Journal articles on the topic 'Ontologia processuale'

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to bridge the gap between critical theory as understood in the Frankfurt school tradition on the one hand, and social ontology understood as a reflection on the ontological presuppositions of social sciences and social theories on the other. What is at stake is the type of social ontology that critical theory needs if it wants to tackle its main social ontological issue: that of social transformation. This paper’s claim is that what is required is neither a substantial social ontology, nor a relational social ontology, but a processual one. The first part of this article elaborates the distinction between substantial, relational and processual social ontologies. The second part analyzes the various ways in which this distinction can be used in social ontological discussions. Finally, the third part focuses on the various possible social ontological approaches to the issue of social transformation.

We ask what it would mean to take seriously the possibility of multiple water ontologies, and what the implications of this would be for water governance in theory and practice. We contribute to a growing body of literature that is reformulating understanding of human–water relations and refocusing on the fundamental question of what water ‘is’. Interrogating the political–ontological ‘problem space’ of water governance, we explore a series of ontological disjunctures that persist. Rather than seeking to characterize any individual ontology, we focus on the limitations of silencing diverse ontologies, and on the potential of embracing ontological plurality in water governance. Exploring these ideas in relation to examples from the Canadian province of British Columbia, we develop the notion of ontological conjunctures, which is based on networked dialogue among multiple water ontologies and which points to forms of water governance that begin to embrace such a dialogue. We highlight water as siwlkw and the processual concept of En’owkin as examples of this approach, emphasizing the significance of cross-pollinating scholarship across debates on water and multiple ontologies.

RESUMO Estudos organizacionais com base em metafísica processual têm gerado crescente interesse ao longo das últimas décadas. Segundo essa perspectiva ontológica, uma visão processual demanda a substituição de explicações simplificadoras da realidade fundamentadas na ideia de substância por explicações mais complexas com base na noção de processo e de relacionalidade. O objetivo central deste artigo consiste em discutir implicações da adoção de uma noção de evento de base ontológica processual strong-view no campo de estudos organizacionais. Para tanto, foi desenvolvido um ensaio teórico fundamentado na: (i) exploração do conceito de evento com base na ontologia processual de Alfred North Whitehead e (ii) identificação de possibilidades da adoção dessa noção de evento para os estudos organizacionais. Como principal resultado do trabalho, destaca-se a discussão de seis princípios ou proposições relacionadas ao conceito de organização com base nessa noção strong-view de evento: organização como estrutura de eventos, ontologia organizacional ancorada em sua temporalidade, eventos como unidades de análise organizacional, organização como processo contínuo, organização como resultado de mecanismos de estabilização dinâmica, organização como reiteração de padrões.

AbstractThis article utilizes van Gennep's neglected theory of territorial passages to answer two key questions in the study of ontological security (OS) in migration. First, why do the members of the receiving society lose their perceived sense of OS in face of a mass of strangers arriving at their gates? Second, how, if at all, do they attempt to reconstitute it while incorporating the strangers into their world? Following the recent call within OS studies in international relations (IR) to spell out the social mechanisms that facilitate the anxiety and uncertainty of the agents, I use the case of the German societal response to the 2015 refugee crisis to demonstrate that van Gennep's classical approach, far from being structural and functionalist, offers an advanced, power-informed, and processual perspective for uncovering a possible sociosymbolic mechanism behind the perceived “losing” and “re-finding” of OS in migratory encounters. The article delineates the principles of a “thick” approach to OS in migration, explains how van Gennep's theory adds to this approach, and highlights the ultimate unattainability of OS as an essentialist category that is either “present” or “absent” throughout the migratory encounter. It concludes by discussing the added value of van Gennep's theory to the study of OS in the contemporary global milieu of the “age of migration.”

We develop the ontology of “process complexity” and describe how the dynamics of “becoming” can be framed as the emerging, stabilising, and ultimate dissolving of “patterns of relationships.” By extending traditional complexity thinking through introducing a “field theory” view, we develop a more nuanced and inclusive perspective of the processual complex world. We show how this leads to the idea of ontological uncertainty. We demonstrate how process complexity resonates with the ontologies of many different schools of thought including quantum gravity, the process philosophers of the Axial Age, and the early modern process philosophers impacted by Darwin’s theory of evolution, such as Bergson, Whitehead, and James. The remarkable alignment of these diverse perspectives from science and philosophy adds conviction and depth to the development of process complexity. We conclude by indicating how process complexity influences our approach to policy and management practice.

The problem of commensurability/incommensurability of different cultural codes is a key problem of modern civilizational development. This is the problem of the search for communicative unity in the world of cultural and biological diversity, which has to be protected, and the search for the cohesion of different Umwelten, of semiotically-defined artificial and natural environments, of ecological and cognitive niches, taking into account that each of them has their own identity and uniqueness. The purpose of the article is to draw attention to the fact that the question of the so-called incommensurability of different conceptual schemes, paradigms, language consciousnesses is widely discussed not only in cross-cultural studies and philosophical problems of translation but also in connection with the problems of incommensurability (untranslatability) between the language of classical physics and the language of relativistic quantum physics. Attention is drawn to the problem of the incommensurability and correlation of different languages that are used in debates about the foundations of quantum mechanics, its interpretation, comprehension and ontology. Two approaches stand out in this debate. The first approach is based on the language of the formed being, on the language of things localized in time and on the logic of Aristotle. The second approach is based on the language of the becoming, process and nonlocality, on the search for various processual-oriented temporal logics. In this regard, we discuss the processual approach to understanding quantum mechanics, proposed in the philosophical and physical works of D. Bohm. The authors argue that (a) the experience of constructive understanding of the metaproblems of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, (b) the critical reception of the legacy of such philosophers of the process as Peirce, Bergson and Whitehead, (c) the deep reflection on the problems of commensurability/ incommensurability of linguistic consciousnesses of different cultures – will eventually create a common synergetic-interdisciplinary space of cooperation for the solutions of the above-mentioned issues.

Roles remain nebulous entities, notwithstanding their extensive interdisciplinary research. This paper argues through a meta-ontological conceptual tool of grounding that there are three key facets of roles: a role position, a role specification, and a role potential. A foundational perspective on roles can be specified by “role choices” as to which facet of roles is primary. Role choices are illustrated with theories of roles that are built in compliance with four well-known upper ontologies: GFO, DOLCE, BFO, and UFO. The relationship between such three facets of roles and the GFO-based three kinds of roles (relational, processual, and social) is closely examined. These three facets are also comparatively studied from linguistic (e.g. ‘have a role’ versus ‘play a role’) and methodological (realism versus conceptualism regarding ontology design) perspectives. Furthermore, the family resemblance view of roles as “epistemic trackers” is proposed: the general notion of role is merely (partially) unified by its three facets and helps to keep track of some entity with respect to its role-related aspects. Finally, defining characteristics of roles in conceptual modeling are considered in terms of the three-facet theory. This work provides the grist for future practical development of an ontological module for generic role representation.

Knowledge development has been continuously challenging. Qualitative research seems to be promising; however, there are difficulties and complexities involved, one of which is validity. Qualitative research is based on different paradigms, ontologies, theories, and methods, and validity assessment may vary. We argue that processual validity can positively influence qualitative health care research. Processual validity is a methodological construction that involves all research steps, including those before and after data collection and analysis. We selected a processual validity model and two cases to illustrate its use and demonstrate processual validity’s importance and applicability. One case explores the gap between medical education and patients’ needs in primary health care. Other studies focus on health care improvements in hospitals. Our results highlight the benefits of processual validity to ensure the transparency and reliability of the research process and provide evidence of the findings to positively influence thinking and the execution of qualitative research in health care.

The last 20 years have witnessed a deepening of the imbrication between capital and the university. This paper seeks to map one point at which this binding occurs: in critical theory. Recently scholars in strategic management have turned to processual and relational ontologies in an attempt to reimagine the logics of profit, value, and growth. These same ontologies have appealed to critical geographers as a means of reconceiving space as unfixed. Drawing on a case study of Deleuze’s appropriation in management literature, I show how such ontologies presuppose a vitalism that necessarily reproduces and obscures the structures of exploitation.

