Articoli di riviste sul tema "Temporality of debt"

This article examines the US student debt crisis through a queer, feminist lens attuned to matters of the material. Examining the discourse of ‘failed’ and/or forestalled millennial adulthood, I argue that the student debt crisis is a product of neoliberal, racial capitalism, and its profit resides in its financialisation. Drawing on queer and feminist theories regarding time and futurity and current research on student debt, I examine the configurations and effects of what I term the ‘student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse’, which renders the crisis of student debt legible through a heteronormative life narrative, and obscures the racialised, gendered realities of student debt. The student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse illustrates how under racial capitalism, heteronormative temporality is structurally conditioned via race. Examining US media coverage, I assert that the reprosexually oriented student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse legitimises new financial products that enable debtors to sustain and reproduce themselves via more debt.

AbstractEstablished with the reform of 1993, Argentina’s private pension funds became crucial sources of credit for the national government. They purchased large amounts of sovereign bonds defaulted on in 2001 and hence were key to the success of the debt restructuring of 2005. The private pillar was always vulnerable to political maneuvering; the nationalization of private pension funds in 2008 was only the last stage in an iterated process of state intervention, a function of public debt dynamics. This article argues that the financial pressures associated with Argentina’s sovereign debt burden systematically shortened the temporality of pension policy decisions, taking those away from long-term concerns about the stability of the social security system and toward the immediacy of debt-financing imperatives. Therefore, the politics of pension reform reversal in Argentina were determined by the increasingly strong and inextricable link between debt and pensions.

This article traces the interrelation of two forms of debt – financial debt and the symbolic debt to the past – in order to propose a rethinking of the discourse of debt through the ‘middle voice’, understood both as a grammatical category and, more generally, as an expressive modality that can take shape through different media. Can we revisit discourses of debt through ‘grammars’ that could restore a form of agency to the ‘indebted subject’ and disrupt the asymmetrical power relation between debtor and creditor? To explore this question, the article turns to literary and artistic responses to the discourse of debt against the backdrop of the Greek debt crisis. Through a close reading of the novella Close to the Belly (2014) by Sotiris Dimitriou and an untitled art installation by Stefania Strouza (2011), it traces how these works cast the subject as produced by the discourse of debt and test alternative conceptions of the indebted subject through the modality of the middle voice. Dimitriou’s novella tries to transcend both the moral discourse of financial debt and the debt to the past by envisioning a disengagement from all debt, which eventually yields a society without past and future. By contrast, Strouza’s installation reconfigures the debtor-creditor relation without renouncing debt altogether. By staging an encounter between Sophocles’ Antigone and Marx’s Capital, it transforms the power relation of debtor and creditor into a deictic exchange that makes these positions malleable and reversible. Through these works, the article explores the conditions for reconsidering the notion of debt through the modality of the middle voice and the risks but also the politically promising possibilities the middle voice opens up for conceiving the indebted subject and the temporality of debt otherwise.

<p>This article examines the works of young adult literature author A.S. King through youth and temporal lenses. It argues that King’s works refute the images of teenagers as atemporal beings uninterested by and uninvolved in the past, present, and future. The analysis attempts to link King’s characters with real-life events – the Vietnam War, the current student-debt crisis, etc. – and to show teenagers as active participants in society, regardless of time period. Furthermore, the article links each book to a particular temporal period (past, present, future), and it uses these temporal periods to show how teenagers, rather than being isolated, share the same temporal struggles – the influence of past struggles, the present quest to survive, planning for the future – that plague their adult counterparts. </p>

Jordan Lord’s Shared Resources (2021) uses access features—namely, open captions and burned-in audio description—as a medium of crip creativity. A meditation on debilitation, debt, disability, and bankruptcy, Lord’s film asks what it means to listen from the perspective of the out-of-synch temporal experiences that disability scholars call “crip time.” To listen in crip time, Lord shows, is to rethink the temporality of access, turning it from an afterthought into a building block of documentary language. By reframing access as a collective responsibility, Shared Resources moves away from transactional and adversarial interpretations of documentary access as risk mitigation into a more powerful framework of accountability.

The Depression Era collective started as several photographers and video artists joined forces in March of 2011 to create an archive of photographic images about the Greek economic crisis, amidst the social and political upheaval provoked by ongoing austerity impositions of the EU on the Greek economy. In this essay, I examine selected images from Depression Era, including images from Marinos Tsagkarakis’s series Non-Places of Transition, Yannis Hadjiaslanis’s series After Dark, Pavlos Fisakis’s series Nea Elvetia, and Georges Salameh’s series Spleen. Bringing together Marxist philosophical approaches to aesthetics, via Walter Benjamin and Jean Luc-Nancy, I argue that these photographers’ work is a performative undoing of capitalist understandings of linear time that capture and foster desires for alternative radical temporalities, for non-capitalist senses of time. I discuss how these works disrupt linear notions of time as progress, and as measure of productivity and economic growth, which are intrinsic to modernity, and the creation of financial debt. Against capitalist linear temporality, these Depression Era photographs enable a performative encounter, a realm of visual experimentation in which the spectator is invited to feel time differently, to imagine different alternative temporalities that emerge from the collapse of capitalism.

In the essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Deleuze discusses the differences between nineteenth-century capitalism and contemporary capitalism, characterising the former as the spaces of enclosure and the latter as the open circuits of the bank. In contemporary capitalism, ‘[m]an is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt’ ( Deleuze 1992 : 6). Deleuze claims that under financial capitalism, where the primary use of money is self-generation, economic relations are thought in terms of an asymmetrical power relationship between debtor and creditor, rather than an exchange between commodities. Taking up Deleuze's claim, this paper analyses how time functions in the formation of subjectivity under financial capitalism, by focusing on the temporal structure of debt. The indebted are expected to bind themselves to the past, not only in the moment they make a promise to pay back, but from that moment onwards; in this process, a subject finds himself passively subjected to the temporality determined by the condition of indebtedness, and yet he also actively reproduces and imposes the fact of indebtedness on himself by the feeling of guilt. Guilt, arising from the irreversibility of what has been done and resulting in the inability to proceed into the future, is central both to the indebted and the melancholic. Thus a melancholic subject emerges: a subject conditioned by the dominance of the past and the impossibility of the future.

The central character of Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film Arrival, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is a linguist tasked with deciphering a logographic alien language in time to avert a seemingly impending global war. I argue that the alien heptapods' logographs exemplify the understanding of language advanced by Jacques Derrida in seminal texts such as Of Grammatology (1976), while also engaging some of the themes concerning time and gift-giving that he develops in later, more explicitly political works. Derrida argues that written signifiers, rather than being a mere vehicle for representing speech, confer their own, supplemental meaning onto communication. Furthermore, he emphasizes that writing is not bound by the same linear temporality as spoken utterances, inasmuch as it is inscribed in a format which allows it to be revisited repeatedly. The significance of this disruption of linear temporality becomes clear in Derrida's later works such as Specters of Marx (1994) and On Cosmopolitanism (2001), where he describes such disruption as a necessary condition for the type of political change he believes is needed in the world. The ability to experience time in a nonlinear fashion allows Banks to prevent the looming war, in an illustration of the connection that Derrida draws between time, violence, and politics. However, it also puts humanity in the heptapods' debt, thus exemplifying the paradox of genuine gift-giving that Derrida claims is impossible. Despite the complex ethical questions it invokes, however, the unique nature of the gift in Arrival signals that this gift might be a genuinely altruistic offering after all.

Structural conditions shape the temporalities that govern the lives of street sex workers operating in Châu Đốc, a small town in Southern Vietnam. These women live each day as they come and make decisions based on quick returns and the management of daily needs, prioritizing short-term solutions over planning for the future. The ethnographic study of the multiple temporalities that govern street sex work, family care, gambling and debt-juggling practices shows that these women live in a frantic present-oriented temporality that is filled with pressing tasks and routines. This leads to an uncertain future that engenders various forms of hopeful and speculative behaviour, but precludes systematic planning. As a result, these women are treading water: putting effort into keep themselves afloat but never furthering their status and lives or catching up with the currents of development and progress. Overall, this article argues that this day-to-day lifestyle goes hand in hand with the linear and future-oriented time of capitalism and wage-labour that has infiltrated everyday life in post-reform Vietnam.

In the article, the right of the controlling body to apply to the court for the restriction of the right to depart outside Ukraine to the officials of legal entities that have a tax debt is divided on structural elements, namely: the subject to which the restrictions are applied, components of the violation, sanction. It is concluded that the restrictions on the departure outside Ukraine of the head of a legal entity or a permanent establishment of a non-resident can be applied only to the citizens of Ukraine. It is proved that the restrictions on the departure outside Ukraine can be applied only to the head of a legal entity, the resident of Ukraine. It is noted that the analyzed restrictions of the rights cannot be applied to all members of the collegial governing body of a legal entity, but only to the person specified as the head in the unified register of legal entities. This conclusion is made on the basis of the analysis of the norms of the legislation which establish the obligatory differentiation of members of a collegial governing body. The essence of the violation for which the restrictions on the departure outside Ukraine are applied is the non-payment of taxes in the amount of UAH 1 million within 240 days from the date of filing the tax claim. The latter element under analysis is the sanction for non-fulfillment of the obligation to pay the tax, namely the restrictions of the right. The result, or a conditional sanction, is characterized by its temporality – it is applied until the repayment of a tax debt. The competitive procedures of realization of the above right provided for in Art. Art. 283 and 289-2 of CAP of Ukraine are analyzed. The conclusion is made concerning the identity of the grounds for opening the procedures set forth in Art. 283 and Art. 289-2 of CAP of Ukraine, and hence the inexpediency of their coexistence in the CAP of Ukraine. It is proposed to exclude Art. 289-2 from the CAP of Ukraine and to clarify the list of grounds for the termination of temporary restrictions on the departure outside Ukraine.

This essay explores Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift (2019) through the lens of ‘palimpsestic memory’, contending that the novel articulates an interconnectedness between memory and migration. Firstly, I will investigate how the tension between aeonic temporality and some paratextual elements that attempt to install order and direct the reader’s orientation mimic and resonate with the intricate motif of the palimpsest. Then, I will illustrate how the alternation between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narration and the format of the multigenerational novel contribute to create a palimpsestic tale where several generations and different stories are inextricably intertwined, generating a spiral pattern where the multiple and invisible trajectories of temporality are refracted and eventually converge.

In Joachim Trier’s debut film, Reprise (2006), the concept of time is a key feature. Time is embedded as self-reflexive by way of several narrative devices, including the reordering of chronology and projections of imaginable events. Time is also central to depictions of the characters’ experiences and states of mind. This article attempts to untangle the modes of temporality at play in the film and offers some interpretative pathways by which they can be understood.

Los Informes Periódicos de Seguridad son documentos de seguimiento post autorización que deben ser remitidos por parte del Titular de un producto farmacéutico veterinario a la Autoridad Nacional Competente, en una temporalidad determinada, para informar reacciones adversas. Para su elaboración se debe disponer de la información respecto a cantidad de producto vendido y especies de destino.AbstractThe Periodic Safety Update Reports are documents of post authorization monitoring that must be submitted by the Marketing Authorisation Holder to the National Competent Authority, in a specific temporality, to report adverse reactions. Its preparation must have the information regarding amount of selling product and target species.

Abstract Between Lully's death (1687) and Rameau's operatic debut (1733), composers of the tragéédie en musique experimented with instrumental effects, greatly expanding the dramatic role of the orchestra. The profusion of these effects coincides with a new aesthetic reappraisal of instrumental music in France, as can be observed in the writings of Du Bos. The tempêête constitutes one of the most remarkable examples. Its sonic violence was too strong to end with the instrumental movement that depicted it; indeed, composers often prolonged the storm scene into a series of movements all connected by thematic material and key to produce a verisimilar effect of the storm's momentum, thereby creating what I term ““the domino effect.”” By the early eighteenth century, the tempêête had become such a well established and popular topos that it began migrating to non-staged genres like the cantata. The transference of the tempest topos from the tragéédie lyrique to the French baroque cantata entailed the breaking of formal frames. Unlike the supple dramatic structure of French opera, the cantata adopted the more rigid mold of the Italian opera seria——the recitative-aria unit——which separated the flow of time into active and static moments. Three case studies——Bernier's Hipolite et Aricie (1703), Jacquet de la Guerre's Jonas (1708), and Morin's Le naufrage d'Ulisse (1712)——demonstrate how composers manipulated this mold to satisfy a French aesthetic that valued temporal continuity for the sake of verisimilitude. All three composers employ key and instrumental music to portray the storm's forward momentum across recitatives and arias, relying primarily on rhythmic energy and melodic activity to create continuity. Although each composer's musical response varies according to personal style, what emerges is a shared aesthetic and compositional strategy employed to portray an event whose relentless power transcends the temporal boundaries between recitative and aria. This aesthetic of continuity and linearity shown by French baroque composers influenced the treatment of the tempest topos in the later eighteenth-century repertory, vocal and instrumental alike, including opera, the concerto, the overture-suite, and the characteristic symphony.

This article explores historical processes of land dispossession through an in-depth case of the Narragansett Indians of present-day Rhode Island. Using an eventful historical methodology, I uncover three primary mechanisms, each temporally situated, that dispossessed the Narragansett tribe of their land: violence, debt, and state governance. I proceed by first considering Narragansett life before the incursion of settler colonialism. Following this brief exploration, I turn to an analysis of both the historical events and processes that dispossessed the Narragansett of their land. This analysis contributes to the literature on empire and colonialism, as well as theoretical debates on primitive accumulation and settler colonialism, by exploring and identifying the mechanisms by which primitive accumulation operated within a specific settler-colonial context. In the end, I argue that sociology must expand analytically and conceptually to include indigenous experiences of ongoing dispossession in order to end the disciplines complicity in the elimination of the native.

