Features of the Implementation of Decommunization Policy of the Symbolic Space in Local Macrocommunities of Ukraine

The article analyzes the practices of local self-government in Ukraine in the field of decommunization of urban spaces in Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Dnieper. The peculiarities of the implementation of the policy of de-communization of the symbolic space indicate that since 2015, at the level of local macrocommunities, they have become public arenas of interpretations of the past. Their memorial symbolic structure reflects the competition between political actors representing competing commemorative orders. Local self-government practices have acquired their expressive specificity in each of the local macrocommunities. In particular, in Kiev, the policy of local self-government bodies is designated by us as “political”, which is associated with its status as the capital of Ukraine. It was this status that subordinated the symbolic space of local history and the retrospective reverse to historical names. Local authorities in Odessa and Kharkov carried out decommunization with the involvement, in addition to the political, pragmatic (Kharkov) and historical (Odessa) practices of renaming toponyms. Historical practice has become the core of the practice of decommunization of the symbolic space of the Dnieper. At the same time, local governments in all four cities of Ukraine were subjects of political competition (“symbolic struggle”) for the right to form and approve the idea of the legitimate order of the city's symbolic space. By referring to Ukraine's policy in the field of decommunization as one that has elements of symbolic violence, local governments fueled the social tension that accompanied the implementation of this policy.

The Phenomenon of Simone Weil as “Excess” and “Lack” in the Symbolic Structure of Philosophical Language: a Personalist Approach

Simone Weil as a subject of philosophizing is the effect of excess, vacuum, or scarcity in the harmoniously coordinated system of paradigms that make up the indicators of intellectual language. Her concept of “God-absence” (silence) as the negative presence of God in the sacred experience of the atheist is a paradox of meeting with God through a metaphysical break with religious orthodoxy. The article analyzes the synchrony and diachrony of S. Weil’s views from materialism to spiritualism in interdisciplinary discourse outside the linear stages and sectoral fragmentation on the methodological basis of personalism. The author pays special attention to reading S. Weil’s autobiographical essay Waiting for God and her Diaries. In these works, S. Weil as an expression of the semiotic unity of the life and the text describes his own experience of emptiness, the Other, attention, desire, faith, dis-belief, love, encounter with Christ. Analysis of the works of famous philosophers and theologians gives grounds to conclude that the views of S. Weil had an impact on modern psychoanalysis, philosophy of dialogue, critical theory, traditionalism, phenomenology.

The NN’s souls-cult: a case study of catholicism and popular religion in Colombia

This article analyzes the cult of the souls in Purgatory in Puerto Berrío, Colombia, and its relationship with the Catholic Church. Through empirical evidence, it identifies three characteristics of this cult, namely, its relative independence from the Catholic Church, its heterogeneity and its utilitarian character, and compares them with other cases of Latin American popular Catholicism. The particularities of the cult enable an analysis of how popular religion, rather than generating a conflict with the Catholic Church, maintains an ambiguous relationship with it. The case shows that popular religion not only incorporates the symbolic structure of the Catholic Church to legitimize itself, but also that the church tolerates it, contributing to the peaceful coexistence of the popular and the institutionalized. Consequently, this leads believers, instead of adhering to a supposed binary opposition, to shift between popular and institutionalized religion.

Machines driving machines: Deleuze and Guattari’s asignifying unconscious

The psychoanalytic tradition is split. Most marketing theorists work with a linguistic model, treating the unconscious as an extension of conscious language. This article promotes the machinic model of Deleuze and Guattari, which treats the unconscious as asubjective but also asignifying. This means that the unconscious is comprised of colliding forces and their contingent connections, rather than a chain of signification in a wider symbolic structure. There are a small number of machinic or proto-machinic articles in marketing theory, but this article explores how explicating the Deleuzoguattarian model could reconceptualise: (1) the unconscious, (2) its relation to sociomaterial systems, (3) its relation to marketing practice, and (4) the role of critical marketing theory. This article also argues that there is a strategic benefit in searching for complementarities between Deleuze and Guattari, on the one hand, and other psychoanalytic thinkers, on the other. A united front of unconscious understandings would be advantageous in a discipline that lionises conscious choice. As such, this article presents the machinic model as another perspective in the already pluralistic tradition of psychoanalytic marketing theory.

