Many scholars agree that the Internet plays a pivotal role in self-radicalization, which can lead to behaviours ranging from lone-wolf terrorism to participation in white nationalist rallies to mundane bigotry and voting for extremist candidates. However, the mechanisms by which the Internet facilitates self-radicalization are disputed; some fault the individuals who end up self-radicalized, while others lay the blame on the technology itself. In this paper, we explore the role played by technological design decisions in online self-radicalization in its (...) myriad guises, encompassing extreme as well as more mundane forms. We begin by characterizing the phenomenon of technological seduction. Next, we distinguish between top-down seduction and bottom-up seduction. We then situate both forms of technological seduction within the theoretical model of dynamical systems theory. We conclude by articulating strategies for combatting online self-radicalization. (shrink)

Jacques Ellul’s work on propaganda provides the basis for this analysis of life in technology. Advertising and the mass media rely on temptation and seduction and create a constant flow of propaganda, all of which serve the technological system. Propaganda aims to condition and regulate us so that we participate in and adapt ourselves to a desired pattern, specifically an existence adjusted to and in accord with the technological milieu. Technology tempts and seduces us with its promise (...) and provision of comfort, convenience, and efficiency. Above all, technology tempts and seduces us with power: power over nature and over human beings. Naively and paradoxically, we believe we have power over technology, even though it actually has power over us. Our immersion in a sea of temptation and seduction, of constant and total propaganda, may seem inescapable; however, to criticize and challenge the primacy of technology is to reassert our freedom. (shrink)

YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This (...) is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users’ attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers. (shrink)

The critical examination of the film American Beauty reveals characteristics illustrative of the form of culture coextensive with modern technological societies. This form of culture creates an imbalance favoring the aesthetical over the ethical dimensions of human orientation. Absorption into the aesthetical dimension of the electronic or digital visual image significantly reduces the capacity of culture to nurture a meaningful symbolic world. The relative absence of a meaningful symbolic world leaves both identity and social relationships without a foundation.

YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This (...) is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users’ attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers. (shrink)

The question I raise in this paper is why measurement systems such as PISA have gained so much power in contemporary education policy and practice. I explore this question from the bottom up by asking what might contribute to the ways in which people invest in systems such as PISA, that is, what are the beliefs, assumptions and desires that lead people to actively lending support to the global education measurement industry or fall for its seduction. I discuss three (...) aspects of what, in the paper, I refer to as the ‘social psychology’ of this dynamics, highlighting the seductive nature of numbers, measurement and comparison, the persistence of technological expectations about education and its workings and the reference to social justice as a key motivator for wanting to know how systems work and perform. I raise critical questions with regard to each of these aspects and, through this, suggest ways towards a more grown-up response to the difficult question of providing good education for everyone, rather.. (shrink)

Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of the cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary education, and even modern electoral politics. Along the way, the book turns to a set of art works from mobile steampunk sculptures to bicentennial adaptations of Frankenstein to a musical about the US Presidential election that ask how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, (...) responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly. (shrink)

This paper traces the role of American technocrats in popularizing the notion later dubbed the “technological fix”. Channeled by their long-term “chief”, Howard Scott, their claim was that technology always provides the most effective solution to modern social, cultural and political problems. The account focuses on the expression of this technological faith, and how it was proselytized, from the era of high industrialism between the World Wars through, and beyond, the nuclear age. I argue that the packaging and (...) promotion of these ideas relied on allegorical technological tales and readily-absorbed graphic imagery. Combined with what Scott called “symbolization”, this seductive discourse preached beliefs about technology to broad audiences. The style and conviction of the messages were echoed by establishment figures such as National Lab director Alvin Weinberg, who employed the techniques to convert mainstream and elite audiences through the end of the twentieth century. (shrink)

As the President's Council on Bioethics emphasized in a recent report, rapid growth of biotechnologies creates increasingly many possibilities for enhancing human traits. This article addresses the claim that enhancement via biotechnology is inherently problematic for reasons pertaining to our identity. After clarifying the concept of enhancement, and providing a framework for understanding human identity, I examine the relationship between enhancement and identity. Then I investigate two identity-related challenges to biotechnological enhancements: (1) the charge of inauthenticity and (2) the charge (...) of violating inviolable core characteristics. My thesis is that a lucid, plausible understanding of human identity largely neutralizes these charges, liberating our thinking from some seductive yet unsound objections to enhancement via biotechnology. (shrink)

