not contribute to the development of creativity, disclosure and activation of the spiritual and intuitive capabilities of the individual, as well as to alienation of individual from the World, loss of personal sense of integrity, unity with the World; that is, to the disharmony of individual with his/her own nature and environment.Personal development of an individual in modern conditions takes the form of "Homo technicus" ("technical person"), "Homo informaticus" (“informational and technogenic person”), "Нomо соnsumens" (“person who consumes”), "Reified man" ("material surplus person"), "Nomo Festivus" ("person who has fun") (Butenko, 2017). As a result, a person with a technocratic, rational thinking, pragmatic and consumer attitude towards the world is brought up, and as a consequence, harmony in the "man-man", "man-nature", "man-society", "man-universe" systems, and correspondingly, the equilibrium in the integrated information-energy system interaction "Man – Society – Earth –Universe" are violated.Approach In contemporary education of all levels, high ontological and existential goals are not set, and not enough attention is paid to the spiritual and mental health of the individual, in particular to problems of spiritual self-knowledge, self-development, self-regulation and self-realization, thus leading to the formation of consumer psychology, dominance of pragmatic values, loss of spirituality, upbringing of a human – destroyer, a soulless person, but not a creator.One of the ways out from the planetary global crisis in the area of a contemporary education in particular, is the noosphereization of education, the imperative task of which is formation of the noospheric individual, actualization of his/her spiritual and intuitive potential, training of the noosphere integral harmonious bioadequate environmentally healthy mindset, which is based on a conscious total ownership of logical (left cerebral hemisphere) and creative, spiritual-intuitive (right cerebral hemisphere) thinking that, due to correspondence with both huamn nature and the laws of the cosmoplanetary world, will provide the individual with possibilities to adequately and fully (at the information and energy levels) perceive and recognize the surrounding world, and to interact with it on a spiritual basis.Results and Discussion The problem of intuition always remains relevant throughout the history of mankind. Among the scholars of the late XX century - beginning of the XXI century the problem of intuition and harmonization of the activity of the left and right hemispheres of the brain has been studied by such researchers as G. Kurmyshev, N. Maslova, Osho Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, I. Smokvina and others. Modern psychophysiological science explains the nature of intuitive thinking and cognition: the human mind combines the ability to integrate and develop both intellectual and intuitive knowledge that modern scientists associate with the activity of the left and right cerebral hemispheres. According to psychological science, the two hemispheres of the brain cognize and reflect the surrounding world differently and, thereafter transform information in their own ways. The left hemisphere "sees" objects as discrete, separated; it is responsible for logic and intellect, verbal thinking, application of sign information (reading, counting, language), and is characterized by the ability for logical, rational, mathematical, and scientific thinking. The right hemisphere binds objects into a single whole; it is responsible for emotions, creative thinking, intuition (unconscious processes). Thanks to the right hemisphere, a holistic image of the world is formed, and the left hemisphere gradually collects the model of the world from separate, but carefully studied details. "Left- hemisphered" thinking is associated with the ability for consistent, step-by-step cognition, which has respectively analytical rather than synthetic character. "Right- hemisphered" thinking is linked to the ability for integral, voluminous and complete cognition, space spatial immediate perception of the world in all of its information-energy interrelations and interactions.Logic and intuition, rational and intuitive paths – are different aspects of the unified process of cognition, and if the intellect can be regarded as the earthly beginning in humans, then intuition – is a spiritual primary source, a phenomenon of nonlinear, unearthly thinking, the logic of the Higher Being, the logic of the Almighty. As was very wittily pointed out by Osho Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, logic – the way our mind cognizes our reality, intuition – is how the spirit passes through the experience of reality (Maslova, 2006). Therefore, logic and intuition are two mutually conditioned mechanisms of scientific cognition that supplement and do not exist in isolation from one another. If the function of intuition in this interaction lies in creative discoveries, inventions, awareness of the true essence of things and phenomena, then the task of the scientific method, acting as an assistant of intuition, is to endeavor to comprehend new ideas, explain them from the point of view of earth science at the logical level, and "adapt" to our reality.Given this, rational and intuitive paths must complement, enrich and explain each other, interact in sync, in synthesis.Intuition is an organic component of the spiritual and psychic nature of the individual. Therefore, the problem of the development of intuition and harmonization of the discourse-logical and spiritual-intuitive components of thinking is extremely important at all levels of contemporary education. This is especially true for student youth, since students are the future spiritual and creative potential of the country, and therefore it is extremely important to reveal and develop their spiritual and intuitive abilities, to harmonize their mental-spiritual sphere, which promotes spiritual self-healing of both the individual and the environment, and harmonization of relations in the world. In the context of the modern information and energy paradigm, intuition is considered as a special mental state of a highly spiritual person, in which he/she deliberately initiates informational and energetic contact with any object of the Universe, in the physical or subtle world, "connects" to its information field, "reads out", "decrypts" and analyzes necessary information. This information-energy interaction is perceived by the individual as the process of connection, merging with the object being studied, which enables instant cognition of its true essence (Smokvina, 2013). As the analysis of the literature on the research problem testifies, if the activity mechanisms of the left hemisphere of the brain are relatively studied in modern science, the problems of the individual’s intuitive updating potential and harmonization of the activity of logical and intuitive cognitive processes are being investigated.According to many scholars, the ability for intuition is inborn in every human; however, unfortunately, in most people it is in a latent state. And only due to intense conscious work of the individual regarding their own spiritual self–cognition and self–perfection, one can discover and develop personal spiritual and intuitive abilities.According to the results of our theoretical study the general conditions contributing to the disclosure and development of intuition are as follows: (Tyurina, 2017) • Ability to cope with one’s own passions, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and achievement of the state of internal silence, voicelessness;• Formed self-motivation for spiritual self–cognition and self–perfection;• Achievement by the individual of the corresponding spiritual level: the higher the spirituality of the human, the more clearly his/her ability is expressed to obtain a higher spiritual knowledge: information and energy interaction, contact with higher levels of psychic reality;• Conscious desire, willingness of the individual to use intuitive cognition that helps overcome information-power resistance, the barrier that exists between a subject and an object, helps create harmony, assonance, interaction with the object being studied;• Intuitive human confidence: deep inner belief in personal intuitive capabilities and ability for intuitive cognition and self-cognition;• Humanistic orientation of the individual and his/her internal psychological properties such as: altruism, active love for all living beings on the Earth, empathy, ability to express compassion, care, and self-consecration, conscious desire to live in harmony with oneself and the world;• Nonjudgmental practice, which consists of the ability of a person to abandon assessments, classifications, analysis, which creates favorable conditions for immersion into the information space around us, makes it possible to connect to the information-energy field (biofield) of the object being studied;• Sense of inner unity with the world, awareness of oneself as a part of mankind, of the Earth, of the Universe, and a feeling of deep responsibility for the world and for ourselves in the world;• Striving for personal self-realization for the benefit of the cosmoplanetary world.In our opinion, the ways of actualization of intuition and harmonization of the activity of logical and intuitive components of the process of cognition should be attributed to the following (Tyurina, 2018):• Concentration, concentration of human consciousness of the subject being studied, deep and thorough knowledge of it.Psychological mood, deep concentration, focus of human consciousness on the subject of research lead to intuitive penetration into its essence, comprehension of the subject of study as if "from within." An intuitive act of cognition is the result of a huge concentration of all human efforts on a particular problem, deep and thorough knowledge of it, mobilization of all its potencies. In particular, for almost 20 years, D. Mandeleev worked continuously on the systematization of chemical elements, and only after that he "saw" his periodic system of elements in his dream. At academician M. Shchetynin school students spend 21 days (6 lessons daily) studying only one academic discipline for the purpose of deep penetration into its essence - information-energy merger, connection with the subject being studied, into a single whole, that is, achieving an intuitive level of comprehension.• Spiritual practices (prayer, meditation).Prayer and meditation are effective ways of spiritualizing a person, awakening and activating his/her intuitive potential. Through prayer, meditation a person learns to adjust to nature and Cosmos, eternity and infinity, the World Harmony, reaches consonance with the World, and permeates its inner essential depth with the heart.It is believed that it is prayer that promotes the spiritual purification of both the human soul and the surrounding world. During a heart-warming prayer a human comes to enlightenment and spiritual enlightenment, intuitive enlightenment.In the process of prayer, meditation, the right and left hemispheres of the brain begin to work synchronously, which makes the brain function in resonance with the Field of Consciousness or the Field of Information - Noosphere.• Spiritual processing of the corresponding religious, spiritual and philosophical sources, fine arts, classical music, information-energy interaction which raises the spiritual level of an individual, awakens his/her intuitive abilities.Spiritual literature is an important way of discovering and developing intuition and harmonizing the activity of intuitive and logical components of thinking, since information and energy interaction with spiritual literature contributes to individual’s spiritual growth, disclosure and development of intuition, and harmonization of personal intuitional and intellectual sphere.It should be noted that various forms of art, in particular, visual and musical, play a special role in the process of disclosure and development, intuition, harmonization of the logical and figurative, spiritual and intuitive perception of reality.The spiritual potential of art is, first of all, that in itself, creating spiritual values, spiritualizes a person, and interprets personality as a phenomenon of a global planetary-cosmic nature. True art has an ecumenical, cosmic dimension. The best masterpieces of world art transfer the idea of unity of humans with the world, their harmonious interaction.The creativity of great artists contributes to the disclosure and development of the personality's spirituality, the heart's perception of the world, the cultivation of the Cosmic Worldview, and directs the person to high ideals.Musical art is one of the most important means of revealing and developing intuition, harmonizing its spiritual and intuitive basis.The results of research by modern scholars show that classical, spiritual music activates the spiritual-intuitive sphere, harmonizes the person, gives a sense of joy and rest, and helps to restore spiritual and mental balance.It has been scientifically proven that classical musical compositions based on the perfection of harmony and rhythm, especially the works of J. Bach, L. Beethoven, J. Brahms, A. Vivaldi, G. Handel, F. List, F. Mendelssohn, A. Mozart, S. Rakhmaninov, O. Scriabin, P. Tchaikovsky, F. Chopin, F. Schubert, R. Schumann and others have a positive effect on the individual on the spiritual, mental and physiological levels, since classical music relates mainly to the natural rhythms of the human body. This music causes not only positive emotions, but also represents a powerful energy force that inspires humans and the world: makes a person more perfect and the world more beautiful.Consequently, fine arts, classical music, contribute to the disclosure and development of the spiritual and intuitive potential of the individual, to harmonization of his/her intuitive-intellectual sphere; they help the person to grow spiritually and be filled with high spiritual energy, accordingly, to change, and improve the natural and social environment.- Bioadequate REAL-methodology of noosphere education (N. Maslova), in which stages of relaxation (accumulation of information, work of the right creative hemisphere in a state of rest), alternating with stages of activity (training of the left hemisphere: logic, analysis, synthesis of information) are presented. As a result, the work of the left and right cerebral hemispheres is synchronized, which promotes harmonization of consciousness, carries a beneficial influence on the spiritual, mental, social and physical health of the student's personality.The fundamental characteristics of the bioadequate method of noospheric education are:1. Health preserving - does not violate the nature of perception, processing and preservation of information.2. Corrective - restores the natural genetic sequence of work with the information and health of the student and the teacher.3. Developing - improves the body's reserves.4. Harmonizing - integrates all systems of the body and personality (Vernadsky, 2002).According to studies of the neuropathologist I. Smokvinova, PhD, bioadequate methods of noosphere education, taking into account the physiological and informational and energy resources of the individual, contribute to the harmonization of the work of the left and right cerebral hemispheres, awaken higher feelings, recharge with life energy, teach the ability to direct vitality to the realization of one’s own higher potential, which also has a beneficial effect on the spiritual, mental and physical health of the individual. Moreover, due to the application of a bioadequate technique, psychological and physiological stress is eliminated, and a positive emotional mood is created that heals the body and the student's psychics (Osho, 2000). According to N. Maslova, holistic thinking contributes to the acquisition of basic energy, biologically adequate to livelihoods programs (Kurmyshev, 2013).Many independent groups of scientists (teachers, psychologists, physicians, biologists) have proved that noosphere education, harmonizing the left and right hemispheres thinking, has a healing effect on the body of both the student and the teacher, contributes to the development of natural creativity.Practical valueResults of our study can be used in lectures and practical classes with students in medical psychology, psychology of creativity, social, general, pedagogical psychology, pedagogy (sections of didactics, spiritual and moral education), sociology, philosophy, etc.ConclusionsThus, the actualization of the spiritual and intuitive potential of the individual and the harmonization of the activity of the left and right cerebral hemispheres stimulates the disclosure of spiritual and creative abilities of the individual, fills the individual with spiritual energy, and the person becomes a source of spiritualization of himself/herself and the world, thus contributing to the spiritual and psychological improvement of society, humanity, and civilization in general, since at the information-energy level, "Man - Society - Earth - Universe" this is the only cosmoplanetary organism, all parts of which are mutually interconnected, interact and stipulate with one another. We consider that it is important in the future to develop appropriate special disciplines for all the sections of modern school and keep working in the direction of developing and incorporating into the content of the curricula, relevant pedagogical technologies aimed at the disclosure and development of the intuitive-mental sphere of the individual

My aim in this paper is to re-examine Arthur Fine’s concept of the natural ontological attitude. Whereas earlier critical interpretations focus on the compatibility of NOA with scientific realism, I argue that Fine’s conception is to be recast in terms of an interpretative theory of scientific research. Specifically, I make the case that the hermeneutic reformulation of NOA is unavoidable when at stake are the issues of the structural, conceptual, and experimental articulation of scientific domain. The paper concludes by considering the formation of local epistemological positions in the research process.