Nel presente contributo vengono discussi i principali problemi circa il contributo che la linguistica può dare alla storia. In particolare vengono trattati l’interdisciplinarità dei problemi linguistici; la natura relazionale e processuale dei dati linguistici; la natura non ontologica del referente; la narrazione come modello ermeneutico; i rapporti tra nicchia e lingua; la varietà linguistica e culturale come situazione naturale; le tracce linguistiche della storia non altrimenti accessibile. La trattazione è esemplificata con numerosi esempi forniti dalla linguistica romanza e da altri ambiti di indagine

Abstract The paper focuses on a comparison between Lawson’s and Mead’s processual ontologies and more specifically on their conceptions of emergence. The first aim of the article is to highlight elements of similarity between their conceptions of social reality. It also aims to show, on the one hand, that Mead’s bio-social account of the emergent can help to interpret the dynamic process of emergence of both the social realm and agents’ identities (as described by Lawson) from a dynamic non-reductive naturalistic perspective; on the other hand, it shows how Lawson’s category of ‘social positioning’ can complement Mead’s ontogenetic explanation of changing social positions and the definition of ‘multiple selves’. By carefully considering the key elements of Lawson’s and Mead’s projects, it is, in fact, possible to understand better the meaning of a commitment to an updated processual ontology. In considering connections with classical pragmatic authors, it can be demonstrated that there are significant overlaps regarding the respective ways of considering the emergent. This offers a chance to understand more deeply how both pragmatism and Cambridge social ontology can together become part of the wider contemporary philosophical debate. In fact, Mead’s attempted synthesis between social and physical theories would help to highlight the common and complementary aspects linking what can be defined as his and Lawson’s ‘processual ontologies’.

This commentary introduces fascia, our bodily connective tissue, as a contribution to thinking body as process beyond mind–body dualisms. Research in the field of Fascia Studies has shown that fascias’ core qualities are shifting and sliding in tensional responsiveness and that its both/and tissue- and-system features challenge clear-cut definitions. Acknowledging these characteristics of human physiology in novel ways, and in particular fascia as our largest sensory organ, becomes relevant to ontologies, alterities and research methodologies emphasizing experience and transdisciplinarity. Importantly, the notion is never to theorize fascia as model or metaphor but as quotidian processual responsive proposition.

O objetivo deste artigo é compreender quais percursos podem ser explorados em termos de escolhas teórico-metodológicas com relação a Teoria Ator-Rede (TAR) e quais os desdobramentos destas escolhas no campo da pesquisa em Administração no Brasil. Para tal, analisou-se qualitativamente como a TAR foi utilizada em 24 teses provenientes de Programas de Pós-Graduação em Administração brasileiros. Ao final, apontamos a existência de dois percursos: um que se aproxima e outro que se afasta da ontologia relacional e da abordagem processual da TAR. Esses caminhos se distinguem entre "usar a TAR" ou "participar da agência da TAR”.

Abstract This article presents a novel theoretical and empirical account of the genesis and constitution of genocide in Sudan. To do so, it brings developments in critical genocide studies, notably the colonial and international “turns” and renewed attention to the scholarship of Lemkin, into dialogue with theoretical arguments about processual ontologies, complexity theory, and assemblage thinking. The latter provide a conceptual vocabulary to rethink the kind of ontological phenomenon that genocide constitutes. Rather than a discrete outcome or temporally and geographically bounded “event,” genocide in Sudan is seen as a heterogeneous, process-based, systemic entity. Challenging conventional genocide models generally and dominant narratives about Sudan specifically, the article argues that genocide in Sudan should be conceptualized as an historical internal frontier-based pattern that is constituted by three intersecting colonial forms: postcolonialism, internal colonialism, and neocolonialism. In doing so, it suggests a new way of thinking about the genocide-colonialism nexus. Tracing these three colonialisms, genocide appears not as an aberrant breakdown, violent outburst, or top-down ideological “master plan.” Neither is it a single, linearly unfolding process. Rather, it is emergent from a colonial ecology, its logic and potentiality imbricated with, and incipient within, a temporally and geographically expansive web of actors, processes, structures, relations, discourses, practices, and global forces.

O presente texto, de natureza teórico conceitual, discute, a partir da ontologia crítica, a produção de conhecimento, os processos de conhecer, ensinar e aprender, bem como as bases ontológicas que consolidam tais processos. A partir de nossos estudos baseados na perspectiva do materialismo histórico-dialético – Lukács, Rubinstein Sheptulin e Heller – e do trabalho de formação que viemos desenvolvendo junto ao Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisa em Ontologia Critica – GEPOC, defendemos como premissa preliminar a preexistência do mundo objetivo independente de nossa consciência, o que implica considerá-lo como possuidor de uma base material que o sustenta e permite, por meio dessa materialidade, que é processual e histórica, estabelecer um conhecimento objetivo sobre si, isto é, uma inteligibilidade do mundo. Nesta direção, em um primeiro momento, abordaremos algumas questões sobre o conhecimento e seu processo de apropriação a partir da base supracitada. Posteriormente, aprofundaremos o conceito de cotidiano escolar e de vida cotidiana, seus conteúdos e sua forma de transmissão e apropriação de conhecimentos, e a relação com a didática. Finalizaremos apresentando questões que nos possibilitem novas investigações.

In this article, we begin to extend ontological security to third-image theorizing. We argue that the autobiographical conceptions of international agents, along with other stories told about international politics, constitute ‘the international’ as a system, society, community, or inhabitable realm beyond and between first- and second-image relations. To develop this point, we focus on the relationship between narrative, anxiety, and time. We contend that ontological security issues resound in the third image once we shift from treating the international realm as social agents' external environment to treating it as a collective project in its own right. Doing so highlights the promise of ontological security studies for further differentiating international fear and anxiety, for enabling novel explanations of international phenomena, and for elaborating third-image identity formation as a wide-ranging timing effort to surmount a dynamic, processual environment full of interconnected coordination challenges.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to critique the metaphor of “shadow organizing” in relation to researchers’ allegedly ontological commitment to processual metaphysics. Design/methodology/approach The paper focuses on the association of “shadow organizing” with post-epistemologies that are grounded in process ontology. The investigation examines aspects of relational thinking and is guided by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley’s genealogical reconstruction of modes of inquiry. Findings Inquiry is construed in either substantialist or relational ways by researchers. By using the metaphor of “shadow organizing,” the relational aspects of organizational phenomena are prioritized for explorative purposes. Other research objectives are aided by substantialist modes of inquiry. It is the argument of the paper, however, that relational research approaches need not make commitment to process ontology, and that the relational ambitions imbued in the metaphor of shadow organizing are in fact better honored for their methodological virtues. Originality/value The paper’s original contribution consists in critiquing post-epistemological attempts to ground organization studies in ontological first principles of process metaphysics. The paper argues that the metaphor of “shadow organizing” is a promising concept that is better appreciated as a methodological move than an ontological commitment.

This article analyses Guattari's and Latour's bodies of work as radical developers of a processual and ontological transdisciplinarity. These works impose a definitive break from the history that, in the 1960s, had drawn upon structuralism in order to oppose philosophy with an epistemological revolution from the perspective of a scientific problematization and first transdisciplinary reconfiguration of the sciences de l'homme. It is shown that the second anti-structuralist transdisciplinarity affirms as its raison dêtre “the necessity to return to Pragmatics” (Guattari), to enact the new significance of the transversal constructions liberated by the rhizomatic monism of a hybrid social ontology (Latour). Between Guattari, Latour, and the ecologization they share, a total de-epistemologization and re-ontologization is engaged. It leads to the fall of the 'Ontological Iron Curtain' erected by the philosophical tradition between mind and matter, nature and society. The article concludes by critically addressing the final statements of both Guattari and Latour towards a new aesthetic paradigm and a new diplomacy of institutional forms respectively.

This report, the second of three, discusses the nature of a recent turn in health geography towards a posthuman theoretical orientation. This is an ontological turn that challenges basic categories leading to the understanding that health is not solely a human condition, but one created within assemblages of multiple human and nonhuman actors and forces. This is a turn concerned with the immediate and processual emergence of health, hence one that recognises the critical roles of pre-personal and more-than-representational events and forces. These facets are explored along with the extent to which the new ‘posthuman geography of health’ is a departure, and the forms of enquiry and ethics it brings forth.

