Literatura científica selecionada sobre o tema "Discarding so books"

Discarding the unreliable late evidence for the Library of Alexandria in the Hellenistic period, I establish a new history of libraries and books on more secure primary sources. Beginning in the second century BCE at various places across the eastern Mediterranean, rich, powerful men began to sponsor collections of books. These new public displays of aristocratic and royal munificence (euergetism) so transcended earlier holdings of books—which had been small, vocational, and private—that in an important sense they constitute the invention of the library. As political institutions, these libraries depended on a revaluation of books, treating them as valuable irrespective of their content, and in various domains people increasingly attended to books as formal objects. Romans accelerated the pace and scope of this biblio-political revolution and extended the revaluation of books, transformations which gave a deeply anachronistic imprint to the frequently cited late stories about Hellenistic libraries.

Abstrak Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui fungsi manajemen kompetensi pedagogi guru bagi guru bahasa arab Kulliyatul Muallimin Islamiyah Pondok Pesantren Tamirul Islam Surakarta Tahun 2019. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode pendekatan penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Teknik pengumpulan data yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah wawancara, observasi, dan dokumentasi. wawancara dilakukan secara santai, penuh keakraban sehingga akan mampu memperoleh informasi sebanyak mungkin dan tidak terkesan kaku secara jujur dan detail. observasi ini peneliti dapat memperoleh informasi, mengetahui dan mengamati secara langsung tentang aktivitas guru bahasa arab yang berkaitan dengan fungsi manajemen pada kompetensi pedagogi guru bahasa arab. Metode dokumentasi ini mendapatkan data pembelajaran yang meliputi silabus dan RPP berupa buku acuan dan foto-foto pembelajaran dan pada waktu wawancara. Subyek penelitian sebanyak 6 responden, menggunakan teknik snow boll dan dilakukan secara acak (random sampling). Data penelitian yang terkumpul di analisis dengan menggunakan teknik pendekatan penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Tujuan penelitian merupakan target yang ingin dicapai melalui kegiatan penelitian. Sesuai dengan pokok permasalahan, Penelitian deskriptif kualitatif menggunakan desain yang secara terus-menerus disesuaikan dengan kenyataan lapangan. Metode pengumpulan data dengan metode observasi, interview, pedoman wawancara, dan dokumentasi. Analisis yang digunakan deskriptif kualitatif. Analisis data yang di gunakan peneliti untuk menganalisis data terdiri dari 3 kegiatan: pertama, pengumpulan data dan melakukan reduksi data, yaitu menggolongkan, menyederhanakan, mengorganisasikan (display data, memilah, membuang data yang tidak diperlukan, serta triangulasi data atau pengecekan keabsahan data. Kedua, data disajikan dalam bentuk narasi. Ketiga, penarikan simpulan dari data yang telah disajikan. Penelitian ini termasuk penelitian kualitatif dengan menggunakan metode pendekatan deskriptif. Sehingga data yag disajikan berupa kata-kata tertulis dari hasil penelitian serta tidak menggunakan alat ukur. Abstract This study aims to determine the function of teacher pedagogical competency management for Arabic language teachers Kulliyatul Muallimin Islamiyah Pondok Pesantren Tamirul Islam Surakarta in 2019. This study uses a qualitative descriptive research approach. Data collection techniques used in this study were interviews, observation, and documentation. Interviews are conducted in a relaxed, friendly manner so that they will be able to obtain as much information as possible and not seem rigid in an honest and detailed manner. In this observation, researchers can obtain information, know and observe directly about the activities of Arabic teachers related to the management function on the pedagogical competence of Arabic teachers. This documentation method obtains learning data which includes the syllabus and lesson plans in the form of reference books and photos of learning and at the time of the interview. The research subjects were 6 respondents, using the snow boll technique and conducted randomly (random sampling). The research data collected were analyzed using a qualitative descriptive research approach. This study uses a qualitative descriptive research approach. Research objectives are targets to be achieved through research activities. In accordance with the subject matter, qualitative descriptive research uses designs that are continuously adapted to the realities of the field. Methods of data collection with the method of observation, interviews, interview guidelines, and documentation. The analysis used was descriptive qualitative. Data analysis used by researchers to analyze data consists of 3 activities: first, data collection and data reduction, namely classifying, simplifying, organizing (data display, sorting, discarding unnecessary data, and data triangulation or checking data validity. , the data is presented in the form of narrative. Third, drawing conclusions from the data that has been presented. This research is a qualitative research using a descriptive approach, so that the data presented is in the form of written words from the results of the study and does not use measuring instruments.

SCIENTISM AND SECULARISM: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology by J. P. Moreland. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018. 224 pages. Paperback; $16.99. ISBN: 9781433556906. *Early in his new book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology, J. P. Moreland relates a story of a hospital stay. After telling his nurse that he earned his BS in physical chemistry, his ThM in theology, his MS in philosophy, and his PhD in philosophy, she observes that he "had taken two very unrelated, divergent paths" (p. 23). "Before she could explain further, I asked if this was what she meant: I started off in science, which deals with reality--hard facts--and conclusions that could be proved to be true. But theology and philosophy were, well, fields in which there were only private opinions and personal feelings ... (p. 23)." *In response, Moreland's nurse looks surprised and acknowledges this "was exactly what she had in mind" (p. 24). Rather than supposing his interlocutor is simply a kind nurse hoping to move on to her next patient, Moreland instead interprets the position he articulates for her as illustrating that "scientism" is "the intellectual and cultural air that we breathe" (p. 24). *Scientism is the nemesis in Moreland's book. He loathes it. But the precise definitional target of his loathing is not always clear. Early in the book, Moreland distinguishes "strong scientism" and "weak scientism." Strong scientism claims "something is true, rationally justified, or known if and only if it is a scientific claim that has been successfully tested and that is being used according to appropriate scientific methodology" (p. 27). Weak scientism, by contrast, "acknowledges truth apart from science," but "still implies that science is by far the most authoritative sector of human knowing" (p. 28). That's a helpful distinction, even if it is doubtful whether many accept strong scientism (Moreland provides no examples), and depending on how one defines "authoritative," it is also doubtful whether many people reject weak scientism. Having thus introduced the distinction, however, this nuance is often lost in the pages that follow, even in places where the clarity could have proved useful. More problematically, we never get a definition of what Moreland means by "science." To his credit, Moreland defends the omission, claiming that science cannot, in principle, be demarcated from nonscience (pp. 160-63). Still, it is difficult to follow the implications of Moreland's argument--effectively, an extended argument against scientism--without a working definition of what science is. Do only the hard sciences count? Or do the so-called soft sciences count as well? Or might empirical-leaning philosophy and theology and history count too? These distinctions are not readily available, and so it isn't clear precisely what position Moreland is arguing against. It is clear only that Moreland really dislikes it. *When Moreland offers data to support his argument, the results are also disappointing. For example, while reflecting on the supposed conflict between science and religion, Moreland estimates *"that 95% of science and theology are cognitively irrelevant to each other ... in that other 5% or so of science, there is direct interaction with Christian doctrine. Within this category, I would say that 3% of science provides further evidential support for Christian teaching ... that leaves 2% of current scientific claims that may seem to undermine Christian theology" (pp. 173-74, emphasis Moreland's). *None of these data are cited. They instead appear to be precisely what Moreland says they are--Moreland shooting from the hip. Oddly, he includes a pie chart to illustrate his guesswork. *Worse than these eccentricities, Moreland regularly falls prey to the very kind of scientific thinking he decries. On one hand, he proposes that "[t]he primary academic disciplines suited to studying the nature of consciousness ... are biblical studies, theology, and philosophy of mind" (p. 85). This view, to be frank, seems rather idiosyncratic and is not one that many academics, including religious ones, would ascribe to. Theistic philosophers rarely lean on biblical scholarship in developing their views of consciousness. On the other hand, Moreland's own variety of scientism appears in his defense of intelligent design, a position that accepts God's direct action throughout evolutionary history. Moreland strongly endorses intelligent design understood this way. Moreover, he emphasizes that we have scientific reasons to endorse the position: "intelligent design advocates believe that they can and have discovered scientific data that is best explained by an intelligent designer--the origin of the universe, life, consciousness, cases of irreducible complexity, and so on" (p. 171). *Understood in this way, intelligent design takes the hypothesis of an intelligent designer to be our best scientific explanation for a range of phenomena. Intelligent design thus stands against rival theistic accounts of evolution such as theistic evolution. Theistic evolution rejects the perspective offered by intelligent design, claiming that a creator is not best construed as a scientific hypothesis. Rather, according to theistic evolution, our reason to believe in God comes largely from nonscientific disciplines such as theology or philosophy. Accounts of creation such as theistic evolution are therefore comfortable with the claim that we can know about God as creator without requiring that this knowledge be distinctively scientific. For Moreland, by contrast, it seems God's creative action is best understood as empirically detectable, and that science offers a privileged perspective on our knowledge of God as creator. In discarding rival theistic accounts in favor of his brand of intelligent design, Moreland thus seems to embrace the very kind of scientism he pleads with us to reject. *Do some of Moreland's arguments land? Of course! Moreland is a professional philosopher with an impressive record. For example, his argument that scientism is self-refuting (p. 47-51) has strong moments: if scientism claims that science offers our only route to knowledge, then accepting that claim entails that we ought not accept scientism, since the position stakes a claim that can't be scientifically verified. Of course, this kind of argument works only for a particularly strong version of scientism, one that resembles the discarded logical positivism of the early twentieth century more than the subtler kinds of scientism that are widely held today. Likewise, some of Moreland's arguments for the immateriality of consciousness (pp. 86-88), the cosmological argument (p. 133-39), and the fine tuning argument (pp. 141-47) track contemporary conversations, even if these arguments are more controversial than Moreland gives them credit for. The problem with Moreland's book is not that it is completely devoid of clear philosophical thinking. The problem is that the wheat is mixed thoroughly with the chaff, and the two are difficult to separate. *Do we recommend the book? Not for the casual reader. Moreland's book is misleading: dangerous for the believer in its mischaracterizations and simplifications, infuriating for the unbeliever in its handling of both science and religion. Importantly, we (the reviewers) agree on this despite coming from different places: one of us (Vukov) is a Catholic and philosopher; the other (Burns), an atheist and biologist. For the careful scholar, though, the book may be worth skimming, as a spur to more careful reflection. Whether scientism is true or false, it has wide-reaching implications. We agree that the subject merits a serious and careful book-length discussion. That's just not what Moreland's book delivers. *Reviewed by Joe Vukov, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL 60660; and Michael B. Burns, Assistant Professor of Biology at Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL 60660.

The demand for materialism in the social life of today's society is an indicator that contributes to the formation of mental aridity. This is an encouragement for people to find institutions and figures who can provide spiritual guidance to calm their hearts. So in this case, Islamic educational institutions are an alternative in providing a solution to this anxiety. This research was conducted at the Darul Hijrah Al Aziziyah Kutacane Islamic Boarding School, the research method was carried out using qualitative methods with a phonomenological approach. Based on the results of research that has been carried out, it was found that the Darul Hijrah Al Aziziyah Islamic Boarding School is an institution that manages two curricula, namely the Islamic boarding school curriculum with an emphasis on learning the Yellow Book and the general education curriculum, namely Middle School and High School. Islamic boarding school educational traditions include the yellow book curriculum, the implementation of congregational worship with an emphasis on remembrance of both obligatory worship and sunnah. The emphasis is on dhikr, which in essence does not only mention the name of Allah, but also presents Him in the heart in worship activities. Therefore, dhikr must be carried out using procedures guided by the Islamic boarding school leadership. So in this case, a teacher has a strategic role in the world of information and communication. A teacher has the role of filtering the flow of information entering the student environment, transmitting what is considered useful and discarding what is considered detrimental to them. This is the role of remembrance in shaping the morals and character of students so that students are careless about worship activities and no longer busy themselves with useless negligence.

