Jason Read takes up the relation between the individual and collectivity in Althusser’s work. Read focuses on Althusser’s interest in the “ideological dimension of the individual,” primarily by tracing his interest in the law and in particular the moral supplement to the law within its historical dimensions.

In his recent study, Concepts, Fodor identifies five nonnegotiable constraints on any theory of concepts. These theses were all shared by the standard medieval theories of concepts. However, those theories were cognitivist, in contrast with Fodor’s: concepts are definitions, a form of natural knowledge. The medieval theories were formed under two influences, from Aristotle by way of Boethius, and from Augustine. The tension between them resulted in the Ockhamist notion of a natural language, concepts as signs. Thus conventional signs, spoken (...) and written, signify things in the world by the mediation of concepts which themselves form a language of thought, signifying those things naturally by their similarity. Indeed, later thinkers realised that everything signifies itself and what is like it naturally in a broad sense by means of the concept of its natural likeness. (shrink)

This commentary on Søren Riis’s paper “Dwelling in-between walls” starts from a position of solidarity with its attempt to build a postphenomenological perspective on architecture and the built environment. It proposes however that a clearer view of a technological structure of experience may be obtained by finding technological-perceptual wholes that incorporate perceiver and perceived as well as the mediating apparatus. Parts and wholes may be formed as nested human-technological interiorities that have structured relations with what is outside—so that the outside (...) constitutes an interiority in its turn which contextualises and situates the first. This nested structure raises questions about the way architects and urbanists see the built environment and understand inhabitation. It is hoped that this effort continues with conceptual and empirical work to research ways to make the human places of our built environment. (shrink)

Yves Citton’sRenverser l’insoutenableis both a thorough critique of the current conjuncture and an attempt to construct a politics to reverse it. With respect to the former, Citton outlines the various ways in which the present should be considered unsustainable, ecologically, economically, politically, psychically, and through its various technological mediations. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Citton proposes a politics that can overcome the untenable conditions of the present. Politics takes two figures here, a politics of pressures, of the loves (...) and hates that drive and determine individual and collective life, and a politics of gestures, of habits and comportments that are both immediate and disseminated through various media. Citton’s political proposals suggest a new political approach, one that focuses on the transindividual, on the affects, imaginations and ideas that form the basis for collective and individual existence. It is on this basis that its merits and limitations should be measured. (shrink)

Drawing upon the General Learning Model, the present study developed a moderated mediation model to provide an in-depth understanding of whether and how adolescents’ reading prosocial content in books predicts their prosocial behavior. The target population in this study is Chinese adolescents, and we adopted a paper-based survey to collect data. The age range of the sample was from 12 to 19. Among all participants, 49.3% were female, and 50.7% were male. PROCESS SPSS Macro was used to analyze (...) the proposed moderated mediation model. The results showed that prosocial content reading was positively associated with adolescents’ prosocial behavior. The positive association included a direct relationship and an indirect relationship through the mediation of moral identity. Furthermore, this study revealed the moderation effect of age on the relationships among prosocial content reading, moral identity, and prosocial behavior. Specifically, as age increases, the effects of prosocial content reading on moral identity and prosocial behavior attenuate, and the mediation effect of moral identity also decreases. The study adds to the body of knowledge on the prosocial media effect by extending it to book reading. (shrink)

Contemporary theologians have enriched our understanding of the Holy Spirit's identity and broadened our grasp of the pneumatological tradition, but a crucial question has not been sufficiently addressed: while we have renewed understandings of who the Spirit is and what the Spirit does, very little has been said about how the Spirit works. On the basis of some clues from Schleiermacher, this essay elaborates and defends an answer to this question. According to this proposal, Christ's normative Spirit is mediated through (...) a process of mutual recognition which carries on the Spirit of Christ's beliefs and actions. (shrink)

Pinyin is a phonological encoding system used to spell modern Chinese Mandarin due to the phonological opacity of Chinese characters. The present study examined the role of Pinyin spelling in the reading abilities of adolescents learning Chinese as a foreign language. A total of 158 Indonesian senior primary students were tested on Pinyin spelling, character production, listening comprehension, depth of vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. Pinyin spelling skills were assessed by two measures, Pinyin Dictation and Pinyin Tagging. Path (...) analysis revealed that even after controlling for the effect of character production, Pinyin dictation performance influenced reading comprehension through the mediating effect of listening comprehension and the depth of vocabulary knowledge, and Pinyin tagging performance also influenced reading comprehension through the mediating effect of the depth of vocabulary knowledge. The results highlight the importance of Pinyin skills for Chinese reading abilities of CFL learners. As a reliable and explicit indicator of specifying Chinese phonological representations and processing, Pinyin spelling has a long-term and multifaceted influence on higher-level CFL abilities. (shrink)