The Nobel Prize-winner South African author, J. M. Coetzee in his debut novel, Dusklands (1974), allows the reader to take a look into the astonishing worlds of vulnerability and violence through the juxtaposition of two locally and temporally discrepant narratives, whose fictional world is dominated by authority. This paper attempts to explore the collapse of the individual identity of the narrators, along the prevailing literary discourses around the time of the novel’s publication, with special regard to the changing concept of the self in post-modern works and to the manners of rewriting its Cartesian concept.

Teleology is still a source of embarrassment for the natural sciences and in particular for biology that seems unable to describe and explain the genesis and structure of life without it. How is it possible for something not yet existing to determine the occurrence of what is temporally prior to it? How can the future cause the present and the past? In what follows we intend to examine the elaboration of the biological notion of «teleonomy» through the writings of Ernst Mayr, in order to verify its rigor and strenght with respect to the criteria of scientificity adopted by Mayr himself, in particular with respect to the adoption of the cybernetic model. On the one hand, to show the consistency of the debt that the so-called scientific discourse owes to the philosophical tradition, where it elaborates notions that claim to be emancipated. On the other hand, to detect, within the scientific discourse itself, the limits that a certain position that claims to be scientifically founded can impose on research, becoming a dogmatic assumption.

El estudio que se presenta trata de poner de manifiesto que, trasla aprobación de la nueva normativa de reducción de la temporalidad en el empleopúblico, la tendencia a la que hemos asistido en los últimos años de igualardeterminadas condiciones de trabajo de los funcionarios interinos con los funcionariosde carrera puede haber dejado de tener sentido ya que si, efectivamente, sereduce la temporalidad y no transcurren más de tres años desde el nombramientode los interinos no parece que, siendo la principal causa de la misma el abuso enla situación de temporalidad, deba mantenerse en algunos casos contra natura.En cualquier caso, dicha tendencia sigue ausente de criterios, más allá de los conceptosjurídicos indeterminados utilizados legalmente, que permitan delimitarmás exactamente el alcance y concreción de lo que significa una desigualdad enlas condiciones de trabajo. Aurkezten den azterlanak agerian utzi nahi du, enplegu publikoanbehin-behinekotasuna murrizteko araudi berria onartu ondoren, azken urteotanbitarteko funtzionarioen eta karrerako funtzionarioen lan-baldintza jakin batzukberdintzeko izan dugun joerak zentzua galdu duela; izan ere, behin-behinekotasunabenetan murrizten bada eta bitartekoak izendatu zirenetik hiru urte baino gehiagoigarotzen ez badira, ez dirudi, behin-behinekotasun egoeran abusua arrazoinagusia izanik, kasu batzuetan naturaren aurka mantendu behar denik. Nolanahiere, joera horrek, legez erabiltzen diren kontzeptu juridiko zehaztugabeetatik harago,ez du lan-baldintzetan desberdintasuna izateak zer esan nahi duen zehatzagozedarritzeko irizpiderik. The objective of the present study is to shine a light on the factthat, after the approval of the recent regulations to reduce temporary publicemployment, the trend that we have witnessed in recent years of creating equaljob conditions for both interim and permanent functionaries may have lostits purpose, since, if temporality is reduced and no more than 3 years pass bywithout the appointment of interim civil servants, it does not seem (consideringthe main cause of it being the abuse of the temporality situation) that it shouldbeyond the undetermined legal concepts, criteria that allow the precise define the scope and specification of what inequality in working conditions means.be maintained in some cases against nature. Anyway, this tendency lacks criteria

Aquest article pretén reflexionar sobre les nocions d’abundància i escassetat, des d’una perspectiva antropològica i històrica. El text es basa en una recerca etnogràfica duta a terme entre els anys 2008 i el 2015 en dues comunitats de ribera del Marañón: San Jacinto i Villa Canán, indígenes kukama-kukamiria. Parlem de l’escassetat i de l’abundància percebudes i experimentades per la població de les dues comunitats, però també hi analitzem les narratives de les cròniques colonials i les dades d’estudis arqueològics i biològics recents. L’etapa colonial realçava l’abundància de recursos i l’escassetat de capacitats dels indígenes per administrar-los; en canvi, entre els indígenes kukama-kukamiria d’avui, les nocions formen part d’un contínuum lligat tant al clima com a l’organització de la vida social en una temporalitat més cíclica. Unes consideracions que en ple debat sobre canvi climàtic fan necessàries les aportacions de l’antropologia.

Boucicault’s Octoroon was famously ‘adapted’ by the author in response to British audience’s discomfort with Zoe’s death in 1861. As it turns out, however, a play very similar to Boucicault’s appeared in England nearly a year before its British debut. The Quadroon; or, the Sun Picture (1860) is not simply an act of plagiarism, or even simply an adaptation of Boucicault’s play. Instead, it is a pastiche of the sources Boucicault drew on for his play, along with unmistakable elements of Boucicault’s – a kind of meta-adaptation. I focus on how The Quadroon incorporates The Octoroon’s use of photography and his sources for the idea of a camera capturing a murderer in the act. What emerges is a play that offers a different representation of the figure of the photographer, the dynamics of racial justice, and the dynamics of racial visuality. By focusing on the use of photography in The Octoroon, The Quadroon, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), I explore more broadly how the spectacle of photographic technology on stage itself offers a self-reflexive commentary on melodramatic form and structure. Melodramas that stage photography both highlight the strange temporality of the tableau and ask us to think of photography as both a frozen image (a product) and kinetic act (a process and performance).

A lo largo del siglo XIX las ciencias históricas alcanzan un gran desarrollo. La Historia de la Iglesia es cultivada por todos los historiadores, pero especialmente por los protestantes. Los católicos van a remolque. Algunas polémicas del Concilio Vaticano I y la cuestión exegética, basadas en argumentos históricos y contrarias a la doctrina de Roma, parecían dificultar la apertura de la Iglesia a la investigación histórica. A pesar de las dificultades, León XIII, partiendo de una postura tradicional, enfrentándose a la Cuestión Romana y defendiendo una postura temporalista del papado, decidió abrir el Archivo Secreto Vaticano para mostrar como la Iglesia no debe temer a la Historia, antes bien ésta le ha de dar la razón. La apertura del Archivo relanzó los estudios históricos en torno al papado y propició la creación de múltiples Institutos Históricos con sede en Roma. Además, se creó una comisión de cardenales para los estudios históricos y se fundó la escuela de Paleografía y Diplomática del Vaticano. Se publicaron numerosas fuentes y monografías y mejoró considerablemente la erudición y las ciencias auxiliares.

L’impuls per part del legislador per reforçar la presència del català en les polítiques de joventut i en les activitats de lleure educatiu demostra l’interès de l’actual majoria política en el Parlament per recuperar els usos i el prestigi de la llengua pròpia oficial en tots els àmbits. En aquest període també s’ha millorat la regulació sobre l’exigència de la capacitació lingüística de les persones que participen en els processos d’estabilització per a la reducció de la temporalitat en l’ocupació pública. En l’esfera competencial, s’ha arribat a la resolució pactada de les discrepàncies sobre la possible extralimitació del legislador estatal a l’hora de regular la llengua en les senyalitzacions de trànsit. En l’àmbit parlamentari i polític, continuen els retrets de les formacions conservadores sobre la suposada discriminació dels empleats del Servei de Salut de les Illes Balears a causa dels requisits lingüístics. També segueixen les controvèrsies sobre el règim lingüístic a l’ensenyament. De moment, però, el Tribunal Superior de Justícia de les Illes Balears desestima la pretensió que el castellà s’usi un vint-i-cinc per cent en un centre d’educació de secundària.

En este artículo se da a conocer la posibilidad de hacer terapia psicológica a través de la fotografía, presentándose como una forma poco empleada de realizar intervenciones terapéuticas. La tesis que sustenta es la siguiente: existe una relación entre la tempora-lidad, las vivencias, las emociones generadas a partir de las fotografías y la intervención terapéutica con estas, desde la película Smoke del director Wayne Wang. Tiene como base las reflexiones proporcionadas por la “escena del álbum fotográfico” de esta pelí-cula. Se toma por tanto la importancia que otorgan los tres elementos de la temporali-dad, pasado, presente y futuro. Dentro de esta temporalidad, se dan las vivencias que generan experiencias y adquieren sentido al ser resignificadas en el aquí y el ahora, por medio de las fotografías en el espacio terapéutico. En este aspecto, lo nombrado por la palabra posibilita la conexión con las emociones y la contextualización de lo que la foto-grafía le representa al paciente. De esta forma, las fotografías se convierten en un aliado terapéutico, enfatizando en aquello que desde la terapia Gestalt es mencionado como figura, lo que permite al paciente comprender aquello que es evidente en la fotografía y sobre lo cual debe acentuar y permitir acompañar su trabajo terapéutico.

In 1995 the Peronist party held the Argentine presidency, a comfortable majority in both congressional chambers, and most provincial governorships and municipalities. In 2013 the political landscape looked exactly the same. However, between 2001 and 2002 the country arguably went through its most serious crisis ever, which led to massive popular uprisings, the early resignation of two presidents, and the largest debt default in international history. The political collapse did not, however, constitute a spontaneous or definite rupture with the past. Instead, the social revolt detonated in December 2001 was not only temporally and territorially limited but also politically nurtured and institutionally bounded. Conventional explanations have tended to overlook a crucial set of actors that was neither marching in the streets nor voting in the Congress. These actors were subnational power holders and they were Peronist, and their participation explains how the protest began, how the crisis unfolded, and how it was resolved. En 1995, el partido peronista ocupaba la presidencia de la Argentina y gozaba de amplia mayoría en ambas cámaras, así como en las gobernaciones y municipios. En 2013, el panorama político lucía exactamente igual. Sin embargo, entre 2001 y 2002 el país sufrió una de las crisis más graves de su historia, que desembocó en levantamientos populares masivos, la renuncia anticipada de dos presidentes y el mayor incumplimiento de pago de una deuda soberana en la historia. El colapso político, sin embargo, no constituyó una ruptura espontánea ni definitiva con el pasado sino un acontecimiento que, además de temporal y territorialmente acotado, fue alimentado políticamente y digerido institucionalmente. Las explicaciones convencionales han pasado por alto a un conjunto de actores que no marchaba en las calles ni votaba en el Congreso. Estos actores tenían dos características: eran autoridades subnacionales y eran peronistas. Su participación explica el inicio de la protesta social, el desarrollo de la crisis y su resolución.

RESUMEN: La ecuación: diversidad de prestaciones - identidad de personas y cosas - un solo procedimiento - una sola sentencia, ha permanecido inamovible durante años en pretexto de la configuración de la continencia de la causa, sin la existencia de una norma que sustente la inflexibilidad con la que se ha aplicado. De cara al derecho humano al libre desarrollo de la personalidad, esta práctica reiterada debe doblegarse en favor del accionante del divorcio incausado, cuyo plan de vida se obstaculiza a causa de la inexorable búsqueda de una sola sentencia definitiva que resuelva las múltiples pretensiones con nexos a la disolución del vínculo matrimonial, sujetas a la temporalidad infructuosa del proceso. Por lo que, en el manuscrito, presentamos la carga argumentativa de contrapeso a lo expuesto por un órgano de control constitucional que, en su labor jurisdiccional, sobrepone la figura procesal de la continencia de la causa al ejercicio pleno del libre desarrollo de la personalidad.Palabras clave. Continencia de la causa, divorcio incausado, libre desarrollo de la personalidad, proceso civil, sentencia definitiva.ABSTRACT: The equation: diversity of legal benefits - personal and acts identity - a single procedure - only one verdict, it has been immovable for years under the pretext of shaping the continence of the cause, without the existence of a rule that supports the inflexibility with which it has been applied. In front to the human right to the free development of the personality, this reiterated practice must bend in favor of the plaintiff of the divorce without cause, whose life plan is hindered due to the inexorable search for a only one veredict that resolves all claims related to the dissolution of the marriage bond subject to the unsuccessful temporality of the process. Therefore, in this manuscript, we present the argumentative burden of counterbalance to the exposed by a constitutional control body that, in its jurisdictional work it imposes the procedural figure of the continence of the cause to the full exercise of the free development of the personality.Keywords. Continence of the cause, divorce without cause, free development of the personality, civil prosecution, definitive veredict.

The motif of journey constitutes one of the most important cornerstones of both postcolonial literatures and science fiction narratives, the latter of which owe a significant debt to the essentially colonial origins of the genre, thus inviting postcolonial practices of reimagining and writing back. For that reason, the following article aims at an examination of the peculiar ties between the postcolonial theory and science fiction, in order to discuss how speculative fiction allows for an in-depth analysis of the contemporary diasporic condition and the issues of memory and cultural identity, in the context of a dialogue with contemporary diaspora studies and postcolonial studies.The motif of the journey, then, understood both in literal and metaphoric terms, becomes the point of departure for a discussion concerning the ways in which the experiences of migration and diasporic existence influence the subject’s identity as well as their relationship with the culture and language of the country of their ancestors.To this end, the paper aims at a thorough analysis of the ways in which Larissa Lai, in her novel Salt Fish Girl, engages in a discussion regarding the contemporary condition of diasporic communities, proposing a new perspective on the complicated relationship between diasporas, their past and ancestral heritage as well as their language, and the motif of journey, understood both spatially (as a journey from one place to another) and temporally (as a journey back to the roots or the impossibility of going back). Employing postcolonial theory as well as the theory of science fiction as the methodological framework, the paper argues that for Lai, the journey of one of the incarnations of the protagonist, Nu Wa, to the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness constitutes an extended metaphor for the experience of Chinese immigrants in Canada. The motif of journey is inextricably tied here with the practices of remembering and forgetting, crucial for diasporic communities, as well as the constant search for a new, hyphenated identity in the new reality. Moreover, Lai suggests that such a journey constitutes a traumatic experience for the individual, which results in the loss of access to ancestral heritage as well as the language and the necessity of accepting one’s liminal condition, which contributes to the feeling of alienation and rootlessness.