Can Rawlsian public reason sufficiently justify public policies that regulate or restrain controversial medical and technological interventions in bioethics (and the broader social world), such as abortion, physician aid-in-dying, CRISPER-cas9 gene editing of embryos, surrogate mothers, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of eight-cell embryos, and so on? The first part of this essay briefly explicates the central concepts that define Rawlsian political liberalism. The latter half of this essay then demonstrates how a commitment to Rawlsian public reason can ameliorate (not completely (...) resolve) many of the policy disagreements related to bioethically controversial medical interventions today. The goal of public reason is to reduce the size of the disagreement by eliminating features of the disagreement that violate the norms of public reason. The norms of public reason are those norms that are politically necessary to preserve the liberal, pluralistic, democratic character of this society. What remains is reasonable disagreement to be addressed through normal democratic deliberative processes. Specific issues addressed from a public reason perspective include personal responsibility for excessive health costs, the utility of a metaphysical definition of death for organ transplantation, and the moral status of excess embryos generated through IVF and/or their use in medical research. (shrink)

This is the story of a seductive idea and its sobering consequences. The twentieth century brought a new cultural confidence in the social powers of invention – but also saw the advance of consumerism, world wars, globalisation and human-generated climate change. Techno-Fixers traces how passive optimism and active manipulations were linked to our growing trust in technological innovation. It pursues the evolving idea through engineering hubris, radical utopian movements, science fiction fanzines, policy-maker soundbites, corporate marketing, and consumer culture. It (...) explores how evangelists of technological fixes have proselytised their faith, and critically examines the examples and products of their followers. The new technological confidence mixed together beliefs that were simultaneously compelling and unsettling. As motor vehicles, electricity supplies and radio became part of modern life in the early decades of the century, it was hard to argue against the transformative effects and inevitability of such transitions. Like it or not, social consequences seemed to come inexorably with the Machine Age, the Space Age and the Information Age. This deterministic vision implied an ever more technological future with unavoidable social consequences. For many, innovative technologies promised appealing new lifestyles and powers. But for a narrower band of proponents – the first generation of technological fixers – wise engineering invention was touted as a guaranteed route to positive human benefits and societal progress. Socially-engaged engineers and designers argued that such improvements could be directed, hastened and amplified. These engineering adventurers argued that modern societies could be guided only by rational designers. They contended that adroit technological solutions could solve contemporary problems better than any traditional method, including economic initiatives, citizen education, political ideology, lifestyle changes, legal frameworks and moral guidance. Their seductive claims were tamed by more mainstream American enthusiasts, and eventually boiled down to the concept of the technological fix. Their shared confidence infused policy-makers, broadcasters and science popularisers. Trust in technological fixes shaped a new generation of managers and law-makers, engineers and educators, futurists and citizens – and continues to drive a new generation of techno-fixers today. This cultural wave, its promoters and detractors, have championed the promise and voiced concerns that we have inherited, still unresolved. This book tracks the hubristic influencers and weighs up the confidences and concerns associated with them: the dramatic potential for novel technologies to work alongside longer human traditions to meet our enduring ambitions – or to reshape society for the worse. (shrink)

Holography, the three-dimensional imaging technology, was portrayed widely as a paradigm of progress during its decade of explosive expansion 1964–73, and during its subsequent consolidation for commercial and artistic uses up to the mid 1980s. An unusually seductive and prolific subject, holography successively spawned scientific insights, putative applications and new constituencies of practitioners and consumers. Waves of forecasts, associated with different sponsors and user communities, cast holography as a field on the verge of success—but with the dimensions of success repeatedly (...) refashioned. This retargeting of the subject represented a degree of cynical marketeering, but was underpinned by implicit confidence in philosophical positivism and faith in technological progressivism. Each of its communities defined success in terms of expansion, and anticipated continual progressive increase. This paper discusses the contrasting definitions of progress in holography, and how they were fashioned in changing contexts. Focusing equally on reputed ‘failures’ of some aspects of the subject, it explores the varied attributes by which success and failure were linked with progress by different technical communities. This important case illuminates the peculiar post-World War II environment that melded the military, commercial and popular engagement with scientific and technological subjects, and the competing criteria by which they assessed the products of science. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 293-302.

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 237-240.