Reading in Chinese is complex because readers should not only recognize characters by basic units but also integrate characters into words when reading text. While many efforts have been devoted to investigating the effect of sub-lexical orthographic knowledge in Chinese character reading, less is known about the role played by lexical orthographic knowledge at word level. A total of 424 secondary learners with Chinese as a second language in Hong Kong were assessed with character reading, (...) class='Hi'>reading comprehension, and two lexical orthographic knowledge tasks: lexical orthographic choice and lexical orthographic choice in context. Path analysis results demonstrated that these lexical orthographic skills significantly mediated the effect of character reading on comprehension, in which OKCC was a more critical mediator as its mediating effect was bigger than that of OKC. Further analyses showed that these mediating effects were significant only among students with richer learning experience. Our results illustrate the possible trajectory of CSL learners’ literacy development from character reading to reading comprehension and provide pedagogical implications for teaching and learning. (shrink)

School belonging is of great significance to students' physical and mental health development, especially academic improvement. However, the mechanism of the influence of school belonging on student academic achievement should be further explored, especially reading performance. Based on ecological systems theory and self-determination theory, the present research constructs a multilevel design to examine a moderated mediation model in which school belonging as a level-1 predictor, mastery goal orientation as a level-1 mediator and school disciplinary climate as a level-2 (...) moderator jointly impact reading literacy. Results of the study were based on the questionnaires from 11,364 15-year-olds nested in 332 schools in mainland China that participated in PISA 2018. The cross-sectional analysis indicated that: school belonging had a direct and positive effect on student reading literacy; the relationship between school belonging and reading literacy was prominently mediated by mastery goal orientation; both school disciplinary climate level and strength could negatively moderate the latter half path of “school belonging → mastery goal orientation → reading literacy.” Implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

This article focuses on the power of technological mediation from the point of view of autonomist Marxism. The first part of the article discusses the theories developed on technological mediation in postphenomenology and critical theory of technology with regard to their respective power perspectives and ways of coping with relations of power embedded in technical artifacts and systems. Rather than focusing on the clashes between the hermeneutic postphenomenological approach and the dialectics of critical theory, it is argued that (...) in both the category of resistance amidst power-relations is at least similar in one regard: resistance to the power of technology is conceptualized as a reactive force. The second part of the article reads technological mediation through the lens of the antagonistic power-perspective on class struggle developed in autonomist Marxism. The outline of a provisional autonomist philosophy of technology is developed using Foucauldian dispositifs of biopower in contrast to the hermeneutic and dialectical approach. It is thus argued that resistance should here be understood in terms of practice that subverts the technically mediated circuit of production itself. (shrink)

Analyzing students’ internal cognitive-motivational appraisals and achievement emotions is of pivotal importance for educational outcomes and student individual wellbeing, yet little is shown about their associations with teacher autonomy support. This study investigates the relationship between perceived teacher autonomy support and reading achievement by addressing mediating influences of control and value-related constructs, i.e., reading self-efficacy, meaning in life, and reading enjoyment. Multiple mediation modeling was adopted to test the proposed model with carrying out a total of (...) 12,058 students from 361 schools in China in the Programme for International Student Assessment 2018 reading database. The results elucidated that student-perceived teacher autonomy support is significantly positively related to adolescents’ reading outcomes by fostering internal control and value appraisals and academic enjoyment. These current findings confirm the positive correlation between teacher autonomy support and adolescents’ motivational and emotional factors, providing significant practical implications for educators to adopt various teaching strategies to enhance adolescents’ self-efficacy, intrinsic values, and positive emotions. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno never spoke to one another. Both thinkers were of Jewish ancestry, though their lives would be impacted in distinct ways by the rise of Nazism. With these historical parallels in mind, this paper seeks to place these thinkers in a productive juxtaposition with regard to the status of ethics and politics in either’s work. In particular, I examine the ramifications of philosophical reflection on Auschwitz as a mediating event in post-war European philosophy, reading Levinas’s (...) and Adorno’s theoretical differences as alternate philosophical responses to this momentous event. I argue that Levinas’s thought is ailed by the problem of immediacy, exemplified by his positing ethics as first philosophy and his rejection of the category of totality which, as Adorno highlights, is an important critical tool for an analysis of the form of society which produces Nazism. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno never spoke to one another. Both thinkers were of Jewish ancestry, though their lives would be impacted in distinct ways by the rise of Nazism. With these historical parallels in mind, this paper seeks to place these thinkers in a productive juxtaposition with regard to the status of ethics and politics in either’s work. In particular, I examine the ramifications of philosophical reflection on Auschwitz as a mediating event in post-war European philosophy, reading Levinas’s (...) and Adorno’s theoretical differences as alternate philosophical responses to this momentous event. I argue that Levinas’s thought is ailed by the problem of immediacy, exemplified by his positing ethics as first philosophy and his rejection of the category of totality which, as Adorno highlights, is an important critical tool for an analysis of the form of society which produces Nazism. (shrink)

