Beyond Weber and Kafka: Conceptualizing a Critical Realist Model of Bureaucracy

Max Weber and Franz Kafka are seminal writers on bureaucracy and administration. While Weber suggests the technical superiority of a bureaucratic “iron cage,” Kafka speaks from within that cage, seeing its repressive rationality as being confounded by recalcitrant citizens searching for freedom. However, if individuals are embedded in a bureaucracy that limits the parameters of actions from which they can choose, how could they ever defy structural control? Articulating the conditions for human liberty, this article uses critical realism to reveal the potential emancipatory nature of bureaucracy as a way out of Kafka’s powerlessness and Weber’s iron cage via citizen engagement.

“And Here We are in the Fairyland” of Children’s Literature: The Case of the French Version of Internatsionalnaya Literatura” (1934)

This article focuses on the issue of La Littérature Internationale, a French version of the multilingual Soviet journal Internatsionalnaya Literatura, which embodied one of the declarations of the First Congress of the Soviet writers on the key role of didacticism in the new literature. The second issue of La Littérature Internationale in 1934 contained a selection of works about children by authors from the USSR, France, United States, and Germany. The aim of this article is to analyze this selection of texts and to determine its function in the literary journal for adults. The author shows the connection of the plot schemes in the selection with the preceding folklore and literary tradition (a folk fairytale and literary Christmas tale, Victorian educational novel, romantic heroic novel). The classic storyline of these works allows us to introduce new themes and plots: re-education and correction, the story of working at the factory and at the mine, shown through the eyes of children as well as the resistance to Hitler’s regime in Germany. The conclusion shows that in this issue, the children’s selection forms a socialist realist model of world literature of a kind. Together with the stories for adults, it sets a pattern for the new universal literature whose plot schemes reflect the main trends in the literature of socialist realism and the anti-fascist literature of the 1930s–1940s.

A Realist Model of Communication Applications for Informational Technology and Artificial Cognitive Systems

The structure of the Shannon-Weaver model of communication (1948) has been the point of departure for the coming communication models that ever since have functioned as a base for developing systems and strategies within all the fields that depend on informational transfer. Attempts to develop the model have not affected its basic structure, or the use of the central concept of information. As it will be argued in this paper, this presents a number of limitations to the development of informational technology and more functional artificial cognitive systems. After contextualizing and adapting a number of central concepts for any theory of communication, the author presents a model of communication that is viable as a foundation for the development of artificial cognitive systems used for functions like natural language-processing, object-recognition and machine-learning.

The Role of Artists' Collectives in Producing State Socialist Art in 1950s Romania the Bottom-Up, Pragmatic Professionalization of State Commissions

This article analyzes the collective basis of the establishment of the Socialist Realist model of production for the fine arts in Romania in the early 1950s. It discusses the unstudied case of the “artists' collectives” (of production) together with other collective forms, such as the collective studios and the guiding commissions. This is an archive-based study of cultural institutionalism of socialist regimes, based on the analysis of under-explored archival sources such as those of the Romanian Artists' Union (UAP) or the Artistic Fund (FP). Focusing on two specific case studies, those of the artists' collectives “Progressive art” and “Th. Aman”, both founded in 1951, it provides more context to the establishment of the socialist model in Romania. The article finds the state assumed definition of art considered the artist as a simple executioner, and the “artists' collectives” participated in eradicating the individuality of the artist, one of the goals of the new socialist model.

Fantastic Laughter in a Socialist-Realist Tradition?

With an aim to shed some light on the regulated yet not necessarily homogenized laughter of the pre-Cultural Revolution Maoist years, this chapter examines the nuanced deployment of laughter in the popular children’s novella The Magic Gourd (Bao hulu de mimi) by the literary humorist Zhang Tianyi (1906–1985) and its eponymous film adaptation by Yang Xiaozhong (1899–1969). Contextualizing these texts both in the larger tradition of modern Chinese literature and culture and in the specific socio-cultural milieu of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, I look into how, without apparently challenging the dominant socialist-realist model, they tactfully relieve the stress between the politically repudiated comic mode of “satire” (fengci) and the purposefully promoted mode of “extolment” (gesong). Whether intended or not, the keen relevance the texts bear to the political and economic hyperboles of the Maoist era adds further ambiguities and ironies to the already layered laughter.

Maximum violation of Wigner inequality for two-spin entangled states with parallel and antiparallel polarizations

The experimental test of Bell’s inequality is mainly focused on Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt (CHSH) form, which provides a quantitative bound, while little attention has been paid to the violation of Wigner inequality (WI). Based on the spin coherent state quantum probability statistics, we in the present paper extend the WI and its violation to arbitrary two-spin entangled states with antiparallel and parallel spin-polarizations. The local part of density operator gives rise to the WI while the violation is a direct result of nonlocal interference between two components of the entangled states. The Wigner measuring outcome correlation denoted by [Formula: see text] is always less than or at most equal to zero for the local realist model ([Formula: see text]) regardless of the specific initial state. On the other hand, the violation of WI is characterized by any positive value of [Formula: see text], which possesses a maximum violation bound [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text]. We conclude that the WI is equally convenient for the experimental test of violation by the quantum entanglement.