What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, like the philosopher’s table: (...) “an assumed background on which one writes.” Like other instruments standard to Western art music, the piano was designed to facilitate the production of a consistent and refined timbre. More than most other such instruments, the piano also facilitated a kind of sonic neutrality. With its wide pitch range and smoothing of the percussive attack of its predecessor instruments, the piano presented composers with a technological means of approaching composition from a seemingly objective vantage point. It exemplified, in Heideggerian terms, the instrumentality of the instrument, serving as a mediator between idea and expression that apparently adds no character of its own. -/- This notion of the invisibility, or transparency, of the mediations that musical technologies such as the piano enact is one of my areas of concern here. So too is its inverse: when these mediations become visible or opaque. Transparency has been a topic of significant recent theoretical attention. Stefanos Geroulanos, for example, has detailed how the supposed transparency of intersubjective, epistemological, and social relations was a major point of critique in postwar French thought, where the supposition of transparency was taken to suppress how the world was “complex, layered, structured, filled with heterogeneity” – and, as I will stress here, contingency. The thinkers Geroulanos considers, from Jean-Paul Sartre through to Jean-François Lyotard, can be said to be united in their refusal to invisibilise mediatedness. From a starting point of conceiving of the piano as a technological artifact, and in particular from John Cage’s ‘prepared piano,’ I will explore how a similar concern has appeared in musical contexts, albeit not without the risk of reversion back into a logic of transparency. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the aesthetic and discursive gap between music and contemporary art, and the recent attempts to remedy this in the field of New Music through a notion of “New Conceptualism.” It examines why, despite musical sources being central to the emergence of conceptual artistic strategies in the 1950s and ’60s, the worlds of an increasingly transmedial “generic art” and music have remained largely distinct. While it takes New Music’s New Conceptualism as its focus, it argues that (...) the perspective on New Music it takes has wider implications in music and art. It begins by defining what exactly “New Music” refers to, and outlines some of the conditions for the recent rise of conceptualism in New Music. It then takes the work of the composer Johannes Kreidler as a key example of some artistic tendencies and theoretical presuppositions in New Conceptualism. Following this it draws on work in the field of sound studies in order to critically examine the theoretical attempt to connect New Music with contemporary art that is found in the notion of “Music in the Expanded Field.” To conclude it offers some reflections on how a more robust conversation between contemporary art and New Music can begin to be conceived. (shrink)

In this essay we will take the American experimental composer John Cage’s understanding of sound as the starting point for an evaluation of that term in the field of sound studies. Drawing together two of the most influential figures in the field, Cage’s thought and work will serve as a lens through which to engage with recent debate concerning the uptake in sound studies of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In so doing we will attempt to develop a path between (...) conflicting sides of sound studies, putting forward an understanding of sound that presents it not as an uninterrogated ontological essence, nor as only a term in a discursive web, but as a problem which must be repeatedly posed anew. We will consider points where this may yet be pushed towards a reified, essentialized understanding of the nature of sound, but move to offset this by emphasizing the production of a practical process of learning and experimentation. (shrink)

Where does agency lie in musical performance? How is it expressed? Recent music scholarship has highlighted an increasingly prominent tendency to conceive of agency as not confined to any one individual or type of individual, instead being distributed across diverse individuals that can be found occupying performance situations. . This article uses two ‘percussion’ works from the 1970s by the composer John Cage, Child of Tree (1975) and its multi-performer elaboration Branches (1976), as a foil for engaging with these practical (...) and theoretical musical concerns, and for suggesting some heretofore underappreciated distinctions within the ongoing work on multi-agential performance. (shrink)

In what follows I offer some reflections on an ethics of listening, or perhaps more generally a philosophy of listening, that can be discerned in different forms in the experimental music that, since the 1950s, has challenged and radicalised how music is understood. I situate these reflections around three of my own concert experiences as an audience member.

