Interstices of the Sublime represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Zi zek, as well as major expressions of contemporary Continental philosophy, including Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, and Badiou. Through creative and constructive psycho-theological readings of topics such as sublimation, schizophrenia, God, and creation ex nihilo, this book contributes to a new form of radical theological thinking that is deeply involved in the world. Here the idea of the Kantian sublime is read into Freud and (...) Lacan, and compared with sublimation. The sublime refers to a conflict of the Kantian faculties of reason and imagination, and involves the attempt to represent what is intrinsically unrepresentable. Sublimation, by contrast, involves the expression and partial satisfaction of primal desires in culturally acceptable terms. The sublime is negatively expressed in sublimation, because it is both the "source" of sublimation as well as that which resists being sublimated. That is, the Freudian sublime is related to the process of sublimation, but it also distorts or disrupts sublimation, and invokes what Lacan calls the Real. The effects of the sublime are not just psychoanalytic but, importantly, theological, because the sublime is the main form that "God" takes in the modern world. A radical postmodern theology attends to the workings of the sublime in our thinking and living, and provides resources to understand the complexity of reality. This book is one of the first sustained theological readings of Lacan in English. (shrink)

We give some information about the action of Aut on M, where M is a countable arithmetically saturated model of Peano Arithmetic. We concentrate on analogues of moving gaps and covering gaps inside M.

Continuing the earlier research in [1] and [4] we work out a class of interstices in countable arithmetically saturated models of PA in which selective types are realized and a class of interstices in which 2-indiscernible types are realized.

The article examines recent debates surrounding public sociology in the context of a UK based Department of Applied Social Sciences. Three areas of work within the department form the focus of the article: violence against women and children; community-based oral history projects and health ethics teaching. The article draws on Micheal Burawoy’s typology comprising public, policy, professional and critical sociology, and argues that much of the work described in the case studies more often lies somewhere in between, in the interstices, (...) rather than within one or other of the four types. The result is not without its tensions and dilemmas, some of which are identified and explored, notably those arising from attempts to appeal to diverse audiences and meet the sometimes conflicting expectations of each. (shrink)

When a group of processes achieves such closure that a set of states of affairs recurs continually, then the effect of that coherence on the world differs from what would occur in the absence of that closure. Such altered effectiveness is an attribute of the system as a whole, and would have consequences. This indicates that the network of processes, as a unit, has ontological significance. Whenever a network of processes generates continual return to a limited set of states of (...) affairs, the system may function as a “whole”— with respect to appropriate interaction partners. The balance achieved by the processes provides the form of definiteness of a unified agent. The causal powers of such coherent aggregates are indeed just the powers of the “constituents acting in concert”. However, the components act in concert in the specific way they do only because of their inclusion in the closed set of interactions that defines the coherence. This renders the causal powers of the coherence defined by that closure non-redundant, and hence the coherence, as a unit, is ontologically significant. The form of definiteness that provides internal coherence also grounds external efficacy of the societal aggregation. The closure is a structural feature of the coherence — possibly, but not necessarily, apparent in spatial structuring. This approach can provide a unified account that includes quantum microphysics, systems biology, and the philosophy of organism ─ without reducing any of these to another. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Interpreting from the IntersticesThe Role of Justice in a Liberal Democracy—Lessons from Michael Walzer and Emmanuel LevinasNicholas R. Brown (bio)1As anyone who is familiar with more recent theological debate can attest, the appraisal of the liberal democratic tradition has undergone a radical reevaluation in the wake of Stanley Hauerwas’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s scathing critiques. As a result of their blistering assault, religious ethicists and philosophers now find themselves operating (...) within a discursive milieu that is almost the photo negative of the one they previously inhabited. For what has followed After Virtue and After Christendom is a situation in which compliance with liberal democratic norms is now perceived as actively inveighing against justice rather than as an integral prerequisite to its pursuit.There are cracks, however, beginning to emerge in the MacIntyre/Hauerwas edifice. For what is becoming disputed and increasingly so among a growing chorus of religious ethicists and philosophers is whether their critical reading of liberal democracy offers the most [End Page 155] helpful or even the most biblical way to think through its own moral dimensions as well as those undergirding its relationship with justice.It is the emergence of these criticisms that forms the basis for this essay. For the thesis that I wish to advance below is that liberal democracy offers religious ethicists and philosophers alike a moral framework and vocabulary from which it is possible to comprehend and enact the normative precepts encapsulated within a biblical understanding of justice. Accordingly, some aspects of my argument will build upon the rhetorical trajectories that have been already charted by the ethicists and philosophers I mention above.What distinguishes my approach, however, is that I will proceed from a more focused examination of some of the ethical and political undercurrents found within contemporary Jewish thought. More specifically, I want to probe the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the political philosophy of Michael Walzer, for I believe the juxtapositional methodology of interpretation which informs each of their perspectives is illustrative of an interstitial hermeneutic that helps further illuminate the moral compatibility between biblical and democratic accounts of justice.2By now, MacIntyre’s and Hauerwas’s critiques of the liberal democratic tradition have been so thoroughly documented, discussed, and dissected that a review of their perspectives cannot help but have a certain pleonastic quality.Probably the most significant and disturbing problem that MacIntyre and Hauerwas see belying the liberal democratic tradition stems from its conception of time and space, or more precisely, its lack thereof. For what they discover upon a more careful probing of its moral and epistemological underpinnings is a pursuit of transcendence not dissimilar to Gnostic metaphysics. In the case of liberalism, however, the existential encumbrances to be excised are not corporeal and carnal in nature, but historical and social. [End Page 156]Such conditionalities, surmise liberal theorists, are so shot through with conceptual prejudices that they comprise an interpretative straight-jacket that vitiates against the kind of objectivity necessary to engage in a nonparochial process of moral and political discernment. For it is precisely this ability “to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity” which MacIntyre sees as constituting “the essence of moral agency” of modern liberalism (AV 31–32). Therefore, “liberalism is successful,” maintains Hauerwas, “exactly because... [it] provide[s] that philosophical account of society designed to deal with” the moral and political implications such a social and historical denuding portends, namely “a system of rules that will constitute procedures for resolving disputes as they pursue their various interests.”1However, what liberalism defines as success MacIntyre and Hauerwas see as anything but. Instead, both judge its “system of rules” to be an insidious prescription for a particularly virulent form of moral nihilism and political bankruptcy. For by stripping moral and political discourse of their historical and social referents, liberalism, ironically and tragically, eviscerates itself of the very heuristic and discursive practices necessary to make those... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.3 (2001) 30-56 [Access article in PDF] The Priceless IntervalTheory in the Global Interstice Reingard Nethersole In a poignant scene in Goethe's Faust [1.2038-39] an eager student seeking what we would call curriculum advice today asks what subjects he should study. Counseled by Mephisto in the guise of the master, Faust, the student is admonished to read for anything but theory because: "Grey, my friend, is all (...) theory, / Green alone is life's golden tree." Uttered from within the epitome of an ivory tower image, a vaulted "gothic study," the advice gains rhetorical strength from alliterative, juxtaposed color metaphors which celebrate an organicist, holistic vision of life. Given current attitudes toward literary theory, many enthusiastic freshmen will receive similar guidance. Theoretical deliberation and mediation in the academy were not always popular, to be sure, but the resistance to theory was never as acute as it is now, when the very institutional space inhabited by thought is being curtailed largely because of financial considerations. Thus drawn into cost-benefit calculations that figure the student (in South Africa) as "client," the professor as "cost factor," and education as branded product, the University sees itself compelled, under the hegemony of the economic, to side with praxis in place of theory. "Doing" rather than thinking, action rather than reflection might have seemingly won the day, yet the controversy surrounding the relation between theory and literature on the one hand and theory and praxis on the other persists both inside and outside the academy.At the heart of a modern organization of knowledge, the dichotomy of theory and praxis is inscribed in Kant's Conflict of the Faculties. It will be remembered that Kant divided the domains of philosophy, theology, law, and medicine that constituted the University of his day into the "lower faculty," philosophy (lower from the point of view of government), and the "higher" faculties of theology, law, and medicine (higher because they are closer to government power). However, by granting philosophy (reason) implicit guardianship over the "higher faculties," lest these would revert to magical practices, Kant's Enlightenment philosophy placed a wedge between theory and praxis, a wedge that not only recast an ancient (Western) fissure between contemplation and action, a conscious I think and an active I do, but also opened a space for a troubled relationship between philosophy and the other faculties and between the faculties and state power—or as is the case today—economic power.Kant's university, of course, did not know the "humanities" of which history and literature were to become an integral part along with philosophy in the early nineteenth century, but by ranking reason below the utilitarian subjects or "faculties" while, at the same time, recognizing philosophy's preeminence as their imperative, Kant's positioning of thought/theory in relation to praxis 1 set up a tension between thinking and doing [End Page 30] that reverberates, for instance, in literary studies' perennial conflictual pairing between a "green" intuitive, untrammeled appreciation of literary texts and a "grey" theory. Moreover, supported by a particular modern, Western socioreligious structure (Protestantism) that values (bourgeois) industriousness or labor more than (aristocratic) leisure, the legacy of the "conflict of the faculties" implicates the connection between the university as institution of knowledge production in relation to the various domains of knowledge application and/or consumption.Concerned about the multiple changes that involve our being and acting in the world before an ever-expanding planetary horizon, which in turn profoundly alters the educational objective of institutions of higher learning in general and menaces such sites of thought as literary theory in particular, I shall, in the following, sketch the interval, a topos borrowed from musicological discourse, as a place for theory under global conditions. In addition I shall attempt to conjoin the disparate sides/sites of criticism and theory by cross-stitching Bill Readings's thoughts on the transformation of the university, descriptions of university "reform" currently under way in South Africa, and Goethe's text in order to illustrate the kind of subject/self produced by education or Bildung in contrast... (shrink)

