scholarly journals Tracing the Action of Technical Objects in an Ethnography: Vinyls in Beijing

2022 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Basile Zimmermann

To do ethnography implies dealing with the agency of technical objectsi. The aim of this paper is to share a few ideas on how to tackle the one of vinyls in the particular activity that is the mix of a disc jockey. To do so, I first provide a general picture of the work of Xiao Deng, a Chinese disc jockey I observed in Beijing between 2003 and 2004. Then I present three observations of specific events that occured during that period which, I believe, bring into light not only some specificities of the agency of the technical object “vinyl” but also useful information about how one can take into account the agency of objects when doing ethnography.

Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Epongse Nkealah ◽  
Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji

Ideas of nationalisms as masculine projects dominate literary texts by African male writers. The texts mirror the ways in which gender differentiation sanctions nationalist discourses and in turn how nationalist discourses reinforce gender hierarchies. This article draws on theoretical insights from the work of Anne McClintock and Elleke Boehmer to analyse two plays: Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon by Bole Butake and Gilbert Doho and Hard Choice by Sunnie Ododo. The article argues that women are represented in these two plays as having an ambiguous relationship to nationalism. On the one hand, women are seen actively changing the face of politics in their societies, but on the other hand, the means by which they do so reduces them to stereotypes of their gender.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.


Author(s):  
Hugh H. Benson
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

This chapter presents a reading of Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. These dialogues, in which Plato depicts the weeks leading up to Socrates’s last day, are replete with various philosophical explorations. Among those explorations is the question of how to live our lives. On the one hand, Socrates is clear and straightforward. We should live the examined life—making logoi and examining ourselves and others in order to determine whether we are as wise as we think we are, and we should live the virtuous life. This is how Socrates lives his life. On the other hand, the examined life undercuts, or at least should undercut, the confidence with which he seeks to live the virtuous life. It may help bring some stability to the general principles by which he lives his life, but it can do so only defeasibly and without certainty.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-360
Author(s):  
Antonio Fábregas ◽  
Rafael Marín

AbstractThe goal of this article is to discuss the nature of so-called perfective adjectives in Spanish (desnudo ‘naked,’ suelto ‘loose’). We do so through a discussion of the problem that participles are blocked by perfective adjectives in some contexts (Dejó la habitación {limpia / ∗limpiada} ‘He left the room {clean / ∗cleaned}). We will argue that perfective adjectives contain in their internal structure a StateP that can contextually be interpreted as a result state; this head has morphological, syntactic and semantic effects, and makes the structure spelled out by the perfective adjective identical to the one associated with a small participle, with the result that a principle of lexical economy blocks the participial morphology in situations where only the small participle is allowed.


1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.


1925 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Otto Glaser

1. For the heart rate in Pterotrachea coronata, intermediate temperatures disclose a thermal increment of 11,200 ±. This value is identical with the one reported by Crozier and Stier for the lamelli-branch, Anodonta. In the pteropod, Tiedemannia neapolitana the same temperatures typically reveal in the heart rate a µ value of 16,200 ± This agrees quantitatively with 16,300 found by Crozier and Stier for the heart of the slug, Limax maximus. 2. At high temperatures the average value of µ for Pterotrachea is 7,300: for Tiedemannia, 7,400. The corresponding averages at the lower limits are 22,000 and 23,000. 3. The great variability found near the edges of the temperature field are explicable in two ways. During intermissions characteristic of high temperatures and occurring also at low, we can assume a restorative process; while at both the upper and lower limits we may, in addition, find that reactions assume control which under ordinary circumstances never do so. Special evidence indicates that the highest temperatures employed, 27°C., and the lowest, 4°C., caused no irreversible changes in mechanism. 4. The theoretical analysis of the experimental facts makes use of Meyerhof's conception of carbohydrate metabolism and projects the cyclical nature of rhythm into the substrate of control. Assuming as a source of energy an original supply of material O, the value of 22,000 ± is assigned provisionally to a mobilization hydrolysis while 11,200 ± and 16,000 ± are attached to oxidative reactions influenced respectively by OH' and possibly Fe, or some other catalyst. The lowest value, 7,300 ± is assumed to indicate a synthetic process (lactic acid → glycogen?), possibly limited by CO2 excretion. In the present state of our knowledge, this distribution and interpretation seems to account reasonably for the experimental facts, but until we know more about the neurogenic controls, is entitled to rank only as an hypothesis.


Human Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 512-517
Author(s):  
Barry Allen

AbstractWe see new technologies changing how we live, and seemingly set to do so at a rising pace. How should we describe these changes, and what exactly is changing? I discuss the theory of technical change in Simondon, On the Modes of Existence of the Technical Object. Once we understand precisely what sort of change qualifies as “technical,” we see that the changes in question today have little to do with technology as such, more with a new infrastructure for its deployment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Naemi Holm

This article presents a theoretical view on culturally embedded thinking and action in encounters between patient and health professional. A key point of the analysis indicates that a highly efficient health sector may entail an implicit duality: on the one hand, the health professional can and often must relate pragmatically to the patient in order to solve problems and do so quickly, while on the other, the professional may be personally challenged when embedded cultural thinking leads to conflicts or dilemmas. This means that a purely pragmatic perspective will be challenged when such conflicts arise. The article looks at interrelated concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘prejudice’ and ‘meaning’ in order to shed light on the presuppositions that are brought into the cultural encounter between patient and health professional. This kind of analysis will hopefully contribute to a raised awareness of what is actually – apart from pragmatic problem solving – going on in such encounters. The conceptual framework used in this article primarily draws on the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, which is contrasted with the pragmatic perspective from the American philosopher Richard Rorty.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Morgan ◽  
Joshua A. Solomon

AbstractIt is usually assumed that sensory adaptation is a universal property of human vision. However, in two experiments designed to measure adaptation without bias, we have discovered a minority of participants who were unusual in the extent of their adaptation to motion. One experiment was designed so that targets would be invisible without adaptation; the other, so that adaptation would interfere with target detection. In the first, participants adapted to a spatial array of moving Gabor patches. On each trial the adapting array was followed by a test array in which but all of the test patches except one were identical to their spatially corresponding adaptors; the target moved in the opposite direction to its adaptor. Participants were required to identify the location of the changed target with a mouse click. The ability to do so increased with the number of adapting trials. Neither search speed nor accuracy was affected by an attentionally-demanding conjunction task at the fixation point during adaptation, suggesting low-level (pre-attentive) sites in the visual pathway for the adaptation. However, a minority of participants found the task virtually impossible. In the second experiment the same participants were required to identify the one element in the test array that was slowly moving: reaction times in this case were elevated following adaptation. The putatively weak adapters from the first experiment found this task easier than the strong adapters.


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