Many critics view Irigaray's work as an extension or deconstruction of a Lacanian paradigm. Few actually analyse it as a direct challenge to Lacanian concepts of symbolic subjectivity, and the consequent, alternative framework this would envisage. This article discusses a poss ible beyond the phallus, in relation to mediating concepts of the female imaginary and symbolic within her work, and an understanding of the female imaginary and symbolic within different feminist interpretations of the maternal imaginary and symbolic, arguing that the (...) imaginary is crucial in delineating a non-separatist cultural sublimation of female desire. Feminist revisions of the Oedipal by Jessica Benjamin and Kaja Silverman are examined in relation to the question of a maternal imagin ary and symbolic. Irigaray objects to Silverman's privileging of a Lacan ian concept of symbolic castration because it cannot negotiate between the literal relation to the body, and the metaphors and language of our cultural symbolic. Her female imaginary and symbolic provide this mediating link in direct challenge to the overly literal penis of Freud's castration complex and the essentially metaphorical nature of Lacan's phallus. Her mediation is related to the work of diverse psychoanalytic thinkers such as Andrew Samuels, Cornelius Castoriadis and Anthony Elliott. Returning to a feminist reading by Margaret Whitford, this article finally negates a Lacanian understanding of these structures and goes on to explore Irigaray's creative bodily imaginary, within two of her papers on analytic practice. Elaboration of a bodily and creative imaginary within the clinical setting can represent necessary mediation between real and symbolic and between the psyche and culture: this HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 10 No. 2 @ 1997 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) pp. 41-60 [0952-6951(199705)10:2] mediation is personified through the hysteric, not through the Oedipal Law of the Father, which is finally the key question in culturally locat ing female desire, thereby connecting the theory of psychoanalysis with practice and with history. (shrink)

SUMMARYEarly modern printers, publishers and booksellers not only influenced readers to purchase particular books but continue to shape our reception of printed books today. Through title-page advertisements, prefaces and indexes, these ‘print agents’ forged unique relationships with new and returning readers. Paying attention to paratextual structures can uncover strategies for marketing new books, corralling readers and outlining new genres. A consideration of framing devices can also further our understanding of digital resources: much as print agents mediated printed books, digital humanists (...) help reinforce the value of new technologies for the study of early modern texts, guiding users to apply new methods of research, and helping establish new areas of scholarship. As a new kind of print agent, digital humanists must be more aware of their choices in curating, organising and labeling metadata. As we rethink what it means to read, edit and disseminate texts through the digital medium, we must also understand the degree to which modern and early modern editorial practices challenge and influence our scholarship and criticism. (shrink)