At one point in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the archdeacon, Claude Frollo, looked up from a book on his table to the edifice of the gothic cathedral, visible from his canon’s cell in the cloister of Notre Dame: “Alas!” he said, “this will kill that” (146). Frollo’s lament, that the book would destroy the edifice, captures the medieval cleric’s anxiety about the way in which Gutenberg’s print technology would become the new universal means for recording and communicating humanity’s ideas and artistic expression, replacing the grand monuments of architecture, human engineering, and craftsmanship. For Hugo, architecture was “the great handwriting of humankind” (149). The cathedral as the material outcome of human technology was being replaced by the first great machine—the printing press. At this point in the third millennium, some people undoubtedly have similar anxieties to Frollo: is it now the book’s turn to be destroyed by yet another great machine? The inclusion of “post print” in our title is not intended to sound the death knell of the book. Rather, we contend that despite the enduring value of print, digital publishing is “present and active” and is changing the way in which research, particularly in the humanities, is being undertaken. Our approach has three related parts. First, we consider how digital technologies are changing the way in which content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a global, distributed network. This section argues that the transition from print to electronic or digital publishing means both losses and gains, particularly with respect to shifts in our approaches to textuality, information, and innovative publishing. Second, we discuss the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) project, with which we are involved. This case study of a digitising initiative opens out the transformative possibilities and challenges of digital publishing and e-scholarship for research communities. Third, we reflect on technology’s capacity to bring about major changes in the light of the theoretical and practical issues that have arisen from our discussion. I. Digitising in a “post-print age” We are living in an era that is commonly referred to as “the late age of print” (see Kho) or the “post-print age” (see Gunkel). According to Aarseth, we have reached a point whereby nearly all of our public and personal media have become more or less digital (37). As Kho notes, web newspapers are not only becoming increasingly more popular, but they are also making rather than losing money, and paper-based newspapers are finding it difficult to recruit new readers from the younger generations (37). Not only can such online-only publications update format, content, and structure more economically than print-based publications, but their wide distribution network, speed, and flexibility attract advertising revenue. Hype and hyperbole aside, publishers are not so much discarding their legacy of print, but recognising the folly of not embracing innovative technologies that can add value by presenting information in ways that satisfy users’ needs for content to-go or for edutainment. As Kho notes: “no longer able to satisfy customer demand by producing print-only products, or even by enabling online access to semi-static content, established publishers are embracing new models for publishing, web-style” (42). Advocates of online publishing contend that the major benefits of online publishing over print technology are that it is faster, more economical, and more interactive. However, as Hovav and Gray caution, “e-publishing also involves risks, hidden costs, and trade-offs” (79). The specific focus for these authors is e-journal publishing and they contend that while cost reduction is in editing, production and distribution, if the journal is not open access, then costs relating to storage and bandwith will be transferred to the user. If we put economics aside for the moment, the transition from print to electronic text (e-text), especially with electronic literary works, brings additional considerations, particularly in their ability to make available different reading strategies to print, such as “animation, rollovers, screen design, navigation strategies, and so on” (Hayles 38). Transition from print to e-text In his book, Writing Space, David Bolter follows Victor Hugo’s lead, but does not ask if print technology will be destroyed. Rather, he argues that “the idea and ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past five centuries” (2). As Hayles noted above, one significant indicator of this change, which is a consequence of the shift from analogue to digital, is the addition of graphical, audio, visual, sonic, and kinetic elements to the written word. A significant consequence of this transition is the reinvention of the book in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by space and time. Rather, it is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors, and texts. The Web 2.0 platform has enabled more experimentation with blending of digital technology and traditional writing, particularly in the use of blogs, which have spawned blogwriting and the wikinovel. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce and Community … and Why We Should Worry is a wikinovel or blog book that was produced over a series of weeks with contributions from other bloggers (see: http://www.sivacracy.net/). Penguin Books, in collaboration with a media company, “Six Stories to Start,” have developed six stories—“We Tell Stories,” which involve different forms of interactivity from users through blog entries, Twitter text messages, an interactive google map, and other features. For example, the story titled “Fairy Tales” allows users to customise the story using their own choice of names for characters and descriptions of character traits. Each story is loosely based on a classic story and links take users to synopses of these original stories and their authors and to online purchase of the texts through the Penguin Books sales website. These examples of digital stories are a small part of the digital environment, which exploits computer and online technologies’ capacity to be interactive and immersive. As Janet Murray notes, the interactive qualities of digital environments are characterised by their procedural and participatory abilities, while their immersive qualities are characterised by their spatial and encyclopedic dimensions (71–89). These immersive and interactive qualities highlight different ways of reading texts, which entail different embodied and cognitive functions from those that reading print texts requires. As Hayles argues: the advent of electronic textuality presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to reformulate fundamental ideas about texts and, in the process, to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes (89–90). The transition to e-text also highlights how digitality is changing all aspects of everyday life both inside and outside the academy. Online teaching and e-research Another aspect of the commercial arm of publishing that is impacting on academe and other organisations is the digitising and indexing of print content for niche distribution. Kho offers the example of the Mark Logic Corporation, which uses its XML content platform to repurpose content, create new content, and distribute this content through multiple portals. As the promotional website video for Mark Logic explains, academics can use this service to customise their own textbooks for students by including only articles and book chapters that are relevant to their subject. These are then organised, bound, and distributed by Mark Logic for sale to students at a cost that is generally cheaper than most textbooks. A further example of how print and digital materials can form an integrated, customised source for teachers and students is eFictions (Trimmer, Jennings, & Patterson). eFictions was one of the first print and online short story anthologies that teachers of literature could customise to their own needs. Produced as both a print text collection and a website, eFictions offers popular short stories in English by well-known traditional and contemporary writers from the US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Europe, with summaries, notes on literary features, author biographies, and, in one instance, a YouTube movie of the story. In using the eFictions website, teachers can build a customised anthology of traditional and innovative stories to suit their teaching preferences. These examples provide useful indicators of how content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a distributed network. However, the question remains as to how to measure their impact and outcomes within teaching and learning communities. As Harley suggests in her study on the use and users of digital resources in the humanities and social sciences, several factors warrant attention, such as personal teaching style, philosophy, and specific disciplinary requirements. However, in terms of understanding the benefits of digital resources for teaching and learning, Harley notes that few providers in her sample had developed any plans to evaluate use and users in a systematic way. In addition to the problems raised in Harley’s study, another relates to how researchers can be supported to take full advantage of digital technologies for e-research. The transformation brought about by information and communication technologies extends and broadens the impact of research, by making its outputs more discoverable and usable by other researchers, and its benefits more available to industry, governments, and the wider community. Traditional repositories of knowledge and information, such as libraries, are juggling the space demands of books and computer hardware alongside increasing reader demand for anywhere, anytime, anyplace access to information. Researchers’ expectations about online access to journals, eprints, bibliographic data, and the views of others through wikis, blogs, and associated social and information networking sites such as YouTube compete with the traditional expectations of the institutions that fund libraries for paper-based archives and book repositories. While university libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase all hardcover books relevant to numerous and varied disciplines, a significant proportion of their budgets goes towards digital repositories (e.g., STORS), indexes, and other resources, such as full-text electronic specialised and multidisciplinary journal databases (e.g., Project Muse and Proquest); electronic serials; e-books; and specialised information sources through fast (online) document delivery services. An area that is becoming increasingly significant for those working in the humanities is the digitising of historical and cultural texts. II. Bringing back the dead: The CLDR project The CLDR project is led by researchers and librarians at the Queensland University of Technology, in collaboration with Deakin University, University of Sydney, and members of the AustLit team at The University of Queensland. The CLDR project is a “Research Community” of the electronic bibliographic database AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, which is working towards the goal of providing a complete bibliographic record of the nation’s literature. AustLit offers users with a single entry point to enhanced scholarly resources on Australian writers, their works, and other aspects of Australian literary culture and activities. AustLit and its Research Communities are supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and financial and in-kind contributions from a consortium of Australian universities, and by other external funding sources such as the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Like other more extensive digitisation projects, such as Project Gutenberg and the Rosetta Project, the CLDR project aims to provide a centralised access point for digital surrogates of early published works of Australian children’s literature, with access pathways to existing resources. The first stage of the CLDR project is to provide access to digitised, full-text, out-of-copyright Australian children’s literature from European settlement to 1945, with selected digitised critical works relevant to the field. Texts comprise a range of genres, including poetry, drama, and narrative for young readers and picture books, songs, and rhymes for infants. Currently, a selection of 75 e-texts and digital scans of original texts from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive have been linked to the Children’s Literature Research Community. By the end of 2009, the CLDR will have digitised approximately 1000 literary texts and a significant number of critical works. Stage II and subsequent development will involve digitisation of selected texts from 1945 onwards. A precursor to the CLDR project has been undertaken by Deakin University in collaboration with the State Library of Victoria, whereby a digital bibliographic index comprising Victorian School Readers has been completed with plans for full-text digital surrogates of a selection of these texts. These texts provide valuable insights into citizenship, identity, and values formation from the 1930s onwards. At the time of writing, the CLDR is at an early stage of development. An extensive survey of out-of-copyright texts has been completed and the digitisation of these resources is about to commence. The project plans to make rich content searchable, allowing scholars from children’s literature studies and education to benefit from the many advantages of online scholarship. What digital publishing and associated digital archives, electronic texts, hypermedia, and so forth foreground is the fact that writers, readers, publishers, programmers, designers, critics, booksellers, teachers, and copyright laws operate within a context that is highly mediated by technology. In his article on large-scale digitisation projects carried out by Cornell and University of Michigan with the Making of America collection of 19th-century American serials and monographs, Hirtle notes that when special collections’ materials are available via the Web, with appropriate metadata and software, then they can “increase use of the material, contribute to new forms of research, and attract new users to the material” (44). Furthermore, Hirtle contends that despite the poor ergonomics associated with most electronic displays and e-book readers, “people will, when given the opportunity, consult an electronic text over the print original” (46). If this preference is universally accurate, especially for researchers and students, then it follows that not only will the preference for electronic surrogates of original material increase, but preference for other kinds of electronic texts will also increase. It is with this preference for electronic resources in mind that we approached the field of children’s literature in Australia and asked questions about how future generations of researchers would prefer to work. If electronic texts become the reference of choice for primary as well as secondary sources, then it seems sensible to assume that researchers would prefer to sit at the end of the keyboard than to travel considerable distances at considerable cost to access paper-based print texts in distant libraries and archives. We considered the best means for providing access to digitised primary and secondary, full text material, and digital pathways to existing online resources, particularly an extensive indexing and bibliographic database. Prior to the commencement of the CLDR project, AustLit had already indexed an extensive number of children’s literature. Challenges and dilemmas The CLDR project, even in its early stages of development, has encountered a number of challenges and dilemmas that centre on access, copyright, economic capital, and practical aspects of digitisation, and sustainability. These issues have relevance for digital publishing and e-research. A decision is yet to be made as to whether the digital texts in CLDR will be available on open or closed/tolled access. The preference is for open access. As Hayles argues, copyright is more than a legal basis for intellectual property, as it also entails ideas about authorship, creativity, and the work as an “immaterial mental construct” that goes “beyond the paper, binding, or ink” (144). Seeking copyright permission is therefore only part of the issue. Determining how the item will be accessed is a further matter, particularly as future technologies may impact upon how a digital item is used. In the case of e-journals, the issue of copyright payment structures are evolving towards a collective licensing system, pay-per-view, and other combinations of print and electronic subscription (see Hovav and Gray). For research purposes, digitisation of items for CLDR is not simply a scan and deliver process. Rather it is one that needs to ensure that the best quality is provided and that the item is both accessible and usable by researchers, and sustainable for future researchers. Sustainability is an important consideration and provides a challenge for institutions that host projects such as CLDR. Therefore, items need to be scanned to a high quality and this requires an expensive scanner and personnel costs. Files need to be in a variety of formats for preservation purposes and so that they may be manipulated to be useable in different technologies (for example, Archival Tiff, Tiff, Jpeg, PDF, HTML). Hovav and Gray warn that when technology becomes obsolete, then content becomes unreadable unless backward integration is maintained. The CLDR items will be annotatable given AustLit’s NeAt funded project: Aus-e-Lit. The Aus-e-Lit project will extend and enhance the existing AustLit web portal with data integration and search services, empirical reporting services, collaborative annotation services, and compound object authoring, editing, and publishing services. For users to be able to get the most out of a digital item, it needs to be searchable, either through