This article examines the gamification of health applications designed to help patients manage chronic pain. Through description of one such program and in-depth interviewing, I describe why gamified pain applications are appealing to patients living with chronic pain. Individuals living with chronic pain are especially disposed to try novel pain management technologies due to the in-control and out-of-control paradox of pain (Leder, 2016). These applications are seductive not only due to this embodied phenomenon, but also because gamification taps into the (...) logic of proactive self-management that is tantamount to an era of biomedicalization, wherein subjects are incentivized to take control of their own health in the face of austerity budgets. However, pain also limits the user’s ability to adopt an immersive, lusory attitude. Thus, the speculative promises of gamified health technologies are just that – speculative, and their immersive potential should not be overstated. (shrink)

The technological transformation of the conduct of war, exemplified by the American employment of drones in Afghanistan and in Iraq, calls for a critical reflection about the fantasies that underpin, and are in turn animated by, the robotic revolution of the military. At play here is a fantasy of a “costless war" or a “sterile war", that is such act of military state violence against the other that is inconsequential for the self. In other words, the seductive appeal of (...) the “costless war’ fantasy rests on the desire to develop a self that is invulnerable in the face of violence. Importantly, it is a desire explicitly projected towards a particular American future (of an imagined warfare, or of a super-power status), but also one that is connected to a lacking critical reflection about the intersubjective aspects of violence in the debates about America’s post-9/11 military involvements. This article reflects critically about the fantasy of the “costless war" and about its underpinning politics of invulnerability from a perhaps unlikely angle of literature. In a close reading of a short story by Benjamin Percy called “Refresh, Refresh" (2008), it explores its narrative insights into how acts of violence, which are undertaken far from home, inevitably return to affect and damage, perhaps beyond repair, the subject at home. Importantly, the return of violence in Percy’s story occurs within the domain of the everyday and the mundane, not of the exceptional, and testifies to the despair experienced by young males “abandoned" by their military fathers. My interpretation draws also on theoretical explorations of the connection between violence, intersubjectivity and vulnerability, based on the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas on the subject's ethical captivity by the suffering of the other, and on Judith Butler's recent “uses" of the Levinasian ethical project in her writing about the post-9/11 America. (shrink)

Quantification is particularly seductive in times of global uncertainty. Not surprisingly, numbers, indicators, categorizations, and comparisons are central to governmental and popular response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay draws insights from critical data studies, sociology of quantification and decolonial thinking, with occasional excursion into the biomedical domain, to investigate the role and social consequences of counting broadly defined as a way of knowing about the virus. It takes a critical look at two domains of human activity that play a (...) central role in the fight against the virus outbreak, namely medical sciences and technological innovation. It analyzes their efforts to craft solutions for their user base and explores the unwanted social costs of these operations. The essay argues that the over-reliance of biomedical research on “whiteness” for lab testing and the techno-solutionism of the consumer infrastructure devised to curb the social costs of the pandemic are rooted in a distorted idea of a “standard human” based on a partial and exclusive vision of society and its components, which tends to overlook alterity and inequality. It contends that to design our way out of the pandemic, we ought to make space for distinct ways of being and knowing, acknowledging plurality and thinking in terms of social relations, alterity, and interdependence. (shrink)

This paper explores the perversion of reality in the context of advanced technologies, such as AI, VR, and AR, through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality and the precession of simulacra. By examining the transformative effects of these technologies on our perception of reality, with a particular focus on the usage of digital avatars, the paper highlights the blurred distinction between the real and the simulated, where the copy becomes more ‘real’ than the original. Drawing on Baudrillard’s concept (...) of hyperreality, the paper delves into the perversion of reality as individuals seek refuge in virtual pleasure paradises and embrace artificial pleasures through their digital avatars, disconnecting from genuine human experiences. The convergence of AI, VR, and AR technologies amplifies this hyperreal condition, where digital avatars mimic or surpass the depth of human relationships, challenging our understanding of what is real. In line with Baudrillard’s theory, the paper explores the objectification and commodification of reality within digital spaces, specifically examining the digital avatars’ role in the erosion of genuine human connections. It explores the implications of these avatars in terms of consent, exploitation, and loss of authenticity, echoing Baudrillard’s concerns about the distortion of reality in contemporary society. Recognizing the implications of these technologies, the paper calls for a critical reflection on their transformative power. It emphasizes the need for a nuanced understanding of the hyperreal condition and ethical responsibility in engaging with AI, VR, and AR, particularly in relation to the usage of digital avatars. By resisting the seductive allure of digital escapism and preserving genuine human connections, we can navigate the perversion of reality and cultivate empathy, compassion, and meaningful interactions that transcend the simulated experiences offered by technology. (shrink)

With Foucault on subjectivation, seduction, and technology What does Confessions of the Flesh add to Foucault’s approach of subjectivation and its application for the ethics of technology? In his late work Foucault focusses on subjectivation following a fourfold framework, without explaining its development. There are good reasons to believe it relates to Aristotle’s four causes and also refers to Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. Foucault’s analysis of early Christian practices of the conduct of souls and of controlling evil seductions is (...) surprisingly relevant with regard to how today’s digital technologies infringe on thinking and willing. Employing the fourfold scheme to apply insights from Confessions of the Flesh to ethics and technology leads to an approach of ethical subjectivation and technology in which: [1] problematization of seduction and technology [2] prompts good use of technology [3] by technologies of the self [4] realizing a practice of freedom. (shrink)

