Culture as a Conceptual Vector of Economic Modernization

The article shows that at present the processes of total marketization have spread to the sphere of artistic culture, in which more and more the value of a creator and the results of his activity is evaluated in terms of market and capital. It becomes one of the factors of the economy stagnation that lasts for decades, in particular, in Russia. Meanwhile, the existing experience of modernization in the USSR shows that there is a powerful feedback when culture and, in particular, art, become an important factor and conceptual vector of socio-economic and technological modernization. The means for this can be and have been historically long-term strategic development programs linking together technological, scientific, economic, educational and cultural transformations, mass labor enthusiasm, the inclusion of workers in social creativity and other relations and institutions that transform a person from a passive object (an employee, consumer) into an active creator. The history of the USSR gives contradictory examples of such relations formation (the GOELRO plan, etc.).

Anthropocene: New Geological Era or New Biophysical

The Anthropocene has created a new cartography where various discursive levels are intertwined. It unites two fields of knowledge: geology and anthropology. In the 19th century, Romanticism challenged the separation between natural sciences and spirit sciences. With the Anthropocene a geological era is established, but with an epistemological dimension: environmental catastrophes are not a passive "object", they become an agent of social and political change. Images of the world (Weltbild) turn nature into an animated whole that challenges the dual vision: observer and observed. There is no nature without "observer", nor geology without anthropology. The Anthropocene modifies the foundations of our view of the world where we had excluded life. This is how concepts such as symbiogenesis, homeostasis, etc., which make visible and try to explain phenomena that are otherwise inexplicable. The Naturwissenschaft by J.W. Goethe is a point of support, with all these ideas that develop in the 20th century and anticipate the Anthropocene term of the 21th century. While the concepts of "belief" and "science" continue to be sharpened, rehabilitating "old quarrels" around anthropology, cosmology, theology, etc. The dignity of man is at stake.

Canonicity Effect on Sentence Processing of Persian-Speaking Broca’s Patients

This research with the aim of scrutinizing fundamental notions of mapping hypothesis tries to investigate the comprehension of diverse complex syntactic structures in four age, education and gender matched Persian-speaking Broca’s patients and eight matched healthy controls via conducting two tasks of syntactic comprehension and grammaticality judgment in which subjects’ comprehension of diverse complex structures were put into scrutiny. The structures being tested included subject –agentive, agentive passive, object experience, subject experience, subject cleft and object cleft constructions. Our results, while corroborating the predictions of mapping hypothesis, showed that in structures in which linguistic elements were substituted and dislocated out of their canonical syntactic positions, namely, agentive passive, subject- experiencer, object -experiencer and object- cleft constructions, Broca’s problems escalated. In contrast, in those structures whose constituent concatenations were aligned with canonical syntactic structures, namely subject agentive and cleft structures, patients had above chance performance. Ultimately, theoretical and clinical implications of the study were discussed

A multiplicity of prek(s): Enacting a socionatural mosaic in the Cambodian upper Mekong delta

In Khmer, the word prek designates a connection between things. In Kandal province in Cambodia, preks crisscross the landscape, connecting rivers with floodplains, supporting rich ecologies and a variety of livelihoods. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and critical water research, this paper explores prek(s) as a multiplicity. Rather than taking the prek as a passive object around which various practices occur, we examine how prek(s) are enacted as ontologically different: as irrigation infrastructure, as pathway to rice intensification, as device for Cambodian state-making, and as climate-friendly agricultural development. After analyzing interference patterns between enactments and their scale-making effects in- and outside the Mekong floodplains, we make explicit our own ontological politics. Focused on sustaining multiple uses and ecosystems, “our” prek is a socionatural mosaic landscape where many human and more-than-human actors and practices can coexist. This ontological politics, we suggest, has implications for planetary environmental knowledges and delta management far beyond Kandal’s landscape.

RE-READING MUSTANG IN THE CONTEXT OF THE IDEOLOGICAL COMPONENTS OF NARRATIVE

Representation of the female body has been one of the most emphasized issues in gender debates. To refrain from reproducing the patriarchal ideology, it is important to be careful with the distinction between the body being tabooed and covered or transformed into an object of consumption under the name of freedom. The sexualization and objectification of the female body has taken place in the historical process. In many products from works of art to mass media, the woman, who is a passive object in front of the man who is the active/subject, is presented to the consumption of the male gaze. In almost every branch of art, from photography to cinema, the female body has been the object of the gaze and has been turned into an object of desire by being removed from the subject identity. Even in films that are claimed to be made with a woman's point of view and against gender discourses, the female body is sometimes objectified with elements such as the stage order, lighting, and perspective preferences. In this study, which aims to reveal how cinematographic elements can change the world of meaning, the first film of Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Mustang (2015), was discussed with feminist criticism in the axis of object-body by giving examples from various art branches in terms of cinematographic preferences. As a result of the study, it has been determined that the film, which claims to have set out with critical point of view, reproduces the discourses it tries to criticize. The reason for this is that the film falls into the traps of patriarchal ideology.