Here I will put forward a claim about rhythm – that rhythm is relation. To develop this I will explore the entanglement of and antagonism between two notions of the musical avant-garde and its theorization. The first of these is derived from the European classical tradition, the second concerns Afrodiasporic musical practices. This essay comes in two parts. The first will consider some music-theoretical and philosophical ideas about rhythm in the post-classical avant-garde. Here I will explore how these ideas have (...) been used to, on one hand, stage a critique of Afrodiasporic musics, and specifically jazz, and, on the other hand, diminish and obscure the relation between the post-classical and Afrodiasporic avant-gardes. In the second part I will develop another lineage of rhythm, orthogonal to that of the post-classical avant-garde. Drawing from philosophy and Afrocentric, Afromodernist and, finally, Afrofuturist theory, I will map a theoretical move from rhythm understood, in its post-classical guise, as an exclusive and strictly musical category, to rhythm understood as an inclusive and plural category. This likewise charts a passage from an aesthetically autonomous understanding of objects of art to social and collective forms of artistic practice. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Gilles Deleuze’s engagement with phenomenology, and with the phenomenological problematic of sensation, in his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Considering Deleuze’s adoption, from the phenomenology of art, of notions of sensation and rhythm, it examines how Deleuze complexifies these phenomenological notions by aligning them with his profoundly non-phenomenological notion of the body without organs, as well as with the concepts of modulation and the diagram. In mapping Deleuze’s complexification of rhythm and his development of a logic (...) of rhythmic modulation, this article shows how Deleuze immanently refines an approach to working beyond phenomenology, through phenomenology. (shrink)

This article evaluates the theoretical and practical grounds of recent debates around Christoph Cox’s realist project of a ‘sonic materialism’ by returning to Gilles Deleuze, a key theoretical resource for Cox. It argues that a close engagement with Deleuze’s work in fact challenges many of the precepts of Cox’s sonic materialism, and suggests a rethinking of materialism in the context of music. Turning to some aspects of Deleuze’s work neglected by Cox, the ‘realist’ ontological inquiry Cox affirms is challenged through (...) the ‘onto-ethology’ that Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop in their A Thousand Plateaus, with this diversely constructive theory of relations explicated through musical examples from John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. To conclude, this article suggests that Deleuze can indeed be understood as subscribing to a materialism, but a materialism that is practical rather than doctrinal. (shrink)

This paper considers the role of myth and phenomenology in Pierre Schaeffer’s research into music and sound, and argues that engagement with these themes allows us to rethink the legacy and contemporary value of Schaeffer’s thought in sound studies. In light of critique of Schaeffer’s project, in particular that developed by Brian Kane and Schaeffer’s own apparent self-disavowal, this paper returns to Schaeffer’s early remarks on the “myth of the seashell” in order to examine the conditions of this critique. While (...) Kane argues that Schaeffer’s recourse to myth, coupled with his adoption of Husserlian phenomenology, leads to a closure of his inquiry and a failure to accommodate the contingency of his position, this paper argues that Schaeffer’s myth of the seashell brings into focus an open-ended, motivating phenomenological problem concerning subjectivity and objectivity that runs through his thought. Drawing on the philosophical work of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze, this paper considers the epistemological significance of this moment in Schaeffer’s thought, suggesting a “problematic” account of the myth of the seashell that puts Schaeffer into conversation with contemporary work in epistemology. (shrink)

In this article I address some questions concerning the emerging conjunction of musical research on improvisation and work in the ‘posthumanities’, in particular the theoretical results of the ‘ontological turn’ in the humanities. Engaging with the work of the composer John Cage, and George E. Lewis’s framing of Cage’s performative indeterminacy as a ‘Eurological’ practice that excludes ‘Afrological’ jazz improvisation, I examine how critical discourse on Cage and his conception of sound is relevant to the improvisation-posthumanities conjunction. After discussing some (...) criticisms of ontological and materialist approaches to sound, I consider the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, posed as offering an alternative to these approaches. Following an examination of some limitations to ANT based around the themes of critique and abstraction, I draw from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Georgina Born to suggest that work on improvisation and the posthumanities may be fruitful, but must be part of a pluralistic mode of inquiry that does not reject critique and abstraction, as some work in the posthumanities has done. (shrink)