Par l'auteur de la Soft-Idéologie, un éclairage total des moyens actuels de censure de masses. La face obscure de la société mondiale du tout-communication enfin révélée dans ses moindres détails. Pourquoi les convictions de ceux que l'on appelle les " élites " ne séduisent plus les masses? Comment une guerre idéologique, que les libéraux avaient l'habitude de remporter, a finalement basculé en faveur du camp conservateur? En quoi les nouvelles technologies ont-elles été les premiers outils de ce renversement? Pour comprendre (...) ce phénomène à l?œuvre, François-Bernard Huyghe part d'un constat : la gestion économique de droite alliée à des références morales de gauche se heurtent au mécontentement populaire.0Ce qui ne serait rien si ce couple ne menait à l'effondrement de la crédibilité des appareils politiques, culturels et médiatiques. C'est donc à une " crise de la séduction " à laquelle nous assistons, et dont Emmanuel Macron est l'avatar. Les promoteurs de " la société ouverte " ont accumulé des erreurs qui ont non seulement conduit à leur effacement, mais ont aussi détruit un logiciel idéologique qu'il leur faudra, à terme, renouveler.0Diagnostic lucide et sans concession, ce livre est aussi le savant exposé des moyens mis en œuvre par les deux camps idéologiques pour imposer leur hégémonie. (shrink)

Partly because physicians can “never say never,” partly because of the seduction of modern technology, and partly out of misplaced fear of litigation, physicians have increasingly shown a tendency to undertake treatments that have no realistic expectation of success. For this reason, we have articulated common sense criteria for medical futility. If a treatment can be shown not to have worked in the last 100 cases, we propose that it be regarded as medically futile. Also, if the treatment fails (...) to restore consciousness or alleviate total dependence on intensive care, we propose such treatment be judged futile. This definition provides clear end points and encourages the profession to review data from the past and perform, prospective clinical studies that not only report treatments that work but also treatments that do not work. We have also argued that, in a variety of settings, physicians have no ordinary ethical obligation to offer futile interventions. Although physicians should inform, and discuss all decisions to withhold or withdraw medical treatments with patients, they need not obtain the patient's permission to desist from futile interventions. (shrink)

This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of the seductive force of their use of empirical forms of display. Green living experiments, which are conducted in the intimate setting of the home and reported on blogs, complicate this understanding, insofar (...) as they seek to format socio-material practices as sites of involvement. This has implications for how we conceive of the relations between public involvement and everyday material practices. While the latter are often located outside the public sphere, green living experiments extend the publicity genre of `being intimate in public' to things. It also follows that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement. (shrink)

