Paradigmas de una epistemología política para la emergencia posmoderna

According to some authors, Latour’s attention to politics during the last decades is the result of his proposing a different approach to politics that entails, with respect to his overall project, one of two situations. Either his epistemological proposal has suffered a “normative turn”—which necessarily breaks with the previous assumptions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT); or, if ANT’s view on technosciences remains valid, his political proposal becomes not possible as a new normative approach. In this paper, I will focus on the critique voiced by John Law, as well as Graham Harman. I will argue that this is a false dilemma because there has not been a change in Latour’s conceptual basis, nor a lack of coherence within his thought that would undermine the democratic commitment of his Political Epistemology. I will justify this by exposing the fact that Latour’s overall project, as part of Science Studies, has not lately followed a “political” but an “ontological” turn, which has been underling his works since the very beginning of ANT.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. —Marshall McLuhan. What is visible and tangible in things represents our possible action upon them. —Henri Bergson. Introduction: Subjective Maps as ‘Contact Zones’ Maps feature heavily in a variety of media; they appear in textbooks, on television, in print, and on the screens of our handheld devices. The production of cartographic texts is a process that is imbued with power relations and bound up with the production and reproduction of social life (Pinder 405). Mapping involves choices as to what information is and is not included. In their organisation, categorisation, modeling, and representation maps show and they hide. Thus “the idea that a small number of maps or even a single (and singular) map might be sufficient can only apply in a spatialised area of study whose own self-affirmation depends on isolation from its context” (Lefebvre 85–86). These isolations determine the way we interpret the physical, biological, and social worlds. The map can be thought of as a schematic for political systems within a confined set of spatial relations, or as a container for political discourse. Mapping contributes equally to the construction of experiential realities as to the representation of physical space, which also contains the potential to incorporate representations of temporality and rhythm to spatial schemata. Thus maps construct realities as much as they represent them and coproduce space as much as the political identities of people who inhabit them. Maps are active texts and have the ability to promote social change (Pickles 146). It is no wonder, then, that artists, theorists and activists alike readily engage in the conflicted praxis of mapping. This critical engagement “becomes a method to track the past, embody memories, explain the unexplainable” and manifest the latent (Ibarra 66). In this paper I present a short case study of Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies a new media art project that aims to model a citizen driven effort to participate in a critical form of cartography, which challenges dominant representations of the city-space. I present a critical textual analysis of the maps produced in the workshops, the artist statements relating to these works used in the exhibition setting, and statements made by the participants on the project’s blog. This “praxis-logical” approach allows for a focus on the project as a space of aggregation and the communicative processes set in motion within them. In analysing such projects we could (and should) be asking questions about the functions served by the experimental concepts under study—who has put it forward? Who is utilising it and under what circumstances? Where and how has it come into being? How does discourse circulate within it? How do these spaces as sites of emergent forms of resistance within global capitalism challenge traditional social movements? How do they create self-reflexive systems?—as opposed to focusing on ontological and technical aspects of digital mapping (Renzi 73). In de-emphasising the technology of digital cartography and honing in on social relations embedded within the text(s), this study attempts to complement other studies on digital mapping (see Strom) by presenting a case from the field of politically oriented tactical media. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has been selected for analysis, in this exploration of media as “zone.” It goes some way to incorporating subjective narratives into spatial texts. This is a three-step process where participants tapped into spatial subjectivities by data collection or environmental sensing led by personal reflection or ethnographic enquiry, documenting and geo-tagging their findings in the map. Finally they engaged an imaginative or ludic process of synthesising their data in ways not inherent within the traditional conventions of cartography, such as the use of sound and distortion to explicate the intensity of invisible phenomena at various coordinates in the city-space. In what follows I address the “zone” theme by suggesting that if we apply McLuhan’s notion of media as environment together with Henri Bergson’s assertion that visibility and tangibility constitutes the potential for action to digital maps, projects such as Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies constitute a “contact zone.” A type of zone where groups come together at the local level and flows of discourse about art, information communication, media, technology, and environment intersect with local histories and cultures within the cartographic text. A “contact zone,” then, is a site where latent subjectivities are manifested and made potentially politically potent. “Contact zones,” however, need not be spaces for the aggrieved or excluded (Renzi 82), as they may well foster the ongoing cumulative politics of the mundane capable of developing into liminal spaces where dominant orders may be perforated. A “contact zone” is also not limitless and it must be made clear that the breaking of cartographic convention, as is the case with the project under study here, need not be viewed as resistances per se. It could equally represent thresholds for public versus private