Статті в журналах з теми "Human-object divde"

Using a mouse-tracking technique, we measured the strength and the temporal unfolding of the conflict when people categorize objectified and nonobjectified human stimuli in the human or object category. We recorded participants’ hand movements when they categorized male and female, objectified and nonobjectified, human, and doll-like stimuli in the person and object categories. As expected, objectified women created a stronger categorization conflict compared to all other human stimuli. The nature of the mouse trajectories indicated that this response competition was caused by the distractor (object category) rather than the target (person category) and showed to be smooth rather than abrupt suggesting dynamic competition between the object–human categories rather than the sequential unfolding of a dual process. These findings demonstrate that the human–object divide fades when women (but not men) are objectified. The implications of the current findings for theorizing on processes of sexual objectification are discussed.

The central puzzle of the law of the dead is that a corpse is both a person and a thing. A dead human body is a material object—a messy, maybe dangerous, perhaps valuable, often useful, and always tangible thing. But a dead human being is also something very different: It is also my father, and my friend, perhaps my child, and some day, me. For even the most secular among us, a human corpse is at the least a very peculiar and particular kind of thing. Scholars generally divide the law of the dead body into the three intertwined realms of defining, using, and disposing of the dead, and debates in each realm center on where and how to draw the line between person and object. The thing-ness of the dead human body is never stable or secure.

This paper unpacks the history of seeing and the separation of subjectivity from objectivity in order to establish a framework for landscape and architectural design interventions on large scales. As perception shifted from an act of subjective creation of meaning to one operating under the auspices of empiricism, a chasm opened between the observer and the observed. Instead of locating the meaning of the observed object within the subject, perception for Moderns became an act of describing the world as-is. The resulting proliferation of descriptions of large-scale, interrelated ecological and urban systems became unintelligible to the human imagination, becoming metaphorical “giants” in our cultural and artistic realms. In the process, the world has became both more distant and seemingly more conquerable. The author suggests confronting the limits of the imagination through exercises in scales in order to negotiate the increasing distance between subject (human observers) and object (the natural and built world).

Soundscape composition and environmental sound art already imply critiques and negotiations of nature/culture divide and human/non-human difference. This article, along with the composition it frames, thinks through a vision of environmental sound art that completes a link between sonic practice and its object. As a project, it navigates human/animal difference through a sonic knowing which is founded on life’s shared constitution in signs. Sounds beyond spoken words, like the signs that dominate non-human life, are foundationally non-symbolic, and the ability of environmental sound art to resemble and evoke networks of icons and indices is in some respects a privileged position of electroacoustic music. The article presents a non-dualistic sonic thinking within the decentred perspective of the environment, which emerges as a plural product of its engagements and participants. A vision for soundscape composition is presented, along with a frame for its interpretation as sonic thought, or phonosophy.

An artificial elastic finger skin for robot fingers has been developed for controlling grasp force when weight and frictional coefficient of the grasped object are unknown. The elastic finger skin has ridges at the surface to divide the stick/slip area. It also has a pair of tactile sensors embedded per ridge similar to human fingertips. The surface of the whole finger is curved so that reaction force distributes. A Finite Element (FE) model of the elastic finger skin was made to conduct dynamic contact analysis using a FE method to design the elastic finger skin in detail. Then the elastic finger skin was made. We confirmed by calculation and experiment that incipient slippage of the ridge occurring near the edge of contact is detected. Then, grasp was controlled using the finger. Arbitrary objects were lifted by incipient slippage near the edge of contact. We found that artificial finger skin is useful for controlling grasping force when the weight and friction coefficient between the elastic finger skin and grasping object are unknown.

<p><em>The current technological developments so rapidly, as well as the development of electronics technology. Robotics is a proof of human civilization that progresses from time to time. The shape of the robot is not just a form that resembles a human or a certain animal, but moves to resemble the form it imitates. The development of computer technology associated with other devices. The problem of this research is the difficulty of checking leakage of gas or water pipes in the pond. The main purpose of the research is to design and build a complete submarine robot with an endoscope camera that can replace human power for. How this robot works is a robot moving forward, backward, turn right, turn left, move up and down (dive) and equipped with a camera to detect the existence of an object. This robot combines hardware and software, using Arduino Uno Microcontroller as the controller of robots, cameras, and motor drivers as control of propeller motion. The submarine is equipped with an endoscope camera as a leak detector of gas or water pipes inside the pool, especially the detection of objects. The result of the research is a robot can dive in the water base to detect the presence of objects. From this then the authors make a robot submarine detection of the existence of objects that can replace human power to check the leakage of gas or water pipes in the pool. expected robots can be smarter than the previous one.</em></p>

Within the context of the ‘Anthropocene’, the current geological epoch marked by the impact of human activity on terrestrial ecosystems and geological formations, this article considers the ways in which the ecological blurring of boundaries between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ might affect existing ontologies of performance. Departing from Richard Bauman’s definition of performance as both communication and enactment, we will use the postulates of Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology to speculate on what performance might mean beyond the human/nonhuman divide. Ultimately, it will be claimed, performance, understood as both enactment and unveiling, is at the core of all encounters between all bodies and irrespective of their perceived nature. As a result, the world must once again be thought as theatrum mundi, as a stage where bodies always encounter one another through the contingency of the personae they play, personae that nonetheless are unable to exhaust the full being of the bodies behind them.

The world in which human beings live is made up of five kinds of lands. Tholkappiyar would divide the lands into Kurinji, Mullai, Marutham, Neithal, and Palai. Tolkappiyar has divided the lands into Muthal Porul (Primary Object), Uripporul (The Theme), and Karupporul (The Epithet). Whatever the subject matter of the literature of this period, it is based on these five kinds of lands. Human society is made up of different ethnic groups. Among them is the novel 'Kurinjitthen' which talks about the Badagas tribe. Kurinji land is a hilly and hills surrounded place. The novel 'Kurinjitthen' depicts the life of the Badagas living in the Nilgiri hills. Through the novel 'Kurinchithen', the novel explores all aspects of the life of the Badagas, such as Hethai, the revered deity worshipped by the Badugas, the rules followed by them to protect the fire, the form of light, the methods of performing the 'Hone (Bamboo Vessel to collect milk)' ritual, and the condition of the women of the Badagas tribe.

Age is not just a number as human body also ages as time pass by. The time passes our vision can also begin to deteriorate as a study suggests 82% of blind people in 39 million blind population are about 50 years and older. So the device suggested can help people to walk without support of others as it uses image recognition by machine learning and informs the user about the obstacle ahead. Such a way of using machine learning has already been applied in self-driving cars and it is quite effective. And also the device can help disable people who were born blind. The camera will be mounted on the user chest and Faster R-CNN will divide the live image into 3 * 3 grid and processes various object in a single grid and compares it with its own database. The algorithm can also calculate the distance from the user to the object like a chair and staircase etc. The device can also read the colour of the traffic lights and can tell the user when the light is green and when the light is red. This device can help many old as well as young people who are blind and reduce the travel difficulties by a large amount.

The region as a concept continues to hold promise as a way of breaking through the many binaries that often divide political ecology. Operationalizing a regional political ecology approach allows the researcher to generate a large number of insights and conclusions that a more narrow disciplinary (disciplined) focus and non-scalar approach would miss; this is because important biophysical and social processes intersect with each another and work together to produce and/or mediate important outcomes for human and environmental well-being. The article draws on a number of cases to examine what comparison of political ecological research between regions could look like. I argue for a reinvigorated relationship between regional political ecology as an approach and agrifood systems as the object of study, and pose questions that can help shape this endeavor.Keywords: regional political ecology, regional comparisons, network political ecology, agriculture, food systems, agroecology

A century of robots is the 21st century. The robots have long been able to cross the divide between the virtual universe and the real world. Robotics, as the most successful contender in the upcoming great technological revolution, will play an ever more important role in society because of the impact it has in every field of life, including medicine, healthcare, architecture, manufacturing and food supplies, logistics and transport. This document introduces a modern approach to the grasp of robots, which draws grasp techniques from the human demonstration and combines these strategies into a grasp-planning framework, in order to produce a viable insight into the objective geometry and manipulation tasks of the object. Our study findings show that grasping strategies of the form of grasp and thumbs positioning are not only necessary for human grasp but also significant restrictions on posture and wrist posture which greatly reduce both the robot hand's workplace and the search space for grasp planning. In the simulation and with a true robotic system this method has been extensively tested for several everyday living representative objects. In the experiment with varying degrees of perceiving in certainties, we have demonstrated the power of our method.

ABSTRACTThis paper challenges Wolfgang Giegerich’s sometimes sophisticated and at other times sophistic notion of absolute negative interiority. In contrast to his uroboric view of ‘psychology proper’, this author resists the successionist ideas of a post-Jungian, trans-human perspective and asserts the notion of an unassimilable and unsurmountable ‘not’. In this paper, the author revisions the traditional divide between Kant and Hegel, taking the ‘thing-in-itself’ as truly other than existing only for consciousness and arguing against privileging theunityof unity and difference. This paper entertains the alchemical ideas of a residue, acaput mortuum, and an archetypally cumbersome object, a real limit, which remains and unhinges the elevating process of spirit on its path to return to itself in absolute interiority. Rather, it acknowledges an abyss ‘behind the back of consciousness’, a non-reified living unconscious – a dark light, an absolute that is not absolute, but rather a gateway back to the beyond, at the root of imagination, wonder, and transformation.

Division of the reachable workspace of upper limbs under different visual and physical conditions, finding the efficient reachable area under concurrent task conditions, and using it as a basis to divide the incorporation boundaries that require robot assistance are the focus of this paper. These could be used to rationalize the allocation of human and robot workspaces to maximize the efficiency of multitask completion, which has significant applications in the enhancement of human–robot collaboration (HRC) capabilities. However, research on this has rarely been conducted due to the complexity and diversity of arm movements. In this paper, we considered the physical and visual restrictions of the human operator, extracted the movement data of 10 participants while completing the reaching task, and divided the workspace into five areas (their angles are 0°~44.761°, 44.761°~67.578°, 67.578°~81.108°, 81.108°~153.173°, and 153.173°~180°). Measuring the concurrent task completion times when the target object is in each area, respectively, we demonstrated that areas Ⅰ ~ Ⅱ are efficient, reachable workspaces for the human. In the non-efficient reachable workspaces, the average completion times for HRC were 86.7% for human operators (in area III) and 70.1% (in area IV), with the average number of warnings reduced from 2.5 to 0.4. The average completion time for HRC in area V was 59.3% for the human operator, and the average number of warnings was reduced from 3.5 to 0.5. Adding robotic assistance in this area could improve the efficiency of the HRC systems. This study provided a quantitative evaluation of human concurrent task completion capabilities and the incorporation boundaries of robots, which is a useful reference for achieving efficient HRC.

In the scientific environment, there are many options for classifying investments, but almost all authors divide investments into real and financial ones. At the same time, there is no single approach to classification by the object of investment in the scientific community, as, however, there is no consensus on the composition of signs that distinguish real and financial investments from the entire spectrum of possible investments. At the same time, the problem of determining the main features of real and financial investments is quite relevant today, since there is no regulatory definition, and the presence of such a definition may be in demand in the near future, which is primarily due to the demand for investments in the real sector of the country's economy, and as a consequence, the establishment of legislative benefits and preferences for enterprises that make real investments in state-defined industries, which is quite problematic to implement in the absence of a regulatory definition. By analyzing the existing points of view on the nature of real and financial investments and their place in the classification, two main directions of opinions on the essence of direct investment can be distinguished. According to some authors, all investments in the object of investment can be divided into real and financial. Another group of scientists suggests a broader classification, adding intangible and intellectual investments, investments in human capital, etc. to real and financial investments. According to the author of the article, investments in intangible assets and tangible assets are components of real investments, and intellectual investments and investments in human capital, in turn, are included in intangible investments. The article also proves that portfolio investments cannot be identified with financial investments, and real investments cannot be identified with direct investments.

In this paper, we propose a model to predict the locations of the most attended pictorial information on a web page and the attention sequence of the information. We propose to divide the content of a web page into conceptually coherent units or objects, based on a survey of more than 100 web pages. The proposed model takes into account three characteristics of an image object: chromatic contrast, size, and position and computes a numerical value, the attention factor. We can predict from the attention factor values the image objects most likely to draw attention and the sequence in which attention will be drawn. We have carried out empirical studies to both develop and determine the efficacy of the proposed model. The study results revealed a prediction accuracy of about 80% for a set of artificially designed web pages and about 60% for a set of real web pages sampled from the Internet. The performance was found to be better (in terms of prediction accuracy) than the visual saliency model, a popular model to predict human attention on an image.

This article examines the debate relating to reparations for ‘past’ human rights violations, with particular focus on the case of the indigenous ‘Stolen Generation’ in Australia. The ‘Stolen Generation’ is a term used to describe the government-sanctioned practice of forced removals of part-Aboriginal children from their indigenous parents and placement into non-indigenous institutions and homes, which occurred in Australia from approximately 1910–1970. The ‘Stolen Generation’ violations present a unique and difficult legal question for international human rights law because they straddle the divide between ‘historic’ violations and contemporary acts, that is, they were committed by Australia after Australia signed key agreements such as the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Declaration on the Rights of the Child and the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, but prior to its ratification of international human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This means that bringing a claim under international human rights law in relation to the violations raises a number of problems. The object of this article will be to explore whether Australia can be held responsible under international human rights law for the ‘Stolen Generation’ violations and possible avenues of redress. In this regard, the focus of the article will be on the possible claims victims could make to relevant treaty monitoring bodies and the types of obstacles they would face in doing so. These legal questions are also relevant to the wider debate that is taking place in relation to reparations, namely the extent to which a State can be held legally responsible to provide reparations for past violations.

Although the posthumanist tag is applied to the society where men and machines compete for power, the mutation earning this name was the one that affected the perception of man’s identity through the collapse of ontological categories. Human nature changed as the historical self was replaced by deconstructionists with the instance saying “I”, man’s cognition was redefined as biological epistemology by Maturana and Varela (1972), quantum physics relegated relations of causation to invisible and unpredictable process at the subatomic level, phases of civilization made room for temporary plateaus generated by signifying particles within the eternal flow of things and energy Deleuze and Guattari (1980). What used to be perceived as reality has become an amorphous mixture of elements, in which bodies are no longer discrete entites but processes, emerging forms of life. If the Deleuzian “becoming animal” of 1980 stirred anxiety around the human body made into a site of various inscriptions and identities, The Shape of Water (2018), a novel written by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus, the homonymous movie (2017) directed by the former, or Robert Bolesto’s screenplay of the Polish movie The Lure (2015) have recently provided the companion pieces of elementary nature “becoming human” across the human/ animal divide The quantum picture of a world reduced to a flux of matter and energy in A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had somehow prepared the ground for this posthuman reversal of the Renaissance worldpicture with man at the top of creation. The process, however, had already started some decades before. We are moving back in time locating its origin in the rise of object-oriented philosophy.

For soft grippers to be applied in atypical industrial environments, they must conform to an object’s exterior shape and momentarily change their stiffness. However, many of the existing grippers have limitations with respect to these functions: they grasp an object with only a single curvature and a fixed stiffness. Consequently, those constraints limit the stability of grasping and the applications. This paper introduces a new multicurvature, variable-stiffness soft gripper. Inspired by the human phalanx and combining the phalanx structure and particle jamming, this work guarantees the required grasping functions. Unlike the existing soft pneumatic grippers with one curvature and one stiffness, this work tries to divide the pressurized actuating region into three parts to generate multiple curvatures for a gripper finger, enabling the gripper to increase its degrees of freedom. Furthermore, to prevent stiffness loss at an unpressurized segment, this work combines divided actuation and the variable-stiffness capability, which guarantee successful grasping actions. In summary, this gripper generates multiple grasping curvatures with the proper stiffness, enhancing its dexterity. This work introduces the new soft gripper’s design, analytical modeling, and fabrication method and verifies the analytic model by comparing it with FEM simulations and experimental results.

This is a narrative about a dress named Laverne and a woman named Elizabeth told through Ian Hodder’s proposition about entanglements. Elizabeth Withey wrote a blog called Frock Around the Clock about her lived experience of wearing the black dress “Laverne” every day for one year. Through Hodder’s three themes of entanglement — humans depend on things, things depend on things, and things depend on humans — the interdependencies between a woman and a dress are uncovered. Laverne is a thread within a web of other threads of entanglement driven by her relationship with a person. This is demonstrated through Hodder’s illustration of sequential staging and the vast network of things required for Laverne’s existence. Laverne and Elizabeth’s interdependent relationship is further developed through a close examination of their interactions, including how Laverne is reliant on Elizabeth to acquire and maintain agency. In turn, Elizabeth finds comfort during a tumultuous year by constructing and reconstructing her identity with Laverne as a kind of transitional object. Our discussion concludes by offering three general insights into the entangled and complex human-clothing relationship. The complexities of a human relationship and interactions with a dress are exposed in this case study through an in-depth dive into slow fashion that reveals significant insights into the entangled relationships and interactions people have with clothing.

The great reserves for further increasing effectiveness of physical education of a learning youth are at secrets of age pecularities of controlling movements as well as at regularities of age changing physiological mechanisms which condition at certain measure stating moving functions of a human at an ontogenesys. The subject of these investigations are age pecularities of building and controlling movements as well as an application of these pecularities at sport and oriented physical education of a youth. Learning this question is possible from the point of view of various sciences: physiology, psychology, biomechanics, cybernetics, pedagogy. It is considered that at present the largest effect we can obtain when there is simultaneous support on all abovenamed branches of science. But when there is such various approach to this question it is important that the attention would be paid to certain object of investigation. This is the structure of psychophysical preparing of a human (PPP) which is considered at the theory of physical education as the whole structure of psychological and physical qualities; this structure determines a successfulness of moving activities ar various conditions. This article considers some results of our investigations; these results characterize pecularities of various appearences of PPP concerned to a youth of various age groups. These data we can divide into three parts: the data about cabability to mastering new moving actions; the data which characterize age pecularities of certain appearences; the data about co – called moving adaptation and a structure PPP of a learning youth.

We propose an image labeling method for LIDAR intensity image obtained by Mobile Mapping System (MMS) using K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) of feature obtained by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Image labeling assigns labels (e.g., road, cross-walk and road shoulder) to semantic regions in an image. Since CNN is effective for various image recognition tasks, we try to use the feature of CNN (Caffenet) pre-trained by ImageNet. We use 4,096-dimensional feature at fc7 layer in the Caffenet as the descriptor of a region because the feature at fc7 layer has effective information for object classification. We extract the feature by the Caffenet from regions cropped from images. Since the similarity between features reflects the similarity of contents of regions, we can select top K similar regions cropped from training samples with a test region. Since regions in training images have manually-annotated ground truth labels, we vote the labels attached to top K similar regions to the test region. The class label with the maximum vote is assigned to each pixel in the test image. In experiments, we use 36 LIDAR intensity images with ground truth labels. We divide 36 images into training (28 images) and test sets (8 images). We use class average accuracy and pixel-wise accuracy as evaluation measures. Our method was able to assign the same label as human beings in 97.8% of the pixels in test LIDAR intensity images.