Abstract This paper argues that Nietzsche indeed pursues a philosophical project of naturalization. But that neither implies the uncritical adoption of naturalistic doctrines nor that he employs ontological or methodological naturalism in a strict sense of the word. To this end I not only dwell upon the extensive terminological difficulties for any non-empty definition of ‘naturalism’ but also on Nietzsche’s well justified reservations against clear defined doctrines. His naturalizing philosophical experiments cannot be understood without an appreciation of his critical epistemic attitude towards the sciences. A contextual reading of the naturalizing and the critical epistemological aphorisms in the first book of Beyond Good and Evil rather reveals that Nietzsche experimentally adopts naturalizing perspectives for abductive reasons without ascribing a privileged position to the natural sciences above philosophy. Nietzsche’s project of naturalization is perspectival.

This study was designed as an action research aimed to help students to elaborate their feelings of traumatic grief, due to a car accident and a suicide of two of their classmates, in an Italian high school. A death education project was realized in order to prevent the Werther effect. The intervention was based on psychodramatic techniques and meditation with Tibetan bells to encourage reflection on the suffering of traumatic loss, the sense of life, and their future. A total of 89 students from four classes (46 in the experimental group: two classes, 43 in the control groups: two classes) participated in the study, among which 82 (45 in the experimental group, 37 in the control group) completed the pre- and post-test survey. The intervention consisted of eight 2-h meetings, during which the themes of death and loss were dealt with through theoretical discussions, dramatization, and meditation. Two other classes which participated in the assessment as a control group did not attend the activities. The following instruments were used: Death Attitude Profile-Revised, which measures individual attitudes toward death; Psychological Well-being Scale, which measures a person’s psychological well-being; Resilience Scale for Adolescents, which measures the construct of resilience in adolescents; Self-Transcendence Scale, which measures self-transcendence; and Testoni Death Representation Scale, which measures the ontological representations of death. The results demonstrated that in the experimental group, there was a reduction in the fear of death and its avoidance, and that the students normalized the representation of death as something natural, thus improving their well-being. It is consequently possible to say that well-being is not simply the absence of suffering and worries, but rather, is rooted in the possibility of thinking of creative solutions to the trauma.

This article the phenomenon of civilization in the aspect of relevant ideas of modern philosophy has been investigated. The difference between the terms “culture” and “civilization” which consists in the fact that civilization is a qualitatively developed phenomenon, and culture is the basis, the values and attitudes of which form and determine the development of civilization has been analyzed. The identification of the ontological foundations of civilization reveals various dimensions of this phenomenon: charisma; call and answer theory; an idea requiring self-realization; the will of the Creator, etc.The emergence and development of civilization provide for the existence of dialectical processes of a change in historical phases under which the action of the deep potentials of culture is guessed. It has been concluded that the contradictions between the natural and social principles ultimately determine the problems of rational and metaphysical vision of reality.Key words: civilization, culture, transcendence, metaphysic, tradition.

IntroductionUtopian and forward looking in tenor, official narratives of urban renewal and development implicitly promote normative ideals of progress and necessary civic improvement. Yet an underlying condition of such renewal is frequently the very opposite of building: the demolition of existing urban fabric. Taking as its starting point the large-scale demolition of buildings proposed for the NSW Government’s Sydney Metro rail project, this article interrogates the role of literary treatments of demolition in mediating complex, and often contradictory, responses to transformations of the built environment. Case studies are drawn from literary texts in which demolition and infrastructure development are key preoccupations, notably Louis Aragon’s 1926 Surrealist document of a threatened Parisian arcade, Paris Peasant, and the non-fiction accounts of the redevelopment of London’s East End by British writer Iain Sinclair. Sydney UnbuiltPresently, Australia’s biggest public transport project according to the NSW Government website, the Sydney Metro is set to revolutionise Sydney’s rail future with more than 30 metro stations and a fleet of fully-automated driverless trains. Its impetus extends at least as far back as the Liberal-National Coalition’s landslide win at the 2011 New South Wales state election when Barry O’Farrell, then party leader, declared “NSW has to be rebuilt” (qtd in Aston). Infrastructure upgrades became one of the Coalition’s key priorities upon forming government. Following a second Coalition win at the 2015 election, the state of NSW, or the city of Sydney more accurately, remains today deep amidst widespread building works with an unprecedented number of infrastructure, development and urban renewal projects simultaneously underway.From an historical perspective, Sydney is certainly no stranger to demolition. This was in evidence in Demolished Sydney, an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney that captured the zeitgeist of 2016 with its historical survey of Sydney’s demolished architecture. As the exhibition media release pointed out: “Since 1788 Sydney has been built, unbuilt and rebuilt as it has grown from Georgian town to Victorian city to the global urban centre it is today” (Museum of Sydney). What this evolutionist narrative glosses over, however, is the extent to which the impact of Sydney’s significant reinventions of itself through large-scale redevelopment are often not properly registered until well after such changes have taken place. With the imminent commencement of Sydney Metro Stage 2 CBD works, the city similarly stands to lose a number of buildings that embody the civic urban ideals of an earlier era, the effects of which are unlikely to be fully appreciated until the project’s post-demolition phase. The revelation, over the past year, of the full extent of demolition required to build Sydney Metro casts a spotlight on the project and raises questions about its likely impact in reconfiguring the character of Sydney’s inner city. An Environmental Impact Statement Summary (EISS) released by the NSW Government in May 2016 confirms that 79 buildings in the CBD and surrounding suburbs are slated for demolition as part of station development plans for the Stage 2 Chatswood to Sydenham line (Transport for NSW). Initial assurances were that the large majority of acquisitions would be commercial buildings. Yet, the mix also comprises some locally-heritage listed structures including, most notably, 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney (Image 1), a residential apartment tower of 54 studio flats located at the top end of the Sydney central business district.Image 1: 7 Elizabeth Street Sydney apartment towers (middle). Architect: Emil Sodersten. Image credit: Ella Mudie.As the sole surviving block of CBD flats constructed during the 1930s, 7 Elizabeth Street had been identified by the Australian Institute of Architects as an example of historically significant twentieth-century residential architecture. Furthermore, the modernist block is aesthetically significant as the work of prominent Art Deco architect Emil Sodersten (1899-1961) and interior designer Marion Hall Best (1905-1988). Disregarding recommendations that the building should be retained and conserved, Transport for NSW compulsorily acquired the block, evicting residents in late 2016 from one of the few remaining sources of affordable housing in the inner-city. Meanwhile, a few blocks down at 302 Pitt Street the more than century-old Druids House (Image 2) is also set to be demolished for the Metro development. Prior to purchase by Transport for NSW, the property had been slated for a state-of-the-art adaptive reuse as a boutique hotel which would have preserved the building’s façade and windows. In North Sydney, a locally heritage listed shopfront at 187 Miller Street, one of the few examples of the Victorian Italianate style remaining on the street, faces a similar fate. Image 2. Druids House, 302 Pitt Street Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.Beyond the bureaucratic accounting of the numbers and locations of demolitions outlined in the NSW Government’s EISS, this survey of disappearing structures highlights to what extent, large-scale transport infrastructure projects like Sydney Metro, can reshape what the Situationists termed the “psychogeography” of a city; the critical manner in which places and environments affect our emotions and behaviour. With their tendency to erase traces of the city’s past and to smooth over its textures, those variegations in the urban fabric that emerge from the interrelationship of the built environment with the lived experience of a space, the changes wrought by infrastructure and development thus manifest a certain anguish of urban dynamism that is connected to broader anxieties over modernity’s “speed of change and the ever-changing horizons of time and space” (Huyssen 23). Indeed, just as startling as the disappearance of older and more idiosyncratic structures is the demolition of newer building stock which, in the case of Sydney Metro, includes the slated demolition of a well-maintained 22-storey commercial office tower at 39 Martin Place (Image 3). Completed in just 1972, the fact that the lifespan of this tower will amount to less than fifty years points to the rapid obsolescence, and sheer disposability, of commercial building stock in the twenty first-century. It is also indicative of the drive towards destruction that operates within the project of modernism itself. Pondering the relationship of modernist architecture to time, Guiliana Bruno asks: can we really speak of a modernist ruin? Unlike the porous, permeable stone of ancient building, the material of modernism does not ‘ruin.’ Concrete does not decay. It does not slowly erode and corrode, fade out or fade away. It cannot monumentally disintegrate. In some way, modernist architecture does not absorb the passing of time. Adverse to deterioration, it does not age easily, gracefully or elegantly. (80)In its resistance to organic ruination, Bruno’s comment thus implies it is demolition that will be the fate of the large majority of the urban building stock of the twentieth century and beyond. In this way, Sydney Metro is symptomatic of far broader cycles of replenishment and renewal at play in cities around the world, bringing to the fore timely questions about demolition and modernity, the conflict between economic development and the civic good, and social justice concerns over the public’s right to the city. Image 3: 39 Martin Place Sydney. Image credit: Ella Mudie.In the second part of this article, I turn to literary treatments of demolition in order to consider what role the writer might play in giving expression to some of the conflicts and tensions, as exemplified by Sydney Metro, that manifest in ‘unbuilding’ the city. How might literature, I ask, be uniquely placed to mobilise critique? And to what extent does the writer—as both a detached observer and engaged participant in the city—occupy an ambivalent stance especially sensitive to the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of the built environment’s relationship to modernity?Iain Sinclair: Calling Time on the Grand Projects For more than two decades, British author Iain Sinclair has been mapping the shifting terrain of London and its edgelands across a spectrum of experimental fiction and non-fiction works. In addition to the thematic attention paid to neoliberal capitalist processes of urban renewal and their tendency to implode established ties between place, memory and identity, Sinclair’s hybrid documentary-novels are especially pertinent to the analysis of “writing demolition” for their distinct writerly approach. Two recent texts, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (2011) and London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), highlight an intensification of interest on Sinclair’s part in the growing influence exerted by global finance, hyper consumerism and security fears on the reterritorialisation of the English capital. Written in the lead up to the 2012 London Olympics, Ghost Milk is Sinclair’s scathing indictment of the corporate greed that fuelled the large-scale redevelopment of Stratford and its surrounds ahead of the Games. It is an angry and vocal response to urban transformation, a sustained polemic intensified by the author’s local perspective. A long-term resident of East London, in the 1970s Sinclair worked as a labourer at Chobham Farm and thus feels a personal assault in how Stratford “abdicated its fixed identity and willingly prostituted itself as a backdrop for experimental malls, rail hubs and computer generated Olympic parks” (28). For Sinclair, the bulldozing of the Stratford and Hackney boroughs was performed in the name of a so-called civic legacy beyond the Olympic spectacle that failed to culminate in anything more than a “long march towards a theme park without a theme” (11), a site emblematic of the bland shopping mall architecture of what Sinclair derisorily terms “the GP [Grand Project] era” (125).As a literary treatment of demolition Ghost Milk is particularly concerned with the compromised role of language in urban planning rhetoric. The redevelopment required for the Olympics is backed by a “fraudulent narrative” (99), says Sinclair, a conspiratorial co-optation of language made to bend in the service of urban gentrification. “In many ways,” he writes, “the essential literature of the GP era is the proposal, the bullet-point pitch, the perversion of natural language into weasel forms of not-saying” (125). This impoverishment and simplification of language, Sinclair argues, weakens the critical thinking required to recognise the propagandising tendencies underlying so many urban renewal programs.The author’s vocal admonishment of the London Olympics did not go unnoticed. In 2008 a reading from his forthcoming book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009), at a local library was cancelled out of fear of providing a public platform for his negative views. In Ghost Milk Sinclair reflects upon the treatment of his not yet published docu-novel as “found guilty, with no right of reply, of being political but somehow outside politics” (115). Confronted with the type of large-scale change that underpins such projects as the Olympic Games, or the Sydney Metro closer to home, Sinclair’s predicament points to the ambiguous position of influence occupied by writers. On the one hand, influence is limited in so far as authors play no formal part in the political process. Yet, when outspoken critique resonates words can become suddenly powerful, radically undermining the authority of slick environmental impact statements and sanctioned public consultation findings. In a more poetic sense, Sinclair’s texts are further influential for the way in which they offer a subjective mythologising of the city as a counterpoint to the banal narratives of bureaucratised urbanism. This is especially apparent in London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), in which Sinclair recounts a single-day street-level pedestrian exploration of the 35-mile and 33-station circuit of the new London Overground railway line. Surveying with disapproval the “new bridges, artisan bakeries, blue-bike racks and coffee shops” (20) that have sprung up along the route of the elevated railway, the initial gambit of the text appears to be to critique the London Overground as a “device for boosting property values” (23). Rail zone as “generator for investment” (31), and driver of the political emasculation of suburbs like Hackney and Shoreditch. Yet as the text develops the narrator appears increasingly drawn to the curious manner in which the Overground line performs an “accidental re-mapping