double keying or OCR (optimal character recognition). The value of CLDR’s contribution The value of the CLDR project lies in its goal to provide a comprehensive, searchable body of texts (fictional and critical) to researchers across the humanities and social sciences. Other projects seem to be intent on putting up as many items as possible to be considered as a first resort for online texts. CLDR is more specific and is not interested in simply generating a presence on the Web. Rather, it is research driven both in its design and implementation, and in its focussed outcomes of assisting academics and students primarily in their e-research endeavours. To this end, we have concentrated on the following: an extensive survey of appropriate texts; best models for file location, distribution, and use; and high standards of digitising protocols. These issues that relate to data storage, digitisation, collections, management, and end-users of data are aligned with the “Development of an Australian Research Data Strategy” outlined in An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework (2006). CLDR is not designed to simply replicate resources, as it has a distinct focus, audience, and research potential. In addition, it looks at resources that may be forgotten or are no longer available in reproduction by current publishing companies. Thus, the aim of CLDR is to preserve both the time and a period of Australian history and literary culture. It will also provide users with an accessible repository of rare and early texts written for children. III. Future directions It is now commonplace to recognize that the Web’s role as information provider has changed over the past decade. New forms of “collective intelligence” or “distributed cognition” (Oblinger and Lombardi) are emerging within and outside formal research communities. Technology’s capacity to initiate major cultural, social, educational, economic, political and commercial shifts has conditioned us to expect the “next big thing.” We have learnt to adapt swiftly to the many challenges that online technologies have presented, and we have reaped the benefits. As the examples in this discussion have highlighted, the changes in online publishing and digitisation have provided many material, network, pedagogical, and research possibilities: we teach online units providing students with access to e-journals, e-books, and customized archives of digitised materials; we communicate via various online technologies; we attend virtual conferences; and we participate in e-research through a global, digital network. In other words, technology is deeply engrained in our everyday lives. In returning to Frollo’s concern that the book would destroy architecture, Umberto Eco offers a placatory note: “in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else” (n. pag.). Eco’s point has relevance to our discussion of digital publishing. The transition from print to digital necessitates a profound change that impacts on the ways we read, write, and research. As we have illustrated with our case study of the CLDR project, the move to creating digitised texts of print literature needs to be considered within a dynamic network of multiple causalities, emergent technological processes, and complex negotiations through which digital texts are created, stored, disseminated, and used. Technological changes in just the past five years have, in many ways, created an expectation in the minds of people that the future is no longer some distant time from the present. Rather, as our title suggests, the future is both present and active. References Aarseth, Espen. “How we became Postdigital: From Cyberstudies to Game Studies.” Critical Cyber-culture Studies. Ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: New York UP, 2006. 37–46. An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework: Final Report of the e-Research Coordinating Committee. Commonwealth of Australia, 2006. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991. Eco, Umberto. “The Future of the Book.” 1994. 3 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Gunkel, David. J. “What's the Matter with Books?” Configurations 11.3 (2003): 277–303. Harley, Diane. “Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Research and Occasional Papers Series. Berkeley: University of California. Centre for Studies in Higher Education. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Hirtle, Peter B. “The Impact of Digitization on Special Collections in Libraries.” Libraries & Culture 37.1 (2002): 42–52. Hovav, Anat and Paul Gray. “Managing Academic E-journals.” Communications of the ACM 47.4 (2004): 79–82. Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth editions, 1993. Kho, Nancy D. “The Medium Gets the Message: Post-Print Publishing Models.” EContent 30.6 (2007): 42–48. Oblinger, Diana and Marilyn Lombardi. “Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education.” Opening up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education Through Open Technology, Open Content and Open Knowledge. Ed. Toru Liyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 389–400. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Trimmer, Joseph F., Wade Jennings, and Annette Patterson. eFictions. New York: Harcourt, 2001.

The epigraph to the call for papers for this issue of M/C Journal is taken from Act 2 Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Prince of Denmark. As it appears in the call for papers, the referenced fragment of Hamlet’s speech, ‘for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ (Shakespeare 75), could lead a reader to suspect that morality derives from reasoned thought in the play and that, according to the speaker, the object of moral judgment is neither good nor bad prior to such thought. Spoken in the context of a disagreement between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about whether Denmark is a prison, the epigraph supports this reading; Hamlet believes that Denmark is a prison, and the two courtiers do not. However, consideration of the entire passage from which the epigraph is taken suggests a subtlely different interpretation. In response to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s assertion that Denmark is not a prison, Hamlet remarks: Why, then ‘tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. (Shakespeare 75) Rather than prompting the previous interpretation, a reading of the entire passage reveals Hamlet describing a sort of relativism. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have their point of view, and Hamlet has his. Hamlet labels neither point of view good or bad here. So why does he introduce the language of morality at all? Why doesn’t he say, ‘Why, then, ‘tis none to you: to me it is a prison,’ instead, omitting the fragment that comprises the epigraph entirely? What function does the epigraphic fragment perform? Addressing these questions in the context of the discussion occurring in Hamlet can provide insight into the contemporary intellectual concerns posed by this call for papers, in particular, the cultural cost of employing a hierarchical or bureaucratic morality to guide determinations, especially consensual ones, about pursuing or discarding specific lines of inquiry. Scene II follows Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost, an event that coincides with the onset of the Prince’s perceived madness. Unsure of its true cause, the King and Queen enlist Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to visit Hamlet and to discover the reason for his recent, strange behavior. The King and Queen promise the two friends money, social recognition, and public appreciation in exchange for their detective work. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern agree to this plan; in fact, once they contract with the crown, they are obligated to carry it out. Their conversation with Hamlet not only fails to produce the desired result but also makes some turns that actually undermine the King and Queen’s purpose. Not only does Hamlet appear more rational than the King and Queen suspect but he also seems quite willing to perform madness, thus meeting the expectations of his audience, in order to speak in an uncensored and unmannerly fashion. In addition, Hamlet only mentions ‘bad’ once, following the passage cited above, in reference to his recent dreams, which Guildenstern notes, whether good or bad, ‘indeed are ambition’ (Shakespeare 75). Their conversation with Hamlet produces other associations, however, between moral judgment and ambition, ambition and dreams, dreams and shadows, and shadows and social relations. This chain of associations builds connection between the worth, and rightness, of any given judgment and the social role of the judging individual. The passage cited above, which embeds the epigraph to this call for papers, is constructed in such a way that it is unclear whether significance attaches to the moral conclusion resulting from thought or the process of thinking itself, which ends up supplanting a thing’s neutral, objective existence with a subjectively-derived judgment of a thing’s worth. In either case, who thinks matters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not authoritative; Hamlet, although considered mad, is. When he closes the passage under consideration with ‘to me it is a prison’ (Shakespeare 75), he makes this assertion confident that what Denmark is to him carries more weight than what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern deem it. In part, his confidence derives from knowing that, as outsiders and employees of the crown, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not in the position to make a public statement of this sort. Additionally, Hamlet’s words are empowered, worthy as words to hear and to heed, even if mad, worthy because he speaks them, and worthy for the moral judgments they convey. As set up in Act 2 Scene II of the play, the rhetorical situation presents a dialectical communication act that exposes the tension between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s dialogue, which conforms to the constraints of unauthoritative, but purchased, speech, and Hamlet’s, which represents the allowable excesses of authoritative, though suspiciously irrational, speech. The former must presume the literalness of language; for instance, Denmark is not a prison, if prison refers to the physical space of incarceration. The latter, unbound to the literalness of language, can use language figuratively. Denmark is a prison to Hamlet, not in the restrictive sense to which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern refer, but metaphorically. Hamlet’s figurative play, connected to his authoritative role and to the permission his role affords him to go crazy without threat of ending up in prison, leads to an interpretive moment, which would have undone the conventions of this rhetorical situation had Hamlet not cut it short. If he had conceded that beggars comprise the social body, and therefore speak with authority, and that monarchs exist in their shadow, guided by the linguistic precedents beggars either perform or circulate, rather than insisting that such an idea exemplifies his inability to reason, Hamlet would have not only justified his own deauthorization but also given up his rights both to perform madness and to use language metaphorically. In other words, if Hamlet had permitted himself to push his own interpretation a bit farther, he would have disclosed the artificiality of the socio-rhetorical conventions that guarantee his words an audience, a disclosure he absolutely refuses to put into words – that is, literally. To use metaphorical language, then, although a privilege that follows from social status and the authority that status affords, permits the speaker to avoid accountability of the sort that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern must demonstrate, specifically, to the King and the Queen. Hamlet, for instance, does not have to admit that his authority is an accident of birth; however, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the audience for the play know that it is his inheritance. Hamlet does not have to say to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he is a thinker, and they are not; although he does, in effect, when he utters the fragment that is the epigraph to this call for papers. Subordinated to the phrase that begins with ‘Why, then ’tis none to you,’ the epigraph might be rewritten as: ‘when you think, you think badly and come to the wrong conclusions.’ In other words, Hamlet does not trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to say anything other than what they are literally expected to say, what is conventional for them to say, and what they are paid by the King and Queen to say. Hamlet’s thinking, while apparently mad, still functions, authoritatively, yet there is no evidence provided in the play for the audience to know, without a doubt, that Denmark is or is not a prison. The truth, which must be interpreted, and therefore becomes a product of thinking, strictly follows from the rank of the speaker. The truth of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s speech derives from the extent to which it suits their station and their role and from the extent to which is satisfies the contractual situation compelling it; the truth does not follow from the content of their words. Rather, since they are paid to discover the source of Hamlet’s madness, their words must serve this economic purpose. The truth of Hamlet’s speech is also measured by its fit to his role. However, his role insures that an audience will attend to and interpret the meaning of the words he speaks. The truth of the rhetorical situation represented in Act 2 Scene II, then, is that the speech following from Hamlet’s position matters more than that uttered by paid courtiers; in fact, his is the only speech that means anything at all beyond simply marking social location or fulfilling an economic transaction. The epigraph suggests, then, not that there is a method for discriminating between good and bad ideas as such, but that an audience receives all ideas relative to the social role of the speaker. Those spoken by actors who use language in ways unfitting their social roles are unimaginable in Hamlet, unless, of course, they have inherited authority, as Hamlet has, and are thought mad. Consequently, speakers act responsibly toward their audiences, playing their parts, speaking their scripted lines. Clearly, Act 2 Scene II teaches readers that the objective or moral quality of any particular idea has less significance than does the recognised authority of the speaker and his or her adherence to socio-rhetorical conventions delimiting language exchange in particular contexts. The world in 2005 bears little or no resemblance to the world that Shakespeare inhabited; however, this lesson still holds true. Today, the free exchange of intellectual ideas—thought to be the primary activity, for instance, of professors and students on college and university campuses—is constrained in ways similar to those on display in Act 2 Scene II. Those who have less authority might pursue lines of inquiry, both in classrooms and in scholarship, that follow up on, apply, or restate authoritative positions. They are at less risk for receiving a low grade, for being rejected or criticised by their colleagues, and for losing their jobs if they do so. This type of teaching and learning, writing and research creates a sort of consensus, sometimes referred to as schools of thought, that at their best challenge and at their worst prohibit imagination. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern could not imagine uttering the words, ‘Denmark is a prison.’ Their language and their structures of imagination are restricted by their economic and their social roles and, because of both, the expectations of their audience. In 2005, those in all social positions can imagine speaking such a critique; however, some might elect not to, self-censoring solely for the purpose of achieving one personal goal or another—a grade, professional recognition, or promotion. Hamlet, unable to imagine Denmark as anything but a prison, takes on an historical burden, transferred to him by his father’s ghost, that requires a break with convention, and with the rhetorical expectations of someone occupying his role, hence his presumed madness. While to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, economic survival requires preserving consensual thinking; according to Hamlet, it will lead to the end of his life, to the demise of Denmark, to the conclusion of Danish history. It is Hamlet’s duty, then, and that of all contemporary intellectuals, to think therefore to imagine, at risk of being thought mad, beyond consensus to sustain the production of ideas and history, the moral ingredient of thoughtful exchange, and to prevent the alternative, that is, the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The interjection that is the epigraph to this call for papers conveys as much to a postmodern, intellectual audience. Ideas have power in Hamlet’s world, no less chaotic, violent, and presumptively immoral than the world in 2005. It is a bad idea, a sort of madness actually, to act, then as now, as if language primarily functions bureaucratically, for the connected purposes of enforcing consensus, or canonicity, as a morally good idea, and of consolidating personal gain, as the sole measure of ethical conduct. Note All quotations appearing in this essay have been taken from Act 2 Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Prince of Denmark. Ed. Willard Farnham. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. 74-6. References Shakespeare, William. Hamlet Prince of Denmark. Ed. Willard Farnham. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hood, Carra Leah. "Schools of Thought: The Madness of Consensus." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/08-hood.php>. APA Style Hood, C. (Feb. 2005) "Schools of Thought: The Madness of Consensus," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/08-hood.php>.