We propose an image labeling method for LIDAR intensity image obtained by Mobile Mapping System (MMS) using K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) of feature obtained by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Image labeling assigns labels (e.g., road, cross-walk and road shoulder) to semantic regions in an image. Since CNN is effective for various image recognition tasks, we try to use the feature of CNN (Caffenet) pre-trained by ImageNet. We use 4,096-dimensional feature at fc7 layer in the Caffenet as the descriptor of a region because the feature at fc7 layer has effective information for object classification. We extract the feature by the Caffenet from regions cropped from images. Since the similarity between features reflects the similarity of contents of regions, we can select top K similar regions cropped from training samples with a test region. Since regions in training images have manually-annotated ground truth labels, we vote the labels attached to top K similar regions to the test region. The class label with the maximum vote is assigned to each pixel in the test image. In experiments, we use 36 LIDAR intensity images with ground truth labels. We divide 36 images into training (28 images) and test sets (8 images). We use class average accuracy and pixel-wise accuracy as evaluation measures. Our method was able to assign the same label as human beings in 97.8% of the pixels in test LIDAR intensity images.

The new historical paradigm ushered in by the Anthropocene offers a timely and urgent opportunity to rethink the relationship of humans and nature. Bruno Latour's take on the Gaia hypothesis, which rejects the traditional subject/object divide, shows how the human can be inscribed into the work of music theory. This turn toward Latour's Actor-Network Theory, which erases the categorical difference between human and nonhuman agents, now dressed up in cosmic garb under the banner of the Gaia hypothesis, appears to be distant from traditional music-theoretical concerns, but the connection is in fact less far-fetched than it seems. J. G. Kastner's music theory, taking its cue from the sound of the Aeolian harp, serves as a test case here: the Aeolian harp, played by wind directly, had long served as a Romantic image of the superhuman forces of nature, but Kastner argues that the Aeolian network only becomes complete in human ears. By unraveling the various instances and agencies of Kastner's theory, this article charts a novel approach to music and sound that sidesteps the conceptual problems in which the nineteenth-century mainstream habitually gets entangled. Kastner's work is based on a fundamental crisis in the conception of sound, after the invention of the mechanical siren (1819) tore down any certainties about the categorical distinction between noise and musical sound. Seeking to rebuild the understanding of sound from the ground up, Kastner leaves no stone unturned, from the obsolete Pythagorean tradition of musica mundana to travelers’ reports about curious sonic environmental phenomena from distant parts of the world. Where the old mechanistic paradigm was built on a “physical music” (and a static “sound of nature” based on the harmonic series), Kastner proposes a new “chemical music” that is based on the dynamic, ever-changing sonority of the Aeolian harp. This chemical music does not (yet) exist, but Kastner gives us some clues about its features, especially in his transcription/simulation of the sound of the Aeolian harp scored for double symphony orchestra. Kastner's “chemical music” finally closes the music-theoretical network that he builds around his new conception of the supernatural sound of the Aeolian harp and its human and nonhuman agents.

We document a seemingly unique case of severe prosopagnosia, L. R., who suffered damage to his anterior and inferior right temporal lobe as a result of a motor vehicle accident. We systematically investigated each of three factors associated with expert face recognition: fine-level discrimination, holistic processing, and configural processing (Experiments 1-3). Surprisingly, L. R. shows preservation of all three of these processes; that is, his performance in these experiments is comparable to that of normal controls. However, L. R. is only able to apply these processes over a limited spatial extent to the fine-level detail within faces. Thus, when the location of a given change is unpredictable (Experiment 3), L. R. exhibits normal detection of features and spatial configurations only for the lower half of each face. Similarly, when required to divide his attention over multiple face features, L. R. is able to determine the identity of only a single feature (Experiment 4). We discuss these results in the context of forming a better understanding of prosopagnosia and the mechanisms used in face recognition and visual expertise. We conclude that these mechanisms are not “all-or-none”, but rather can be impaired incrementally, such that they may remain functional over a restricted spatial area. This conclusion is consistent with previous research suggesting that perceptual expertise is acquired in a spatially incremental manner [Gauthier, I., & Tarr, M. J. Unraveling mechanisms for expert object recognition: Bridging brain activity and behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 28, 431-446, 2002].

Lying in ditches, tromping through mud, wedged in urns, trash bins, buried in earth, bodies in Beckett appear anything but capable of acting meaningfully on their environments. Bodies in Beckett seem, rather, synonymous with abjection, brokenness, and passivity—as if the human were overcome by its materiality: odours, pain, foot sores, decreased mobility. To the extent that Beckett's personae act, they act vaguely (wandering) or engage in quasi-obsessive, repetitive tasks: maniacal rocking, rotating sucking stones and biscuits, uttering words evacuated of sense, ceaseless pacing. Perhaps the most vivid dramatization of bodies compelled to meaningless, repetitive movement is Quad (1981), Beckett's ‘ballet’ for television, in which four bodies in hooded robes repeat their series ad infinitum. By 1981, has all possibility for intentional action in Beckett been foreclosed? Are we doomed, as Hamm puts it, to an eternal repetition of the same? (‘Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended.’)This article proposes an alternative reading of bodily abjection, passivity and compulsivity in Beckett, a reading that implies a version of agency more capacious than voluntarism. Focusing on Quad as an illustrative case, I show how, if we shift our focus from the body's diminished possibilities for movement to the imbrication of Beckett's personae in environments (a mound of earth), things, and objects, a different story emerges: rather than dramatizing the impossibility of action, Beckett's work may sketch plans for a more ecological, post-human version of agency, a more collaborative mode of ‘acting’ that eases the divide between the human, the world of inanimate objects, and the earth.Movements such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology challenge hierarchies among subjects, objects and environments, questioning the rigid distinction between animate and inanimate, and the notion of the Anthropocene emphasizes the influence of human activity on social and geological space. A major theoretical challenge that arises from such discourses (including 20th-century challenges to the idea of an autonomous, willing, subject) is to arrive at an account of agency robust enough to survive if not the ‘death of the subject’ then its imbrication in the material and social environment it acts upon. Beckett's treatment of the human body suggests a version of agency that draws strength from a body's interaction with its environment, such that meaning is formed in the nexus between body and world. Using the example of Quad, I show how representations of the body in Beckett disturb the opposition between compulsivity (when a body is driven to move or speak in the absence of intention) and creative invention. In Quad, serial repetition works to create an interface between body and world that is receptive to meanings outside the control of a human will. Paradoxically, compulsive repetition in Beckett, despite its uncomfortable closeness to addiction, harnesses a loss of individual control that proposes a more versatile and ecologically mindful understanding of human action.

One thing that discriminates living things from inanimate matter is their ability to generate similarly complex or non-random structures in a large abundance. From DNA sequences to folded protein structures, living cells, microbial communities and multicellular structures, the material configurations in biology can easily be distinguished from non-living material assemblies. Many complex artefacts, from ordinary bioproducts to human tools, though they are not living things, are ultimately produced by biological processes—whether those processes occur at the scale of cells or societies, they are the consequences of living systems. While these objects are not living, they cannot randomly form, as they are the product of a biological organism and hence are either technological or cultural biosignatures. A generalized approach that aims to evaluate complex objects as possible biosignatures could be useful to explore the cosmos for new life forms. However, it is not obvious how it might be possible to create such a self-contained approach. This would require us to prove rigorously that a given artefact is too complex to have formed by chance. In this paper, we present a new type of complexity measure, which we call ‘Pathway Complexity’, that allows us not only to threshold the abiotic–biotic divide, but also to demonstrate a probabilistic approach based on object abundance and complexity which can be used to unambiguously assign complex objects as biosignatures. We hope that this approach will not only open up the search for biosignatures beyond the Earth, but also allow us to explore the Earth for new types of biology, and to determine when a complex chemical system discovered in the laboratory could be considered alive. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Reconceptualizing the origins of life’.

The paper aims to tell the story of archaeozoology and utilize it to point out changes in the perception of nature and culture, the perception of animals as organisms that belong entirely to the domain of nature (unlike people who ‘build’ culture onto their nature), as well as display how these perceptions shaped the discipline of archaeozoology and influenced its position within archaeology. Animal remains, almost as a rule, represent some of the most common findings at archaeological sites; however, the attention which has been given to them in archaeological analysis and interpretation was largely dependent on the dominant paradigms in science. With the appearance of the ‘new’ or processual paradigm in archaeology and the concurrent development of archaeozoology, findings like these became the object of study and an important ‘key’ for understanding questions of sustenance, economy and strategies of survival in the past. The strict divide between the natural sciences and humanities (which is a consequence of the wider modernist narrative about the dichotomy of nature and culture), meant that only specialized experts could study animal remains, and that animal remains should be viewed, studied and published on separately from studies on architecture, sculptures and figurines, tools and other artifacts. Thus, archaeozoological reports long represented merely a kind of ‘addition’ to archaeological publications and rarely figured significantly in interpretations. With the paradigm shift brought on by post-processual archaeology, the research focus shifted from economic and functionalist explanations of social phenomena to the study of the influence of culture on shaping human behavior and values. Social theories of cultural constructivism indicate that concepts of ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’ are culturally shaped and a product of discourse, but they often ignore osteological analyses of human and animal remains in the process. Even though at first glance it may seem that constructivist studies and the positivist scientific method on which osteology is based are mutually exclusive in contemporary archaeology, their integration can provide a more detailed picture of how animals shape the way in which humans experience the world, of meanings ascribed to animals, as well as of the very nature of boundaries between people and animals in different cultural contexts.

The Object of the Study. Modern theoretical and methodological approaches to the assessment of social inequality. The Subject of the Study. Internationally used indicators to assess the digital divide. The Purpose of the Study is analyzing of the theoretical and methodological approaches used in international practice to assess digital inequality in order to find ways to improve the indicators which currently are used in the Rossiyskaya Federatsiya. The Main Provisions of the Article. This author examines the following aspects of the impact of digitalization on Russian society: changes in the availability of information resources for different categories of the population caused by the use of ICT, differentiation in special skills for using ICT, and differences in the dynamics of changes in the quality and standard of living. The process of theoretical and methodological understanding of the phenomenon of digital inequality began in the second half of the XX century. It was initially understood as an economic difference between people in terms of their access to certain technologies, however it gradually gained a more comprehensive conceptualization as a systemic phenomenon: a manifestation of structural social inequality in a network society. Today researchers identify three levels of the digital divide (or steps in its evolution), highlighting the growing role of digital skills as well as social connections, intellectual, motivational and wider – human capital in social stratification. The problem of the inequality between individuals on the matter of using digital skills to improve level and quality of life is exacerbated by Industry 4.0 implementation and realization of the Russian government project of the creation of the digital economy. Analysis of the current Rosstat data from the point of view of three levels of digital inequality showed significant improvements in its first level – every year ICT becomes more accessible for Russians. The increase in the number of users leads to a drop in the average indicators of digital skills proficiency, nevertheless the number of Russians using such technologies to improve their level and quality of life is gradually growing. However, additional work is needed in this direction to make the reduction of third-level inequality a sustainable trend. The analysis of indicators which currently are used in the Rossiyskaya Federatsiya to assess the development of the information society, carried out in the framework of this study, demonstrated their compliance with international standards. The theoretical and methodological problem of the statistical methodology used by The Rosstat was revealed: the current indicators do not allow to reflect the correlation between the employment of the population and it’s level of the digital skills. Therefore the indicators currently used in Russiya for digital divide evaluation do not allow to access the readiness of the population to the transition period between industrial revolutions which are always accompanied by the primary wave of technological unemployment in the process of creative destruction of social and economic systems. The Russian state program «Digital Economy» had the strategic target «to launch a regular monitoring to identify the needs of different groups of the working population in the formation of digital economy competencies with the involvement of employers» by June 2019. However checking of the governmental sites of the authorities, who are responsible for the implementation of the mentioned monitoring showed that it is still not ready or just doesn’t accessible for general public.

OBJECT Insufficient biomechanical data exist from comparisons of the stability of expandable lateral cages with that of static transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF) cages. The purpose of this biomechanical study was to compare the relative rigidity of L4–5 expandable lateral interbody constructs with or without additive pedicle screw fixation with that of L4–5 static TLIF cages in a novel cadaveric spondylolisthesis model. METHODS Eight human cadaver spines were used in this study. A spondylolisthesis model was created at the L4–5 level by creating 2 injuries. First, in each cadaver, a nucleotomy from 2 channels through the anterior side was created. Second, the cartilage of the facet joint was burred down to create a gap of 4 mm. Light-emitting-diode tracking markers were placed at L-3, L-4, L-5, and S-1. Specimens were tested in the following scenarios: intact model, bilateral pedicle screws, expandable lateral 18-mm-wide cage (alone, with unilateral pedicle screws [UPSs], and with bilateral pedicle screws [BPSs]), expandable lateral 22-mm-wide cage (alone, with UPSs, and with BPSs), and TLIF (alone, with UPSs, and with BPSs). Four of the spines were tested with the expandable lateral cages (18-mm cage followed by the 22-mm cage), and 4 of the spines were tested with the TLIF construct. All these constructs were tested in flexion-extension, axial rotation, and lateral bending. RESULTS The TLIF-alone construct was significantly less stable than the 18- and 22-mm-wide lateral lumbar interbody fusion (LLIF) constructs and the TLIF constructs with either UPSs or BPSs. The LLIF constructs alone were significantly less stable than the TLIF construct with BPSs. However, there was no significant difference between the 18-mm LLIF construct with UPSs and the TLIF construct with BPSs in any of the loading modes. CONCLUSIONS Expandable lateral cages with UPSs provide stability equivalent to that of a TLIF construct with BPSs in a degenerative spondylolisthesis model.

Decoding and annotation of the Oak genome has clarified the taxonomy of the genus Quercus and opens up new possibilities for researchers and foresters for selection and assessment of the evolutionary development of forest formers and forest communities. The purpose of the review was to analyze modern genosystematics, as well as biological characteristics of naturally growing and introduced species of the genus Quercus in Central Russia. For the species Quercus robur, the genome was sequenced, assembled and annotated; the genome decoding made it possible to find out that the longevity and resistance of oak trees is largely based on duplication of R genes for resistance to pathogens, as well as to confirm the accumulation and transmission of somatic mutations in the apical meristems of the shoots. Genetic analysis made it possible to clarify the phylogenetic relationships and divide the genus into the subgenera Euquercus (from 320 to 354 species) and Cyclobalanopsis (76 species) and 6 sections, the main of which are: the Erythrobalanus group (red oak), the Lepidobalanus (white oak), and the Cerris group. The genus Quercus is an important forest producer in the Northern Hemisphere. Considering its ecological nature (the dominance, diversity and development of the data of their phylogenetic, genomic and ecological resources of an important model clade), the oak is a model object of scientific research. Flexible phenology and features of the water regime made it possible to adapt to a wide range of habitat conditions, to form climatypes within and between species, contributing to their high abundance and diversity. Oaks as long-lived plants represent a unique model for the formation of sustainable forest communities; the diversity of species allows them to be introduced into regions of different climatic and ecological factors. In most cases, oaks are ecological dominants, so discoveries at the genome level will be relevant at the level of forest ecosystems and may be the key to solving the problems of sustainability and productivity of oak forests. The review presents modern data on the division of the genus Quercus into subgenera and clades, genetic maps, and the basics of oak longevity. The data on the biology of the genus and species of Central Russia are presented, as well as ecological significance of the genus and the possibility of using trees in various spheres of human activity

The Anthropocene as a new epoch brings into question the traditional modes of conceptualising International Relations. We believe that it does this by forcing students and practitioners of International Relations to think through how the discipline works as a set of ideas and practices, in fact, as a way of understanding the nature of problems and policymaking per se. As a discipline, International Relations is particularly sensitive to the questioning of the problematics of human exceptionalism, rationalist problem-solving and liberal modernist imaginaries of progress, which have shaped the agendas of international peace, development and democracy. Beyond the dark days of the Cold War, when International Relations was essentially a strategic exercise of Realpolitik, the discipline has staked a lot on the basis that Enlightenment liberalism is the universal panacea to human ills and that irrational structures or agencies can be civilised or tamed to further the interests of humanity, both in national or global regimes of good governance and the rule of law. These dreams of liberal universal solutions appear to have run aground in the Anthropocene as the last decade has marked a shift away from universal, modernist or ‘linear’ understandings of power and agency. In a world, construed as more complex, contingent and relational and replete with crises and unpredicted ‘tipping points’, traditional assumptions are up-ended and unintended consequences seem more relevant than ‘good intentions’. Concomitantly, the methodological focus has switched away from understanding the essence of entities and towards privileging the analysis of relations, networks and contexts. Key to this has been debates focused around climate change and global warming which explicitly cast policy problems not as external threats to the ‘good life’ (that requires securing) but as instead questioning the starting assumptions of separations between inside/ outside, humanity/ nature, solutions/ problems and referents/ threats. This elicits a very different way of thinking. If natural processes can no longer be separated from the historical impact of human development and are no longer merely the backdrop to a purely human drama of domestic and international political contestation, then the modernist understanding of the nature/ culture divide, separating social and natural science, no longer holds. Nature can no longer be understood as operating on fixed or natural laws, while politics and culture can no longer be understood as operating in a separate sphere of autonomy and freedom. These assumptions, central to modernist constructions of progress, are seen to no longer exist or to have always been problematic. Thus, the Anthropocene is not merely a question of new or more pressing problems, such as climate change and extreme weather events, but also a matter of the tools and understandings that are available to us: in other words, it is a matter of how we know —of epistemology— and also of what we understand the world to consist of —i.e. questions of ontology. Consider, for example, the conventional understanding of security as the protection of a valued referent against external threats. The condition of the Anthropocene challenges such a notion of security. The Anthropocene as a condition, problematises easy assumptions about ‘us’ as the security ‘referent’ —as the object to be secured. The problematisation of ‘us’ —the privileged gaze of the Western policymaking subject— opens up a substantial set of problems which deeply impact the disciplinary assumptions of International Relations. This is expressed, for example, in Bruno Latour’s concept of Earthbound people, i.e., an imaginary collective of people who consider themselves sensitive and responsive, due to being bound by and to the Earth. We are the problem as much as the solution, the ‘them’ as much as the ‘us’, the ‘enemy’ as much as the ‘friend’. Accordingly, the Anthropocene condition calls for reflection upon —and ultimately transition away from— the idea of a separation between nature and humanity. To perform this shift in perspective, concepts such as “worldly” or “ecological security” have been proposed. Matt McDonald develops a notion “ecological security” through an engagement with existing discourses of climate security. According to him, established ways of thinking about climate security would reinforce a problematic nature-culture divide by either presenting climate change as an external threat to vulnerable human communities or, conversely, human actors as a threat to fragile nature in need of protection. Ecological security would instead focus on supporting and sustaining the long-term resilience of ecosystems —understood as entangled systems of both human and non-human elements. Ensuring that “ecosystems can continue to function in the face of current and future change” is accordingly, the only defensible approach to security in the condition of the Anthropocene. Similarly, a worldly approach to security stresses that threats such as war, major industrial accidents, or ecological collapse do not affect humans in isolation but rather endanger the common worlds co-constituted by humans and diverse nonhuman beings. Harrington and Shearing hold that security in the Anthropocene should become oriented towards an “ethics of care”. Care, according to them, is able to emphasize the types of deep relational thinking that are so appropriate when discussing the Earth’s ongoing and unknown patterns of interactions and responses. It allows one to see security as a radical entanglement between humans, non-human animals, plants, bacteria, materials and technology. Learning how to navigate this entanglement with care will be a primary task for International Relations in our Anthropocene world. This article is organised in three sections. Firstly, we introduce the concept of the Anthropocene. We refer to the Anthropocene as a condition that we are in rather than as an external set of problems which we are confronted with. Understood as a condition which we are in, rather than merely a set of strategic and tactical problems which we confront, the Anthropocene enables us to go beyond the traditional binaries of our disciplinary tradition. The second section provides some background to the disciplinary history of International Relations, here we seek to briefly flag up the importance of thinking the Anthropocene in relation to the history of the discipline, which could be understood as moving from an ‘inter-national’ or state-centred focus during the Cold War to a global set of much broader concerns from the 1980s to the 2000s, to an increased interest in the Anthropocene, understood as a ‘planetary’ challenge to the liberal universal assumptions that followed the decline of ‘realist’ hegemony. The third section focuses on the implications of the Anthropocene for three key themes: knowledge, governance and security.