In this chapter I look at some questions around the notion of experimentation in philosophy, science, and the arts, through the thought of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze. My argument is articulated around three areas of enquiry – Bachelard’s work on the experimental sciences, Deleuze’s notion of philosophy as an experimental practice, and recent musicological debate around the practical and political stakes of the term ‘experimental music’. By drawing together these three senses of experimentation, I test the possibilities of understanding (...) experimentation as a transdisciplinary concept and/or method. I develop a notion of experimentation as open, fluid, and non-hierarchical, but also consider points where such an idea is short-circuited by the reassertion of disciplinary closure and more top-down forms of method. My frame for discussing this question is a commonly posited distinction between the experiment and the experimental. Here the experiment is something like a controlled and closed environment in which a privileged observer tests predefined hypotheses, while the experimental concerns attempts to relinquish such control and to produce contexts in which the unknown and the unexpected can arise. By turning to Bachelard’s studies of the practice of science, I will question the common conception of a disciplinary split between the experiments of science and experimental art, showing both how such a distinction cannot be so neat and how these terms are often not easily separable. Putting this notion into conjunction with recent critical discourse on experimentation in music, namely regarding the kinds of exclusions and closures that the term ‘experimental music’ has produced, and with Deleuze’s criticisms of scientific method as well as the apparent disciplinary closure of his transdisciplinary project that is present and his and Félix Guattari’s final work, What is Philosophy?, I argue that refining our understanding of experimentation as a pluralistic and fragile concept will help us engage with the difficulties raised in these fields. More generally I point towards a project of mapping out the diverse and divergent relations that a transdisciplinary understanding of experimentation may draw between philosophy, science, and art. (shrink)

Rhythm is generally taken to refer to a temporal pattern of events. Yet in recent years, across diverse fields in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, it has come to serve as the conceptual marker for a wide range of new approaches to understanding relations and relationality, following most explicitly from the late work of Henri Lefebvre. This article explores the temporal aspect of such relational thinking, in particular asking how time is implicated in relations, and how it can be (...) meaningful in those relations. The sense of time is surveyed from the perspectives of both cognition and metaphysics as well as with reference to music scholarship and social theory, and key threads are drawn, from the writings of Gaston Bachelard and Charles Sanders Peirce in particular, in order to suggest that time can be a sign, and that the signifying properties of rhythm have critical social consequences. (shrink)

When beginning to think about the relation between experimental music and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, this quotation seems to be a natural starting point. In Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation of this phrase from John Cage they suggest a resonance between music and philosophy: in both fields the experimental approach entails a dismantling of predetermining codes and hierarchies, and with this arises the opportunity for an open-endedness that accommodates singular events and encounters. This understanding of experimentation, however, is not as (...) transparent as it seems. In the context of the uptake and critique of Deleuzian ideas in the theorisation of music and sound, as well as recent re-evaluations of the milieu of “experimental music,” critics have argued that a range of normative demands, ideological assumptions, and metaphysical reductions undermine the purported freedoms of both Cagean and Deleuzian experimentalism. -/- Here I can only deal with a small aspect of the wide historical and theoretical problem this involves; but in short my aim is to begin to construct a means through which Deleuze and Guattari’s thought can be used to help us examine some strategies that composers and performers in post-Cagean musical experimentalism developed to navigate around the demands, assumptions, and reductions of Cage’s thought. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the status and stakes of Gilles Deleuze’s “break” with structuralism. With a particular focus on a transitional text of Deleuze, the 1967/1972 article “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” it asks how Deleuze understood structuralism and why, after his encounter with Félix Guattari and Guattari’s own transitional text, 1969’s “Machine and Structure,” Deleuze felt the need to break with structuralism. It argues that reading these two texts together allows us to see that Deleuze already perceived tensions (...) within the structuralist project, and argues that Guattari’s non-structural account of the machine allowed Deleuze to clarify this perception, and see it as necessitating a departure from structuralism. To close, however, it turns to recent work by philosophers such as Étienne Balibar and Patrice Maniglier that re-examines the structuralist moment and identifies an ongoing legacy that the “poststructuralism” of Deleuze and Guattari may be part of. By considering Deleuze and Guattari’s break with structuralism in light of this work, this article considers how the polemical rejection of structuralism by Deleuze and Guattari may not fully account for the ongoing legacy of the structuralist program and the persistence of a structuralist problematic in their thought. (shrink)