In a listicle on becomingminimalist.com, Joshua Becker argues that advances in personal computing have contributed to the growing popularity of the minimalist lifestyle. Becker explains that computational media can efficiently absorb physical artefacts like books, photo albums, newspapers, clocks, calendars, and more. In Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Happy Old Year (2019, ฮาวทูทิ้ง ทิ้งอย่างไร..ไม่ให้เหลือเธอ) the protagonist Jean also argues that material possessions are wasteful and unnecessary in the era of cloud storage. In the film, she redesigns her old-fashioned and messy childhood home to create a minimalist home office. In decluttering their material possessions through a partial reliance on computational storage, Jean and Becker conveniently dispense with the materiality of informational infrastructures and digital archives. Informational technology’s ever-growing capacity for storage and circulation also intensify anxieties about clutter. During our online interactions, we inadvertently leave an amassing trail of metadata behind that allows algorithms to “personalise” our interfaces. Consequently, our interfaces are “cluttered” with recommendations that range from toothpaste to news, movies, clothes, and more, based on a narrow and homophilic comparison of datasets. Notably, this hypertrophic trail of digital clutter threatens to overrepresent and blur personal identities. By mindfully reducing excessive consumption and discarding wasteful possessions, our personal spaces can become tidy and coherent. On the other hand, there is little that individuals can do to control nonhuman forms of digital accumulation and the datafied archives that meticulously record and store our activities on a micro-temporal scale. In this essay, I explore archive fever as the prosthetic externalisation of memory across physical and digital spaces. Paying close attention to Sianne Ngai’s work on vernacular aesthetic categories and Susanna Paasonen’s exploration of equivocal affective sensations, I study how advocates of minimalist design seek to recuperate our fraught capacities for affective experience in the digital era. In particular, I examine how Thamrongrattanarit problematises minimalist design, prosthetic memory, and the precarious materiality of digital media in Happy Old Year and Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy (2013, แมรี่ อีส แฮปปี้, แมรี่ อีส แฮปปี้). Transmedial Minimalist Networks and Empty Spaces Marie Kondo famously teaches us how to segregate objects that spark joy from material possessions that can be discarded (Kondo). The KonMari method has a strong transmedial presence with Kondo’s bestselling books, her blog and online store, a Netflix series, and sticky memes that feature her talking about objects that do not spark joy. It is interesting to note the rising popularity of prescriptive minimalist lifestyle blogs that utilise podcasts, video essays, tutorials, apps, and more to guide the mindful selection of essential material possessions from waste. Personal minimalism is presented as an antidote to late capitalist clutter as self-help gurus appear across our computational devices teach us how we can curb our carbon footprints and reduce consumerist excess. Yet, as noted by Katherine Hayles, maximal networked media demands a form of hyper-attention that implicates us in multiple information streams at once. There is a tension between the overwhelming simultaneity in the viewing experience of transmedial minimalist lifestyle networks and the rhetoric of therapeutic selection espoused in their content. In their ethnographic work with minimalists, Eun Jeong Cheon and Norman Makoto Su explore how mindfully constructed empty spaces can serve as a resource for technological design (Cheon and Su). Cheon and Su note how empty spaces possess a symbolic and functional value for their respondents. Decluttered empty spaces offer a sensuous experience for minimalists in coherently representing their identity and serve as a respite from congested and busy cities. Furthermore, empty spaces transform the home into a meaningful site of reflection about people’s objects and values as minimalists actively work to reduce their ownership of physical artefacts and the space that material possessions occupy in their homes and minds: the notion of gazing upon empty spaces is not simply about reading or processing information for minimalists. Rather, gazing gives minimalists, a visual indicator of their identity, progress, and values. (Cheon and Su 10) Instead of seeking to fill and augment empty space, Cheon and Su ask what it might mean to design technology that appreciates the absence of information and the limitation of space. The Interestingness of “Total Design and Internet Plenitude” Sianne Ngai argues that in a world where we are constantly hailed as aesthetic subjects, our aesthetic experiences grow increasingly fragile and ineffectual (Ngai 2015). Ngai further contends that late capitalism makes the elite exaggeration of the autonomy of art (at auction houses, mega-exhibitions, biennales, and more) concurrently possible with the hyper-aestheticisation of everyday life. The increase in inconsequential aesthetic experiences mirrors a larger habituation to aesthetic novelty along with the loss of the traditional friction between art and the commodity form: in tandem with these seismic changes to longstanding ideas of art’s vocation, weaker aesthetic categories crop up everywhere, testifying in their very proliferation to how, in a world of “total design and Internet plenitude”, aesthetic experience while less rarefied also becomes less intense. (Ngai 21) Ngai offers us the cute, interesting, and zany as the key vernacular categories that describe aesthetic experience in “the hyper-commodified, information-saturated, and performance-driven conditions of late-capitalist culture” (1). Aesthetic experience no longer subscribes to an exceptionally single feeling but is located at the ambiguous mixture of mundane affect. Susanna Paasonen notes how Ngai’s analysis of an everyday aesthetic experience that is complex and equivocal helps explain how seemingly contradictory and irreconcilable affective tensions might in fact be mutually co-dependent with each other (Paasonen). By critiquing the broad and binary generalisations about addiction and networked technologies, Paasonen emphasises the ambivalent and fleeting nature of affective formation in the era of networked media. Significantly, Paasonen explores how ubiquitous networked infrastructures bind us in dynamic sensations of attention and distraction, control and helplessness, and boredom and interest. For Ngai, the interesting is a “low, often hard-to-register flicker of affect accompanying our recognition of minor differences from a norm” (18). There is a discord between knowledge and feeling (and cognition and perception) at the heart of the interesting. We are drawn to the interesting object after noticing something peculiar about it and yet, we are simultaneously at a loss of knowledge about the exact contents of that peculiarity. The "interesting" is embodied in the seriality of constant circulation and a temporal experience of in-betweenness and anticipation in a paradoxical era of routinised novelty. Ngai notes how in the 1960s, many minimalist conceptual artists were preoccupied with tracking the movement of objects and information by transport and communication technologies. In offering a representation of networks of circulation, “merely interesting” conceptual art disseminates information about itself and makes technologies of distribution central to its process of production. The interesting is a pervasive aesthetic judgment that also explains our affectively complex rapport with information in the context of networked technologies. Acclimatised to the repetitive tempos of internet browsing and circular refreshing, Paasonen notes we often oscillate between boredom and interest during our usage of networked media. As Ngai explains, the interesting is “a discursive aesthetic about difference in the form of information and the pathways of its movement and exchange” (1). It is then “interesting” to explore how Thamrongrattanarit tracks the circulation of information and the pathways of transmedial exchange across Twitter and cinema in Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy. Digital Memory in MIHMIH Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy is adapted from a set of 410 consecutive tweets by Twitter user @marymaloney. The film instantiates the phatic, ephemeral flow of a Twitter feed through its deadpan and episodic narrative. The titular protagonist Mary is a fickle-headed high-school senior trying to design a minimalist yearbook for her school to preserve their important memories. Yet, the sudden entry of an autocratic principal forces her to follow the school administration’s arbitrary demands and curtail her artistic instincts. Ultimately, Mary produces a thick yearbook that is filled with hagiographic information about the anonymous principal. Thamrongrattanarit offers cheeky commentary about Thailand’s authoritarian royalist democracy where the combination of sudden coups and unquestioning obedience has fostered a peculiar environment of political amnesia. Hagiographic and bureaucratic informational overload is presented as an important means to sustain this combination of veneration and paranoia. @marymaloney’s haphazard tweets are superimposed in the film as intertitles and every scene also draws inspiration from the tweet displayed in an offhand manner. We see Mary swiftly do several random and unexplained things like purchase jellyfishes, sleep through a sudden trip to Paris, rob a restaurant, and more in rapid succession. The viewer is overwhelmed because of a synchronised engagement with two different informational currents. We simultaneously read the tweet and watch the scene. The durational tension between knowing and feeling draws our attention to the friction between conceptual interpretation and sensory perception. Like the conceptual artists of the 1960s, Thamrongrattanarit also shows “information in the act of being circulated” (Ngai 157). Throughout the film, we see Mary and her best friend Suri walk along emptied railway tracks that figuratively represent the routes of informational circulation across networked technologies. With its quirky vignettes and episodic narrative progression, MIHMIH closely mirrors Paasonen’s description of microevents and microflow-like movement on social media. The film also features several abrupt and spectacular “microshocks” that interrupt the narrative’s linear flow. For example, there is a running gag about Mary’s cheap and malfunctioning phone frequently exploding in the film while she is on a call. The repetitive explosions provide sudden jolts of deadpan humour. Notably, Mary also mentions how she uses bills of past purchases to document her daily thoughts rather than a notebook to save paper. The tweets are visually represented through the overwhelming accumulation of tiny bills that Mary often struggles to arrange in a coherent pattern. Thamrongrattanarit draws our attention to the fraught materiality of digital memory and microblogging that does not align with neat and orderly narrativisation. By encouraging a constant expression of thoughts within its distinctive character limit, Twitter promotes minimal writing and maximal fragmentation. Paasonen argues that our networked technologies take on a prosthetic function by externalising memory in their databases. This prosthetic reserve of datafied memory is utilised by the algorithmic unconscious of networked media for data mining. Our capacities for simultaneous multichannel attention and distraction are increasingly subsumed by capital’s novel forms of value extraction. Mary’s use of bills to document her diary takes on another “interesting” valence here as Thamrongrattanarit connects the circulation of information on social media with monetary transactions and the accumulation of debt. While memory in common parlance is normally associated with acts of remembrance and commemoration, digital memory refers to an address for storage and retrieval. Wendy Chun argues that software conflates storage with memory as the computer stores files in its memory (Chun). Furthermore, digital memory only endures through ephemeral processes of regeneration and degeneration. Even as our computational devices move towards planned obsolescence, digital memory paradoxically promises perpetual storage. The images of dusty and obsolete computers in MIHMIH recall the materiality of the devices whose databases formerly stored many prosthetic memories. For Wolfgang Ernst, digital archives displace cultural memory from a literary-based narrativised framework to a calculative and mathematical one as digital media environments increasingly control how a culture remembers. As Jussi Parikka notes “we are miniarchivists ourselves in this information society, which could be more aptly called an information management society” (2). While traditional archives required the prudent selection and curation of important objects that will be preserved for future use on a macro temporal scale, the Internet is an agglomerative storage and retrieval database that records information on a micro temporal scale. The proliferation of agglomerative mini archives also create anxieties about clutter where the miniarchivists of the “information-management society” must contend with the effects of our ever-expanding digital trail. It is useful to note how processes of selection and curation that remain central to minimalist decluttering can be connected with the design of a personal archive. Ernst further