Overproduction, consumerism and commodity fetishism — it seems like these tendencies are omnipotent and omnipresent in the modern world. The difference between the society criticized by Marx and the reality encompassing us is that in the postmodern societies, it is the information and images that serve as an object of consumption and consequently commodity fetishism. In other words, the service sector produces images that become the means of mediation. In the article, the author looks into the work of Stanislaw Lem Futurological Congress and contemporary French movie The Congress following the same plot. The analysis being founded on the theories of Guy Debord, Slavoj Žižek and Karl Marx, as well as the recent investigations of a journalist Naomi Klein, the author uncovers implicit consequences of the consumerist way of life, imposed on us by the capitalist system as well as media and transnational companies. Arguing, after Žižek, that the criticism of late-capitalism is directly linked to the understanding of the human psyche’s recesses, the article attempts to explain the consumer turning into a marionette of large businesses. This position is further strengthened by the natural necessity for an individual to embrace the system’s core impositions, in particular, to recognize the non-existing authenticity behind a brand. The tendency further leads to the alienation from real merit and overconfidence in the fairness inherent in the existing system. Overproduction and the ubiquitous loss of Walter Benjamin’s Aura result in actual poverty behind the mask of abundance, nature of the art and authenticity becoming extinct. This leads to the natural drive to substitute the lost identity for the (re-) invented one and manifest individualities, sometimes aggressively and vigorously. As Lem’s characters balance on the verge between reality and hallucinations, modern-day consumers lose the established coordinate system, distracted by the absolute and seemingly non-restricted liberty of choice, the virtual reality permitting to act out any repressed impulses and instincts fully and with impunity. Citing Debord, ‘the poverty unites everyone involved in the spectacle and its controversies’. The author is of the opinion that Lem’s Futurological Congress aims at forewarning the reader from the possibility of the imaginary system progressing irreversibly, the idea further reflected in the movie. There is no hope for a society abandoning the boundaries of reality and moral guidelines for good. The analysis could possibly describe the broadening sphere of influence of the multinational corporations and contribute to the lively discussions on the digital divide and the social networks’ actual/ impact on society.

Full TextIn contemporary, North American society, what it means to be ‘human’ is often taken for granted; in other words, ‘humanness’ is usually accepted as a readily knowable, uncomplicated and stable aspect of social reality. Ivone Gebara argues that because we believe that we already know the meaning of ‘humanness,’ reflecting on this notion often appears to be of little interest, need or value. “Since we imagine that everyone already knows what a [‘human’] is, we might have the feeling that we are wasting our time on notions that are already familiar, and that we ought to be seeking solutions to the urgent problems that [currently] face us” (Gebara, 1999: 67). Like Gebara, I argue that the concept of ‘human,’ is not ‘natural,’ stable or straightforward, rather it is a culturally-specific and historical invention, one intimately implicated within contemporary, environmental problems. In other words, although the category of human is often understood as readily comprehensible and fundamentally elevated above, and detached from, nature and ‘more-thanhuman’I beings, I maintain that the human subject is positioned within what I will term ‘the web of life,’ that is, the worldwide, ecological community which encompasses both human and more-than-human subjects. I believe the term, ‘becoming’ is a useful adjective to describe the human; becoming allows us to consider the human not as a natural or stable entity, but as one which is emerging and transforming in relation to environmental and social contexts. As a being situated within an ecological web of life, the human is not distinct from nature and more-than-human animals, but exists and changes in continuous relation to them. Long before the onset of European colonization of what is now considered North America, various dualisms permeated the European, historical imagination. Within this worldview, aspects of these dichotomies were understood to exist in fundamental distinction from one another; that is, not only were divisions of each dualism conceptualized as inherently disconnected and independent, but one aspect of each dichotomy was always understood as naturally and intrinsically superior to the other. Sallie McFague argues that the primary dualism within this imagination was the conceptualization of ‘reason’ and ‘nature’ as fundamentally distinct entities, in which reason was positioned in hierarchical relation to nature. However, this dichotomy has been broadened to represent, incorporate and interconnect with multiple other dichotomies, including, spirit/body, male/female, reason/ emotion, and human/nature (McFague, 1997: 88). According to McFague, “the [reason/nature] dualism illuminates most of the other dualisms: whatever falls on the top side of a dualism has connections with ‘reason,’ and whatever falls on the bottom side is seen as similar to ‘nature’” (1997: 88). In this sense, the projection of these constructions onto seemingly-different aspects of reality, including ‘different’ bodies, functioned to hierarchically organize both European society and the universe at large. It is important to recognize that because these dualisms were constructions of a very particular and ethnocentric group within European history, namely elite, white men, such subjects were also imagined to embody the superior aspects of various dichotomies; in other words, characteristics associated with reason were presumed to adhere to white, European males (McFague, 1997: 88). Within this imagination, the rational capacities and spiritual natures of white, masculine and European humans were imagined to prevent them from being confined by or to their bodies, or influenced by emotional or sexual responses. Importantly, because such racialized and gendered subjects were the only subjects envisioned to embody these and other superior dimensions of various dualisms, white, European men were positioned as the ideal modes of humanness within a great chain of being. In this sense, as the white, European masculine subject was assumed to embody humanness, subjects who were constructed to embody the opposing dimensions of these dichotomies were regarded as his nonhuman Others. Arguably, as the human was constructed to embody whiteness, masculinity and European ancestry, his Other may be regarded as the colonized, non-white woman. Through her gendered, racialized and cultural difference from the human, she was constructed to embody characteristics he did not. According to this dualistic relationship of interconnected difference(s), because she embodied matter, or solely bodily existence, she possesses neither inherent consciousness nor spirituality allowed by such consciousness. Because she was conceptualized as the Other to the sole, normative human, she was categorized as nonhuman. In this sense, it may be recognized how there has existed a significant, conceptual connection between non-white women and nature, as both were understood as nonhuman material beings in relation to the European, white man, who was presumed to embody true humanness. Through this ideology of the normative human subject, women and nature are conceptually demoted to a subordinate position because of what they are assumed to be (Primavesi, 1991: 142). However, this connection between nature and Aboriginal women is not only ideological: because both are regarded to exist in solely material form, and therefore to lack spiritual natures or capacities for consciousness, various manifestations of colonial violence against both nature and Aboriginal women have been historically disregarded, undermined or recognized as justified. This construction of the masculine human subject as the one who alone inhabits higher realms of reason and spirit served to legitimize and stabilize future social and religious structures of subordination and dominance. Women and nature have been placed under male domination and rule by the compelling and authoritative force of this prevailing ideology (Primavesi, 1991: 142-147). Within contemporary, North American academe, this historical, European construction of the human has been greatly interrogated, denaturalized and critiqued by postcolonial, critical race and psychoanalytic theorists, including Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, among many others. Within their theories, great energy is focused on how the articulation of humanness has, and continues to affect subjects who have been historically excluded by this rigid definition at the level of social, emotional, psychic and bodily realities. These theorists are correct in their assertions that the purpose of the human construction was to reduce the modes of being, embodied by nonwhite and non-European/nonwestern subjects, in order to elevate the mode of being embodied by their cultural Others. However, it must be recognized that there exists a subtle, but continued, hierarchical and dualistic relationship between human and nonhuman within these theories. Not only do human beings continue to be understood as stably and inherently different from nonhuman beings, principally animals, but human experiences of colonial violence, and therefore, human modes of being, are essentially recognized as more significant than the modes of being and lived realities of more-than-human beings. In fact, as the conflation of racialized humans with more-thanhumans is articulated as undermining the violence experienced by such human subjects, violence against animals and nature, in such forms as human invasion, objectification, exploitation and voracious consumption, is disregarded as violence per se. Gebara calls this trend an anthropocentric “hierarchicalizing of knowing [that actually] runs parallel to the hierarchicalizing of society, [which is] itself a characteristic of the patriarchal world” (1999: 25). In this sense, within such criticism, there is an attempt to destabilize one conception of the boundary between human and nonhuman, while a second human/nonhuman dualism is (re)produced and supported; ultimately, the traditional border, employed in colonial fantasies to distinguish what counts as (a) human and what does not, is kept intact. These attempts to distinguish the human, along with having a colonial genealogy, are built on the assumption of a distinct sphere in which humans act, and blind to ideas of significant interconnection and interdependence: dimensions of each dualism are considered not only unrelated to, but to actually oppose, one another. However, each element of social reality is constructed in relation to others; in other words, every aspect of each dichotomy involves a reference to that which is supposedly opposite, distinct from, or Other to, the primary category (See Hewitt Suchocki, 1982). In this sense, all aspects of the dichotomies require reference beyond them in order to develop as intelligible categories and, therefore, cannot be understood, or even exist, outside the relationships within which they are implicated (Hewitt Suchocki, 1982: 6—7). More importantly, there are material interrelationships that are not captured by these dichotomies. As an example we can think of contemporary environmental threats, such as global warming and Colony Collapse Disorder in North America, that illustrate how humans are not ultimately separate from nature, but dependent on it for our survival, and that ‘natural’ phenomena has the potential to powerfully and disastrously affect humans. In this sense, it must be recognized that there is danger within denial: by assuming that we are not part of nature, we ultimately deny the significance of ecological problems on their own bodies and lived realities. However, I think it necessary at this point to remark on the (neo)colonial anthropo-centrism within many conceptions of human/nature relationality. Similar to the consciousness of more-than-human animals, when ecological problems are recognized as problems per se, and especially, when such issues are recognized to transcend the human/nature divide and create an impact in the lives of humans, such problems tend to be understood in human terms. In other words, nature often becomes the subject of human attention, concern, and care when humans acknowledge the fact that we are intimately related to, and ultimately dependent on, the earth for our survival and wellbeing, and that by abusing and destroying nature and more-than-human subjects, humans ultimately bring about their own destruction. Although within such types of care, the interrelatedness among all beings within the web of life is recognized, such care for nature often develops because humans fear the effects of environmental disasters on our lives, and not because we genuinely care about the lives and wellbeing of Other creatures or the earth, in and of themselves. And even within environmental concerns, the recognition of the interrelatedness of all living subjects often leads to a hierarchy of environmental issues. Within conceptions of human/ more-than-human relations, there is often a hierarchy of environmental issues and social issues, including the (neo)colonial treatment of humans outside the dominant, white, European/western man as nonhuman, strengthening the conceptual disconnect between these human and more-than-human. These aspects of environmental interrelatedness must be regarded as not only anthropocentric, but violent, contemporary manifestations of the historically-dominant, European construction of the normative and viable human subject. In this sense, it is evident that a new consciousness must emerge. Humans must begin to recognize that, as Paula Gunn Allen states, “we are the land… the land and the people are the same… The earth is the source of being of the people and we are equally the being of the earth. The land is not really a place separate from ourselves… The land is not a mere source of survival, distant from the creatures it nurtures” (Allen, as quoted in Christ, 1997: 114). Christ employs the term ‘interdependence’ in order to characterize the connection between all beings in the web of life. Yet the word interdependence must be used cautiously, for although humans are dependent on nature, animals, plants and other more-than-humans, as well as other humans for our survival, the earth is not reciprocally dependent on humans. In fact, the presence of (certain) humans on the earth has historically prevented, and continues to threaten, the flourishing and wellbeing of Others, including both human and more-than-human beings within the web of life. In this sense, concepts such as interdependence undermine the reality of power relations that exist between and among different modes of being, including human relationships and those between humans and nature. For this reason, ecofeminists’ use the notion interdependence to illustrate that humans are not separate from, but intimately implicated within, the natural world. This concept helps to demonstrate that “‘human’ beings are essentially relational and interdependent. We are tied to [‘human’ and ‘more-than-human’] Others from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Our lives are dependent in more ways than we can begin to imagine on support and nurture from the web of life, from the earth body” (Christ, 1997: 136). Because the interdependent relation between human subjects and the earth is conceptualized as so intimate, human actions can have significant, and often disastrous effects on nature. However, the agency and power of nature in creating significant phenomena in the lived realities, societies and experiences of humans must also be recognized. This concept destabilizes colonial, western (and gendered) conceptions of the earth as a passive object, to be owned, harnessed, excavated and harvested in order to increase the economic and social flourishing of humans. In other words, the notion of interdependence demonstrates that humans are also affected by more-than-human lives, and that the earth is not a passive, receptive instrument to be exploited by and for human cultures. Examples such as decreased air quality and Colony Collapse Disorder illustrate the power of the earth to violently fight back against human abuse in order to protect itself. In order for a more life-affirming, harmonious relationship between the natural world and human beings to emerge and, therefore, in order to ensure the survival of all beings within the web of life, what ultimately needs to emerge is a new conception of the relationship between human and more-than-human life. McFague proposes the notion of subject-subjects relations, which encompasses a radical and life-affirming way of transforming this hierarchical relationship. According to this model, human subjects must relate to nature as a subject. While recognizing their own intrinsic relation to Other subjects, grounded in their interconnection within the web of life, human subjects must recognize morethan- human subjects’ own intrinsic value and right to live, quite apart from human interests and lives. In other words, we must recognize the otherness of morethan- humans, yet simultaneously feel a connection and recognize an affinity with such subjects. This connection “underscores both radical unity and radical individuality. It suggests a different, basic sensibility for all our knowing and doing and a different kind of know-ink and doing… It says: ‘I am a subject and live in a world of many other different subjects’” (McFague, 1997: 38). According to McFague, this will involve “the loving eye [as well as] the other senses, for it moves the eye from the mind (and the heavens) to the body (and the earth). It will result in an embodied kind of knowledge of other subjects who, like ourselves, occupy specific bodies in specific locations on this messy, muddy, wonderful, complex, mysterious earth” (Mc Fague, 1997: 36). Practicing this type of relationship will implicitly and explicitly embody a radical challenge to what it has historically meant to be both a human and nonhuman subject. It will require an erosion of the imagined boundary, grounded in the perception of difference, between human and nature, and the other, interconnected dichotomies within the European, colonial, historical imagination. It will also involve re-valuing the both sides of classic western dualisms as significant and worthy in and of themselves. This type of relationship will necessitate the erosion of concepts such as intrinsic inferiority and superiority, and potentially end the embodied and lived power relations that such concepts sanction. Perhaps most importantly, the subject-subjects relationship will allow a new understanding of the relations between all beings within the web of life to emerge; the human, that is, the normative, white, European man of the (neo)colonial imagination, and the human of the human/nature dichotomy, and his wellbeing, subjectivity, knowledge and mode of being, will be displaced of from the dominant center. Beginning to recognize and relate to more-thanhumans as subjects will inevitably represent a strong challenge to the coherence of the traditional, anthropocentric, colonial paradigm. The fantasy of humans as the sole, normative subjects within the universe has historically, and continues to provide powerful senses of security and identity to many of us; we are therefore deeply attached to this conception of humanness. However, in order for a more life affirming, harmonious relationship between the natural world and human beings to emerge, we must begin to practice such models within all of our relationships, including relationships with more-than-human beings and other human subjects. Such an endeavor is crucial for the flourishing, and ultimately, the survival of all beings within the web of life. Bibliography Christ, Carol P (1997). Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. California, Massachusetts and New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing. Gebara, Ivone (1999). Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Hewitt Suchocki, Marjorie (1982). “Why a Relational Theology?” In God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 3-11. McFague, Sallie (1997). Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Primavesi, Anne (1991). From Apocalypse to Genesis: Ecology, Feminism and Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. i The term, ‘more-than-human’ will be used in place of the term, ‘nonhuman’ in certain areas within this paper. For a number of reasons, I believe the former term is more appropriate. Firstly, nonhuman carries connotations of difference from an explicitly human norm, and a related sense of deficiency and deviance. For this reason, I will employ nonhuman in areas in which I describe traditional, colonial human perceptions of more-than-humans. However, I believe that more-than-human conveys a sense that there literally exists significantly more than simply human realities in the world. More-than-human is also more comprehensive than related terms, such as animals or nature, as it can encompass many diverse expressions of realities, experiences and subject(ivitie)s that transcend traditional constructions of humanness.