I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both Deleuze and Guattari undertook, individually and together, beginning in the 1960s. I first outline Deleuze’s theory of signs as a theory of encounter as (...) developed in Proust and Signs (1964) and Difference and Repetition (1968), following which I sketch Guattari’s engagements with signs and semiotics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through his notion of “a-signifying semiotics” and the concept of the “diagram” he adapts from the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. I close by showing how these heterogeneous theories of the sign are drawn together in A Thousand Plateaus through the Spinozist reading of the ethology of Jakob von Uexküll and the theorisation of rhythm in the form of the refrain. (shrink)

This text has already been published, in La Deleuziana – online journal of philosophy – n. 10 / 2019 – rhythm, chaos and nonpulsed man.: I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both (...) Deleuze and Guattari - Philosophie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

In this thesis we construct a critical encounter between the composer John Cage and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This encounter circulates through a constellation of problems found across and between mid-twentieth century musical, artistic, and philosophical practices, the central focus for our line of enquiry being the concept of experimentation. We emphasize the production of a method of experimentation through a practice historically situated with regards to the traditions of the respective fields of music and philosophy. However, we argue that (...) these experimental practices are not reducible to their historical traditions, but rather, by adopting what we term a problematic reading, or transcendental critique, with regards to historical givens, they take their historical situation as the site of an experimental departure. We follow Cage through his relation to the history of Western classical music, his contemporaries in the musical avant-garde, and artistic movements surrounding and in some respects stemming from Cage’s work, and Deleuze through his relation to Kant, phenomenology, and structuralism, in order to map the production of a practice of experimentation spanning music, art, and philosophy. Some specific figures we engage with in these respective traditions include Jean-Phillipe Rameau, Pierre Schaeffer, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Boulez, Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Edmund Husserl, Maurice-Merleau-Ponty, Alain Badiou, and Félix Guattari. In so doing we seek to find between these practices points of both conjunction and disjunction which enrich our understanding of Cage’s and Deleuze’s work, and, more widely speaking, of the passage of twentieth century music and philosophy in general. Here we hope to make contributions to the fields of continental philosophy and music theory especially, and to open a point of engagement with the nascent field of sound studies. (shrink)

As a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic, paramedics in the UK face unprecedented challenges in the care of acutely unwell patients and their family members. This article will describe and discuss a new ethical dilemma faced by clinicians in the out-of-hospital environment during this time, namely the delivery of bad news to family members who are required to remain at home and self-isolate while the critically unwell patient is transported to hospital. I will discuss some failings of current practice (...) and reflect on some of the ethical and practical challenges confronting paramedics in these circumstances. I conclude by making three recommendations: first, that dedicated pastoral outreach teams ought to be set up during pandemics to assist family members of patients transported to hospital; second, I offer a framework for how bad news can be delivered during a lockdown in a less damaging way; and finally, that a new model of bad news delivery more suited for unplanned, time-pressured care should be developed. (shrink)

The solution structures of several small proteins have recently been determined from high‐resolution nuclear magnetic resonance data. The principal features of the methods available to do this are outlined here, together with the advantages, limitations and future prospects of the technique.

This book theorises technology and its host of social, material, and epistemic transformation techniques, tools, and methods as indeterminate through sixteen methodologically diverse contributions from media philosophy, art and architectural theory, mathematics, computer science, and anthropology scholars.

Contributors to this book include key theorists and practitioners from media theory, Native Science, bio-media and sound art, philosophy, art history and design informatics. Collectively, they examine the becoming-technique of animal-human- machinic perceptibilities; and micro-perceptions that lie beneath the threshold of known perceptions yet create energetic vibrations. Who, what, and where perceives, and how? What are the sedimentations, inscriptions and axiologies of animal, human and machinic perceptions? What are their perceptibilities? Deleuze uses the word 'visibilities' to indicate that visual perception (...) isn't just a physiological given but cues operations productive of new assemblages. Perceptibilities are, by analogy, spatio- temporal, geolocative, kinaesthetic, audio-visual, and haptic operations that are always already memory. In the case of strong inscriptions, they are also epigenetic events. The contributors show distributed perception to be a key notion in addressing the emergence and persistence of plant, animal, human and machine relations. An invaluable reference for students and scholars in a range of areas including Media Theory, Sociology, Philosophy, Art and Design. (shrink)