argues that digital memory cannot be visualised as a place where objects lay in static rest but is better understood as a collection of mini archives in motion that become perceptible because of dynamic signal-based processing. In MIHMIH, memory inscription is associated with the “minimalist” yearbook that Mary was trying to create along with the bills where she documents her tweets/thoughts. At one point, Mary tries to carefully arrange her overflowing bills across her wall in a pattern to make sense of her growing emotional crisis. Yet, she is overwhelmed by the impossibility of this task. Networked media’s storage of prosthetic memory also makes self-representation ambiguous and messy. As a result, Mary’s story does align with cathartic and linear narrativisation but a messy agglomerative database. Happy Old Year: Decluttering to Mend Prosthetic Memories Kylie Cardell argues that the KonMari method connects tidiness to the self-conscious design of a curated personal archive. Marie Kondo associates decluttering with self-representation. "As Kondo is acutely aware, making memories is not simply about recuperating and preserving symbolic objects of the past, but is a future-oriented process that positions subjects in a peculiar way" (Cardell 2). This narrative formation of personal identity involves carefully storing a limited number of physical artefacts that will spark joy for the future self. Yet, we must segregate these affectively charged objects from clutter. Kondo encourages us to make intuitive judgments of conviction by overcoming ambivalent feelings and attachments about the past that are distributed over a wide set of material possessions. Notably, this form of decluttering involves archiving the prosthetic memories that dwell in our (analogue) material possessions. In Happy Old Year, Jean struggles to curate her personal archive as she becomes painfully aware of the memories that reside in her belongings. Interestingly, the film’s Thai title loosely translates as “How to Dump”. Jean has an urgent deadline to declutter her home so that it can be designed into a minimalist home office. Nevertheless, she gradually realises that she cannot coldly “dump” all her things and decides to return some of the borrowed objects to her estranged friends. This form of decluttering helps assuage her guilt about letting go of the past and allows her to (awkwardly and) elegantly honour her prosthetic memories. HOY reverses the clichéd before-after progression of events since we begin with the minimalist home and go back in flashbacks to observe its inundated and messy state. HOY’s after-before narrative along with its peculiar title that substitutes ‘new’ with ‘old’ alludes to the clashing temporalities that Jean is caught up within. She is conflicted between deceptive nostalgic remembrance and her desire to start over with a minimalist-blank slate that is purged of her past regrets. In many remarkable moments, HOY instantiates movement on computational screens to mirror digital media’s dizzying speeds of circulation and storage. Significantly, the film begins with the machinic perspective of a phone screen capturing a set of minimalist designs from a book. Jean refuses to purchase (and store) the whole book since she only requires a few images that can be preserved in her phone’s memory. As noted in the introduction, minimalist organisation can effectively draw on computational storage to declutter physical spaces. In another subplot, Jean is forced to retrieve a photo that she took years ago for a friend. She grudgingly searches through a box of CDs (a cumbersome storage device in the era of clouds) but ultimately finds the image in her ex-boyfriend Aim’s hard disk. As she browses through a folder titled 2013, her hesitant clicks display a montage of happy and intimate moments that the couple shared together. Aim notes how the computer often behaves like a time machine. Unlike Aim, Jean did not carefully organise and store her prosthetic memories and was even willing to discard the box of CDs that were emblematic of defunct and wasteful accumulation. Speaking about how memory is externalised in digital storage, Thamrongrattanarit notes: for me, in the digital era, we just changed the medium, but human relationships stay the same. … It’s just more complicated because we can communicate from a distance, we can store a ton of memories, which couldn’t have ever happened in the past. (emphasis added) When Jean “dumped” Aim to move to Sweden, she blocked him across channels of networked communicational media to avoid any sense of ambient intimacy between them. In digitising our prosthetic memories and maintaining a sense of “connected presence” across social media, micro temporal databases have made it nearly impossible to erase and forget our past actions. Minimalist organisation might help us craft a coherent and stable representation of personal identity through meticulous decluttering. Yet, late-capitalist clutter takes on a different character in our digital archives where the algorithmic unconscious of networked media capitalises on prosthetic storage to make personal identity ambiguous and untidy. It is interesting to note that Jean initially gets in touch with Aim to return his old camera and apologise for their sudden breakup. The camera can record events to “freeze” them in time and space. Later in the film, Jean discovers a happy family photo that makes her reconsider whether she has been too harsh on her father because of how he “dumped” her family. Yet, Jean bitterly finds that her re-evaluation of her material possessions and their dated prosthetic memories is deceptive. In overidentifying with the frozen images and her affectively charged material possessions, she is misled by the overwhelming plenitude of nostalgic remembrance. Ultimately, Jean must “dump” all her things instead of trying to tidy up the jumbled temporal frictions. In the final sequence of HOY, Jean lies to her friend Pink about her relationship with Aim. She states that they are on good terms. Jean then unfriends Aim on Facebook, yet again rupturing any possibility of phatic and ambient intimacy between them. As they sit before her newly emptied house, Pink notes how Jean can do a lot with this expanded space. In a tight close-up, Jean gazes at her empty space with an ambiguous yet pained expression. Her plan to cathartically purge her regrets and fraught memories by recuperating her prosthetic memories failed. With the remnants of her past self expunged as clutter, Jean is left with a set of empty spaces that will eventually resemble the blank slate that we see at the beginning of the film. The new year and blank slate signify a fresh beginning for her future self. However, this reverse transition from a minimalist blank slate to her chaotically inundated childhood home frames a set of deeply equivocal affective sensations. Nonetheless, Jean must mislead Pink to sustain the notion of tidy and narrativised coherence that equivocally masks her fragmented sense of an indefinable loss. Conclusion MIHMIH and HOY explore the unresolvable and conflicting affective tensions that arise in an ecosystem of all-pervasive networked media. Paasonen argues that our ability to control networked technologies concurrently fosters our mundane and prosthetic dependency on them. Both Jean and Mary seek refuge in the simplicity of minimalist design to wrestle control over their overstimulating spaces and to tidy up their personal narratives. It is important to examine contemporary minimalist networks in conjunction with affective formation and aesthetic experience in the era of “total design and internet plenitude”. In an information-management society where prosthetic memories haunt our physical and digital spaces, minimalist decluttering becomes a form of personal archiving that simultaneously empowers unambiguous aesthetic feeling and linear and stable autobiographical representation. The neatness of minimalist decluttering conjugates with an ideal self that can resolve ambivalent affective attachments about the past and have a coherent vision for the future. Yet, we cannot sort the clutter that resides in digital memory’s micro temporal archives and drastically complicates our personal narratives. Significantly, the digital self is not compatible with neat and orderly narrativisation but instead resembles an unstable and agglomerative database. References Cardell, Kylie. “Modern Memory-Making: Marie Kondo, Online Journaling, and the Excavation, Curation, and Control of Personal Digital Data.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.3 (2017): 499–517. DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2017.1337993. Cheon, Eun Jeong, and Norman Makoto Su. “The Value of Empty Space for Design.” Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018. DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173623. Ernst, Wolfgang, and Jussi Parikka. Digital Memory and the Archive. U of Minnesota P, 2013. Happy Old Year. Dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit. Happy Ending Film, 2019. Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine.” ADE Bulletin (2010): 62-79. DOI: 10.1632/ade.150.62. Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Ten Speed Press, 2010. Kyong, Chun Wendy Hui. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT P, 2013. Mankowski, Lukasz. “Interview with Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit: Happy Old Year Is Me in 100% for the First Time.” Asian Movie Pulse, 9 Feb. 2020. <http://asianmoviepulse.com/2020/02/interview-with-nawapol-thamrongrattanarit-2/>. Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy. Dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit. Pop Pictures, 2013. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard UP, 2015. Paasonen, Susanna. Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media. MIT P, 2021. Stephens, Paul. The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 明末清初嶺南三大家之一梁佩蘭詩論最突出之處乃在於擺脱當時宗唐與宗宋之二元對立，提出“自成面目”之論。此詩論自成體系，經歷多年醖釀而成，是佩蘭詩學思想之核心。其論與創作實踐相結合，並體現在其一生創作之各個階段，在清初詩壇甚爲少見。此論以“自成面目”説爲總綱，下分“天地真聲”説、“殖學務本”説、“大筆大墨”説三主軸。其主張寫詩以自成面目爲終極；首先須自道其真情；還須有先天後天之才，而先天不可强，故須殖學；才情兼備後，乃極其思以求化，寫出變化莫測之境界；最後以大筆大墨之題材範圍之。此詩論乃針對明代以來復古摹擬、幽深僻冷、淺率俚俗等詩風及流弊而發，其論首重性情之真，强調殖學，從學問中化出性情，先天後天之才並舉；客觀上正可去除公安派俚俗、過於率真之失，以及竟陵派幽僻之弊，同時有挽救復古派摹古而乏真情之病。佩蘭欲超脱宗唐宗宋之對立、調和各家之用意彰彰甚明。而此理論承繼唐順之“真精神”、公安派“真則我面不能同君面”之説以及錢謙益“學殖以深其根”的見解；並較好地吸取公安派重真之説，以殖學、温厚去其淺率俚俗。其同時又接續嶺南禪宗、心學、《易》學、文學等自成面目之學術文化傳統，尤其是上接嶺南文學傳統中多重革新之一面。其論儘管受前人論見及嶺南傳統影響，但在嶺南以至清初詩壇，正式將“自成面目”楬櫫成詩論，並形成完備體系，在多篇文章中發表，有“自成面目”之思維覺醒，且視之爲嶺南獨異於中原之詩歌特色，則當以梁佩蘭爲代表。 The most prominent feature of the poetics of Liang Peilan (1630- 1705), one of the “Three Great Masters of Lingnan,” is his innovation in promoting the theory of “self-fashioned idiosyncrasy.” This theory features a self-contained system, which had undergone developments for many years before it became the core of Liang's poetic thought. Liang's poetics are closely connected with his creative output and reflected in all stages of his artistic life. This was not a common phenomenon in that period. The theory of “self-fashioned idiosyncrasy” as its general outline consists of three main principles, namely：1 ) writing in the true voice of heaven and earth, 2) strengthening one's learning of the basics, and 3) writing in a carefree manner on significant themes. Liang advocated “self-fashioned idiosyncrasy' as an ultimate goal. First of all, one must tell one's genuine feelings. One must have innate and acquired talents, the former of which varies from one to another and cannot be acquired through effort； so learning is essential. When one has both talents and feelings, one needs to give full play to imagination and write about the realm of unpredictable changes. Finally，one should write in a carefree manner on significant themes. This kind of poetics has been directed against the poetic styles of archaism, mimicking, uncommon diction and vulgarity since the Ming Dynasty. Their foremost emphases include: the expression of genuine feelings, the need to cultivate temperament from knowledge, and the simultaneous development of innate and nurtured talents. Objectively speaking, it would remove the vulgarity and flaws of excessive straightforwardness of the Gong'an School and the uncommon diction of the Jingling School. At the same time it would correct the lack of true feelings in the works of the archaists. Liang Peilan had a noble goal to achieve. He aimed at transcending the demarcation of the worship of Tang and Song poetics in order to reconcile various schools. Liang's poetics were built on the basis of his predecessors. They include: the “true spirit” advocated by Tang Shunzhi (1507-1560) , the theory on udistinct idiosyncrasyn by the Gong'an School and Qian Qianyi's (1582 -1664) insights of ulearning to cultivate one's foundation.n They also adopt the u self-fashioned idiosyncrasy” and emphasis of the truth advocated by the Gong'an School， while discarding its drawbacks of simplicity and vulgarity. At the same time， they are an extension of the academic and cultural traditions of Lingnan Chan Buddhism, Study of the Heart-mind, scholarship of the Book of Changes, and literature, laying special emphases on innovation in the literary tradition of Lingnan. Although Liang's poetics were influenced by some predecessors as well as the Lingnan tradition， he formally proposed the theory of “self-fashioned idiosyncrasy，” published his views in many articles and consummated a complete form of poetics. He often consciously expressed the ideas of “self-fashioned idiosyncrasyn and regarded them as the unique features of Lingnan poetry, differentiated from the poetry of central China. Therefore ， Liang Peilan should be seen as the main representative of this campaign.