Рассматривается задача перемещения подвешенного груза без колебаний. На основе уравнений Лагранжа для обобщённых координат получена математическая модель системы “каретка-груз”, продемонстрированы существенная нелинейность модели и нестационарность её параметров. Сделан вывод о целесообразности решения поставленной задачи на основе синергетических принципов многоальтернативного управления, которые бы позволили формировать управление с максимальным использованием траекторий собственного движения объекта. С этой целью проведён анализ физического содержания процесса перемещения груза и установлено, что для реализации плоскопараллельного перемещения системы начало движения необходимо осуществлять в несколько этапов: приложить первоначальное силовое воздействие на каретку для трогания её с места, затем снять воздействие и обеспечить свободное движение груза и снова сообщить каретке ускорение с целью выравнивания её скорости со скоростью груза с последующим переходом к движению без раскачиваний. Для останова груза без колебаний достаточно создать симметричную последовательность команд с обратным знаком. Указанное управление предложено построить на основе нечётких процедур принятия решений, хорошо зарекомендовавших себя в условиях нестационарности параметров объекта. Сформировано множество входных и выходных лингвистических переменных регулятора и определён перечень нечётких величин, необходимых для реализации синергетического управления. Предложено разделить функции каналов обратной связи по угловому положению груза и его угловой скорости, определив для первого из них основную задачу компенсации колебаний, а для второго - функцию переключения режимов разгона и торможения. Полученный алгоритм нечёткого управления по своей простоте и физическому содержанию оказался близким к неформальным приёмам разгона и торможения грузов под управлением оператора-человека. Отмечено сходство этого алгоритма с оптимальным управлением, синтезируемым на основе принципа максимума по критерию быстродействия. Представлены результаты проверки работоспособности системы на имитационной модели и подтверждена эффективность предложенных алгоритмов управления The article considers the problem of moving a suspended load without swinging. On the basis of the Lagrange equations for generalized coordinates, we obtained a mathematical model of the carriage-load system, demonstrated the significant nonlinearity of the model and the nonstationarity of its parameters. We made the conclusion about the expediency of solving the problem on the basis of a synergistic approach, which will allow the formation of control with the maximum use of the object's own movement. For this purpose, we carried out an analysis of the physical content of the process of moving the load and found that in order to implement the plane-parallel movement of the system, the start of movement must be carried out in several stages: apply an initial force effect on the carriage to move it from its place, then remove the effect and ensure the free movement of the load, and again give the carriage an acceleration in order to equalize its speed with the speed of the load, followed by a transition to motion without swaying. To stop the load without swinging, it is enough to create a symmetrical sequence of commands with the opposite sign. We proposed to build the specified control on the basis of fuzzy decision-making procedures that have proven themselves well in the conditions of non-stationary parameters of the object. We formed a set of input and output linguistic variables of the regulator and determined a list of fuzzy values necessary for the implementation of synergistic control. We proposed to divide the functions of feedback channels according to the angular position of the load and its angular velocity, defining for the first of them the main function of oscillation compensation, and for the second - the function of switching acceleration and deceleration modes. The resulting fuzzy control algorithm in its simplicity and physical content turned out to be close to informal methods of acceleration and deceleration of loads under the control of a human operator. We noted the similarity of this algorithm with the optimal control synthesized on the basis of the maximum principle with respect to the performance criterion. We checked the operability of the proposed system on a simulation model, and confirmed its effectiveness

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to speed up the exponential growth of cutting-edge technology, much way the Internet did. Due to intense competition from the private sector, governments, and businesspeople around the world, the Internet has already reached its peak as an exponential technology. In contrast, artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, and people all over the world are unsure of how it will impact their lives in the future. Artificial intelligence, is a field of technology that enables robots and computer programmes to mimic human intellect by teaching a predetermined set of software rules to learn by repetitive learning from experience and slowly moving toward maximum performance. Although this intelligence is still developing, it has already demonstrated five different levels of independence. Utilized initially to resolve issues. Next, think about solutions. Third, respond to inquiries. Fourth, use data analytics to generate forecasts. Fifth, make tactical recommendations. Massive data sets and "iterative algorithms," which use lookup tables and other data structures like stacks and queues to solve issues, make all of this possible. Iteration is a strategy where software rules are regularly adjusted to patterns in the data for a certain number of iterations. The artificial intelligence continuously makes small, incremental improvements that result in exponential growth, which enables the computer to become incredibly proficient at whatever it is trained to do. For each round of data processing, the artificial intelligence tests and measures its performance to develop new expertise. In order to address complicated problems, artificial intelligence aims to create computer systems that can mimic human behavior and exhibit human-like thought processes [1]. Artificial intelligence technology is being developed to give individualized medication in the field of healthcare. By 2030, six different artificial intelligence sectors will have considerably improved healthcare delivery through the utilization of larger, more accessible data sets. The first is machine learning. This area of artificial intelligence learns automatically and produces improved results based on identifying patterns in the data, gaining new insights, and enhancing the outcomes of whatever activity the system is intended to accomplish. It does this without being trained to learn a particular topic. Here are several instances of machine learning in the healthcare industry. The first is the IBM Watson Genomics, which aids in rapid disease diagnosis and identification by fusing cognitive computing with genome-based tumour sequencing. Second, a project called Nave Bayes allows for the prediction of diabetes years before an official diagnosis, before it results in harm to the kidneys, the heart, and the nerves. Third, employing two machine learning approaches termed classification and clustering to analyse the Indian Liver Patient Data (ILPD) set in order to predict liver illness before this organ that regulates metabolism becomes susceptible to chronic hepatitis, liver cancer, and cirrhosis [2]. Second, deep learning. Deep learning employs artificial intelligence to learn from data processing, much like machine learning does. Deep learning, on the other hand, makes use of synthetic neural networks that mimic human brain function to analyse data, identify relationships between the data, and provide outputs based on positive and negative reinforcement. For instance, in the fields of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT), deep learning aids in the processes of picture recognition and object detection. Deep learning algorithms for the early identification of Alzheimer's, diabetic retinopathy, and breast nodule ultrasound detection are three applications of this cutting-edge technology in the real world. Future developments in deep learning will make considerable improvements in pathology and radiology pictures [3]. Third, neural networks. The artificial intelligence system can now accept massive data sets, find patterns within the data, and respond to queries regarding the information processed because the computer learning process resembles a network of neurons in the human brain. Let's examine a few application examples that are now applicable to the healthcare sector. According to studies from John Hopkins University, surgical errors are a major contributor to medical malpractice claims since they happen more than 4,000 times a year in just the United States due to the human error of surgeons. Neural networks can be used in robot-assisted surgery to model and plan procedures, evaluate the abilities of the surgeon, and streamline surgical activities. In one study of 379 orthopaedic patients, it was discovered that robotic surgery using neural networks results in five times fewer complications than surgery performed by a single surgeon. Another application of neural networks is in visualising diagnostics, which was proven to physicians by Harvard University researchers who inserted an image of a gorilla to x-rays. Of the radiologists who saw the images, 83% did not recognise the gorilla. The Houston Medical Research Institute has created a breast cancer early detection programme that can analyse mammograms with 99 percent accuracy and offer diagnostic information 30 times faster than a human [4]. Cognitive computing is the fourth. Aims to replicate the way people and machines interact, showing how a computer may operate like the human brain when handling challenging tasks like text, speech, or image analysis. Large volumes of patient data have been analysed, with the majority of the research to date focusing on cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Companies like Google, IBM, Facebook, and Apple have shown interest in this work. Cognitive computing made up the greatest component of the artificial market in 2020, with 39% of the total [5]. Hospitals made up 42% of the market for cognitive computing end users because of the rising demand for individualised medical data. IBM invested more than $1 billion on the development of the WATSON analytics platform ecosystem and collaboration with startups committed to creating various cloud and application-based systems for the healthcare business in 2014 because it predicted the demand for cognitive computing in this sector. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the fifth. This area of artificial intelligence enables computers to comprehend and analyse spoken language. The initial phase of this pre-processing is to divide the data up into more manageable semantic units, which merely makes the information simpler for the NLP system to understand. Clinical trial development is experiencing exponential expansion in the healthcare sector thanks to NLP. First, the NLP uses speech-to-text dictation and structured data entry to extract clinical data at the point of care, reducing the need for manual assessment of complex clinical paperwork. Second, using NLP technology, healthcare professionals can automatically examine enormous amounts of unstructured clinical and patient data to select the most suitable patients for clinical trials, perhaps leading to an improvement in the patients' health [6]. Computer vision comes in sixth. Computer vision, an essential part of artificial intelligence, uses visual data as input to process photos and videos continuously in order to get better results faster and with higher quality than would be possible if the same job were done manually. Simply put, doctors can now diagnose their patients with diseases like cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disorders more quickly and at an earlier stage. Here are a few examples of real-world applications where computer vision technology is making notable strides. Mammogram images are analysed by visual systems that are intended to spot breast cancer at an early stage. Automated cell counting is another example from the real world that dramatically decreases human error and raises concerns about the accuracy of the results because they might differ greatly depending on the examiner's experience and degree of focus. A third application of computer vision in the real world is the quick and painless early-stage tumour detection enabled by artificial intelligence. Without a doubt, computer vision has the unfathomable potential to significantly enhance how healthcare is delivered. Other than for visual data analysis, clinicians can use this technology to enhance their training and skill development. Currently, Gramener is the top company offering medical facilities and research organisations computer vision solutions [7]. The usage of imperative rather than functional programming languages is one of the key difficulties in creating artificial intelligence software. As artificial intelligence starts to increase exponentially, developers employing imperative programming languages must assume that the machine is stupid and supply detailed instructions that are subject to a high level of maintenance and human error. In software with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, human error detection is challenging. Therefore, the substantial amount of ensuing maintenance may become ridiculously expensive, maintaining the high expenditures of research and development. As a result, software developers have contributed to the unreasonably high cost of medical care. Functional programming languages, on the other hand, demand that the developer use their problem-solving abilities as though the computer were a mathematician. As a result, compared to the number of lines of code needed by the programme to perform the same operation, mathematical functions are orders of magnitude shorter. In software with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, human error detection is challenging. Therefore, the substantial amount of ensuing maintenance may become ridiculously expensive, maintaining the high expenditures of research and development. As a result, software developers have contributed to the unreasonably high cost of medical care. Functional programming languages, on the other hand, demand that the developer use their problem-solving abilities as though the computer were a mathematician. As a result, compared to the number of lines of code needed by the programme to perform the same operation, mathematical functions are orders of magnitude shorter. The bulk of software developers that use functional programming languages are well-trained in mathematical logic; thus, they reason differently than most American software developers, who are more accustomed to following step-by-step instructions. The market for artificial intelligence in healthcare is expected to increase from $3.4 billion in 2021 to at least $18.7 billion by 2027, or a 30 percent annual growth rate before 2030, according to market research firm IMARC Group. The only outstanding query is whether these operational reductions will ultimately result in less expensive therapies.

Human-object interaction is of great relevance for robots to operate in human environments. However, state-of-the-art robotic hands are far from replicating humans skills. It is, therefore, essential to study how humans use their hands to develop similar robotic capabilities. This article presents a deep dive into hand-object interaction and human demonstrations, highlighting the main challenges in this research area and suggesting desirable future developments. To this extent, the article presents a general definition of the hand-object interaction problem together with a concise review for each of the main subproblems involved, namely: sensing, perception, and learning. Furthermore, the article discusses the interplay between these subproblems and describes how their interaction in learning from demonstration contributes to the success of robot manipulation. In this way, the article provides a broad overview of the interdisciplinary approaches necessary for a robotic system to learn new manipulation skills by observing human behavior in the real world.

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) can extremely damage and affect the operation of the electronic devices which is mainly due to the discharge of static electricity through the human or an object contact to the electronic devices. Though ESD protection has been made in many ICs internally, it can only sustain a certain level of voltage surge. To withstand high voltage surge mainly above 4kV, external ESD protection devices such as ESD capacitor and TVS (Transient Voltage Suppressor) are used for signal integrity considerations. For automotive application using 12V battery, a circuit model which has the capability to explain the behaviour of the ESD protection device for 8kV is proposed. Comparison between simulation by LTspiceXVII and calculated results are shown and also presents the pros and cons of two different approaches. When comparing ESD capacitor to TVS diode, the result shows 32.8 percentage reduce in voltage, 1 percentage increase in current and 1.43 percentage reduce in power dissipation. In addition to the theoretically calculated capacitor value, other capacitors are used and its results were presented

This article critically engages with Russell Belk’s ‘extended self’ theory and Susan Fournier’s ‘human relationship model’. When a human development model is applied to the ‘extended self’ theory, Belk appears to equate the psychology of infants with consumerism in general – an inability to differentiate between the self and other. Fournier concludes that when consumers think about brands as if they were human, endowing inanimate brand objects with personality qualities, the object becomes animated, facilitating a ‘relationship dyad’. However, she confuses ‘dyad’ with the projection of the self onto objects, what psychoanalytic theory suggests is a classic symptom of narcissism. Devoid of any (psychological) understanding of narcissism, these theorists do not make connections between narcissism and its behavioural patterns exhibited in contemporary consumer culture. While the culture of consumption facilitates associations and projections of the self onto objects through a steady flow of fantasy, encouraging consumers to blur self-other distinctions, it does not necessarily follow that all consumers are unable to differentiate between the self and other. Through examining the complex symbolism and powerful repositories of meaning that consumers project onto objects, our understanding of how consumers interact with products will be deepened; by (re-)inserting the unconscious into consumer theory, the self-other divide emerges.

AbstractThe adversarial attack can force a CNN-based model to produce an incorrect output by craftily manipulating human-imperceptible input. Exploring such perturbations can help us gain a deeper understanding of the vulnerability of neural networks, and provide robustness to deep learning against miscellaneous adversaries. Despite extensive studies focusing on the robustness of image, audio, and NLP, works on adversarial examples of visual object tracking—especially in a black-box manner—are quite lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial attack method to generate noises for single object tracking under black-box settings, where perturbations are merely added on initialized frames of tracking sequences, which is difficult to be noticed from the perspective of a whole video clip. Specifically, we divide our algorithm into three components and exploit reinforcement learning for localizing important frame patches precisely while reducing unnecessary computational queries overhead. Compared to existing techniques, our method requires less time to perturb videos, but to manipulate competitive or even better adversarial performance. We test our algorithm in both long-term and short-term datasets, including OTB100, VOT2018, UAV123, and LaSOT. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three mainstream types of trackers: discrimination, Siamese-based, and reinforcement learning-based trackers. We release our attack tool, DIMBA, via GitHub https://github.com/TrustAI/DIMBA for use by the community.

Cells in the human circulatory system and identifying the types and its functionalities cannot be done through naked eye. This asks for greater accurate methods of visualizing it and hence is vital in understanding blood disease causes, symptoms and the solution for them. But this field lacked clearance for the imaging system. Image Recognition was innovated using Deep Learning Technique.Human body cells assume an astounding job in the human resistant framework. To know more about blood-related infections and its effects, pathologists need to think about the attributes of cells. To diagnose a blood related disease, we need to identify and characterize blood samples of patients. In the medical field, automation for detecting and classifying blood cells and its subtypes have gained more importance nowadays. Recognition of an object is a basic piece for the vision of a computer that distinguishes an article in the given picture regardless of foundations, impediment, lighting or the edge of the view. Problems that are too difficult to solve can be handled using architectures that run deep using algorithms that dive deeper into the features extracted from the input and this can be possible using Deep Learning.

This article offers a queer reading of Brent Watanabe’s 2016 video game–based art piece San Andreas Deer Cam, a mod of Grand Theft Auto V in which a computer-controlled deer wanders the game’s extensive open world. During the time that San Andreas Deer Cam was streamed live on Twitch, it became something of an internet sensation, drawing attention for its comedic elements and the deer’s seeming invisibility. I argue here that Watanabe’s piece can read in an alternative way: as a work of queer posthumanism. Drawing from game studies scholars whose research explores the non-human (such as Alenda Chang and Paolo Ruffino), as well as queer studies scholars who have theorized how posthumanism challenges norms of gender, sexuality, and intimacy (such as Dana Luciano and Mel Chen), I analyze video recordings of San Andreas Deer Cam. Through these videos, I articulate the piece’s posthumanist elements, with a focus on the implications of Watanabe’s choice to make the game unplayable and the powerful yet ambivalent picture the piece offers of queerness ‘beyond the human’. In San Andreas Deer Cam, queerness manifests in many forms, all of them wrapped up with the messy divide between peoples, animals, and machines: the visual erotics of the deer sensuously rendered backside, moments of sexual misrecognition as non-player characters appear to catcall the deer, even a prolonged scene in which the deer becomes the object of homophobic violence. Ultimately, I conclude, San Andreas Deer Cam offers a model for how video games themselves can be used to rethink the centrality of human agency, which has long been considered the defining feature of the medium. Watanabe’s piece serves as a provocation to consider the queer potential of games that are unplayable and of refusing – rather than doggedly pursuing – the supposed capacity of video games to place human players in control.

Цель статьи заключается в выработке методологии развития процесса воспроизводства человеческого капитала в условиях цифровой экономики. Использованные методы исследования: В статье использована методология системного подхода к анализу воспроизводства человеческого капитала в условиях цифровой экономики, который предполагает изучение причинно-следственных, прямых и обратных связей. Результаты исследования: Авторами выявлено, что расширение воспроизводства человеческого капитала в Казахстане на основе новых направлений вызывает необходимость изменения функций воспроизводственного процесса и приобретении ими нового содержания. С позиции воздействия на среды (внутреннюю и внешнюю) было целесообразно разделить и функционал на внешний и внутренний. В связи с этим проведен анализ этих функций воспроизводства человеческого капитала. Выводы исследования: Воспроизводственный процесс человеческого капитала в рамках кругооборота (накопления и использования) позволяет увидеть, что его компоненты взаимодействуют между собой в различных срезах (внешней и внутренней) и на разных уровнях (макро-, мезо-, микро-), видоизменяясь в соответствии с условиями функционирования в экономической системе. Objective of the research: The object of the article is to develop a methodology for the development and reproduction of human capital in a digital economy. Research methods used: The article uses the methodology of a systematic approach to the analysis of the reproduction of human capital in the digital economy, which involves the study of causal, direct and feedback relationships. Research results: The authors found that the expansion of the reproduction of human capital in Kazakhstan on the basis of new directions makes it necessary to change the functions of the reproduction process and acquire new content. From the position of impact on the sphere (internal and external), it was advisable to divide the functionality into external and internal. In this regard, an analysis of these functions of the reproduction of human capital was carried out. Conclusions of the research: The reproduction process of human capital within the framework of the cycle (accumulation and use) allows us to see that its components interact with each other in various sections (external and internal) and at different levels (macro-, meso-, micro-), changing in accordance with conditions of functioning in the economic system.