Introdução: Gerenciar problemas relativos à organização da informação é uma tarefa árdua e dispendiosa, uma vez que demandam conhecimentos específicos, metodologias apropriadas e ferramentas adequadas. Neste contexto, as ontologias e a modelagem de processos tem se destacado. Aliadas, é uma alternativa para alcançar a interoperabilidade entre sistemas. Objetivo: Diante disso, o presente artigo busca apresentar uma fundamentação filosófica, ontológica e em gestão relativa a processos, e evidenciar que tais fundamentos são capazes de sustentar a necessidade de melhorias em modelagem. Metodologia: Para tal, apresenta-se uma contextualização teórica sobre processos no âmbito filosófico, em gestão corporativa, em ontologias de domínio e, contextualiza o corpo teórico em gestão de processos clínicos. Resultado: Como resultado, o artigo evidencia o avanço do entendimento dos processos em diferentes âmbitos de aplicação. Com o avançar da pesquisa, espera-se identificar nos processos as suas características essenciais e sua adequada categorização. Por meio das notações, os processos apresentarão subsídios para a representação da realidade e das entidades processuais a eles relacionadas. Os processos clínicos, objetivo final da pesquisa em andamento, se desenvolvem no contexto da saúde e se referem à rotina em clínicas, ambulatórios, hospitais ou até mesmo atividades administrativas. Esses processos são caracterizados pelo envolvimento com prestação de cuidados envolvendo vidas, onde o tempo é algo precioso para tomada de decisão. Conclusões: Espera-se que os desdobramentos proporcionados por este estudo sejam utilizados como fundamentação teórica para a utilização de ontologias orientadas a processos no ambiente clínico, contribuindo para o seu desenvolvimento no campo da Ciência da Informação.

A última grande obra filosófica de Gyorgy Lukács, para uma ontologia do ser social, assim como os prolegômenos constituem no interior do marxismo uma inovação radical diante da interpretação dispensada à obra de Marx ao longo do último século, pois têm o mérito de enfatizar o caráter ontológico do pensamento de Marx. Entretanto, se deve sublinhar que, segun- do o filósofo húngaro, a categoria da generidade explicita a concepção revolucionária sobre o ser e o devir do gênero huma- no instaurada por Marx. Lukács identifica o lócus genético dessa concepção, ou seja, a superação do gênero natural mudo e o surgimento do gênero propriamente humano, precisamente na práxis que constitui a maneira segundo a qual a “adaptação ativa” se desenvolve e na qual, por consequência, se realiza de modo contraditório e não idêntico a constituição processual do ser social. Nesse contexto, Lukács não compreende a individua-lidade como um dado humano originário, mas, antes, como categoria que se constitui também historicamente, sobre o fundamento de uma “determinação recíproca” com a generidade.

O objetivo do presente artigo almeja conceber uma noção de criatividade judicial mais ampla, não estando restrita nem aos atos nem às prerrogativas de atores jurídicos particulares. Para tanto, o artigo adota a filosofia processual como marco teórico e conceitual com o intuito de interrogar a maneira pela qual a criatividade é concebida a partir de uma concepção de realidade jurídica que privilegia a ordem, a estabilidade e a previsibilidade frente ao vir-a-ser, à mudança e à desordem. A pesquisa adota como fio condutor a inserção da criatividade na dinâmica de reorganização contínua da ordem jurídica com o intuito de dissociá-la da produção normativa restrita a determinados órgãos e atores jurídicos: categorias e teorias jurídicas não apenas expressam a criatividade judicial, como trazem consigo o potencial para a transformação e redefinição dessas práticas. A hipótese adotada consiste em apontar como uma concepção mais ampla de criatividade possibilita repensar a maneira pela qual a ordem jurídica é constantemente transformada por novas questões suscitadas no campo social. Abstract This present article intends to conceive a broad notion of legal creativity, one which is not restricted to the acts nor the functional powers of specific legal actors. The article adopts processual philosophy as its theoretical and conceptual framework to expose how the usual conception of legal creativity is entrenched in an ontological conception of reality that privileges stability, order and security over change, disorder and becoming. This research, however, inscribers creativity within the dynamic of continuous reorganization of the legal order so creativity could be dissociated with the idea of normative production narrowly associated with legal actors: legal theories and categories not only expresses a kind of legal creativity, they also have the potential to transform and redefine common accepted practices within the legal context. The chief hypothesis of this article is that a broader conception of creativity would be relevant to rethink how legal order as constantly transformed by new concerns that emerges within the social field.

Objective of the study: In this essay, we problematize the onto-epistemological assumptions of organizational decision-making theories, focusing on the concepts of action and decision.Approach: Based on the epistemological perspective of transaction, we propose an understanding of decision as a relational element of action and in action, constructing an explanation supported on the relational ontological understanding of reality.Originality/relevance: We introduce the concept of decision entity-ness, based on relational sociology from the perspective of transaction and the idea of relational agency.Main results: The concept of decision entity-ness allowed us to theoretically combine the processual and performative dimensions of organizational decision-making.Theoretical contribution: As a contribution, we developed an original theoretical-explanatory framework that emphasizes decision, understanding it as an element that distinguishes organizations from other social systems.

Queer theory argues that ruling heteronormative discourses are productive of sexualities. How then does heteronormativity produce lesbians? We theorize femme and butch as sexual embodiment projects—processual, relational responses to patriarchal heteronormativity incessantly textually threaded throughout our lives. Drawing on radical feminisms updated with Foucault and Dorothy Smith, we offer autoethnographic accounts of our sexual embodiments of butch and femme, arguing not that rape experiences, but the constant threat of rape in everyday life can produce lesbian desire and embodiment. Ultimately, we understand sexual embodiment as not based on a fixed ontological ground but always in the relational, everyday doings of people and, hence, malleable within the social context, discursive moment, and individual intersections of one’s life within relations of power (gender, race, class, religiosity, nationality, and so on).

The 20th-century quest for a Trinitarian ontology was associated with a critical reconsideration of the modern philosophy of the subject. However, this reconsideration did not reject the question of subjectivity itself. It rather rejected any narrowed ontological assumptions that would identify the very ground of subjectivity with a univocal eidetic structure of being. In its most advanced forms, the modern and postmodern philosophy of the subject proved to be radically structuralist, relational, or even differentialist. While many attempts at Trinitarian ontology have faced this challenge either by adapting Christian dialogical personalism or reviving older metaphysical traditions and notions, e.g., the analogy, the participation, and the concept of the subsisting person, Klaus Hemmerle emphasised in his Theses Towards a Trinitarian Ontology (1976) above all the ontological primacy of the relational self-giving (Sich-Geben), explicated phenomenologically. Every subsisting being, including the human person, gains its concrete contour only from within this relational process. But does this relational reappearance of the human person mean its self-alienated completion, or rather its complete alienation? How can this relational account of the human person be related to older metaphysical, theological, and personalistic traditions? Does Hemmerle avoid the dangerous dissolution of the human person as a mere processual moment of the whole community and the world?

Relational sociology rejects substantialism and focuses its attention on the complexity and dynamics of all forms of social life and the subjective nature of action. Relational thinking is an alternative attitude to both functional structuralism and strongly individualistic-oriented theories. Relationality emphasizes the processual and emergent nature of reality. Actions— individual and collective—appear as successive stages of a specific process of events, and result from the configuration of relations and social interactions constituting a particular situation. Different conceptions of identity have been developed within relationally oriented sociology. The aim of the article is to summarize the narrative and realistic approaches, and to present how much they differ in their ontological assumptions. The constructionist concept of narrative identity presented by Margaret R. Somers, and Kenneth J. Gergen’s project of a “relational self,” illustrate the narrative approach. Pierpaolo Donati’s concept of the relational subject and the theory of agency developed by Margaret S. Archer exemplify the position of critical realism.

This article takes a processualist position to identify the current forces conducive to rapid change in the social sciences, of which the most important is the divergence between their empirical and normative dimensions. It argues that this gap between the many and various empirical ontologies we typically use and the much more restricted normative ontology on which we base our moral judgments is problematic. In fact, the majority of social science depends on a “normative contractarianism.” While this ontology is the most widely used basis for normative judgments in the social sciences, it is not really effective when it comes to capturing the normative problems raised by the particularity and historicity of the social process, nor the astonishing diversity of values in the world. The article closes with a call to establish a truly processual foundation for our analysis of the social world, which must move away from contractualism and imagine new ways of founding the human normative project.