Wearing clothing from the past is all the rage now. Different styles and aesthetics of vintage and historical clothing, original or appropriated, are popular with fashion wearers and home sewers. Social media is rich with images of anachronistic clothing and the major pattern companies have a large range of historical sewing patterns available. Butterick McCall, for example, have a Making History range of patterns for sewers of clothing from a range of historical periods up to the 1950s. The 1950s styled fashion is particularly popular with pattern producers. Yet little research exists that explains why anachronistic clothing is all the rage. Drawing on 28 interviews conducted by the author with women who wear/make 1950s styles clothing and a survey of 229 people who wear/make historical clothing, this article outlines four key reasons that help explain the popularity of wearing/making anachronistic clothing: It argues that there exists rage against four ‘fast fashion’ practices: environmental disregard, labour breaches, poor quality, and poor fit. Ethical consumption practices such as home sewing quality clothes that fit, seeks to ameliorate this rage. That much of what is being made is anachronistic speaks to past sewing techniques that were ethical and produced quality fitting garments rather than fashion today that doesn’t fit, is of poor quality, and it unethical in its production. Fig. 1: Craftivist Collective Rage: Protesting Fast FashionRage against Fast Fashion Rage against fast fashion is not new. Controversies over Disney and Nike’s use of child labour in the 1990s, the anti-fur campaigns of the 1980s, the widespread condemnation of factory conditions in Bangladesh in the wake of the 2016 Rana Plaza collapse and Tess Holiday’s Eff Your Beauty Standards campaign, are evidence of this. Fast fashion is “cheap, trendy clothing, that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments … at breakneck speed” (Rauturier). It is produced cheaply in short turnarounds, manufactured offshore by slave labour, with the industry hiding these exploitative practices behind, and in, complex supply chains. The clothing is made from poor quality material, meaning it doesn’t last, and the material is not environmentally sustainable. Because of this fast fashion is generally not recycled and ends up as waste in landfills. This for Rauturier is what fast fashion is: “cheap, low quality materials, where clothes degrade after just a few wears and get thrown away”. The fast fashion industry engages in two discrete forms of obsolescence; planned and perceived. Planned obsolescence is where clothes are designed to have a short life-span, thus coercing the consumer into buying a replacement item sooner than intended. Claims that clothes now last only a few washes before falling apart are common in the media (Dunbar). This is due to conscious manufacturing techniques that reduce the lifespan of the clothes including using mixed fibres, poor-quality interfacing, and using polyester threads, to name a few. Perceived obsolescence is where the consumer believes an otherwise functioning item of clothing to no longer to be valued. This is borne out in the idea that an item is deemed to be “in vogue” or “in fashion” and its value to the consumer is thus embedded in that quality. Once it falls out of fashion is deemed worthless. Laver’s “fashion cycle” elucidated this idea over eighty years ago. Since the 1980s the fashion industry has sped up, moving from the traditional twice annual fashion seasons to the fast fashion system of constantly manufacturing new styles, sometimes weekly. The technologies that have allowed the rapid manufacturing of fast fashion mean that the clothes are cheaper and more readily available. The average price of clothing has dropped accordingly. An item that cost US$100 in 1993 only cost US$59.10 in 2013, a drop of 41 per cent (Perry, Chart). The average person in 2014 bought 60 per cent more clothing that they did in 2000. Fast fashion is generally unsaleable in the second-hand market, due to its volume and poor design and manufacture. Green notes that many charity clothing stores bin a large percentage of the fast fashion items they receive. Environmental Rage Consumers are increasingly expressing rage about the environmental impact of fast fashion. The production of different textiles places different stresses on the environment. Cotton, for example, accounts for one third of the fibres found in all textiles, yet it requires high levels of water. A single cotton shirt needs 2,700 litres of water alone, the equivalent to “what one person drinks in two-and-a-half years” (Drew & Yehounme). Synthetics don’t represent an environmentally friendly alternative. While they may need less water, they are more carbon-intensive and polyester has twice the carbon footprint of cotton (Drew & Yehounme). Criticisms of fast fashion also include “water pollution, the use of toxic chemicals and increasing levels of textile waste”. Textile dyeing is the “second largest polluter of clean water globally.” The inclusion of chemical in the manufacturing of textiles is “disruptive to hormones and carcinogenic” (Perry, Cost). Naomi Klein’s exposure of the past problems of fast fashion, and revelations such as these, inform why consumers are enraged by the fast fashion system. The State of Fashion 2019 Report found many of the issues Klein interrogated remain of concern to consumers. Consumers continue to feel enraged at the industry’s disregard for the environment (Shaw et al.) any many are seeking alternative sources of sustainable fashion. For some consumers, the ethical dilemmas are overcome by purchasing second-hand or recycled clothing, or participate in Clothing Exchanges. Another alternative to ameliorating the rage is to stop buying new clothes and to make and wear their own clothes. A recent article in The Guardian, “’Don’t Feed the Monster!’ The People Who Have Stopped Buying New Clothes” highlights the “growing movement” of people seeking to make a “personal change” in response to the ethical dilemmas fast fashion poses to the environment. While political groups like Fashion of Tomorrow argue for collective legislative changes to ensure environmental sustainability in the industry, consumers are also finding their own individual ways of ameliorating their rage against fast fashion. Over recent decades Australians have consistently shown concern over environmental issues. A 2016 national survey found that 63 per cent of Australians considered themselves to be environmentalists and this is echoed in the ABC’s War on Waste programme which examined attitudes to and effects of clothing waste in Australia. In my interviews with women wearing 1950s style clothing, almost 65 per cent indicated a distinct dissatisfaction with mainstream fashion and frustration particularly with pernicious ‘fast fashion’. One participant offered, “seeing the War on Waste and all the fast fashion … I really like if I can get it second hand … you know I feel like I am helping a little bit” [Gabrielle]. Traid, a network of UK charity clothes shops diverts 3 000 tonnes of clothes from landfill to the second-hand market annually, reported for 2017-18 a 30 per cent increase in its second-hand clothes sales (Coccoza). The Internet has helped expand the second-hand clothing market. Two participants offered these insights: “I am completely addicted to the Review Buy Swap and Sell Page” [Anna] and “Instagram is huge for girls like us to communicate and get ideas” [Ashleigh]. Slave Rage The history of fashion is replete with examples of exploitation of workers. From the seamstresses of France in the eighteenth century who had to turn to prostitution to supplement their meagre wages (Jones 16) to the twenty-first century sweatshop workers earning less than a living wage in developing nations, poor work conditions have plagued the industry. For Karl Marx fashion represented a contradiction within capitalism where labour was exploited to create a mass-produced item. He lambasted the fashion industry and its “murderous caprices”, and despite his dream that the invention of the sewing machine would alleviate the stress placed on garment workers, technology has only served to intensify its demands on its poor workers (Sullivan 36-37). The 2013 Rena Plaza factory disaster shows just how far some sections of the industry are willing to go in their race to the bottom.In the absence of enforceable, global fair-trade initiatives, it is hard for consumers to purchase goods that reflect their ethos (Shaw et al. 428). While there is much more focus on better labour practices in the fashion industry, as the Baptist World Aid Australia’s annual Ethical Fashion Report shows, consumers are still critical of the industry and its labour practices.A significant number of participants in my research indicated that they actively sought to purchase products that were produced free from worker exploitation. For some participants, the purchasing of second-hand clothing allowed them to circumnavigate the fast fashion system. For others, mid-century reproduction fashion was sourced from markets with strong labour laws and “ethically made” without the use of sweat shop labour” [Emma]. Alternatively, another participant rejected buying new vintage fashion and instead purchased originally made fashion, in this case clothing made 50 to 60 years ago. This was one was of ensuring “some poor … person has [not] had to work really hard for very little money … [while the] shop is gaining all the profits” [Melissa]. Quality Rage Planned obsolescence in fashion has existed at least since the 1940s when Dupont ensured their nylon stockings were thin enough to ladder to ensure repeat custom (Meynen). Since then manufacturers have deliberately used poor techniques and poor material – blended fabrics, unfinished seams, unfixed dyes, for example – to ensure that clothes fail quickly. A 2015 UK Barnardo’s survey found clothes were worn an average of just seven times, which is not surprising given that clothes can last as little as two washes before being worn out (Dunbar). Extreme planned obsolescence in concert with perceived obsolescence can lead to clothes being discarded before their short lifespan had expired. The War on Waste interviewed young women who wore clothes sometimes only once before discarding them.Not all women are concerned with keeping up to date with fashion, instead wanting to create their own identify though clothes and are therefore looking for durability in their clothes. Many of the women interviewed for this research were aware of the declining quality of clothes, often referring to those made before the fast fashion era as evidence of quality clothing. For many in this study, manufacturing of classically styled clothing was of higher concern than mimicking the latest fashion trend. Some indicated their “disgust” at the poor quality of fast fashion [Gabrielle]. Others has specific outrage at the cost of poorly made fast fashion: “I don’t like spending a lot of money on clothing that I know may not necessarily be well made” [Skye] and “I got sick of dresses just being see through … you know, seeing my bras under things” [Becky]. For another: “I don’t like the whole mass-produced thing. I don’t think that they are particularly well made … Sometimes they are made with a tiny waist but big boobs, there’s no seams on them, they’re just overlocked together …” [Vicky]. For other participants in this research fast fashion produced items were considered inferior to original items. One put it is this way: “[On using vintage wares] If something broke, you fixed it. You didn’t throw it away and go down to [the shop] and buy a new one ... You look at stuff from these days … you could buy a handbag today and you are like “is this going to be here in two years? Or is it going to fall apart in my hands?” … there’s that strength and durability that I do like” [Ashleigh]. For another, “vintage reproduction stuff is so well made, it’s not like fast fashion, like Vivien of Holloway and Pin Up Girl Clothing, their pieces last forever, they don’t fall apart after five washes like fast fashion” [Emma]. The following encapsulates the rage felt in response to fast fashion. I think a lot of people are wearing true vintage clothing more often as a kind of backlash to the whole fast fashion scene … you could walk into any shop and you could see a lot of clothing that is very, very cheap, but it’s also very cheaply made. You are going to wear it and it’s going to fall apart in six months and that is not something that I want to invest in. [Melissa]Fit RageFit is a multi-faceted issue that affects consumers in several ways: body size; body shape; and height. Body size refers to the actual physical size of the body, whether one is underweight, slim, average, muscular or fat. Fast fashion body size labelling reflects what the industry considers to be of ‘normal sizes’, ranging from a size 8 through to a size 16 (Hackett & Rall). Body shape is a separate, if not entirely discrete issue. Women differ widely in the ratios between their hips, bust and waist. Body shape distribution varies widely within populations, for example, the ‘Size USA’ study identified 11 different female body shapes with wide variations between populations (Lee et al.). Even this doesn’t consider bodies with physical disabilities. Clothing is designed to fit women of ‘average’ height, thus bodies that are taller or shorter are often excluded from fast fashion (Valtonen). Even though Australian sizing practices are based on erroneous historical data (Hackett and Rall; Kennedy), the fast fashion system continues to manufacture for average body shapes and average body heights, to the exclusion of others. Discrimination through clothing sizes represents one way in which social norms are reinforced. Garments for larger women are generally regarded as less fashionable (Peters 48). Enraged consumers label some of the offerings ‘fat sacks’, ‘tents’ and ‘camouflage wear’ (Colls 591-592). Further, plus size is often more expensive and having been ‘sized up’ from smaller sizes, the result is poor fit. Larger body’s therefore have less autonomy in fashioning their identity (Peters 45). Size restrictions can lead to consumers having to choose between going without a desired item or wearing a size too small for them as no larger alternative is available (Laitala et al. 33-34).The ideology behind the thin aesthetic is that it is framed as aspirational (Barry) and thus consumers are motivated to purchase clothes based upon a desire to fit in with this beauty ideal. This is a false dichotomy (Halliwell and Dittmar 105; Bian and Wang). For participants in this research rage at fashion fashions persistance in producing for ‘average’ sized women was clearly evident. For a plus-size participant: “I don’t suit modern stuff. I’m a bigger girl and that’s not what style is these days. And so, I find it just doesn’t work for me” [Ashleigh]. For non-plus participants, sizing rage was also evident: I’m just like a praying mantis, a long string bean. I’m slim, tall … I do have the body shape … that fast fashion catered for, and I can still dress in fast fashion, but I think the idea that so many women feel excluded by that kind of fashion, I just want to distance myself from it. So, so many women have struggles in the change rooms in shopping centres because things don’t fit them nicely. [Emma] For this participant reproduction fashion wasn’t vanity sized. That is, a dress from the 1950s had the body measurements on the label rather than a number reflecting an arbitrary and erroneous sizing system. Some noted their disregard for standardised sizing systems used exclusively for fast fashion: “I have very non-standard measurements … I don’t buy dresses for that reason … My bust and my waist and my hips don’t fit a standard. You know I can’t go “ooh that’s a 12, that’s an 18”. You know, I don’t believe in standard sizing basically” [Skye]. Variations of sizing by brands adds to the frustration of fashion consumers: “if someone says 'I’m a size 16' that means absolutely nothing. If you go between brands … [shop A] XXL to a [shop B] to a [shop C] XXL to a [shop D] XXL, you know … they’re not the same. They won’t fit the same, they don’t have the same fit” [Skye]. These women recognise that their body shape, size and/or height is not catered for by fast fashion. This frees them to look for alternatives beyond the product offerings of the mainstream fashion industry. Although the rage against aspects of fast fashion discussed here – environmental, labour, quality and fit – is not seeing people in the streets protesting, people are actively choosing to find alternatives to the problem of sourcing clothes that fit their ethos. ReferencesABC Television. "Coffee Cups and Fast Fashion." War on Waste. 