We prove a number of results concerning the variety of first-order theories and isomorphism types of pairs of the form $(N,M)$ , where $N$ is a countable recursively saturated model of Peano Arithmetic and $M$ is its cofinal submodel. We identify two new isomorphism invariants for such pairs. In the strongest result we obtain continuum many theories of such pairs with the fixed greatest common initial segment of $N$ and $M$ and fixed lattice of interstructures $K$ , such that $M\prec (...) K\prec N$. (shrink)

Tandis que j’écrivais mon article sous le titre ‘L’utilitarisme est-il une éthique acceptable?’paru dans ce numéro de la Revue d’Etudes benthamiennes, j’ai eu la chance d’avoir accès, dans le cadre de mon travail au CHU de Rouen, à un ensemble d’entretiens avec des médecins au sujet de la connaissance qu’ils avaient de la loi Léonetti. Les entretiens ont été numérotés de I à XXVI; ils ne sont pas tous cités ici, d’autant que quelques-uns, prévus, n’ont pas eu lieu. Le propos (...) qui suit se trouve à la confluence de trois apports: celui de la thèse soutenue dans le n° 9 de la REB, celui de mon enseignement d’éthique à l’hôpital auprès de soignants et de philosophes, celui enfin de l’existence de ce précieux dossier réuni par les soins du Docteur Clémence Joly. Je livre ici des réflexions que j’ai assemblées et articulées. Il convient de préciser, pour la compréhension du texte suivant, que les entretiens ont eu cours auprès de médecins qui répondaient, au cours des derniers mois, aux mêmes questions liées à leur connaissance de la loi Léonetti de 2005. Quand ils ne la connaissaient pas –ce qui fut l’aveu du plus grand nombre-, l’entretien ne cessait pas pour autant et il était alors possible aux interviewés de découvrir cette loi; ainsi, article par article, ils donnaient, guidés par les questions de l’interrogatrice, leur avis de praticiens sur le détail d’une loi qu’ils connaissaient beaucoup mieuxqu’ilsle croyaient au départ. (shrink)

In a countable, recursively saturated model of Peano Arithmetic, an interstice is a maximal convex set which does not contain any definable elements. The interstices are partitioned into intersticial gaps in a way that generalizes the partition of the unbounded interstice into gaps. Continuing work of Bamber and Kotlarski [1], we investigate extensions of Kotlarski's Moving Gaps Lemma to the moving of intersticial gaps.