Falls have become one of the reasons for death. It is common among the elderly. According to World Health Organization (WHO), 3 out of 10 living alone elderly people of age 65 and more tend to fall. This rate may get higher in the upcoming years. In recent years, the safety of elderly residents alone has received increased attention in a number of countries. The fall detection system based on the wearable sensors has made its debut in response to the early indicator of detecting the fall and the usage of the IoT technology, but it has some drawbacks, including high infiltration, low accuracy, poor reliability. This work describes a fall detection that does not reliant on wearable sensors and is related on machine learning and image analysing in Python. The camera's high-frequency pictures are sent to the network, which uses the Convolutional Neural Network technique to identify the main points of the human. The Support Vector Machine technique uses the data output from the feature extraction to classify the fall. Relatives will be notified via mobile message. Rather than modelling individual activities, we use both motion and context information to recognize activities in a scene. This is based on the notion that actions that are spatially and temporally connected rarely occur alone and might serve as background for one another. We propose a hierarchical representation of action segments and activities using a two-layer random field model. The model allows for the simultaneous integration of motion and a variety of context features at multiple levels, as well as the automatic learning of statistics that represent the patterns of the features.

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the economy and human lives worldwide, particularly the vulnerable low-income population. We employ a large panel data of 5.6 million daily transactions from 2.6 million debit cards owned by the low-income population in the U.S. to quantify the joint impacts of the state lockdowns and stimulus payments on this population’s spending along the inter-temporal, geo-spatial, and cross-categorical dimensions. Leveraging the difference-in-differences analyses at the per card and zip code levels, we uncover three key findings. (1) Inter-temporally, the state lockdowns diminished the daily average spending relative to the same period in 2019 by $3.9 per card and $2,214 per zip code, whereas the stimulus payments elevated the daily average spending by $15.7 per card and $3,307 per zip code. (2) Spatial heterogeneity prevailed: Democratic zip codes displayed much more volatile dynamics, with an initial decline three times that of Republican zip codes, followed by a higher rebound and a net gain after the stimulus payments; also, Southwest exhibited the highest initial decline whereas Southeast had the largest net gain after the stimulus payments. (3) Across 26 categories, the stimulus payments promoted spending in those categories that enhanced public health and charitable donations, reduced food insecurity and digital divide, while having also stimulated non-essential and even undesirable categories, such as liquor and cigar. In addition, spatial association analysis was employed to identify spatial dependency and local hot spots of spending changes at the county level. Overall, these analyses reveal the imperative need for more geo- and category-targeted stimulus programs, as well as more effective and strategic policy communications, to protect and promote the well-being of the low-income population during public health and economic crises.

IntroductionStevens-Johnson Syndrome is a rare life-threatening condition characterized by severe mucocutaneous epidermal necrolysis and detachment of the epidermis. The condition centers around a delayed-type hypersensitivity reaction with a complex etiology stemming from a variety of causes.ObjectivesTo present the case of a patient with a diagnosis of intellectual disability, bipolar disorder and epilepsy who, 14 days after starting treatment with Cariprazine, presented with pseudovesicular skin lesions suggestive of Steven-Johnson syndrome.MethodsA non-systematic literature review on PubMed database on Steven-Johnson syndrome and other autoimmune processes in patients with bipolar disorder, and the impact on the affective symptoms of the former, was conducted. The clinical case report was prepared through the review of clinical records of the patient.ResultsThe authors present the case of a 50-year-old woman, undergoing psychiatric follow-up for more than 30 years with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She has a moderate intellectual disability and generalized epilepsy diagnosed at the age of 13. Since the age of 20, the patient has presented clinical manifestations compatible with bipolar disorder.On a dermatological level, the patient had medical records of hypersensitivity reaction to amoxicillin-clavulanic acid, intolerance to carbamazepine; and toxicoderma and hepatitis after treatment with Lamotrigine, compatible with DRESS syndrome.At the time of the study, psychopharmacological treatment consisted in valproic acid, lithium and cariprazine (the latter being introduced 14 days earlier). Pseudovesicular and papular skin lesions were observed, with a dianiform appearance and central necrosis.Prior to the debut of the dermatological condition, the patient showed a decompensation of her bipolar disorder, with escalating irritability, soliloquies, verbosity and hostility towards her parents, with episodes of psychomotor agitation.After the appearance of the skin lesions, a striking clinical change was observed, with an almost complete remission of affective symptoms, temporally coincident with DRESS syndrome and cariprazine withdrawal.ConclusionsIn recent years, research on autoimmune diseases and their relationship with mental disorders, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression, has become increasingly abundant. The conclusions point to the fact that both disorders could be interrelated even at an etiopathogenic level. In this case report, we discuss a patient with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder with an important component of autoimmune response to different drugs, which seems to have influenced the clinical course of the mental illness.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

The content of moratorium on debt recovery as an element of state regulation of civil relations, which significantly affects the usual course of civil obligation, and its impact on ensuring interests of the state as the owner and other participants in civil relations is investigated. The relevance of the study is determined by the uniqueness of the national legal system, where a moratorium is becoming less the exception than the rule, can become a means to protect the interests of an entity, a group or a cluster of them, what, in turn, may encroach on the property status of creditors, including those who have exercised their right to judicial protection of the violated, unrecognized or disputed right. The author analyses the types of introduced moratoriums on debt recovery, including the extended classification criteria, regulatory consolidation, peculiarities of their application. It is stated that the introduction of moratoriums by the state is done not only and not so much for individual debtors who are unable to fulfill their obligations, but mainly due to imperfections of legislation in other areas (e.g. property management) or to prevent deterioration of socio-economic and political situation in the country in the result of instability in the property sphere provoked by economic crises and armed conflict (war) on the territory of Ukraine, which significantly affects the entire property sphere, especially of those individuals and legal entities related to the occupied and frontline territories. The need to revise the state policy on the application of moratoriums on debt recovery as a tool for regulating property relations and enforcement proceedings is accentuated. Emphasis is placed on the necessity for more detailed justification of the introduction and application, coercion, justification, real temporality of moratoriums on debt recovery, establishing a clear balance of creditor (debt collector) and debtor given the high interests of their introduction in order to respect constitutional and conventional human rights and fundamental freedoms on protection of property rights, the right to judicial protection, etc.

This article examines the social practice of gambling among stigmatized construction workers in Tokyo’s vanishing day laborer district, San’ya. By considering the abstract temporality of surplus extraction imposed on the manual laborer at the construction site, and the deadening effects of this discipline on his sensorial experience of the world, the article demonstrates how the enactment of masculinity through gambling involves a transformation of the abstract time of the working day into what Walter Benjamin has described as a “narcotic.” Whereas manual labor demands that the construction worker shield and numb himself against interruptive contingencies of accidents and material stimuli, the gambler seeks an embodied exposure to the penetrating contingency of victory or defeat in a moment of risk. The article argues that the form of this transformation of time propels the gambler, and that it is through debt and credit that he actualizes his reputation as a man.

AbstractBased on a total of 1,590 listed non-financial firms on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchanges covering the period of 2007 ~ 2020, this study examines whether a firm's capital structure is affected by its corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. While existing research has explored the impact of a firm’s CSR performance on various financial and non-financial consequences, this study argues that firm engaging in CSR is putting greater emphasis on the financial and bankruptcy risks arising from the use of debt financing and to maintain firm’s sustainability, firm with better CSR performance tends to reduce the use of debt. Through descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and multiple regression estimation, principal outcome shows that firm with better CSR performance tends to use less debt financing and inter-temporally reduce the use of debt.

Abstract Purpose Previous studies linking experiential avoidance (EA) and eating pathology have largely relied on single measurements based on traditional retrospective questionnaires. Taking advantage of available repeated assessments of EA and disordered eating behaviors (DEBs) in the everyday lives of young people from an epidemiological cohort, we aimed to investigate ecologically valid temporal associations between these constructs. Methods A random population sample of N = 1180 14–21-year-olds from Dresden, Germany, participated at baseline (2015/2016). As part of smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA), participants reported on engagement in EA and four DEBs (skipping eating, eating large amounts of food, loss-of-control eating, and restrained eating) up to eight times per day for four days. Multilevel modeling of concurrent and time-lagged associations between EA and DEBs, was conducted among those with at least 50% EMA-compliance (n = 1069). Results EA was associated with higher concurrent levels of all four types of concurrent DEBs. In addition, EA significantly predicted subsequent levels of restrained eating. Only loss-of-control eating significantly predicted subsequent EA, and this effect depended on the timespan between consecutive assessments. When this timespan was short, higher Loss-of-control eating predicted lower subsequent EA, while it predicted higher subsequent EA when the timespan was longer. Conclusion The present findings suggest that EA is temporally closely linked to greater engagement in DEBs, supporting theoretical assumptions that DEBs may serve an attempted avoidance function in the context of unpleasant inner experiences. Future studies may benefit from examining samples with more pronounced eating pathology. Level of evidence Level IV: Evidence obtained from multiple time series with or without the intervention, such as case studies.

Este artículo se centra en las diferencias entre los auxiliares have y be en las formas analíticas del inglés. Defendemos que, mientras que el verbo to be en un auxiliar de aspecto gramatical, el verbo to have debe considerarse un auxiliar de tiempo. Esta diferencia explicará no sólo la contribución de cada uno de ellos a la temporalidad final de la proposición, sino también su relación e interacción con otros constituyentes de la oración (adverbiales, verbos modales, etc.).Palabras clave: Lingüística, Sintaxis, Aspecto Gramatical.ABSTRACTThis paper offers an account of the differences between the auxiliaries have and be in perfect and progressive forms. We argue that whereas be is an aspectual auxiliary, have should better be treated as a temporal marker. This different role explains their contribution to the overall temporality of the proposition, but also their relationship and interaction with other constituents of the sentence (adverbials, modal verbs etc.).Key words: Linguistics, Syntax, Grammatical Aspect.

Abstract. Muhtadi A, Pulungan A, Nurmaiyah, Fadlhin A, Melati P, Sinaga RZ, Uliya R, Rizki M, Rohim N, Ifanda D, Leidonald R, Wahyuningsih H, Hasani Q. 2020. The dynamics of the plankton community on Lake Siombak, a tropical tidal lake in North Sumatra, Indonesia. Biodiversitas 21: 3707-3719. The tidal lake is a very dynamic estuary ecosystem and very vulnerable to environmental stresses and disturbances. Plankton is an aquatic organism that is very easily affected by environmental pressures and disturbances. This study aimed to reveal the phenomenon of plankton dynamics in tropical tidal lakes in Indonesia. The study was conducted at Siombak Lake from September 2018 to August 2019. Data were collected at high and low tides every month during the full month. The data analysis included plankton abundance, diversity index, and the relationship between water quality and plankton with PCA and succession analysis. The results showed that in Siombak Lake was found 66 genera which consisted of 54 phytoplankton genera and 12 zooplankton genera. Plankton abundance is higher in parts of the lake (stations 1-8) than in the river (stations 9-11) at both high and low tide. Temporally it shows that plankton abundance is higher in the rainy season (Feb-Aug, outside May) than in the rainy season (Sep-Jan, and May). Spatially, plankton in Siombak Lake at high tide is more influenced by TSS, phosphate, and salinity, while at low tide, it is influenced by TSS, Water transparency, BOD, silicate, salinity, and dissolved oxygen. Temporally, plankton in Siombak Lake at high tide is more influenced by salinity, conductivity, Debit, TSS, and salinity, while at low tide, it is influenced by salinity, conductivity, turbidity, TSS, TDS, DO, BOD, and COD. Based on the plankton Frontier succession graph, it shows that Siombak Lake is included in stage 1 and stage 2. Stage 1 occurs before the rainy season (August-September) and the peak of the dry season (March-April).

”And we’re tip-toing into the black throat of the mountain”: Mountain, stone and porous temporality in Mare Kandre’s I ett annat land and Stig Dagerman’s De dömdas ö. The title of this article is borrowed from Mare Kandre’s debut novel I ett annat land (1984). The novel tells the story of a young girl who is traveling with her family in a distant country where sensory experience embosses the narrative and aesthetic. The mountain is one of several more-than-human bodies that the protagonist encounters, and it vividly affects her. Nearly forty years earlier, Stig Dagerman wrote his feverish and surrealist novel De dömdas ö (1946), where a few shipwrecked humans spend their last remaining days on a remote island. As in Kandre’s novel, there is a profound focus on sensory experiences between the human and the more-than-human, and the stony appearance of a mountain becomes an important part of the landscape. The purpose of this article is to study how the stony formations in both novels are created and whether it is possible to understand them as active elements that contribute to the narratives. Through sedimentation, rocks have the capacity to incorporate both time and place in their materiality, and it is therefore possible to regard them as spatio-temporal bodies. Comparing and combining I ett annat land with De dömdas ö in a material ecocritical analysis enables a deeper understanding of how more-than-human matter may constitute a complex part of the storyworld. I will illuminate how these non-organic bodies, through their specific materiality in the sensuous and metaphorical aesthetics of the two novels, brings forth new stories about agency, belonging, and coloniality.