Facing nature, man perceives reality. Observes, analyses, synthesises and through a metacognitive process of knowledge construction, associates and dissociates elements. This process of inter-relationship between elements fragments reality into simplified parcels later rebuilt in cognitive structures that apprehend the complexity through the adoption of analytical models. The synthesis that he seeks to construct expresses the dialectical relationship between the self and the world/object. Then, by desire and by reason, man transforms the natural environment, builds, shapes, occupies, limits, reinterprets the natural. However, before doing so as material, he does it in his consciousness, imagines, designs, verifies, and by doing it this way, before being real as material, it also becomes spiritual, virtual and aesthetic. The opposition between matter and space is rebalanced by human perception and consciousness in a tripartite structure that is constituted as the architecture object. We are interested in the systematization of this process, in other words, in the way that the self constructs the path or method of approach into the object. Antonio Machado suggests: Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más. Perante a natureza, o homem percepciona o mundo natural. Observa, analisa, sintetiza e através de um processo metacognitivo de construção de conhecimento, associa elementos e dissocia outros. Este processo de inter-relação entre elementos divide a realidade em parcelas simplificadas reconstruídas posteriormente em estruturas cognitivas de apreensão da complexidade, mediante a adoção de modelos analíticos. A síntese que procura construir exprime a relação dialética entre o mundo e o eu. Em seguida, pelo desejo e pela razão, o homem transforma o meio natural, constrói, modela, ocupa, limita e reinterpreta o natural. No entanto, antes de o fazer como matéria, fá-lo na sua consciência; imagina, projeta, verifica e, ao fazê-lo deste modo, antes de ser real como matéria, é também espiritual, virtual e estético. A oposição entre matéria e espaço é reequilibrada pela percepção e consciência humana numa estrutura tripartida que se constitui como o objecto da Arquitectura. Interessa-nos a sistematização deste processo, ou seja, a forma como, no projeto de Arquitectura, o eu/sujeito constrói o caminho ou método de abordagem ao mundo/objecto. Antonio Machado sugere, Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más.

Considering the estimate of the potential system in the classroom, lights and fan control is expected to be performed in three modules. Thus, in the case of light and ventilator power, occupancy sensor is used to estimate the amount of output voltage increases in the diode while the rotational speed increases simultaneously. Motion sensors are common where safety and energy efficiency are concerned. They can be used for burglary alarms or surveillance cameras, which activate such devices when it detects nearby motion. This can be an energy saver by turning off lights in a building as it no longer detects activity and is commonly used in office buildings and toilets. The PIR is a motion sensor that you might have seen when you enter a bathroom or office space, normally with a white mask. They are lightweight, low powered, simple to use and low cost. The way it detects motion is by sensing the temperature differences between the surroundings PIRs are fitted with a passive sensors level of infrared radiation –all emits some low-level radiations, but a human body emits good heat. This triggers a pulse when the sensor senses a different shift between the two slots which is what it detects as ‘movement’ Technology is available that combines both PIR and microwave sensors to have less false alarms, a sudden increase in room temperature will cause the PIR to go off while wind will push an object and activate the microwave sensor.

It is only in recent decades that subjective experience - or consciousness - has become a legitimate object of scientific inquiry. As such, it represents perhaps the greatest challenge facing neuroscience today. Subsumed within this challenge is the study of subjective experience in non-human animals: a particularly difficult endeavor that becomes even more so, as one crosses the great evolutionary divide between vertebrate and invertebrate phyla. Here, we explore the possibility of consciousness in one group of invertebrates: cephalopod molluscs. We believe such a review is timely, particularly considering cephalopods' impressive learning and memory abilities, rich behavioral repertoire, and the relative complexity of their nervous systems and sensory capabilities. Indeed, in some cephalopods, these abilities are so sophisticated that they are comparable to those of some higher vertebrates. Following the criteria and framework outlined for the identification of hallmarks of consciousness in non-mammalian species, here we propose that cephalopods - particularly the octopus - provide a unique test case among invertebrates for examining the properties and conditions that, at the very least, afford a basal faculty of consciousness. These include, among others: (i) discriminatory and anticipatory behaviors indicating a strong link between perception and memory recall; (ii) the presence of neural substrates representing functional analogs of thalamus and cortex; (iii) the neurophysiological dynamics resembling the functional signatures of conscious states in mammals. We highlight the current lack of evidence as well as potentially informative areas that warrant further investigation to support the view expressed here. Finally, we identify future research directions for the study of consciousness in these tantalizing animals.

The ontological equality and material vitality of all things, and efforts to remove “the human” from its apical position in a hierarchy of being, are Object-Oriented Ontology theory (OOO) concepts. These axioms are useful in a discussion of the aesthetics of augmented robotic art, alongside speculations regarding any interagency between the human/non-human and possible co-evolutionary relationships. In addition, they help to wash out the sticky habits of conventional art writing, such as removed critique or an authoritative expert voice. This article aims to address the robotic work Accomplice by Sydney-based artists Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders as a means of interrogating the independence and agency of robots as non-human species, and as a mode of investigating how we see these relationships changing for the futureFor Accomplice, an artwork exhibited at Artspace, Sydney, in 2013, Gemeinboeck and Saunders built robots, strategised properties, and programmed their performative actions. Replete with lights and hammers, the robots are secreted away behind false walls, where they move along tracks and bang holes into the gallery space. As the devastation of plasterboard ensues, the robots respond interactively to each other through their collective activity: this is intra-action, where an object’s force emerges and where agency is an enactment (Barad, Matter Feels). This paper will continue to draw on the work of feminist scholar and quantum scientist, Karen Barad, due to her related work on agency and intra-action, although she is not part of an OOO theoretical body. Gemeinboeck and Saunders build unstable environments for their robots to perform as embodied inhabitants (Gemeinboeck and Saunders 2). Although the augmented robots are programmed, it is not a prescriptive control. Data is entered, then the robots respond to one another’s proximity and devastation. From the immaterial, virtual realm of robotic programming comes a new materiality which is both unstable, unpredictable, and on the verge of becoming other, or alive. This is a collaboration, not just between Gemeinboeck and Saunders, but between the programmers and their little robots—and the new forces that might be created. Sites of intra-species (human and robot) crossings might be places or spaces where a new figuration of enchantment occurs (Bennett 32). Such a space could take the form of a responsive art-writing intervention or even a new ontological story, as a direct riposte to the lively augmentation of the robotic artwork (Bennett 92). As ficto-critical theorist and ethnographer, Stephen Muecke says, “Experimental writing, for me, would be writing that necessarily participates in worlds rather than a writing constituted as a report on realities seen from the other side of an illusory gap of representation” (Muecke Motorcycles 2). Figure 1: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)Writing Forces When things disappear then reappear, there is a point where force is unleashed. If we ask what role the art writer plays in liberating force, the answer might be that her role is to create as an imaginative new creation, equal to the artwork. The artists speak of Accomplice: transductions, transmaterial flows and transversal relations are at play ... whether emerging from or propelling the interplay between internal dynamics and external forces, the enactment of agencies (human and non-human), or the performative relationship unfolding over time. (Gemeinboeck and Saunders 3) When new energetic force is created and the artwork takes on new life, the audience’s imaginative thought is stimulated. This new force might cause an effect of a trans-fictional flow. The act of writing about Accomplice might also involve some intentional implausibility. For instance, whilst in the exhibition gallery space, witnessing Accomplice, I decided to write a note to one of the robots. I could see it, just visible beyond the violently hammered hole in the wall. Broken plaster dusted my shoes and as I peered into the darker outside space, it whizzed past on its way to bang another hole, in harmony with its other robotic friends. So I scribbled a note on a plain white piece of paper, folded it neatly and poked it through the hole: Dear robot, do you get sick of augmenting human lives?Do you get on well with your robotic friends?Yours sincerely, Prue. I waited a few minutes and then my very same piece of paper was thrust back through the hole. It was not folded but was crumpled up. I opened it and noticed a smudged mark in the corner. It looked like an ancient symbol, a strange elliptical script of rounded shapes, but was too small to read. An intergalactic message, a signal from an alien presence perhaps? So I borrowed a magnifying glass from the Artspace gallery attendant. It read: I love opera. Robot Two must die. This was unexpected! As I pondered the robot’s reply, I noticed the robots did indeed make strange bird-like noises to one another; their tapping was like rhythmic woodpeckers. Their hammering was a kind of operatic symphony; it was not far-fetched that these robots were appreciative of the sound patterns they made. In other words, they were responding to stimuli in the environment, and acting in response. They had agency beyond the immaterial computational programming their creators had embedded. It wasn’t difficult to suspend disbelief to allow the possibility that interaction between the robots might occur, or that one might have gone rogue. An acceptance of the possibility of inter-agency would allow the fantastical reality of a human becoming short-term pen pals with an augmented machine. Karen Barad might endorse such an unexpected intra-action act. She discourages conventional critique as, “a tool that keeps getting used out of habit” (Matter Feels). Art writing, in an era of robots and awareness of other non-human sentient life-forms can be speculative invention, have a Barad-like imaginative materiality (Matter Feels), and sense of suspended disbelief. Figure 2: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) The Final Onto-Story Straw Gemeinboeck and Saunders say the space where their robots perform is a questionable one: “the fidelity of the space as a shared experience is thus brought into question: how can a shared virtual experience be trusted when it is constructed from such intangible and malleable stuff as streams of binary digits” (7). The answer might be that it is not to be trusted, particularly in an OOO aesthetic approach that allows divergent and contingent fictive possibilities. Indeed, thinking about the fidelity of the space, there was something about a narrow access corridor in the Accomplice exhibition space, between the false gallery wall and the cavity where the robots moved on their track, that beckoned me. I glanced over my shoulder to check that the Artspace attendant wasn’t watching and slipped behind the wall. I took a few tentative steps, not wanting to get knocked on the nose by a zooming robot. I saw that one robot had turned away from the wall and was attacking another with its hammer. By the time I arrived, the second robot (could it be Robot Two?) had been badly pummeled. Not only did Robot One attack Robot Two but I witnessed it using its extended hammer to absorb metal parts: the light and the hammer. It was adapting, like Philip K. Dick’s robots in his short story ‘Preserving Machine’ (See Gray 228-33). It was becoming more augmented. It now had two lights and two hammers and seemed to move at double speed. Figure 3: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)My observance of this scene might be explained by Gemeinboeck/Saunders’s comment regarding Philip K. Dick-style interference and instability, which they actively apply to their work. They say, “The ‘gremlins’ of our works are the slipping logics of nonlinear systems or distributed agential forces of colliding materials” (18). An audience response is a colliding material. A fictional aside is a colliding material. A suspension of disbelief must also be considered a colliding material. This is the politics of the para-human, where regulations and policies are in their infancy. Fears of artificial intelligence seem absurd, when we consider how startled we become when the boundaries between fiction/truth become as flimsy and slippery as the boundaries between human/non-human. Art writing that resists truth complements Gemeinboeck/Saunders point that, “different agential forces not only co-evolve but perform together” (18).The DisappearanceBefore we are able to distinguish any unexpected or enchanted ontological outcomes, the robots must first appear, but for things to truly appear to us, they must first disappear. The robots disappear from view, behind the false walls. Slowly, through the enactment of an agented force (the action of their hammers upon the wall), they beat a path into the viewer’s visual reality. Their emergence signals a performative augmentation. Stronger, better, smarter, longer: these creatures are more-than-human. Yet despite the robot’s augmented technological improvement upon human ability, their being (here, meaning their independent autonomy) is under threat in a human-centred world environment. First they are threatened by the human habit of reducing them to anthropomorphic characteristics: they can be seen as cute little versions of humans. Secondly, they are threatened by human perception that they are under the control of the programmers. Both points are arguable: these robots are undoubtedly non-human, and there are unexpected and unplanned outcomes, once they are activated. These might be speculative or contestable outcomes, which are not demonstrably an epitome of truth (Bennett 161). Figure 4: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)Gemeinboeck’s robotic creatures, with their apparent work/play and civil disobedience, appeared to exhibit human traits. An OOO approach would discourage these anthropomorphic tendencies: by seeing human qualities in inanimate objects, we are only falling back into correlational habits—where nature and culture are separate dyads and can never comprehend each other, and where humankind is mistakenly privileged over all other entities (Meillassoux 5). This only serves to inhibit any access to a reality outside the human-centred view. This kind of objectivity, where we see ourselves as nature, does no more than hold up a mirror to our inescapably human selves (Barad, Matter Feels). In an object-oriented approach the unpredictable outcomes of the robots’s performance is brought to attention. OOO proponent and digital media theorist Ian Bogost, has a background in computational media, especially video and social media games, and says, “computers are plastic and metal corpses with voodoo powers” (9). This is a non-life description, hovering in the liminal space between being and not being. Bogost’s view is that a strange world stirs within machinic devices (9). A question to ask: what’s it like to be a robot? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere between what it does and how we see it. It is difficult not to think of twentieth century philosopher Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis theory when writing of Gemeinboeck/Saunders’s work because Heidegger, and OOO scholar Graham Harman after him, uses the hammer as his paradigmatic tool. In his analysis, things are only present-at-hand (consciously perceived without utility) once they break (Harman, Heidegger Explained 63). However, Gemeinboeck and Saunders’s installation Accomplice straddles Heidegger’s dual present-at-hand and read-at-hand (the utility of the thing) because art raises the possibility that we might experience these divergent qualities of the robotic entities, simultaneously. The augmented robot, existing in its performative exhibition ecology, is the bridge between sentient life and utility. Robotic Agency In relation to the agency of robots, Ian Bogost refers to the Tableau Machine which was a non-human actor system created by researchers at Georgia Tech in 1998 (Bogost 106). It was a house fitted with cameras, screens, interfaces, and sensors. This was an experimental investigation into ambient intelligence. The researchers’s term for the computational agency was ‘alien presence,’ suggesting a life outside human comprehension. The data-collator sensed and interpreted the house and its occupants, and re-created that recorded data as abstract art, by projecting images on its own plasma screens. The implication was that the home was alive, vital, and autonomously active, in that it took on a sentient life, beyond human control. This kind of vital presence, an aliveness outside human programming, is there in the Accomplice robots. Their agency becomes materialized, as they violate the polite gallery-viewing world. Karen Barad’s concept of agency works within a relational ontology. Agency resists being granted, but rather is an enactment, and creates new possibilities (Barad, Matter Feels). Agency is entangled amongst “intra-acting human and non-human practices” (6). In Toward an Enchanted Materialism, Jane Bennett describes primordia (atoms) as “not animate with divine spirit, and yet they are quite animated - this matter is not dead at all” (81). This then is an agency that is not spiritual, nor is there any divine purpose. It is a matter of material force, a subversive action performed by robotic entities, not for any greater good, in fact, for no reason at all. This unpredictability is OOO contingency, whereby physical laws remain indifferent to whether an event occurs or not (Meillassoux 39). Figure 5: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) A Post-Human Ethic The concept of a post-human state of being raises ethical concerns. Ethics is a human construct, a criteria of standards fixed within human social systems. How should humans respond, without moral panic, to robots that might have life and sentient power outside human control? If an OOO approach is undertaken, the implication is that all things exist equally and ethics, as fixed standards, might need to be dismantled and replaced with a more democratic set of guidelines. A flat ontology, argued for by Bogost, Levi Bryant and other OOO advocates, follows that all entities have equal potential for independent energy and agency (although OOO theorists disagree on many small technical issues). The disruption of the conventional hierarchical model of being is replaced by a flat field of equality. This might cause the effect of a more ethical, ontological ecology. Quentin Meillassoux, an influential figure in the field of Speculative Realism, from which OOO is an offshoot, finds philosophical/mathematical solutions to the problems of human subjectivity. His eschewing of Kantian divisions between object/subject and human/world, is accompanied by a removal from Kantian and Cartesian critique (Meillassoux 30). This turn from critique, and its related didactic authority and removed judgment, marks an important point in the culture of philosophy, but also in the culture of art writing. If we can escape the shackles of divisive critique, then the pleasures of narrative might be given space. Bogost endorses collapsing the hierarchical model of being and converting conventional academic writing (89). He says, “for the computers to operate at all for us first requires a wealth of interactions to take place for itself. As operators or engineers, we may be able to describe how such objects and assemblages work. But what do they “experience” (Bogost 10)? This view is complementary to an OOO view of anti-subjectivity, an awareness of things that might exist irrespective of human life, from both inside and outside the mind (Harman 143). Figure 6: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) New Materiality In addition to her views on human/non-human agency, Karen Barad develops a parallel argument for materiality. She says, “matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.” Barad’s agential realism is predicated on an awareness of the immanence of matter, with materiality that subverts conventions of transcendence or human-centredness. She says, “On my agential realist account, all bodies, not merely human bodies, come to matter through the world’s performativity - its iterative intra-activity.” Barad sees matter, all matter, as entangled parts of phenomena that extend across time and space (Nature’s Queer Performativity 125). Barad argues against the position that acts against nature are moral crimes, which occur when the nature/culture divide is breached. She questions the individuated categorizations of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ inherent in arguments like these (Nature’s Queer Performativity, 123-5). Likewise, in robotic and machinic aesthetics, it could be seen as an ethical breach to consider the robots as alive, sentient, and experiential. This confounds previous cultural separations, however, object-oriented theory is a reexamination of these infractions and offers an openness to discourse of different causal outcomes. Figure 7: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) Co-Evolution Artists Gemeinboeck/Saunders are artists and scholarly researchers investigating new notions of co-evolution. If we ascribe human characteristics to robots, might they ascribe machinic properties to us? It is possible to argue that co-evolution is already apparent in the world. Titanium knees, artificial arteries, plastic hips, pacemakers, metallic vertebrae pins: human medicine is a step ahead. Gemeinboeck/Saunders in turn make a claim for the evolving desires of their robots (11). Could there be performative interchangeability between species: human and robot? Barad asks us not to presume what the distinctions are between human and non-human and not to make post-humanist blurrings, but to understand the materializing effects of the boundaries between humans and nonhumans (Nature’s Queer Performativity 123). Vital matter emerges from acts of reappearance, re-performance, and interspecies interaction. Ian Bogost begins his Alien Phenomenology by analysing Alan Turing’s essay, Computing Machinery and Intelligence and deduces that it is an approach inextricably linked to human understanding (Bogost 14). Bogost seeks to avoid distinctions between things or a slippage into an over-determination of systems operations, and instead he adopts an OOO view where all things are treated equally, even cheeky little robots (Bogost 17).Figure 8: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, installation view, Artspace, Sydney. (Photo: silversalt photography) Intra-Active ReappearanceIf Barad describes intra-action as enacting an agential cut or separation of object from subject, she does not mean a distinction between object and subject but instead devises an intra-active cutting of things together-apart (Nature’s Queer Performativity 124). This is useful for two reasons. First it allows confusion between inside and outside, between real and unreal, and between past and future. In other words it defies the human/world correlates, which OOO’s are actively attempting to flee. Secondly it makes sense of an idea of disappearance as being a re-appearance too. If robots, and all other species, start to disappear, from our consciousness, from reality, from life (that is, becoming extinct), this disappearance causes or enacts a new appearance (the robotic action), and this action has its own vitality and immanence. If virtuality (an aesthetic of being that grew from technology, information, and digital advancements) meant that the body was left or abandoned for an immaterial space, then robots and robotic artwork are a means of re-inhabiting the body in a re-materialized mode. This new body, electronic and robotic in nature, might be mastered by a human hand (computer programming) but its differential is its new agency which is one shared between human and non-human. Barad warns, however, against a basic inversion of humanism (Nature’s Queer Performativity 126). Co-evolution is not the removal of the human. While an OOO approach may not have achieved the impossible task of creating a reality beyond the human-centric, it is a mode of becoming cautious of an invested anthropocentric view, which robotics and diminished non-human species bring to attention. The autonomy and agency of robotic life challenges human understanding of ontological being and of how human and non-human entities relate.References Barad, Karen. "Nature’s Queer Performativity." Qui Parle 19.2 (2011): 121-158. ———. Interview. In Rick Dolphijn and Van Der Tuin. “Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers: Interview with Karen Barad.” New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan; Open Humanities Press, 2012. ———. "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003): 801-831. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2012. Bryant, Levi. The Democracy of Objects. University of Michigan Publishing: Open Humanities Press, 2011. ———, N. Srnicek, and GHarman. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re:press, 2011. Gemeinboeck, Petra, and Rob Saunders. “Other Ways of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete.” Fibreculture Journal 18 (2011). ‹http://eighteen.fibreculturejournal.org/2011/10/09/fcj-120-other-ways-of-knowing-embodied-investigations-of-the-unstable-slippery-and-incomplete/›. Gray, Nathan. "L’object sonore undead." In A. Barikin and H. Hughes. Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction. Melbourne: Surpllus, 2013. 228-233. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Winchester UK: Zero Books, 2011. ———. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. ———. Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2007. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. New York: Continuum, 2008. Muecke, Stephen. "The Fall: Ficto-Critical Writing." Parallax 8.4 (2002): 108-112. ———. "Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgment." Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (2012): 40-58. ———. “The Writing Laboratory: Political Ecology, Labour, Experiment.” Angelaki 14.2 (2009): 15-20. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.