The project investigated the development of more sustainable managerial practices than the widespread New Public Management. The concrete case concerned the public Danish daycare sector and included all groups of actors (children, pedagogues, parents, Centre leaders, administration and politicians) aiming at inventing structures and practices, which could support and preserve ‘the good daycare’. An analysis of the existing practices showed that the system in all its layers and interconnections predominantly was built on static ontologies. This included the guiding principles for children’s learning and development, the educational programmes and manuals as well as the formats of documentation and evaluation. Ambitiously, we suggested a change towards a processual ontology, in which dialogues between all groups fed into the establishment of a new managerial order, built on multi-voiced meaningful premises. We thus aimed at supporting the construction of new kind of knowledge, moving from abstract generalized to concrete generalized. The concrete generalized evolved through dialogues and interactions as collaborative strategies, guiding conceptualizations and procedures as well as a common care for the ‘we’ and the object of the shared attention: The good daycare. These processes are presented and discussed in the paper.

Objetivo: De forma similar à “explosão informacional” o fenômeno do Big Data vem sendo de forma crescente, objeto da CI/OC. Como descobrir, acessar, processar e reusar a enorme e crescente quantidade de dados que são disponibilizados continuamente na Web por nossa sociedade? Em especial, como tratar os chamados “dados não estruturados”, documentos textuais, que sempre foram o objeto da CI/OC? Metodologia: Teorias de amplo espectro como Ontologia e Semiótica foram utilizadas para analisar dados como elemento essencial do Big Data, em especial os “dados não estruturados”. Resultados: A partir da análise de várias definições de dados, um dado é identificado como parte de esquemas lógicos e semióticos já conhecidos, as proposições. Um dado é encontrado juntamente com outros, formando conjuntos de dados. Conjuntos de dados são na verdade conjuntos de proposições. Estas estão presentes no que é conhecido como dados estruturados - tabelas de bancos de dados relacionais ou de planilhas. Documentos textuais também contém conjuntos de proposições. Dados estruturados são comparados com “dados não estruturados”. Conclusões: Embora no limite, ambos contenham proposições e possam ser equivalentes, enquanto conjuntos, dados estruturados são expressos e percebidos como um todo, conjuntos de dados não estruturados são processuais, expressos sequencialmente o que torna mais difícil a identificação de dados não estruturados em documentos textuais para seu processamento por máquinas.

Como qualquer outra sociedade humana, as comunidades virtuais enfrentam questões éticopolíticas. Discussões sobre os direitos humanos dos internautas, especialmente os relativos à liberdade humana, e sobre a legitimidade de modelos de regulamentação estão sempre presentes nos fóruns internacionais da Internet. A disputa contemporânea pela verdadeira concepção da liberdade ainda coloca na arena os herdeiros de Kant e de Hegel. Seguindo a via dialética, vemos como um dos principais desafios de nossa época desvelar o conceito de liberdade que emerge de uma ontologia evolutiva. De acordo com o projeto de atualização da dialética ora exposto, a Internet é concebida como mais um subsistema que emerge na natureza sob as restrições impostas pelo espaço lógico evolutivo. Como processo auto-organizado que evolui no tempo, a Internet também possui traços relacionais e processuais, apresentando por igual um movimento em direção à coerência da própria rede. As sociedades on-line seguem a mesma lei da coerência que rege as sociedades reais e a liberdade on-line apresenta o mesmo caráter da liberdade real, a exploração do campo aberto dos modos possíveis da coerência. A liberdade pessoal na Internet guarda traços em comum com a liberdade pessoal que cada um tem, e deve ter, na sociedade real, mas como mostraremos depois, há também sutis diferenças entre ambas, com forte impacto na Teoria do Direito.

In this Special Issue we explore and extend conceptions, characterisations, and applications of skill within and beyond geography. Framed by the question: “where is skill located?”, the papers assembled do not just explore where skilled practice ‘takes place’, its sites and situations, but also prompt a deeper ontological and epistemological rethinking of skill. And it is this rethinking of skill that is at stake in our editorial. In what follows, we map out this rethinking and introduce the five advantages of skill that the papers develop. Firstly, skill is practical in that it is concerned with the actual doing or use of something with accomplishment. Secondly, skill is processual in that the skilled practitioner works emergently and responsively rather than rubrically and successionally. Thirdly, skill is technical in that it involves not just techniques of the body but encompasses what Bernard Stiegler calls the ‘originary technicity’ of the body. Fourthly, skill is ecological in that it is not of the individual body, but of the entire field of relations that make practice possible. And finally, skill is political in that there is a continuous flow between the micro – (that which is emergent) and macro – (that which exists more concretely and can be represented) politics of practice.

This paper addresses the scholarly debate over Nietzsche’s relationship to transhumanism. Most writing on this topic has focused almost exclusively on whether or not Nietzsche’s thought is philosophically compatible with transhumanist philosophy. Because ideas are not always transmitted in philosophically cogent ways, this approach is inadequate to address the question of how Nietzsche may have influenced transhumanism. I propose replacing the current approach with a history of ideas approach that also tracks “para-philosophical” vectors of influence. Bringing to bear such an approach, I argue that Nietzsche was crucial in laying the groundwork for transhumanism. First, his rejection of Being, of a fixed ontological order, decisively undermined essentialist conceptions of human nature, opening the door to a radical refashioning of the human being such as that envisioned in the transhumanist “posthuman.” Second, Nietzsche’s superman and the transhumanist posthuman are instantiations of apotheosis, a perennial impulse toward self-divinization at the core of many mystical and esoteric systems. The superman represents the ideal of apotheosis filtered through Nietzsche’s materialism and his processual turn, and it is in this modified, post-Nietzschean form that the ideal passes to transhumanism. Finally, I demonstrate that Nietzsche’s thought is not as philosophically incompatible with transhumanism as some critics claim.

What would it mean to construct a post-imperial discipline rather than a ‘post-Western’ one? ‘Post-imperial’ means addressing the ways in which colonial empires divided the world into separate realms of human capability and thought. The binary categories of Western and Eastern, or Western and non-Western, represent one such way of dividing the world according to an imperial imaginary. Rather than merely excluding, these divisions created justifications for local universalisms and power structures. Yet, many anti-Eurocentric scholars now make use of these categories in order to argue for fixed epistemic differences between Western and non-Western populations. Accordingly, I critique the imperial division of the world by drawing on the intellectual trajectories of two thinkers who struggled against empire in the 20th century: WEB Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. Du Bois and Fanon were both aware of how ethnic and cultural foundations for politics could reproduce imperial order, and, therefore, offer potential alternatives to Western/non-Western ontologies. This includes recognising that representations of difference are processual, determined by strategic necessity, and subject to incentives to represent difference within hierarchical institutions. This article builds on recent studies in International Relations and other disciplines to think through the legacies of empire in knowledge production, and to push towards more historical and relational approaches to world political and social inquiry.

The post-processual archaeology that dominated the scholarship of Anglo-American academics in the 1980s and 1990s now lies moribund, done in by an ‘ontological turn’ in the study of anthropology that began some 15 or 20 years ago. Anthropos is no longer the sole focal point; human beings no longer occupy the central place in our understanding of cultures and societies. As contemporary anthropologists have noted, human actions and ideas are not the lone contributors to the creation of a civilization's structures and objects or the development of societal forms. Other kinds of ‘life’, a variety of other non-human organisms contribute to their creation as well. They most notably include places and what we generally refer to as things: objects, constructions and materials. In effect, they include all the organic and non-organic components of the world about us. These are the ‘beings’, both animate and inanimate, that ‘make’ the world. Moreover, ‘things’ are no longer regarded as pure inert ‘objects’, only created or transformed by the will of humans or the force of their technology. The present transformations of the Anthropocene, which is producing climatic changes at a global scale, are pushing us to consider that ‘natural’ events—such as floods or hurricanes—may be the direct result of human actions and material ‘things’—such as the earth and the oceans—may be active agents of change. In other words, they are also the subjects of history.