El presente artículo revisa la famosa tesis del “fin de la historia” lanzada por el politólogo norteamericano Francis Fukuyama a finales de los años ochenta del siglo XX. A través de dicho análisis, que se inspira en los recientes estudios sobre teoría de la narración histórica, así como en un conocimiento genuino de la filosofía hegeliana, su autor llega a la siguiente conclusión: la idea del “fin de la historia” del escritor norteamericano no puede ser considerada ni como un “descubrimiento científico”, como aseguraron en su momento las campañas mediáticas, ni tampoco como un enunciado verdadero como podría suponer una epistemología ingenua y “apolítica”; debe ser vista más bien como un relato “adecuado”, o incluso como una “mentira adecuada” en defensa de unos intereses políticos. De hecho, la afirmación de que la unión de libre mercado, democracia parlamentaria y tecno-ciencia habría traído el “fin de la historia”, e inaugurado una nueva etapa de la historia universal, ha sido completamente desmentida en las últimas décadas por las vicisitudes y el papel de países como China, los Estados Unidos, o por la propia evolución del capitalismo.Palabras claveHistoria universal, enunciados performativos, temporalidad, relato histórico, filosofía. AbstractThis article reviews the famous thesis of the “end of history” launched by the NorthAmerican political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, at the end of the nineties eighties. Through this analysis, inspired in the recent studies on the theory of historical narrative, as well as in a thorough knowledge of Hegelian philosophy, the author of the article comes to this conclusion: the idea of the “end of history” of the North-American writer by no means can be considered as a “scientific discovery”, as media campaigns then assured, nor can it be seen as a true assessment or true account, as an ingenuous apolitical epistemology would suppose: it must be regarded as a “fit” story, or even as an “appropriate lie” in defence of some political interests. In fact, the idea that the combination of free market, parliamentary democracy and techno-science would have brought about the “end of history”, giving pass to a new period in the universal history, has been utterly refuted by the events and the role that countries such as China and the United States has been performing, or by the current evolution of capitalism.Key wordsUniversal history, performative utterances, temporality, historical account, philosophy

Abstract Biodiversity is temporally dynamic, reflecting historical environmental conditions and influencing ecosystem stability. Colonisation and extinction dynamics frequently exhibit asynchronous patterns, resulting in net imbalances and thus to long‐lasting richness trends. If these trends are not functionally random, functional net imbalances between colonisations and extinctions (fNICE) are likely to emerge. Using community time series data of European freshwater fish and North American breeding birds, we investigated how fNICE differs from its taxonomic equivalent (tNICE), to provide a comprehensive picture of biodiversity dynamics. Our findings reveal that taxonomic and functional delays are a prevalent feature, challenging the assumption of an immediate response to environmental changes. Taxonomic delays manifest as extinction debts and colonisation credits, while functional delays indicate a shift in the balance between functional gains and losses over time. Moreover, we found that taxonomic and functional imbalances are not always directly correlated, although some specific patterns were found consistently for fish and birds. Early colonisations outpaced functional gains, indicating that although new species arrived earlier than the extinction of other species, the acquisition of new functional traits lagged. Although this may temporarily stabilise communities, as functional redundancy can mitigate loss of function via local extinctions, excessive redundancy can compromise biodiversity's capacity to respond to environmental variations, thereby undermining long‐term resilience. In conclusion, understanding the intricate temporal dynamics of biodiversity responses is paramount for effective conservation practices. While short‐term observations may suggest an equilibrium between diversity and the environmental conditions, our results underscore the importance of considering long‐term dynamics and the interplay between species traits and changing environments. The metrics tNICE and fNICE are valuable tools for quantifying these temporal dynamics and unravelling their consequences for ecosystem stability. Incorporating these insights into conservation strategies can aid in proactively preserving biodiversity and safeguarding the integrity of ecosystems. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

A pesar de que la infección es más prevalente en los adultos; el número de casos en la población pediátrica ha ido en aumento. La presentación clínica es variable y puede ir desde una infección asintomática hasta presentarse como insuficiencia respiratoria aguda, requiriendo manejo en la unidad de cuidados intensivos. En la población pediátrica, sobre todo en los menores de 15 años, se han descrito manifestaciones que pueden estar o no asociadas a fiebre, presencia de síntomas respiratorios (tos, odinofagia, entre otras) y/o síntomas gastrointestinales que pueden ir desde leves a severos. Según la gravedad de la sintomatología, los casos se han estratificado en asintomáticos, leves, graves o críticos, siguiendo los lineamientos de la OMS. Para considerar un caso como sospechoso se debe tener en cuenta el nexo epidemiológico, los síntomas clínicos, los hallazgos radiológicos y de laboratorio. Un caso confirmado es aquel en el que se tiene una PCR SARS-CoV-2 o estudios serológicos (IgM e IgG) positivos. Respecto al tratamiento de esta nueva enfermedad, se han realizado múltiples ensayos clínicos con medicamentos como hidroxicloroquina, cloroquina, ivermectina, tocilizumab, entre otros, en búsqueda de un manejo apropiado; sin embargo, hasta el momento no existe un medicamento que haya demostrado efectividad, y por lo tanto no es posible recomendar un tratamiento específico para la infección por SARS-CoV-2.Este capítulo del consenso presenta la información que se tiene hasta la fecha, acerca de esta patología en la población pediátrica. Se reportan los principales signos y síntomas basados en las series de casos publicadas. Se sugiere una clasificación clínica según la severidad de la infección; así como la evidencia disponible en cuanto a tratamiento de la infección por SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19.Se describe además lo reportado más recientemente en la literatura, frente al aumento inusual de casos de un síndrome inflamatorio similar a la Enfermedad de Kawasaki, que se ha denominado Síndrome Inflamatorio sistémico temporalmente asociado a SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, (SIMS-TAC por sus siglas en español o PIMS-TS por sus siglas en inglés Pediatric Inflammatory Multisystem Syndrome Temporally Associated with SARS-CoV-2). Finalmente se realiza una recomendación sobre la necesidad de continuar con los esquemas de vacunación, que son necesarios para evitar infecciones circulantes o el resurgimiento de otras ya erradicadas.

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.)

In the heady expansion of capital’s productive capacity during the post-war period, E.P. Thompson wondered optimistically at potentials accruing to humanity by accelerating automation. He asked, “If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not ‘how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?’ but ‘what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live?’” (Thompson 36). Indeed, linear and economistic variants of Marxian materialism have long emphasised that the socialisation of production by the use of machinery will eventually free us from work. At the very least, the underemployment produced by the automation of pivotal labour roles is supposed to create a political subject capable of agitating successfully against bourgeois and capitalist hegemony. But contrary to these prognostications, the worker of 2019 is caught up in a process of generalising work far beyond what is considered necessary by tradition, or at least the convention of what David Harvey calls “embedded liberalism” (11). As Anne Helen Peterson wrote in a recent Buzzfeed article,even the trends millennials have popularized — like athleisure — speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they’re efficient: you can transition seamlessly from an exercise class to a Skype meeting to child pickup. We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work. (Peterson)For the work-martyr, activity in its broadest Aristotelian sense is evaluated by and subordinated to the question of efficiency and productivity. Occupations of time that were once considered external to “work” as matters of “life” (to use Kathi Weeks’s vocabulary) are reconceived as waste when not deployed in the service of value-generation (Weeks 15).The point here, then, is to provide some answers for why the decrease in socially-necessary labour time in an age of automation has not coincided with the Thompsonian expansion of free time. The current dilemma of the neoliberal “work-martyr” is traceable to the political responses generated by crises in production during the depression and the stagflationary disaccumulation of the 1960s-70s, and the major victory in the “battle for ideas” was the transformation of the political subject into human capital. This “intensely constructed and governed” suite of possible values is tasked, according to Wendy Brown, “with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavours and ventures” (Brown 10). Connecting the creation of this subject in relation to personal or free time is important partly because of time’s longstanding importance to philosophies of subjectivity. But more to the point, the focus on time is important because it serves to demonstrate the economic foundations of the incursion of capitalist governance into the most private domains of existence. Against the criticism of Marx’s ‘abstract’ theory of value, one can see that the laws of capitalist accumulation make their mark in all parts of contemporary human being, including temporality. By tracing the emergence of afterwork as the unpaid continuation of the accumulation of value, one can show how each subject increasingly ‘lives’ capital. This marks a turning point in political economy. When work spills over a temporal limit, its relationship to reproduction is finally blurred to the point of indistinction. What this means for value-creation in 2019 is something in urgent need of critique.State ReproductionAccording to the Marxian theory, labour’s minimum cost is abstractly determined by the price of the labourer’s necessities. Once they have produced enough objects of value to cover these costs, the rest of their work is surplus value in the hands of the capitalist. The capitalist’s aim, then, is to extend the overall working-day for as long beyond the minimum as possible. Theoretically, the full 24 hours of the day may be used. The rise of machine production in the 19th century allowed the owners to make this theory a reality. The only thing that governed the extension of work-time was the physical minimum of labour-power’s reproduction (Marx 161). But this was on the provision that all the labourer’s “free” time was to be spent regrouping their energies. Anything in excess of this was a privilege: time wasted that could have been spent in the factory. “If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself”, says Marx, “he robs the capitalist” (162).This began to change with the socialisation of the work process and the increase in technical proficiency that labour demanded in early 20th-century industry. With the changes in the sophistication of the manufacture process, the labourer came to be factored in the production process less as an “appendage of the machine” and more as a collection of decisive skills. Fordism based itself around the recognition that capital itself was “dependent on a family-based reproduction” (Weeks 27). In Ford’s America, the sense that work’s intensity might supplant losses in the working day propelled owners of production to recognise the economic need of ensuring a robust culture of social reproduction. In capital’s original New Deal, Ford provided an increase in wages (the Five Dollar Day) in exchange for a rise in productivity (Dalla Costa v). To preserve the increased rhythm of industrial production required more than a robust wage, however. It required “the formation of a physically efficient and psychologically disciplined working class” (Dalla Costa 2). Companies began to hire sociologists to investigate how workers spent their spare time (Dalla Costa 8). They led the charge in a what we might call the first “anthropological revolution” of the American 20th century, whereby the improved wage of the worker was underpinned by the economisation of their reproduction. This was enabled by the cheapening of social necessities (and thus a reduction in socially-necessary labour time) in profound connection to the development of household economy on the backs of unpaid female labour (Weeks 25).This arrangement between capital and labour persisted until 1929. When the inevitable crisis came, however, wages faltered, and many workers joined the ranks of the unemployed. Unable to afford even the basics of their own reproduction, the working-class looked to the state. They created political and social pressure through marches, demonstrations, attacks on shops and the looting of supply trucks (Dalla Costa 40). The state held out against them, but the crisis in production eventually reached such a point of intensity that the government was forced to intervene. Hoover instituted the Emergency Relief Act and Financial Reconstruction Corporation in 1932. This was expanded the following year by FDR’s New Deal, transforming Emergency Relief into a federal institution and creating the Civil Works Association to stimulate the job market (Dalla Costa 63). The security of the working class was decisively linked to the state through the wage guarantees, welfare measures and even the legal guarantee of collective bargaining.For the most part, the state’s intervention in social reproduction took the pressure off industry by ensuring that the workforce would remain able to handle its burdens and that the unemployed would remain employable. It guaranteed a minimum wage for the employed to ensure that demand didn’t collapse, and provided care outside the workforce to women, children and the elderly.Once the state took responsibility for reproduction, however, it immediately became interested in how free time could be made efficient and cost effective. Abroad, they noted the example of European statist and corporativist approaches. Roosevelt sent a delegation to Europe to study the various measures taken by fascist and United Front governments to curb the effects of economic crisis (Dogliani 247). Among these was Mussolini’s OND (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro) which sought to accumulate the free time of workers to the ends of production. Part of this required the responsibilisation of the broader community not only for regeneration of labour-power but the formation of a truly fascist political subject.FDR’s social reform program was able to reproduce this at home by following the example of workers’ community organisation during the depression years. Throughout the early ‘30s, self-help cooperatives, complete with “their own systems of payment in goods or currency” emerged among the unemployed (Dalla Costa 61). Black markets in consumer goods and informal labour structures developed in all major cities (Dalla Costa 34). Subsistence goods were self-produced in a cottage industry of unpaid domestic labour by both men and women (Dalla Costa 71). The paragon of self-reproducing communities was urbanised black Americans, whose internal solidarity had saved lives throughout the depression. The state took notice of these informal economies of production and reproduction, and started to incorporate the possibility of community engineering into their national plan. Roosevelt convened the Civilian Conservation Corps to absorb underemployed elements of the American workforce and recover consumer demand through direct state sponsorship (wages) (Dogliani, 247). The Committee of Industrial Organisation was transformed into a “congress” linking workers directly to the state (Dalla Costa 74). Minium wages were secured in the supreme court in 1937, then hiked in 1938 (78). In all, the state emerged at this time as a truly corporativist entity- the guarantor of employment and of class stability. From Social Reproduction to Human Capital InvestmentSo how do we get from New Deal social engineering to yoga pants? The answer is deceptively simple. The state transformed social reproduction into a necessary part of the production process. But this also meant that it was instrumentalised. The state only had to fund its workforce’s reproduction so long as this guaranteed productivity. After the war, this was maintained by a form of “embedded liberalism” which sought to provide full employment, economic growth and welfare for its citizens while anchoring the international economy in the Dollar’s gold-value. However, by providing stable increases in “relative value” (wages), this form of state investment incentivised capital flight and its spectacular consequent: deindustrialisation. The “embedded liberalism” of the state-capital-labour compromise began to breakdown with a new crisis of accumulation (Harvey 11-12). The relocation of production to non-union states and decolonised globally-southern sites of hyper-exploitation led to an ‘urban crisis’ in the job market. But as capitalist expansion carried on abroad, inflation kept dangerous pace with the rate of unemployment. This “stagflation” put irresistible pressure on the post-war order. The Bretton-Woods policy of maintaining fixed interest rates while pinning the dollar to gold was abandoned in 1971 and exchange rates were floated all over the world (Harvey 12). The spectre of a new crisis loomed, but one which couldn’t be resolved by the simple state sponsorship of production and reproduction.While many solutions were offered in place of this, one political vision singled out the state’s intervention into reproduction as the cause of the crisis. The ‘neoliberal’ political revolution began at the level of individual groups of capitalist agitants seeking governmental influence in a crusade against communism. It was given its first run on the historical pitch in Chile as part of the CIA-sponsored Pinochet revanchism, and then imported to NYC to deal with the worsening urban crisis of the 1970s. Instead of focusing on production (which required state intervention to proceed without crisis), neoliberal theory promulgated a turn to monetisation and financialisation. The rule of the New York banks after they forced the City into near-bankruptcy in 1975 prescribed total austerity in order to make good on its debts. The government was forced by capital itself to withdraw from investment in the reproduction of its citizens and workers. This was generalised to a federal policy as Reagan sought to address the decades-long deficit during the early years of his presidential term. Facilitating the global flow of finance and the hegemony of supranational institutions like the IMF, the domestic labour force now became beholden to an international minimum of socially-necessary labour time. At the level of domestic labour, the reduction of labour’s possible cost to this minimum had dramatic consequences. International competition allowed the physical limitations of labour to, once again, vanish from sight. Removed from the discourse of reproduction rights, the capitalist edifice was able to focus on changing the ratio of socially necessary labour to surplus. The mechanism that enabled them to do so was competition among the workforce. With the opening of the world market, capital no longer had to worry about the maintenance of domestic demand.But competition was not sufficient to pull off so grand a feat. What was required was a broader “battle of ideas”; the second anthropological revolution of the American century. The protections that workers had relied upon since the Fordist compromise and the corporativist solution eroded as the new “class-power” of the bourgeoisie levelled neoliberal assaults against associated labour (Harvey 23). While unions were gradually disempowered to fight the inevitable tide of deindustrialisation and capital flight, individual workers were coddled by a stream of neoliberal propaganda promising “Freedom” to those who would leave the stifling atmosphere of collective association. The success of this double enervation crippled union power, and the capitalist could rely increasingly on internal workplace wage stratification to regulate labour at an enterprise level (Dalla Costa 25). Incentive structures transformed labour rights into privileges; imagining old entitlements as concessions from above. In the last thirty years, the foundation of worker protections at large has, according to Brown, become illegible (Brown 38).Time and ValueThe reduction of time needed to produce has not coincided with an expansion of free time. The neoliberal anthropological revolution has wormed its way into the depth of the individual subject’s temporalising through a dual assault on labour conditions and propaganda. The privatisation of reproduction means that its necessary minimum is once again the subject of class struggle. Time spent unproductively outside the workplace now not only robs the capitalist, but the worker. If an activity isn’t a means to increase one’s “experience” (the vector of employability), it is time poorly spent. The likelihood of being hired for a job, in professional industries especially, is dependent on your ability to outperform others not only in your talents and skills, but in your own exploitability. Brown points out that the groups traditionally defined by the “middle strata … works more hours for less pay, fewer benefits, less security, and less promise of retirement or upward mobility than at any time in the past century” (Brown 28-29).This is what is meant by the transformation of workers into ‘human capital’. As far as the worker is concerned, the capitalist no longer purchases their labour-power: they purchase the sum of their experiences and behaviours. A competitive market has emerged for these personality markers. As a piece of human capital, one must expend one’s time not only in reproduction, but the production of their own surplus value. Going to a play adds culture points to your brand; speaking a second language gives you a competitive edge; a robust Instagram following is the difference between getting or missing out on a job. For Jess Whyte, this means that the market is now able to govern in place of the state. It exercises a command over people’s lives in and out of the workplace “which many an old tyrannical state would have envied” (Whyte 20).There is a question here of change and continuity. A survey of the 20th century shows that the reduction of ‘socially necessary labour time’ does not necessarily mean a reduction in time spent at work. In fact, the minimum around which capitalist production circulates is not worktime but wages. It is only at the political level that the working class prevented capital from pursuing this minimum. With the political victory of neoliberalism as a “restoration of class power” to the bourgeoisie, however, this minimum becomes a factor at the heart of all negotiations between capital and labour. The individual labourer lying at the heart of the productive process is reduced to his most naked form: human capital. This capital must spend all its time productively for its own benefit. Mundane tasks are avoidable, as stipulated by the piece of human capital sometimes known as Anne Helen Peterson, if they “wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better”. People are never really after-work under neoliberalism; their spare time is structurally adjusted into auxiliary labour. Competition has achieved what the state could never have dreamed of: a total governance of spare hours. This governance unites journalists tweeting from bed with Amazon workers living where they work, not to mention early-career academics working over a weekend to publish an article in an online journal that is not even paying them. These are all ways in which the privatisation of social reproduction transforms afterwork into unpaid overtime.ReferencesBrown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.Dalla Costa, Maria. Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal. Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2015.Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Engels, Friedrich, and Karl Marx. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. R.C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Vol. 1 and 2. Trans. E. Aveling and E. Untermann. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2013.Peterson, Anne Helen. “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Buzzfeed. 10 Oct. 2019 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work>.Postone, Moishe. Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” In Stanley Aronowitz and Michael J. Roberts, eds., Class: The Anthology. Hoboken: Wiley, 2018.Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018.Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.Whyte, Jessica. “The Invisible Hand of Friedrich Hayek: Submission and Spontaneous Order.” Political Theory (2017): 1-29.