Introduction Animals have a significant presence in human lives, with many human interactions involving animals. This role of animals in social life, however, has largely been ignored and marginalised. In the words of Tovey (197), “to read most sociological texts, one might never know that society is populated by non-human as well as human animals”. Human-animal relations are evident in everyday human uses of animals as companions, pets, meat sources, and entertainment. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does demonstrate how humans create and perpetuate systems of human/animal difference which are, at times, contradictory and ambivalent. There are no consistencies in how humans view and understand animal bodies. These differences matter, as they have serious consequences for how humans view and treat animals. It also has dire consequences for animals. While humans and animals are different species, we still live together, co-evolve, and create shared histories. We are, in the words of Haraway, companion species. This exposes that animals are not just nature, but culture. It is often forgotten that one of the everyday uses of animals is as testing and experimental models in medical and scientific research. Hidden away in laboratories, these animals remain invisible, only to be discovered when the histories of innovations and breakthroughs are unravelled. Animals are veiled behind dissection, vaccinations, pharmaceuticals, insulin injections, deep brain stimulation, and so on. Of interest in this paper is one potential medico-scientific innovation that cannot disguise the animal body as it is central for the success of the technology, xenotransplantation (XTP; animal-to-human transplantation). This refers to “any procedure that involves transplantation, implantation or infusion into a human recipient of cells, tissues or organs from a nonhuman animal source” (Xenotransplantation Working Party 22, original emphasis). While many animals have been used historically in XTP, the choice animal source is currently pigs. In order for xenotransplants to perform the required functions in a human body, the fragments of the pig’s body must remain living. This fuses the living pig part and living human body intimately, where the embodiment and functionality of each relies on the other. Such practices theoretically break down the traditional dualisms between humans/pigs and self/other. However, XTP raises a number of scientific, ethical, and social hurdles that must be addressed. As Bijker, Hughes and Pinch indicate, technical innovations are not simply scientific endeavours but sociocultural issues where usage, design, and content can be contentious. In the case of XTP this relates to, amongst other issues, the explicit physical breakdown of the human/pig divide, yet boundary work still occurs in an attempt to symbolically maintain the divisions between self/other. Drawing on the work of various cultural theorists, this paper presents a sociocultural approach to examine how XTP and the associated manufacturing of pigs, demonstrates the fluidity of science and culture. This is achieved by incorporating theoretical frameworks inspired by Durkheimian thought, such as the sacred and profane, and Douglas’ use of pollution and dirt. This analysis reveals how classificatory systems of culture, such as the sanctity of the body and its boundaries, are powerful obstacles to the cultural acceptance of XTP. The Sacred Body In the work of Durkheim and his Année Sociologique colleagues, the sacred and the profane are distinct classifications attached to material objects. These binary constructs are the basis for religious life, as argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. The Durkheimian tradition also argues that these building blocks of religion are apparent in secular cultural life. The world (the profane) drives people to engage with the sacred or those places, objects, and people that are collectively valued with high esteem. In contrast, the profane is marginalised. The narratives/myths which underpin the sacred provide a type of collective fervour that stands in opposition to the mundane flows of the everyday. Through this process, high or low social value is attributed. Durkheim later considered that this duality also existed within the human. Individuals experience a double-being, where the mind (soul) and the body are, repeating Cartesianism, radically different, opposed, and independent substances. The soul holds sacred qualities “that has always been denied the body” (Durkheim, The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions, 150-1), which renders the body profane and the soul divine. In the contemporary West, however, there has been a significant shift away from the soul and towards the body. Turner argues that we have become a “somatic society”, where increasingly this once profane site has become a cultural obsession. The body has become a site of performance and consumption, where the self is realised and practiced. This has lead to intense rituals, such as disciplining the body through fitness training (Sassatelli) to personal grooming practices (Goffman), that seek to separate the body from polluting or profane influences. The body is no longer approached as sinful and demeaning to the soul. It has become culturally conceived as collectively sacred. At the same time, certain attributes of the body can and do signify disgust or profane qualities. As Kendall and Michael have argued, the body is a site of order and disorder. While our best efforts are implemented to ensure that the body’s biological, social, and cultural features remain ordered, the natural processes of excretion, decay, disease, and other undesirable disorders, consistently impinge on and challenge the sacred body. Significant effort ensures, as Goffman argues, that these undesirable attributes are hidden or removed from public view through secular rituals of purification. We can relate this to the prominent use in the West of anti-ageing products to the compulsion to institutionalise the ill, diseased, and elderly. Douglas follows this Durkheimian inspired tradition, utilising concepts such as purity, pollution, and danger. These are theoretically similar to the sacred/profane distinction, which we believe lends significant insight into the dialectic of human/animal bodies in XTP. To illustrate this further, we will briefly touch upon her contribution to cultural theory that serves as the basis for our arguments here. Purity, Danger and XTP: Being ‘Out of Order’ In her significant work, Purity and Danger, Douglas exposes the deeply embedded systems of classification that underpin social life. To exemplify this, she examines ‘dirt’ and questions why we feel it necessary to clean. Her answer is that dirt reflects a “systematic ordering and classification of matter”, that is “matter out of place” (35). In other words, our social lives are ordered according to those ‘matters’ classified as belonging or coherent in the flows of everyday life. Dirt transcends this ‘ordering’ and creates disorder. This then requires action on behalf of the individual to ‘reorder’ their surrounds through purification rituals. Douglas is able then to extract this theoretical point into various examples, such as the cultural classifications and uses of pigs. Culture categorises animals in relation to how they are to be consumed or enjoyed, as already stated. A range of relatively recent sociological projects, such as Zerubavel’s cognitive sociology program, are revealing how the animal world is culturally determined. For instance, Zerubavel demonstrates that repulsion towards certain foods, especially animal, may cause physical distress to the individual. This is not linked to our gastronomies, but sociocultural perceptions embedded in our individual minds (cf. Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’). This is also demonstrated by how classificatory systems deny the human consumption of certain animals. For instance, the taboo on consuming pork for Israelites rests for Douglas on the inability for the pig to be classified as a normal farm animal because it has cloven hooves and does not chew cud. Through this cultural perception, the pig is defined as pollution, impinging on the sanctity of the soul and sitting uncomfortably in collective thought. It resides on the margins and threatens our social order. In other words, what is safe and what is dangerous are differentiated culturally. What a pig represents in one culture can differ dramatically from the next. In the world of XTP, similar impressions remain embedded in the cognitive processes of individuals, thus creating conflict between cultural norms and values, and that of science (cf. Alexander and Smith). A further important point needs to be considered before discussing XTP explicitly. As suggested earlier, Douglas argues that some of the most dangerous cultural artefacts/objects to our sense of order are those which impinge on the pure through their unclassifiable nature. However, partial objects from these polluted things can also cause distress. Contemporary examples are bodily fluids, excretions, and other naturally occurring by-products of the body. These are generally held as disgusting within cultural contexts once removed from the body. Douglas explains this through their symbolic connection to a ‘human’ identity. She writes that these mundane objects remain “dangerous; their half identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence” (160). Fluids, such as mucus, when found in the home or other ‘ordered’ situations are considered most disgusting not because of the substance itself, but because it remains connected to the embodiment and identity of the other. Until that substance is cleansed from view, or reordered, it impinges on order in the most dangerous ways because of its ‘half identity’. It is still connected to its host. From this perspective, we can begin to envisage why the consumption of animals is closely governed by specific classificatory systems. The presentation of whole animals cooked, with head and limbs attached, may invoke disgust through the inability to completely remove the animal’s identity. Whole ducks, fish, or pigs presented at the dinner table, with their eyes gazing at the diners, can cause significant distress. The identity of the animal is reaffirmed and a reaction of disgust can occur. The reappropriation of animals as cuts of meat and meat-based products, can strip away the identity of the animal by dividing it into parts. This reordering makes it appropriate and pure for human consumption. By carving the body of an animal into pieces, it becomes a product that is removed from the living being. This is extended through ‘meat discourses’; the pig becomes pork, ham and bacon, and an anaemic calf becomes veal. It is meat; just another object in the cultural universe. In viewing XTP as a cultural artefact, these significantly stringent classifications of the pure and polluting remain deeply embedded and potent. Pig organs such as the heart remain, despite any cleansing processes undertaken by science and unlike the reappropriation of animals for consumption, linked to the pig’s embodiment. The removal of this body part does not remove it from the pig’s identity. It remains connected, clinging to its ‘half identity’. Furthermore, unlike the meat industry or various other medico-scientific uses of animals, it is vital that the pig’s body parts remain living. Xenotransplants would not function without, for example, the pig’s heart continuing to beat, pumping blood around the new human body it inhabits. This creates cultural barriers that go beyond the ordered animal products that currently exist, which serves to threaten the acceptance and successful appropriation of XTP amongst society. There is then a culturally perceived taboo on combining the self and other in XTP. Pig bodies must somehow be ‘cleansed’ by science, although, as we alluded to previously, this is not necessarily successful. These rituals of purification by science are undertaken for scientific and cultural reasons. For example, Cook outlines that scientists working in XTP go to great lengths to justify why the polluting other, the pig, can and should be used as the source animal. This involves a complex narration on the differences and similarities between humans and animals. Significantly, XTP relies on and perpetuates the differential cultural worth that is placed on human life (high value) and animal life (low value), in order to justify XTP procedures. However, pig parts need to become worthy of being harvested for human bodies, meaning that pigs must be elevated from their lowly status to that worthy of being human. This leads science to engage in, according to Cook, a complex interweaving of desirable-similarity, desirable-dissimilarity, undesirable-similarity, and undesirable-dissimilarity, to establish continuities and disparities between pig and human bodies. This functions not only for the purposes of science, but to culturally justify the practices and artefacts of XTP. While XTP involves intimately mixing humans and pigs, these “science stories” (Cook) additionally work to maintain species divides. Simultaneously, these processes operate to justify that it is appropriate for humans to embody pigs. Hence, science attempts to mould the social into desirable ways of thinking about XTP, thus supporting it and the science behind it. This includes the experimental and therapeutic sacrifice of pigs. At the same time, science cannot avoid that the practice and delivery of XTP involves the culturally pure/sacred human body coming into conflict with the polluted/dangerous ‘other’, pig part/s. The genetic engineering of pigs to express select human complementary regulatory proteins, which inhibit self-damage when the immune system reacts to the presence of a foreign body such as a transplanted organ, somewhat disintegrates the human/animal divide within the pig body itself. It is becoming human. However, science still faces a significant hurdle. Namely, “How can we physically mix (natural-technical discourse) if we’re so different (social-moral discourse)?” (Brown 333). Pig parts in human bodies, and pigs genetically engineered to be more ‘human like’, still involve pig parts being out of place and therefore disgusting. Despite the rituals employed by science to draw similarities between humans and pigs (and genetically engineered pigs), there remain cultural classification systems that compromise the normalisation of XTP. Hence, crossing the species divide in XTP is scientifically unproblematic (though getting XTP to work is another matter), but the fusing of human and pig bodies may still be culturally dangerous. In other words, cultural classifications may render pigs as incompatible with humans, despite any social constructions attempted by science. The body expresses these social values. In XTP, porcine genetics cannot be physically separated from their social and genetic being. Incorporating this with the human can cause disgust, even amongst those who have received xenotransplants: “I wonder how much from an animal can be introduced into my body before my humanity vanishes” (porcine cellular xenotransplant recipient qtd. in Lundin 150). While science may reduce the body to mechanistic functioning and seek to objectify it, the body, be it human or pig, possesses material-semiotic importance. The heart is not simply a pump; it is symbolically powerful. A xenotransplanted pig heart challenges the sanctity of the human body and how the human body and its parts are culturally constructed. However, the potentiality of XTP to save a life may trump any individual concerns, even if an individual may reject it culturally (Lundin). There still remains another dilemma that cannot be subsumed by such negotiations—the potentiality of cross-species viral infections (zoonosis) that could result from the embodied fusion of living pig parts and living human bodies. While a detailed examination of this is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that the social fears of zoonosis, such as avian influenza (bird flu) and swine influenza, have resulted in increased international collaborative efforts to study and halt the global spread of contagion. While there are a number of differences between these zoonotic infections and any unforeseen zoonotic consequences of XTP, what is of significance is the boundary pollution. That is, all forms of animal-to-human zoonosis involve a violation of the sacred human body by the dirty and profane other. For example, the recent outbreaks of swine influenza involved disparate species coming into contact with each other through disgusting body products, namely contaminated droplets emitted by infected individuals sneezing or coughing. The physical bodies of humans and animals, however, still remain differentiated even if zoonosis symbolically challenges such classifications. XTP, on the other hand, is an intimate physical and symbolic fusion of these bodies. The human and the animal can no longer be separated as independent beings. Thus, the potential of pollution from XTP moves beyond the fear of the symbolically disgusting pig body and the symbolism of particular body parts, to include what the pig parts may actually physically carry with them. As a result, the cultural dangers of transplanted pig parts and their potential violations are not just symbolic, but also materially ‘real’. Conclusion By categorising animals as a lower species, humans enable their exploitation and use in a multitude of ways. This process of cultural classification in the contemporary West means that we attribute a sacred, high value to human bodies, and a low, profane quality to animal bodies. While the scientific intermingling of human and pig bodies in XTP could be seen to present a cultural challenge to these species dualisms, it does not overcome such cultural classifications. That is, the interests and social constructions of pigs by science cannot overpower or suppress the sociocultural. The removal of pig parts from the pig’s body does not eliminate its ‘half identity’. It is still a living product from an animal’s body. Unlike other pig products, life cannot be removed from the pig parts for XTP, as this is the vital function required for xenotransplants to (potentially) work. A heart needs to beat. Any purification rituals undertaken by science, such as using pigs genetically engineered with human proteins, cannot overcome this cultural construction. While it may be argued that XTP will become culturally acceptable with time, this disrespects how social knowledges are as equally important as the scientific. This further disavows that cultural concerns over mixing pig and human bodies are as viable as scientific constructions. This is perhaps most potently highlighted by zoonosis. Thus, the pigs used in XTP have cultural-technical bodies that are materially and symbolically significant, which science cannot purge. References Alexander, J. C. and P. Smith. “Social Science and Salvation: Risk Society as Mythical Discourse.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 25 (1996): 251-262. Bijker, W.E., T.P. Hughes and T. Pinch. Eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Bourdieu, P. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge, 1986. Brown, N. “Xenotransplantation: Normalizing Disgust”. Science as Culture 8 (1999): 327-55. Cook, P.S. “Science Stories: Selecting the Source Animal for Xenotransplantation.” Social Change in the 21st Century 2006 Conference Proceedings. Eds. C. Hopkinson and C. Hall. Centre for Social Change Research, School of Humanities and Human Services, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 2006. 6 Aug. 2010. Douglas, M. Purity and Danger, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1976[1966]. Durkheim, E. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York: The Free Press, 1995[1912]. Durkheim, E. “The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions.” Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society: Selected Works. Ed. R. Bellah. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973[1914]. Goffman, E. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Haraway, D. J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Kendall, G. and M. Michael “Order and Disorder: Time, Technology and the Self.” Culture Machine, Interzone, Nov. 2001. 6 Aug. 2010 .Lundin, S. “Understanding Cultural Perspectives on Clinical Xenotransplantation.” Graft 4.2 (1999): 150-153. Sassatelli, R. “The Commercialization of DIscipline: Keep-fit Culture and its Values.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 5.3 (2000): 396-411. Tovey, H. “Theorising Nature and Society in Sociology: The Invisibility of Animals.” Sociologia Ruralis 43.3 (2003): 196-215. Turner, B.S. The body and society: explorations in social theory. Second Ed. London: Sage, 1996. Xenotransplantation Working Party. Animal-to-Human Transplantation Research: How Should Australian Proceed? Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2003. Zerubavel, E. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Since its return in 2005 the science fiction series Doctor Who (BBC1) has featured many alien creatures which bear a striking similarity to non-human Earth species: the Judoon in “Smith and Jones” (2007) have heads like rhinoceroses; the nurses in “New Earth” (2006) are cats in wimples; the Tritovores in “Planet of the Dead” (2009) are giant flies in boilersuits. Yet only one non-human animal has appeared twice in the series, in unrelated stories: the pig. Furthermore, alien races such as the Judoon and the Tritovores simply happen to look like human species, and the series offers no narrative explanation as to why such similarities exist. When the pig has appeared, however, it has instead been as the consequence of experimentation and mutation, and in both cases the appearance of such porcine hybrids is signalled as horrific, unsettling and, in the end, to be pitied. The fact that the pig has appeared in this way twice suggests there is something about the human understanding of this animal which means it can fulfil a role in fiction unavailable to other Earth species. The pig’s appearance has been in two stories, both two-parters. In “Aliens of London”/“World War Three” (2005) a spaceship crashes into London’s Thames river, and the pilot inside, thought to be dead, is sent to be scientifically examined. Alone in the laboratory, the pathologist Doctor Sato is startled to find the creature is alive and, during its attempt to escape, it is shot by the military. When the creature is examined The Doctor reveals it is “an ordinary pig, from Earth.” He goes on to explain that, “someone’s taken a pig, opened up its brain, stuck bits on, then they’ve strapped it in that ship and made it dive-bomb. It must have been terrified. They’ve taken this animal and turned it into a joke.” The Doctor’s concern over the treatment of the pig mirrors his earlier reprimand of the military for shooting it; as he cradles the dying creature he shouts at the soldier responsible, “What did you do that for? It was scared! It was scared.” On the commentary track for the DVD release of this episode Julie Gardner (executive producer) and Will Cohen (visual effects producer) note how so many people told them they had a significant emotional reaction to this scene, with Gardner adding, “Bless the pig.” In that sense, what begins as a moment of horror in the series becomes one of empathy with a non-human being, and the pig moves from being a creature of terror to one whose death is seen to be an immoral act. This movement from horror to empathy can be seen in the pig’s other appearance, in “Daleks in Manhattan”/“Evolution of the Daleks” (2007). Here the alien Daleks experiment on humans in order to develop the ability to meld themselves with Earthlings, in order to repopulate their own dwindling numbers. Humans are captured and then tested; as Laszlo, one of the outcomes of the experimentation, explains, “They’re divided into two groups: high intelligence and low intelligence. The low intelligence are taken to becomes Pig Slaves, like me.” These Pig Slaves look and move like humans except for their faces, which have prolonged ears and the pig signifier of a snout. At no point in the story is it made clear why experimentations on low intelligence humans should result in them looking like pigs, and a non-hybrid pig is not seen throughout the story. The appearance of the experiments’ results is therefore not narratively explained, and it does not draw on the fact that “in digestive apparatus and nutrient requirements pigs resemble humans in more ways than any mammal except monkeys and apes, which is why pigs are much in demand for [human] medical research” (Harris 70); indeed, considering the story is set in the 1930s such a justification would be anachronistic. The use of the pig, therefore, draws solely on its cultural, not its scientific, associations. These associations are complex, and the pig has been used to connote many things in Western culture. Children’s books such as The Sheep-Pig (King-Smith) and Charlotte’s Web (White) suggest the close proximity of humans and pigs can result in an affinity capable of communication. The use of pigs to represent Poles in Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman), on the other hand, has been read as offensive, drawing on the animal’s association with dirt and greed (Weschler). These depictions are informed by debates about pigs in the real world, whereby an animal which, as mentioned above, is similar enough to humans to be useful in medical research can also, for the food industry, go through a slaughtering process described by Bob Torres as “horribly cruel” (47). Such cruelty can only be justified if the boundaries between the pig and the human are maintained, and this is why pig-human representations are capable of being shocking and horrific. The hybrid nature of the human-pig creature draws on the horror trope that Noël Carroll refers to as “fusion” which works because it “unites attributes held to be categorically distinct” such as “inside/outside, living/dead, insect/human, flesh/machine” (43). He explains that this is why characters in horror narratives do not find such creatures simply fearful, but also “repellent, loathsome, disgusting, repulsive and impure” (54); their failure to conform to accepted cultural categories destabilises assumed norms and, perhaps most horrifically, undermines ‘the human’ as a stable, natural and superior category. As Donna Haraway notes, “‘The species’ often means the human race, unless one is attuned to science fiction, where species abound” (18). Science fiction therefore commonly plays with ideas of species because it is often interested in “the image of the scientist ‘playing god’” (Jones 51) and the horrific outcomes of “the total severing of scientific concerns from ethical concerns” (53). That the result of human/non-human experimentation should be regarded as horrific is evidence of the need to maintain the distinctions between humans and other creatures; after all, a pig/human can only be thought of as horrific if it as assumed that there is something unnatural about the destabilisation of the human category. And it is precisely the human which matters in this equation; it is not really as if anyone cares about the pig’s categorical stability in all of this. In both these stories, the appearance of the pig-creature is narratively structured to be surprising and shocking, and is withheld from the audience for as long as possible. The first appearance of a Pig Slave in “Daleks in Manhattan” constitutes that episode’s pre-credits cliff-hanger, with the creature appearing out of the shadows and bearing down upon the camera, directly towards the audience viewing at home. At this point, the audience has no idea why such a creature exists; the meaning of the pig-human hybrid is contained purely in its visual appearance, with the horrific fact of its contradictory appearance perhaps drawing on the pig’s historical association with evil and the Devil (Sillar and Meyler 82). Similarly, in “Aliens of London” we see Sato’s shocked reaction to the pig far earlier than we actually see the creature ourselves, and Sato’s scream is clearly intended to construct what we have yet to encounter as horrific. The Doctor’s search for the creature is similarly signalled, as he roams dimly-lit corridors trying to find it, following the trail of the grunts and noises that it makes. That the pig might constitute a horrific—or at least unsettling—site for humans is unsurprising considering the cultural roles it has often played. There is, after all, an “opposition between civilization and piggishness” (Ashley, Hollows, Jones and Taylor 2) in which (incorrect) assumptions about pigs’ filthy behaviour helps mark out humanity’s cleaner and more civilised way of living. While this is true of all human/non-human interactions, it is argued that the pig occupies a particular role within this system as it is a “familiar beast” (4) because for centuries it has been a domesticated animal which has often lived alongside humans, usually in quite close proximity. In that sense, humans and pigs are very similar. Demarcating the human as a stable and natural “conceptual category ... in which we place all members of our own species and from which we exclude all non-members” (Milton 265-66) has therefore required the denigration of non-humans, at least partly to justify the dominion humans have decided they have the right to hold over other creatures such as pigs. The difficulties in maintaining this demarcation can be seen in the documentary The Private Life of Pigs (BBC2 2010) in which the farmer Jimmy Docherty carries out a number of tests on animals in order to better understand the ‘inner life’ of the pig. Docherty acknowledges the pig’s similarity to humans in his introductory piece to camera; “When you look in their piggy little eyes with their piggy little eyelashes you see something that reflects back to you—I don’t know—it makes you feel there’s a person looking back.” However, this is quickly followed by a statement which works to reassert the human/non-human boundary; “I know we have this close relationship [with pigs], but I’m often reminded that just beneath the surface of their skin, they’re a wild animal.” Perhaps the most telling revelation in the programme is that pigs have been found to make certain grunting noises only when humans are around, which suggests they have developed a language for ‘interacting’ with humans. That Docherty is uncomfortably startled by this piece of information shows how the idea of communication troubles ideas of human superiority, and places pigs within a sphere hitherto maintained as strictly human. Of course, humans often willingly share domestic spaces with other species, but these are usually categorised as pets. The pet exists “somewhere between the wild animal and the human” (Fudge 8), and we often invest them with a range of human characteristics and develop relationships with such animals which are similar, but not identical, to those we have with other humans. The pig, however, like other food animals, cannot occupy the role afforded to the pet because it is culturally unacceptable to eat pets. In order to legitimise the treatment of the pig as a “strictly utilitarian object; a thing for producing meat and bacon” (Serpell 7) it must be distinguished from the human realm as clearly as possible. It is worth noting, though, that this is a culturally-specific process; Dwyer and Minnegal, for example, show how in New Guinea “pigs commonly play a crucial role in ceremonial and spiritual life” (37-8), and the pig is therefore simultaneously a wild animal, a source of food, and a species with which humans have an “attachment” (45-54) akin to the idea of a pet. Western societies commonly (though not completely) have difficulty uniting this range of animal categories, and analogous ideas of “civilization” often rest on assumptions about animals which require them to play specific, non-human roles. That homo sapiens define their humanity in terms of civilization is demonstrated by the ways in which ideas of brutality, violence and savagery are displaced onto other species, often quite at odds with the truth of such species’ behaviour. The assumption that non-human species are violent, and constitute a threat, is shown in Doctor Who; the pig is shot in “Aliens of London” for assumed security reasons (despite it having done nothing to suggest it is a threat), while humans run in fear from the Pig Slaves in “Evolution of the Daleks” purely because of their non-human appearance. Mary Midgley refers to this as “the Beast Myth” (38) by which humans not only reduce other species to nothing other than “incarnations of wickedness, … sets of basic needs, … crude mechanical toys, … [and] idiot children” (38), but also lump all non-human species together thereby ignoring the specificity of any particular species. Midgley also argues that “man shows more savagery to his own kind than most other mammal species” (27, emphasis in original), citing the need for “law or morality to restrain violence” (26) as evidence of the social structures required to uphold a myth of human civilization. In that sense, the use of pigs in Doctor Who can be seen as conforming to centuries-old depictions of non-human species, by which the loss of humanity symbolised by other species can be seen as the ultimate punishment. After all, when the Daleks’ human helper, Mr Diagoras, fears that the aliens are going to experiment on him, he fearfully exclaims, “What do you mean? Like those pig-men things? You’re not going to turn me into one of those? Oh, God, please don’t!” In the next episode, when all the Pig Slaves are killed by the actions of the Doctor’s companion Martha, she regrets her actions, only to be told, “No. The Daleks killed them. Long ago”, for their mutation into a ‘pig-man thing’ is seen to be a more significant loss of humanity than death itself. The scene highlights how societies are often “confused about the status of such interspecies beings” (Savulescu 25). Such confusion is likely to recur considering we are moving into a “posthumanist” age defined by the “decentering of the human” (Wolfe xv), whereby critiques of traditional cultural categories, alongside scientific developments that question the biological certainty of the human, result in difficulties in defining precisely what it is that is supposedly so special about homo sapiens. This means that it is far too easy to write off these depictions in Doctor Who as merely drawing on, and upholding, those simplistic and naturalised human/non-human distinctions which have been criticised, in a manner similar to sexism and racism, as “speciesist” (Singer 148-62). There is, after all, consistent sympathy for the pig in these episodes. The shooting of the pig in “Aliens of London” is outrageous not merely because it gives evidence of the propensity of human violence: the death of the pig itself is presented as worth mourning, in a manner similar to the death of any living being. Throughout the series the Doctor is concerned over the loss of life for any species, always aiming to find a non-violent method for solving conflicts and repeatedly berating other characters who resort to bloodshed for solutions. Indeed, the story’s narrative can be read as one in which the audience is invited to reassess its own response to the pig’s initial appearance, shifting from fear at its alien-ness to sympathy for its demise. This complication of the cultural meanings of pigs is taken even further in the two-part Dalek story. One of the key plots of the story is the relationship between Laszlo, who has been transmuted into a Pig Slave, and his former lover Tallulah. Tallulah spends much of the story thinking Laszlo has disappeared, when he has, in fact, gone into hiding, certain that she will reject him because of his post-experimentation porcine features. When they finally reunite, Laszlo apologises for what has happened to him, while Tallulah asks, “Laszlo? My Laszlo? What have they done to you?” At the end of the story they decide to try re-establishing their relationship, despite Laszlo’s now-complicated genetic make-up. In response to this Martha asks the Doctor, “Do you reckon it’s going to work, those two?” The Doctor responds that while such an odd pairing might be problematic pretty much anywhere else, as they were in New York they might just get away with it. He reflects, “That’s what this city’s good at. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and maybe the odd Pig Slave Dalek mutant hybrid too.” While there is an obvious playfulness to this scene, with the programme foregrounding the kinds of narrative available to the science fiction genre, it is also clear that we are invited to find this a good narrative conclusion, a suitable resolution to all that has preceded it. In that sense, the pig and the human come together, dissolving the human/non-human divide at a stroke, and this is offered to the audience as something to be pleased about. In both narratives, then, the pig moves from being understood as alien and threatening to something if not quite identical to human, then certainly akin to it. Certainly, the narratives suggest that the lives, loves and concerns of pigs—even if they have been experimented upon—matter, and can constitute significant emotional moments in primetime mainstream family television. This development is a result of the text’s movement from an interest in the appearance of the pig to its status as a living being. As noted above, the initial appearances of the pigs in both stories is intended to be frightening, but such terror is dependent on understanding non-human species by their appearance alone. What both of these stories manage to do is suggest that the pig—like all non-human living things, whether of Earth or not—is more than its physical appearance, and via acknowledgment of its own consciousness, and its own sense of identity, can become something with which humans are capable of having sympathy; perhaps more than that, that the pig is something with which humans should have sympathy, for to deny the interior life of such a species is to engage in an inhuman act in itself. This could be seen as an interesting—if admittedly marginal—corrective to the centuries of cultural and physical abuse the pig, like all animals, has suffered. Such representations can be seen as evoking “the dreaded comparison” (Spiegel) which aligns maltreatment of animals with slavery, a comparison that is dreaded by societies because to acknowledge such parallels makes justifying humans’ abusive treatment of other species very difficult. These two Doctor Who stories repeatedly make such comparisons, and assume that to morally and emotionally distinguish between living beings based on categories of species is nonsensical, immoral, and fails to acknowledge the significance and majesty of all forms of life. That we might, as Gardner suggests, “Bless the pig”—whether it has had its brain stuffed full of wires or been merged with a human—points towards complex notions of human/non-human interaction which might helpfully destabilise simplistic ideas of the superiority of the human race. References Ashley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor. Food and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Dwyer, Peter D. and Monica Minnegal. “Person, Place or Pig: Animal Attachments and Human Transactions in New Guinea.” Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacies. Ed. John Knight. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. 37-60. Fudge, Erica. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Harris, Marvin. “The Abominable Pig.” Food and Culture: A Reader. Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. 67-79. Jones, Darryl. Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. London: Arnold, 2002. King-Smith, Dick. The Sheep-Pig. London: Puffin, 1983. Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man. London and New York: Routledge, 1979/2002. Milton, Kay. “Anthropomorphism or Egomorphism? The Perception of Non-Human Persons by Human Ones.” Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacies. Ed. John Knight. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. 255-71. Savulescu, Julian. “Human-Animal Transgenesis and Chimeras Might be an Expression of our Humanity.” The American Journal of Bioethics 3.3 (2003): 22-5. Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Sillar, Frederick Cameron and Ruth Mary Meyler. The Symbolic Pig: An Anthology of Pigs in Literature and Art. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1961. Singer, Peter. “All Animals are Equal.” Animal Rights and Human Obligations. Ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1989. 148-62. Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. London and Philadelphia: Heretic Books, 1988. Speigelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986/1991. Torres, Bob. Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. Edinburgh, Oakland and West Virginia: AK Press, 2007. Weschler, Lawrence. “Pig Perplex.” Lingua France: The Review of Academic Life 11.5 (2001): 6-8. White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. London: Harper Collins, 1952. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Neither mere flesh nor mere thing, the yellow woman, straddling the person-thing divide, applies tremendous pressures on politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology. — Anne Anlin Cheng, OrnamentalismIn this (apparently) very versatile piece of clothing, she [Michelle Zauner] smokes, sings karaoke, rides motorcycles, plays a killer guitar solo … and much more. Is there anything you can’t do in a hanbok?— Li-Wei Chu, commentary, From the Intercom IntroductionAnne Anlin Cheng describes the anomaly of being “the yellow woman”, women of Asian descent in Western contexts, by underlining the haunting effects of this artificial identity on multiple politically valent forms, especially through Asian women’s conceived ambivalent relations to subject- and object-hood. Due to the entangled constructiveness conjoining Asiatic identities with objects, things, and ornaments, Cheng calls for new ways to “accommodate the deeper, stranger, more intricate, and more ineffable (con)fusion between thingness and personness instantiated by Asiatic femininity and its unpredictable object life” (14). Following this call, this essay articulates a creative combination of José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification and Avery Gordon’s haunting theory to account for some hauntingly disidentificatory ways that the performance of diaspora sensibilities reimagines Asian American life and femininity.This essay considers “Everybody Wants to Love You” (2016) (EWLY), the music video of Michelle Zauner’s solo musical project Japanese Breakfast, as a ghostly performance, which features a celebration of the Korean culture and identity of Zauner (Song). I analyse it as a site for identifying the confrontational moments and haunting effects of the diaspora sensibilities performed by Zauner who is in fact Jewish-Korean-American. Directed by Zauner and Adam Kolodny, the music video of EWLY features the persona that I call the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, singing in a restroom cubicle, eating a Dunkin Donuts sandwich, shotgunning a beer, shredding a Fender electric guitar on the hood of a truck, riding a motorcycle with her queer lover, and partying with a crowd all in the traditional Korean attire hanbok that used to belong to her late mother. The story ends with Zauner waking up on a bench with a hangover and fleeing from the scene, conjuring up a journey of self-discovery, self-healing, and self-liberation through multiple sites and scenes of everyday life.What I call a ghostly performance is concerned with Avery Gordon’s creative intervention of haunting as a method of social analysis to study the intricate lingering impact of ghostly matters from the past on the present. Jacques Derrida develops hauntology to describe how Marxism continues to haunt Western societies even after its so-called failure. It refers to a status that something is neither present nor absent. Gordon develops haunting as a way of knowing and a method of knowledge production, “forcing a confrontation, forking the future and the past” (xvii). A ghostly performance is thus where ghostly matters are mobilised in “confrontational moments”:when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (xvi)The interstitiality that transgresses and reconfigures the geographical and temporal borders of nation, culture, and Eurocentric discourses of progression is important for understanding the diverse experiences of diaspora sensibilities as critical double consciousness (Dayal 48, 53). As Gordon suggests, confrontational moments force us to confront and expose the interstitial state of objects, subjects, feelings, and conditions. Hence, to understand this study identifies the confrontational moments in Zauner’s performance as a method to identify and deconstruct the triggering moments of diaspora sensibilities.While deconstructing the ghostly performances of diaspora sensibilities, the essay also adopts an object-oriented approach to serve as a focused entry point. Not only does this approach designate a more focused scope with regard to applying Gordon’s hauntology and Muñoz’s disidentification theory, it also taps into a less attended territory of object theories such as Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented ontology due to the overlooking of the relationship between objects and racialisation that is much explored in Asian American and critical race and ethnic studies (Shomura). Moreover, while diaspora as, or not as, an object of study has been a contested topic (e.g., Axel; Cho), the objects of diaspora have been less studied.This essay elaborates on two ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails. It uncovers two haunting effects throughout the analysis: the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America. By defying the objectification of Asian bodies with objects of diaspora and refusing to assimilate into the American nightlife, Zauner’s Korean woman persona haunts a multiculturalist post-racial America that fails to recognise the specificities and historicity of Korean America and performs an alternative reality. Disidentificatory ghostly performance therefore, I suggest, thrives on confrontations between the past and the present while gesturing toward the futurities of alternative Americas. Mobilising the critical lenses of disidentification and ghostly performance, finally, I aver that disidentificatory ghostly performances have great potential for envisioning a better politics of performing and representing Asian bodies through the ghostly play of haunting objects/ghostly matters.The Embodied (Objects) and the Disembodied (Ghosts) of DisidentificationThe sonic-visual lifeworld constructed in the music