This paper introduces a new theory of constant regions, which generalizes that of interstices, in nonstandard models of arithmetic. In particular, we show that two homogeneity notions introduced by Richard Kaye and the author, namely, constantness and pregenericity, are equivalent. This led to some new characterizations of generic cuts in terms of existential closedness.

Résumé Les interstices représentent ce qui résiste encore dans les métropoles, ce qui résiste aux emprises réglementaires et à l’homogénéisation. Ils constituent en quelque sorte la réserve de « disponibilité » de la ville. Du fait de leur statut provisoire et incertain, les interstices laissent deviner ou entrevoir un autre processus de fabrication de la ville, ouvert et collaboratif, réactif et transversal. Ils nous rappellent que la société ne coïncide jamais parfaitement avec elle-même et que son développement laisse en arrière (...) plan nombre d’hypothèses non encore investies. L’interstice constitue certainement un des espaces privilégiés où des questions refoulées continuent à se faire entendre, où certaines hypothèses récusées par le modèle dominant affirment leur actualité, où nombre de devenirs minoritaires entravés, bloqués, prouvent leur vitalité. À ce titre, l’expérience interstitielle représente la parfaite métaphore de ce que peut être le mouvement de l’antagonisme et de la contradiction dans la ville postfordiste : un mouvement qui s’affirme au fur et à mesure de ce qu’il expérimente, qui monte en intensité grâce aux modalités de vie et de désir qu’il libère, qui s’oppose à la hauteur de ce qu’il est susceptible d’inventer et de créer. (shrink)

Résumé Les interstices représentent ce qui résiste encore dans les métropoles, ce qui résiste aux emprises réglementaires et à l’homogénéisation. Ils constituent en quelque sorte la réserve de « disponibilité » de la ville. Du fait de leur statut provisoire et incertain, les interstices laissent deviner ou entrevoir un autre processus de fabrication de la ville, ouvert et collaboratif, réactif et transversal. Ils nous rappellent que la société ne coïncide jamais parfaitement avec elle-même et que son développement laisse en arrière (...) plan nombre d’hypothèses non encore investies. L’interstice constitue certainement un des espaces privilégiés où des questions refoulées continuent à se faire entendre, où certaines hypothèses récusées par le modèle dominant affirment leur actualité, où nombre de devenirs minoritaires entravés, bloqués, prouvent leur vitalité. À ce titre, l’expérience interstitielle représente la parfaite métaphore de ce que peut être le mouvement de l’antagonisme et de la contradiction dans la ville postfordiste : un mouvement qui s’affirme au fur et à mesure de ce qu’il expérimente, qui monte en intensité grâce aux modalités de vie et de désir qu’il libère, qui s’oppose à la hauteur de ce qu’il est susceptible d’inventer et de créer. (shrink)

Naturalism holds that there is no higher access to truth than empirically testable hypotheses. Still it does not repudiate untestable hypotheses. They fill out interstices of theory and lead to further hypotheses that are testable.A hypothesis is tested by deducing, from it and a background of accepted theory, some observation categorical that does not follow from the background alone. This categorical, a generalized conditional compounded of two observation sentences, admits in turn of a primitive experimental test.The observation sentences themselves, like (...) ape cries and bird calls, are in holophrastic association with ranges of neural intake. Denotation of determinate objects figures neither in this association nor in deducing the categorical from the scientific hypotheses. Hence the indeterminacy of reference; ontology is purely auxiliary to the structure of theory. Truth, however, is seen still as transcendent at least in this sense: we say of a superseded scientific theory not that it ceased to be true, but that it is found to have been false. (shrink)

The development of a compositional model shows the incoherence of such notions as levels of being and both bottom-up and top-down causality. The mathematization of nature through the partial considerations of physics qua quantities is seen to lead to Pythagoreanism, if what is not included in the partial consideration is denied. An ontology of only probabilities, if not Pythagoreanism, is equivalent to a world of primitive dispositionalities. Problems are found with each. There is a need for properties as well as (...) quantities and these properties must be qualitative as well as dispositional. So there is a need for physical qualia (qualities) for the depiction of the intrinsic character of the finest interstices of nature. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgements -- PART I: WHAT HAPPENED? -- Inheriting from Seattle -- What Are We Dealing With? -- Daring to be Pragmatic -- Infernal Alternatives -- Minions -- PART II: LEARNING TO PROTECT ONESELF -- Do You Believe in Sorcery? -- Leaving Safe Ground -- Marx Again... -- To Believe in Progress No Longer? -- Learning Fright -- PART III: HOW TO GET A HOLD? -- Thanks to Seattle? -- The Trajectory of an Apprenticeship -- Fostering (...) New Connections -- Sorry, but we have to -- Reactivating History -- PART IV: NEEDING PEOPLE TO THINK -- A Cry -- Interstices -- Ecosophy -- Political Creation -- Empowerment -- Reclaim -- Above All, Not to Conclude -- Index. (shrink)

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of an in-between stance which he calls the “parallaxview”: when confronted with an antinomic stance, in the precise Kantian sense of the term, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other. One should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the (...) irreducible gap between the positions themselves, the purely structural interstice between them. Kant’s stance is thus “to see things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through difference .” What Kant does is to change the very terms of the debate; his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it first rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental and irreducible limitation of the human condition, which is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be fully mediated—reconciled. And, according to Karatani, Marx, in his “critique of political economy,” when faced with the opposition of the “classical” political economy and the neo-classic reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance, accomplished exactly the same breakthrough toward the “parallax” view: he treatedthis opposition as a Kantian antinomy, i.e., value has to originate outside circulation, in production, and in circulation. (shrink)