life, the city-as-text and the city-as-social space, or the zone where representations of space and representational spaces interface (Lefebvre 233), and culture flows between the mediated and ideated (Appadurai 33–36). I argue that a project like Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies demonstrates that maps as urban text form said “contact zones,” where not only are media forms such as image, text, sound, and video are juxtaposed in a singular spatial schematic, but narratives of individual and collective subjectivities (which challenge dominant orders of space and time, and city-rhythm) are contested. Such a “contact zone” in turn may not only act as a resource for citizens in the struggle of urban design reform and a democratisation of the facilities it produces, but may also serve as a heuristic device for researchers of new media spatiotemporalities and their social implications. Critical Cartography and Media Tactility Before presenting this brief illustrative study something needs to be said of the context from which Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has arisen. Although a number of Web 2.0 applications have come into existence since the introduction of Google Maps and map application program interfaces, which generate a great deal of geo-tagged user generated content aimed at reconceptualising the mapped city-space (see historypin for example), few have exhibited great significance for researchers of media and communications from the perspective of building critical theories relating to political potential in mediated spaces. The expression of power through mapping can be understood from two perspectives. The first—attributed largely to the Frankfurt School—seeks to uncover the potential of a society that is repressed by capitalist co-opting of the cultural realm. This perspective sees maps as a potential challenge to, and means of providing emancipation from, existing power structures. The second, less concerned with dispelling false ideologies, deals with the politics of epistemology (Crampton and Krygier 14). According to Foucault, power was not applied from the top down but manifested laterally in a highly diffused manner (Foucault 117; Crampton and Krygier 14). Foucault’s privileging of the spatial and epistemological aspects of power and resistance complements the Frankfurt School’s resistance to oppression in the local. Together the two perspectives orient power relative to spatial and temporal subjectivities, and thus fit congruently into cartographic conventions. In order to make sense of these practices the post-oppositional character of tactical media maps should be located within an economy of power relations where resistance is never outside of the field of forces but rather is its indispensable element (Renzi 72). Such exercises in critical cartography are strongly informed by the critical politico-aesthetic praxis of political/art collective The Situationist International, whose maps of Paris were inherently political. The Situationist International incorporated appropriated texts into, and manipulated, existing maps to explicate city-rhythms and intensities to construct imaginative and alternate representations of the city. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies adopts a similar approach. The artists’ statement reads: We build our subjective maps by combining different methods: photography, film, and sound recording; […] to explore the visible and invisible […] city; […] we adopt psycho-geographical approaches in exploring territory, defined as the study of the precise effects of the geographical environment, consciously developed or not, acting directly on the emotional behaviour of individuals. The project proposals put forth by workshop participants also draw heavily from the Situationists’s A New Theatre of Operations for Culture. A number of Situationist theories and practices feature in the rationale for the maps created in the Bangalore Subjective Cartographies workshop. For example, the Situationists took as their base a general notion of experimental behaviour and permanent play where rationality was approached on the basis of whether or not something interesting could be created out of it (Wark 12). The dérive is the rapid passage through various ambiences with a playful-constructive awareness of the psychographic contours of a specific section of space-time (Debord). The dérive can be thought of as an exploration of an environment without preconceptions about the contours of its geography, but rather a focus on the reality of inhabiting a place. Détournement involves the re-use of elements from recognised media to create a new work with meaning often opposed

This work is aimed at giving an insight into the issues raised by Goldman in his argument that social epistemology is ‘real epistemology’. Goldman wants to convince the mainstream epistemologists and the philosophical world in general that social epistemology is real epistemology by distinguishing between three forms of social epistemology: revisionist, preservationist, and expansionist. These three forms of social epistemology construed and proposed by Goldman differ in how they relate to the basic assumptions of traditional/classical epistemology. While acknowledging the various authors for their divergent views and contributions to social epistemic discourse, this work holds that though Goldman, more than any other social epistemologist, raised a fresh perspective in social epistemology, yet, there is a missing link in his submission. Goldman’s preservationist social epistemology, which he argued is “real epistemology”, fails to give at least, a spotlight on what this work calls historical social epistemology. This does not in any way downplay Goldman’s giant stride in awakening epistemologists from their slumber which led some scholars to include issues like analytic social epistemology, diagnostic social epistemology, naturalistic social epistemology, and political social epistemology in the epistemic lexicon; and by so doing, expanding the frontiers of the epistemic domain of philosophical enterprise. It is the position of this research that Goldman’s social epistemology elicited a renewed interest in epistemologists and scholars alike in the social dimension of knowledge. This work employs historical, conceptual, contextual, and textual methods of analyses.