of London” (24). He drifts, then, in search of: a site in which to confront one’s shadow. In a degraded form, this was the ambition behind our orbital tramp. To be attentive to the voices; to walk beside our shadow selves. To reverse the polarity of incomprehensible public schemes, the secret motors of capital defended and promoted by professionally mendacious politicians capable of justifying anything. (London Overground 127)Summoning the oneiric qualities of the railway and its inclination to dreaming and reverie, Sinclair reimagines it as divine oracle, a “ladder of initiation” (47) bisecting resonant zones animated by traces of the visionary artists and novelists whose sensitivity to place have shaped the perception of the London boroughs in the urban imaginary. It is in this manner that Sinclair’s walks generate “an oppositional perspective against the grand projects of centralized planning and management of space” (Weston 261). In a kind of poetic re-enchantment of urban space, texts like Ghost Milk and London Overground shatter the thin veneer of present-day capitalist urbanism challenging the reader to conceive of alternative visions of the city as heterogeneous and imbued with deep historical time.Louis Aragon: Demolition and ModernityWhile London Overground was composed after the construction of the new railway circuit, the pre-demolition phase of a project is, by comparison, a threshold moment. Literary responses to impending demolition are thus shaped in an unstable context as the landscape of a city becomes subject to unpredictable changes that can unfold at a very swift pace. Declan Tan suggests that the writing of Ghost Milk in the lead up to the London Olympics marks Sinclair’s disapproval as “futile, Ghost Milk is knowingly written as a documentary of near-history, an archival treatment of 2012 now, before it happens.” Yet, paradoxically it is the very futility of Sinclair’s project that intensifies the urgency to record, sharpening his polemic. This notion of writing a “documentary of near-history” also suggests a certain breach in time, which in the case of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant is mined for its revolutionary energies.First published in book form in 1926, Paris Peasant is an experimental Surrealist novel comprising four collage-like fragments including Aragon’s famous panegyric on the Passage de l’Opéra, a nineteenth-century Parisian arcade slated for demolition to make way for a new access road to the Boulevard Haussmann. Reading the text in the present era of Sydney Metro works, the predicament of the disappearing Opera Arcade resonates with the fate of the threatened Art Deco tower at 7 Elizabeth Street, soon to be razed to build a new metro station. Critical of the media’s overall neglect of the redevelopment, Aragon’s text pays sympathetic attention to the plight of the arcade’s business owners, railing against the injustices of their imminent eviction whilst mourning the disappearance of one of the last vestiges of the more organic configuration of the city that preceded the Haussmann renovation of Paris:the great American passion for city planning, imported into Paris by a prefect of police during the Second Empire and now being applied to the task of redrawing the map of our capital in straight lines, will soon spell the doom of these human aquariums. (Aragon 14)In light of these concerns it is tempting to cast Paris Peasant as a classic anti-development polemic. However, closer interrogation of the narrator’s ambivalent stance points to a more complicated attitude towards urban renewal. For, as he casts a forensic eye across the arcade’s shops it becomes apparent that these threatened sites hold a certain lure of attraction for the Surrealist author. The explanatory genre of the guide-book is subverted in a highly imaginative inventory of the arcade interiors. Touring its baths, brothels and hair salon, shoe shine parlour, run-down theatre, and the Café Certa—meeting place of the Surrealists—the narrator’s perambulation provides a launching point for intoxicated reveries and effervescent flights of fancy. Finally, the narrator concedes: “I would never have thought of myself as an observer. I like to let the winds and the rain blow through me: chance is my only experience, hazard my sole experiment” (88). Neither a journalist nor an historian, Paris Peasant’s narrator is not concerned merely to document the Opera Arcade for posterity. Rather, his interest in the site resides in its liminal state. On the cusp of being transformed into something else, the ontological instability of the arcade provides a dramatic illustration of the myth of architecture’s permanency. Aragon’s novel is concerned then, Abigail Susik notes, with the “insatiable momentum of progress,” and how it “renders all the more visible what could be called the radical remainders of modernity: the recently ruined, lately depleted, presently-passé entities that, for better and for worse, multiply and accumulate in the wake of accelerated production and consumption in industrial society” (34). Drawing comparison with Walter Benjamin’s sprawling Arcades Project, a kaleidoscopic critique of commodity culture, Paris Vaclav similarly characterises Paris Peasant as manifesting a distinct form of “political affect: one of melancholy for the destruction of the arcades yet also of a decidedly non-conservative devotion to aesthetic innovation” (24).Sensitive to the contradictory nature of progress under late capitalist modernity, Paris Peasant thus recognises destruction as an underlying condition of change and innovation as was typical of avant-garde texts of the early twentieth century. Yet Aragon resists fatalism in his simultaneous alertness to the radical potential of the marvellous in the everyday, searching for the fault lines in ordinary reality beneath which poetic re-enchantment challenges the status quo of modern life. In this way, Aragon’s experimental novel sketches the textures and psychogeographies of the city, tracing its detours and shifts in ambience, the relationship of architecture to dreams, memory and fantasy; those composite layers of a city that official documents and masterplans rarely ascribe value to and which literary authors are uniquely placed to capture in their writings on cities. ConclusionUnable to respond within the swift publication timeframes of journalistic articles, the novelist is admittedly not well-placed to halt the demolition of buildings. In this article, I have sought to argue that the power and agency of the literary response resides, rather, in its long view and the subjective perspective of the author. At the time of writing, Sydney Metro is poised to involve a scale of demolition that has not been seen in Sydney for several decades and which will transform the city in a manner that, to date, has largely passed uncritiqued. The works of Iain Sinclair and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant point to the capacity of literary texts to deconstruct those broader forces that increasingly reshape the city without proper consideration; exposing the seductive ideology of urban renewal and the false promises of grand projects that transform multifaceted cityscapes into homogenous non-places. The literary text thus makes visible what is easily missed in the experience of everyday life, forcing us to consider the losses that haunt every gain in the building and rebuilding of the city.ReferencesAragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Trans. Simon Taylor Watson. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Aston, Heath. “We’ll Govern for All.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Mar. 2011. 23 Feb. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/state-election-2011/well-govern-for-all-20110326-1cbbf.html>. Bruno, Guiliana. “Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies.” Ruins. Ed. Brian Dillon. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. 76-81.Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Museum of Sydney. Demolished Sydney Media Release. Sydney: Sydney Living Museums 20 Oct. 2016. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/2016/12/05/new-exhibition-demolished-sydney>.Paris, Vaclav. “Uncreative Influence: Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.1 (Autumn 2013): 21-39.Sinclair, Iain. Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project. London: Penguin, 2012. ———. Hackney, That Rose Red Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009.———. London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015.Susik, Abigail. “Paris 1924: Aragon, Le Corbusier, and the Question of the Outmoded.” Wreck: Graduate Journal of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory 2.2 (2008): 29-44.Tan, Declan. “Review of Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair.” Huffington Post 15 Dec. 2011; updated 14 Feb. 2012. 21 Feb 2017 <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/declan-tan/ghost-milk-ian-sinclair-review_b_1145692.html>. Transport for NSW, Chatswood to Sydenham: Environmental Impact Statement Summary. 25 Mar. 2017 <http://www.sydneymetro.info>. Sydney: NSW Government, May-June 2016.Weston, David. “Against the Grand Project: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (Summer 2015): 255-79.

IntroductionThis article proposes that the practice of relaxation—a mode of bodily self-organisation within time—provides a way to diversify times as political and creative intervention. Relaxation, which could seem counter-intuitive, may function as intentional temporal intervention and means to slip some of the binds of neoliberal, surveillance capitalist logics. Noting the importance of decision-making (resonant with what Zuboff has called “promising”) as political, ethical capacity (and what dilutes it), I will argue here that relaxation precedes and invites a more active relation to the future. Relaxing and deciding are contrasted, in turn, with something dubbed ‘sub-habituality.’ This neologism would work as a critical poetics for the kind of (non)time in which we may be increasingly living. If, in Discipline and Punish, 1970s Foucault explored the various strategies of coupling time constraints/‘refining’ of time periods (150) with surveillance, I argue here that we might reconsider these same elements—time, constraint, intentionality—aslant and anew, as we approach the third decade of the 21st century (nearly 20 years after Google began opportunistically gathering the data exhaust of its searches). If in a disciplinary society, the organisation of bodies in time served various orders of domination, is it possible that in a control society (as Deleuze has named it), time and bodily composure may be harnessed otherwise to evade surreptitious logics of a neoliberal flavour?The elements noted by Foucault (i.e. structured time, bodily organisation) can—when rendered decisive, coupled with relaxation (to be defined), and with surveillance muddled or subtracted—become tools and modes for questioning, resisting and unsettling various mechanisms of domination and the dilutions of ethical capacity that accompany them in the current moment. We may, in other words, decide to structure our time when unobserved (for example with Flight Mode or connectivity off on laptops, etc.) for intentional, onto-political ends. A later Foucault, incidentally, went on to connect certain practices of care of the self to ethics, as ethical obligations (Foucault, “Ethics”). Time plays a role in such practices. With this as background, this article will read atmospherically some of Gilles Deleuze’s ontological offerings regarding time from his 1968 work Difference and Repetition. However, before this, I wish to clarify the article’s understanding of neoliberalisation in a digital moment.A neoliberalising moment, to use Springer’s preferred nomenclature (5), co-exists presently with a ubiquity of digital media engagement and co-opts it and exacerbates its reach for its manoeuvres. The former’s logics—which digital practices might at once support and/or contest—involve well-known imperatives of ‘efficiency’, aesthetics of striving, untrammelled growth, logics of scarcity and competition, privatisation of community assets, the so-called autonomy of the market, and so on. In his essay on control societies (which notably, after World War II, eclipse the disciplinary societies described by Foucault), Deleuze puts it like this:the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. (5, my emphasis)Neoliberalism, where corporations have tended to replace factories, relies variously on competition between peers, dubious forms of (often ludicrous) motivation, fluctuating salaries and debt (in the place of explicit enclosures), so as to reduce the capacity and the lived expansiveness of the human (and non-human) beings who exist within its order.With this as background, I’m interested in the ways that personal electronic devices (PEDs) and the apps they house may—if used mostly compliantly and uncritically—impact what I would like to call our temporal diversity. This would involve a whittling-down of our access to atmospheres, thus to more impoverished constellations of living, and finally to profound disenablings in many spheres. PEDs provide a monetisable means of pervasive surveillance and increasingly-normalised "veillance" (Lupton 44). Certain modes of domination—if we read this term to mean a reduction of (ethical, creative, political) capacity—furthermore mobilise very specifically a co-opting of time (in the form of ‘engagement’, our eyes on a screen) and time’s strategic fragmentation. The latter is facilitated variously by monetised, gamified apps, and social media Skinner-box effects, entwined with the veillance made possible by the data exhaust of our searches and other trackable online behaviours, self-loggings, and so on. Recalling the way, in disciplinary societies, that power relations play out via the enclosure and regulation of bodies and their movement—the latter imposed externally and with the imperative of a ‘useful time’ or with the aim of self-optimising—I’m curious about how self-selected modes of resistant bodily organisation might operate to insulate or shelter humans living under and within various intensities of neoliberalisation, its discourse and its gaze. Sheltered, one might recover a creative or robust response. To use temporal strategies and understandings, we may subtract ourselves (even just sometimes) from stealthy modes of control or ‘nudging’, from ways of being which are increasingly marketed as ‘common sense’ approaches to activity and spendings of time.With regard to neoliberalisation (defined according to Springer, 37-38) and its coupling with digital life, I query if we may be finding ourselves too-often dipping below the threshold of what ought to be our most assumed temporality: namely, Deleuze’s ‘living’ or habitual present (from the second chapter of his Difference and Repetition). The moniker of ‘temporal diversity’ seeks to flag that—in a moment where we observe and resist the shutting down of diversity in numerous spheres, of species, eco-systems, cultures and languages, and their eclipse by modes produced for our consumption by globalisation—we could easily miss another register at which diversity is threatened. We might arguably be facing the loss of something which, after the fact, we may struggle to name—since it is not a ‘thing’—and whose trajectory of disappearance might wholly elude us. This diversity is that of times.Deleuze’s Three Syntheses in Difference and RepetitionIn Chapter 2 of his 1968 work, Deleuze explores three ways in which time can synthesise. Each synthesis involves a kind of weaving of the basic operations of difference and repetition. One way to read Deleuze in this work is that he (among other things) effectively sketches three kinds of atmospheres of time. Each of these, I argue, if seen as frame, contributes a richness and diversity to what a life—and what our shared life—can be and feel like.The first kind of time is called the habitual or ‘living’ present. It synthesises from a stitching together, drawing together, of the retaining of disappearing, disparate instances that otherwise bear no basic relation to one another (Deleuze, Difference 97). As a ‘present’, it has a stretch, a ‘reach’ which depends somewhat on our organism’s capacity to contract discontinuous instants. As Hughes beautifully puts it: “Our contractile range is the index of our finitude” (110). As we’ll see below, it would be a crumbling of this ‘range’ that sub-habituality designates. This living present of Deleuze also has a past inflection, marked by the just-gone and by a mode of memory, as well as