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of an in-between stance which he calls the “parallaxview”: when confronted with an antinomic stance, in the precise Kantian sense of the term, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other. One should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the (...) irreducible gap between the positions themselves, the purely structural interstice between them. Kant’s stance is thus “to see things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through difference (parallax).” What Kant does is to change the very terms of the debate; his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it first rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental and irreducible limitation (“finitude”) of the human condition, which is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be fully mediated—reconciled. And, according to Karatani, Marx, in his “critique of political economy,” when faced with the opposition of the “classical” political economy and the neo-classic reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance, accomplished exactly the same breakthrough toward the “parallax” view: he treatedthis opposition as a Kantian antinomy, i.e., value has to originate outside circulation, in production, and in circulation. (shrink)

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of an in-between stance which he calls the “parallaxview”: when confronted with an antinomic stance, in the precise Kantian sense of the term, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other. One should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the (...) irreducible gap between the positions themselves, the purely structural interstice between them. Kant’s stance is thus “to see things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through difference (parallax).” What Kant does is to change the very terms of the debate; his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it first rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental and irreducible limitation (“finitude”) of the human condition, which is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be fully mediated—reconciled. And, according to Karatani, Marx, in his “critique of political economy,” when faced with the opposition of the “classical” political economy and the neo-classic reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance, accomplished exactly the same breakthrough toward the “parallax” view: he treatedthis opposition as a Kantian antinomy, i.e., value has to originate outside circulation, in production, and in circulation. (shrink)

Amartya Sen's teeming account of an ecumenical life lived across three continents and over nine decades, in the interstices of colonial encounter, takes the reader on an intimate journey through some of the most significant global, intellectual, and historical events of the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We learn of Sen's formative years at Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan University (he was named by the sage himself), and of the lasting impact of the Bengal Famine of 1943 on (...) his oeuvre and outlook. At Cambridge (where Sen was a student and later master of Trinity College, becoming the first Asian head of an Oxbridge college), his interlocuters included Edward Morgan Forster and Piero Sraffa—the Italian economist who reputedly catalyzed Wittgenstein's later work by scratching his (own) chin with an upward sweep to communicate a non-verbal “form of life” expletive. Sraffa and the Marxian Maurice Dobb, among others, fueled Sen's interest in welfare economics at a time when the discipline was all about capital and growth. Several chapters also point to the little-known impact of the ancient Indic renunciatory tradition on Sen's dazzling, counterintuitive vision of economics as an ethical enterprise, more concerned with living well than with factors of capital growth or prosperity as such. “Even though economic growth is important,” Sen writes, “the single-minded pursuit of it... is terrible... for people's quality of life.” A good life gains more substantially from opportunities for the development of existential capabilities. This insight is at the heart of Sen's modified social choice theory. He tells us that it was fully anticipated and realized in ascetic outlooks that proliferated around the fifth century BCE across the Eastern Gangetic Plain, incorporating parts of modern Bihar, Nepal, and Bengal (proximate stomping grounds of Sen's childhood and early youth). It's worth lingering on this point.The German philosopher, Karl Jaspers—a winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, awarded to Sen as well in 2020—discerned early signs of non-Western modernity in these subcontinental ascetic philosophies, instigated by eccentric proponents, such as Kashyapa the elder, Makkali of the cowshed, Ajita of the hairshirt, and Vardhamana Mahavira and Siddhartha Gautama, the more reputable founders of Jainism and Buddhism, respectively. By modernity, Jaspers means individual self-sufficiency, in the Kantian sense: a dissociative freedom from the paraphernalia of law, custom, habitual observances, and the lives and examples of others. Sen agrees and disagrees. In his reading, the Indic enlightenment tradition pioneered by the Buddha and his contemporaries calls for critical yet compassionate coexistence, points of reentry into, rather than rupture from, the mainstay of human interaction. Buddhist asceticism (much like Sen's brand of economics) takes the suffering of the destitute as a conceptual springboard. Its proposal to end suffering—or capability-deprivation, in Sen's formulation—through the liberation of transformative resources for living well (agencies and choices) is revealed only in the company of others, on plural ground (to follow Sen's thinking about justice) and as a program of joint action. The program is thwarted by systemic inequality and interpersonal intolerance when, for example, interest groups (identified by gender, race, religion, caste, sexuality, and so on) insist on privileged distance or divergence from other groups.Sen's memoir tempts us to imagine the earliest Buddhist disciples in his own likeness: fearless, free, highly sociable, brimful of curiosity and clarity, a touch impatient, compassionate, tolerant, restless, immeasurably sane. (shrink)

Popular filmic and literary stereotypes of teachers from Brodie and Chips to Keating and Schneebly have not only reflected a public desire for radically innovative and perverse teaching practices, but also created those paradigms in ways that are not always readily identifiable or traceable. This article seeks to analyse tensions between traditional institutional protocols and contemporary populist opinion on the role of the effective teacher. In doing so, the article takes Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) as a primary example (...) of those tensions and argues for a perverse ‘foolosophical’ view of pedagogical performance and a new appreciation for the necessity of ignorance in the classroom. Since ignorance and understanding are not taken as unambiguous antonyms, the article proposes that effective teaching and learning occur most effectively in the interstices between humility and hospitality. (shrink)

In this paper, I invoke various matterings of felt in order to generate a practice of writing that engenders bodily difference that is affective, moving, and wooly. In attending to ‘how to write as felt,’ as a touching encounter, I consider how human and nonhuman matter composes. This co-mingling that felt performs enacts what Alaimo calls transcorporeality. Connecting felt with theories of touch and transcorporeality becomes a way to open up and re-configure different bodily imaginaries, both human and nonhuman, that (...) are radically immanent and intensive; as an assemblage of forces and flows that open bodies to helices and trans connections :27–58, 2017b). My contribution to this collection on ‘humanity in a posthuman age’ is experimental and performative. Felt is activated not as a metaphor but rather poses questions about what writing does at the interstices between research and creation. (shrink)