This essay critically assesses Seth Heringer’s important recent contribution to the debates surrounding theological accounts of history, as presented in his monograph Uniting History and Theology.1 His arguments arrive at a time when Christian theologians and biblical scholars are growing in confidence in their criticisms of the historical-critical method. For example, Francis Watson asks, “Does historical criticism exist as anything other than a rhetorical figure, useful for ideological purposes?”2 After all, some historical methods have been applied to reading Scripture for as long as the church has existed; it is the ideological narrative that has changed. Samuel Adams, in vigorous critique of the historical method of N. T. Wright, similarly concludes that Wright’s method cannot address its own subject matter, namely Christian origins and the question of God.3 But Heringer’s thesis is arguably the most theoretically rich of all recent works pertaining to the subject of history and theology, even if its theological argument is less developed than that of Adams.4 For this reason, it deserves sustained analysis of its primary contributions. Heringer’s argument unfolds in four chapters: (1) “Revisiting German Historicism” (1–41); (2) “Christian Reflection in the Shadow of Ranke” (43–104); (3) “The Construction of History” (105–75); and (4) “The Theological Interpretation of History” (177–219). This review will be structured according to these four parts before finishing with a critical assessment.In his first chapter, Heringer argues that German historicism,5 as appropriated in biblical studies, is synonymous only with a particular reading of Leopold von Ranke and Ernst Troeltsch. It is a flat reading that has incorporated only naturalism and “scientific objectivity” into its procedure. On the contrary, the historicists themselves reflected an idealism that could include such notions as art, aesthetics, poetry, and, yes, theology. Precisely these, however, have been stripped out in biblical scholarship. It follows that “Christian historiography needs to revisit its intellectual heritage and reengage these German thinkers” (1).Heringer proceeds with an account of Troeltsch that includes a few surprises for those only acquainted with secondary literature (2–6, 19–28). Troeltsch divided the supernatural from the natural, yes, but he believed both of them to be necessary. Indeed, this dualism ran deep in Troeltsch’s work such that Heringer, with Toshimasa Yasukata,6 maintains that his “life’s work was an attempt to combine his religious convictions and the contemporary intellectual world” (3).Heringer documents his case with care for biblical scholarship tends to assume Troeltsch is best credited for the three principles of criticism, analogy, and correlation. But Troeltsch’s grasp of the relationship between theology and history is more nuanced. He critiqued Heilsgeschichte for being inconsistent, for example. It wants to use the historical method (including correlation, analogy, etc.) but only selectively. The method is incongruently abandoned when the historical conclusions appear uncomfortable. Troeltsch’s work is an attempt to reconcile the uniqueness of Jesus Christ with his principles of historical criticism in a manner which avoids the weaknesses of Heilsgeschichte.Even more important and misunderstood is the figure of “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” fame, Leopold Ranke (as discussed in 9–19). Heringer insists that Ranke is neither the founder of historical-critical method nor, following F.C. Beiser, the “archetype of positivist historiography” (11).7 Similar to Troeltsch, Ranke attempted to “synthesize two different interests: science and art” (11). The latter (art) is the historical pursuit of underlying causes, the spirit of history. Ranke wanted to remove bias or prejudice from historical work. Hence he proffers rules, for example, for distinguishing between good and bad sources. But he also wants art to play a significant role in his work, for “history is not merely analytical but also creative” (15). Further, because art reveals and is elevated by facts, art and history must go together. “Art,” Beiser argued, reflects Ranke’s idealism; he wanted an underlying order that unifies and brings morality to bear upon history, something he can even occasionally name “God” (16–17).These insights allow Heringer to demonstrate the substance of the mature Troeltsch’s historical theory. Following Ranke, he recognized that “unfettered science could lead the world into materialism and naturalism; unfettered historicism to anarchy and skepticism.” Hence, “his main concern [was] to find normative ethical principles in the flux of history,” to “discover why historicism does not necessarily lead to the relativizing of all knowledge” (19). While Troeltsch didn’t give theology voice in this, he realized that there was more to history than matter and causation. Both Ranke and Troeltsch, then, mobilize two tendencies. One involved “objective,” source-critical historical work. The other pointed to idealism’s desire to find an underlying unity or coherence in history.But this is not how biblical historical-critical scholarship has read the historicist tradition! Heikki Räisänen, to take a prominent example, adopts only one aspect of the German tradition, and thereby distorts it.8 Räisänen split history and theology, which Ranke and Troeltsch were keen to think together. Heringer thus presents a case in direct contrast to Räisänen. He will seek to show how the aspect of historicism that sought to join history and religion has a brighter future, and that Christian theology has resources to aid this reconciliation with these often hidden aspects of German historicism.Heringer’s opening chapter is a little muddled in terms of structure. It begins with Troeltsch, despite the fact that he follows Ranke, then offers an aside, then addresses Ranke before returning again to Troeltsch. Some may also question whether the chapter is strictly necessary to the developing argument. After all, so what if some have only developed part of the earliest historicist tradition? Methodological naturalism has its own justifications. A more charitable reading of Heringer, however, notes that some key claims have been advanced upon which the second chapter will build.The second chapter offers exacting and devastating criticisms of modern Christian historical work. It maintains that modern Christian scholarship either abandons history, or theology, or consistency, a fact which points