Agricultural Big Data analytics (ABDA) is being proposed to ensure better farming practices, decision-making, and a sustainable future for humankind. However, the use and adoption of these technologies may bring about potentially undesirable consequences, such as exercises of power. This paper will analyse Brey’s five distinctions of power relationships (manipulative, seductive, leadership, coercive, and forceful power) and apply them to the use agricultural Big Data. It will be shown that ABDA can be used as a form of manipulative power to (...) initiate cheap land grabs and acquisitions. Seductive power can be exercised by pressuring farmers into situations they would not have otherwise chosen (such as installing monitors around their farm and limited access to their farm and machinery). It will be shown that agricultural technology providers (ATPs) demonstrate leadership power by getting farmers to agree to use ABDA without informed consent. Coercive power is exercised when ATPs threaten farmers with the loss of ABDA if they do not abide by the policies and requirements of the ATP or are coerced to remain with the ATP because of fear of legal and economic reprisal. ATPs may use ABDA to determine willingness-to-pay rates from farmers, using this information to force farmers into precarious and vulnerable positions. Altogether, this paper will apply these five types of power to the use and implementation of ABDA to demonstrate that it is being used to exercise power in the agricultural industry. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on one member in particular of the anthropocenic triad Earth – technology – humankind, namely the current form of human subjectivity that characterizes humankind in the Anthropocene. Because knowledge, desire and behavior are always embedded in a particular form of subjectivity, it makes sense to look at the current subjective structure that embeds knowledge, desire and behavior. We want to move beyond the common psychological explanations that subjects are unable to correctly assess the consequences of their current (...) technological lifestyle or unable to change their lifestyle because well-intended behavior is modified by factors such as laziness, lack of knowledge, seduction by convenience, etc. Instead, we will argue from a philosophical point of view that transcendental illusions play a central role in a contemporary account of subjectivity. Consumerism is considered as a means of not becoming a subject and framed in a profound ambivalence at the heart of our acting against better knowledge. We appeal to collective transcendental conditions of subjectivity in the Anthropocene in terms of illusions without owners – a term borrowed from Robert Pfaller’s work on interpassivity. Central in our account is the idea that illusions without owners are the conditions of possibility for the disconnection between knowledge and behavior – the characteristic par excellence of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Themes of mastery, domination and power are familiar to any scholar of modern technology. Science is commonly cast as enabling the technological control over both the natural and physical worlds. Indeed, Francis Bacon famously equated scientific knowledge with power itself—stating that ‘knowledge itself is a power’. Bacon’s now ubiquitous phrase—commonly repeated as the banal ‘knowledge is power’—was an attempt to combat three heresies in scriptural interpretation by asserting the conjunction between biblical knowledge and divine power. Opening his critique of (...) the heresies he states: ‘You err, not knowing the scriptures nor the power of God’. In this sense the equation made between knowledge and power is of cosmic significance for Bacon in that knowledge is fundamentally associated with divine power. This image of scientific knowledge, method and rationality is deeply seductive. In this Baconian mode scientific method is irreducibly associated with human mastery over natural systems and the material world. In this image science and technology are defined as a kind of power over the physical world—the power of knowledge, method and the logos over nature, myth and irrationality. In its original Latin sense—ipsa scientia potestas est—the word that translates in English as simply power is a in fact a specific type of power. Potestas is defined as ‘power over’—with particular resonances with political and juridical traditions in Roman law. That is, knowledge is equated not simply with personal capacity. Rather, knowledge produces the power of mastery, domination and coercion... (shrink)

Transhumanists would have humanity's creation of posthumanity be our governing aim. Susan B. Levin challenges their overarching commitments regarding the mind, brain, ethics, liberal democracy, knowledge, and reality. Her critique unmasks their notion of humanity's self-transcendence via science and technology as pure, albeit seductive, fantasy.

Copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of … Trent Reznor’s formula sounds so much more exciting and seductive than two millennia-old formula of representation and identity also known as A=A. Oversubscribed to central perspective, concerned with clarity and distinctness too content with the content of the image and strongly bonded with its apparatus, photography of the past century repeatedly failed to see the invisible, still acting as a copy of some ideal original, assuming (...) this role from painting. If the painting managed to free itself from representation, what can photography do? With new technologies of image production and dissemination, the pillars of the image of thought begin to crack, with identity and recognition losing the centre stage to difference and repetition. Through the emergence of the ability to photograph everywhere, automated camera and ubiquitous digital dissemination of images, photography is suddenly revealed as the medium of a copy, of uncountable recurrences of the same, and with all of its subjects and objects becoming simulacra, rendering only difference as real and originary. (shrink)

Copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of … Trent Reznor’s formula sounds so much more exciting and seductive than two millennia-old formula of representation and identity also known as A=A. Oversubscribed to central perspective, concerned with clarity and distinctness too content with the content of the image and strongly bonded with its apparatus, photography of the past century repeatedly failed to see the invisible, still acting as a copy of some ideal original, assuming (...) this role from painting. If the painting managed to free itself from representation, what can photography do? With new technologies of image production and dissemination, the pillars of the image of thought begin to crack, with identity and recognition losing the centre stage to difference and repetition. Through the emergence of the ability to photograph everywhere, automated camera and ubiquitous digital dissemination of images, photography is suddenly revealed as the medium of a copy, of uncountable recurrences of the same, and with all of its subjects and objects becoming simulacra, rendering only difference as real and originary. (shrink)

Here is a mystery: in 1939, when the Hollywood Studio System, at the peak of its power, produced such films as Gone with the Wind, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Wuthering Heights, the movies' number-one box-office attraction was not Gable, Garbo, Wayne, Garland, Stewart, or Olivier. In 1939, 1940, and 1941, the most popular performer in the American cinema was Mickey Rooney, who owed his success primarily to a low-budget MGM series that concentrated (...) on his character, Andy Hardy. Here is another mystery: at some point in the past decade, film studies, once the most innovative of the humanities disciplines, began to harden into a catechism of predictable questions and answers. By committing itself exclusively to rational critique, film studies left itself overmatched by the enormously popular, seductive, and enigmatic representations that constitute the movies. And by eschewing experimentation with the forms of criticism, film studies ironically cut itself off from the new methods of research and writing prompted by the twentieth century's revolution in communications technologies. Robert Ray's book about Andy Hardy proposes that alternative ways of thinking and writing about the movies can be derived from the humanities' equivalent of science's pure research--the avant-garde arts. Drawing on the Surrealist tradition, with its use of games, chance, fragments, anecdotes, and collage, Ray invents for film studies new forms of research that imitate the cognitive habits encouraged by photography, computers, and the cinema itself. In doing so, he reveals that even the Andy Hardy movies, a routine product of the Hollywood Studio System, were, after all, rich and mysterious. (shrink)