The 1979 partial nuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island was simultaneously hyper-visible and hidden from public view. It was the subject of non-stop media attention, but its causes and consequences required expert explanation. No fire or explosion marked the moment when insensible radionuclides escaped the facility. Yet, residents recalled a variety of troubling sights, sounds, odors, tastes, and sensations. Public distrust percolated in the interstices between government assertions that little radiation had escaped the facility and residents’ sense memories of (...) the incident. This article traces intertwined networks of activists from Japan and Pennsylvania as they mobilized legally, politically, and scientifically to develop evidence about the offsite effects of Three Mile Island. Exploring the distinct cosmology of evidence that activists marshaled, the article shows how they placed the messy, contingent, dynamic living world at the center of inquiries about the meltdown’s consequences. Activists developed new practices of biological witness that reconfigured the interplay between scientific, legal, and moral authority, while concurrently reformulating sufferers’ subjectivities and notions of scientific objectivity. In the process, they suggested that environmental justice entailed epistemic justice. Their cosmology of evidence served as an argument and a material proof that the beloved but suffering living world, and the sciences used to understand it, could and should frame the governance of industrial society’s invisible harms. (shrink)

Mathematics educators suggest that students of all ages need to participate in productive forms of mathematical argument (NCTM, 2000). Accordingly, we developed two complementary frameworks for analyzing the emergence of mathematical argumentation in one second‐grade classroom. Children attempted to resolve contesting claims about the “space covered” by three different‐looking rectangles of equal area measure. Our first analysis renders the topology of the semantic structure of the classroom conversation as a directed graph. The graph affords clear “at a glance” visualization of (...) how various senses of mathematics—as imagined, as performed, and as historically rooted—were interrelated. The graph represents the emergence and intercoordination between conceptual and procedural knowledge in the ebb and flow of classroom conversation. The graph has not just descriptive, but also predictive power: Interconnectedness among the nodes of the graph representing the first 40 min of conversation predicted the structure of recall in the final ten minutes by children who had played little overt role in the conversation up to that point. The second, complementary framework draws upon Goffman's expanded repertoire of roles in speech to demonstrate how the teacher orchestrated this classroom conversation to establish coherent argument. In this second analysis, we establish how the teacher mediated between the everyday talk of her students and the discourse of mathematics. Her revoicing of student talk created interstices for identity and participation in the formation of the argument. Together, the two forms of analysis illuminate the emergence of mathematical argument at two levels: as collective structure and concurrently, as individual activity. (shrink)

“A Phenomenology of Seeing and Affect in a Polarized Climate,” focuses on the polarized political climate that reflects racial and class differences in the wake of the Trump election. She explores how to see differently about those with whom one disagrees—that is in this specific scenario for Lee, the Trump supporters, including Asian American members of her own family. Understanding Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the interstice between the visible and the invisible, if human beings are to see otherwise, we (...) need to disrupt the ready association between the visible and the invisible. Here, she explores the function of affect for the possibility of this break. The phenomenological understanding of emotion does not necessarily empower emotion with any sort of superlative force, especially over reason. But a subject’s emotion chiasmatically reflects the world and vice versa. The caustic and strong emotions felt by people about this presidency reflects the entrenched political climate in our society and chiasmatically the entrenched political climate embroils people in strong emotions that make it difficult to see those with whom we disagree as people we can trust and consider reasonable. To break out of this standoff, to see differently about Trump supporters, one needs to feel differently about them as well. (shrink)

This volume explores the relationship between law and geography, especially with respect to taken-for-granted distinctions between the social and the material, the human and non-human, and what constitutes persons and things. As a genuinely reflective `Law and Geography' project, this collection offers interdisciplinary inquiry, particularly in response to globalisation - of law, commerce, environmental change and society - which renders relations between the local and the global more significant. Because of the sheer expansiveness and complexity of both law and geography (...) we use conceptual frames to structure this volume - boundaries, land, property, nature, identity, culture and time, and knowledge. These frames cut across the various subdivisions of law and geography described above and provide a route into the various practical and theoretical deliberations on the interrelationship and interstices of law and geography which follow. The chapters are diverse in style, research methodology, and subject matter. (shrink)

This collection of essays is unlike others in the field of African studies, for it is based on three very precisely delineated focal points: a particular geographical region, the sub-Sahara; specific modes of cultural production, literature and cinema; and a focus on works of French expression. This three-fold approach to exploring the relationships between power and culture in a non-Western environment greatly contributes to making this book unique from a variety of perspectives: African, Francophone and postcolonial studies, as well as (...) cross-disciplinary, cultural, transnational and diasporic studies. Moreover, the book offers deft and innovative analyses that move beyond the rhetoric of crises on the African continent we so very often hear of, so as to present a critical reflection on the subject at hand that is specific to the sub-Sahara and at the same time intimately linked to global culture, economy and politics. The authors' three-fold approach also presupposes that disciplinary compartmentalization increases power conflicts in academia. If only in part, compartmentalization is the result of antagonistic and competitive relations between specialization and multidisciplinary education. This book is thus a modest attempt at presenting an alternative to excessively fixed and homogeneous academic frontiers while considering that disciplinary expertise remains a must. Keeping in mind that an increasing number of scholars in Anglophone Postcolonial studies and Francophone African studies have been attempting for quite some time now to open interstices and build crossroads that can better connect them to each other, keeping in mind that these scholars work at revealing mechanisms by which any antagonistic discourses can mix, influence, act upon or react to one another, this book seeks to take a constructive step in establishing enduring grounds for multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and transnational academic research and collaboration. (shrink)

Résumé À partir d’expériences concrètes, les auteurs montrent les dimensions politiques des démarches micro-urbaines et d’une reconstruction de l’espace de proximité à partir des marges, des bords et des interstices de la ville capitaliste. Ces interventions permettent la constitution d’une subjectivité collective et synaptique capable d’appropriations territoriales poreuses et de transformations politiques à partir du quotidien. Une démocratisation continue de l’espace de proximité par « agencement jardinier », un agir interstitiel et biopolitique « en bas de chez soi ».