back to the concerns of Troeltsch in ch. 1. To structure this chapter, Heringer presents a summary of Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, particularly Frei’s typology.9Frei argued that the premodern unity, in which the world was understood by means of Scripture, was fractured by the arrival of historical criticism. Figural interpretation was summarily rejected, leading to a disjunction between the narrative of Scripture and the “real world.” What followed this rupture is the point of Frei’s fourfold typology. He distinguishes die Sache approaches (of both ostensive and non-ostensive varieties) from “grammatical interpretation.” Frei’s move was to point beyond historical referents and die Sache to “the cumulative narrative of the text and the world it projects” (51). But Heringer rightly asks whether Frei’s approach is a reaction to the worry that the narratives of Scripture are not historical. It is thereby determined by this fear, offering safe haven on the shores of narrative. Following Frei, readers do not need to ask whether the narrative “really happened” or not (52). So Frei’s project fails, but the terms of his typology remain helpful. Thus he examines Martin Kähler as mythophile, and Wolfhart Pannenberg and N. T. Wright as supernaturalists.Kähler’s approach is well documented, but to be noted is how he rejects the historicist “principle of analogy” when it applies to Jesus. He does this because he is committed to the claim that Jesus is unique. Hence, historical-critical work cannot press behind the source material to the supposed “real” Jesus. At best it might offer an account of the disciples’ pre-resurrection vision of Jesus. But this was incomplete, faulty, and left them “in the dark” about the true identity of Jesus. Kähler thus famously pointed to the early Church’s kerygma (the “preached Christ”), which lies “beyond proof” and thus beyond scientific history (57, 59).10 Without offering much by way of critical reflection on Kähler,11 Heringer is rather more cutting in his account of Pannenberg and Wright, to which we now turn.For Pannenberg, in contrast to Kähler, “Christian doctrine is from first to last a historical construct” (59).12 Because revelation is never direct but historical, the historical-critical method is the vital lens through which theology must refract. If it were otherwise, theology would not be grounded in God’s revelation in concrete acts in history. Further, as all of history, for Pannenberg, is God’s “indirect autobiography” (60), Pannenberg famously insisted that divine self-revelation must be understood within the framework of “universal history,” including both past and, importantly, the future. God is “nearer” to the future, and this makes Jesus fit into the scheme of history by being “history’s furthest progression” (63). This is not a fideistic claim for Pannenberg, for all such religious claims must have “purchase in reality” and must be tested against public historical-critical work by means of analysis of a text’s historical origin and the intentions of the author (65–67). It follows that historians become priests of God’s Word, so to speak; they are the ones who mediate knowledge of God.However, Heringer demonstrates how cracks show in Pannenberg’s theory when the historical-critical method problematizes theological claims Pannenberg will not surrender (cf. Troeltsch, above). So, the historical method is “adjusted” to accommodate the resurrection (69). He thereby reworks the principle of analogy, as well as rejects Troeltsch’s principle of correlation, all for theological reasons informed by eschatology. But this means that Pannenberg’s prior commitments about what is possible in the world are central to his method, mitigating against his claim to establish a public account of theological verifiability. In other words, Pannenberg’s historical-critical work is ultimately one of his own devising, not a neutral or public affair.13 In sum, Pannenberg argues for two contradictory theses. He claims to present a theology which can be publicly respected by historical-critical science, but he also rejects this public critical work as insufficiently theological in its account of reality.Heringer demonstrates similar inconsistencies in N. T. Wright’s project. Positively, Wright moves beyond Pannenberg with a focus on the importance of preconceptions (“stories” and “worldviews” in Wright’s nomenclature). Key to this move is a particular account of “critical realism,”14 which seeks to establish the reality of things as well as our provisional knowledge of the same. This makes access to knowledge possible only through “the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known” (76; italics suppressed). It creates a leveling out of all positions or precommitments—all are provisional and require conversation with other views.15Indeed, those stories and worldviews become central to Wright’s project for it enables him to propose a way to unite theology and history. After all, Christianity has to do with history; it is in history that we find what is normative for Christian faith. But historical work needs theology as an “essential ingredient in the stories that encapsulate worldviews” (79). Integral to this idea is Wright’s claim that history both happens and is best interpreted in certain ways, which leads Heringer to claim that Wright “believes that historical reality contains one, discoverable narrative—what I will term the True Narrative” (80). It follows that the goal of “writing history is not to construct a new and compelling narrative but to show that the proposed narrative is the same as the one that has existed in history all along” (80). This is a goal obtained by applying Wright’s method, which takes account not only of the facts but also of the worldviews and perceptions involved. It leads Wright to his criteria for judging between historical reconstructions in the public domain, such as fit of data, elegance of explanation, and simplicity.16Against this concept, Heringer first argues that Wright underestimates how his proposed method for making the best historical construct is itself shaped by a worldview, a fact that mitigates against claims to offer historical work that can be adjudicated “publicly.” Second, what to make of Wright’s claim that all of the data needs to fit into one’s historical narrative? After all, what constitutes the data? Is Jesus’s walking on the water, for example, a datum to include, or is the datum merely the claim that Jesus walked on water? Different worldviews will answer this