video of EWLY is, first of all, a cultural public sphere, through which social norms are contested, reimagined, and reconfigured. A cultural public sphere reveals the imbricated relations between the political, the public, and the personal as contested through affective (aesthetic and emotional) communications (McGuigan 15). Considering the sonic-visual landscape as a cultural public sphere foregrounds two dimensions of Gordon’s hauntology theory: the psychological and the sociopolitical states. The emphasis on its affective communicative capacities enables the psychological reach of a cultural production. Meanwhile, the multilayered articulation of the political, the public, and the personal shows the inner-network of acts of haunting even when they happen chiefly on the sociopolitical level. What is crucial about cultural public spheres for minoritarian subjects is the creative space offered for negotiating one’s position in capacious and flexible ways that non-cultural publics may not allow. One of the ways is through imagination and disputation (McGuigan 16). The idea that imagination and disputation may cause a temporal and spatial disjunction with the present is important for Muñoz’s theorisation of disidentification. With such disjunction, Muñoz believes, queer of colour performances create future-oriented visions and coterminous temporality of the present and the future. These future-oriented visions and the coterminous temporality can be thought through disidentifications, which Muñoz identifies asa performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. (97)Disidentification offers a method to identify specific moments of imagination and disputation and moments of temporal and spatial disjunction. The most distinct example of the co-nature of imagination and disputation residing in the EWLY lifeworld is the persona of the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, as she intrudes into the everyday field of American life in a hanbok, such as a bar, a basketball court, and a convenience store. Gordon would call these moments “confrontational moments” (xvi). When performers don’t perform in ways they are supposed to perform, when they don’t operate objects in ways they are supposed to operate, when they don’t mobilise feelings in ways they are supposed to feel, they resist and disidentify with “the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology” (Muñoz 97).In addition to Muñoz’s disidentification and Gordon’s confrontational moments, I adopt an object-oriented approach to guide my analysis of disidentificatory ghostly performances. Object theory departs from objects and matters to rediscover identity and experience. My object-oriented approach follows new materialism more closely than object-oriented ontology because it is less about debating the ontology of Asian American experiences through the lens of objects. Instead, it is more about how re-orienting our attention towards the formation and operation of objecthood reveals and reconfigures the vexed articulation between Asian American experiences and racialised objectification. To this end, my oriented-object approach aligns particularly well with politically engaged frameworks such as Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Eunjung Kim’s ethics of objects.Taking an object-oriented approach in inquiring Asian American identities could be paradoxically intervening because “Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects” (Shomura). Furthermore, this objectification is doubly performed onto the bodies of Asian American women due to the Orientalist conflations of Asia as feminine (Huang 187). Therefore, applying object theory in the case of EWLY requires special attention to the interplay between subject- and object-hood and the line between objecthood and objectification. To avoid the risk of objectification when exploring the objecthood of ghostly matters, I caution against an objects-define-subjects chain of signification and instead suggest a subjects-operate-objects route of inquiry by attending to both the haunting effects of objects and how subjects mobilise such haunting effects in their performance. From a new materialist perspective, it is also important to disassociate problems of objectification from exploration of objecthood (Kim) while excavating the world-making abilities of objects (Bennett). For diasporic peoples, it means to see objects as affective and nostalgic vessels, such as toys, food, family photos, attire, and personal items (e.g., Oum), where traumas of displacement can be stored and rehearsed (Turan 54).What is revealing from a racialised subject-object relationship is what Christopher Bush calls “the ethnicity of things”: things can have ethnicity, an identification that hinges on the articulation that “thingliness can be constituted in ways analogous and related to structures of racialization” (85). This object-oriented approach to inquiry can expose the artificial nature of the affinity between Asian bodies and certain objects, behind which is a confession of naturalised racial order of signification. One way to disrupt this chain of signification is to excavate the haunting objects that disidentify with the norms of the present, that conjure up what the present wants to be done. This “something-to-be-done” characteristic is critical to acts of haunting (Gordon xvii). Such disruptive performances are what I term as “disidentificatory ghostly performances”, connecting the embodied objects with Gordon’s disembodied ghosts through the lens of Muñoz’s disidentificatory reading with a two-fold impact: first exposing such artificial affinity and then suggesting alternative ways of knowing.In what follows, I expand upon two haunting objects/ghostly matters: the manicured nails and the hanbok. I contend that Zauner operates these haunting objects to embody the “something-to-be-done” characteristic by curating uncomfortable, confrontational moments, where the constituted affinity between Koreanness/Asianness and anomaly is instantiated and unsettled in multiple snippets of the mundane post-racial, post-globalisation world.What Can the Korean Woman (Not) Do with Those Nails and in That Hanbok?The hanbok that Zauner wears throughout the music video might be the single most powerful haunting object in the story. This authentic hanbok belonged to Zauner’s late mother who wore it to her wedding. Dressing in the hanbok while navigating the nightlife, it becomes a mediated, trans-temporal experience for both Zauner and her mother. A ghostly journey, you could call it. The hanbok then becomes a ghostly matter that haunts both the Orientalist gaze and the grieving Zauner. This journey could be seen as a process of dealing with personal loss, a process of “reckoning with ghosts” (Gordon 190). The division between the personal and the public, the historical and the present cease to exist as linear and clear-cut forces. The important role of ghosts in the performance are the efforts of historicising and specifying the persona of the Korean woman, which is a strategy for minoritarian performers to resist “the pull of reductive multicultural pluralism” (Muñoz 147). These ghostly matters haunt a pluralist multiculturalist post-racial America that refuses to see minor specificities and historicity.The Korean woman in an authentic hanbok, coupled with other objects of Korean roots, such as a traditional hairdo and seemingly exotic makeup, may invite the Orientalist gaze or the assumption that Zauner is self-commodifying and self-fetishising Korean culture, risking what Cheng calls “Oriental female objectification” operating through “the lenses of commodity and sexual fetishism” (14). However, she “fails” to do any of these. The ways Zauner acts in the hanbok manifests a self-negotiation with her Korean identity through disidentificatory sensibilities with racial fetishism. For example, in various scenes, the Korean woman appears to be drunk in a bar, gorging a sandwich, shotgunning a beer, smoking in a restroom cubicle, messing with strangers in a basketball court, rocking on a truck, and falling asleep on a bench. Some may describe what she does as abnormal, discomforting, and even disgusting in a traditional Korean garment which is usually worn on formal occasions. The Korean woman not only subverts her traditional Koreanness but also disidentifies with what the Asian fetish requires of Asian bodies: obedient, well-behaved model minority or the hypersexualised dragon lady (e.g., Hsu; Shimizu). Zauner’s performance foregrounds the sentimental, the messy, the frenetic, the aggressive, and the carnivalesque as essential qualities and sensibilities of the Korean woman. These rarely visible figurations of Asian femininities speak to the normalised public disappearance of “unwanted” sides of Asian bodies.Wavering public disappearance is a crucial haunting effect. The public disappearance is an “organized system of repression” (Gordon 72) and a “state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission” (115). While the journey of EWLY evolves through ups and downs, the Korean woman does not maintain the ephemeral joy and takes offence at the people and surroundings now and then, such as at an arcade in the bar, at some basketball players, or at the audience or the camera operator. The performed disaffection and the conflicts substantiate a theory of “positive perversity” through which Asian American women claim the representation of their sexuality and desires (Shimizu), engendering a strong and visible presence of the ghostly matters operated by the Korean woman. This noticeable arrival of bodies disorients how things are arranged (Ahmed 163), revealing and disrupting whiteness, which functions as a habit and a background to actions (149). The confrontational performances of the encounters between Zauner and others cast a critique of the racial politics of disappearing by reifying disappearing into confrontational moments in the everyday post-racial world.What is also integral to Zauner’s antagonistic performance of wavering public disappearing and failure of “Oriental female objectification” is a punk strategy of negativity through an aesthetic of nihilism and a mediation of performing objects. For example, in addition to the traditional hairdo that goes with her makeup, Zauner also wears a nose ring; in addition to partying with a crowd, she adopts a moshing style of dancing, being carried over people’s heads in the hanbok. All these, in addition to her disaffectionate, aggressive, and impolite body language, express a negative punk aesthetics. Muñoz describes such a negative punk aesthetics as an energy that can be described “as chaotic, as creating a life without rhyme or reason, as quintessentially self-destructive” (97). What lies at the heart of this punk dystopia is the desire for “something else”, something “not the present time or place” (Muñoz). Through this desire for impossible time and place, utopian is reimagined, a race riot, in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s term.On the other hand, the manicured fingernails are also a major operating force, reminiscent of Korean American immigrant history along with the racialised labor relations that have marked Korean bodies as an alien anomaly (Liu). With “Japanese Breakfast” being written on the screen in neon pink with some dazzling effect, the music video begins in a warm tone. The story begins with Zauner selecting EWLY with her finger on a karaoke operation screen, the first of many shots on her carefully manicured nails, decorated with transparent nail extensions, sparkly ornaments, and hanging fine chains. These nails conjure up the nail salon business in the US that heavily depended on immigrant labor and Korean women immigrants have made significant economic contributions through the manicure business. In particular, differently from Los Angeles where nail salons have been predominantly Vietnamese and Chinese owned, Korean women immigrants in the 1980s were the first ones to open nail salons in New York City and led to the rapid growth of the business (Kang 51). The manicured nails first of all conjure up these recent histories associated with the nail salon business.Moreover, these fingernails haunt post-racial and post-globalisation America by revealing and subverting the invisible, normalised racial and ethnic nature of the labor and objects associated with fingernails cosmetic treatment. Ghostly matters inform “a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives” (Gordon xvii). They function as a reminder of the damage that seems forgotten or normalised in modern societies and as an alternative embodiment of what modern societies could have become. In the universe of EWLY, the fingernails become a forceful ghostly matter by reminding us of the damage done onto Korean bodies by fixing them as service performers instead customers. The nail salon business as performed by immigrant labor has been a business of “buying and selling of deference and attentiveness”, where white customers come to exercise their privilege while not wanting anything associated with Koreaness or Otherness (Kang 134). However, as a haunting force, the fingernails subvert such labor relations by acting as a versatile agent operating varied objects, such as a karaoke machine, cigarettes, a sandwich, a Fender guitar, and a can of beer. Through such operating, an alternative labor relation is formed. This alternative is not entirely without roots. As promoted in Japanese Breakfast’s Instagram (@jbrekkie), Zauner’s look was styled by a nail artist who appears to be a white female, Celeste Marie Welch from the DnA Salon based in Philadelphia. This is a snippet of a field that is now a glocalised industry, where the racial and gender makeup is more diverse. It is increasingly easier to see non-Asian and non-female nail salon workers, among whom white nail salon workers outnumbered any other non-Asian racial/ethnic groups (Preeti et al. 23). EWLY’s alternative worldmaking is not only a mere reflection of the changing makeup of an industry but also calling out the societal tendency of forgetting histories. To be haunted, as Gordon explains, is to be “tied to historical and social effects” (190). The ghostly matters of the manicure industry haunt its workers, artists, consumers, and businesspeople of a past that prescribes racialised labor divisions, consumption relations, and the historical and social effects inflicted on the Othered bodies. Performing with the manicured nails, Zauner challenges now supposedly multicultural manicure culture by fusing oppositional, trans-temporal identities into the persona of the Korean woman. Not only does she conjure up the racialised labor relations as the child of a Korean mother, she also disidentifies with the worker identity of early Korean women immigrants as a consumer who receives service from an artist who would otherwise never perform such labor in the past.Conclusion: Toward a Disidentificatory Ghostly PerformanceThis essay suggests seeing the disidentificatory ghostly performance of the Korean woman as an artistic incarnation of her lived Othering experience, which Zauner may or may not navigate on an everyday basis. As Zauner lives through what looks like a typical Friday night in an American town, the journey represents an interrogation of the present and the past. When the ghostly matters move through public spaces – when she drinks in a bar, walks down the street, and parties with a crowd – the Korean woman neither conforms to what she is expected to do in a hanbok nor does she get fully assimilated into this American nightlife.Derrida avers that haunting, repression, and hegemony are structurally interlocked and that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because “hegemony still organizes the repression” (46). This is why the creative capacity of disidentificatory performances is crucial for acts of haunting and for historically repressed groups of people. 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The control of technological systems by human operators has been the object of study for many decades. The increasing complexity in the digital age has made the optimization of the interaction between system and human operator particularly necessary.. In the present thematic issue, ten exemplary articles are presented, ranging from observational field studies to experimental work in highly complex navigation simulators. For the human operator, the processes of attention play a crucial role, which are captured in the contributions listed in this thematic issue by eye-tracking devices. For many decades, eye tracking during car driving has been investigated extensively (e.g. Lappi & Lehtonen, 2013; Grüner & Ansorge, 2017). In the present special issue, Cvahte Ojsteršek & Topolšek (2019) provide a literature review and scientometric analysis of 139 eye-tracking studies investigating driver distraction. For future studies, the authors recommend a wider variety of distractor stimuli, a larger number of tested participants, and an increasing interdisciplinarity of researchers. In addition to most studies investigating bottom-up processes of covered attention, Tuhkanen, Pekkanen, Lehtonen & Lappi (2019) include the experimental control of top-down processes of overt attention in an active visuomotor steering task. The results indicate a bottom-up process of biasing the optic flow of the stimulus input in interaction with the top-down saccade planning induced by the steering task. An expanding area of technological development involves autonomous driving where actions of the human operator directly interact with the programmed reactions of the vehicle. Autonomous driving requires, however,a broader exploration of the entire visual input and less gaze directed towards the road centre. Schnebelen, Charron & Mars (2021) conducted experimental research in this area and concluded that gaze dynamics played the most important role in distinguishing between manual and automated driving. Through a combination of advanced gaze tracking systems with the latest vehicle environment sensors, Bickerdt, Wendland, Geisler, Sonnenberg & Kasneci (2021) conducted a study with 50 participants in a driving simulator and propose a novel way to determine perceptual limits which are applicable to realistic driving scenarios. Eye-Computer-Interaction (ECI) is an interactive method of directly controlling a technological device by means of ocular parameters. In this context, Niu, Gao, Xue, Zhang & Yang (2020) conducted two experiments to explore the optimum target size and gaze-triggering dwell time in ECI. Their results have an exemplary application value for future interface design. Aircraft training and pilot selection is commonly performed on simulators. This makes it possible to study human capabilities and their limitation in interaction with the simulated technological system. Based on their methodological developments and experimental results, Vlačić, Knežević, Mandal, Rođenkov & Vitsas (2020) propose a network approach with three target measures describing the individual saccade strategy of the participants in this study. In their analysis of the cognitive load of pilots, Babu, Jeevitha Shree, Prabhakar, Saluja, Pashilkar & Biswas (2019) investigated the ocular parameters of 14 pilots in a simulator and during test flights in an aircraft during air to ground attack training. Their results showed that ocular parameters are significantly different in different flying conditions and significantly correlate with altitude gradients during air to ground dive training tasks. In maritime training the use of simulations is per international regulations mandatory. Mao, Hildre & Zhang (2019) performed a study of crane lifting and compared novice and expert operators. Similarities and dissimilarities of eye behavior between novice and expert are outlined and discussed. The study of Atik & Arslan (2019) involves capturing and analyzing eye movement data of ship officers with sea experience in simulation exercises for assessing competency. Significant differences were found between electronic navigation competencies of expert and novice ship officers. The authors demonstrate that the eye tracking technology is a valuable tool for the assessment of electronic navigation competency. The focus of the study by Atik (2020) is the assessment and training of situational awareness of ship officers in naval Bridge Resource Management. The study shows that eye tracking provides the assessor with important novel data in simulator based maritime training, such as focus of attention, which is a decisive factor for the effectiveness of Bridge Resource Management training. The research presented in the different articles of this special thematic issue cover many different areas of application and involve specialists from different fields, but they converge on repeated demonstrations of the usefulness of measuring attentional processes by eye movements or using gaze parameters for controlling complex technological devices. Together, they share the common goal of improving the potential and safety of technology in the digital age by fitting it to human capabilities and limitations. References Atik, O. (2020). Eye tracking for assessment of situational awareness in bridge resource management training. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.3.7 Atik, O., & Arslan, O. (2019). Use of eye tracking for assessment of electronic navigation competency in maritime training. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.3.2 Babu, M. D., JeevithaShree, D. V., Prabhakar, G., Saluja, K. P. S., Pashilkar, A., & Biswas, P. (2019). Estimating pilots’ cognitive load from ocular parameters through simulation and in-flight studies. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.3.3 Cvahte Ojsteršek, T., & Topolšek, D. (2019). Eye tracking use in researching driver distraction: A scientometric and qualitative literature review approach. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.3.5 Grüner, M., & Ansorge, U. (2017). Mobile eye tracking during real-world night driving: A selective review of findings and recommendations for future research. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.10.2.1 Lappi, O., & Lehtonen, E. (2013). Eye-movements in real curve driving: pursuit-like optokinesis in vehicle frame of reference, stability in an allocentric reference coordinate system. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.6.1.4 Mao, R., Li, G., Hildre, H. P., & Zhang, H. (2019). Analysis and evaluation of eye behavior for marine operation training - A pilot study. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.3.6 Niu, Y.- feng, Gao, Y., Xue, C.- qi, Zhang, Y.- ting, & Yang, L.- xin. (2020). Improving eye–computer interaction interface design: Ergonomic investigations of the optimum target size and gaze-triggering dwell time. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.3.8 Schnebelen, D., Charron, C., & Mars, F. (2021). Model-based estimation of the state of vehicle automation as derived from the driver’s spontaneous visual strategies. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.3.10 Tuhkanen, S., Pekkanen, J., Lehtonen, E., & Lappi, O. (2019). Effects of an active visuomotor steering task on covert attention. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.16910/Jemr.12.3.1 Vlačić, S. I., Knežević, A. Z., Mandal, S., Rođenkov, S., & Vitsas, P. (2020). Improving the pilot selection process by using eye-tracking tools. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.3.4