Neither mere flesh nor mere thing, the yellow woman, straddling the person-thing divide, applies tremendous pressures on politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology. — Anne Anlin Cheng, OrnamentalismIn this (apparently) very versatile piece of clothing, she [Michelle Zauner] smokes, sings karaoke, rides motorcycles, plays a killer guitar solo … and much more. Is there anything you can’t do in a hanbok?— Li-Wei Chu, commentary, From the Intercom IntroductionAnne Anlin Cheng describes the anomaly of being “the yellow woman”, women of Asian descent in Western contexts, by underlining the haunting effects of this artificial identity on multiple politically valent forms, especially through Asian women’s conceived ambivalent relations to subject- and object-hood. Due to the entangled constructiveness conjoining Asiatic identities with objects, things, and ornaments, Cheng calls for new ways to “accommodate the deeper, stranger, more intricate, and more ineffable (con)fusion between thingness and personness instantiated by Asiatic femininity and its unpredictable object life” (14). Following this call, this essay articulates a creative combination of José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification and Avery Gordon’s haunting theory to account for some hauntingly disidentificatory ways that the performance of diaspora sensibilities reimagines Asian American life and femininity.This essay considers “Everybody Wants to Love You” (2016) (EWLY), the music video of Michelle Zauner’s solo musical project Japanese Breakfast, as a ghostly performance, which features a celebration of the Korean culture and identity of Zauner (Song). I analyse it as a site for identifying the confrontational moments and haunting effects of the diaspora sensibilities performed by Zauner who is in fact Jewish-Korean-American. Directed by Zauner and Adam Kolodny, the music video of EWLY features the persona that I call the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, singing in a restroom cubicle, eating a Dunkin Donuts sandwich, shotgunning a beer, shredding a Fender electric guitar on the hood of a truck, riding a motorcycle with her queer lover, and partying with a crowd all in the traditional Korean attire hanbok that used to belong to her late mother. The story ends with Zauner waking up on a bench with a hangover and fleeing from the scene, conjuring up a journey of self-discovery, self-healing, and self-liberation through multiple sites and scenes of everyday life.What I call a ghostly performance is concerned with Avery Gordon’s creative intervention of haunting as a method of social analysis to study the intricate lingering impact of ghostly matters from the past on the present. Jacques Derrida develops hauntology to describe how Marxism continues to haunt Western societies even after its so-called failure. It refers to a status that something is neither present nor absent. Gordon develops haunting as a way of knowing and a method of knowledge production, “forcing a confrontation, forking the future and the past” (xvii). A ghostly performance is thus where ghostly matters are mobilised in “confrontational moments”:when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (xvi)The interstitiality that transgresses and reconfigures the geographical and temporal borders of nation, culture, and Eurocentric discourses of progression is important for understanding the diverse experiences of diaspora sensibilities as critical double consciousness (Dayal 48, 53). As Gordon suggests, confrontational moments force us to confront and expose the interstitial state of objects, subjects, feelings, and conditions. Hence, to understand this study identifies the confrontational moments in Zauner’s performance as a method to identify and deconstruct the triggering moments of diaspora sensibilities.While deconstructing the ghostly performances of diaspora sensibilities, the essay also adopts an object-oriented approach to serve as a focused entry point. Not only does this approach designate a more focused scope with regard to applying Gordon’s hauntology and Muñoz’s disidentification theory, it also taps into a less attended territory of object theories such as Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented ontology due to the overlooking of the relationship between objects and racialisation that is much explored in Asian American and critical race and ethnic studies (Shomura). Moreover, while diaspora as, or not as, an object of study has been a contested topic (e.g., Axel; Cho), the objects of diaspora have been less studied.This essay elaborates on two ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails. It uncovers two haunting effects throughout the analysis: the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America. By defying the objectification of Asian bodies with objects of diaspora and refusing to assimilate into the American nightlife, Zauner’s Korean woman persona haunts a multiculturalist post-racial America that fails to recognise the specificities and historicity of Korean America and performs an alternative reality. Disidentificatory ghostly performance therefore, I suggest, thrives on confrontations between the past and the present while gesturing toward the futurities of alternative Americas. Mobilising the critical lenses of disidentification and ghostly performance, finally, I aver that disidentificatory ghostly performances have great potential for envisioning a better politics of performing and representing Asian bodies through the ghostly play of haunting objects/ghostly matters.The Embodied (Objects) and the Disembodied (Ghosts) of DisidentificationThe sonic-visual lifeworld constructed in the music video of EWLY is, first of all, a cultural public sphere, through which social norms are contested, reimagined, and reconfigured. A cultural public sphere reveals the imbricated relations between the political, the public, and the personal as contested through affective (aesthetic and emotional) communications (McGuigan 15). Considering the sonic-visual landscape as a cultural public sphere foregrounds two dimensions of Gordon’s hauntology theory: the psychological and the sociopolitical states. The emphasis on its affective communicative capacities enables the psychological reach of a cultural production. Meanwhile, the multilayered articulation of the political, the public, and the personal shows the inner-network of acts of haunting even when they happen chiefly on the sociopolitical level. What is crucial about cultural public spheres for minoritarian subjects is the creative space offered for negotiating one’s position in capacious and flexible ways that non-cultural publics may not allow. One of the ways is through imagination and disputation (McGuigan 16). The idea that imagination and disputation may cause a temporal and spatial disjunction with the present is important for Muñoz’s theorisation of disidentification. With such disjunction, Muñoz believes, queer of colour performances create future-oriented visions and coterminous temporality of the present and the future. These future-oriented visions and the coterminous temporality can be thought through disidentifications, which Muñoz identifies asa performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. (97)Disidentification offers a method to identify specific moments of imagination and disputation and moments of temporal and spatial disjunction. The most distinct example of the co-nature of imagination and disputation residing in the EWLY lifeworld is the persona of the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, as she intrudes into the everyday field of American life in a hanbok, such as a bar, a basketball court, and a convenience store. Gordon would call these moments “confrontational moments” (xvi). When performers don’t perform in ways they are supposed to perform, when they don’t operate objects in ways they are supposed to operate, when they don’t mobilise feelings in ways they are supposed to feel, they resist and disidentify with “the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology” (Muñoz 97).In addition to Muñoz’s disidentification and Gordon’s confrontational moments, I adopt an object-oriented approach to guide my analysis of disidentificatory ghostly performances. Object theory departs from objects and matters to rediscover identity and experience. My object-oriented approach follows new materialism more closely than object-oriented ontology because it is less about debating the ontology of Asian American experiences through the lens of objects. Instead, it is more about how re-orienting our attention towards the formation and operation of objecthood reveals and reconfigures the vexed articulation between Asian American experiences and racialised objectification. To this end, my oriented-object approach aligns particularly well with politically engaged frameworks such as Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Eunjung Kim’s ethics of objects.Taking an object-oriented approach in inquiring Asian American identities could be paradoxically intervening because “Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects” (Shomura). Furthermore, this objectification is doubly performed onto the bodies of Asian American women due to the Orientalist conflations of Asia as feminine (Huang 187). Therefore, applying object theory in the case of EWLY requires special attention to the interplay between subject- and object-hood and the line between objecthood and objectification. To avoid the risk of objectification when exploring the objecthood of ghostly matters, I caution against an objects-define-subjects chain of signification and instead suggest a subjects-operate-objects route of inquiry by attending to both the haunting effects of objects and how subjects mobilise such haunting effects in their performance. From a new materialist perspective, it is also important to disassociate problems of objectification from exploration of objecthood (Kim) while excavating the world-making abilities of objects (Bennett). For diasporic peoples, it means to see objects as affective and nostalgic vessels, such as toys, food, family photos, attire, and personal items (e.g., Oum), where traumas of displacement can be stored and rehearsed (Turan 54).What is revealing from a racialised subject-object relationship is what Christopher Bush calls “the ethnicity of things”: things can have ethnicity, an identification that hinges on the articulation that “thingliness can be constituted in ways analogous and related to structures of racialization” (85). This object-oriented approach to inquiry can expose the artificial nature of the affinity between Asian bodies and certain objects, behind which is a confession of naturalised racial order of signification. One way to disrupt this chain of signification is to excavate the haunting objects that disidentify with the norms of the present, that conjure up what the present wants to be done. This “something-to-be-done” characteristic is critical to acts of haunting (Gordon xvii). Such disruptive performances are what I term as “disidentificatory ghostly performances”, connecting the embodied objects with Gordon’s disembodied ghosts through the lens of Muñoz’s disidentificatory reading with a two-fold impact: first exposing such artificial affinity and then suggesting alternative ways of knowing.In what follows, I expand upon two haunting objects/ghostly matters: the manicured nails and the hanbok. I contend that Zauner operates these haunting objects to embody the “something-to-be-done” characteristic by curating uncomfortable, confrontational moments, where the constituted affinity between Koreanness/Asianness and anomaly is instantiated and unsettled in multiple snippets of the mundane post-racial, post-globalisation world.What Can the Korean Woman (Not) Do with Those Nails and in That Hanbok?The hanbok that Zauner wears throughout the music video might be the single most powerful haunting object in the story. This authentic hanbok belonged to Zauner’s late mother who wore it to her wedding. Dressing in the hanbok while navigating the nightlife, it becomes a mediated, trans-temporal experience for both Zauner and her mother. A ghostly journey, you could call it. The hanbok then becomes a ghostly matter that haunts both the Orientalist gaze and the grieving Zauner. This journey could be seen as a process of dealing with personal loss, a process of “reckoning with ghosts” (Gordon 190). The division between the personal and the public, the historical and the present cease to exist as linear and clear-cut forces. The important role of ghosts in the performance are the efforts of historicising and specifying the persona of the Korean woman, which is a strategy for minoritarian performers to resist “the pull of reductive multicultural pluralism” (Muñoz 147). These ghostly matters haunt a pluralist multiculturalist post-racial America that refuses to see minor specificities and historicity.The Korean woman in an authentic hanbok, coupled with other objects of Korean roots, such as a traditional hairdo and seemingly exotic makeup, may invite the Orientalist gaze or the assumption that Zauner is self-commodifying and self-fetishising Korean culture, risking what Cheng calls “Oriental female objectification” operating through “the lenses of commodity and sexual fetishism” (14). However, she “fails” to do any of these. The ways Zauner acts in the hanbok manifests a self-negotiation with her Korean identity through disidentificatory sensibilities with racial fetishism. For example, in various scenes, the Korean woman appears to be drunk in a bar, gorging a sandwich, shotgunning a beer, smoking in a restroom cubicle, messing with strangers in a basketball court, rocking on a truck, and falling asleep on a bench. Some may describe what she does as abnormal, discomforting, and even disgusting in a traditional Korean garment which is usually worn on formal occasions. The Korean woman not only subverts her traditional Koreanness but also disidentifies with what the Asian fetish requires of Asian bodies: obedient, well-behaved model minority or the hypersexualised dragon lady (e.g., Hsu; Shimizu). Zauner’s performance foregrounds the sentimental, the messy, the frenetic, the aggressive, and the carnivalesque as essential qualities and sensibilities of the Korean woman. These rarely visible figurations of Asian femininities speak to the normalised public disappearance of “unwanted” sides of Asian bodies.Wavering public disappearance is a crucial haunting effect. The public disappearance is an “organized system of repression” (Gordon 72) and a “state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission” (115). While the journey of EWLY evolves through ups and downs, the Korean woman does not maintain the ephemeral joy and takes offence at the people and surroundings now and then, such as at an arcade in the bar, at some basketball players, or at the audience or the camera operator. The performed disaffection and the conflicts substantiate a theory of “positive perversity” through which Asian American women claim the representation of their sexuality and desires (Shimizu), engendering a strong and visible presence of the ghostly matters operated by the Korean woman. This noticeable arrival of bodies disorients how things are arranged (Ahmed 163), revealing and disrupting whiteness, which functions as a habit and a background to actions (149). The confrontational performances of the encounters between Zauner and others cast a critique of the racial politics of disappearing by reifying disappearing into confrontational moments in the everyday post-racial world.What is also integral to Zauner’s antagonistic performance of wavering public disappearing and failure of “Oriental female objectification” is a punk strategy of negativity through an aesthetic of nihilism and a mediation of performing objects. For example, in addition to the traditional hairdo that goes with her makeup, Zauner also wears a nose ring; in addition to partying with a crowd, she adopts a moshing style of dancing, being carried over people’s heads in the hanbok. All these, in addition to her disaffectionate, aggressive, and impolite body language, express a negative punk aesthetics. Muñoz describes such a negative punk aesthetics as an energy that can be described “as chaotic, as creating a life without rhyme or reason, as quintessentially self-destructive” (97). What lies at the heart of this punk dystopia is the desire for “something