scholarly journals “Living Document”: From Documents to Documentality, from Mimesis to Performative Indexicality

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Day
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Scientific Paper ◽  
Content Representation ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
Relationship Of

In this article, in distinction to documentation as an epistemic understanding of documents, I will discuss the epistemology of documentality as an indexical theory of documental functions, which I will develop through Bruno Latour’s notion of information. This notion of indexicality is different than Suzanne Briet’s notion of indexicality (which I have discussed elsewhere (Briet, 2006)). I will begin this paper with an historical problem that illustrates the issues of viewing documents as content representation. This is the problem identified by Vincent Debaene (Debaene, 2014) in early and mid-twentieth century French field anthropology of the “two book” phenomenon, which attempted to address a perceived epistemic distance between lived experience and its representation through scientific documents. The solution to this problem of presence and representation was the writing and publication by French anthroplogists of a second, more literary, document after the production of the scientific paper or book, which supposedly represented the experience of the anthropologist and the group under study more fully. I will argue that both texts, however, followed genre conventions and practices, which are neither more or less faithful to an original experience. I will argue that the notion of an original experience reflected in the content of the text misses the performatively indexical relationship of text to world and the role that this plays in scientific and other forms of documentality. In short, what Vincent Debaene identified as the French anthropologists’ quest for producing a “living documents,” which closes the gap between life and documental representation, is a Quixotic task, since the problem is not real but rather is a product of the epistemology of re-presentation, which forecloses from our understanding what really happens with scientific and other documents.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

The Gallic Singularity and the Royal Mistress

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realm

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.

The Only Wonderful Things

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa J. Homestead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Southwest ◽  
Advertising Agency ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Park Avenue ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
First Time

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison James
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Twentieth Century French Literature ◽  
A Site ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This book studies the documentary impulse that plays a central role in twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on nonfiction narratives, it analyzes the use of documents—pieces of textual or visual evidence incorporated into the literary work to relay and interrogate reality. It traces the emergence of an enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage with current events or the historical archive. Writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, but also reveal its constructed and mediated nature and integrate it as a voice within a larger composition. This ambivalent documentary imagination, present in works by Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano (among others), shapes the relationship of literature to visual media, testimonial discourses, and self-representation. Far from turning away from realism in the twentieth century, French literature often turns to the document as a site of both modernist experiment and engagement with the world.

Ethics of Information Technology in the Context of a Global Worldview

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-41
Author(s):  
Ibraim Didmanidze ◽  
Irma Bagrationi
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Digital Computer ◽  
Scientific Paper ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Human Spirit ◽  
Modern Information Technology ◽  
Modern Information ◽  
Cultural Contradictions

The present scientific paper outlines in today’s contempo­rary world - where everything is as it seems at first glance, subordinated to the economy, technology and politics are essentially ruled by ethics, value attitudes, which in that or otherwise find embodiment for purposes activities. After all, the question of goals, intentions is the question about values. The paper underlines that modern information technology has sharpened the problem of the values of the human spirit and choice further path of our world civilization. Everyone remembers the 20th century with its socio-cultural contradictions. And the scale of the achievements, and the scale of destruction committed by people in the twentieth century, incomparable with any other times in its history. The present paper emphasizes that if we want to keep human moral values in the information sphere, then is the technology itself sufficient for this, creating suitable programs forcing save them? Of course, working in networks and not consider off-grid the laws impossible. The paper concludes that what will this process lead to, hard to say. One thing is clear now: interacting with a digital computer, we inevitably become different. Society becomes others. And to regret it is nostalgia for past, it is sweet - meaningless. Like us modern peace or not - but this is reality life, and of them desirable proceed if we want to impact on construction our future

Afghanistan Enters the Twenty-first Century

Afghanistan ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Barfield
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Community ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
National Government ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter looks at the first decade of the twenty-first century in Afghanistan. As the twentieth century ended, ever-larger numbers of Afghans had become caught up in political and military struggles from which they had been previously isolated. Whether as fighters, refugees, or just victims of war and disorder, few escaped the turmoil that roiled the country. Ethnic and regional groups in Afghanistan had become politically and militarily empowered, reversing the process of centralization that had been imposed by Amir Abdur Rahman. Yet when the international community set about creating the new Afghan constitution, it did not start afresh but attempted to restore the institutions of old. This brought to the surface long-simmering disputes about the relationship of the national government to local communities, the legitimacy of governments and rulers, and the relationship that Afghanistan should have with the outside world.