30 May 2017. Barnardo's. "Once Worn, Thrice Shy – British Women’s Wardrobe Habits Exposed!" 11 June 2015. 1 Mar. 2019 <http://www.barnardos.org.uk/news/press_releases.htm?ref=105244http://www.barnardos.org.uk/news/press_releases.htm?ref=105244>.Barry, Ben. "Selling Whose Dream? A Taxonomy of Aspiration in Fashion Imagery." Fashion, Style & Popular Culture 1.2 (2014): 175-92.Cocozza, Paula. “‘Don’t Feed The Monster!’ The People Who Have Stopped Buying New Clothes”. The Guardian 19 Feb. 2019. 20 Feb. 2019 <http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/feb/19/dont-feed-monster-the-people-who-have-stopped-buying-new-clothes#comment-126048716>.Colls, Rachel. "‘Looking Alright, Feeling Alright’: Emotions, Sizing and the Geographies of Women's Experiences of Clothing Consumption." Social & Cultural Geography 5.4 (2004): 583-96.Drew, Deborah, and Genevieve Yehounme. "The Apparel Industry’s Environmental Impact in 6 Graphics." World Resources Institute July 2005. 24 Feb. 2018 <http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/07/apparel-industrys-environmental-impact-6-graphics>.Dunbar, Polly. "How Your Clothes Are Designed to Fall Apart: From Dodgy Stitching to Cheap Fabrics, Today's Fashions Are Made Not to Last – So You Have to Buy More." Daily Mail 18 Aug. 2016. 25 Feb. 2018 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3746186/Are-clothes-fall-apart-dodgy-stitching-cheap-fabrics-today-s-fashions-designed-not-buy-more.htmlhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3746186/Are-clothes-fall-apart-dodgy-stitching-cheap-fabrics-today-s-fashions-designed-not-buy-more.html>.Hackett, Lisa J., and Denise N. Rall. "The Size of the Problem with the Problem of Sizing: How Clothing Measurement Systems Have Misrepresented Women’s Bodies from the 1920s – Today." Clothing Cultures 5.2 (2018): 263-83.Kennedy, Kate. "What Size Am I? Decoding Women's Clothing Standards." Fashion Theory 13.4 (2009): 511-30.Klein, Naomi. No Logo, No Space, No Choice, No Jobs: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. London: Flamingo, 2000.Laitala, Kirsi, Ingun Grimstad Klepp, and Benedict Hauge. "Materialised Ideals Sizes and Beauty." Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 3 (2011): 19-41.Laver, James. Taste and Fashion. London: George G. Harrap, 1937.Lee, Jeong Yim, Cynthia L. Istook, Yun Ja Nam, Sun Mi Pak. "Comparison of Body Shape between USA and Korean Women." International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology 19.5 (2007): 374-91.Perry, Mark J. "Chart of the Day: The CPI for Clothing Has Fallen by 3.3% over the Last 20 Years, while Overall Prices Increased by 63.5%." AEIdeas 12 Oct. 2013. 4 Jan. 2019 <http://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-the-cpi-for-clothing-has-fallen-by-3-3-over-the-last-20-years-while-overall-prices-increased-by-63-5/http://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-the-cpi-for-clothing-has-fallen-by-3-3-over-the-last-20-years-while-overall-prices-increased-by-63-5/>. Perry, Patsy. “The Environmental Cost of Fast Fashion.” Independent 8 Jan. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/environment-costs-fast-fashion-pollution-waste-sustainability-a8139386.html>.Peters, Lauren Downing. "You Are What You Wear: How Plus-Size Fashion Figures in Fat Identity Formation." Fashion Theory 18.1 (2014): 45-71.Rauturier, Solene. “What Is Fast Fashion?” 1 Aug. 2010. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://goodonyou.eco/what-is-fast-fashion/>.Shaw, Deirdre, Gillian Hogg, Edward Shui, and Elaine Wilson. "Fashion Victim: The Impact of Fair Trade Concerns on Clothing Choice." Journal of Strategic Marketing 14.4 (2006): 427-40.Sullivan, Anthony. "Karl Marx: Fashion and Capitalism." Thinking through Fashion. Eds. Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik. London: I.B. Tauris, 2016. 28-45. Valtonen, Anu. "Height Matters: Practicing Consumer Agency, Gender, and Body Politics." Consumption Markets & Culture 16.2 (2013): 196-221.

A new device, sure to inspire technological bedazzlement, has been installed in Hong Kong shopping malls. Called simply The Love Machine, it functions like a photo booth, dispensing on-the-spot portraits1. But rather than one subject, it requires a couple, in fact the couple, in order to do its work of digital reproduction. For the output of this imaging machine is none other than a picture of the combined features of the two sitters, 'morphed' together by computer software to produce a technological child. Its Japanese manufacturers, while obviously cashing in on the novelty value, nevertheless list the advantage it allows for future matrimonial selection based around the production of a suitable aesthetic. Needless to say, the good citizens of Hong Kong have not allowed any rigid criteria for genetic engineering to get in the way of the progeny such a machine allows, creating such monstrous couplings as the baby 'cat-human', achieved by a sitter coupling with their pet. Rather than being the object of love here, technology acts as the conduit of emotion, or stronger still, it is the love relation itself, bringing the two together as one. What I want to touch upon is the sense in which a desire for oneness inhabits our relations to and through the technological. There is already an abundance of literature around the erotics of cyberspace, documenting and detailing encounters of virtual sex fantasies and romance. As well, there are more theoretical attempts to come to terms with what Michael Heim describes as the "erotic ontology of cyberspace" (59). Heim depicts these encounters not as a ravaging desire gone wild, sprouting up in odd places or producing monstrous offspring, but in homely and familial terms. Finally with the computer as incarnation of the machine, our love for technology can cease its restless and previously unfulfilled wanderings and find a comfortable place. What is worth pausing over here is the sense in which the sexual is subjugated to a conjugal and familial metaphor, at the same time as desire is modelled according to a metaphysics of fullness and lack. I would argue that in advancing this kind of love relation with the computer and the digital, the possibility of a relation is actually short-circuited. For a relation assumes the existence of at least two terms, and in these representations, technology does not figure as a second term. It is either marked as the other, where desire finds a soul mate to fill its lack. Or the technological becomes invisible, subsumed in a spiritual instrumentalism that sees it merely forging the union of cybernetic souls. I would suggest that an erotic relation with the technological is occluded in most accounts of the sexual in cyberspace and in many engagements with digital technologies. Instead we are left with a non-relational meeting of the same with itself. We might describe the dominant utilisation of the technological as onanistic. Relations of difference could be a productive effect of the technological, but are instead culturally caught up within an operational logic which sees the relational erotic possibilities of the machinic eliminated as sameness touches itself. I want to point towards some different models for theorising technology by briefly drawing upon the texts of Félix Guattari and Avital Ronell. These may lead to the production of a desiring relation with technology by coupling the machine with alterity. One of several climatic scenes from the 'virtual sex' movie Strange Days, directed by Katherine Bigelow, graphically illustrates the onanistic encounter. Set on the eve of the new millennium, the temporality of the film sets up a feeling of dis-ease: it is both futuristic and yet only too close. The narrative centres on the blackmarket in ultimate VR: purchasing software which allows the user, donning special headgear, to re-experience recorded memories in other peoples' lives. An evil abuser of this technology, known until the end of the film as an anonymous male junkie, is addicted to increasingly frequent hits of another's apperception. In his quest to score above his tolerance level, the cyber-junkie rapes a prostitute, but instead of wearing the headgear used to record his own perception of the rape, he forces the woman to put it on making her annex her subjectivity to his experience of desire. He records her reaction to becoming an appendage to him. The effect of watching this scene is deeply unsettling: the camera-work sets up a point-of-view shot from the position of the male subject but plays it to the audience as one might see through a video view-finder, thus sedimenting an assumed cultural association between masculinity and the male gaze. What we see is the violence produced by the annihilation of another's desire; what we hear is the soundtrack of the woman mimicking the male's enjoyment of his own desire. Put simply, what we watch is a feedback loop of a particular formation of technological desire, one in which the desire of or for the other is audio-visually impeded. Ultimately the experience can be stored and replayed as a porn movie solely for future masturbation. The scene in Strange Days quite adequately summarises the obstructed and obstructive desire to go no further than masturbation caught in the defiles of feedback. Feedback is also the term used in both video and sound production when a recording device is aimed at or switched onto a device playing back the same recording. The result, in the case of video, is to create an infinite abyss of the same image playing back into itself on the monitor; in the case of sound a high-pitched signal is created which impedes further transmission. By naming the desire to fuse with the technological a feedback loop, I am suggesting that manifestations of this desire are neither productive nor connective, in that any relation to exterior or heterogeneous elements are shut out. They stamp out the flow of other desires and replay the same looping desire based around notions of fullness and lack, completion and incompletion, and of course masculinity and femininity. Mark Dery makes this association between the desire for the technological, the elision of matter and phallic modes of masculinity: This, to the masculinist technophile, is the weirdly alchemical end point of cyberculture: the distillation of pure mind from base matter. Sex, in such a context, would be purged of feminine contact -- removed, in fact, from all notions of physicality -- and reduced to mental masturbation. (121) Dery's point is a corollary to mine; in discarding the need for an embodied sexual experience, the literature and representations of cyberspace, both theoretical and fictional, endorse only a touching of the sublimated self, no other bodies or even the bodily is brought into contact. There is no shortage of evidence for the disregard embodiment holds among the doyens of cyber-architecture. Hans Moravec and Marvin Minsky, writing about Artificial Intelligence, promote a future in which pure consciousness, freed from its entanglement with the flesh, merges with the machine (Mind Children; The Society of Mind). Here the reverence shown towards digital technology enters the sublime point of a coalition where the mind is supported by some sophisticated hardware, ultimately capable of adapting and reproducing itself. There are now enough feminist critics of this kind of cyberspeak to have noticed in this fantasy of machinic fusion a replay of the old Cartesian mind/body dualism. My point, however, is that this desire is not simply put in place by a failure to rethink the body in the realm of the digital. It is augmented by the fact that this disregard for theorising an embodied experience feeds into an inability to encounter any other within the realm of the technological. We should note that this is perpetuated not just by those seeking future solace in the digital, but also by its most ardent cultural critics. Baudrillard, as one who seemingly fits this latter category, eager to disperse the notion that writers such as Moravec and Minsky propound regarding AI, is driven to making rather overarching ontological remarks about machines in general. In attempting to forestall the notion that the machine could ever become the complement to the human, Baudrillard cancels the relation of the machine to desire by cutting off its ability to produce anything in excess of itself. The machine, on his account, can be reduced to the production of itself alone; there is nothing supplementary, exterior to or differential in the machinic circuit (53). For Baudrillard, the pleasures of the interface do not even extend to the solitary vice of masturbation. Celibate machines are paralleled by celibate digital subjects each alone with themselves, forming a non-relational system. While Baudrillard offers a fair account of the solitary lack of relation produced in and by digital technologies, he nevertheless participates in reinforcing the transformation of what he calls "the process of relating into a process of communication between One and the Same" (58). He catches himself within the circulation of the very desire he finds problematic. But whether onanistic or celibate, the erotics of our present or possible relations to technology do not become any more enticing in many actual engagements with emerging technologies. Popular modes of interfacing our desires with the digital favor a particular assemblage of body and machine where a kind of furtive one-handed masturbation may be the only option left to us. I will call this the operational assemblage, borrowing from Baudrillard and his description of Virtual Man, operating and communicating across computer cables and networks while being simultaneously immobilised in front of the glare of the computer screen. An operational assemblage, whilst being efficacious, inhibits movement and ties the body to the machine. Far from the body being discarded by information technologies, the operational assemblage sees certain parts of the body privileged and territorialised. The most obvious instance of this is VR, which, in its most technologically advanced state, still only selects the eyes and the hand as its points of bodily interface. In so-called fully immersive VR