else”, something “not the present time or place” (Muñoz). Through this desire for impossible time and place, utopian is reimagined, a race riot, in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s term.On the other hand, the manicured fingernails are also a major operating force, reminiscent of Korean American immigrant history along with the racialised labor relations that have marked Korean bodies as an alien anomaly (Liu). With “Japanese Breakfast” being written on the screen in neon pink with some dazzling effect, the music video begins in a warm tone. The story begins with Zauner selecting EWLY with her finger on a karaoke operation screen, the first of many shots on her carefully manicured nails, decorated with transparent nail extensions, sparkly ornaments, and hanging fine chains. These nails conjure up the nail salon business in the US that heavily depended on immigrant labor and Korean women immigrants have made significant economic contributions through the manicure business. In particular, differently from Los Angeles where nail salons have been predominantly Vietnamese and Chinese owned, Korean women immigrants in the 1980s were the first ones to open nail salons in New York City and led to the rapid growth of the business (Kang 51). The manicured nails first of all conjure up these recent histories associated with the nail salon business.Moreover, these fingernails haunt post-racial and post-globalisation America by revealing and subverting the invisible, normalised racial and ethnic nature of the labor and objects associated with fingernails cosmetic treatment. Ghostly matters inform “a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives” (Gordon xvii). They function as a reminder of the damage that seems forgotten or normalised in modern societies and as an alternative embodiment of what modern societies could have become. In the universe of EWLY, the fingernails become a forceful ghostly matter by reminding us of the damage done onto Korean bodies by fixing them as service performers instead customers. The nail salon business as performed by immigrant labor has been a business of “buying and selling of deference and attentiveness”, where white customers come to exercise their privilege while not wanting anything associated with Koreaness or Otherness (Kang 134). However, as a haunting force, the fingernails subvert such labor relations by acting as a versatile agent operating varied objects, such as a karaoke machine, cigarettes, a sandwich, a Fender guitar, and a can of beer. Through such operating, an alternative labor relation is formed. This alternative is not entirely without roots. As promoted in Japanese Breakfast’s Instagram (@jbrekkie), Zauner’s look was styled by a nail artist who appears to be a white female, Celeste Marie Welch from the DnA Salon based in Philadelphia. This is a snippet of a field that is now a glocalised industry, where the racial and gender makeup is more diverse. It is increasingly easier to see non-Asian and non-female nail salon workers, among whom white nail salon workers outnumbered any other non-Asian racial/ethnic groups (Preeti et al. 23). EWLY’s alternative worldmaking is not only a mere reflection of the changing makeup of an industry but also calling out the societal tendency of forgetting histories. To be haunted, as Gordon explains, is to be “tied to historical and social effects” (190). The ghostly matters of the manicure industry haunt its workers, artists, consumers, and businesspeople of a past that prescribes racialised labor divisions, consumption relations, and the historical and social effects inflicted on the Othered bodies. Performing with the manicured nails, Zauner challenges now supposedly multicultural manicure culture by fusing oppositional, trans-temporal identities into the persona of the Korean woman. Not only does she conjure up the racialised labor relations as the child of a Korean mother, she also disidentifies with the worker identity of early Korean women immigrants as a consumer who receives service from an artist who would otherwise never perform such labor in the past.Conclusion: Toward a Disidentificatory Ghostly PerformanceThis essay suggests seeing the disidentificatory ghostly performance of the Korean woman as an artistic incarnation of her lived Othering experience, which Zauner may or may not navigate on an everyday basis. As Zauner lives through what looks like a typical Friday night in an American town, the journey represents an interrogation of the present and the past. When the ghostly matters move through public spaces – when she drinks in a bar, walks down the street, and parties with a crowd – the Korean woman neither conforms to what she is expected to do in a hanbok nor does she get fully assimilated into this American nightlife.Derrida avers that haunting, repression, and hegemony are structurally interlocked and that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because “hegemony still organizes the repression” (46). This is why the creative capacity of disidentificatory performances is crucial for acts of haunting and for historically repressed groups of people. 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Introduction “Patterns are everywhere”, design researcher Anuradha Reddy told her virtual audience at the 2023 speaker series hosted by Brilliant Labs, a Canadian non-profit focussed on experiential digital learning and coding (Brilliant Labs / Labos Créatifs). Like other technology fora, this public-facing series offered designers an opportunity to highlight the accessibility of code. But unlike many such fora, Reddy’s code was worn on the body. Sitting at the now-standard webinar lectern, Reddy shared a flurry of images and contexts as she introduced a garment she called b00b, a bra that she created in 2021 to probe the encoding of more than aesthetic possibility. Her presentation included knotted motifs of Andean Quipus; symbolic arcs of Chinese Pan Chang knots; geometric transformations of African American cornrow hairstyles (Eglash and Bennett, Brilliant Labs / Labos Créatifs). She followed the patterned imagery with questions of uncertainty that are often central for design researchers like her. Facing what might be a possible swipe, tap, or otherwise engagement, a technologist cannot fully determine what a user does. But they can “nudge”, a term popularised by behavioral economists Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein in 2008 and later propagated within technoscientific discourses on risk (see Duffy and Thorson; Rossi et al.; Thaler and Sunstein). Adjacent bodies of scholarship frame the related concept of trust as a form of compliance (Adam et al.; Gass and Seiter). The more trustworthy an interface, the more likely a user is to comply. Rooted in social-psychological precepts, this line of scholarship frames trust less as a condition than a perception. When a user trusts an indicator light, for example, an app is more likely to see increased acceptance and engagement. Reddy approaches trust from and with b00b, an emphatically intimate (soft, pliable, textile) artifact. “How do we use these … perspectives to deal with uncertainty and things we do not know yet in the future?”, Reddy asks her Brilliant Labs audience (Brilliant Labs / Labos Créatifs). To make this argument, I examine Reddy’s b00b in conversation with a legacy feminist textile performance that brings questions of embodiment (and embodied trust) to an ostensibly disembodied technocratic scene. b00b is a decorative bra that emulates two-factor authentication, or what Reddy calls “b00b factor authentication.” The bra uses its two cups to verify a user’s access to a Website describing the project. With this interaction, the bra is self-referential—asking users to unlock a link that brings them back to someone’s chest. In practice, b00b asks users to scan a bra cup that relies on scanning the companion bra cup for a second passcode. Rather than messaging users, an initial passcode that triggers a second passcode sent by text message, the engagement requires bodily proximity. The bra cups take the place of electronic media (such as the text message) so that a close encounter with the bra enlivens digital trust. Under these circumstances, a trusted user becomes a risk-taker—gaining access while transgressing personal boundaries. In the sections that follow, I thread conversations on digital and algorithmic trustworthiness with critiques of trust and compliance that pervade Reddy’s 2021 handmade experiment. To date, technology analysts tend to treat trust as a perception: feelings of confidence in a person or thing (Gilkson and Woolley). As Natasha Schüll notes, a user might trust a slot machine but might miss its implications for further (and potentially excessive) gambling. Additionally, media scholars such as Evgeny Morozov have since mapped this addiction principle within social media development, pointing to a familiar science of incentive structures, gamification dashboards, and behaviour-change techniques, each designed to raise user engagement and keep people in apps longer. Thinking with Reddy’s work, I argue that trust can reveal an embodied desire, something momentarily felt and differentially shared (see also Gregg; Sharma; Irani). Reddy frames the weft of woven material as code, the purl and knit stitches of knitting as binary, and the knots of rope as algorithms. She urges her audience to see fabric as a means of challenging common assumptions about technology. With needles and thread, she proffers algorithmic trust as a relational ethics. In Technology We Trust From a design perspective, trust grows from the strategic balancing of risk and uncertainty (Cheshire). Users who find a digital feature reliable or trustworthy are more likely to grow their engagement and convince others to join in (Hancock et al.). In a recent analysis of the overlapping dynamics of algorithmic trust and bias, communication and information scholars Jeff Hancock, Mor Namaan, and Karen Levy (95) argue that machine learning tools such as the Chrome extension Just Not Sorry often replicate bias within training data. The extension disproportionately alerts femme users when they use qualifying words like “sorry”, and “I think”. In ​​other contexts, Hancock and colleagues suggest, an AI-aided tool may help mitigate interpersonal biases since if it “imparts signals of trustworthiness between peer-based social exchange partners, these countervailing cues may neutralise stereotypes that would otherwise impede the transaction” (ibid). Here, the signal of trustworthiness holds the promise of accountability. But because the signals focus on cognition (manipulating an individual’s perceptions), what they refer to and how they may alleviate harms caused by entrenched cultural bias remains less clear. Grounded in social-psychological tenets, technology analysts codify trust as the relationship between two primary concepts: risk and uncertainty. As information scholar Coye Chesire (50) explains, “trust is not simply the absence of risk and uncertainty. More accurately, trust is a complex human response to situations that are rife with risk and uncertainty”. Through a range of controlled methods including observations, self-reports, survey questions, and the experimental conditions of a lab study, researchers measure the trustworthiness of user interface features as assessments of risk and uncertainty that explain differing motivations for use and disengagement. For example, design researcher Nick Merrill’s and Cheshire’s study of heart rate monitors finds that listening to an acquaintance's normal heart rate can lead to negative trust-related assessments in challenging contexts such as waiting to meet the acquaintance about a legal dispute. Parallel work by Hancock and colleagues uses self-reports and large-scale experiments on platforms like Facebook to map the significance of AI-enabled curation features like news feeds (Hancock et al.). As a psychological state, trustworthiness tends to indicate a behavioral metric that can be numerically encoded and individually addressed. By measuring trust-infused dimensions of user activity, analysts seek to systematically identify new ways of scaffolding trust-building behaviour by manipulating perception (Hancock, Namaan, and Levy), ultimately convincing a user to comply. A core goal is to maximise participation. The US government applied these principles to mass data collection and dissemination efforts during national census such as the COVID response (Halpern). But a secondary effect grows from the political-economic dimensions of user experience. Through compliance, users become easier to place, measure, count, and amend—a process Michelle Murphy names the economisation of life. When people’s certainty in interpersonal relationships grows, “the source of uncertainty then shifts to the assurance system, thereby making trustworthiness and reliability of the institution or organisation the salient relationship” (Cheshire 54). For instance, we may trust people in our text messages because we meet them face to face and put their numbers in our phones. But once we trust them, this assurance moves to our social media service or cellular phone provider. The service that manages our contacts also preserves the integrity of our contacts, such as when a messaging platform like WhatsApp automatically updates a cell phone number without our knowledge or explicit consent. Conversely, feelings of assurance in a digital interface feature may dwindle with decreased feelings of assurance by a platform. Until November 2022, users may have trusted someone with a blue checkmark on Twitter more than someone without one, even if they did not trust them at an interpersonal level. But with a chaotic acquisition that, according to a Washington Post report (Weatherbed), led to shifting check mark meanings and colours, this assurance grew more complicated. Murphy (24) might call these quantitative practices enriched with affect the “phantasmagrams” of rationalised assurance. Like a check mark that may or may not index a particular measure of confidence, excitement or worry, these shifting dynamics reveal the “trust and belief that animates numbers” (52). A less considered outcome of this framing is how individuated expressions of distrust (situations that foster psychological and physiological concern, skepticism, or fear for a single person) overshadow its complement: non-unconditional expressions of care. How might a user interface foster networks of connection for self and community? As Anna Lauren Hoffmann suggests, efforts to thwart algorithmic discrimination undergird this conundrum—“mirroring some of antidiscrimination discourse’s most problematic tendencies” (901). The particular value placed on trust often proceeds quick-fix techniques such as multi-factor authentication and cryptography that reduce trust to a neutral transaction (see Ashoori, et al.). In this discussion, design researchers have only begun to conceive trust (and distrust) as a deeply embodied process. Looks, Cuts, and Scans Reddy’s b00b invites audiences to explore embodied positioning. Sitting on a static mannequin, the garment invites audience members to engage the handiwork laid atop its breasts. In video documentation (Reddy), Reddy holds up a phone to a mannequin wearing the bra. She touches the phone to the mannequin’s right nipple, and the phone screen opens a Web browser with a password-protected field. As Reddy moves the phone to the mannequin’s left nipple, the phone shares the password ‘banjara,’ a reference to the community from which the embroidery techniques derive. The password opens a Website full of descriptive text and imagery detailing this material reference. In this interaction, b00b joins a movement of artistic work that uses textile artifacts to frame boundaries of self and other as porous and shifting. Consider Nam June Paik’s 1969 TV Bra for Living Sculpture. Across the 1970s, Charlotte Moorman performed the work by playing cello while wearing a transparent brassiere with two miniature television screens mounted on her chest (Paik; Rothfuss). As Moorman played her cello, wires connecting the cello to the two television sets sent sonic signals to the video that manipulate its imagery. Moorman’s instrumentation controlled the visuals displayed on the screens, inviting audience members to come closer to the electronic garment and her body—or, as Joan Rothfuss explains, “never mind that the bra actually encouraged prurience by compelling spectators