The revised edition of Subject to Ourselves, a lively and provocative book that was a leader on its topic in England, uses psychoanalytic theory as the basis for a fresh reassessment of the nature of modernity and postmodernism. Analyzing changing experiences of selfhood, desire, interpersonal relations, culture and globalization, the author develops a novel account of postmodernity that supplants current understandings of "fragmented selves." Subject to Ourselves includes a diverse set of case studies, including the power of fantasy in military (...) violence and war, the debate over sexual seduction in psychoanalysis, and the cultural uses of media and new information technologies. The book will be essential reading for students and professionals of social and political theory, psychoanalytic studies, psychology and cultural studies, as well as those with an interest in the modernity/postmodernity debate. Praise for the First Edition: 'This book not only fills an important gap in the literature, for it summarises a debate that is scattered across a decade of rather difficult texts, but also offers a resolution that is sensible and grounded in the best current thinking. It will be widely read by graduate students, faculty, and professionals in the humanities and social sciences.' Choice 'This is an informative and enjoyable book, which will be of use to students and academics...It is accessibly written and provides useful summaries of the different theories and debates in cultural and psychoanalytic theory. Recommended.' Radical Philosophy. (shrink)

Unnatural Horizons presents a selective history of the last five centuries of landscape architecture at the intersection of poetics and science, rhetoric and technology, and philosophy and politics. It investigates the relations between garden aesthetics and metaphysics, discussing issues similar to those raised by Weiss's critically acclaimed Mirrors of Infinity. The Western garden has always served as a setting for music, dance, theater, sculpture, and architecture, as well as the minor arts of meditative contemplation and erotic seduction. The history (...) of landscape architecture is therefore inextricable from the histories of the other arts, and must be studied from an interdisciplinary and polycultural point of view. Some of the topics included in this book are the influence of neo-Platonic philosophy on the Italian Renaissance garden, erotic fantasies and the 18th-century libertine garden, the contrast between Thoreau's romantic notion of virgin nature and changes in perception due to increasing speed and mechanization, and the limits of landscape architecture as art form in 20th-century gardens. (shrink)

This essay addresses the violence of the digital world through its relationship to the visuality of noise and how it shapes the image of thought. Noting how deep and contemplative silence is integral to any creative and critical process, it fleshes out the ways the hyper-technologization of life is throwing us into an immersive abyss. This represents another indicator in the digital colonization of the human condition, through which the poetic is being completely appropriated by a technological vision for (...) species being. Calling for a revival in attentive silence, it draws upon literary thinkers and artists, to move beyond the mimetic understanding for art and reveal the violent depths of digitalization and its total noise seduction which ultimately devour its own content. Over-stimulation thus becomes an audible clamor for lives lost within a digital trace; lives which no longer find they are able to cast any meaningful shadow. (shrink)