Harris and Sørensen's critique of the archaeological inattention to emotion and their recognition of the material mediation of affect bring to the fore perennial epistemological problems defining the broader archaeological enterprise. The immediate citation of the long-discredited Hawkesian ladder of inference challenges the assumption that past emotional states are unrecoverable from archaeological contexts, just as an earlier generation of archaeologists rejected processual theory that meaning, conceptual schemas and symbolism fell beyond the pale of scientific inference. Of course, Hawkes was not a materialist in the strict sense of the term, and he recognized that value systems transcended the epiphenomenal and played a vital role in structuring social practice and shaping historical process. It was his contention, however, that conceptual and symbolic schemes and their role in social reproduction were simply too complex to be read satisfactorily from material remains (Hawkes 1954; see Fogelin 2008, 129–30). He wrote that ‘there is nothing in North American ecology . . . to compel either Iroquois institutions . . . or the constitution of the United States’ (Hawkes 1954, 163). To be sure, Hawkes probably would not have denied that moved to move is intrinsic to the human condition and that affective dispositions were a force in individual experiences and the collective fortunes and self-representations of past communities. At the same time, he probably gave little consideration to the dialectical interdependence of the material world and emotion, a relationship that has captured the imagination of recent scholars. Hawkes would no doubt have scoffed at the notion that emotion as ontological problem, cultural construct or variable of social interaction is amenable to archaeological interpretation.

O artigo tem o objetivo de relacionar os conceitos de mediação pedagógica, trabalho e tecnologias, os quais foram elaborados em processos de pesquisas realizadas nesse campo desde a década de 1990. O diálogo teórico com autores do campo dialético na perspectiva crítica volta às origens do conceito “mediação” em Hegel, seguido da articulação com o materialismo histórico dialético com base em Marx e Engels e sua utilização a partir de autores que têm investigado o campo da economia solidária e das tecnologias sociais, tendo o trabalho, no sentido ontológico, como centralidade e princípio educativo. A sistematização histórica e processual sobre os sentidos identificados possibilitou elucidar uma relação virtuosa entre os conceitos. Como um conceito contraditório em um contexto de colonialidade, mantêm-se abertas as possibilidades de as atividades do trabalho, potencializadas pelas tecnologias voltadas à reprodução ampliada da vida, constituírem-se em mediações pedagógicas libertadoras para os diferentes sujeitos individuais ou coletivos envolvidos. REFLECTIONS ON PEDAGOGICAL MEDIATIONS, LABOR AND TECHNOLOGIESAbstractThis article aims to connect the concepts of pedagogical mediation, labor and technologies that have been formulated in processes of research carried out in this field since the 1990s. In the text, we dialogue theoretically with authors of the dialectical field in the critical perspective and we return to the origins of the concept “mediation” in Hegel, followed by the articulation with historical materialism based on Marx and Engels; and its use among authors who have investigated the field of social economy and technologies, considering the centrality of the concept of labor in its ontological meaning, as well as an educational principle. The historical and procedural systematization of the emerged meanings made it possible to observe a virtuous relationship among the concepts. As a contradictory concept in a context of coloniality, we should keep our mind open to the possibilities of work activities promoted by technologies aimed at the extended reproduction of life being constituted in emancipatory pedagogical mediations for the different individual or collective subjects involved.Keywords: Pedagogical mediations. Associated work. Social technologies. REFLEXIONES SOBRE MEDIACIONES PEDAGÓGICAS, TRABAJO Y TECNOLOGÍASResumenEl artículo tiene como objetivo relacionar los conceptos de mediación pedagógica, trabajo y tecnologías, los cuales fueron elaborados en procesos de investigaciones realizadas en este campo, desde la década de 1990. El diálogo teórico con autores del campo dialectico en perspectiva crítica vuelve a los orígenes del concepto “mediación” en Hegel, seguido de la articulación con el materialismo histórico dialectico con base en Marx y Engels, y su utilización a partir de autores que han investigado el campo de la economía solidaria y de las tecnologías sociales, teniendo el trabajo, en el sentido ontológico, como centralidad y principio educativo. La sistematización histórica y procesual sobre los sentidos identificados, posibilitó dilucidar una relación virtuosa entre los conceptos. Como un concepto contradictorio en un contexto de colonialidad, se mantienen abiertas las posibilidades de las actividades de trabajo, potencializadas por las tecnologías destinadas a la reproducción ampliada de la vida, de constituirse en mediaciones pedagógicas libertadoras para los diferentes sujetos individuales o colectivos involucrados.Palabras clave: Mediaciones pedagógicas. Trabajo asociado. Tecnologías sociales.

While there is a substantive body of research that recognizes the importance of authentic leadership theory, critiques have challenged its dominant and positive-focused conceptualization. We synthesize these extant critiques, providing researchers with an integrative understanding of the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical deficiencies facing authenticity in a leadership context. These deficiencies have thwarted authentic leadership’s development limiting our understanding of what authentic leadership is and who authentic leaders are. Synthesizing what has been said about authentic leadership demonstrates why authenticity needs to be conceived of and studied differently. We offer being-in-becoming as a multi-paradigmatic umbrella which accommodates different ontological foundations of what it means to be authentic. A being-in -becoming approach recognizes that authenticity emanates from a developmental process, suggesting the study of authenticity must also be thought of processually. Studying authenticity as a developmental process holds important theoretical and practical implications as it embraces the processual nature of our dynamic, evolutionary beings.

Demonstrar a diferença substancial entre diversidade humana e diversidade cultural se faz essencial e imprescindível atualmente, ainda mais quando o irracionalismo pós-moderno avança e ameaça de contágio todo o universo da produção científica, desontologizando o real e o próprio ser social, desterrando a historicidade dos fatos e fenômenos sociais, a causalidade, a teleologia e as mediações inelimináveis entre as instâncias que perfazem a totalidade social (universal, particular e singular). Afirmar e repor a necessidade de contra-hegemonia, pensando crítica, científica e historicamente a realidade em seu movimento processual dialético, se faz uma tarefa premente a fim de fortalecer o projeto político-social de “revolução política com alma social” em prol da emancipação humana.

This article explores the ‘lack of meaning’ in contemporary society as a consequence of Western dualist thought paradigms and ontologies, via Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘reactive nihilism’ following the colloquial murder of God. The article then explores processual and new materialist approaches in the understanding of the lived and carnal self, arguing for immanent and senseful materiality as an ethical platform for religious, environmental, and societal solidarity for tomorrow. For the theoretical justification of the processual approach in understanding the enfleshed self, the article employs John Dupré’s processual approach in the philosophy of biology, as well as Astrida Neimani’s critical posthumanism, and contextualizes these considerations with Erich Fromm’s ethical distinction of being and having.

Three basic acceptations of the possible are presented: the epistemological, the ontological, and the metaphysical. The latter two are presented in some details. They could be distinguished as the processual unfolding of conditions (the ontological reading) and the vision of the process as given and fully completed within each present moment (the metaphysical reading). The ontological dimension can be further distinguished into two different unfoldings of real processes: as the horizontal (temporal) accumulation of determinations and as the vertical (through strata of reality) emergence of both higher entities and higher determinations.

Basic understandings of subjectivity are derived from principles of masculine embodiment such as discreteness. But pregnancy challenges such understandings because it represents a sort of splitting of the body. In the pregnant situation, a subject may experience herself as both herself and an other, as well as neither herself nor an other. This is logically untenable—an impossibility. If our discourse depends on discrete referents, then what paradigms of identity are available to the pregnant subject? What could be the pregnant subject's ontology? Eric Bapteste and John Dupré offer the idea that organisms are processual beings. In their view, the ecological interrelationships between the organisms are defining, and render them dynamic processes, rather than stable things. Does Bapteste and Dupré’s processual ontological account accommodate pregnant organisms, including pregnant subjects? Here, I suggest some criteria for an ontology of pregnancy. I test the processual account and determine whether it can accommodate the phenomenon of pregnancy. I find that a processual ontology captures a great deal about pregnant embodiment and is a significant improvement over Cartesian and anti-metaphysical accounts. However, in order to accommodate pregnancy, what we still need from an ontology is the inclusion of subjectivity.