differently. There is no pristine data all can agree upon prior to the operation of worldviews. The same problem applies to the assessment of competing worldviews. In theory, Wright’s thesis merely ends up pushing scholarly debate from narrative accounts of the past to the differing worldviews of the historians involved when answering what makes a hypothesis “simple,” “comprehensive,” etc. And why these criteria and not others?So much for Wright’s historical theory. But Wright’s historical practice involves different problems. Importantly, Heringer points to the moments when Wright claims his practice is less encumbered by biases than other historians. These instances are particularly revealing, so Heringer reflects upon Wright’s account of the resurrection as a test case.Initially it seems that the historical-critical method cannot present the resurrection as historical, for an appeal to God as one cause amongst others is not allowed. Wright, of course, resists this conclusion, but he does so—in problematic Pannenbergian fashion—by adjusting the terms of historical-critical methods.17 Once again, the role of worldviews and prior commitments militate against the claim that the presented methods are public. Sensing this tension, Heringer argues that Wright’s practice resolves the inconsistencies involved in his own methodology by prioritizing not worldviews but the prima facie, the known, and the reality of historical data (88). It is for this reason that Wright can claim that his account of the resurrection is the best explanation of the data for anyone “willing to look at the data” (89). Such a claim can only make sense if worldviews have “little effect on how data are seen or adjudicated” (89). Wright is thus inconsistent in the application of his own methodology, resolving it in one direction. Wright insists that worldviews are inevitable but then problematically chides other scholars for how their worldviews bias them. “How,” Heringer asks, “does Wright know that he has overcome his own biases better than others?” (89).Despite the fact that Heringer is sympathetic to Wright’s method and finds it the most compelling response to the pressure historical-critical methods place on theology, it “falls apart when it posits that humans can penetrate through our [sic] biases, requires that a True Narrative exists in history, and continues the practices of the historical-critical method with a supernatural epistemology added as an addendum” (92).Heringer prefers to avoid two mistakes. On the one hand, both Frei and Kähler, in different ways, problematically abandoned history to maintain theological integrity (whether with a focus on “narrative” or the kerygma). However, on the other hand, both Pannenberg and Wright believed theology and history could be united by developing and tweaking historical critical methods. For Pannenberg this involved focus on the “events of history.” For Wright it involved analysis of history’s True Narrative. But they both believed that the historical task was to present history “as it really was” by presenting public methods in order to assess and adjudicate various historical proposals. However, both fail at this endeavor. Heringer will show that this Rankean goal of “discovering the one narrative account embedded in historical reality” fails to account for modern historical theory, which leads to his third chapter (cf. 106).Chapter 3 presents an analysis of the relationship between events and narratives in contemporary “constructivist” or “postmodern” criticisms of the Rankean tradition. Heringer examines Arthur Danto, Roland Barthes, Hayden White, and Frank Ankersmit.Turning to Danto, Heringer notes a devastating refutation of the logical coherence of the Rankean tradition. Danto asks what the perfect example of Rankean history might look like. The answer necessitates the notion of the “Ideal Chronicler” (who knows everything about their time) and who writes an “Ideal Chronicle” (which represents every detail of their present) (107). But precisely when the perfect Rankean ideal has been articulated, problems are obvious. After all, “the whole truth concerning an event can only be known after, and sometimes only long after the event itself is taken place,” which means that the Ideal Chronicle, “despite its perfect description of the past moment by moment, lacks the necessary future-knowledge to write history” (108). The Ideal Chronicler, to use Heringer’s example, could not write that someone “planted roses,” for this would necessitate “identification across time,” which is not possible in the Ideal Chronicle. Hence, it could not describe historical periods such as the French Revolution or the Renaissance (109). It follows that “the best-case scenario for Rankean historians—a complete record of everything that happens at a given moment—is irreparably hampered by its inability to speak in narrative sentences,” something which needs the “retrospective perspective” offered by future knowledge (110). What is more, because these retrospective narrative structures don’t exist in history, are not part of the Ideal Chronicle (which records everything that exists at a given moment), these narratives are not available to the Ideal The Rankean thus problematically wants to focus on narratives that these narratives are not embedded in the Ideal Chronicle. Danto the Rankean is Roland Barthes, Heringer argues that Rankean theory is in its claim to objectivity” He on that which is in historical to history from It is a practice historians remove themselves from the to allow history to italics But of these events don’t speak for historians write history In so they and give to history. these structures upon historical It as that is an ideological it is not and never was of events we to the problems with the Ideal Hayden work to show that the Rankean cannot how events and narratives are as we have no access to “the prior to them being through our and so our of historical narrative is also to a and This reflects an in the work that the famously to The point of it is to the claim that “history is not or but through the use of and not exist in history; they are added to history by Heringer, thesis the between history and theology the past in such a way that what is at It is not a between history and it can now be seen “as one between different of the different and this brings to the of Heringer’s that the is not a place in which the Christian can be Christian theologians an to that of historiography” a Heringer will with theological in his chapter, he notes how