experience, it is the hand, wearing a data glove, which propels the subject into movement in the virtual world, but it is a hand propelled by the subject's field of vision, computer monitors mounted in the enveloping headset. Thus the hand operates by being subjected to the gaze2. In VR, then, the real body is not somehow left behind as the subject enters a new state of electronic consciousness; rather there is a re-organisation and reterritorialisation of the hand under the operative guidance of the eye and scopic desire. This is attested to by the experience one has of the postural body schema during immersion in VR. The 'non-operational' body remaining in physical space often feels awkward and clumsy as if it is too large or cumbersome to drag around and interact in the virtual world, as if it were made virtually non-functional. The operational assemblage of a distanced eye territorialising the hand to create a loop of identity through the machine produces a desiring body which is blocked in its relational capacities. It can only touch itself as self; it cannot find itself an other or as other. Rather than encouraging the hand to break connections with the circuit of the gaze, to develop speeds, capabilities and potentials of its own, these encounters are perpetually returned to the screen and the domain of the eye. They feed back into a loop where relations to other desires, other kinds of bodies, other machines are circumvented. Looping back and returning to the aesthetic reduction performed by the Love Machine, a more lo-tech version of the two technologically contracted to one might point to the possibility of alterity that current digital machines seem keen to circumvent. At San Fransisco's Exploratorium museum one of the public points of interface with the Human Genome Project can be found3. The Exploratorium has a display set up which introduces the public to the bioinformation technology involved as well as soliciting responses to bio-ethical issues surrounding the question of genetic engineering. In the midst of this display a simple piece of glass hangs as a divider between two sides of a table. By sitting on one side of the table with a light shining from behind, one could see both a self-reflection and through the glass to whomever was sitting on the other side. The text accompanying the display encourages couples to occupy either side of the glass. What is produced for the sitter on the light side is a combination of their own reflection 'mapped' onto the features of the sitter on the other side. The text for the display encourages a judgement of the probable aesthetic outcome of combining one's genes with those of the other. I tested this display with my partner, crossing both sides of the mirror/glass. Our reactions were similar; a sensation approaching horror arose as we each faced our distorted, mirrored features as possible future progeny, a sensation akin to encountering the uncanny4. While suggesting the familiar, it also indicates what is concealed, becoming a thing not known and thus terrifying. For what was decidedly spooky in viewing a morphing of my image onto that of the other's, in the context of the surrounding bioinformatic technologies, was the sense in which a familiarity with the homely features of the self was dislocated by a haunting, marking the claim of a double utterly different. Recalling the assertion made by Heim that in the computer we find an intellectual and emotional resting point, we could question whether the familiarity of a resting place provides a satisfactory erotic encounter with the technological. We could ask whether the dream of the homely, of finding in the computer a kinship which sanctions the love machine relation, operates at the expense of dispelling that other, unfamiliar double through a controlling device which adjusts differences until they reach a point of homeostasis. What of a reading of the technological which might instaurate rather than diffuse the question of the unfamiliar double? I will gesture towards both Guattari's text Chaosmosis and Ronell's The Telephone Book, for the importance both give to the double in producing a different relation with the technological. For Guattari, the machine's ghost is exorcised by the predominant view that sees particular machines, such as the computer, as a subset of technology, a view given credence at the level of hype in the marketing of AI, virtual reality and so forth as part of the great technological future. It also gains credibility theoretically through the Heideggerian perspective. Instead Guattari insists that technology is dependent upon the machinic (33). The machinic is prior to and a condition of any actual technology, it is a movement rather than a ground; the movement through which heterogeneous elements such as bodies, sciences, information come to form the interrelated yet specific fields of a particular assemblage we might term technological. It is also the movement through which these components retain their singularity. Borrowing from modern biology, Guattari labels this movement "autopoietic" (39). Rather than the cybernetic model which sees the outside integrated into the structure of the machinic by an adjustment towards homogeneity cutting off flow, Guattari underlines a continual machinic movement towards the outside, towards alterity, which transforms the interrelations of the technological ensemble. The machinic is doubled not by the reproduction of itself, but by the possibility of its own replacement, its own annihilation and transformation into something different: Its emergence is doubled with breakdown, catastrophe -- the menace of death. It possesses a supplement: a dimension of alterity which it develops in different forms. (37) Here, we can adjoin Guattari with Ronell's historical reading of the metaphorics of the telephone in attempts to think through technology. Always shadowed by the possibility Heidegger wishes to stake out for a beyond to or an overcoming of the technological, Ronell is both critical of the technologising of desire in the cybernetic loop and insistent upon the difference produced by technology's doubling desire. Using the telephone as a synecdoche for technology -- and this strategy is itself ambiguous: does the telephone represent part of the technological or is it a more comprehensive summary of a less comprehensive system? -- Ronell argues that it can only be thought of as irreducibly two, a pair (5). This differentiates itself from the couple which notoriously contracts into one. She argues that the two are not reducible to each other, that sender and receiver do not always connect, are not reducible to equal end points in the flow of information. For Ronell, what we find when we are not at home, on unfamiliar ground, is -- the machine. The telephone in fact maintains its relation to the machinic and to the doubling this implies, via the uncanny in Ronell's text. It relates to a not-being-at-home for the self, precisely when it becomes machine -- the answering machine. The answering machine disconnects the speaker from the listener and inserts itself not as controlling device in the loop, but as delay, the deferral of union. Loosely soldering this with Guattari's notion that the machine introduces a "dimension of alterity", Ronell reads the technological via the telephone line as that relation to the outside, to the machinic difference that makes the self always unfamiliar (84). I would suggest then that pursuing a love relation with technology or through the technological leads us to deploy an entire metaphorics of the familial, where the self is ultimately home alone and only has itself to play with. In this metaphorics, technology as double and technology's doubling desire become a conduit that returns only to itself through the circuitous mechanism of the feedback loop. Rather than opening onto heterogeneous relations to bodies or allowing bodies to develop different relational capacities, the body here is immobilised by an operational and scopic territorialisation. To be excited by an encounter with the technological something unfamiliar is preferable, some sense of an alternating current in the midst of all this homeliness, an external perturbation rubbing up against the tired hand of a short-circuiting onanism. Footnotes 1. The Love Machine is also the title of a digital still image and sound installation commenting upon the Hong Kong booth produced by myself and Michele Barker and last exhibited at the Viruses and Mutations exhibition for the Melbourne Festival, The Aikenhead Conference Centre, St. Vincent's Hospital, October, 1998. 2. For an articulation of the way in which this maps onto perspectival vision, see Simon Penny, "Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment Project." Culture on the Brink. Eds. G. Bender and T. Druckery. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994. 3. Funded by the US Government, the project's goal is to develop maps for the 23 paired human chromosomes and to unravel the sequence of bases that make up the DNA of these chromosomes. 4. This is what Freud described in his paper "The Uncanny". Tracing the etymology of the German word for the uncanny, unheimlich, which in English translates literally as 'unhomely', Freud notes that heimlich, or 'homely', in fact contains the ambiguity of its opposite, in one instance. References Baudrillard, Jean. "Xerox and Infinity." The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena. Trans J. Benedict. London: Verso, 1993. 51-9. Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17. Trans. and ed. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. Heim, Michael. "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace." Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994.59-80. Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Moravec, Hans. Mind Children. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Anna Munster. "Love Machines." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php>. Chicago style: Anna Munster, "Love Machines," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Anna Munster. (1999) Love machines. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php> ([your date of access]).

“Power” is a central concept for politics, arguably defining the political domain as such. However, despite decades of debate across political science, sociology, and philosophy, a proper definition of power is still to be had. Existing definitions fail because they are either circular or so far removed from the ordinary meaning of “power” that they cannot credibly claim to be about the same concept. This book, employing an Arendtian approach to conceptual analysis, provides a more proper definition—power denotes the condition of having available possibilities and representing them as such—and examines its implications for the study of politics, both empirical and normative. From the vantage point of a proper definition, the book shows how, by neglecting the category of possibility, significant portions of political science and philosophy become incapable of conceptualizing power, and therefore politics. The main issue with political science is the increasingly exclusive focus on causal and probabilistic regularities; political philosophy, on the other hand, tends to prioritize various forms of a teleologically oriented normativity. Both of these approaches end up discarding possibility in favor of necessity, and are therefore unable to adequately conceptualize power. Finally, bringing together the different disciplinary discourses, the book examines the conditions for the concept of power to have an actual referent, which is to say: for politics to appear in our world.

Abstract This book brings together fourteen essays from the work of John Cottingham on moral philosophy and philosophy of religion spanning the past fifteen years. The chapters are closely related in so far as they all deal with the perennial challenges of human existence—the drive to understand the world we live in, the limits of scientific inquiry, the search for a good and meaningful life, and the human quest for transcendence. As well as being thematically linked, they share a common style and methodology, illustrating the distinctive goal that has informed the author’s work in recent years, that of promoting a more ‘humane’ conception of philosophizing. While in no way discarding the technical tools of the professional philosopher such as abstract argumentation and analysis, whose value is unquestionable, this approach is notable for drawing on the full range of resources available to the human mind, including those that depend on literary, poetic, imaginative, aesthetic, and emotional modes of awareness. In contrast to the model of the philosopher as a kind of detached scrutineer, the essays exemplify the belief that there is also a distinctive and valuable kind of philosophical understanding that requires a more involved and engaged stance. The topics dealt with fall broadly within the familiar domains of moral philosophy and philosophy of religion, but the reflections offered on these areas of human thought and practice always aim to be sensitive to how morality and religion actually operate in the lives of the human beings involved.

Abstract THE Mellon chansonnier, a collection of polyphonic songs compiled in the mid-147os, has been edited and issued in a luxurious fashion. The production of such a lavish edition, including an entire volume of introductory and ancillary matter, presented the two editors, Howard Garey and Leeman Perkins, with an opportunity to consider the cultural context of the songs in the manuscript. In his introduction to the poetry, set by composers such as Busnoys, Dufay, and Ockeghem, Howard Garey declares that the poems open ‘a door to ⃛ the world so sensitively described by Johan Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages’. Garey is commending what is perhaps the most famous book ever written about the later lVIiddle Ages in the North and one that enjoys a ‘legendary fame’, in the words of Reinhard Strohm.

Rapid increase in different types of hazardous waste due to continuous economic growth, industrialization and urbanization is becoming a major problem for government to ensure effective and sustainable waste management. The transport, separation, handling and discarding of wastes needs to be properly managed without affecting the environmental health. At present, there is no such system of separation of dry, wet and metallic wastes. This process proposes an Automated Waste Separator (AWS) which is a simple and economical separation system for domestic purpose in the most economical and effective method. This report proposes implementation of an advanced waste separator. The waste has to be separated and monitored properly so as to gain the golden property of the waste by recycling. Also if the waste is handled manually then there is a chance of spread of diseases and various infections. If the waste is handled with fast working separator machine and a data of separated waste then it reduces the chances of various diseases by keeping it far away from workers and helps industries to make a great profit by recycling them at their required pace. The separated dry materials like plastic glass can be further recycled, the metallic waste can be melted and re-used. The wood waste can be converted into briquette and wet waste is converted into manure. This work proposes an Automatic Waste Separator (AWS) which is a cheap, easy to use solution.