In recent years noise seems to have become an interdisciplinary concept par excellence, apt to capturing important dynamics at work whether in technological, scientific, social, or aesthetic domains. But when economists, biologists, psychologists, and musicians speak of noise, are they really all referring to the same thing? In An Epistemology of Noise Cecile Malaspina takes this dispersion of the notion of noise as a starting point, and moreover accepts that, when removed from its mathematical formulation in information theory and spread (...) into diverse disciplines, noise takes on a metaphorical ambiguity. Yet rather than aiming to eliminate this ambiguity, Malaspina sets out to account for it. The key problem in An Epistemology of Noise is not to identify the legitimate usage of the concept of noise, but rather to examine what happens when noise moves between disciplines, and what the ‘noisiness’ of this movement tells us about the conditions for interdisciplinary knowledge. Noise here is both an object (or many objects) of inquiry and a condition for that inquiry, and presents us with the problem of how knowledge can find its ground in these ‘shifting sands’ (9). (shrink)

Framed within theories of fairness and stress, the current paper examines bystanders’ intervention intention to workplace bullying across two studies based on international employee samples (N = 578). Using a vignette-based design, we examined the role of bullying mode (offline vs. online), bullying type (personal vs. work-related) and target closeness (friend vs. work colleague) on bystanders’ behavioural intentions to respond, to sympathise with the victim (defender role), to reinforce the perpetrator (prosecutor role) or to be ambivalent (commuter role). Results illustrated (...) a pattern of the influence of mode and type on bystander intentions. Bystanders were least likely to support the victim and more likely to agree with perpetrator actions for cyberbullying and work-related acts. Tentatively, support emerged for the effect of target closeness on bystander intentions. Although effect sizes were small, when the target was a friend, bystanders tended to be more likely to act and defend the victim and less likely to reinforce the perpetrator. Implications for research and the potential for bystander education are discussed. (shrink)

Prefrontal cortex is dysregulated in women with restricting anorexia nervosa . It is not known whether appetitive non-conscious stimuli bias cognitive responses in those with RAN. Thirteen women with RAN and 20 healthy controls completed a dorsolateral PFC working memory task and an anterior cingulate cortex conflict task, while masked subliminal food, aversive and neutral images were presented. During the DLPFC task, accuracy was higher in the RAN compared to the HC group, but superior performance was compromised when subliminal food (...) stimuli were presented: errors positively correlated with self-reported trait anxiety in the RAN group. These effects were not observed in the ACC task. Appetitive activation is intact and anxiogenic in women with RAN, and non-consciously interacts with working memory processes associated with the DLPFC. This interaction mechanism may underlie cognitive inhibition of appetitive processes that are anxiety inducing, in people with AN. (shrink)

Heidegger is now widely recognized as one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, yet much of his later philosophy remains shrouded in confusion and controversy. Restoring Heidegger's understanding of metaphysics as 'ontotheology' to its rightful place at the center of his later thought, this book demonstrates the depth and significance of his controversial critique of technology, his appalling misadventure with Nazism, his prescient critique of the university, and his important philosophical suggestions for the future of (...) higher education. It will be required reading for those seeking to understand the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and National Socialism, as well as the continuing relevance of his work. (shrink)

Iain Atack identifies the contribution of nonviolence to political theory through connecting central characteristics of nonviolent action to fundamental debates about the role of power and violence in politics. This in turn provides a platform for going beyond historical and strategic accounts of nonviolence to a deeper understanding of its transformative potential. From Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to toppled communist regimes in Eastern Europe and pro-democracy movements in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, nonviolent action has played a significant (...) role in achieving social and political change in the last century. The Arab Spring revolutions, particularly those in Tunisia and Egypt, and the Occupy movement in the US and UK demonstrate that nonviolence continues to be a vital feature of many campaigns for democracy, human rights and social justice. (shrink)

Two important debates have characterized mainstream epistemology in recent years. The first is the debate between foundationalists and anti-foundationalists. The second is the debate over the details of a naturalized epistemology. Both debates have meant that traditional concepts of rationality and justification are now understood in a new light. Both debates have helped focus attention on the future direction of epistemology, its goals and its limitations.