MARINA PAOLA BANCHETTI-ROBINO is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and zoosemiotics. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Synthese, Husserl Studies, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and The Review of Metaphysics. She has also contributed essays to The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy (1997), Feminist Phenomenology (2000), and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial (...) Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (2006). She co-edited Philosophies of the Environment and Technology (1999) and is currently working on a book-length project entitled The Birth of Science Out of the Spirit of Myth: A Historico-Phenomenological Re-Examination of the Crisis of the European Sciences. BERNARD BOXILL was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1971. He has published numerous articles, a book, Blacks and Social Justice (1992), and is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ED BRANDON was born and educated in England, studying philosophy and linguistics at The University of York, England, and later philosophy at The University of Oxford with the late John Mackie. After teaching in Sierra Leone and briefly in England, he went to teach philosophy of education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1978. From 1992 he has been attached to a policy unit of the Vice-Chancellery, based at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, where he has been assisting since 2000 with a new major in philosophy. His academic work can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/personalpage.html CAROLYN CUSICK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of the Phenomenology Roundtable. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology, Africana philosophy, and phenomenology. LEWIS GORDON is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Laura H. Carnell Professor, the most distinguished chair, at Temple University, where he holds appointments in philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies and directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). CLEVIS HEADLEY is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master's in Liberal Studies. Professionally, he serves as the Vice-President and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in Analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege. PAGET HENRY is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and the co-editor of C. L. R. James' Caribbean. Professor Henry also serves as the editor of the C. L. R. James Journal, and has published numerous articles on the political economy of the Caribbean as well as on African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. ESIABA IROBI is Associate Professor of International Theatre/Performance Studies at Ohio University, Athens. His groundbreaking book: A Theatre for Cannibals: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1441 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, in 2007. He has been invited to be an External Resident Fellow at the prestigious Dartmouth College Humanities Institute for the 2007-2008 academic year. CHIKE JEFFERS is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. His interests are in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. He is originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CATHERINE JOHN is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press and UWI Press in 2003. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature and culture and her current book project is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She spends her summer working in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica helping with a summer school for children and participating in the community's emancipation celebration. KENNETH KNIES is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus are phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is also a contributing editor for Political Affairs magazine. EDIZON LEN is a photographer and coordinator of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2006, he was curator of the photo exhibit "The Color of the Diaspora" presented at the Cultural Center of the Catholic University of Ecuador and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently completing his doctorate at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar with a focus on Maroon thought. REKHA MENON is Associate Professor of Art History at State University of New York, Buffalo State. She is the author of Seductive Aesthetics of Post Colonialism (forthcoming). Her area of research focuses on current philosophical investigations in colonial and neocolonial aspects of Indian art, artistic/cultural practices and philosophies and their relationship to Western arts and philosophies. Her manuscripts under review are: Ashamed of Our Nakedness, Is There Ever a Naked Body? Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Expressive Aesthetics and Insatiable Desire. MICHAEL R. MICHAU is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, and during the 2006-2007 school year, a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies and Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He is the co-founder and co-secretary of the North American Levinas Society. CHARLES W. MILLS is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). MABOGO P. MORE is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has published articles on African philosophy and social and political philosophy in a number of academic journals, such as South African Journal of Philosophy, Dialogue and Universalism, Alternation, Theoria, and African Journal of Political Science. MARILYN NISSIM-SABAT, Ph.D., M.S.W. is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Lewis University. Dr. Nissim-Sabat is also a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the author of numerous book chapters and papers in the fields of philosophy (Husserlian phenomenology), psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical race theory. Citations of her works can be found on her website: marilynnissim-sabat.com. FREDERICK OCHIENG'-ODHIAMBO is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Coordinator of the discipline at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. His major research areas are African philosophy and social philosophy. He has published several articles on philosophic sagacity. IVAN PETRELLA is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is author of The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Orbis Books, 2005) as well as co-editor of the series Reclaiming Liberation Theology (SCM Press) RICHARD PITHOUSE is a research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, 2006). SATHYA RAO is Assistant Professor in French translation at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research fields include: theory of translation, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, discourses on Africa, and Francophone cinema and literature. He has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and written chapters in several collective books such as: De l'Ecrit Africain a l'Oral le Phenomene Graphique Africain, Simon Battestini (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006) and Thèorie-rèbellion. Un Ultimatum, Gilles Grelet (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005). He has a co-edited a book on Francophone African cinema L'Afrique fait son cinema (Montreal: Memoires d'encrier, forthcoming). Sathya Rao is vice-president of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), member of the Canadian Association of Translatology (CATS), coordinator of the research team Poexil, and Secretary of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is co-founder of an online journal Alternative Francophone. CATHERINE WALSH is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean Diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crìtico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), "Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference," in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) and "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes," Cultural Studies (forthcoming). KRISTIN WATERS has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her anthology Enlightened Conversations: Women and Men Political Theorists (Blackwell, 2000) challenges political theorists to be more inclusive of race and gender in their research and teaching. Her book Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol Conaway (University of Vermont Press, forthcoming), addresses the varied intellectual traditions of black women's thought that spans more than two hundred years in North America. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University. (shrink)

The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they (...) can induce us to terminate our inquiries too early — before we spot the flaws in the system. How might the sense of clarity be faked? Let’s first consider the object of imitation: genuine understanding. Genuine understanding grants cognitive facility. When we understand something, we categorize its aspects more easily; we see more connections between its disparate elements; we can generate new explanations; and we can communicate our understanding. In order to encourage us to accept a system of thought, then, an epistemic manipulator will want the system to provide its users with an exaggerated sensation of cognitive facility. The system should provide its users with the feeling that they can easily and powerfully create categorizations, generate explanations, and communicate their understanding. And manipulators have a significant advantage in imbuing their systems with a pleasurable sense of clarity, since they are freed from the burdens of accuracy and reliability. I offer two case studies of seductively clear systems: conspiracy theories; and the standardized, quantified value systems of bureaucracies. (shrink)