The Institute of Medicine’s 2005 publication, Dietary Supplements: A Framework for Evaluating Safety, is authoritative and thorough, and thus representative of other reports by the Institute of Medicine. What makes this report particularly interesting, however, is the rich political subtext that exists in the interstices of the report, popping up here and there in brief comments and barely suppressed yelps of exasperation. To understand this context, it is useful to reflect for a moment on the special nature of the IOM (...) and its relationship to government.IOM is part of the National Academy of Sciences, and is a private, non-governmental organization that does not receive direct federal funding for its work. Rather, IOM studies are often funded by contract with governmental entities that request reports on particular topics. As a case in point, the dietary supplement study was requested and paid for by the FDA. (shrink)

La Segunda consideration intempestiva delimita una relación funcional con la historia: esta beneficia a la vida cuando se posiciona desde una perspectiva ilusoria, disimulada y estratégica. Se analizan dos consecuencias: la crítica de la historia como ciencia objetiva y los matices que se desprenden de considerarla como relato. Si G. Agamben ha mostrado cómo la historia surge en el intersticio que hay entre lenguaje y discurso, el debate debe orientarse al proceso por el que la subjetividad adviene a un lenguaje (...) que debe "historizar". Esto implica explorar las relaciones entre felicidad e historia como depósito de sentido y de esperanza. The Second Untimely Meditation establishes a functional relation to history: the latter benefits life when it is considered from an illusory, dissimulated, and strategic perspective. The article analyzes two consequences of this: the critique of history as an objective science and the nuances entailed by considering it as a narrative. If G. Agamben has shown how history arises in the interstice between language and discourse, the debate should focus on the process through which subjectivity acquires a language that must be "historicized". This implies exploring the relations between happiness and history as a repository of meaning and hope. A Segunda consideração intempestiva delimita uma relação funcional com a história: esta beneficia a vida quando se posiciona a partir de uma perspectiva ilusória, disfarçada e estratégica. Analisam-se duas consequências: a crítica da história como ciência objetiva e as matizes que se desprendem de considerá-la como relato. Se G. Agamben tem mostrado como a história surge no interstício que há entre linguagem e discurso, o debate deve ser orientado ao processo pelo qual a subjetividade advém a uma linguagem que deve "historizar". Isso implica explorar as relações entre felicidade e história como depósito de sentido e de esperança. (shrink)

Abstract This paper examines a fundamental, though relatively understudied, aspect of the physical theory of the physician Asclepiades of Bithynia, namely his doctrine of pores. My principal thesis is that this doctrine is dependent on a conception of void taken directly from Epicurean physics. The paper falls into two parts: the first half addresses the evidence for the presence of void in Asclepiades' theory, and concludes that his conception of void was basically that of Epicurus; the second half focuses on (...) the precise nature of Asclepiadean pores, and seeks to show that they represent void interstices between the primary particles of matter which are the constituents of the human body, and are thus exactly analogous to the void interstices between atoms within solid objects in Epicurus' theory. (shrink)

The issue of how race and genetics should interrelate goes to the heart of an unfinished discussion about race and racism in both the United States and around the world. The category of race is still powerful and dangerous, especially in scientific work. Addressing this issue is all the more important given the fact that race is still frequently essentialized and treated as biologically real. This tendency continues even as social and natural scientists such as Troy Duster and Charles Mills (...) largely agree that race is a social construction. Mills sees this racial construction as deeply rooted in the legal and constitutional orders of American society. Race is a modern category invented by white male scientists in the “era of modernity” and instantiated globally in the consciousness, social practices, and institutional interstices of Western European cultures, among countless others worldwide. Indeed, the pseudoscience of the period was highly informed by tales of difference brought back by explorers. (shrink)

Sexual and gender minorities in contemporary India are formed in the interstices between the neoliberal, Hindutva state; transnational discourses of liberal democracy and sexual ‘rights’; as well as cosmopolitan culture and global LGBT movements. As is evident in recent court judgments and legislation, particularly since 2014, postcolonial Hindu nationalism has created cultural conditions where forms of queer gender are permissible while queer sexuality is generally unacceptable. In recent years, significant developments have focused on transgender communities, complicating activism surrounding sexual and (...) gender identities. By positing some identities as state-sanctioned acceptable citizens and others as not, certain ‘transgender’ individuals are conceptualised as bearers of rights while finding other facets of their identities discriminated against and maintained as illegal. The 2014 Supreme Court NALSA v. Union of India judgment and The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016 passed by the Lok Sabha, alongside further judgments and legislation affecting wider LGBT communities, have kept discourses fixed on sexual and gender identities and their relationship to Indian citizenship at the forefront of discussions of gender justices and injustices in India today. Focusing on recent judicial and legislative developments, this paper examines how transgender rights are being granted in the context of the neoliberal, Hindutva state and considers which forms of transgender identity are currently being conceptualised as legitimate and authentic in such discourses, which can serve to bolster larger right-wing visions and ideologies of the nation and its citizens. It contemplates the ways in which gender ‘justices’, framed in relation to both transnational LGBT rights discourses and right-wing agendas, are conceptualised and played out on the bodies of sexual and gender minorities. (shrink)

Semantic indeterminacy is the ether of philosophy of language. It fills the interstices of our intentions and pervades accounts of presupposition, tense, fiction, translation, and especially, vagueness. Yet semantic indeterminacy is as impossible as ectoplasm. Indeed, more so! The demonstration need only borrow a few assumptions used elsewhere in widely accepted impossibility results. Since an impossibility is never a necessary condition for anything actual, semantic indeterminacy must be superfluous. Language is no more explained by semantic indeterminacy than calculus is explained (...) by (pre-Robinsonian) infinitesimals. (shrink)

When the French philosopher Sarah Kofman committed suicide in 1994 she left behind an impressive oeuvre in which both the autobiographical genre and the treatment of women play a central role. Her theoretical re ections on both topics situate themselves in the interstices between psychoanalysis, feminism and deconstruction and share a common concern: the respect of alterity in all its guises. Kofman's resistance to the authoritative claim of the retrospective closure underlying traditional autobiographies is closely related to her celebration of (...) an e ®criture parricide, a mode of writing which undoes the repression of multiplicity and otherness. Shortly before her death Kofman published an autobiographical account of her own childhood years after the deportation and death of her father in a concentration camp. This article addresses the striking discrepancies between the theoretical positions Kofman defends throughout her philosophical writings and the autobiographical turn of her own last words. (shrink)

