The materiality of the letter in Seto oral culture

This article focuses on the concept of letter in oral folklore. The main research material is examples from the older folk songs of Seto, where a letter, a book and other items referring to literacy are mentioned. Texts under consideration are poetical and the meaning conveyed in them is not always very clear. The term letter may be related to a message, paper, book, leaf or other material medium in the songs. The boundary between oracy and literacy is therefore thin, given that letters and writing are often imagined and conveyed in a physical context. Literacy in Seto folk songs is sometimes reflected as part of mythological knowledge and a mythological worldview. The written text or objects carrying it may have magical power. In some songs the writing can also be found on plants, which is interesting from a cross-cultural perspective. Similar motives from the folklore and beliefs of other peoples have been used comparatively to understand the content of the songs under consideration. The song of heavenly cows eating holy plants offers an opportunity to draw intercultural parallels and raises the question about the ethnogenesis of the Seto and their relatedness to different Eurasian peoples further to the east.

Paper in Motion: Communication, Knowledge and Power: Case Studies for an Interdisciplinary Approach

This essay intends to use a series of case studies to exemplify the role of paper as (1) material medium for communication and consequently for the establishment of human communities and institutions, including the normative patterns employed in their administration and the emotional ties that generated and pervaded them, and (2) as a trope that denotes the nature and the function of the information, emotions and values it is used to record and convey. After a survey of the current state of the art, the case studies will illustrate how the different uses and functions of paper determined strategies and methods employed in the administration of the movement of people, ideas, and goods, and in the creation of complex networks (political, economic, religious, and intellectual) across the Mediterranean and beyond. There will be a particular focus upon the circulation of texts and documents involved in the articulation of discursive varieties for the expression of both subjective and collective emotional identities and for the establishment of the norms that regulated their public and social dimensions.

Existing in Discrete States: On the Techno-Aesthetics of Algorithmic Being-in-Time

Against a remarkable hardware oblivion in discussions of algorithmic intelligence, this article insists that algorithmic thought, or abstract computation, cannot be separated from its technological implementation. It requires a material medium for an abstract mechanism to become a procedural event. Temporality is both the condition and the limiting (and irritating) factor in the computational function. ‘Radical’ media archaeology is proposed as a method for such an analysis, and the neologism of techno lógos to describe some aspects of algorithmic reason which only unfold in the moment of its techno-processual coming-into-being. Some core operations, such as the time-discrete rhythm of actual computing algorithms, are discussed, where the ‘tempoReal’ flashes up in computing. In a wider sense, the time-discreteness of digital computing is related to an aesthetics of existence which acknowledges the machine element within human reasoning itself, while at the same time re-actualizing previous cultural techniques of non-narrative chronology. Turing the ‘man’ himself, in the sense of the Turing machine, can be addressed ‘itself’, in its archival sense as a sequence of expressions by symbols.

Critical review of quantum plasmonic models for finite-size media

We provide a critical analysis of some of the commonly used theoretical models to describe quantum plasmons in finite size media. We summarize the standard approach based on a Fano diagonalization and we show explicit discrepancies in the obtained results by taking the limit of vanishing coupling between the electromagnetic field and the material medium. We then discuss the derivation of spontaneous emission in a plasmonic environment, which usually relies on a Green tensor and is based on an incomplete identity. The effect of the missing terms is calculated in a one-dimensional model.

Forensic Iconicity: The Experimental Law’s Whatness in Digital Culture

Thinking about the whatness of the Law in the digital era means to return to question its ontological abyss and its metaphysical violence. The essay rests on the idea that Law, to declare or to command, to condemn or to absolve, needs a material medium of communication that allows its sensible perceptibility. At the same time, the concrete appearances of the Law in the public sphere are partial and paradoxical: they are haunted by an ontological excess that resists against a conclusive form of mundane apprehension. Forensic Iconicity is the expression coined to figuratively depict the structural ambiguity between ostensibility and concealment that marks the Law’s presentialness. The aim of the work is to explore the transmutations and the displacements of the ancient bodies of symbolic representation of the Law up to the current dispersion in algorithmic sequences and digital traces. Moreover, according to the view proposed, the unresolved relationship between the abstract prophecy of Law and its physical precipitate has been captured and explained by the means of different paradigms, moving from political theology to algorithmic angelism.