by a future aspect, marked—not always constructively—by anticipation.One way to read the ‘living’ present is as being akin to our temporal ‘food and shelter’, a basic synthesis in which to dwell basically. Not thrilling or obviously creative, seductive or vast, it is the time—I’d suggest—in which we establish routine, in which we maintain a liveable life. Theorists such as Grosz have argued—in this tradition with Deleuze which positively evaluates habit—that habit, as mode of time, frees the organism up so that invention and innovation can then seed (see Grosz).The ‘living’ present turns out, however, not to be assumable in every case. For example, in cases of PTSD, I’d contend, it may be interrupted, lost, thus is not to be taken for granted under all conditions. Its status under a gamified neoliberalisation or surveillance capitalism is of interest to me and thus I offer this poetics of sub-habituality as a way to designate its vulnerability—that we might slip below its steadying threshold.Neither does the habitual present constitute much of a diversity; it would not cut it, let’s say, as enough for an abundant or varied temporal life. The habitual present contributes to the conditions that would enable me to form intentions (as a cohering ‘self’), to fashion basic schedules with my own initiative, to order an adult life. For a truly rich temporal life, however, we’d wish to include the poetics intimated by Deleuze’s two other syntheses, their more diverse atmospheres and the arguably political capacities they open to us.The second (passive) synthesis pertains to a vast and insisting past, in the lineage of Henri Bergson, and which, Deleuze notes, might be accessed or ‘saved for ourselves’ via that which we call reminiscence (Difference 107)—a dreamy, expansive and often-pleasurable state (except, for example, in cases of PTSD, or even perhaps versions of dementia, where the person may not be able to leave or surface from it). To dig, in thought, ‘down’ into the register of this vast past and to unearth a rigorous account of it, one goes via a series of paradoxes (see Deleuze, Difference 101-105). If the first passive synthesis is constituted by habit’s mechanisms, the second passive synthesis is constituted by memory’s: “memory is the fundamental synthesis of time which constitutes the being of the past (that which causes the present to pass)” (Deleuze, Difference 101). Hughes puts it thus: “the pure past in general [is] a horizon of having-been-ness, in which what was apprehended [in the first synthesis] finds the conditions of its reproducibility” (108). If such a pastness designates one moment in how selves and their being-as-time synthesise, one might want to know how to include this rich, languorous, sometimes lost and meandering, atmosphere in a life. This might assist an understanding of what distorts or precludes it, and thus our learning for how to invite it in, alongside our more habitual modes.No mode of time, therefore, is simplistically inflected as positive or negative. Without their multiplicity, I’m arguing, we are left temporally less endowed. I wish to articulate not the swapping of one kind of time for another—as if one would only favour productive ‘times’, or efficient ‘times’, or competitive ‘times’, or steady ‘times’, or dreamy, meandering ‘times’—but a diversity. When we feel wildly dissatisfied and imagine that a tangible thing, situation or acquisition—content in time, in other words—would serve as a salve for this uneasiness, we might also consider that what’s missing could be a temporal mode. Which one have we lost the capacity to access or drift into? I’ll now turn to the third synthesis which Deleuze explores, which pertains to the future and its opening up.For the purposes of my argument here, I want to use this third synthesis to gesture towards the future as a possible mode—empty, sheer—and which distinguishes itself entirely from the future ‘aspects’ of the first two syntheses. I both take a poetic cue from Deleuze, as well as note that this synthesis is the least obvious or accessible in a usual life, one in which habit’s organisation is established, and even in which perhaps there are pockets of the ‘erotic’ (Deleuze, Difference 107) and/or expansive driftings of the second synthesis of memory. The third synthesis, then—associated with Deleuze’s take on thought—marks the moment when something becomes active. Deleuze presents it to the reader of Difference and Repetition in relation to Nietzsche’s Eternal Return:that is why it is properly called a belief of the future, a belief in the future. Eternal Return affects only the new, what is produced under the condition of default and by the intermediary of metamorphosis. However it causes neither the condition nor the agent to return: on the contrary, it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. (Difference 113, emphasis original)When habit dominates our temporal palette, the future appears to be possible only in habit’s guise of it—that is, in the mode of anticipation, which then morphs to prediction as this synthesis moves into its more active modes. Anticipation is a pragmatic but weak future. It is useful, without doubt, since habit’s future mode knows to say: at three o’clock I need to get my shoes on, grab keys and wallet, and drive to pick up X. I anticipate that they will be waiting on this corner, and so on. Habit’s internally available ‘future’ is crucial and steadying. Knowing how to manoeuvre within it is part of learning to live some kind of organised life. In sub-habituality I’d argue, we may not even have that. Zuboff intimates this when in Chapter 11 she speaks of a right to a future tense.Deleuze’s third synthesis opens the self precisely onto that which-cannot-be-anticipated. The Nietzschean mode of the future that Deleuze explores at length is not akin to habit’s ordering and stabilising; it is not to be compared to the reminiscent climes of pure memory, to the vast dilations and contractions of its insisting topographies. The third synthesis asks more of us. It asks us to forget the versions of ourselves we have been (in the very moment that we affirm the repetition of everything that has been, to the letter) and to stare unblinkingly into a roaring Nothingness, or better into the strange weathers of a Not-Determined-Yet.My own practice-based creative research into these matters confirms Deleuze’s architectures. I say: we need the two other temporal syntheses and rely on them in order to dramatise something new in the third synthesis. The is the ability, in other words, to decide and to forget enough to be able to dance forward into an unknown future.Sub-Habituality: Or Less than a ‘Living’ PresentKorean thinker Byung-Chul Han links our use of devices, and the necessity of engaging with them for our social/economic survival, to the kind of dispersed and fretful awareness needed by animals surviving predators in the wild. He sees ‘multitasking’ in no way as any kind of evolution, but names it provocatively a regression, which precludes the kind of contemplation upon which sophisticated cultural practices and fields, such as art and philosophy, arguably depend (Han 26-29). Habit involves the crucial notion of a ‘range’ of, or a capacity for, contracting disparate instants—so as to make possible their being stitched together, via contemplation’s passivity (Deleuze 100), and thereby to synthesise a (stable, even liveable) present. Recall that Hughes called it the index of our finitude. How do digital engagements—specifically with apps and their intentionally gamified designs, and which involve a certain velocity of uncadenced movement and gesture (eyes, hands, neck position)—impact an ability to synthesise a steady-enough present? Sub-habituality, as name, seeks a poetics to bring to articulation an un-ease that would be specifically temporal, not psychological, or even merely physiological.To know about the stability offered by habit’s time allows the cultivation of temporal atmospheres that are pleasant and stable, as well as having the potential to open onto creative/erotic modes of a vast past, as well as not be closed to the pure future. This would be a curation of the present, learning how to ‘play’ its mechanisms such that the most expansive and interesting aspects of this mode—which can condition and court other modes—can come forth.Sub-habituality is that time where the gathering of instants into any stretch is hindered, shattering the operations of coherence and narrowing aperture for certain experiences. No stretch in which to dwell. The vast and calming surfaces of our attention breaking into shards. Sub-habituality would be anti-contemplative, in an ontological sense. No instant could hold for long enough to relate to its temporal peers. Teetering there on the edge of a non-time, any ‘subject’ who might intend is undermined.Next, I turn to the notion of relaxation as bodily practice and strategy to insulate or shelter humans living under and within various intensities of digitalised neoliberalisation. Instead of offering oneself up for monetised organisation, one organises oneself via the nuanced effort that is a ‘dropping of excess effort’. The latter is relaxation and may thwart surreptitious modes of (imposed temporal) (dis)organisation, or what tends to appear increasingly as ‘common sense’ approaches to activity and spendings of time. We practise deciding to structure blocks of time, so that within their bounds we can risk experimenting with relaxation, its erotics and its vectors of transformation.RelaxationNeoliberalisation, after Springer, involves the becoming common-sensical of numerous logics: competitiveness in every sphere of life, ubiquity of free market logics, supposed scarcity (of time, opportunity), rationalisation and instrumentalisation of processes and attitudes to doing, and an emphasis on a discourse of efficiency (even when it is not, in actuality, what obtains). For Deleuze, in a control society, similarlymany young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they are being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. ("Postscript", 7)How can we serve less this current telos? What (counter or subtractive) practices might undermine the conditions for the entrenching of such logics? My contention in this article is that practices of the body that also involve the intentional organising of time, along with approaches to movement generally that forgo striving and forcing (that is: kinds of violent ‘work’), may counter some of the impacts (especially of a temporal nature, as discussed above) that align with and allow for neoliberal logics’ pervading of all spheres of life. Relaxation is a useful shorthand for such strategies.In my work elsewhere on practising, I’ve argued that relaxation is the third (of four) criteria that constitute the specific approach to ‘doing’ that can be designated practising (see Pont; Attiwill et al.). Relaxation is a very particular approach to any behaviour or movement, whereby the ‘doer’ pays close attention and seeks to use only the necessary amount of effort for the activity in question. This dropping of ‘natural’ (or knee-jerk) effort is itself a kind of unusual effort. The word ‘natural’ here comes from writings by Vachaspati Mishra (192) and makes the subtle point that relaxation intervenes on what is ‘natural’ or on what has acquired inertia, on that which enacts itself without decision or intention. In this strictly ontological/temporal intervention, relaxation refuses to collude with common-sense approval for striving-as-new-piety that dominate neoliberalised discourses and their motivational propagandas.Relaxation constitutes an enacted—repeatedly enacted—decision at the level of the body to organise movement/doing in ways subtracted from neoliberalised discourse, reawakening intention. It is a quiet intervention, precise and difficult, that works to counter a widespread fundamentalism of doing with excess (or Leistung with its inevitable flipside of collapse and exhaustion, as critiqued by Han 24-25). This dovetails with the ubiquity of digital engagements/behavioural training, which effectively constitute an unending labour for many. Counter-intuitively, relaxation (when understood strictly as practice, not in its lay inflection as compensatory ‘collapse’) can establish a minimum membrane hindering the penetration of this labour into all spheres of a life. Once PEDs are intentionally used—very difficult to do—and limited in terms of the proportion of time they are engaged with, they pose a reduced threat to times’ diversity. (To organise my time, curiously too, I make use of PED timer features, on flight mode, and so on. Others use apps specifically designed to help them use fewer apps.)We find ourselves here faced with various and emergent practices of saying ‘no’ to serve a process that experiments with affirming something else—perhaps this ‘else’ would be the conditions for that which does yet exist, that is: truly open futures, creativity, robustness in the face of change. Promising? Deciding? My argument is that a body immersed too much in sub-habituality is less capable overall of withstanding the atmospheres of the third synthesis (and, if we follow Han, too dispersed and fragmented to access certain atmospheres that we might associate with the second). It may not even have a sense of a living present. It becomes less and less intentional, more malleable, very tired.There is—in the work of the body that resists complying with the logics of neoliberalisation, that resists a certain corrosion of Deleuze’s first time (and of the subsequent two times that in Deleuze open from them)—a clear practice of dropping, letting fall, not picking up in the first place. We forgo then certain modes of, or approaches to, action when we work to subtract ourselves from an encroaching (a)temporality that is none at all. To foil reactivity we have two obvious options: we learn to activate our reactivity—to act it; or we pause just before enacting from within its logic. Relaxation is more about the latter.ConclusionThe sub-habitual discussed in this article is, most importantly, a grim affective/temporal register to inhabit. For many, its unpleasantness is met with queries about mental health, since it naturally impacts us in a register that feels like bad thinking, like bad feeling. By introducing an onto-temporal inflection into such queries, I suggest there might be a certain kind of ‘health’ or better still a ‘pleasure’ in a life that can obtain with the cultivation of a diversity of times. Deleuze’s model of three kinds of temporal synthesis tempts me as one way to track what might be going missing in a moment when certain technologies, serving particular economic and political agendas and ideologies, can coax our rhythms, behaviours and preoccupations down particular paths. The fleshy, energetic and thinking body, as a site of affirmation, as a vehicle for practices that subtract themselves from dominant logics, can—I’ve argued here—be a crucial factor in working with temporality in such a way that one is not left with an homogenised non-time in which we are not-quite-subjects or diluted selves vulnerable to being worked on by logics that drive neoliberalisation and its sufferings. Relaxation is among a suite of strategies that may keep our times (and ourselves as modes of time) diverse: stable, pleasure-capable, imaginative and fierce.ReferencesAttiwill, Suzie, Terri Bird, Andrea Eckersley, Antonia Pont, Jon Roffe, and Philipa Rothfield. Practising with Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2004.———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3-7.Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.———. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997. 281-302.Grosz, Elizabeth. “Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us.” Body and Society 19(2&3): 2013. 217-239.Han, Byung-Chul. Müdigkeitsgesellschaft Burnoutgesellschaft Hoch-Zeit. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2016.Hughes, Joe. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. Lupton, Deborah. The Quantified Self. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.Mishra, Vachaspati. The Yoga System of Patanjali. Trans. J. Haughton Woods. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1914 (by arrangement with Harvard University Press).Pont, Antonia. “An Exemplary Operation: Shikantaza and Articulating Practice via Deleuze.” Transcendence, Immanence and Intercultural Philosophy. Eds. Nahum Brown & William Franke. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 207-236.Springer, Simon. The Discourse of Neoliberalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. (Kindle Edition.)

