Colourful Planets

In the Myth of Er, Plato describes the ‘Spindle of Necessity’, a contraption presenting the cosmos as guided by Sirens and Fates, and ascribes different colours to the planets (Rep. 616e-617a). This paper argues that Plato probably used astronomical data for that passage, but possibly gave them a metaphorical sense, and discusses the likelihood of his having used Mesopotamian sources. The second half of the paper studies receptions of and allusions to the image, with context-based astronomical, political, and metaphysical features. Cicero adjusted the image to contemporary astronomy, and to the political function of the cosmic structures in the Somnium Scipionis. His commentator Macrobius emphasizes empirical correctness, but possibly with metaphysical undertones. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses alludes to the image in a portrait of Isis, perhaps to refer to her metaphysical role. Finally, Proclus interprets the Platonic passage as primarily metaphysical, and pointing to truths beyond astronomical phenomena.

Mettere in questione l’ornamento attraverso un approccio morfologico al visibile

The paper investigates the question of the ornament starting from a parallelism between biological- architectural ornaments and decorative-artistic ones. The element of innovation and the emergency of the ornament allow to consider images as if they were living organisms and to highlight their becoming through new forms. Starting from a morphological point of view, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the contemporary morphology, the ornament is strictly connected to the dynamics of forms and to a particular approach to the visible. The ornamental dynamics, according to the binomial form-function, open the dimension of the visible to new perspectives and foreshadow potentially infinite changes. The essay analyzes the consequences in the production of visible forms and in the attribution of meanings, but also the political function of images, with particular reference to the idea of an economy of visible forms.

Beyond verification: Flesh witnessing and the significance of embodiment in conflict news

Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Drawing on examples from the Syrian conflict, we provide an analysis of the narrative strategies through which flesh witnessing acquires truth-telling authority and we reflect on what is gained and lost in the process. western story-telling, we conclude, strategically co-opts the affective dimension of flesh witnessing – its focus on child innocence, heroic martyrdom or the data aesthetics of destruction – and selectively minimizes its urgency by downplaying or effacing the bodies of non-western witnesses. This preoccupation with verification should not be subject to geopolitical formulations and needs to be combined with an explicit acknowledgement of the embodied voices of conflict as testimonies of the flesh whose often mortal vulnerability is, in fact, the very condition of possibility upon which western broadcasting rests.

The “Winnetou Kitsch” and Other Traces of “Americanization”

The starting point for this article is the observation that American cultural influence never waned in socialist Czechoslovakia despite all attempts of the Communist Party to eliminate it and the Communist Party’s seemingly omnipotent position. The study focuses on the relationship between state policies, producers’ interests, and consumers’ demands, a triad more complex than the dichotomy of an “omnipotent” totalitarian regime versus an oppressed society. It describes the distinct phases in managing American cultural influence and illuminates the various interests and factors that contributed to the popularity and spread of “American” cultural goods. As the article shows, the approach of the Communist Party in prioritizing the political function of culture over entertainment or aesthetics facilitated consumers’ interest in cultural imports from abroad, mainly from the US. This interest in American cultural goods, in turn, exerted pressure on producers of culture and intermediaries to satisfy the demand. As a result, the American cultural influence not only survived in Czechoslovakia during the forty years of the Communist rule, but rather intensified and eventually took on a subversive force.

Deleuze and the Digital: On the Materiality of Algorithmic Infrastructures

In his short and often quoted essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Gilles Deleuze famously describes the structures of power in the dawning twenty-first century as driven by ‘machines of a third type, computers’, as novel and predominantly digital infrastructures. In fact, from a Deleuzian perspective the entire ecosystem of the digital transformation can be described as a larger shift in modes of production and the political economy. This essay proposes to read this ‘technological evolution’ as the power of algorithms and their material substance – digital infrastructures that entail a different mode of interaction between humans and technology. In looking at these infrastructures from a materialist position, my essay reconceptualises the digital as the unfolding logic of assemblages that have been shaping a ‘long now’ of technological modernity. In bringing a Deleuzian reading of infrastructures to the study of technology and society, this essay seeks to shed a new light on the political function – and the increasing abstraction – of infrastructures in the realm of the digital.

Divine Warning or Prelude to Secularization? Religion, Politics, and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Turkey

Religion was a major pillar in the government’s pandemic management and featured centrally in a string of public controversies in the course of the coronavirus crisis in Turkey. This article analyzes the role of Islam in the political and social responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey, with a focus on four dimensions: (1) religion as a tool of governance, (2) the regulation of collective religious practices, (3) religious interpretations of the pandemic, and (4) predictions about the future impact of the coronavirus crisis on religion. Based on this analysis, the study concludes that the salience and political function of religion in the course of pandemics are contingent upon the place of religious mobilization in the political repertoire of the ruling party and the balance of power between the government and the religious field, respectively. The government's extensive instrumentalization of religion in pandemic management, on the other hand, is likely to give rise to a political backlash against organized religion.

Temporal Regimes in Kenmu nitchū gyōji (Daily Observances of the Kenmu Era), with annotated translation

This article examines time recording and time practices in Kenmu nitchū gyōji, a medieval document describing daily and monthly routine at the court of Emperor Go-Daigo in the beginning of the fourteenth century. By probing into the text’s chronographic and chronopolitical features, it is shown that Kenmu nitchū gyōji is strongly concerned with temporality, providing an ideal in which court regularities are meant to repeat identically according to a minutely regulated sequential progression. These peculiar temporal characteristics exhibit the text’s political function: by way of a chronological and at the same time cyclical structure, the image of a divine order is provided, thus legitimizing imperial rule.

Signifying the Self: Cultural Trauma and Mechanisms of Memorialization in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Starting from Hirsch and Smith’s concept of a feminist counterhistory and referencing the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this paper undertakes a (re)reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as construction of gendered countermemory. Such an interpretation would enable a recognition of the political function of the novel as an identity matrix of African-American womanhood. Expanding upon the classical, post-Lacanian approach to trauma studies and its post-colonial reconfigurations, I use a poststructuralist framing of collective trauma, and the Saussurian concept of signification, to highlight the struggle for self-determination of an oppressed community as it is signified-upon by its oppressors through violently imposed discourse. I further question the complicity between conventional forms of narration and the hegemony of an external signifier, and I trace this patterned mechanism of aggression within the linguistic and diegetic fabric of the novel, in order to expose Hurston’s literary methodology of collective memorialization and the way it challenges canonical representations of trauma.

Mass Media Occurrence as a Political Career Maker

Ample work in political communication showed that high-level politicians get more media attention than their lower ranking colleagues. With power comes media attention. More than hard work, charisma, or experience, it is the political function performed by politicians that is the crucial factor in explaining how much media attention they receive. But what about the opposite relationship: does media attention also generate power? In this paper, we examine the media path leading to power. Basically, two important career steps of politicians are assessed: becoming a party leader and becoming a minister; we test whether, compared to those who did not make a top career, the politicians who came to take these steps were more prominent in the media before they moved up and became elite politicians. We draw on the case of Belgium here and leverage on a longitudinal automated media content analysis (2000–2020) combined with a data set of 532 national/regional politicians and their careers. The study finds that media occurrences matters for being promoted to a top function in Belgium, more so for becoming a minister than for becoming a party leader. Furthermore, rejecting our initial idea based on political mediatization theories, the influence of media occurrence does not seem to increase through time for both functions.