This is a case study investigating the growth of fair trade pioneer, Cafédirect. We explore the growth of the company and develop strategic insights on how Cafédirect has attained its prominent position in the UK mainstream coffee industry based on its ethical positioning. We explore the marketing, networks and communications channels of the brand which have led to rapid growth from niche player to a mainstream brand. However, the company is experiencing a slow down in its meteoric rise and we (...) question whether it is possible for the company to regain its former momentum with its current marketing strategy. (shrink)

Fair Trade companies have pulled off an astonishing tour de force. Despite their relatively small size and lack of resources, they have managed to achieve considerable commercial success and, in so doing, have put the fair trade issue firmly onto industry agendas. We analyse the critical role played by social capital in this success and demonstrate the importance of values as an exploitable competitive asset. Our research raises some uncomfortable questions about whether fair trade has 'sold out' to the mainstream (...) and whether these companies have any independent future or whether their ultimate success lies in the impact they have had on day-to-day trading behaviour. (shrink)

This paper exhorts geographers to become more active in debate about ethical research practice. It also suggests that ethical theory, practical problems, and lessons learned from postmodern thought make the prospects of establishing prescriptive codes of ethics unlikely. Instead, flexible prompts for moral contemplation might be used to encourage careful thought on matters of ethics. Because the practical feasibility of moral prompts rests on the existence of moral imaginations, it is vital to consider ways in which those imaginations might be (...) stimulated and nurtured. Professional associations and university academics have significant roles to play in this. Geographers must position themselves as effective agents in the processes by which professional research ethics are shaped rather than awaiting the potentially inappropriate outcomes of other agencies' deliberations. (shrink)

This paper investigates the difficulties of creating economic, social, and environmental values when operating as a hybrid venture. Drawing on hybrid organizing and sustainable business model research, it explores the implications of alternative forms of business model experimented with by farmer owned, fairtrade social enterprise Cafédirect. Responding to changes and challenges in the market and societal environment, Cafédirect has tried multiple business model innovations to deliver on all three forms of value capture, with differing levels of success. This longitudinal case (...) study, therefore, provides a contribution to our understanding of how business models enact hybrid mission, providing a platform for triple-bottom-line value capture. In doing so, we are able to expand on the normative understandings of integrating hybrid objectives, and the complications of multiple types of value capture. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most Nietzsche scholars read the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals as an account of the development of Christian asceticism after the slave revolution in morals. In this article, I argue that that is a misreading of Nietzsche's argument, the consequence of which is a failure to understand Nietzsche's treatment of the transition from noble morality to slave morality. I contend that we can track this transition only once we understand the role of the ascetic priest in (...) the slave revolution. The third essay's account of asceticism, then, is indispensable in understanding how slave morality grows out of priestly values. With this argument in place I begin to trace the deep lines of asceticism in the slave revolt as described in the first essay. (shrink)

Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy, developing his argument that art can help lead humanity beyond the nihilistic ontotheology of the modern age. Providing pathbreaking readings of Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and his notoriously difficult Contributions to Philosophy, this book explains precisely what postmodernity meant for Heidegger, the greatest philosophical critic of modernity, and what it could still mean for us today. Exploring these issues, Iain D. Thomson examines (...) several postmodern works of art, including music, literature, painting and even comic books, from a post-Heideggerian perspective. Clearly written and accessible, this book will help readers gain a deeper understanding of Heidegger and his relation to postmodern theory, popular culture and art. (shrink)

In this book John Campbell shows that the general structural features of human thought can be seen as having their source in the distinctive ways in which we...

The digitisation of academic journals has created the technical possibility that research can be made available to any interested party free of charge. This possibility has been undermined by the proprietary control that commercial publishers exercise over the majority of this material. The control of commercial publishers over publicly-funded research has been criticised by charitable bodies, politicians and academics themselves. While the existing critical literature on academic publishers has considerable value, it fails to link questions of control within the journal-industry (...) to the wider restructuring of economic and social relations that has taken place over the last three decades. This article seeks to complement this literature by highlighting how broader profitability pressures and the subsequent attempts by state-managers to expand the social space for capitalist accumulation have structured the development of the journal-industry. (shrink)