works with two of a and of The latter the by it to This a of are in terms of how they be as a are events that have are not part of “the world” facts and narratives are of and which are similar to but But and this is not exist in they are are as much as a claim to which we and This is the which takes beyond White, it follows from this account that historical events do not the historical narratives that can be about them. Hence, or need to be on other notes and the of The for Heringer, is that what the Rankean as the the biases of the as history’s more historians their is more than the facts they Heringer’s this means that is not the only deep and so on all much about reality” It also means that events can be in Indeed, this is what makes historical work do not need to a True Narrative. and following White, it also means that to out the or even divine cannot be presented as neutral or are themselves on and ends this chapter by the work of Frank who seeks to he claim that such a role in historical Precisely this Heringer is most for Christian historians in historical to move beyond is not a narrative He also that narrative structures in the are not his narratives and reality more united subject and in It to back against to give much to the and not to reality” But this is no with his of and to some such that there is a between reality and But this does not that is a of Heringer that for reality are often present than what they At this important to for do more than aspects of reality their leads to It can do this because truth is the or its to in terms of its italics as they the of a so that it reality” following the this is not to be understood in terms of or particularly “the and of the is the of claims become and a framework to complete the with For there is of subject and and remain It is the place of the can in a particular namely in that of which to the the For it follows that the subject in this by in so is what is from the One again in a new The new is a returning to that beyond the and of the of the One into The of to some is that Rankean historiography as in its of the and It is precisely there that historical reality is chapter Heringer’s of the claims of historical-critical It cannot offer a neutral for public to take with this of is the of the thus But is this And what does he offer in its What does a Christian theology of history and theology look To answer these Heringer presents in his argument has been a of the Rankean notion that historians the of these ideological Heringer for a Christian of history from a informed approaches to history are so Heringer presents one with an Christian Importantly, Heringer claims that his will from Pannenberg and Wright and back in such a way that avoids Frei’s of history. After all, make claims about reality in their theological as makes obvious. History and happened” italics these what might a Christian account of history look Heringer to a way first thesis is that history has two On the one hand, history is about but it is also to a History merely with the idealism in German principles and have long supposed that this be the principle of revelation from a point Heringer makes with to such as and The is that to the world as God one requires This Heringer takes to that divine must be involved in the necessary of This was key in refutation of the The read Scripture so and then these parts into a narrative that not with the “Christian a for the and of namely the of truth Jesus Christ is the of Scripture, the parts and up the of the these claims Heringer the of the It follows that a Christian of history involves the of we are the of that our and all of which the of history, with a Christian second thesis involves the of and If historical work involves one’s biases and for would the claim that God acts in the world.” What is more, it is to something one is not In contrast to certain scholarship in the second chapter, as well as other such as and Heringer that biases cannot be they Rankean is with a Christian of history” It is because it for public methodology and by which historiography can be But this is not second thesis thus follows from the If history involves both events and history cannot be the between

The purpose of this article is twofold: to give scientific reasoning for the objectives-based interpretation as a special kind of legal norms’ teleological explication and to apply it for essence, purposefulness and advisability determination of criminal procedural norm on the entitlement of a prosecutor with powers of investigation judge according to Art. 615 of Criminal Procedural Code of Ukraine and exercising them in an area (administrative territory) of enacting the measures on the provision of the national security and defence, resistance and deterrence of armed aggression. The methodological basis of the research was general scientific and special methods, namely dialectical, hermeneutic, teleological, logical, historical, formal legal (legal positivism) and natural law (value-based) methods. The dialectical method was the basis for the work; it allowed the author to consider in complex the achievement of objectives of criminal procedure by the Ukrainian legal system. The hermeneutic method was used to define the meaning of the new text of the analysed legal provision. The historical method was manifested in the attempt to discover prerequisites of amendments to the criminal procedural norm. The article has both general legal and criminal procedural, applicable in practice scientific novelty: the author provided his own method of interpretation of criminal procedural provisions, that was named the «objectives-based» method; the author proposed methodological grounds and instruments for it, which originates from the notions on the purpose of Law and human rights in general, and on the purpose of Criminal Process in particular; the author applied the objectives-based interpretation on the provision on the entitlement of a prosecutor with powers of investigation judge and exercising them in an area (administrative territory) of enacting the measures on the provision of the national security and defence, resistance and deterrence of armed aggression in order to solve legal uncertainty of its essence. As a conclusion of conducting the research, the author focuses on the beneficial effects of applying the objectives-based method of interpretation of criminal procedural provisions, its simplicity, promptness and expediency; the author comes to the conclusion that the procedure for restricting fundamental human rights and freedoms introduced in the Criminal Procedural Code of Ukraine in recent amendments may possibly be inconsistent with relevant provisions of the Constitution of Ukraine; finally, expressed in this article ideas can be used in further scientific and expert researches on the issues of legislative improvement of the criminal procedures in the extraordinary situations – on the legal regime of emergency or martial law. Keywords: objectives-based interpretation; objectives of criminal procedure; ratio legis; ratio juris; Joint Forces Operation; purposefulness of law; advisability of criminal procedure; norms implementation; International Humanitarian Law; prosecution in International Armed Conflict; restriction of rights and freedoms; constitutionality; martial law; boundaries of security zones.