to stare at [Moorman’s] breasts” (243). TV Bra invited its audience to breach conventional limits of closeness and contact much like users of b00b. Yoko Ono’s celebrated Cut Piece has sparked a similar prurience. During the work Ono dressed in some of her finest clothes and invites audience members to walk on stage and shear away pieces of fabric. Notably documented in the Albert and David Maysles film of Ono’s 1965 Carnegie Hall performance, the audience leaves Ono’s body nearly fully exposed at the performance’s end, save for her arms holding remaining pieces of fabric. With scissors in hand, the performance threatens imminent danger—inspiring snickers, pause, and discomforting ease among audience members eager to participate. Cut Piece encourages the audience to disregard consent and expose a certain breach of trust, practice mirrored with b00b. In this process of cutting cloth, often on the bias (or on a slanted angle; see Benabdallah, et al.; Rosner), feminist performance works have long prompted audiences to trouble the intimate relationship between themselves and the performer. As Vivian Huang has deftly argued, Ono’s shredded fabrics are more than neutral inconveniences; they also hint at whatever racialised and gendered feelings of trust might or might not exist between Ono and her audience. “If Orientalist conflations of the East with femininity have in turn sexualized Asian women as simultaneously hypersexual and submissive”, Haung contends, “then how can we as viewers and readers performatively read Asian femininity in a different, and not anti-relational, orientation to hospitality?” (187). b00b asks a similar question with systems of verification. Examining this possibility, Peggy Kyoungwon Lee recently puts Cut Piece in conversation with the contemporary media art of Lisa Park, and notes that “Ono’s signature composure both enacts and challenges archetypes of the feminized Asian body: cognitive efficiency, durability, calculative emotionality, docility, passivity” (54). For Lee, Cut Piece continues to open pathways for interpretation by diverting audience members from the compliance arguments above. Where algorithmic trust further complicates the making of trust with an added layer of uncertainty (is this made by an algorithm or is this not?), Cut Piece and TV Bra see in and through uncertainty to recentre a relational ethics. This concern for the relationality endures in Reddy’s b00b. To fashion the near-field communication (NFC) cards, Reddy draws from Banjara embroidery, a heritage craft technique featured in her home city of Hyderbad (Telangana). Like Banjara, b00b incorporates varied accessories (mirrors, tassels, shells) with colourful pattern. She embellishes the bra with lively zig-zagging embroidery, fashioning each nipple with a mirror that expertly doubles as an NFT tag hidden behind the embroidery. Garments like Ono’s, Paik and Moorman’s, and now Reddy’s, share an understanding that technology can and should reflect a certain felt complexity. At the Brilliant Labs event, Reddy presents b00b to conference-goers invested in shared hardware design specification standards. Across the 48-minute presentation, b00b interrupts the audience's presumed intentions. As Elizabeth Goodman has argued, hackers and tech enthusiasts interested in schematics, wireframes, and other digital drawings often prioritise formats that anyone can examine, adapt, use, and circulate by overlooking their situated social and political stakes. In the theatrical setting of a tech forum, b00b’s fabric draws attention to the body—manoeuvring the (often white Western) gaze around femme Asian subjectivities and questioning proximities between one body and another. Through its embodied relationality, real or imagined, b00b shares a concern for reimagining trust within mechanisms of control. b00b is Reddy’s attempt at generative justice, a concept of inclusive making she calls part of “bringing the Open Hardware community closer to heritage craft communities” (Reddy). In documentation, she discusses the geopolitical conditions of NFC-based authentication that relies on intimate connection as a means of state-led coercion and control. Situating her work in contemporary trust politics, she describes the Aadhar biometric identification system designed to compel Indian residents to record biometric data through iris scans, fingerprints, and photographs in exchange for a unique identity number (Dixon). She writes that systems like Aadhar “make minority communities more vulnerable to being identified, classified, and policed by powerful social actors” (Dixon). Wearing b00b challenges efforts to root NFC transactions in similar carceral and colonial logics. With an intimate scan, a user or audience makes room for counter-expressions of dis/trust. Sitting across from Reddy during a recent Zoom conference, I felt the tug of this work. With the piece modelled on a mannequin in the background, it reminded me of the homegrown techno-armour worn throughout Friedrichshain, a lively neighborhood in the former eastern part of Berlin. For the onlooker, the bra incites not only intrigue but also a careful engagement; or what Reddy names the “need to actively participate in conveying trust and intimacy with the bra’s wearer”. I couldn't help but wonder what an attendee at the Open Hardware Summit might make of the work. Would they bristle at the intimacy, or would they—like Ono’s audiences—cut in? On the surface, b00b presents a playful counterpoint to the dominant narrative of technology as slick, neutral, and disembodied. By foregrounding the tactile, handmade qualities of electronic media, Reddy’s work suggests we reconsider the boundaries between physical and digital worlds to complicate readings of computational risk. She is taking a highly technical process typically used for practical applications like finance, online identity, or other well-defined authentication problems, and enlivening it. The garment invites her audience to appreciate two-factor encryption as something intimate—both in an abstract sense and in a resolutely embodied sense. By defamiliarising digital trust, Reddy calls attention to its absurdity. How can a term like “trust” (associated with intimacy and mutual concern) also denote the extractive politics of algorithmic control (the verification of a user, the assessment of risk, the escalating manipulation of use)? Look closer at b00b, and the focus on authentication offers something specific for our ideas of algorithmic trust. Reddy turns a computational process into an extension of the body, registering a distinctly affective intrusion within the digital codification of assurance and accountability. Working with interaction design in the tradition of feminist performance, b00b directs our digital gaze back toward the embodied. Toward a Relational Ethics of Trust Fabric artifacts like b00b have long challenged digital scholars to consider questions of uncertainty and accountability. From what counts as computational, to whose labour gets recognised as innovative, woven material sparks a particular performance of risk. As Lisa Nakamura (933) shrewdly observes, gendered and racialised “traits” associated with textiles tend to fuel technological production, casting women of colour as the ideal digital workers. Looking to transnational flows connected with making, Silvia Lindnter argues that these stereotypes bring strategic meanings to feminised Asian bodies that naturalise their role within digital economies. Whose bodies get associated with fabric (through making, repair, consumption, aesthetics) reflects deep-seated stratifications within the masculine history of computing—with seemingly few possibilities for circumvention. If trust works as a felt condition, digital developments might more fully honour that condition. Bringing textile possibilities to NFTs suggests examining how authentication systems work on and through the body, even without touch. It is in this reciprocal encounter between content and user, audience and performer, textile and algorithm that something like a bra can hint at a profound ethics of connection. Reddy’s work reveals the consensual contact that can meaningfully shape who and how we digitally trust. While this essay has focussed on trust, I want to end with a brief consideration of the way a textile—in this case a conceptual and maybe even ontoepistemic (da Silva) artifact—brings the status of users closer to that of audience members. It begins to weave an analytic thread between the orientations, capacities, and desires of performance and design. Across this connection, b00b’s design works as minoritarian performance, as Jasmine Mahmoud (after José Esteban Muñoz) describes: a practice that “centers performance—as an object of study, a method, and theoretical container—as a means of centering minortized knowledge”. As minoritarian knowledge, the embroidered NFT expands Rozsika Parker’s profound insight into the subversive power of needlecraft. As Julia Bryan-Wilson (6) observes, “accounting for textiles—objects that are in close physical contact with us at virtually every minute of the day—demands alternative methodologies, ones that extend from shared bodily knowledge”. For digital scholars, b00b opens a similar possibility under racial technocapitalism. It asks us to notice how an indicator light on an AI-trained surveillance camera, for instance, does not map to an engaged or disaffected condition for an over-monitored user. It registers the need for probing relationships that underlie those tools—relationships between workers and employers, between non-users and corporate platforms, between differentially marked bodies. It challenges the reduction of trust dynamics into individualised or universalised motivations. To trust and be trusted with thread opens the possibility of algorithmic re-embodiment. Acknowledgements I’m grateful to insightful comments and suggestions from Anuradha Reddy, Amanda Doxtater, Scott Magelssen, Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud, Adair Rounthwaite, Anne Searcy, James Pierce, and the anonymous reviewers of the current M/C Journal issue. References Adam, Martin, Michael Wessel, and Alexander Benlian. "AI-Based Chatbots in Customer Service and Their Effects on User Compliance." 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Introduction In the wake of the disaster of World War I, the Surrealists formulated a hostile critique of the novel that identified its limitations in expressing the depth of the mind's faculties and the fragmentation of the psyche after catastrophic events. From this position of crisis, the Surrealists undertook a series of experimental innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. This article examines how the praxis of shock is deployed in a number of Surrealist city novels as a conduit for revolt against a society that grew increasingly mechanised in the climate of post-war regeneration. It seeks to counter the contemporary view that Surrealist city dérives (drifts) represent an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research. By reconsidering its origins in response to a world catastrophe, this article emphasises the Surrealist novel’s binding of the affective properties of shock to the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of the political position of Surrealism. The Surrealist City Novel Today it has almost become a truism to assert that there is a causal link between the catastrophic devastation wrought by the events of the two World Wars and the ideology of rupture that characterised the iconoclasms of the Modernist avant-gardes. Yet, as we progress into the twenty-first century, it is timely to recognise that new generations are rediscovering canonical and peripheral texts of this era and refracting them through a prism of contemporary preoccupations. In many ways, the revisions of today’s encounters with that past era suggest we have travelled some distance from the rawness of such catastrophic events. One post-war body of work recently subjected to view via an unexpected route is the remarkable array of Surrealist city novels set in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, representing a spectrum of experimental texts by such authors as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, and Michel Leiris. Over the past decade, these works have become recuperated in the Anglophone context as exemplary instances of ludic engagement with the city. This is due in large part to the growing surge of interest in psychogeography, an urban research method concerned with the influence that geographical environments exert over the emotions and behaviours of individuals, and a concern for tracing the literary genealogies of walking and writing in broad sweeping encyclopaedic histories and guidebook style accounts (for prominent examples see Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography). Yet as Surrealist novels continue to garner renewed interest for their erotic intrigue, their strolling encounters with the unconscious or hidden facets of the city, and as precursors to the apparently more radical practice of Situationist psychogeography, this article suggests that something vital is missing. By neglecting the revolutionary significance that the Surrealists placed upon the street and its inextricable connection to the shock of the marvellous, I suggest that we have arrived at a point of diminished appreciation of the praxis of the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of Surrealist politics. With the movement firmly lodged in the popular imagination as concerned merely with the art of play and surprise, the Surrealists’ sensorial conception of the city as embedded within a much larger critique of the creators of “a sterile and dead world” (Rasmussen 372) is lost. This calls into question to what extent we can now relate to the urgency with which avant-gardes like the Surrealists responded to the disaster of war in their call for “the revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and released the fantastic” (372). At the same time, a re-evaluation of the Surrealist city novel as a significant precursor to the psychogeograhical dérive (drift) can prove instructive in locating the potential of walking, in order to function as a form of praxis (defined here as lived practice in opposition to theory) that goes beyond its more benign construction as the “gentle art” of getting lost. The Great Shock To return to the origins of Surrealism is to illuminate the radical intentions of the movement. The enormous shock that followed the Great War represented, according to Roger Shattuck, “a profound organic reaction that convulsed the entire system with vomiting, manic attacks, and semi-collapse” (9). David Gascoyne considers 1919, the inaugural year of Surrealist activity, as “a year of liquidation, the end of everything but also of paroxysmic death-birth, incubating seeds of renewal” (17). It was at this time that André Breton and his collaborator Philippe Soupault came together at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in Paris to conduct their early experimental research. As the authors took poetic license with the psychoanalytical method of automatic writing, their desire to unsettle the latent content of the unconscious as it manifests in the spontaneous outpourings of dream-like recollections resulted in the first collection of Surrealist texts, The Magnetic Fields (1920). As Breton recalls: Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar with his methods of examination which I had had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought. (Breton, Manifesto 22–23) Despite their debts to psychoanalytical methods, the Surrealists sought radically different ends from therapeutic goals in their application. Rather than using analysis to mitigate the pathologies of the psyche, Breton argued that such methods should instead be employed to liberate consciousness in ways that released the individual from “the reign of logic” (Breton, Manifesto 11) and the alienating forces of a mechanised society. In the same manifesto, Breton links his critique to a denunciation of the novel, principally the realist novel which dominated the literary landscape of the nineteenth-century, for its limitations in conveying the power of the imagination and the depths of the mind’s faculties. Despite these protestations, the Surrealists were unable to completely jettison the novel and instead launched a series of innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. As