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’— Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)Dickens’s famous pedant, Thomas Gradgrind, was not an anomaly. He is the pedagogical manifestation of the rise of quantification in modernism that was the necessary adjunct to massive urbanisation and industrialisation. His classroom caricatures the dominant epistemic modality of modern global democracies, our unwavering trust in numbers, “data”, and reproductive predictability. This brief quotation from Hard Times both presents and parodies the 19th century’s displacement of what were previously more commonly living and heterogeneous existential encounters with events and things. The world had not yet been made predictably repetitive through industrialisation, standardisation, law, and ubiquitous codes of construction. Theirs was much more a world of unique events and not the homogenised and orthodox iteration of standardised knowledge. Horses and, by extension, all entities and events gradually were displaced by their rote definitions: individuals of a so-called natural kind were reduced to identicals. Further, these mechanical standardisations were and still are underwritten by mapping them into a numerical and extensive characterisation. On top of standardised objects and procedures appeared assigned numerical equivalents which lent standardisation the seemingly apodictic certainty of deductive demonstrations. The algebraic becomes the socially enforced criterion for the previously more sensory, qualitative, and experiential encounters with becoming that were more likely in pre-industrial life. Here too, we see that the function of this reproductive protocol is not just notational but is the sine qua non for, in Althusser’s famous phrase, the manufacture of citizens as “subject subjects”, those concrete individuals who are educated to understand themselves ideologically in an imaginary relation with their real position in any society’s self-reproduction. Here, however, ideology performs that operation through that nominally least political of cognitive modes, the supposed friend of classical Marxism’s social science, the mathematical. The historical onset of this social and political reproductive hegemony, this uniform supplanting of time’s ineluctable differencing with the parasite of its associated model, can partial be found in the formation of metrics. Before the 19th century, the measures of space and time were local. Units of length and weight varied not just between nations but often by municipality. These parochial standards reflected indigenous traditions, actualities, personalities, and needs. This variation in measurement standards suggested that every exchange or judgment of kind and value relied upon the specificity of that instance. Every evaluation of an instance required perceptual acuity and not the banality of enumeration constituted by commodification and the accounting practices intrinsic to centralised governance. This variability in measure was complicated by similar variability in the currencies of the day. Thus, barter presented the participants with complexities and engagements of skills and discrete observation completely alien to the modern purchase of duplicate consumer objects with stable currencies. Almost nothing of life was iterative: every exchange was, more or less, an anomaly. However, in 1790, immediately following the French Revolution and as a central manifestation of its movement to rational democratisation, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand proposed a metrical system to the French National Assembly. The units of this metric system, based originally on observable features of nature, are now formally codified in all scientific practice by seven physical constants. Further, they are ubiquitous now in almost all public exchanges between individuals, corporations, and states. These units form a coherent and extensible structure whose elements and rules are subject to seemingly lossless symbolic exchange in a mathematic coherence aided by their conformity to decimal representation. From 1960, their basic contemporary form was established as the International System of Units (SI). Since then, all but three of the countries of the world (Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States), regardless of political organisation and individual history, have adopted these standards for commerce and general measurement. The uniformity and rational advantage of this system is easily demonstrable in just the absurd variation in the numeric bases of the Imperial / British system which uses base 16 for ounces/pounds, base 12 for inches/feet, base three for feet/yards, base 180 for degrees between freezing and cooling, 43,560 square feet per acre, eights for division of inches, etc. Even with its abiding antagonism to the French, Britain officially adopted the metric system as was required by its admission to the EU in 1973. The United States is the last great holdout in the public use of the metric system even though SI has long been the standard wanted by the federal government. At first, the move toward U.S. adoption was promising. Following France and rejecting England’s practice, America was founded on a decimal currency system in 1792. In 1793, Jefferson requested a copy of the standard kilogram from France in a first attempt to move to the metric system: however, the ship carrying the copy was captured by pirates. Indeed, The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 expressed a more serious national intention to adopt SI, but after some abortive efforts, the nation fell back into the more archaic measurements dominant since before its revolution. However, the central point remains that while the U.S. is unique in its public measurement standard among dominant powers, it is equally committed to the hegemonic application of a numerical rendition of events.The massive importance of this underlying uniformity is that it supplies the central global mechanism whereby the world’s chaotic variation is continuously parsed and supplanted into comparable, intelligible, and predictable units that understand individuating difference as anomaly. Difference, then, is understood in this method not as qualitative and intensive, which it necessarily is, but quantitative and extensive. Like Gradgrind’s “horse”, the living and unique thing is rendered through the Apollonian dream of standardisation and enumeration. While differencing is the only inherent quality of time’s chaotic flow, accounting and management requite iteration. To order the reproduction of modern society, the unique individuating differences that render an object as “this one”, what the Medieval logicians called haecceities, are only seen as “accidental” and “non-essential” deviations. This is not just odd but illogical since these very differences allow events to be individuated items so to appear as countable at all. As Leibniz’s principle, the indiscernibility of identicals, suggests, the application of the metrical same to different occasions is inherently paradoxical: if each unit were truly the same, there could only be one. As the etymology of “anomaly” suggests, it is that which is unexpected, irregular, out of line, or, going back to the Greek, nomos, at variance with the law. However, as the only “law” that always is at hand is the so-called “Second Law of Thermodynamics”, the inconsistently consistent roiling of entropy, the evident theoretical question might be, “how is anomaly possible when regularity itself is impossible?” The answer lies not in events “themselves” but exactly in the deductive valorisations projected by that most durable invention of the French Revolution adumbrated above, the metric system. This seemingly innocuous system has formed the reproductive and iterative bias of modern post-industrial perceptual homogenisation. Metrical modeling allows – indeed, requires – that one mistake the metrical changeling for the experiential event it replaces. Gilles Deleuze, that most powerful French metaphysician (1925-1995) offers some theories to understand the seminal production (not reproduction) of disparity that is intrinsic to time and to distinguish it from its homogenised representation. For him, and his sometime co-author, Felix Guattari, time’s “chaosmosis” is the host constantly parasitised by its symbolic model. This problem, however, of standardisation in the face of time’s originality, is obscured by its very ubiquity; we must first denaturalise the seemingly self-evident metrical concept of countable and uniform units.A central disagreement in ancient Greece was between the proponents of physis (often translated as “nature” but etymologically indicative of growth and becoming, process and not fixed form) and nomos (law or custom). This is one of the first ethical and so political debates in Western philosophy. For Heraclitus and other pre-Socratics, the emphatic character of nature was change, its differencing dynamism, its processual but not iterative character. In anticipation of Hume, Sophists disparaged nomos (νόμος) as simply the habituated application of synthetic law and custom to the fluidity of natural phenomena. The historical winners of this debate, Plato and the scientific attitudes of regularity and taxonomy characteristic of his best pupil, Aristotle, have dominated ever since, but not without opponents.In the modern era, anti-enlightenment figures such as Hamann, Herder, and the Schlegel brothers gave theoretical voice to romanticism’s repudiation of the paradoxical impulses of the democratic state for regulation and uniformity that Talleyrand’s “revolutionary” metrical proposal personified. They saw the correlationalism (as adumbrated by Meillassoux) between thought and thing based upon their hypothetical equitability as a betrayal of the dynamic physis that experience presented. Variable infinity might come either from the character of God or nature or, as famously in Spinoza’s Ethics, both (“deus sive natura”). In any case, the plenum of nature was never iterative. This rejection of metrical regularity finds its synoptic expression in Nietzsche. As a classicist, Nietzsche supplies the bridge between the pre-Socratics and the “post-structuralists”. His early mobilisation of the Apollonian, the dream of regularity embodied in the sun god, and the Dionysian, the drunken but inarticulate inexpression of the universe’s changing manifold, gives voice to a new resistance to the already dominate metrical system. His is a new spin of the mythic representatives of Nomos and physis. For him, this pair, however, are not – as they are often mischaracterised – in dialectical dialogue. To place them into the thesis / antithesis formulation would be to give them the very binary character that they cannot share and to, tacitly, place both under Apollo’s procedure of analysis. Their modalities are not antithetical but mutually exclusive. To represent the chaotic and non-iterative processes of becoming, of physis, under the rubric of a common metrics, nomos, is to mistake the parasite for the host. In its structural hubris, the ideological placebo of metrical knowing thinks it non-reductively captures the multiplicity it only interpellates. In short, the polyvalent, fluid, and inductive phenomena that empiricists try to render are, in their intrinsic character, unavailable to deductive method except, first, under the reductive equivalence (the Gradgrind pedagogy) of metrical modeling. This incompatibility of physis and nomos was made manifest by David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) just before the cooptation of the 18th century’s democratic revolutions by “representative” governments. There, Hume displays the Apollonian dream’s inability to accurately and non-reductively capture a phenomenon in the wild, free from the stringent requirements of synthetic reproduction. His argument in Book I is succinct.Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely from that origin. (Part 3, Section 8)There is nothing in any object, consider'd in itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it; ... even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience. (Part 3, Section 12)The rest of mankind ... are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. (Part 4, Section 6)In sum, then, nomos is nothing but habit, a Pavlovian response codified into a symbolic representation and, pragmatically, into a reproductive protocol specifically ordered to exclude anomaly, the inherent chaotic variation that is the hallmark of physis. The Apollonian dream that there can be an adequate metric of unrestricted natural phenomena in their full, open, turbulent, and manifold becoming is just that, a dream. Order, not chaos, is the anomaly. Of course, Kant felt he had overcome this unacceptable challenge to rational application to induction after Hume woke him from his “dogmatic slumber”. But what is perhaps one of the most important assertions of the critiques may be only an evasion of Hume’s radical empiricism: “there are only two ways we can account for the necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible. The former supposition does not hold of the categories (nor of pure sensible intuition) ... . There remains ... only the second—a system ... of the epigenesis of pure reason” (B167). Unless “necessary agreement” means the dictatorial and unrelenting insistence in a symbolic model of perception of the equivalence of concept and appearance, this assertion appears circular. This “reading” of Kant’s evasion of the very Humean crux, the necessary inequivalence of a metric or concept to the metered or defined, is manifest in Nietzsche.In his early “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche suggests that there is no possible equivalence between a concept and its objects, or, to use Frege’s vocabulary, between sense or reference. We speak of a "snake" [see “horse” in Dickens]: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.The literal is always already a reductive—as opposed to literature’s sometimes expansive agency—metaphorisation of events as “one of those” (a token of “its” type). The “necessary” equivalence in nomos is uncovered but demanded. The same is reproduced by the habitual projection of certain “essential qualities” at the expense of all those others residing in every experiential multiplicity. Only in this prison of nomos can anomaly appear: otherwise all experience would appear as it is, anomalous. With this paradoxical metaphor of the straight and equal, Nietzsche inverts the paradigm of scientific expression. He reveals as a repressive social and political obligation the symbolic assertion homology where actually none can be. Supposed equality and measurement all transpire within an Apollonian “dream within a dream”. The concept captures not the manifold of chaotic experience but supplies its placebo instead by an analytic tautology worthy of Gradgrind. The equivalence of event and definition is always nothing but a symbolic iteration. Such nominal equivalence is nothing more than shifting events into a symbolic frame where they can be commodified, owned, and controlled in pursuit of that