The purpose of the article is to study restrictions on human rights and freedoms from the perspective of proportionality, which is determined by the nature of public interests which are the legitimate purpose of restrictions on human rights and freedoms, which is especially relevant in the context of armed aggression against Ukraine, since ignoring their threatens the functioning of the state. The research methods used are systematic analysis, synthesis, generalization, historical method, etc. The peculiarities of the implementation with the principle of proportionality under extraordinary conditions have been considered. It has been emphasized that in a situation of full-scale war and the introduction of martial law in Ukraine, the interests of the state lie primarily in ensuring security, territorial integrity of the state, protection of state sovereignty and repelling armed aggression. In the event of a threat to these interests, the state resorts to the application of restrictions on human rights and freedoms, applying the principle of proportionality between the interests of the state and basic fundamental human rights. This is manifested in the application of a number of restrictions on personal rights and freedoms, restrictions and special regulation in the field of economic activity, financial transactions, labour relations, and civil law obligations.

Introduction: in the modern world, the level of international terrorism is constantly growing, with an increasing tendency for terrorists to use an impressive arsenal of weapons of destruction, which creates a real threat to the world community, for all countries without exception. The use of various types of explosive devices in public places – streets, railway stations, and trains – is directed by terrorists to intimidate the population and create a serious threat to stability and security in society. Therefore, at the present stage, it is important to apply all previously developed methods and techniques, as well as to use new recommendations in order to improve the logistics of the law enforcement agencies. The involvement of specialists in conducting such an important investigative action as the inspection of the accident scene will contribute to an objective perception, a full study of the scene, the detection, recording and removal of various traces and other physical evidence in order to clarify the nature of the event. The purpose of the study: to determine the methods available to the investigator, providing the maximum possible information for further investigation of the crime. The objectives of the study: to describe the principles of modern tactics of conducting the accident scene observation; to clarify requirements and review the specifics of the inspection report of the explosion scene; to develop recommendations on the examination and recovery of the objects. Methods: the methodological framework is based on the methods of historicism, systematization, and comparative law. Results: the proposals were made to improve the interaction of the investigator with the forensic expert involved in the scene examination. Conclusions: as a result of the study, it is revealed that when the forensic examination of corpses or their fragments discovered at the accident scene when an explosive device was used, an approximate list of questions for the forensic expert is formed for the investigators. It is established that the use of the techniques available to the investigator provides the necessary information for further investigative actions.

Aim. To develop new legal constructions in the theory of law and constitutional law, ensuring the protection of the physical existence of a person in the modern world. To define the way the principles of the right to housing, enshrined in law in the Constitutions of the countries of the world, affect the physical aspects of human being. Methodology. The study used variable methods of analysis and synthesis of individual components, included into the understanding of complex legal structures in law, the comparative legal method, with the help of which an analysis of the constitutional provisions of the basic laws of various states of the world in terms of securing the right to housing was carried out, the historical method by which the norms included in the constitutions of previous years are analyzed, as well as formal-logical, legal-dogmatic methods that made it possible to investigate the provisions enshrined in the constitutional norms and norms of current legislation related to the implementation of the human right to housing. Results. The authors studied 160 different constitutions. The main conclusion of the scientific study was the identification of those factors that have a fundamentally important impact on the physical existence of a person in the modern world and need legal regulation in order to ensure the protection of the physical existence of a person. The constitutional provisions of various states within the framework of the consolidation of the right to human housing were analyzed. The right to housing was ambiguously enshrined in the constitutional norms of the countries of the world. Gaps in the legal regulation of housing relations were identified, and some legislative initiatives were presented. The importance of establishing the standards of human life, and, accordingly, the quality of housing, has been proven. Research implications. The findings of the study can be used in law enforcement and law-making activities in the development of new housing legislation. A new conceptual apparatus is being introduced into legal science, which will improve legal equipment in the preparation of regulatory acts affecting the rights of a person and a citizen in our country.