Alfred Marshall is often depicted as a pioneer of neoclassical economics almost as if this is a label he embraces and promotes. Yet neoclassical economics is not a category Marshall deploys but a term Thorstein Veblen introduces in characterising Marshall. Veblen coins the term neoclassical to identify an ontological discrepancy in the work of a specific group of his contemporaries, a prominent figure among whom is Marshall. Veblen’s view is that Marshall and other neoclassicals discern features of social reality that suggest a tentative recognition of a causal processual social ontology of the type Veblen associates with modern evolutionary approaches and yet also remain staunchly committed to a taxonomic conception of science underpinned by a quite different set of ontological presuppositions. Veblen’s assessment of Marshall is brief and assertive. In this paper it is argued that the ontological discrepancy interpretation of Marshall, that Veblen first sketched, can convincingly be filled out, has substantial merit and is of importance in developing an adequate appreciation of Marshall.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus and Edmund Husserl’s Experience and Judgement (Erfahrung und Urteil) are based on remarkably different conceptual frameworks and methodologies. After analyzing their respective accounts on the foundations of (formal) logic, I map out their common aims and different conclusions. I hold that Husserl and Wittgenstein both use the epistemic necessity of the existence of logical relations among things as an argument against philosophical skepticism, but their different epistemological convictions lead them to decisively diverging accounts of the nature of those relations. Wittgenstein assumes a syntactic correspondence theory of truth, which identifies general logical form as necessary condition for accurate representation, apparent in the existence of local truth-functions between propositions. As logical form is the (transcendental) necessary condition of every meaningful proposition, he infers that it is itself not representable and without ontological status. Husserl, by contrast, does not draw from a correspondence theory, but from a processual theory of certainty and truth, which offers genetic instead of categorical distinctions between perception and the logical relations apparent in conceptual knowledge. His theory of formal logic ultimately offers a coherent ontology for logical objects, which avoids logical mysticism.

This article operationalises Simondon’s theory of becoming and Deleuze and Spinoza’s ethics and unfolds their conceptualisations in the lives of a group of irregular migrants in Finland. From an ontological and ontogenetic perspective, individuals and their environment are always in a non-complete, non-linear and ethically affective state of becoming. In this sense, migrant bodies register the positive and negative affections accumulated over time, and, via information, make them a material, yet unfinished, and ready to be challenged again, part of their becoming. Applying these concepts to ethnographic fieldwork, this article highlights three dimensions of the observed irregular migrants’ becoming: their relentless efforts of becoming themselves through hardships; non-linear tensions with disparate realities, such as the bureaucratic procedures, and the negative affections the latter entail; and the struggle towards positive affections in temporary stabilities (e.g. in community life). In focusing on the processual and ontological making of migrants in their environment, the article contributes to broader debates regarding the non-linear and ethical dimensions of their everyday lives, as well as their capacity of transforming themselves, and aims at opening up dialogues on the significance of an ontogenetic approach to the field of irregular migration and beyond.

This essay argues that the West could glimpse its own unthought-of by ‘de-ontologicalizing’ its thought, and that a fruitful way to do this is to draw on Chinese thought. In particular, the author develops herein the notion of between ( l’entre), which is less a locus than a dynamic passage between states or extrema. This contrasts with the (static) Western notion of Being, where a thing either is or is not. Unlike a thing, between has no being, no nature, no properties. For the Greeks life was, similarly, an alternation of emptiness (desire or want) and fullness (satiety). Instead, life is in flux between those extrema. Accordingly, between is not an (ontological) intermediary but processual, like the through of the Tao. The author explores between in the Chinese conception of landscape as mountain(s)-water(s) and applies between to urban renewal, underscoring its value as a tool for the de-ontologizing of Western thought.

AbstractEdmund Husserl’s ultimate aim was to give an overall philosophical explanation of the totality of Being. In this endeavour, the term “absolute” was crucial for him. In this paper, I aim to clarify the most important ways in which Husserl used this notion. I attempt to show that, despite his rather divergent usages, eventually three fundamental meanings and coordinated levels of the “absolute” can be differentiated in his thought: the epistemological (absolute evidence and ego), the ontological (intersubjectivity), and the theological or metaphysical level (God). According to Husserl, we can approach this ultimate level of the Absolute, through the method of phenomenological construction. A closer reading of Husserl’s texts shows that his conception of the absolute was astonishingly modern. The main features of the conception—on all three levels—were non-foundationalism, contextualism, openness, and circularity. Each level mutually founds and determines the others. It is a non-foundational Absolute, the moments of which constitute an organic and open totality which is essentially processual. In my interpretation, this theory opens a fruitful working area, which has enormous philosophical potential and is surprisingly up-to-date.

PurposeThis paper maps utopian theories of technological change. The focus is on debates surrounding emerging industrial technologies which contribute to making the relationship between humans and machines more symbiotic and entangled, such as robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. The aim is to provide a map to navigate complex debates on the potential for technology to be used for emancipatory purposes and to plot the grounds for tactical engagements.Design/methodology/approachThe paper proposes a two-way axis to map theories into to a six-category typology. Axis one contains the parameters humanist–assemblage. Humanists draw on the idea of a human essence of creative labour-power, and treat machines as alienated and exploitative form of this essence. Assemblage theorists draw on posthumanism and poststructuralism, maintaining that humans always exist within assemblages which also contain non-human forces. Axis two contains the parameters utopian/optimist; tactical/processual; and dystopian/pessimist, depending on the construed potential for using new technologies for empowering ends.FindingsThe growing social role of robots portends unknown, and maybe radical, changes, but there is no single human perspective from which this shift is conceived. Approaches cluster in six distinct sets, each with different paradigmatic assumptions.Practical implicationsMapping the categories is useful pedagogically, and makes other political interventions possible, for example interventions between groups and social movements whose practice-based ontologies differ vastly.Originality/valueBringing different approaches into contact and mapping differences in ways which make them more comparable, can help to identify the points of disagreement and the empirical or axiomatic grounds for these. It might facilitate the future identification of criteria to choose among the approaches.