J.H. Matthews suggests, “Being then, as all creative surrealism must be, the expression of a mood of experimentation, the Surrealist novel probes not only the potentialities of feeling and imagination, but also those of novelistic form” (Matthews 6). When Nadja appeared in 1928, Breton was not the first Surrealist to publish a novel. However, this work remains the most well-known example of its type in the Anglophone context. Largely drawn from the author’s autobiographical experiences, it recounts the narrator’s (André’s) obsessive infatuation with a mysterious, impoverished and unstable young woman who goes by the name of Nadja. The pair’s haunted and uncanny romance unfolds during their undirected walks, or dérives, through the streets of Paris, the city acting as an affective register of their encounters. The “intellectual seduction” comes to an abrupt halt (Breton, Nadja 108), however, when Nadja does in fact go truly mad, disappearing from the narrator’s life when she is committed to an asylum. André makes no effort to seek her out and after launching into a diatribe vehemently attacking the institutions that administer psychiatric treatment, nonchalantly resumes the usual concerns of his everyday life. At a formal level, Breton’s unconventional prose indeed stirs many minor shocks and tremors in the reader. The insertion of temporally off-kilter photographs and surreal drawings are intended to supersede naturalistic description. However, their effect is to create a form of “negative indexicality” (Masschelein) that subtly undermines the truth claims of the novel. Random coincidences charged through with the attractive force of desire determine the plot while the compressed dream-like narrative strives to recount only those facts of “violently fortuitous character” (Breton, Nadja 19). Strikingly candid revelations perpetually catch the reader off guard. But it is in the novel’s treatment of the city, most specifically, in which we can recognise the evolution of Surrealism’s initial concern for the radically subversive and liberatory potential of the dream into a form of praxis that binds the shock of the marvellous to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. This praxis unfolds in the novel on a number of levels. By placing its events firmly at the level of the street, Breton privileges the anti-heroic realm of everyday life over the socially hierarchical domain of the bourgeois domestic interior favoured in realist literature. More significantly, the sites of the city encountered in the novel act as repositories of collective memory with the power to rupture the present. As Margaret Cohen comprehensively demonstrates in her impressive study Profane Illumination, the great majority of sites that the narrator traverses in Nadja reveal connections in previous centuries to instances of bohemian activity, violent insurrection or revolutionary events. The enigmatic statue of Étienne Dolet, for example, to which André is inexplicably drawn on his city walks and which produces a sensation of “unbearable discomfort” (25), commemorates a sixteenth-century scholar and writer of love poetry condemned as a heretic and burned at the Place Maubert for his non-conformist attitudes. When Nadja is suddenly gripped by hallucinations and imagines herself among the entourage of Marie-Antoinette, “multiple ghosts of revolutionary violence descend on the Place Dauphine from all sides” (Cohen 101). Similarly, a critique of capitalism emerges in the traversal of those marginal and derelict zones of the city, such as the Saint-Ouen flea market, which become revelatory of the historical cycles of decay and ruination that modernity seeks to repress through its faith in progress. It was this poetic intuition of the machinations of historical materialism, in particular, that captured the attention of Walter Benjamin in his 1929 “Surrealism” essay, in which he says of Breton that: He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”—in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. (210) In the same passage, Benjamin makes passing reference to the Passage de l’Opéra, the nineteenth-century Parisian arcade threatened with demolition and eulogised by Louis Aragon in his Surrealist anti-novel Paris Peasant (published in 1926, two years earlier than Nadja). Loosely structured around a series of walks, Aragon’s book subverts the popular guidebook literature of the period by inventorying the arcade’s quotidian attractions in highly lyrical and imagistic prose. As in Nadja, a concern for the “outmoded” underpins the praxis which informs the politics of the novel although here it functions somewhat differently. As transitional zones on the cusp of redevelopment, the disappearing arcades attract Aragon for their liminal status, becoming malleable dreamscapes where an ontological instability renders them ripe for eruptions of the marvellous. Such sites emerge as “secret repositories of several modern myths,” and “the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral”. (Aragon 14) City as Dreamscape Contemporary literature increasingly reads Paris Peasant through the lens of psychogeography, and not unproblematically. In his brief guide to psychogeography, British writer Merlin Coverley stresses Aragon’s apparent documentary or ethnographical intentions in describing the arcades. He suggests that the author “rails against the destruction of the city” (75), positing the novel as “a handbook for today’s breed of psychogeographer” (76). The nuances of Aragon’s dream-awakening dialectic, however, are too easily effaced in such an assessment which overlooks the novel’s vertiginous and hyperbolic prose as it consistently approaches an unreality in its ambivalent treatment of the arcades. What is arguably more significant than any documentary concern is Aragon’s commitment to the broader Surrealist quest to transform reality by undermining binary oppositions between waking life and the realm of dreams. As Hal Foster’s reading of the arcades in Surrealism insists: This gaze is not melancholic; the surrealists do not cling obsessively to the relics of the nineteenth-century. Rather it uncovers them for the purposes of resistance through re-enchantment. If we can grasp this dialectic of ruination, recovery, and resistance, we will grasp the intimated ambition of the surrealist practice of history. (166) Unlike Aragon, Breton defended the political position of Surrealism throughout the ebbs and flows of the movement. This notion of “resistance through re-enchantment” retained its significance for Breton as he clung to the radical importance of dreams and the imagination, creative autonomy, and individual freedom over blind obedience to revolutionary parties. Aragon’s allegiance to communism led him to surrender the poetic intoxications of Surrealist prose in favour of the more sombre and austere tone of social realism. By contrast, other early Surrealists like Philippe Soupault contributed novels which deployed the praxis of shock in a less explicitly dialectical fashion. Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris (1928), in particular, responds to the influence of the war in producing a crisis of identity among a generation of young men, a crisis projected or transferred onto the city streets in ways that are revelatory of the author’s attunement to how “places and environment have a profound influence on memory and imagination” (Soupault 91). All the early Surrealists served in the war in varying capacities. In Soupault’s case, the writer “was called up in 1916, used as a guinea pig for a new typhoid vaccine, and spent the rest of the war in and out of hospital. His close friend and cousin, René Deschamps, was killed in action” (Read 22). Memories of the disaster of war assume a submerged presence in Soupault’s novel, buried deep in the psyche of the narrator. Typically, it is the places and sites of the city that act as revenants, stimulating disturbing memories to drift back to the surface which then suffuse the narrator in an atmosphere of melancholy. During the novel’s numerous dérives, the narrator’s detective-like pursuit of his elusive love-object, the young streetwalker Georgette, the tracking of her near-mute artist brother Octave, and the following of the ringleader of a criminal gang, all appear as instances of compensation. Each chase invokes a desire to recover a more significant earlier loss that persistently eludes the narrator. When Soupault’s narrator shadows Octave on a walk that ventures into the city’s industrial zone, recollections of the disaster of war gradually impinge upon his aleatory perambulations. His description evokes two men moving through the trenches together: The least noise was a catastrophe, the least breath a great terror. We walked in the eternal mud. Step by step we sank into the thickness of night, lost as if forever. I turned around several times to look at the way we had come but night alone was behind us. (80) In an article published in 2012, Catherine Howell identifies Last Nights of Paris as “a lyric celebration of the city as spectacle” (67). At times, the narrator indeed surrenders himself to the ocular pleasures of modernity. Observing the Eiffel Tower, he finds delight in “indefinitely varying her silhouette as if I were examining her through a kaleidoscope” (Soupault 30). Yet it is important to stress the role that shock plays in fissuring this veneer of spectacle, especially those evocations of the city that reveal an unnerving desensitisation to the more violent manifestations of the metropolis. Reading a newspaper, the narrator remarks that “the discovery of bags full of limbs, carefully sawed and chopped up” (23) signifies little more than “a commonplace crime” (22). Passing the banks of the Seine provokes “recollection of an evening I had spent lying on the parapet of the Pont Marie watching several lifesavers trying in vain to recover the body of an unfortunate suicide” (10). In his sensitivity to the unassimilable nature of trauma, Soupault intuits a phenomenon which literary trauma theory argues profoundly limits the text’s claim to representation, knowledge, and an autonomous subject. In this sense, Soupault appears less committed than Breton to the idea that the after-effects of shock might be consciously distilled into a form of praxis. Yet this prolongation of an unintegrated trauma still posits shock as a powerful vehicle to critique a society attempting to heal its wounds without addressing their underlying causes. This is typical of Surrealism’s efforts to “dramatize the physical and psychological trauma of a war that everyone wanted to forget so that it would not be swept away too quickly” (Lyford 4). Woman and Radical Madness In her 2007 study, Surrealist Masculinities, Amy Lyford focuses upon the regeneration and nation building project that characterised post-war France and argues that Surrealist tactics sought to dismantle an official discourse that promoted ideals of “robust manhood and female maternity” (4). Viewed against this backdrop, the trope of madness in Surrealism is central to the movement’s disruptive strategies. In Last Nights of Paris, a lingering madness simmers beneath the surface of the text like an undertow, while in other Surrealist texts the lauding of madness, specifically female hysteria, is much more explicit. Indeed, the objectification of the madwoman in Surrealism is among the most problematic aspects of its praxis of shock and one that raises questions over to what extent, if at all, Surrealism and feminism can be reconciled, leading some critics to define the movement as inherently misogynistic. While certainly not unfounded, this critique fails to answer why a broad spectrum of women artists have been drawn to the movement. By contrast, a growing body of work nuances the complexities of the “blinds spots” (Lusty 2) in Surrealism’s relationship with women. Contemporary studies like Natalya Lusty’s Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Katharine Conley’s earlier Automatic Woman both afford greater credit to Surrealism’s female practitioners in redefining their subject position in ways that trouble and unsettle the conventional understanding of women’s role in the movement. The creative and self-reflexive manipulation of madness, for example, proved pivotal to the achievements of Surrealist women. In her short autobiographical novella, Down Below (1944), Leonora Carrington recounts the disturbing true experience of her voyage into madness sparked by the internment of her partner and muse, fellow Surrealist Max Ernst, in a concentration camp in 1940. Committed to a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Carrington was treated with the seizure inducing drug Cardiazol. Her text presents a startling case study of therapeutic maltreatment that is consistent with Bretonian Surrealism’s critique of the use of psycho-medical methods for the purposes of regulating and disciplining the individual. As well as vividly recalling her intense and frightening hallucinations, Down Below details the author’s descent into a highly paranoid state which, somewhat perversely, heightens her sense of agency and control over her environment. Unable to discern boundaries between her internal reality and that of the external world, Carrington develops a delusional and inflated sense of her ability to influence the city of Madrid: In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring that digestive organ to health […] I believed that I was capable of bearing that dreadful weight and of drawing from it a solution for the world. The dysentery I suffered from later was nothing but the illness of Madrid taking shape in my intestinal tract. (12–13) In this way, Carrington’s extraordinarily visceral memoir embodies what can be described as the Surrealist woman’s “double allegiance” (Suleiman 5) to the praxis of shock. On the one hand, Down Below subversively harnesses the affective qualities of madness in order to manifest textual disturbances and to convey the author’s fierce rebellion against societal constraints. At the same time, the work reveals a more complex and often painful representational struggle inherent in occupying the position of both the subject experiencing madness and the narrator objectively recalling its events, displaying a tension not present in the work of the male Surrealists. The memoir concludes on an ambivalent note as Carrington describes finally becoming “disoccultized” of her madness, awakening to “the mystery with which I was surrounded and which they all seemed to take pleasure in deepening around me” (53). Notwithstanding its ambivalence, Down Below typifies the political and historical dimensions of Surrealism’s struggle against internal and external limits. Yet as early as 1966, Surrealist scholar J.H. Matthews was already cautioning against reaching that point where the term Surrealist “loses any meaning and becomes, as it is for too many, synonymous with ‘strange,’ ‘weird,’ or even ‘fanciful’” (5–6). To re-evaluate the praxis of shock in the Surrealist novel, then, is to seek to reinstate Surrealism as a movement that cannot be reduced to vague adjectives or to mere aesthetic principles. It is to view it as an active force passionately engaged with the pressing social, cultural, and political problems of its time. While the frequent nods to Surrealist methods in contemporary literary genealogies and creative urban research practices such as psychogeography are a testament to its continued allure, the growing failure to read Surrealism as political is one of the more contradictory symptoms of the expanding temporal distance from the catastrophic events from which the movement emerged. As it becomes increasingly common to draw links between disaster, creativity, and renewal, the shifting sands of the reception of Surrealism are a reminder of the need to resist domesticating movements born from such circumstances in ways that blunt their critical faculties and dull the awakening power of their praxis of shock. To do otherwise is to be left with little more than cheap thrills. References Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant (1926). Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929). Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part I, 1927–1930. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P, 2005. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1990. ———. Nadja (1928). Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove P, 1960. 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