This article examines field studies of nursing work published in the English language between 1993 and 2003 as the first step towards an empirically based reformulation of the nursing mandate. A decade of ethnographic research reveals that, contrary to contemporary theories which promote an image of nursing work centred on individualised unmediated caring relationships, in real‐life practice the core nursing contribution is that of the healthcare mediator. Eight bundles of activity that comprise this intermediary role are described utilising evidence from (...) the literature. The mismatch between nursing's culture and ideals and the structure and constraints of the work setting is a chronic source of practitioner dissatisfaction. It is argued that the profession has little to gain by pursuing an agenda of holistic patient care centred on emotional intimacy and that an alternative occupational mandate focused on the healthcare mediator function might make for more humane health services and a more viable professional future. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine how Cavell's discussion of the challenges and attendant risks faced by artworks to be genuine rather than "fraudulent" informs his discussion of the challenges and attendant risks faced by art critics to offer interpretations rather than misinterpretations of artworks. Moreover, I clarify how this relation between Cavell's philosophy of art and his philosophy of criticism is mediated by his discussion of modernism. For Cavell, modernism does not so much introduce challenges for artworks as exacerbate them. (...) In doing so, modernism also exacerbates the challenges faced by art critics. In exacerbating rather than introducing these challenges, modernism has a revelatory significance for arts criticism. Namely, it reveals that the difference between imposing meaning upon an artwork ("reading into it") and illuminating an artwork ("hearing it out") is non-criterial, such that good arts criticism necessarily resembles bad, even "fraudulent" arts criticism. With this challenge in clear view, Cavell argues the art critic must accept the hermeneutical risk of imposing meaning upon a work in order to illuminate it by embracing rather than discounting or bracketing her subjectivity. Attempting to avoid this risk denies what modernism reveals about arts criticism, and accordingly, Cavell argues, it both fails and introduces new hermeneutical risks. (shrink)

ArgumentLinking up with recent studies on the experience of space and place in modern youth literature, this article analyzes how the “journey” as a narrative line and motif transformed Dutch early modern travel books for children from classical teaching instruments into explorative knowledge places. In the popular seventeenth-century Glorious and Fortunate Journey to the Holy Land, young readers were invited to travel within the book, which was presented as a place that covers material pages to observe as well as imagined (...) places to read about. Eighteenth-century travel books, for example written by Joachim Heinrich Campe, shifted from an inner to an empirical mode of travelling. They raised the suggestion that they offered unmediated observations and travel experiences, as if reading about places was equal to seeing places. Since travel literature facilitated active knowledge quisition among youngsters, but also left little room for autonomous innovations or different interpretations, this article reveals the emancipatory as well as restrictive character of such places of learning. By turning reading into a kind of travelling, travel books served as a substitute for travel. (shrink)

Adorno believed that a circular relationship was established between immediacy and mediation. Should we now say that this model with its clear Hegelian influence is outdated? Or does it need some theoretical integration? This volume addresses these questions by covering the performance of music, its technological reproduction and its modes of communication - in particular, pedagogy and dissemination through the media. The book's four parts each deal with different aspects of the mediation process. The contributing authors outline the (...) problematic moments in Adorno's reasoning but also highlight its potential. In many chapters the pole of immediacy is explicitly brought into play, its different manifestations often proving to be fundamental for the understanding of mediation processes. The prime reference sources are Adorno's Current of Music, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction and Composing for the Films. Critical readings of these texts are supplemented by reflections on performance studies, media theories, sociology of listening, post-structuralism and other contiguous research fields. (shrink)

This article reviews the outstanding and thought-provoking work by Roberta De Monticelli (2021), _Towards a Phenomenological Axiology. Discovering What Matters_. The article addresses the reasons why it should be read by everyone but especially by help professions practitioners. Although we all deal with morality and value judgments on on mundane, everyday bases, the professional life of education and care practitioners is namely a series of morally-loaded practices and decision-making informed by morally oriented (expert) knowledge. Beyond the thesis advanced in the (...) book, its major contribution consists in making the reader think the inescapability of morality in everyday thinking and acting and the need for a reflective positioning towards this issue. By aligning with “the hedgehog vs. the fox” struggle proposed by the author as the framework of her theoretical proposal, the article advances what would be the doubts and counterarguments of a fox-like scholar in education. It illustrates why her “professional vision” cannot but notice what appears to be under-thematized by the hedgehog, i.e., the unavoidable mediation of language and social interaction that _precedes_ and therefore impacts the constitution of what the hedgehog convincingly notices: the entanglement of fact and value. The conclusion is dedicated to the (underestimated?) place of social sciences in such a debate, their tension between implicit normativity and presumed descriptivity, as well the challenges of the increasingly explicit normativity of applied social sciences. (shrink)

