Bullied: The Story of an Abuse

What happens when the defining moment of your life might be a figment of your imagination? How do you understand — and live with — definitive feelings of having been abused when the origin of those feelings won’t adhere to a singular event but are rather diffused across years of experience? In Bullied: The Story of an Abuse, Jonathan Alexander meditates on how, as a young man, he struggled with the realization that the story he’d been telling himself about being abused by a favorite uncle as a child might actually just have been a “story” — a story he told himself and others to justify both his lifelong struggle with anxiety and to explain his attraction to other men. Story though it was, Alexander maintains that some form of abuse did occur. In writing that is at turns reflective, analytic, and hallucinatory, Alexander traces what it means to suffer homophobic abuse when such is diffused across multiple actors and locales, implicating a family, a school, a culture, and a politics — as opposed to a singular individual who just happened to be the only openly gay man in young Alexander’s life. Along the way, Alexander reflects on Jussie Smollett, drug abuse, MAGA-capped boys, sadomasochism, Catholic priests, cruising, teaching young adult fiction about rape, and a host of other oddly but intimately related topics.

The World around Us

Chapter 2 sets the compass through a work that seems to have little to say about sampling. 4’33” (four thirty-three) by John Cage is based on no (performed) sounds, no flashy pyrotechnics in its execution, nor reverence for the notion of music as a singular, individual creative act, or performance. The chapter considers Cage’s evocation of “silence” as the sampled material that is at stake in this iconic piece. I consider how silence, and silencing work in the context of censorship and social control given that the timeframe for the inception of 4’33” resonates with post-World War II, mid-twentieth-century United States during the Cold War. Engaging with this work can also tell us something about the role of censorship in public arts life half a century later, in the US shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001. As I argue, when regarded as a material of music, and thereby as a source from which to “sample” silence, 4’33”offers both a sonic and “sound-less” baseline for the four case studies to follow. “Silence” as rendered in Cage’s work, its wider connotations and evocation of the sensation of sound-filled stillness also serve as a signal for instances of domination, of how oppression can take place quietly, without fanfare. Considering silence as a geocultural, socio-musicological matter allows us a moment to retune our ears and minds by encountering the broader (in)audible domains through, and from which sampling practices take place.

Growing Shapes with a Generalised Model from Neural Correlates of Visual Discrimination

This paper focuses on the application of visual Event-Related Potentials (ERP) in better generalisations for design and architectural modelling. It makes use of previously built techniques and trained models on EEG signals of a singular individual and observes the robustness of advanced classification models to initiate the development of presentation and classification techniques for enriched visual environments by developing an iterative and generative design process of growing shapes. The pursued interest is to observe if visual ERP as correlates of visual discrimination can hold in structurally similar, but semantically different, experiments and support the discrimination of meaningful design solutions. Following bayesian terms, we will coin this endeavour a Design Belief and elaborate a method to explore and exploit such features decoded from human visual cognition.

Desenvolupament comunitari, oci i participació cívica en el medi rural. El entroido gallec, un estudi de cas

<div><p>L'objectiu d'aquest treball passa per presentar l’<em>Entroido</em> com genuïna pràctica de lleure i exemple de dinàmica participativa autogestionada fet que suposa, al nostre parer, una oportunitat per ancorar o arrelar processos de desenvolupament comunitari, essencialment en contextos rurals, ja que relaciona tradició (resistència a l'occidentalització, homogeneïtzació i atomització cultural) i dimensió lúdico-festiva possibilitant l'habilitació dels recursos endògens d'una comunitat.</p><p>En aquest sentit, el text aborda, des d'una perspectiva sociopedagògica, la constant polèmica i el complex equilibri entre la generalització de l'oci com a experiència vital que aprofundeix en l'autonomia personal, i la minimització de la capacitat de maniobra que suposa l'extensió d'un oci massificat i basat en la cultura de l'espectacle, concebent a les persones com a mers clients, consumidors, usuaris, i no com els veritables protagonistes d'aquesta experiència singular, individual o compartida, que és l'oci, sempre en el marc de la voràgine temporal que exigeix la societat de consum i que impedeix a les persones prendre les rendes del seu projecte vital.</p><p>Finalment, el que tractem és d'evidenciar les potencialitats que aquest tipus d'iniciatives populars tenen en l'àmbit de desenvolupament comunitari, com a enfortiment de vincles personals, i promoció de la identitat social.</p></div>

The fictionalized reader in popular science: reader engagement with the scientific community

I propose that the fictionalized reader as observed in popular science represents a novel approach to the incorporation of a reader into a non-fiction text. The traditional approach relies on “the reader-in-the-text” – an entity that covertly represents a generalized real reader through author’s voice using evaluation, modalization, concession, and mood among other mechanisms. The findings are based on a comparative analysis of a corpus of 193 occurrences of presented discourse of scientists (extracted from 100 narratives of discovery) and 73 occurrences of presented discourse attributed to the reader (observed outside the narratives). The analysis shows that the fictionalized reader uses presented discourse (speech and thoughts assigned to the reader) to shape a reader-character, who represents a singular individual (as opposed to a generalized audience) with whom a reader can relate. The need for a more concrete reader arises in thought experiments commonly used as explanatory devices in popular science. The fictionalized reader helps popular science authors explain scientific concepts in more engaging terms and contributes to a more interactive and inclusive model of popularization.