From Home to Hospital

2021 ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Agnes Arnold-Forster
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Cancer Patients ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Patient Voice ◽  
Middlesex Hospital ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter explores the senses and emotions that attended living with and dying from cancer in the early nineteenth century. The archives of The Middlesex Hospital consist of registers of cancer patients from 1792 through to the twentieth century, and a potted selection of casebooks. This chapter, therefore, tells the stories of sixty patients from 1805 to 1836. From these case notes, flesh and blood can be added to the lived experience of cancer and go some way towards recovering the patient voice. We can follow in their footsteps from home to hospital, and in multiple literal and metaphorical ways appreciate the distances they travelled in their ‘cancer journeys’.

‘Even If You Don’t Want to Drink, You Still Have to Drink’

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Invented Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers the history of alcohol in Nuosu Yi society in relation to the formal codification of a Yi heritage of alcohol-related culture, and the question of alcohol in Yi health. The relationship of newly invented tradition to older practice and thought is often obscure in studies that lack historical perspective. Examining the historical narratives associated with the exposition of a Yi heritage of alcohol, this study reveals that those narratives are woven from a tapestry of threads with histories of their own, and they therefore shape present-day heritage work. After a brief overview of ideas about alcohol in contemporary discourses on Yi heritage, the chapter then analyses historical texts to argue that many of these ideas are remarkably similar to ones that emerged in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century contact between Yi and Han communities.

scholarly journals Transnational Practices and Emotional Belonging among Early 20th-Century Greek Migrants in the United States

Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Margarita Dounia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Village Community ◽  
Greek Migrants ◽  
Private Collections

This article aims at studying transnational families dispersed among Greece and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. It examines the ways in which transnationalism was a common way of being, acting and feeling strongly associated with the available “technologies” of those times, namely photographs, letters and private financial and judicial records. The focus is purposefully micro-historical, analyzing the private collections of two families in a small mountainous village community of the Greek south. Its purpose is to manifest the ways in which transnational families communicated, exchanged items, thoughts and emotions, fulfilled economic obligations and marital aspirations and, overall, created “proxy” transnational spaces. At the same time, shifting the focus to individuals, it aims at presenting the diversities of transnationalism as a lived experience, as unfolded in the personal records of migrants and their kin. Further, it explores transnationalism as a holistic, multi-faceted and all-encompassing ground, with its dynamics influencing not only migrants, but also their families and societies back in the homeland.

Do Not Forbid Nietzsche to Minors: On Deleuze's Symptomatological Thought

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 552-566
Author(s):  
Paolo Vignola
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
The Core ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Relationship Of

The paper aims to describe the stakes of a Nietzschean influence on Deleuze's reflections on the transcendental and conversely to highlight the Deleuzian operation of politicising Nietzsche by ‘minorising’ him. In order to further understand such a complex relationship of becoming between Deleuze and Nietzsche, the first objective of the paper is to focus on active and reactive forces, which seem to be the core of this very relation. Thus, the paper suggests that micropolitics has its conditions of possibility in the Nietzschean corpus and, in particular, in the symptomatology of decadence, resentment and nihilism. In this sense, now the title of the paper reveals its meaning: the whole Deleuzian operation could be summarised as the passage from the criticism and questioning of an image of Nietzsche ‘forbidden to minors’ (especially for its presumed political dangerousness and alleged discrediting of minorities), typical of the interpretations of the first half of the twentieth century, to a becoming-minor of these very same Nietzschean concepts. It is precisely through such a becoming-minor that Nietzsche's diagnosis and concepts are translated in a political and emancipatory key, in order to give power to minorities.

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