Starting from the premise that nowadays media has a privileged status in the way we relate to the other, the paper explores the ethical challenges raised by the growing mediated nature of communication. Since the mediated communication calls for a multidisciplinary examination, the article uses conceptual tools offered by a different framework. First, we draw on M. Buber’s ontology of relation in order to discus mediation in terms of authenticity. Then, we analyze different views on the special dynamics of (...) the relation between ethics, religion and mediated communication. In the last part of the article, we emphasize the idea that, in order to acknowledge the true significance of the recent changes that affect the way we communicate, they should be read in terms of a postmodern ethics. (shrink)

Sara Rappe has given us a stimulating book full of interesting suggestions concerning philosophers hardly known, in some cases, in the English-speaking world. She raises a question concerning these philosophers that has not previously been discussed on this scale. The question arises from the comparison of two features of Neoplatonism. For the Neoplatonist philosopher, discursive thinking does not yield knowledge. By discursive thought is meant the kind of thinking we normally practice. It has to do with objects external to thought, (...) objects mediated by images derived from sense perception or also from a higher form of thought. From these images discursive thought elaborates further ideas derived by methods of reasoning such as those codified in Aristotelian logic. This kind of thinking is open, however, to the attacks of Skepticism, against which the Neoplatonist argues by appealing to another form of thinking and to the knowledge it constitutes, a form of thinking free of all mediation separating subject and object of thought, where subject and object of thought are identical. This is not discursive thought; dis- cursive thought does not yield knowledge that is immune to skeptical attack and that is obtained by a form of thought beyond discursive thinking. To the extent that language is the expression of discursive thought, this knowledge is not expressed in language. Yet the Neoplatonists of Late Antiquity were plunged in discursivity. In particular, they did philosophy by interpreting texts, the authoritative texts of their tradition, not only Plato’s dialogues, but also the Aristotelian corpus and what they supposed were the more ancient sources of their philosophy, Pythagorean and Orphic texts and the Chaldaean Oracles. How are and to be reconciled? The thesis explored by Rappe in this book is that the Neoplatonists had recourse to nondiscursive textual strategies, images, symbols, myths, ritual formulae, so as to convey nondiscursive thought and knowledge through their reading of discursive texts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phantom Mediators: Reflections on the Nature of the Violence in AlgeriaRéda Bensmaïa (bio)Translated by Hassan MelehyIn order to justify himself, each person depends on the crime of the other. There is a casuistry of blood where an intellectual, it seems to me, has no place, except to take up arms himself. When violence responds to violence in an exasperating delirium that makes the simple language of reason impossible, (...) the role of intellectuals cannot be, as we read every day, to excuse from afar one act of violence and condemn another, which has the effect both of angering the one condemned of violence to the point of rage and of encouraging the one who is not condemned to more violence. If they themselves don’t join the combatants, their role (a more obscure one, to be sure!) must be only to work in the direction of an appeasement so that reason may again have a chance.—Albert Camus, Actuelles IIIAt a secondhand bookstore in Santa Monica, I found a story by Friedrich Torberg: “Mein ist die Rache” (“Vengeance is Mine”). The author describes the sadistic practices of a concentration-camp commandant in 1943 who drives a group of Jewish prisoners to commit suicide one after the other. It is almost unbearable to read. One reader, apparently an emigré German Jew, added some bitter marginal notes after the war. On the last page this reader penciled in, “America is full of Jews who love Germany and long for it.”The night after I read this book, a question occurred to me that has stayed on my mind ever since and that I want to pass on to you: What would we all give, each one of us, each individual German, for this not to have happened? It’s a”pan-German” question. Perhaps we will know something more about ourselves if each one of us tries to answer it individually, as honestly and above all as concretely as possible. And doesn’t it lead to three other questions that are worrying us?: What was? What remains? What will be?—Christa Wolf, “Parting from Phantoms”A few weeks after reading Christa Wolf’s text, the same questions continue to haunt me. “Pan-Maghrebian” questions: what would we be willing to give, each one of us, each Algerian in any case, for what is happening now never to have occurred?What was? What remains? What will be? These are the questions that have guided me in the different steps of writing the text I offer here.In the very fine article he contributed under the heading of “The Intellectual and Society” to the Encyclopaedia Universalis, philosopher François Châtelet wrote, “If we confine ourselves to the three historical groups we have arbitrarily taken as examples—the Greek sophist, the ‘judge’ of the Russell Tribunal, and the eighteenth-century philosopher, it is clear that the would-be intellectual claims to be the teacher and the advocate of political [End Page 85] freedom, of the rights of the person, the architect of a transparent society in which the individual and the citizen coincide.“Doubtless,” added Châtelet, “one aspect or another prevails on him, according to the circumstances; but a certain structure subsists, which may allow us to define, superficially and differentially, intellectuals as a group and an agency” [my emphasis].Beginning with this definition, I would like to examine the following questions: What is the status of intellectuals in a country like Algeria? How can it be explained that they have been and still are the victims of the violence that strikes them today?Given the current situation of international politics, the example of Algeria is inevitable, because in the opinion of numerous analysts what is happening in that country is a test case, a limit case that may serve as an indicator of what the future holds for the formerly colonized countries. For many analysts, the evolution of the political situation in Algeria may also serve as an analytical operator in the large ideological movements that are shaking not only the countries of the Maghreb but also the Arab-Muslim world in its totality. And in... (shrink)