Communal Dreaming: Beyond the ‘We’ We Know

The article discusses the possibility of alternative ways of being together on the basis of an example of the durational performance Dream Hostel CII, in which the notion of communitas is explored through the performative application of the practice of communal dreaming. This performative experiment attempted to rethink and reimagine in practice the paradoxical complexity of our contemporary ways of being together by putting into question the individual as the ultimate value and measure and property as a basis from which we weave our social structure and by creating an alternative reality of a shared space of dreaming and the exchanging of dreams. The article talks about the consequences the practice of dreaming and the exchanging of dreams has for singular individual as well as communal subjects, which in the time of the performance exist between the two processes of undoing and individuation, which takes place through actively transformed conditions of a subject’s own becoming. The subject who unfolds from their relation to potentiality as a common and from the space in-between are ‘we’ beyond the ‘we’ we know.

El valor exponencial del concepto de individuo en el Diario de Søren A. Kierkegaard. The Exponential Value of the Concept of Individual in the Diary of Søren A. Kierkegaard

En los textos de los diarios de Kierkegaard podemos encontrar un análisis del concepto de individuo que gira en torno al den Enkelte o individuo singular. Sin embargo, no debemos confundir el concepto de “individuo” con el de “individuo singular”. Entre ambos existe una relación compleja y análoga que permite establecer una tipología humana. Por otro lado, de dichos textos se deduce, además, un progreso o desarrollo humano cuyo sentido último tiene que ver con la realización auténtica de la existencia cristiana, a la que se apunta teleológicamente mediante esa gura paradigmática que es Jesucristo como individuo singular frente a Dios. We can find in Kierkegaard’s journals an analysis on the concept of individual which focus on the concept of den Enkelte or singular individual. However, we must not confuse the concept of “individual” with the concept of “singular individual”. Between both of them, there exists a complex and analogous relation that allows us to establish a human typology. On the other hand, a progress or human development is deduced from the aforementioned texts, one whose ultimate meaning is related to the authentic accomplishment of the Christian existence, to which it points in a teleological way by means of the paradigmatic figure that is Jesus Christ as a singular individual in comparison to God.

Ser singular, ser social: la invectiva a la alteridad categórica en los Diarios de S. A. Kierkegaard. Singular Being, Social Being: the Invective to Categorical Alterity in the Journals and Papers of S. A. Kierkegaard

Según Kierkegaard, el individuo, el verdadero individuo, se enfrenta o confronta con lo numérico (el grupo, la masa, la multitud, el género, el público, el pueblo, los partidos). Se acentúa la singularidad frente a lo social. En ese sentido, el filósofo danés llevó a cabo una dura crítica a las categorías asociativas, excepción hecha de la de comunidad religiosa cristiana, ya que todas ellas representan una despersonalización. Cabe hablar, pues, de una dialéctica individuo-sociedad, en la que el primero se antepone siempre cualitativamente al segundo. El problema fundamental viene dado por la aplicación errónea de las categorías asociativas al ámbito religioso cristiano. Hasta tal punto que el individuo singular se ha sustituido por el género humano con relación al cristianismo y a Dios.According to Kierkegaard, the individual, the true individual, faces or confronts the numerical (group, mass, multitude, public, people). Thus, singularity is accentuated over the social. In this sense, the Danish philosopher carried a hard criticism of the associative categories, with the exception of the religious Christian community, because they represent a depersonalization. Therefore, it is possible to talk about an individual-society dialectic in which the former is always qualitatively in front of the latter. The fundamental problem arises from the erroneous application of the associative categories to the religious Christian area, to the extent that mankind has replaced the singular individual with relation to Christianity and God.

Twilight of the Proletariat: Reading Critical Balkanology as Liberal Ideology

Critical Balkanology is a sub-discipline of Central and East European Studies that deconstructs and renders arbitrary the claims of ethnic nationalisms and Western “colonial” representations of the Balkans. Yet, this critical and nominally anti-racist project is parasitic on a hegemonic Euro-Atlantic liberal ideology in that it cannot see beyond the singular individual as victim and vanguard, thereby obscuring and/or effacing an awareness of class inequality. Tomislav Longinović's Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (2011) is emblematic of this project. I place this text under an immanent critique and a contrapuntal reading as an example of how one can rescue class consciousness from this literature and push the limits of its politics while, in Longinović's case, reading it against the socioeconomic contradictions of post-MiloŠević Serbia. Longinović's tracing of the vampire metaphor as a way of understanding the consumptive nature of both ethnic nationalism and Western imperialism reveals a politics that stigmatizes Serbia's plebeian history in favour of a Westernized and urban middle class youth cult of techno-culture, rock music, and the disembodied voices of (male) intellectuals – a form of epistemic violence that parallels processes of privatization, social cleansing, and class oppression consuming the bodies of (sub)proletarians.

Is A New Life Possible? Deleuze and the Lines

In his dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze asserts that: ‘Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made of lines’ ( Deleuze and Parnet 2007 : 124). In A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari), Deleuze calls these kinds of ‘lifelines’ or ‘lines of flesh’: break line (or segmental line, or molar line), crack line (or molecular line) and rupture line (also called line of flight) ( Deleuze and Guattari 2004a : 22). We will explain the difference between these three lines and how they are related to the ‘soul’. We will also explain how a singular individual or group can arise from the play of the lines. Eventually, we will introduce the concept of ‘Creal’ to develop the Deleuzian figure of the ‘Anomal’, the so(u)rcerer.