Pathology as a phenomenological tool

The phenomenological method (or rather, methods) has been fruitfully used to study the experience of illness in recent years. However, the role of illness is not merely that of a passive object for phenomenological scrutiny. I propose that illness, and pathology more generally, can be developed into a phenomenological method in their own right. I claim that studying cases of pathology, breakdown, and illness offer illumination not only of these experiences, but also of normal function and the tacit background that underpins it. In particular, I claim that the study of embodiment can be greatly enhanced, and indeed would be incomplete, without attending to bodily breakdown and what I term bodily doubt. I offer an analogy between illness and Husserl’s epoché, suggesting that both are a source of distancing, and therefore motivate a reflective stance.

SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTACTS OF FOREIGN TRAVELERS IN THE TOBOLSK NORTH IN THE XIX - THE BEGINNING OF THE XX CENTURIES

The publication considers the features of socio-cultural contacts, mainly in the north of Western Siberia. The participants of them were foreign travelers and the local Russian and native population. Travelling in traditional culture and in later times was considered a way out of the ordinary. Memoirs created by educated travelers indicate the existence of sustainable cultural stereotypes. Peoples of the outskirts and especially the indigenous population were perceived as a passive object outside of civilization. The negative impact of the “cultural peoples” leads them to the edge of death. The only way to salvation is assimilation and acceptance of European values. Many travelers such as M. Castrén, A. Ahlquist, O. Finsch, S. Sommier, U. Sirelius, K. Karjalainen, S. Patursson agreed with this position. Their memoirs distort not so much the facts as the picture of the life of aboriginal people. Subjective silence and not quite correct estimates indicate that the archaic or its components were preserved not only in the worldview of the aborigines, but also among a number of highly educated individuals.

Transformative Technologien

The anthology is interested in the relationship between technology and law. Transformative technologies not only displace competing technologies from the market, i.e., they do not only have a disruptive effect in an economic sense, but are also able to influence normative concepts. Thus, technical innovations such as digitization not only confront the law with new regulatory tasks, but also change it at the same time. Law is actively shaping the process of the digital transformation of society, but at the same time is becoming its passive object. The contributions to this anthology illuminate this dual character of digitization as a transformative technology from the perspectives of law, philosophy, and cultural and media studies. With contributions by Prof. Dr. Bijan Fateh-Moghadam, Prof. Dr. Herbert Zech; Prof. Burkhard Schafer; Lukas Brand; Prof. Dr. Peter Georg Picht, Gaspare Tazio Loderer; Prof. Dr. Roberto Simanowski; Stefan Huonder, Olivier Raemy; Tianyu Yuan and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem.

Bartleby as Subject

Interpreting Bartleby the scrivener’s formula, “I would prefer not to,” in Herman Melville’s short story is a challenge for many philosophers, and Bartleby’s inaction also hints at a political position. The problem is how to explain this (in)action. It is unclear whether the scrivener is an active subject or a passive object. One potential solution would be to reduce Bartleby’s duality to one of its modes. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim the scrivener is a revolutionary subject; the uncertainty of his actions is regarded as a refusal. Hardt and Negri link this refusal with the next stage in the production of a new society and a new subject. Slavoj Žižek is also ambivalent about “Bartleby politics”. Although the Slovenian philosopher criticizes the authors of Empire, he still declares Bartleby a parallax figure combining action and inaction. However, Žižek did not stake out a position on the ontological status of the scrivener: is he a cunning subject and escape artist, or is he a distinction-basis of the system itself? In the contrary direction, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben propose a program for the desubjectification of the scrivener from Wall Street. Here Bartleby is not a subject, but a figure of the ontology of a transcendental source which exists before all ontic differences. The essay offers a radically different solution to the Bartleby problem. It rejects the dichotomy between the subject and object and moves toward the object-oriented theory of action and relational ontology as presented in the works of Bruno Latour. In this ontology, any actors (human or non-human) may turn out situationally to be active or inactive, depending on their position in relation to other actors.