This paper has several aims. Its main interpretive task is to argue that the democratic aspirations of contemporary critical theory are informed and haunted by an essentially Hegelian conception of constitutional order that I describe in part 1, according to which the modern state represents an institutional structure that integrates society through rational activity by mediating between the different interests of various social strata, connecting them in a common enterprise—haunted, because this Hegelian vision of making individuals free and “at home” (...) in the modern world, reconciled to it by virtue of being able to comprehend their social order as the work of their own shared reasons, remains a griping one, but one that critical theorists starting with the Left Hegelians view as increasingly implausible under modern social conditions. In section 2, I trace the decline of confidence in the prospects for the rational/mediational integration of society Hegel envisioned through Horkheimer and Adorno, and discuss some relevant aspects of Habermas’s initial reception of their views. Section 3 argues that the conceptions of democratic constitutional politics offered by Habermas and Benhabib should be read as attempts to recover, in a critical manner and under changed conditions, Hegel’s idea of social order as the product of rational activity. Along the way, I will make three interpretive and critical points: first, the existence of this link to Hegelian conceptions of constitutionalism demonstrates that interpretations of Habermas’s later work that read him as having broken with the tradition of Left Hegelianism are overstated—my reading of Habermas highlights his essentially Hegelian proceduralism and the social theoretic dimension of his work, and should challenge people who think of him as a neo-Kantian moralist. Second, this Left Hegelian social theoretic backdrop provides a stronger normative justification for the practice of democratically rearticulating constitutional norms—along with its apparent demotion of the stabilizing virtues of the rule of law—than the contextual one that some legal theorists have so far offered. Thirdly, I will comment on the shortcomings of Habermas’s conception of democratic constitutionalism, as well as Benhabib’s modified concept of “democratic iterations,” along with some brief suggestions on how this set of ideas should be developed. (shrink)

Clathrin‐mediated endocytosis is a major route for the retrieval of plasma‐membrane cargoes, and defects of this process can cause catastrophic human dysfunctions. However, the processes governing how a clathrin‐coated profile (ccp) is initiated are still murky. Despite an ever‐growing cast of molecules proposed as triggers of ccp nucleation and increasingly sophisticated bioimaging techniques examining clathrin‐mediated endocytosis, it is yet unknown if ccp formation is governed by a universal mechanism. A recent paper by Cocucci et al. has tracked single‐molecule events to (...) identify that stable accumulation of ccps requires the near‐simultaneous arrival of two AP2 adaptors bridged by one clathrin triskelion. This commentary examines the role of AP2 in cargo‐mediated endocytosis in the light of recent advances in biophotonics, chemical inhibitors and genetics, examines the claims of other molecules to be the initiators of ccp formation and proposes future directions in research into this topic.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays: The evolution of dynamin to regulate clathrin‐mediated endocytosis AbstractClathrin‐mediated endocytosis: What works for small, also works for big Abstract. (shrink)

This article proffers a critical reading of multiliteracy pedagogy and a materialism of the multimodal and machinic. A critical stance is taken against the mesmerising modes of representation that run rampant across our ocular territories. The article assesses the dangers of fetishizing technologies. To this end, Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) is read through a Guattarian theoretical prism to emphasise four chief points: (1) the role of the unconscious, (2) the role of affect (affectus in the Spinozian sense; contrary to (...) feeling which immobilises, affect moves us), (3) the apparent becoming cyborg of the human race and (4) the desire to desire repression. The author contends that while qualitative multiplicities play a central role for MLT, it is neither inconsistent nor contradictory to consider the role of the machinic in greater detail. It is argued that more research must be directed into the cartographic, ethological and noological mechanisms at work in plastic universes of reference (new technologies and the arts) which transform the virtual and transfigure the dynamic of affect. (shrink)