tertiary equivalence which has become the primary repressive modality of modern societies: money. This article has attempted, with absurd rapidity, to hint why some ubiquitous concepts, which are generally considered self-evident and philosophically unassailable, are open not only to metaphysical, political, and ethical challenge, but are existentially unjustified. All this was done to defend the smaller thesis that the concept of anomaly is itself a reflection of a global misrepresentation of the chaos of becoming. This global substitution expresses a conservative model and measure of the world in the place of the world’s intrinsic heterogenesis, a misrepresentation convenient for those who control the representational powers of governance. In conclusion, let us look, again too briefly, at a philosopher who neither accepts this normative world picture of regularity nor surrenders to Nietzschean irony, Gilles Deleuze.Throughout his career, Deleuze uses the word “pure” with senses antithetical to so-called common sense and, even more, Kant. In its traditional concept, pure means an entity or substance whose essence is not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material, uncontaminated by physical pollution, clean and immaculate. The pure is that which is itself itself. To insure intelligibility, that which is elemental, alphabetic, must be what it is itself and no other. This discrete character forms the necessary, if often tacit, precondition to any analysis and decomposition of beings into their delimited “parts” that are subject to measurement and measured disaggregation. Any entity available for structural decomposition, then, must be pictured as constituted exhaustively by extensive ones, measurable units, its metrically available components. Dualism having established as its primary axiomatic hypothesis the separability of extension and thought must now overcome that very separation with an adequacy, a one to one correspondence, between a supposedly neatly measurable world and ideological hegemony that presents itself as rational governance. Thus, what is needed is not only a purity of substance but a matching purity of reason, and it is this clarification of thought, then, which, as indicated above, is the central concern of Kant’s influential and grand opus, The Critique of Pure Reason.Deleuze heard a repressed alternative to the purity of the measured self-same and equivalent that, as he said about Plato, “rumbled” under the metaphysics of analysis. This was the dark tradition he teased out of the Stoics, Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, Nicholas d’Autrecourt, Spinoza, Meinong, Bergson, Nietzsche, and McLuhan. This is not the purity of identity, A = A, of metrical uniformity and its shadow, anomaly. Rather than repressing, Deleuze revels in the perverse purity of differencing, difference constituted by becoming without the Apollonian imposition of normalcy or definitional identity. One cannot say “difference in itself” because its ontology, its genesis, is not that of anything itself but exactly the impossibility of such a manner of constitution: universal anomaly. No thing or idea can be iterative, separate, or discrete.In his Difference and Repetition, the idea of the purely same is undone: the Ding an sich is a paradox. While the dogmatic image of thought portrays the possibility of the purely self-same, Deleuze never does. His notions of individuation without individuals, of modulation without models, of simulacra without originals, always finds a reflection in his attitudes toward, not language as logical structure, but what necessarily forms the differential making of events, the heterogenesis of ontological symptoms. His theory has none of the categories of Pierce’s triadic construction: not the arbitrary of symbols, the “self-representation” of icons, or even the causal relation of indices. His “signs” are symptoms: the non-representational consequences of the forces that are concurrently producing them. Events, then, are the symptoms of the heterogenetic forces that produce, not reproduce them. To measure them is to export them into a representational modality that is ontologically inapplicable as they are not themselves themselves but the consequences of the ongoing differences of their genesis. Thus, the temperature associated with a fever is neither the body nor the disease.Every event, then, is a diaphora, the pure consequent of the multiplicity of the forces it cannot resemble, an original dynamic anomaly without standard. This term, diaphora, appears at the conclusion of that dialogue some consider Plato’s best, the Theaetetus. There we find perhaps the most important discussion of knowledge in Western metaphysics, which in its final moments attempts to understand how knowledge can be “True Judgement with an Account” (201d-210a). Following this idea leads to a theory, usually known as the “Dream of Socrates”, which posits two kinds of existents, complexes and simples, and proposes that “an account” means “an account of the complexes that analyses them into their simple components … the primary elements (prôta stoikheia)” of which we and everything else are composed (201e2). This—it will be noticed—suggests the ancient heritage of Kant’s own attempted purification of mereological (part/whole relations) nested elementals. He attempts the coordination of pure speculative reason to pure practical reason and, thus, attempts to supply the root of measurement and scientific regularity. However, as adumbrated by the Platonic dialogue, the attempted decompositions, speculative and pragmatic, lead to an impasse, an aporia, as the rational is based upon a correspondence and not the self-synthesis of the diaphorae by their own dynamic disequilibrium. Thus the dialogue ends inconclusively; Socrates rejects the solution, which is the problem itself, and leaves to meet his accusers and quaff his hemlock. The proposal in this article is that the diaphorae are all that exists in Deleuze’s world and indeed any world, including ours. Nor is this production decomposable into pure measured and defined elementals, as such decomposition is indeed exactly opposite what differential production is doing. For Deleuze, what exists is disparate conjunction. But in intensive conjunction the same cannot be the same except in so far as it differs. The diaphorae of events are irremediably asymmetric to their inputs: the actual does not resemble the virtual matrix that is its cause. Indeed, any recourse to those supposedly disaggregate inputs, the supposedly intelligible constituents of the measured image, will always but repeat the problematic of metrical representation at another remove. This is not, however, the traditional postmodern trap of infinite meta-shifting, as the diaphoric always is in each instance the very presentation that is sought. Heterogenesis can never be undone, but it can be affirmed. In a heterogenetic monism, what was the insoluble problem of correspondence in dualism is now its paradoxical solution: the problematic per se. What manifests in becoming is not, nor can be, an object or thought as separate or even separable, measured in units of the self-same. Dogmatic thought habitually translates intensity, the differential medium of chaosmosis, into the nominally same or similar so as to suit the Apollonian illusions of “correlational adequacy”. However, as the measured cannot be other than a calculation’s placebo, the correlation is but the shadow of a shadow. Every diaphora is an event born of an active conjunction of differential forces that give rise to this, their product, an interference pattern. Whatever we know and are is not the correlation of pure entities and thoughts subject to measured analysis but the confused and chaotic confluence of the specific, material, aleatory, differential, and unrepresentable forces under which we subsist not as ourselves but as the always changing product of our milieu. In short, only anomaly without a nominal becomes, and we should view any assertion that maps experience into the “objective” modality of the same, self-evident, and normal as a political prestidigitation motivated, not by “truth”, but by established political interest. ReferencesDella Volpe, Galvano. Logic as a Positive Science. London: NLB, 1980.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.Guenon, René. The Reign of Quantity. New York: Penguin, 1972.Hawley, K. "Identity and Indiscernibility." Mind 118 (2009): 101-9.Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 2014.Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1929.Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum, 2008.Naddaf, Gerard. The Greek Concept of Nature. Albany: SUNY, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.———. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Trans. Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1976.Welch, Kathleen Ethel. "Keywords from Classical Rhetoric: The Example of Physis." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17.2 (1987): 193–204.

‘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>.

Dégueulasse is French slang for “disgusting,” derived in 1867 from the French verb dégueuler, to vomit. Despite its vulgar status, it is frequently used by almost every French speaker, including foreigners and students. It is also a term that has often been employed to describe the 1973 cult film, La Grande bouffe [Blow Out], by Marco Ferreri, which recounts in grotesque detail the gastronomic suicide of four male protagonists. This R-rated French-Italian production was booed, and the director spat on, at the 26th Cannes Film Festival—the Jury President, Ingrid Bergman, said it was the most “sordid” film she’d ever seen, and is even reported to have vomited after watching it (Télérama). Ferreri nevertheless walked away with the Prix FIPRESCI, awarded by the Federation of International Critics, and it is apparently the largest grossing release in the history of Paris with more than 700,000 entries in Paris and almost 3 million in France overall. Scandal sells, and this was especially seemingly so 1970s, when this film was avidly consumed as part of an unholy trinity alongside Bernardo Bertolucci’s Le Dernier Tango à Paris [Last Tango in Paris] (1972) and Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] (1973). Fast forward forty years, though, and at the very moment when La Grande bouffe was being commemorated with a special screening on the 2013 Cannes Film Festival programme, a handful of University of Melbourne French students in a subject called “Matters of Taste” were boycotting the film as an unacceptable assault to their sensibilities. Over the decade that I have been showing the film to undergraduate students, this has never happened before. In this article, I want to examine critically the questions of taste that underpin this particular predicament. Analysing firstly the intradiegetic portrayal of taste in the film, through both gustatory and aesthetic signifiers, then the choice of the film as a key element in a University subject corpus, I will finally question the (dis)taste displayed by certain students, contextualising it as part of an ongoing socio-cultural commentary on food, sex, life, and death. Framed by a brief foray into Bourdieusian theories of taste, I will attempt to draw some conclusions on the continual renegotiation of gustatory and aesthetic tastes in relation to La Grande bouffe, and thereby deepen understanding of why it has become the incarnation of dégueulasse today. Theories of Taste In the 1970s, the parameters of “good” and “bad” taste imploded in the West, following political challenges to the power of the bourgeoisie that also undermined their status as the contemporary arbiters of taste. This revolution of manners was particularly shattering in France, fuelled by the initial success of the May 68 student, worker, and women’s rights movements (Ross). The democratization of taste served to legitimize desires different from those previously dictated by bourgeois norms, enabling greater diversity in representing taste across a broad spectrum. It was reflected in the cultural products of the 1970s, including cinema, which had already broken with tradition during the New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and became a vector for political ideologies as well as radical aesthetic choices (Smith). Commonly regarded as “the decade that taste forgot,” the 1970s were also a time for re-assessing the sociology of taste, with the magisterial publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English trans. 1984). As Bourdieu refuted Kant’s differentiation between the legitimate aesthetic, so defined by its “disinterestedness,” and the common aesthetic, derived from sensory pleasures and ordinary meanings, he also attempted to abolish the opposition between the “taste of reflection” (pure pleasure) and the “taste of sense” (facile pleasure) (Bourdieu 7). In so doing, he laid the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding the apparently incommensurable choices that are not the innate expression of our unique personalities, but rather the product of our class, education, family experiences—our habitus. Where Bourdieu’s theories align most closely with the relationship between taste and revulsion is in the realm of aesthetic disposition and its desire to differentiate: “good” taste is almost always predicated on the distaste of the tastes of others. Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others. “De gustibus non est disputandum”: not because “tous les goûts sont dans la nature,” but because each taste feels itself to be natural—and so it almost is, being a habitus—which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes (Bourdieu). Although today’s “Gen Y” Melbourne University students are a long way from 1970s French working class/bourgeois culture clashes, these observations on taste as the corollary of distaste are still salient tools of interpretation of their attitudes towards La Grande bouffe. And, just as Bourdieu effectively deconstructed Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the 18th “century of taste” notions of universality and morality in aesthetics (Dickie, Gadamer, Allison) in his groundbreaking study of distinction, his own theories have in turn been subject to revision in an age of omnivorous consumption and eclectic globalisation, with various cultural practices further destabilising the hierarchies that formerly monopolized legitimate taste (Sciences Humaines, etc). Bourdieu’s theories are still, however, useful for analysing La Grande bouffe given the contemporaneous production of these texts, as they provide a frame for understanding (dis)taste both within the filmic narrative and in the wider context of its reception. Taste and Distaste in La Grande bouffe To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla […] Enough with feelings, I want to make a physiological film (Celluloid Liberation Front). Marco Ferreri’s statements about his motivations for La Grande bouffe coincide here with Bourdieu’s explanation of taste: clearly the director wished to depart from psychological cinema favoured by contemporary critics and audiences and demonstrated his distaste for their preference. There were, however, psychological impulses underpinning his subject matter, as according to film academic Maurizio Viano, Ferrari had a self-destructive, compulsive relation to food, having been forced to spend a few weeks in a Swiss clinic specialising in eating disorders in 1972–1973 (Viano). Food issues abound in his biography. In an interview with Tullio Masoni, the director declared: “I was fat as a child”; his composer Phillipe Sarde recalls the grand Italian-style dinners that he would organise in Paris during the film; and, two of the film’s stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi, actually credit the conception of La Grande bouffe to a Rabelaisian feast prepared by Tognazzi, during which Ferreri exclaimed “hey guys, we are killing ourselves!” (Viano 197–8). Evidently, there were psychological factors behind this film, but it was nevertheless the physiological aspects that Ferreri chose to foreground in his creation. The resulting film does indeed privilege the physiological, as the protagonists fornicate, fart, vomit, defecate, and—of course—eat, to wild excess. The opening scenes do not betray such sordid sequences; the four bourgeois men are introduced one by one so as to establish their class credentials as well as display their different tastes. We first encounter Ugo (Tognazzi), an Italian chef of humble peasant origins, as he leaves his elegant restaurant “Le Biscuit à soupe” and his bourgeois French wife, to take his knives and recipes away with him for the weekend. Then Michel (Piccoli), a TV host who has pre-taped his shows, gives his apartment keys to his 1970s-styled baba-cool daughter as he bids her farewell, and packs up his cleaning products and rubber gloves to take with him. Marcello (Mastroianni) emerges from a cockpit in his aviator sunglasses and smart pilot’s uniform, ordering his sexy airhostesses to carry his cheese and wine for him as he takes a last longing look around his plane. Finally, the judge and owner of the property where the action will unfold, Philippe (Noiret), is awoken by an elderly woman, Nicole, who feeds him tea and brioche, pestering him for details of his whereabouts for the weekend, until he demonstrates his free will and authority, joking about his serious life, and lying to her about attending a legal conference in London. Having given over power of attorney to Nicole, he hints at the finality of his departure, but is trying to wrest back his independence as his nanny exhorts him not to go off with whores. She would rather continue to “sacrifice herself for him” and “keep it in the family,” as she discreetly pleasures him in this scene. Scholars have identified each protagonist as an ideological signifier. For some, they represent power—Philippe is justice—and three products of that ideology: Michel is spectacle, Ugo is food, and Marcello is adventure (Celluloid Liberation Front). For others, these characters are the perfect incarnations of the first four Freudian stages of sexual development: Philippe is Oedipal, Michel is indifferent, Ugo is oral, and Marcello is impotent (Tury & Peter); or even the four temperaments of Hippocratic humouralism: Philippe the phlegmatic, Michel the melancholic, Ugo the sanguine, and Marcello the choleric (Calvesi, Viano). I would like to offer another dimension to these categories, positing that it is each protagonist’s taste that prescribes his participation in this gastronomic suicide as well as the means by which he eventually dies. Before I develop this hypothesis, I will first describe the main thrust of the narrative. The four men arrive at the villa at 68 rue Boileau where they intend to end their days (although this is not yet revealed). All is prepared for the most sophisticated and decadent feasting imaginable, with a delivery of the best meats and poultry unfurling like a surrealist painting. Surrounded by elegant artworks and demonstrating their cultural capital by reciting Shakespeare, Brillat-Savarin, and other classics, the men embark on a race to their death, beginning with a competition to eat the most oysters while watching a vintage pornographic slideshow. There is a strong thread of masculine athletic engagement in this film, as has been studied in detail by James R. Keller in “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism,” and this is exacerbated by the arrival of a young but matronly schoolmistress Andréa (Ferréol) with her students who want to see the garden. She accepts the men’s invitation to stay on in the house to become another object of competitive desire, and fully embraces all the sexual and gustatory indulgence around her. Marcello goes further by inviting three prostitutes to join them and Ugo prepares a banquet fit for a funeral. The excessive eating makes Michel flatulent and Marcello impotent; when Marcello kicks the toilet in frustration, it explodes in the famous fecal fountain scene that apparently so disgusted his then partner Catherine Deneuve, that she did not speak to him for a week (Ebert). The prostitutes flee the revolting madness, but Andréa stays like an Angel of Death, helping the men meet their end and, in surviving, perhaps symbolically marking an end to the masculinist bourgeoisie they represent.To return to the role of taste in defining the rise and demise of the protagonists, let me begin with Marcello, as he is the first to die. Despite his bourgeois attitudes, he is a modern man, associated with machines and mobility, such as the planes and the beautiful Bugatti, which he strokes with greater sensuality than the women he hoists onto it. His taste is for the functioning mechanical body, fast and competitive, much like himself when he is gorging on oysters. But his own body betrays him when his “masculine mechanics” stop functioning, and it is the fact that the Bugatti has broken down that actually causes his death—he is found frozen in driver’s seat after trying to escape in the Bugatti during the night. Marcello’s taste for the mechanical leads therefore to his eventual demise. Michel is the next victim of his own taste, which privileges aesthetic beauty, elegance, the arts, and fashion, and euphemises the less attractive or impolite, the scatological, boorish side of life. His feminized attire—pink polo-neck and flowing caftan—cannot distract from what is happening in his body. The bourgeois manners that bind him to beauty mean that breaking wind traumatises him. His elegant gestures at the dance barre encourage rather than disguise his flatulence; his loud piano playing cannot cover the sound of his loud farts, much to the mirth of Philippe and Andréa. In a final effort to conceal his painful bowel obstruction, he slips outside to die in obscene and noisy agony, balanced in an improbably balletic pose on the balcony balustrade. His desire for elegance and euphemism heralds his death. Neither Marcello nor Michel go willingly to their ends. Their tastes are thwarted, and their deaths are disgusting to them. Their cadavers are placed in the freezer room as silent witnesses to the orgy that accelerates towards its fatal goal. Ugo’s taste is more earthy and inherently linked to the aims of the adventure. He is the one who states explicitly: “If you don’t eat, you won’t die.” He wants to cook for others and be appreciated for his talents, as well as eat and have sex, preferably at the same time. It is a combination of these desires that kills him as he force-feeds himself the monumental creation of pâté in the shape of the Cathedral of Saint-Peter that has been rejected as too dry by Philippe, and too rich by Andréa. The pride that makes him attempt to finish eating his masterpiece while Andréa masturbates him on the dining table leads to a heart-stopping finale for Ugo. As for Philippe, his taste is transgressive. In spite of his upstanding career as a judge, he lies and flouts convention in his unorthodox relationship with nanny Nicole. Andréa represents another maternal figure to whom he is attracted and, while he wishes to marry her, thereby conforming to bourgeois norms, he also has sex with her, and her promiscuous nature is clearly signalled. Given his status as a judge, he reasons that he can not bring Marcello’s frozen body inside because concealing a cadaver is a crime, yet he promotes collective suicide on his premises. Philippe’s final transgression of the rules combines diabetic disobedience with Oedipal complex—Andréa serves him a sugary pink jelly dessert in the form of a woman’s breasts, complete with cherries, which he consumes knowingly and mournfully, causing his death. Unlike Marcello and Michel, Ugo and Philippe choose their demise by indulging their tastes for ingestion and transgression. Following Ferreri’s motivations and this analysis of the four male protagonists, taste is clearly a cornerstone of La Grande bouffe’s conception and narrative structure. It is equally evident that these tastes are contrary to bourgeois norms, provoking distaste and even revulsion in spectators. The film’s reception at the time of its release and ever since have confirmed this tendency in both critical reviews and popular feedback as André Habib’s article on Salo and La Grande bouffe (2001) meticulously demonstrates. With such a violent reaction, one might wonder why La Grande bouffe is found on so many cinema studies curricula and is considered to be a must-see film (The Guardian). Corpus and Corporeality in Food Film Studies I chose La Grande bouffe as the first film in the “Matters of Taste” subject, alongside Luis Bunuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, and Laurent Bénégui’s Au Petit Marguery, as all are considered classic films depicting French eating cultures. Certainly any French cinema student would know La Grande bouffe and most cinephiles around the world have seen it. It is essential background knowledge for students studying French eating cultures and features as a key reference in much scholarly research and popular culture on the subject. After explaining the canonical status of La Grande bouffe and thus validating its inclusion in the course, I warned students about the explicit nature of the film. We studied it for one week out of the 12 weeks of semester, focusing on questions of taste in the film and the socio-cultural representations of food. Although the almost ubiquitous response was: “C’est dégueulasse!,” there was no serious resistance until the final exam when a few students declared that they would boycott any questions on La Grande bouffe. I had not actually included any such questions in the exam. The student evaluations at the end of semester indicated that several students questioned the inclusion of this “disgusting pornography” in the corpus. There is undoubtedly less nudity, violence, gore, or sex in this film than in the Game of Thrones TV series. What, then, repulses these Gen Y students? Is it as Pasolini suggests, the neorealistic dialogue and décor that disturbs, given the ontologically challenging subject of suicide? (Viano). Or is it the fact that there is no reason given for the desire to end their lives, which privileges the physiological over the psychological? Is the scatological more confronting than the pornographic? Interestingly, “food porn” is now a widely accepted term to describe a glamourized and sometimes sexualized presentation of food, with Nigella Lawson as its star, and hundreds of blog sites reinforcing its popularity. Yet as Andrew Chan points out in his article “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” this film is where it all began: “the genealogy reaches further back, as brilliantly visualized in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande bouffe, in which four men eat, screw and fart themselves to death” (47). Is it the overt corporeality depicted in the film that shocks cerebral students into revulsion and rebellion? Conclusion In the guise of a conclusion, I suggest that my Gen Y students’ taste may reveal a Bourdieusian distaste for the taste of others, in a third degree reaction to the 1970s distaste for bourgeois taste. First degree: Ferreri and his entourage reject the psychological for the physiological in order to condemn bourgeois values, provoking scandal in the 1970s, but providing compelling cinema on a socio-political scale. Second degree: in spite of the outcry, high audience numbers demonstrate their taste for scandal, and La Grande bouffe becomes a must-see canonical film, encouraging my choice to include it in the “Matters of Taste” corpus. Third degree: my Gen Y students’ taste expresses a distaste for the academic norms that I have embraced in showing them the film, a distaste that may be more aesthetic than political. Oui, c’est dégueulasse, mais … Bibliography Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1984. Calvesi, M. “Dipingere all moviola” (Painting at the Moviola). Corriere della Sera, 10 Oct. 1976. Reprint. “Arti figurative e il cinema” (Cinema and the Visual Arts). Avanguardia di massa. Ed. M. Calvesi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. 243–46. Celluloid Liberation Front. “Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures.” Bright Lights Film Journal 60 (2008). 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://brightlightsfilm.com/60/60lagrandebouffe.php#.Utd6gs1-es5›. Chan, Andrew. “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 3.4 (2003): 47–53. Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Ebert, Roger, “La Grande bouffe.” 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/la-grande-bouffe-1973›. Ferreri, Marco. La Grande bouffe. Italy-France, 1973. Freedman, Paul H. Food: The History of Taste. U of California P, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald C. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1999. Habib, André. “Remarques sur une ‘réception impossible’: Salo and La Grande bouffe.” Hors champ (cinéma), 4 Jan. 2001. 11 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/cinema/030101/salo-bouffe.html›. Keller, James R. “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism.” Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2006: 49–59. Masoni, Tullio. Marco Ferreri. Gremese, 1998. Pasolini, P.P. “Le ambigue forme della ritualita narrativa.” Cinema Nuovo 231 (1974): 342–46. Ross, Kristin. May 68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Smith, Alison. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Télérama: “La Grande bouffe: l’un des derniers grands scandales du Festival de Cannes. 19 May 2013. 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.telerama.fr/festival-de-cannes/2013/la-grande-bouffe-l-un-des-derniers-grands-scandales-du-festival-de-cannes,97615.php›. The Guardian: 1000 films to see before you die. 2007. 17 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/film/series/1000-films-to-see-before-you-die› Tury, F., and O. Peter. “Food, Life, and Death: The Film La Grande bouffe of Marco Ferreri in an Art Psychological Point of View.” European Psychiatry 22.1 (2007): S214. Viano, Maurizio. “La Grande Abbuffata/La Grande bouffe.” The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower Press, 2004: 193–202.