This essay asserts freedom as the essence of the prophetic Black Christian tradition that propelled the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strikes, and largely guided the moral compass of the late-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. Sexism, however, is a moral paradox that emerges at the interstices of the prophetic Black Church’s institutional espousal of freedom and its consistently conflicting practices of gender discrimination that bind Black women to politics of silence and invisibility. An exploration of the iconic “I AM a Man” placards worn (...) by strikers during Martin Luther King Jr.’s final campaign in Memphis alongside a contemporary icon of the Black Lives Matter movement illumines how black women continue to be challenged by intracommunal invisibility, even as they are consistently the progenitors, mobilizers, sustainers, and intellectual architects of Black movements for social change. (shrink)

Michael Jackson ’s _Lifeworlds_ is a masterful collection of essays, the culmination of a career aimed at understanding the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. Seeking the truths that are found in the interstices between examiner and examined, world and word, and body and mind, and taking inspiration from James, Dewey, Arendt, Husserl, Sartre, Camus, and, especially, Merleau-Ponty, Jackson creates in these chapters a distinctive anthropological pursuit of existential inquiry. More important, he buttresses this philosophical approach with committed empirical research. Traveling (...) from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone to the Maori in New Zealand to the Warlpiri in Australia, Jackson argues that anthropological subjects continually negotiate—imaginatively, practically, and politically—their relations with the forces surrounding them and the resources they find in themselves or in solidarity with significant others. At the same time that they mirror facets of the larger world, they also help shape it. Stitching the themes, peoples, and locales of these essays into a sustained argument for a philosophical anthropology that focuses on the places between, Jackson offers a pragmatic understanding of how people act to make their lives more viable, to grasp the elusive, to counteract external powers, and to turn abstract possibilities into embodied truths. (shrink)

This chapter examines María Lugones’s germane and insightful attempt to theorize “intermeshed oppressions,” which, she argues, have been (mis)represented in women of color feminisms by the concepts of “interlocking systems of oppression” and, more recently, “intersectionality.” The latter, intersectionality, introduced by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw as a metaphor (1989) and as a “provisional concept” (1991), has become the predominant way of referencing the mutual constitution of what have been theorized as multiple systems of oppression, constructing the multiplicity (...) of social identities. But Lugones’s analysis, which maintains subtle but important distinctions among the concepts of “intermeshed,” “interlocking,” and “intersecting” oppressions, shows that intersectionality theory often conflates fragmentation with multiplicity, and—by reifying “intersectional identities”—reproduces social-ontological fragmentation at the political and perceptual-cognitive levels of representation. Intersectional accounts redeploy unitary categories (for instance, race, gender, class, sexuality, disability) that are defined to the exclusion of each other by privileging the identities of normative group members. Consequently, they remain within what Lugones calls the “logic of purity,” which erases “curdled,” impure, category-transgressive, border-dwelling, mestiza subjects. Although, according to Lugones, intersectionality enables us to discern how the logic of purity produces “women of color” as impossible beings, she argues that the liminal identities of subjects dwelling in categorial interstices can only be made visible by conceptualizing oppressions as fused or “intermeshed.” However, as I interpret her, Lugones is not merely criticizing intersectionality or seeking to transcend its conceptual limitations by proposing an alternate concept. Rather, the concepts of “intermeshed,” “interlocking,” and “intersecting” oppressions do significantly different work in her account and illuminate different aspects of the social ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology of resistance to oppression. First, I situate Lugones with respect to the current conjuncture in intersectionality studies, in which some scholars are calling for a post-intersectional turn. Then, I reconstruct Lugones’s complex account of intermeshed oppressions, interlocking oppressions, and intersectionality. Finally, I discuss the status of intersectionality in the shift in Lugones’s work from “women of color feminisms” to “decolonial feminism.” Intersectionality is now routinely invoked as a representational theory of multiple identities, but Lugones’s heterodox interpretation helps us to see that it is best understood as a critique of representations based on the logic of purity: specifically, of how categorial axes of oppression (mis)represent intermeshed oppressions. Lugones’s triadic distinction (intersecting/interlocking/intermeshed) points toward a provisional usage of intersectionality, namely, to diagnose the fragmentation of social experiences of multiplicity (which, I would argue, is more consistent with the concept’s original aims). In her visionary philosophy, which attempts to theorize resistance against the grain of fragmentation from a conceptual space outside of the “logic of purity,” we find “glimpses” of a non-fragmented account of oppression, and praxical possibilities for liberatory, decolonial feminist coalitions. (shrink)