Phenomenological accounts of technology, mediation, and embodiment are beginning to problematize traditional distinctions between subject and object. This shift is often attributed to a material or post-human turn since it is usually associated with an interest in the non-human actors and objects that make media interfaces possible. This article contends that these tendencies should also be considered part of a deeper lineage of dialectical thought in critical theory. Using videogames as an example, I argue that academic debates related to (...) the player/game relationship can be read through the lens of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Developing Adorno’s concept of mimesis, I argue that the interface is often treated as a dialectical question of how the space between subject and object should be traversed. I reflect on the possible advantages of focusing on this contested space through a discussion of game controllers and the Aristotelian concept of techne. (shrink)

Phenomenological accounts of technology, mediation, and embodiment are beginning to problematize traditional distinctions between subject and object. This shift is often attributed to a material or post-human turn since it is usually associated with an interest in the non-human actors and objects that make media interfaces possible. This article contends that these tendencies should also be considered part of a deeper lineage of dialectical thought in critical theory. Using videogames as an example, I argue that academic debates related to (...) the player/game relationship can be read through the lens of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Developing Adorno’s concept of mimesis, I argue that the interface is often treated as a dialectical question of how the space between subject and object should be traversed. I reflect on the possible advantages of focusing on this contested space through a discussion of game controllers and the Aristotelian concept of techne. (shrink)

The essay explores the meaning and implications of Milbank's claim that the post‐Kantian presuppositions of modern theology must be eradicated. After defining and locating the post‐Kantian element in the context of Milbank's broader concerns, the essay employs a comparison between Milbank and Barth to draw out the differences between radical orthodoxy and neo‐orthodoxy with respect to the Kantian ideal of “mediation” between theology and culture. The essay concludes with comparisons of Milbank's metanarrative concerning “modern” thought with those offered by (...) Hans Blumenberg and James Edwards. The effect is not only to suggest the apparent arbitrariness of Milbank's account, but also to indicate the evident futility of arguing with Milbank's theological position on the basis of alternative accounts of the post‐Kantian tradition. (shrink)

Distinguished contributors take up eminent scholar Daniel R. Schwarz’s reading of modern fiction and poetry as mediating between human desire and human action. The essayists follow Schwarz’s advice, “always the text, always historicize,” thus making this book relevant to current debates about the relationships between literature, ethics, aesthetics, and historical contexts.

Alston's perceptual account of mystical experience fails to show how it is that the sort of predicates that are used to describe God in these experiences could be derived from perception, even though the ascription of matched predicates in the natural order are not derived in the manner Alston has in mind. In contrast, if one looks to research on shared attention between individuals as mediated by mirror neurons, then one can give a perceptual account of mystical experience which draws (...) a tighter connection between what is reported in mystical reports and the most similar reports in the natural order. (shrink)

This article develops a theory of border subjectivity that considers the cybernetic role of narrative structures and mediation in political advocacy aimed at dreamers and DACA recipients. "Cybersujetos” are border subjects who are racialized by cybernetic systems and media narratives, but can resist control by repurposing cultural technologies. In assessing the limitations of journalism, literature, and film as outlets for political advocacy, this article finds that remediated representations of undocumented youth that attempt to expand their political agency can further (...) alienate them. Outdated stereotypes in representation are substituted with a proliferation of diverse but still racialized figures meant to demarcate "exceptional" candidates for naturalization, thus failing to challenge the normative parameters of citizenship itself and the militarized position of the US on the global stage. (shrink)

TRADITIONALLY, SCHLEIERMACHER’S REDEN ÜBER DIE RELIGION has been considered to emphasize intuition and immediacy as the means by which to understand and relate to the world. This reading was popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey and carried on into the twentieth century by Karl Barth and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Though none of these thinkers is solely interested in the Reden, it forms their starting point and as such informs much of their interpretation of Schleiermacher’s later works. More recently, however, an emphasis on (...) Schleiermacher’s notion of mediacy has appeared, with readings ranging so widely that some call Schleiermacher a “good Kantian,” remaining within the limitations of Kant’s first Kritik, while others claim that Schleiermacher is proto-Hegelian, and still others, that he is a proto-pragmatist. In emphasizing one or the other, immediacy or mediacy, intuition or mediation, these attempts have avoided the complexity of Schleiermacher’s project: the fact that Schleiermacher considers immediacy and mediacy, intuition and mediation, of equal significance and goes so far as to place them side by side in his understanding of experience and of knowledge. (shrink)