This article aims at making a case for the role of seduction in existential education, that is, education that focuses on the pupil’s life choices. First, the article attempts to show that the relationship between the teacher and the pupil can be understood as a form of seduction. Secondly, the article examines how such a relationship functions in practice. Thirdly, the article warns against dangerous aspects related to seduction, and lastly, the article offers five conditions for how (...) seduction can be used in a justifiable manner in existential education. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s metaphor of seduction suggests that language catches philosophers in the trap of metaphysics. Nietzsche uses the poetic powers of language to fight against this metaphysical language. However, his use of the metaphor of truth as a woman seems to seduce him back in metaphysics. Metaphors become seductive because of their rhetorical and performative power. One must therefore be wary of the seduction of metaphors when attempting at revaluating the metaphysics of language. Hélène Cixous undertakes such a task, (...) using a poetic language in order to escape the metaphysical dualisms embedded in language without falling back into its traps. (shrink)

By meshing psychology with literary analysis, this book inspires us to view the reading of fictional works as an emotional and seductive affair between reader and writer. Arguing that current teaching practices have contributed to the current decline in the study of literature, Jean-François Vernay's plea brings a refreshing perspective by seeking new directions and conceptual tools to highlight the value of literature. Interdisciplinary in focus and relevant to timely discussions of the vitality between emotion and literary studies, particularly within (...) the contexts of psychology, affect studies, and cognitive studies, this book will open up a space in which the formation of our emotions can be openly examined and discussed. Jean-François Vernay has published extensively in the field of Literary Studies both in French and in English. His books, Water from the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch andA Brief Take on the Australian Novel, focus on Australian fiction. Carolyne Lee is a Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published four books, the latest being Our Very Own Adventure. (shrink)

On the first page of 1984, Winston Smith is confronted with several posters featuring the face of Big Brother and the famous sentence, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” This may not seem like a promising way to seduce someone, but the seduction of Winston Smith by Big Brother in 1984 is a most unusual love story. I call it a seduction because Winston’s mind and heart are slowly won over in the aptly-named Ministry of Love. Moreover, in the (...) final scene of the novel, Winston gazes, with tears in his eyes, up at Big Brother on the telescreen. The last sentence of the book states, simply, “He loved Big Brother.” How does Big Brother seduce Winston Smith? He certainly does not employ stereotypical methods. Big Brother is not particularly sexy, and his incessant angry shouting does not seem calculated to foster adoration. On top of that, Winston never meets Big Brother in person. His only access is through media: posters, stories, and the telescreen. We all know that it’s hard to maintain a long-distance relationship. Long-distance seduction is even more challenging. So how does Big Brother manage it? To answer this question, I use the theory of seduction first articulated by the philosopher John Forrester (1990, p. 42), who argues that “the first step in a seductive maneuver could be summed up as, ‘I know what you’re thinking.’”. (shrink)

La séduction est une constante de la relation humaine. Elle est à la fois prise de pouvoir sur l’autre et bénéfice narcissique pour le séducteur, qu’elle conforte dans l’estime qu’il a de lui-même. La séduction appartient aux deux sexes, mais, lorsqu’on cherche dans la littérature des exemples de séduction, on trouve curieusement plus de séducteurs que de séductrices. À partir d’exemples littéraires, l’auteur tente de définir les voies et les moyens de la séduction. Transgression et perversion avec Don Juan, plaisir (...) et instinct avec Casanova, stratégie et ruse avec Valmont. Sans oublier les plans élaborés de la carte du tendre, héritière au XVII e siècle de l’amour courtois du Moyen Âge, et la méthode très sophistiquée de séduction exposée par le philosophe danois Soeren Kierkegaard dans Le journal d’un séducteur. La séduction est de tous les temps et de toutes les époques. Organiquement liée à la sexualité, elle est « l’art des préliminaires ». (shrink)

La séduction est un phénomène universel, présent en toute relation, notamment en toute action thérapeutique, où son analyse s’impose. La séduction narcissique et son emprise entraînent diverses réactions défensives, crises et ruptures, notamment annulation du désir sexuel chez l’un ou l’autre partenaire, du fait de la menace d’assujettissement et d’atteinte identitaire. C’est à ce niveau profond, d’accès difficile, que doit se situer l’analyse de l’intervention thérapeutique.