The Value of Curating Music

This article examines the practice of concert organization from an ethical perspective. By examining the field in relation to the notion of value, it explores the processes by which curators produce live acts, and the issues they face when they do so. The central argument traces a trajectory from the material to the immaterial aspects. The first part (Context and Value) shows how financial and cultural matters are embedded into live music production, and frames curatorship as the articulation of their co-dependent relations. The second part (Praxis) explores how music curators breathe value creation in their work context, by comparing interviews with the directors of Venice Biennale Musica, London Contemporary Music Festival, and No-Nation. The third part (Risk and Ethics) introduces risk-taking as a unit of value measurement, and points out the force of the curatorial in its power to confer value.

Elevators as media objects manipulating information in time

We investigate elevators as media. Our central argument is that elevators manipulate information in time. Time manipulation of elevators (movement data + genetic algorithms) produces temporal order. Elevators have become media objects because they produce data that are digitally manipulated to optimize movement. We conducted an empirical study in a multinational corporation that manufactures elevators, including 4 months of field research at multiple locations and interviewed 64 people. We show how time manipulation changes with the information architecture: first, time manipulation took place inside and during the movement of elevators by pushing the buttons. Second, time manipulation took place in the cloud by statistical mathematics. The latest development is toward decentralized social application where elevators as independent media objects manipulate time using genetic algorithms and communicate with each other. We reveal how largely hidden media affects our temporality and argue that media theory should study its implications in contemporary society.

Alternative View of Modernity: The Subaltern Speaks

This article derives from my 2021 ASA presidential address. I examine how sociologists including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and white American sociologists have omitted key determinants of modernity in their accounts of this pivotal development in world history. Those determinants are white supremacy, western empires, racial hierarchies, colonization, slavery, Jim Crow, patriarchy, and resistance movements. This article demonstrates that any accounts omitting these determinants will only produce an anemic and misleading analysis of modernity. The central argument maintains that the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois developed a superior analysis of modernity by analytically centering these determinants. I conclude by making a case for the development of an emancipatory sociology in the tradition of Du Boisian critical sociological thought.

Introduction

The Introduction situates David Jones’s work as a poet–artist within the broader currents of high and late modernism, particularly within the context of a tradition of medievalism in twentieth-century poetry. It draws on Alexander Nagel’s conception of the medieval modern to show how Jones approaches the culture and history of the early Middle Ages as a form of live material open to play and adaptation. The Introduction also reframes our understanding of David Jones’s perception of himself as Anglo-Welsh in relation to changing attitudes to early medieval Welsh (Celtic) and English (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) history over the course of his lifetime. This discussion introduces the monograph’s central argument: as a poet of the medieval modern, Jones plays with and reworks early medieval English histories, narratives, and artefacts in order to challenge the singularity and exceptionalism of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ canon.

Introduction

The introductory chapter sets forth the book’s central argument that the struggle over inequality has been the underlying force driving the unfolding of all human history. This struggle underlies the other presumed primary drivers of history such as technological advances, demographics, group conflict, war, religion, or great men. Three key supporting claims are briefly explored. First, the ultimate driving force for inequality is found in human biology, the fact that the decisive competition that counts for sexually reproducing animal species is success in mating and thereby sending one’s unique set of genes into future generations. Second, because of sexual selection and because humans are social beings, inequality underlies all politics. Third, although physical violence always remains the trump card in creating, maintaining, or increasing inequality, ideology has always been, day to day, the most important inequality-sustaining political weapon. How the book will unfold is then set forth.

Inductive Warrant

But Hertz’s suggestions did not address his original “small metaphysics” conflicts in a credible manner. The alternative resolution that material scientists currently favor supplies an alternative paradigm upon which this book will later elaborate. To this end, the present chapter reviews the intellectual circumstances that Hertz confronted and why they were important to him. He displayed a keen eye for delicate detail in his diagnostic work, in a manner that should serve as a sterling model of conceptual detective work whenever it is wanted. But the depth of his insights has been frequently misunderstood by later generations, largely due to a greatly diminished form of “classical mechanics” that became popular in the twentieth century because of the parochial requirements of quantum theory. Within this reduced setting, Hertz’s motivating problems disappear, not because they have been solved, but because they have been ignored. As an aftereffect, many philosophers writing today confidently believe that they understand what “the worlds of classical mechanics are like,” although these rash presumptions embody a significant degree of simplistic misrepresentation. The present chapter outlines the forgotten background required to appreciate Hertz’s conceptual puzzles as he confronted them. These details are not required for the central argument of the book, but they nicely illustrate the natural contexts from which “small metaphysics” puzzles characteristically emerge within a gradually evolving discourse.