I'll grow up some time then you'll be mine I want to screw you down whilst my mind is on the ground I want to move your switch make you go squish my desiring machine -- Sonic Youth A small story: the other saturday night, having just completed my saturday ritual of visiting the video shop and the beer shop, I was sitting at a bus-stop. And it just so happens that on this saturday evening, the bus-stop I was sitting at was opposite a catholic church in the middle of the mass. Now, its been many years since I was a catholic -- I am in fact happily pagan -- however, I strongly identify with that well-known atheist and socialist (and co-incidentally, British Minister of Overseas Development) Clare Short, who nonetheless describes herself as 'culturally catholic' (as they say, 'once a catholic always a catholic'). And so, as I was sitting at this bus-stop, I found myself having the usual internal conversation I seem to have whenever I pass a catholic mass, in which I imagine I'm having to justify just why I'm not in there as well and why I think their beliefs are theoretically unsustainable and politically regressive. During this internal dialogue however, I realised that what the micks were doing in their mass -- that is, expressing a desire to connect with something outside of themselves -- was the same thing I did whenever I witnessed a sabbat or esbat, or visited a stone circle, fairy mound or burial barrow. Admittedly, whereas I achieve this experience of being with something outside myself through the earth, the sun, the moon, the passing of time, and my relationships with my friends and lovers, they did it through a submissive appeal to a fetishised figure of an alien God. And that this wasn't much different from or any worse than the mindless commodity fetishism practiced by so many materialists within our advanced industrialised economy. And all of this led me to speculate on just what the nature of desire is: that perhaps desire is the self's experience, within the self, of something outside of (or greater than) the self -- desire as theology, that is. If I can be a bit clearer: that perhaps desire is a recognition, not of a lack, but of the necessary and perpetual circulation across the threshold of the self -- if i can put it that way -- of the array of subjectless individuations that collectively constitute us as 'human'. This is not at all to suggest that desire is what makes us 'better', or that it is solely a positive thing -- and not simply because I refuse the implication that desiring to be with the Christian God can ever be positive. In formulating desire as a circulation of affects across the boundary of the self, I am explicitly refusing the narrative of original sin of the self, either in its Christian 'guilt' or psychoanalytic 'lack' manifestations that desire is often framed in. What I am suggesting here is that 'desire' is the name for that perpetual and spontaneous process of 'becoming' through which the self is continuously constructed and reconstructed, and that this process is by definition circulatory. The obvious analogy here is with meteorological phenomena, in particular frontal systems. The cold front that brings rain with it, and usually marked on the evening television weather forecasts with a thick, identifiable line, is in fact a fictional construct. It marks, in practice, a perpetual and spontaneous exchange of heat, through a thermodynamic process, between a relatively warmer body of air and a relatively colder one behind it. The front, so lively on the weather map, marching across the continent with martial purpose, in fact moves only as it is drawn by pressure differentials, by the rotation of the earth, and by the very process of heat exchange that it signifies. As a line, an interface, a boundary, the front is permeable, unstable, fractal and undefinable; an effect that becomes a metonym for the process it represents. Similarly, the thing we call 'the self' -- myself, yourself, themselves -- is an effect, an ever-shifting, fluid and variable effect of a circulation of affect that is called desire. This is not at all to suggest that desire is what makes us 'better', or that it is solely a positive thing -- and not simply because I refuse the implication that desiring to be with the Christian God can ever be positive. In formulating desire as a circulation of affects across the boundary of the self, I am explicitly refusing the narrative of original sin of the self, either in its Christian 'guilt' or psychoanalytic 'lack' manifestations that desire is often framed in. What I am suggesting here is that 'desire' is the name for that perpetual and spontaneous process of 'becoming' through which the self is continuously constructed and reconstructed, and that this process is by definition circulatory. The obvious analogy here is with meteorological phenomena, in particular frontal systems. The cold front that brings rain with it, and usually marked on the evening television weather forecasts with a thick, identifiable line, is in fact a fictional construct. It marks, in practice, a perpetual and spontaneous exchange of heat, through a thermodynamic process, between a relatively warmer body of air and a relatively colder one behind it. The front, so lively on the weather map, marching across the continent with martial purpose, in fact moves only as it is drawn by pressure differentials, by the rotation of the earth, and by the very process of heat exchange that it signifies. As a line, an interface, a boundary, the front is permeable, unstable, fractal and undefinable; an effect that becomes a metonym for the process it represents. Similarly, the thing we call 'the self' -- myself, yourself, themselves -- is an effect, an ever-shifting, fluid and variable effect of a circulation of affect that is called desire. In one sense this definition is almost a truism, because as Deleuze & Guattari make explicitly clear in A Thousand Plateaus, almost all formations can be described in some sense as fasiscular, and even the most rhizomatic formation can have aborescent knots. That is, the distinction between rhizomatic and aborescent schemas is not dualistic, there is "no ontological dualism between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad"; rather their relationship is processual: The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. ... No, this is not a new or different dualism. (Deleuze & Guattari 20) Thus, as Deleuze & Guattari are at pains to explain, what they call rhizomatic formations are neither better or worse than arborescent formations, nor are they two mutually exclusive, they are two different ways of organising and doing things which can each lead to the other or contain the other. In this sense, Probyn is not suggesting anything new to say that desire can be considered as rhizomatic, as engendering an uncountable array of unruly connections, because the possibility that anything might be thusly considered is contained within the princples of 'the rhizome' that Deleuze & Guattari provide. What I am suggesting however, is that desire is more than simply an excellent example of this processual movement between and across rhizomes and arborescences. For whilst the arborescent knots, the despotic formations of desire are readily apparent -- who isn't familiar with the disappointment that is an inevitable and integral part of commodity fetishism; the desolation of unrequited loves or the destructive capacity of satiated desires -- I am suggesting that desire is solely and strictly rhizomatic, and that as a rhizome that subverts, subtends and extends the self, it processually defines 'the human'. In his insightful commentary upon deleuzoguattarian philosophy entitled A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi states that desire, "in its widest connotation" is the plane of consistency as multiple cocausal becoming ... on the human level, it is never a strictly personal affair, but a tension between sub- and superpersonal tendencies that intersect in the person as an empty signifier. (82) For Massumi then, desire is a profoundly anti-human, or more accurately nonhuman, process, whose operation has the effect of causing what he calls 'the person' to be precipitated. Desire is, therefore, the definition of the machinic auto-poiesis -- the immanent and pragmatic functioning of the process of becoming -- that generates each of us as human subjects. Contra Massumi however, I would suggest that the resultant effect of desire -- that is, the instantiation of the person -- is far from being an empty signifier, a precipitious by-product. Even the most inchoate desire, the most mute and directionless 'I want', articulates a connection beyond the self that carries within it an implicit enunciation of what the self might be. As Michel Foucault argued in a somewhat different context, the trangressing of a boundary by a productive process -- such as desire -- does not ipso facto circumvent that boundary or render it devoid of meaning, although it might have that effect; the function of crossing or trangressing a limit is to liminalise it, to re-inscribe it (for two differing examples, see Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1 45, and Foucault, "Revolutionary Action: Until Now" 226). For although 'the person' does not pre-figure desire, and is in fact constituted and re-constituted through the operation of desire, it is neither an empty signifier nor a level playing field. "The word religion", says the French philosopher Michel Serres, could have two origins. According to the first, it would come from the Latin verb religare, to attach. Does religion bind us together, does it assure the bond of this world to another? According to the second ... it would mean to assemble, gather, lift up, traverse or read. (47) But, observes Serres, we are rarely told what sublime word our language opposes to the religious, in order to deny it: negligence. Whoever has no religion should not be called an atheist or unbeliever, but negligent. (48) The process, perpetual and spontaneous, of attachment to things, subjects, objects-multiplicities-outside of ourselves, whether it is to an unseeing God, the earth, one's friends, family and lovers or that funky new consumer durable, that we call desire, is what defines us as human. "Without love", says Serres "there are no ties or alliances" (49). Thus, the rhizomatic functioning of desire as a process of becoming continually produces, in a transversal fashion, the articulation of the self: we are each the product of desire. Desire, as a thermodynamic process, is thus the engine of 'the human', of a form of contingent humanism -- although a humanism that isn't simply limited to people: a becoming that liminalises the self through its incorporation of subjectless individuations beyond the self, within the self, through which the self is processually experienced and embodied. Whether it is the desire for the reified God, the becoming-another of the carnal and corporeal, the longing for the fetishised commodity or the 'I want to believe' of the search for extra-terrestrials, desire is the motive force that defines us as human, our raison d'être, our theology. And all this from sitting at a bus-stop. References Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. With foreword by Brian Massumi. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1978. Foucault, Michel. "Revolutionary Action: Until Now." Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. Massumi, Brian. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. A Swerve Edition. Cambridge, MA.: MIT P, 1992. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Sonic Youth. "Female Mechanic on Duty." A Thousand Leaves. Compact Disc. Geffen, GEFD-25203, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sean Aylward Smith. "[ t o b e a n d t o h a v e ]." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/be.php>. Chicago style: Sean Aylward Smith, "[ t o b e a n d t o h a v e ]," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/be.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sean Aylward Smith. (1999) [ t o b e a n d t o h a v e ]. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/be.php> ([your date of access]).