Le mouvement, c'est être en mouvement avec un mouvement. Ce n'est pas un déplacement d'un point à un autre. Le mouvement, c'est un déplacement qui laisse sa place à la rencontre et lui permet sa trace. Et la trace, c'est une place qui s'efface pour laisser place au mouvement qui se déplace. Le mouvement, c'est la vague, c'est la musique, c'est la joie… C'est la sensation mais pas la fusion. Le mouvement, c'est l'interstice qui glisse. Le mouvement, c'est ce (...) qui s'équilibre dans le déséquilibre. Ce - Pour une éthique et une politique du rythme. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Selected Letters by William, Henry JamesWilliam James EarleWilliam and Henry James. Selected Letters. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Introduction by John J. McDermott. Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Pp. xxxi + 570. $ 39.95.Almost fifty years of letters to and from the very diversely brilliant James brothers: in this volume a generous, and probably ample, selection of 216 from a total of (...) 740 surviving letters or postcards, from an original total, according to the present editors, of twice as many. This volume of correspondence reflects the deep, unquestioned, unshakable familial (and virtually statutory) closeness of William and Henry who happened, as adults, to be seldom in the same place. There is, it must be said, very little explicit philosophy, narrowly or broadly defined, in these letters, but the philosophical reader will—or ought to—find much raw material for philosophical reflection. For example, a reasonable historicist thesis of how brotherhood, or family connection generally, plays itself out is supported by these documents. The nineteenth century is not the same as the twentieth. For example, here is William’s comment on the will of his sister, Alice, who left more to her companion and care-giver, Katherine Loring, a [End Page 479] women of extraordinary virtue and burden, than to her brother Robertson: “I can well sympathize with Alice’s desire to leave her something handsome; but I must say that her own consent (being apparently privy to the will) strikes me as tant soit peu lacking in delicacy. Surely no one of us would like to be in such a position in her family or any other” (271). This would be, in 1998, a rather unenlightened and ungenerous attitude, but is natural enough in 1892, even if not quite inevitable, not being shared by Alice herself. There is, incidentally, much discussion of wills and bequests, for the Jameses were of the genteel class, people with small family money and modest private incomes for whom the wherewithal to maintain homes with servants and to provide themselves with country houses and recuperative European vacations was always a faintly embarrassing, and occasionally a pressing, problem.It is probably also true that the much-discussed question of Henry’s homosexuality has, somehow, to be recast in historically relative terms. Here is an early report—1869—of Henry’s from Oxford: “As I walked along the river I saw hundreds of the mighty lads of England, clad in white flannel & blue, immense, fair-haired, magnificent in their youth, lounging down the stream in their punts or pulling in straining crews & rejoicing in their godlike strength” (41). This could not, the point is, be said by anyone, gay or straight, in 1998. Yet Henry is neither generally naive nor uncritically anglophile. He says of the Warwickshire scenery, which in a way he likes, that it is “too monotonously sweet & smooth—too comfortable, too ovine, too bovine, too English in a word.” And he adds, a little surprisingly: “It seems like a vast show region kept up at the expense of the poor” (41). This is only one of many appealing comments not sparsely scattered, but unpredictably, in letters of more ordinary news. Here’s one I liked occasioned by seeing theater in Paris: “We talk about it & write about it & criticize & dogmatize & analyse to the end of time: but those brave players stand forth & exemplify it & act—create—produce!” (66).Of course the “wit and wisdom” are not the monopoly of Henry. Here is William being wise: “We all learn sooner or later that we must gather ourselves up and more or less arbitrarily concentrate our interests, throw much overboard to save any” (55–56). Again: “It is a sweet world, in the interstices of its bedevilment & brutality” (321). And William being funny: “Boils are surely the most slowly evolving things in nature—Christian doctrine is nothing to them” (393). He is talking about his own boils and was subject, at every period, to ailments and infirmities: “Since writing to you, I have been swimming in deep seas of influenza, gout and Erysipelas of the face” (443). Or as he, in 1900, sums it up: “My... (shrink)

Publication date: 30 March 2017 Source: Author: Khalid El Aref This essay tackles the way the postcolony is refigured in Waciny Laredj’s Aṣābiʿ Lūlītā. It makes use of a number of theoretical insights to uncover the interplay between the representation of the colony during the colonial period through a brief examination of the fly metaphor in Nedjma, first published in 1956, and that of the postcolony. Relying on intertextuality, the essay attempts to highlight how the metaphor of the femme fatale, (...) a key trope in Nedjma, is relocated in the interstices between national and transnational ways of constructing Arab identity that continues to be both here and there. The intertextual nature of Aṣābiʿ complicates the postcolony as it rewrites it. This rewriting seems to highlight the tragic position of Arab characters that continue to vacillate between a traditional past and a postmodern present. Thus, Waciny Laredj subverts the femme fatale trope by making it literal and ends up shaking the very basis of the postcolonial state. (shrink)

Economic sociologists have developed and applied theories and concepts in close connection with broadly economic phenomena, including, recently, embeddedness and actor network theory. Key to these theories is understandings of action given uncertainty in which actors develop calculative capabilities, and an emphasis on markets with boundaries and interstices as essential properties. This article reflects upon the connections between Parsons' and Smelser's economic sociology and that of contemporary authors including Granovetter, Callon and White. As a strange other to economics and to (...) sociology, economic sociology can develop research questions in considering arbitrage generally, rather than only restricted to financial markets. (shrink)

Résumé Selon la perspective de l’œuvre ouverte développée par Eco, « un texte est un tissu d’espaces blancs, d’interstices à remplir … un mécanisme paresseux qui vit sur la plus-value de sens qui y est introduite par le destinataire » (Eco 1985, Lector in fabula ou la coopération interprétative dans les textes narratifs, Myriem Bouzaher (trad.). Paris: Grasset, 66–67). C’est à cette plus-value de sens, concomitante à l’activité interprétative, que la présente étude s’attardera, et ce, afin d’identifier d’abord des éléments (...) de l’album d’enfance nécessitant l’interprétation d’un lecteur modèle et d’en convoquer par la suite les significations qui peuvent être appliquées au texte. Plus précisément, il s’agira de décrire et d’analyser les mécanismes intertextuels qui enrichissent l’organisation syntaxique et sémantique de quatre albums d’enfance parus au Québec entre 1992 et 2002 et qui nécessitent l’intervention d’un lecteur modèle pour identifier les systèmes de signification et les savoirs qui y sont rattachés. Les albums soumis à l’investigation reprennent le schéma narratif de contes de fée connus et celui d’une nouvelle contemporaine. L’hypothèse est la suivante: si les composantes génériques de l’album dévoilent à un jeune lecteur des univers de références connus et familiers, le processus de l’intertextualité sollicite des contenus qui, soumis à l’interprétation d’un lecteur modèle, font parfois surgir des structures de signification inattendues. (shrink)

Reforms associated with New Public Management have led to changes in the management of work and organization that challenge the stability, durability and linearity of the managerial hierarchy in contemporary public sector workplaces. Against this background, this article considers the ways in which two clinician-managers who work in a large metropolitan teaching hospital speak about their organizational roles. Reflecting the complexity of their part of the organization, the emergency department, the interviewees position themselves as operating at the interstice between (...) the competing and contradictory spatial logics of locality and mobility. With their identities strongly anchored in emergency as locality, the clinician-managers intervene in the flows of meanings and resources that affect its processes in ways that require intra- and inter-organizational mobility and which are incommensurate with traditional perceptions of middle managers. In regarding the interviews as `practical authoring', we note our own spatial ambiguity as academic researchers interested in organizations other than our own and suggest that our insider-outsider positionings are reflected in the interviews' complex spatialities. We conclude that the interviewees' boundary-spanning and cross-spatial self-positionings are indicative of the hybrid roles that workers under NPM increasingly embody and are in contrast to traditional perceptions of how the provision and management of public service work is carried out. (shrink)