Data from a longitudinal study into the key management success factors in the fair trade industry provide insights into the essential nature of inter-organizational alliances and networks in creating the profitable and growing fair trade market in the UK. Drawing on three case studies and extensive industry interviews, we provide an interpretive perspective on the organizational relationships and business networks and the way in which these have engendered success for UK fair trade companies. Three types of benefit are derived from (...) the networks: competitive developments through virtual integration in which the organizations remain flexible and small while projecting size to the market; intellectual developments through the sharing of intellectual capital with a diverse network of organizations in many fields; and ideological developments through an ideological network of like-minded individuals by which the companies can prevent the co-opting of the original purpose of fair trade. However, relative success at leveraging these benefits is influenced by three managerial factors: partner choice, partner use and partner management. (shrink)

Employee buy-in is a key factor in ensuring small- and medium-size enterprise (SME) engagement with corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this exploratory study, we use participant observation and semi-structured interviews to investigate the way in which three fair trade SMEs utilise human resource management (and selection and socialisation in particular) to create employee engagement in a strong triple bottomline philosophy, while simultaneously coping with resource and size constraints. The conclusions suggest that there is a strong desire for, but tradeoff within (...) these companies between selection of individuals who already identify with the triple bottomline philosophy and individuals with experience and capability to deal with mainstream brand management – two critical employee attributes that appear to be rarely found together. The more important the business experience to the organisation, the more effort the organisation must expend in formalising their socialisation programmes to ensure employee engagement. A key method in doing this is increasing employee knowledge of, and affection for, the target beneficiaries of the CSR programme (increased moral intensity). (shrink)

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie was, from the outset, more concerned with ontogeny than ontology, i.e. not on what nature is but on what it does: ubiquitous creation. Therefore, the processes articulated in the Philosophy of Mythology remain instances of a philosophy driven by what might be called a post-naturalist naturalism. The two aims of this paper are, firstly, to demonstrate this nature-philosophical continuity throughout Schelling’s so-called Protean philosophical projects in order, secondly, to re-prepare Schellingian themes for current debates concerning ontology. To this (...) end, I draw on the worldmaking and abundance postulates of Goodman and Feyerabend, respectively, to demonstrate the persistence of Schellingian ontogenetic pathways for remodelling process metaphysics for contemporary philosophy. Finally, the paper argues that the logical form of the hypothesis (antecedent and consequent) is itself consequent upon the ontogeny it hypothesises. (shrink)

This paper exhorts geographers to become more active in debate about ethical research practice. It also suggests that ethical theory, practical problems, and lessons learned from postmodern thought make the prospects of establishing prescriptive codes of ethics unlikely. Instead, flexible prompts for moral contemplation might be used to encourage careful thought on matters of ethics. Because the practical feasibility of moral prompts rests on the existence of moral imaginations, it is vital to consider ways in which those imaginations might be (...) stimulated and nurtured. Professional associations and university academics have significant roles to play in this. Geographers must position themselves as effective agents in the processes by which professional research ethics are shaped rather than awaiting the potentially inappropriate outcomes of other agencies ' deliberations. (shrink)

This article explores the extent to which consumers consider ethics in luxury goods consumption. In particular, it explores whether there is a significant difference between consumers’ propensity to consider ethics in luxury versus commodity purchase and whether consumers are ready to purchase ethical-luxury. Prior research in ethical consumption focuses on low value, commoditized product categories such as food, cosmetics and high street apparel. It is debatable if consumers follow similar ethical consumption patterns in luxury purchases. Findings indicate that consumers’ propensity (...) to consider ethics is significantly lower in luxury purchases when compared to commoditized purchases and explores some of the potential reasons for this reduced propensity to identify or act upon ethical issues in luxury consumption. (shrink)

This paper reports on a study of ethical decision-making in a fair trade company. This can be seen to be a crucial arena for investigation since fair trade firms not only have a specific ethical mission in terms of helping growers out of poverty, but they tend to be perceived as (and are often marketed on the basis of) having an "ethical" image. Eschewing a straightforward test of extant ethical decision models, we adopt Thompson''s proposal for a more contextualist understanding (...) rooted in ethnographic data. Our findings suggest that the fair trade mission of the firm is experienced as an over-riding ethical claim, which is often invoked to justify potentially ethically questionable decisions. Moreover, decision precedents emerge which can mean that the decision process is bypassed or hurried through. Finally we provide evidence that the significance of these precedents, and indeed, even moral intensity itself, could be actively shaped and constructed by organization members to support different, even shifting, conceptions of what is a morally acceptable decision for a fair trade company to make. (shrink)