HAPPINESS AS A DOUBLE GESTURE OF A TRIGGER: BREAKING AND CONCEPTING

The background of the study is an existential psychological analysis of the phenomenon of happiness as a state of radical break with the dominant signifiers of symbolic hegemony and, at the same time, voluntary value filling of the formed vacuum in the symbolic structure of a split subject with new meanings corresponding to his self. Research methods: structural psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, semiotics of culture, hermeneutics, philosophical comparative studies, deconstruction and universal ethics, theological methods of correlation between secular and religious models of thinking. Research results: comparison of the positive ontology of happiness in the Eastern Slavic Christian classical thought and the negative ontology of happiness in the Western post-Lacanian postmodernity; the implementation of the synthesis of images of happiness in the ways of thought of the postmodern West and the modern East on the basis of the dialogue of universalism and particularism, traditionalism and neo-modernism, personalism and collectivism. Conclusions: confirmation of the hypothesis of the double nature of happiness as a unity of metaphysical rupture and dialectical synthesis, manifested through the chronotopes of secular and religious cultures, traditions and innovations.

Prácticas significantes: una investigación híbrida sobre la estructura simbólica de la sexualidad masculina=Significant practices: a hybrid research about the symbolic structure of male sexuality

<p align="left"><strong>Resumen</strong></p><p>Este artículo se propone indagar sobre la construcción y funcionamiento de la masculinidad hegemónica en el ámbito de la sexualidad y desde su interacción con el cuerpo de las mujeres. Con dicho objetivo, se recurrirá a una metodología híbrida que tomará fuentes filosóficas, antropológicas, artísticas y estadísticas, prestando especial atención al ámbito contemporáneo español y articulando un discurso crítico que dividirá su propuesta en tres razonamientos principales. El primero, como una breve introducción a los presupuestos simbólicos de la sexualidad masculina. El segundo, problematizando los peligros y paradojas del concepto de libertad sexual en diálogo con la teoría feminista. Y, el último, planteando el consumo de pornografía y el de prostitución como prácticas significantes imprescindibles en el posicionamiento jerárquico supremacista de la masculinidad hegemónica.</p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>This article aims to investigate the construction and functioning of hegemonic masculinity in the field of sexuality and its interaction with the body of women. With this objective, a hybrid methodology will be used together with philosophical, anthropological, artistic and statistical sources, paying special attention to the contemporary Spanish environment and articulating a critical discourse that will divide its proposal into three main arguments. The first one, as a brief introduction to the symbolic presuppositions of male sexuality. The second one, problematizing the dangers and paradoxes of the concept of sexual freedom in dialogue with the feminist theory. And the last one, setting out the consumption of pornography and prostitution as essential significant practices in the supremacist hierarchical positioning of hegemonic masculinity.</p>

Simulating and Predicting Dynamical Systems with Spatial Semantic Pointers

While neural networks are highly effective at learning task-relevant representations from data, they typically do not learn representations with the kind of symbolic structure that is hypothesized to support high-level cognitive processes, nor do they naturally model such structures within problem domains that are continuous in space and time. To fill these gaps, this work exploits a method for defining vector representations that bind discrete (symbol-like) entities to points in continuous topological spaces in order to simulate and predict the behavior of a range of dynamical systems. These vector representations are spatial semantic pointers (SSPs), and we demonstrate that they can (1) be used to model dynamical systems involving multiple objects represented in a symbol-like manner and (2) be integrated with deep neural networks to predict the future of physical trajectories. These results help unify what have traditionally appeared to be disparate approaches in machine learning.

Two kinds of music in B. Poplavsky’s poem Dark Madonna

The article studies the topic of music and its functioning in the poem by B. Poplavsky Dark Madonna. Its motivational and symbolic structure, as well as its composition and intertextual ties with the modernist poetry are considered. The article focuses on the description of the ‘spirit of music’ concept in the poet’s philosophy and its interpretation in the text of the miniature.

Cognitive Modeling of Task Switching in Discretionary Multitasking Based on the ACT-R Cognitive Architecture

Discretionary multitasking has emerged as a prevalent and important domain in research on human–computer interaction. Studies on modeling based on cognitive architectures such as ACT-R to gain insight into and predict human behavior in multitasking are critically important. However, studies on ACT-R modeling have mainly focused on concurrent and sequential multitasking, including scheduled task switching. Therefore, in this study, an ACT-R cognitive model of task switching in discretionary multitasking was developed to provide an integrated account of when and how humans decide on switching tasks. Our model contains a symbolic structure and subsymbolic equations that represent the cognitive process of task switching as self-interruption by the imposed demands and a decision to switch. To validate our model, it was applied to an illustrative dual task, including a memory game and a subitizing task, and the results were compared with human data. The results demonstrate that our model can provide a relatively accurate representation, in terms of task-switching percent just after the subtask, the number of task-switching during the subtask, and performance time depending on the task difficulty level; it exhibits enhanced performance in predicting human behavior in multitasking and demonstrates how ACT-R facilitates accounts of voluntary task switching.