Introduction It is now commonplace for babies to begin their lives inhabiting media environments characterised by the presence, distribution, and mobility of digital devices and screens. Such arrangements can be traced, in part, to the birth of a new regime of mobile and touchscreen media beginning with the release of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, which stimulated a surge in household media consumption, underpinned by broadband and wireless Internet infrastructures. Research into these conditions of ambient mediation at the beginnings of life, however, is currently dominated by medical and educational literature, largely removed from media studies approaches that seek to understand the everyday contexts of babies using media. Putting aside discourses of promise or peril familiar to researchers of children’s media (Buckingham; Postman), this paper draws on ongoing research in both domestic and social media settings exploring infants’ everyday encounters and entanglements with mobile media and communication technologies. The paper identifies the ways infants’ mobile communication is assembled and distributed through touchscreen interfaces, proxy parent users, and commercial software sorting. It argues that within these interfacial, intermediary, and interactive contexts, we can conceptualise infants’ communicative agency through an emerging repertoire of techniques: accidental, assisted and automated. This assemblage of infant communication recognises that children no longer live with but in media (Deuze), which underscores the impossibility of a path of media resistance found in medical discourses of ‘exposure’ and restriction, and instead points to the need for critical and ethical responses to these immanent conditions of infant media life. Background and Approach Infants, understandably, have largely been excluded from analyses of mobile mediality given their historically limited engagement with or capacity to use mobile media. Yet, this situation is undergoing change as mobile devices become increasingly prominent in children’s homes (OfCom; Rideout), and as touchscreen interfaces lower thresholds of usability (Buckleitner; Hourcade et al.). The dominant frameworks within research addressing infants and media continue to resonate with long running and widely circulated debates in the study of children and mass media (Wartella and Robb), responding in contradictory ways to what is seen as an ever-increasing ‘technologization of childhood’ (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Education research centres on digital literacy, emphasising the potential of mobile computing for these future digital learners, labourers, and citizens (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Alternatively, health research largely positions mobile media within the rubric of ‘screen time’ inherited from older broadcast models, with paediatric groups continuing to caution parents about the dangers of infants’ ‘exposure’ to electronic screens (Strasburger and Hogan), without differentiating between screen types or activities. In turn, a range of digital media channels seek to propel or profit from infant media culture, with a number of review sites, YouTube channels and tech blogs promoting or surveying the latest gadgets and apps for babies. Within media studies, research is beginning to analyse the practices, conceptions and implications of digital interfaces and content for younger children. Studies are, for example, quantifying the devices, activities, and time spent by young children with mobile devices (Ofcom; Rideout), reviewing the design and marketing of children’s mobile application software products (e.g. Shuler), analysing digital content shared about babies on social media platforms (Kumar & Schoenebeck; Morris), and exploring emerging interactive spaces and technologies shaping young children’s ‘postdigital’ play (Giddings; Jayemanne, Nansen and Apperley). This paper extends this growing area of research by focusing specifically on infants’ early encounters, contexts, and configurations of mobile mediality, offering some preliminary analysis of an emerging repertoire of mobile communication techniques: accidental, assisted, and automated. That is, through infants playing with devices and accidentally activating them; through others such as parents assisting use; and through software features in applications that help to automate interaction. This analysis draws from an ongoing research project exploring young children’s mobile and interactive media use in domestic settings, which is employing ethnographic techniques including household technology tours and interviews, as well as participant observation and demonstrations of infant media interaction. To date 19 families, with 31 children aged between 0 and 5, located in Melbourne, Australia have participated. These participating families are largely homogeneous and privileged; though are a sample of relatively early and heavy adopters that reveal emerging qualities about young children’s changing media environments and encounters. This approach builds on established traditions of media and ethnographic research on technology consumption and use within domestic spaces (e.g. Mackay and Ivey; Silverstone and Hirsch), but turns to the digital media encountered by infants, the geographies and routines of these encounters, and how families mediate these encounters within the contexts of home life. This paper offers some preliminary findings from this research, drawing mostly from discussions with parents about their babies’ use of digital, mobile, and touchscreen media. In this larger project, the domestic and family research is accompanied by the collection of online data focused on the cultural context of, and content shared about, infants’ mobile media use. In this paper I report on social media analysis of publicly shared images tagged with #babyselfie queried from Instagram’s API. I viewed all publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, and collected the associated captions, comments, hashtags, and metadata, over a period of 48 hours in October 2014, resulting in a dataset of 324 posts. Clearly, using this data for research purposes raises ethical issues about privacy and consent given the posts are being used in an unintended context from which they were originally shared; something that is further complicated by the research focus on young children. These issues, in which the ease of extracting online data using digital methods research (Rogers), needs to be both minimised and balanced against the value of the research aims and outcomes (Highfield and Leaver). To minimise risks, captions and comments cited in this paper have been de-identified; whist the value of this data lies in complementing and contextualising the more ethnographically informed research, despite perceptions of incompatibility, through analysis of the wider cultural and mediated networks in which babies’ digital lives are now shared and represented. This field of cultural production also includes analysis of examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores that support baby image capture and sharing, and in particular in this paper discussion of the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. The rationale for drawing on these multiple sources of data within the larger project is to locate young children’s digital entanglements within the diverse places, platforms and politics in which they unfold. This research scope is limited by the constraints of this short paper, however different sources of data are drawn upon here in order to identify, compare, and contextualise the emerging themes of accidental, assisted, and automated. Accidental Media Use The domestication and aggregation of mobile media in the home, principally laptops, mobile phones and tablet computers has established polymediated environments in which infants are increasingly surrounded by mobile media; in which they often observe their parents using mobile devices; and in which the flashing of screens unsurprisingly draws their attention. Living within these ambient media environments, then, infants often observe, find and reach for mobile devices: on the iPad or whatever, then what's actually happening in front of them, then naturally they'll gravitate towards it. These media encounters are animated by touchscreens interfaces that are responsive to the gestural actions of infants. Conversely, touchscreen interfaces drive attempts to swipe legacy media screens. Underscoring the nomenclature of ‘natural user interfaces’ within the design and manufacturer communities, screens lighting up through touch prompts interest, interaction, and even habituation through gestural interaction, especially swiping: It's funny because when she was younger she would go up the T.V. and she would try swiping to turn the channel.They can grab it and start playing with it. It just shows that it's so much part of their world … to swipe something. Despite demonstrable capacities of infants to interact with mobile screens, discussions with parents revealed that accidental forms of media engagement were a more regular consequence of these ambient contexts, interfacial affordances and early encounters with mobile media. It was not uncommon for infants to accidentally swipe and activate applications, to temporarily lock the screen, or even to dial contacts: He didn't know the password, and he just kept locking it … find it disabled for 15 minutes.If I've got that on YouTube, they can quite quickly get on to some you know [video] … by pressing … and they don't do it on purpose, they're just pushing random buttons.He does Skype calls! I think he recognizes their image, the icon. Then just taps it and … Similarly, in the analysis of publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, there were instances in which it appeared infants had accidentally taken photos with the cameraphone based on the image content, photo framing or descriptions in the caption. Many of these photos showed a baby with an arm in view reaching towards the phone in a classic trope of a selfie image; others were poorly framed shots showing parts of baby faces too close to the camera lens suggesting they accidentally took the photograph; whilst most definitive was many instances in which the caption of the image posted by parents directly attributed the photographic production to an infant: Isabella's first #babyselfie She actually pushed the button herself! My little man loves taking selfies lol Whilst, then, the research identified many instances in which infants accidentally engaged in mobile media use, sometimes managing to communicate with an unsuspecting interlocutor, it is important to acknowledge such encounters could not have emerged without the enabling infrastructure of ambient media contexts and touchscreen interfaces, nor observed without studying this infrastructure utilising materially-oriented ethnographic perspectives (Star). Significantly, too, was the intermediary role played by parents. With parents acting as intermediaries in household environments or as proxy users in posting content on their behalf, multiple forms of assisted infant communication were identified. Assisted Media Use Assisted communication emerged from discussions with parents about the ways, routines, and rationale for making mobile media available to their children. These sometimes revolved around keeping their child engaged whilst they were travelling as a family – part of what has been described as the pass-back effect – but were more frequently discussed in terms of sharing and showing digital content, especially family photographs, and in facilitating infant mediated communication with relatives abroad: they love scrolling through my photos on my iPhone …We quite often just have them [on Skype] … have the computers in there while we're having dinner … the laptop will be there, opened up at one end of the table with the family here and there will be my sister having breakfast with her family in Ireland … These forms of parental mediated communication did not, however, simply situate or construct infants as passive recipients of their parents’ desires to make media content available or their efforts to establish communication with extended family members. Instead, the research revealed that infants were often active participants in these processes, pushing for access to devices, digital content, and mediated communication. These distributed relations of agency were expressed through infants verbal requests and gestural urging; through the ways parents initiated use by, for example, unlocking a device, preparing software, or loading an application, but then handed them over to infants to play, explore or communicate; and through wider networks of relations in which others including siblings, acted as proxies or had a say in the kinds of media infants used: she can do it, once I've unlocked … even, even with iView, once I'm on iView she can pick her own show and then go to the channel she wants to go to.We had my son’s birthday and there were some photos, some footage of us singing happy birthday and the little one just wants to watch it over and over again. She thinks it's fantastic watching herself.He [sibling] becomes like a proxy user … with the second one … they don't even need the agency because of their sibling. Similarly, the assisted communication emerging from the analysis of #babyselfie images on Instagram revealed that parents were not simply determining infant media use, but often acting as proxies on their behalf. #Selfie obsessed baby. Seriously though. He won't stop. Insists on pressing the button and everything. He sees my phone and points and says "Pic? Pic?" I've created a monster lol. In sharing this digital content on social networks, parents were acting as intermediaries in the communication of their children’s digital images. Clearly they were determining the platforms and networks where these images were published online, yet the production of these images was more uncertain, with accidental self-portraits taken by infants suggesting they played a key role in the circuits of digital photography distribution (van Dijck). Automated Media Use The production, archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito). Here, software automates process of sorting and shaping information, and in doing so both empowers and governs forms of infant media conduct. The final theme emerging from the research, then, is the identification of automated forms of infant mobile media use enabled through software applications and algorithmic operations. Automated techniques of interaction emerged as part of the repertoire of infant mobile mediality and communication through observations and discussions during the family research, and through surveying commercial software applications. Within family discussions, parents spoke about the ways digital databases and applications facilitated infant exploration and navigation. These included photo galleries stored on mobile devices, as well as children’s Internet television services such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s catch-up online TV service, iView, which are visually organised and easily scrollable. In addition, algorithmic functions for sorting, recommending and autoplay on the video-sharing platform YouTube meant that infants were often automatically delivered an ongoing stream of content: They just keep watching it [YouTube]. So it leads on form the other thing. Which is pretty amazing, that's pretty interactive.Yeah, but the kids like, like if they've watched a YouTube clip now, they'll know to look down the next column to see what they want to play next … you get suggestions there so. Forms of automated communication specifically addressing infants was also located in examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores: the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. These applications are designed to support baby image capture and sharing, promising to “allow your baby to take a photo of him himself [sic]” (Giudicelli), based on automated software features that use sounds and images to capture a babies attention and touch sensors to activate image capture and storage. In one sense, these applications may appear to empower infants to participate in the production of digital content, namely selfies, yet they also clearly distribute this agency with and through mobile media and digital software. Moreover, they imply forms of conduct, expectations and imperatives around the possibilities of infant presence in a participatory digital culture. Immanent Ethic and Critique Digital participation typically assumes a degree of individual agency in deciding what to share, post, or communicate that is not typically available to infants. The emerging communicative practices of infants detailed above suggests that infants are increasingly connecting, however this communicative agency is distributed amongst a network of ambient devices, user-friendly interfaces, proxy users, and software sorting. Such distributions reflect conditions Deuze has noted, that we do not live with but in media. He argues this ubiquity, habituation, and embodiment of media and communication technologies pervade and constitute our lives becoming effectively invisible, negating the possibility of an outside from which resistance can be mounted. Whilst, resistance remains a solution promoted in medical discourses and paediatric advice proposing no ‘screen time’ for children aged below two (Strasburger and Hogan), Deuze’s thesis suggests this is ontologically futile and instead we should strive for a more immanent relation that seeks to modulate choices and actions from within our media life: finding “creative ways to wield the awesome communication power of media both ethically and aesthetically” ("Unseen" 367). An immanent ethics and a critical aesthetics of infant mediated life can be located in examples of cultural production and everyday parental practice addressing the arrangements of infant mobile media and communication discussed above. For example, an article in the Guardian, ‘Toddlers pose a serious risk to smartphones and tablets’ parodies moral panics around children’s exposure to media by noting that media devices are at greater risk of physical damage from children handling them, whilst a design project from the Eindhoven Academy – called New Born Fame – built from soft toys shaped like social media logos, motion and touch sensors that activate image capture (much like babyselfie apps), but with automated social media sharing, critically interrogates the ways infants are increasingly bound-up with the networked and algorithmic regimes of our computational culture. Finally, parents in this research revealed that they carefully considered the ethics of media in their children’s lives by organising everyday media practices that balanced dwelling with new, old, and non media forms, and by curating their digitally mediated interactions and archives with an awareness they were custodians of their children’s digital memories (Garde-Hansen et al.). I suggest these examples work from an immanent ethical and critical position in order to make visible and operate from within the conditions of infant media life. Rather than seeking to deny or avoid the diversity of encounters infants have with and through mobile media in their everyday lives, this analysis has explored the ways infants are increasingly configured as users of mobile media and communication technologies, identifying an emerging repertoire of infant mobile communication techniques. The emerging practices of infant mobile communication outlined here are intertwined with contemporary household media environments, and assembled through accidental, assisted, and automated relations of living with mobile media. Moreover, such entanglements of use are both represented and discursively reconfigured through multiple channels, contexts, and networks of public mediation. Together, these diverse contexts and forms of conduct have implications for both studying and understanding the ways babies are emerging as active participants and interpellated subjects within a continually expanding digital culture. Acknowledgments This research was supported with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130100735). I would like to express my appreciation to the children and families involved in this study for their generous contribution of time and experiences. References Buckingham, David. 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