Distinguished contributors take up eminent scholar Daniel R. Schwarz’s reading of modern fiction and poetry as mediating between human desire and human action. The essayists follow Schwarz’s advice, “always the text, always historicize,” thus making this book relevant to current debates about the relationships between literature, ethics, aesthetics, and historical contexts.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Authority, Reading, Reflexivity: Pierre Bourdieu and the Aesthetic Judgment of KantKoenraad Geldof (bio)Translated by Alex Martin (bio)1. AuthorityFor some time now, Pierre Bourdieu has been a true author 1 —a producer, in other words, of an impressive number of theoretical and analytical discourses in a wide variety of research fields. 2 Whether in anthropology or ethnology, in the sociology of institutions or of the structure and workings of (...) the market of symbolic goods, or in the sociology of literature, the name Bourdieu imposes itself: it establishes authority. Contributing to this is another particularity quite typical of authority: it gets itself talked about; it generates, at accelerated speed, discourses that in one way or another (re-)produce and thus reinforce the authority of the author who was their point of departure and origin. The international proliferation of articles dealing with one aspect or another of Bourdieu’s thought, 3 essay collections, 4 and introductions to Bourdieu’s work 5 testifies to this. The intensity of metadiscursive production not only gives material form to the intrinsic analytic pertinence and richness of the discourse on which it comments—these are evident—but also shows, independent of the pieces’ intentions, that the proliferation is situated in a process of (re-)production of authority, that it is an integral part of a canonizing effort. The articles and introductions problematize, implicitly or explicitly, the direct accessibility of Bourdieu’s discourse. They make the oeuvre into a complex totality, difficult and diversified to the extreme, whose coherence can be revealed only with the help of a gradual, exegetic, and essentially submissive reading practice.To put it another way, and to examine the question more closely, the metadiscursive (re-)production of the authority of the author we call Pierre Bourdieu reveals itself to be [End Page 20] ambivalent: it is at once innovative—it invites the uninitiated to get to know a fascinating new universe of thought—and authoritarian, indeed even conservative. An introduction is never a simple mediation of discourse between an author and his or her potential readers: it provides a sort of user’s guide, it (re-)produces a reading habitus, an ideology of the correct interpretation the reader must learn and interiorize to be able to distinguish orthodox from false, heterodox, readings. Between the metadiscourse/commentary and the authority it discusses, a relationship of tautological circularity is established that surreptitiously transforms the discourse read into a legend (into what must be read): the possibility of an autonomous reading practice is erased by a pedagogy of legendary decoding. 6The authority of an author, that of Bourdieu for example, is consequently implicated in a dynamic of opening (the proliferation of metadiscourses) and closing (the tendency to discipline reading, to make it obey certain norms of legibility). It would be erroneous, however, to attribute the paradoxical aspect of authority simply to the ambivalent effect of metadiscourses/commentaries. This is because authors who establish authority can only rarely escape the canonizing efforts of which they are the object: in many cases, authors themselves participate in the production and reproduction of a mode of reading and interpretation judged to be legitimate. The fact that no authority can completely and exhaustively control its discursive and institutional space does not in any way contradict, therefore, that other distinctive and essential feature of authority: its intrinsic animation by a desire to control, by the desire to see itself respected. Authority wants to become Law and be recognized as such. Thus the tendency of certain authors to become actively involved in the modes of appropriation of their name and their discourses, to endeavor to make the reading of the author’s work not simply an act of connaissance but also a proof of reconnaissance. Authority detests being insufficiently or poorly known. Let us take the case of Bourdieu. As an author, he is first and foremost the one to whom we owe Raisons pratiques, La distinction, Homo academicus and Les règles de l’art, the producer, in other words, of a series of momentous works that, upon publication, established authority. Furthermore, Bourdieu is also the author of a considerable number of accompanying discourses, dominated by the... (shrink)