A critical review of the Cabinet Circular on Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Treaty of Waitangi advice to ministers

The New Zealand state developed from a treaty between the British Crown and hapū (sub-tribes) in 1840. The te Reo (Māori language) text and the English version of the agreement are fundamentally different. Breaches of this treaty and tension over how the political relationship between Māori and the Crown should proceed are ongoing. In 2019, the Cabinet Office issued a Circular instructing bureaucratic advisers of the questions they should address when providing advice to ministers on the agreement’s contemporary application. In this article, we use Critical Tiriti Analysis (CTA) – an analytical framework applied to public policies – to suggest additional and alternative questions to inform bureaucratic advice. The article defines CTA in detail and shows how using it in this way could protect Māori rights to tino rangatiratanga (a sovereignty and authority that is not subservient to others) and substantive engagement, as citizens, in the formation of public policy. This article’s central argument is that the Circular reflects an important evolution in government policy thought. However, in showing how the Circular privileges the English version (the Treaty of Waitangi) over the Māori text (Te Tiriti o Waitangi), the article demonstrates how Māori political authority remains subservient to the Crown in ways that Te Tiriti did not intend. We show through the conceptual illustration of the care and protection of Māori children, despite the significant evolution in government thought that it represents, these rights are not fully protected by the Circular. This is significant because it was Te Tiriti, with its protection of extant Māori authority and sovereignty, that was signed by all but 39 of the more than 500 chiefs who agreed to the British Crown establishing government over their own people, but who did not agree to the colonial relationship which may be read into the English version.

Not Yet Uhuru: Aspects of Social Realism in Vonani Bila’s Selected Poetry

This article analyses Vonani Bila’s selected poetry for its ability to produce an ‘air of reality’. The central argument of the article is that Bila embraces an aesthetic of realism, which essentially values unsparing, accurate and sordid representations of the psychological, social and material realities of postcolonial (and democratic) South Africa. Undergirded by the Marxist theory of Social Realism, the qualitative approach and descriptive design, this article purposively selected ten poems from some of the anthologies in which Bila published his poetry, namely; Magicstan Fires, Handsome Jita and Sweep of the Violin. Bila’s poetry can best be situated within the historical contexts that shape his texts, namely; the apartheid era, ideas about capitalism in newly democratic South Africa, the emergence of a vibrant immigrant community in South Africa and idealised notions of achieving equality and prosperity through education in South Africa. This article is mainly a critical analysis, and not a historical account of the apartheid era and democratic dispensation of South Africa. In the analysis, it was noted that Bila’s poetry generally manifests the literary categories of social and psychological realism, respectively. As a social realist, Bila explores the problems of economic inequality and captures the experience of both rural and urban life in a post- and neo-colonial context of South Africa. As a psychological realist, on the other extreme, Bila is concerned with delving beneath the surface of social life to probe the complex motivations and (un)conscious desires that shape his literary personae’s perceptions. The article concludes with the notion that, in his commitment to document the realities of everyday life in South Africa, both at social and psychological dimensions, Bila offers a penetrating insight into the repression, alienation, marginalisation, instabilities, and inequalities that structure post- and neo-colonial South Africa.

Digital Humanism and the Limits of Artificial Intelligence

This chapter is programmatic in style and content. It describes some patterns and one central argument of that, what I take as the view of digital humanism and which we exposed in our book (Nida-Rümelin and Weidenfeld 2018). The central argument regards the critique of strong and weak AI. This chapter does not discuss the logical and metaphysical aspects of digital humanism that I take to be part of the broader context of the theory of reason (Nida-Rümelin 2020, Chaps. VI and VII).

See you on Wall St. Sept 17. Bring Tent: Occupy Wall Street, Framing, and Mobilisation

<p>The phenomenon of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has been widely discussed in the academic and popular discourse. Of its many contributions, the language of the Occupy Movement has had a profound influence on contemporary discussions about inequality – contrasting the ‘99%’ with the ‘1%’ is now a permanent part of the conversation. However, despite this discursive shift, the literature has yet to seriously consider how the ideational elements of OWS influenced its mobilisation. While changing the dominant discourse is an important achievement, mobilising collective action around a cause remains an essential task for social movements. To explain social movement mobilisation, this thesis utilises the framing perspective, which seeks to understand why and how certain ideas are able to inspire or inhibit collective action. By using qualitative analysis of movement texts over time, this thesis has constructed the key frames articulated in selected OWS documents over the course of its serious efforts to mobilise. More specifically, it has examined whether changes in the movement’s use of diagnostic, prognostic, motivational, and identity frames can explain the trajectory of mobilisation. The central argument is that the framing perspective can offer a plausible explanation for the mobilisation of OWS; a correlation between changes in framing and expected changes in mobilisation can be observed. However, while the findings of this thesis fill one important part of the puzzle, in order to corroborate the arguments put forward here future research must consider the way the frames proffered by OWS were actually received and acted (or not acted) upon by potential participants. By doing so, we can not only gain a more perceptive insight into this topical phenomenon, but also improve our understanding of the nature and dynamics of contemporary social movements.</p>