Who would have thought so much activity and noise over stillness? According to the contributors of this issue of M/C Journal 'still' as phenomenon, state, pause, symbolic field or geopolitical struggle fizzes, vibrates and resonates. It hums; it makes one vulnerable; it draws one into the world differently and it accesses new agencies and movement. Or not. Such is the complexity of the topologies/ecologies and economies (in every sense of the word) of still. For us and our contributors, still is an intriguing theoretical figure that media-mobility-cultural studies and indeed, the world should attend to more closely, more slowly. Now is the time for what Andrew Murphie has called, "the revenge of the still". This collection is positioned within a world that has increasingly come to be understood through the theoretical and conceptual lens of animation. There are multiple overlapping antecedents to this, criss-crossing the humanities and social sciences. Metaphors of movement, from Manuel Castells’ space of flows to Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity underpin much work within the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry) that is interested in understanding the world through relations of movement and flux. Moving away from a sedentary metaphysics of being-in-the-world, burgeoning mobilities research illustrates a commitment to exploring the differentiated dynamics of a world increasingly characterised by networks of corporeal, virtual and imaginative mobilities. In a different but related vein, the ‘affective turn’ (Clough and Halley) has generated new ways of attending to the relations between bodies, technology and matter, through a renewed ontological focus on the pre-individual bodily forces that constitute life. Attending to the excessiveness of affect, matter is increasingly apprehended as processual, turbulent and fluid. Indeed it is through a sense of liveliness and energy within which worldly dwelling is increasingly conceptualised. Against this buzz of mobility and animation, a topology of stillness haunts the space of flows. Indeed mobility scholars have increasingly recognised the importance of considering the relational dialectic of mobilities and immobilities; or 'mobilities and moorings' to use John Urry's phrase; understanding how these relations are central, not only to the functioning of mobility systems, but how they have the capacity to generate the systematic inequalities that are such a significant (and indeed integral) part of such systems. Yet we want to suggest that to focus on such a dialectic of stasis and movement neglects other registers and modalities which still inhabits, where still emerges through other configurations of matter which are not necessarily reducible to the dialectic of mobility and immobility. What happens if we think stillness not only as rhythm, but also as technic or trope? As attunement or perception? As such, each paper in this collection attends to still through a range of different grammars and vocabularies; illuminating the multiplicity of ontological and epistemological registers through which still moves.For some in this collection, still emerges as a site of political and ethical potential. For Emma Cocker, the significance of collective acts of still have the capacity to augment the affectual capacity of the body. Here, experimental practices of still in the city constitute events of resistance that disrupt habitual modalities of inhabiting the city, producing fissures within which new lines of flight can emerge. Such deliberative attunement through collective practices of still produces an affirmative model of subjectivity; a challenge to the choking assemblages of governance that stratify bodies. Similarly, for Natalia Radwyl, the body’s affective intensities are enhanced and augmented through still. Still here works as a reflexive figure, serving to focus attention on how we are conditioned and desensitised by habitual rhythms of the everyday. In a rather different context, Sebastian Abrahamsson’s discussion of the still of Gunther van Hagen's plastinates also highlights how still enacts a mode of resistance, in this instance to the temporal organisational logics of modernity. Such an affirmative vitalism works to emphasise the presencing tendencies of still; how still enables bodies to become aware of the otherwise imperceptible rhythms, materialities and intensities that are more often than not subsumed beneath the hallucinatory effects of the dizzying flux of contemporary flows. We might consider this still as attunement where still provides the necessary conditions under which productive, focused activity can emerge. Greg Noble and Megan Watkins emphasise how such attunement in educational settings might be achieved through a particular set of corporeal postures characterised by still. Still here generates a more receptive body, enhancing a disposition towards learning. In a radically different context, Peter Adey describes how still functioned to prime the body in a variety of different ways during the air raids of World War II. Here the development of anticipatory structures of feeling through still formed part of a strategy of affectual management where achieving still was a means of survival. Others in this collection illustrate the problematics of aligning still with such affirmative presencing; the calling into being of a body. Paul Harrison considers the nature of agency and determination through an exploration of gestures of ‘suspension’, ‘decline’ and ‘remaining aside’. In the absence of wilful or effective action, where resolution is suspended, we are forced to rethink the morality of action and the persistent ‘telos of the political’ that is often assumed to inhabit action. For Harrison, far from constituting resignation or failure, this suspension of meaning and value in ‘remaining still’ exists as a condition of political possibility.Debbie Lisle too points to the radical incommensurability of still, where meaning stutters and fails. Her discussion of the still of photographic images thus problematises the assumption of the role of media to generate and transmit meaning. In a similar non-relational vein, J.-D. Dewsbury also problematises the assumption of a reflexive, intentional body, arguing that still invites us to consider the ‘neutral presence of life itself’. This is not the surrender to still that emerges through Radywyl’s discussion, rather it is the still point which brings bodies into being, and provides the conditions through which it is possible to comprehend as a body. This still not only promises a sensitivity to the susceptibility and vulnerability of corporeal being in the world, but also radically decentres the body from analysis; demonstrating an appreciation for an expanded repertoire of materialities. Shades of the post-human are evident in Ross Harley’s paper which considers the dynamic geometries brought about by a range of non-human materialities in the airport. Here it is only a spectre of the human that haunts these images which are instead inhabited by a world of hums, transparencies, lightwaves, luminosities and glows. Reworking the oft-invoked dualistic relation between the attentive body and inattentive spatiality, these ‘techno-veins and tendrils’ reach out and press into a body tending towards still. Indeed the stubborn obduracy of matter is also underlined by Nour Dados in her discussion on the endurance of the archive. Contrary to a corporeal emphasis, Adey also points to how still might be better apprehended as a sensibility distributed through ‘bodies, feelings, materials and atmospheres’. And yet this collection also warns us that we need to be attentive to the shadows of still; where still is seized upon and engineered by other forces - particularly through channels of authoritarian capitalism to great material and symbolic effect. Whilst still often denotes as a threat to neoliberal capitalism, for Sarah Sharma, even under conditions of capitalism disintegration, the inexorable power of capitalism is revealed through its wily recalibrations. The constraints placed on mobility during periods of capital restructuring open up new avenues of exploitation, which, when folded through sentimental, insular nationalist discourses culminates in an intoxicating profusion of moral responsibility to be still and an obedience to capitalism that only exacerbates socio-economic inequalities. Whilst remaining still is presented as a necessary consolation of the broken promises of capitalism, it also serves to illustrate the tensions that simmer between the impression of an agentive, autonomous individual taking charge of their situation, and the parallel still of the credulous ‘passenger’, swindled yet again by the overbearing affective and discursive power of capitalism. This echoes Cocker’s assertion of the power of capitalism to generate ‘sad affects’. Such a sinister manipulation of still also emerges through regimes of governmentality. For Andrew Murphie, still has always been and remains a powerful ‘technic of modernity’, which has the capacity to coerce, organise and stratify bodies in harmful ways that reduce their potential for action. In contrast to vitalist-inspired literature that explores how corporeal limits can be transcended affectually and materially through various configurations of practical activity, coerced still can push bodies to limits in ways that diminish their potentials. Here, still can inflict wounds, tear and break down the body, reducing its capacity to act. In a similar vein, for Nicholas Gill, still emerges as a crucial tool of political strategy to organise and arrange asylum seekers’ bodies.But in attending to still, are we merely just reversing the glamour of animation? World-weary with the dizzying effect that chasing movement induces, have we become self-effacing post-humanists, taking respite by languishing in the resignation and reprive that tending to still might offer? Does still offer an escapist fantasy from the hell of constant commodified and complicit motion, as Cocker asks? Or in tending to still are we just acknowledging the failure and fallout, not only of systems and networks, but also of representational, symbolic and discursive systems? There are certainly many suggestions that we need to slow down. Indeed many writers have draw attention to the epistemic problematic associated with the impulse to relentlessly move conceptual understandings beyond; a drive that is often characteristic of academic practice. An unremitting desire to put things in the 'post-'. The implication here is that speed, and the resulting displacement, as a particular characteristic of engagement does not provide the space for a sustained involvement within - or sufficient reflection through - worldly phenomena. Decisions and interventions made too hastily, where the unabating power of affect curtails apparently sensible, reflective dispositions, are often condemned for being overly reactive, partisan or thoughtless. Here, still is related to tropes of mindfulness, contemplation and responsibility where an enhanced, attuned ethical sensibility is forged out of a suspension of judgement. Still might enable composure and provide the conditions through which a responsibility towards depth and detail can emerge.Whilst there certainly might be inflections of each of these suggestions, this collection does not proffer a critique of hyper-mobility.Indeed reflection on recent catastrophic events illuminates how the ‘still’ aligned with inaction is often taken to be ethically scandalous, not to mention politically disastrous. No writer in this collection evidences an urge to simply escape, transcend or withdraw from the liveliness of being-in-the-world. Still is not a state or place of escape. It is not introspective or purposefully deferential. Still here is resolutely not about the wilful invitation of an 'agency to come' in the words of Harrison. Whilst each of these papers works to undo the pejorative associations with indolence and laziness that so often accretes around paranoiac renderings of still, equally they do not advocate that still should be put to work to generate productive, purposive activity.Yes, still can be optimised, engineered, governed. But is is the radical aporia that still presents which gives it its significance to our thinking. Taken together, what this collection demonstrates is a sensitivity to still as a relation-to-the-world that moves beyond the dualisms of mobility and immobility; activity and inactivity without transcending them. The promise of still is a particular mode of engagement with a world that rearranges intensities, folds through the vital and the vulnerable, providing a new set of political and ethical concerns.Is there a still that is still? Is still to cultural studies what God might be to the process philosophy of Alfred Whitehead. If as Paul Harrison suggests still can be thought of as a theoretical figure without value - a condition of political possibility in all forms, then there is much value in this lack of value as it produces a still that is neither immanent nor transcendent but which provides a new mode of 'coherence' through which we might explore the flux of the world.AcknowledgementsWe would like to take this opportunity to thank each of the contributors for making this issue sparkle. We would like to extent our debt of gratitude to the referees for providing such thoughtful, detailed and helpful commentaries on each of the papers. We would also like to thank Elly Clarke, our cover artist, for providing such a pertinent image to front our collection.ReferencesBauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity P, 2000.Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996Clough, Patricia, and Jean Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke U P, 2007.Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. "The New Mobilities Paradigm." Environment and Planning A 38.2 (2006): 207-226.Urry, John. Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity P, 2003.