Summary. This article deals with legal nature of the rulings of the Chief State Sanitary Inspectors, possibility and legality of imposed restrictions on human rights during COVID-19 pandemic in Kazakhstan. Goal. The article aims at defining the legal nature of abovementioned rulings with determination of their place within the Kazakhstan’s legal system and legal norms that allow Sanitary Inspectors to impose limitations on human rights. Imposed restrictions were evaluated in terms of their compliance with both the Kazakhstani laws and international human rights law provisions. The author analyzes current legal issues and does not aim at appealing the necessity of certain restrictions to protect the public health. Methods. Historical method, comparative legal analysis as well as studying and synthesis were used during research. Results. Analysis of the legal information and practice of certain states made it possible to come to the following results. Rulings of the Chief State Sanitary Inspectors are neither normative legal acts, nor non-normative legal acts. In other words, their position within Kazakhstan’s legal system is undefined. Also, there is no law that define criteria in accordance with which human rights and freedoms could be restricted and no exhaustive list of rights and freedoms that might be limited during massive spread of infectious and other dangerous diseases. The rulings didn’t follow the conditions stipulated in Kazakhstan’s Constitution and International Covenant on civil and political rights. Conclusions. Uncertain position of the rulings of the Chief State Sanitary Inspectors makes it necessary to regulate them within the newly adopted Administrative procedural and processrelated Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan that will enter into force on July 1st, 2021 and referring to them as administrative acts. This will clarify the process of their adoption, enforcement and appealing. Treatment of the rulings as administrative acts as well as introduction of legislative amendments in terms of adoption of the exhaustive and complete list of human rights and freedoms that might be restricted and the officials that might impose them will ensure the legality and legal certainty related to human rights.

The object of this research is an international organization “Human Rights Watch” that conducts and advocacy on human rights. The subject of this research is the activity of this international non-governmental organization since its establishment until 2020. The author examines such aspects of the topic as the history of creation of “Human Rights Watch”, the nature of its activity during the Cold War, the evolution of approaches towards the core issues in the area of human rights protection during the post-bipolar period; as well as analyzes the current campaigns of this international NGO. The methodological framework is comprised of the systemic, structural-functional, comparative-political approaches, methods of historicism, analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, and observation. For the first time in Russian historiography, leaning on the primary sources and relevant scientific literature, the role of international non-governmental organization advocating for human rights “Human Rights Watch” is analyzes within the system of global governance since its foundation until the present. In conclusion, the author indicates a sizable contribution of the organization “Human Rights Watch” alongside other NGOs advocating for human rights in solution of global issues; however notes that these actors of world politics as not utterly unbiased and neutral organizations. On the one hand, namely due to the activity of such organizations, the problem of the supremacy of law,  universal human rights and freedoms became one of the key concepts of international relations at the turn of centuries; but on the other hand, they are rightly criticized for prejudice, political bias, and double standards.

The article highlights issues related to the theoretical and legal understanding of the nature of the right to judicial protection guaranteed by the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The analysis of this legal category is given through the prism of material-legal theory using the method of historicism. The problematic issues concerning the understanding of the essence of the institution of the right to judicial protection of its origins are considered. A parallel is drawn between the right to judicial protection, as well as the concept of a claim and the right to a claim. Special attention is paid to the consideration of the right to judicial protection from the point of view of constitutional law. This constitutional right is considered as one of the types of state protection of human and civil rights and freedoms, ensuring the guarantee of rights and freedoms through the activities of the system of courts as specialized state bodies. In addition, the circle of subjects entitled to judicial protection, as well as the rights and freedoms themselves subject to it, is analyzed. The methodological basis of the research was the modern general scientific and private scientific methods of scientific cognition of social phenomena and processes (dialectical, inductive, deductive, analysis, synthesis, formal legal), as well as the comparative historical method.

Sexual crimes have a disturbing effect on society, because in addition to their seriousness, they often leave lasting physical, psychological and emotional consequences on the victims. They also cause strong social condemnation because they directly attack basic human values, such as human freedom, dignity and security. In addition to the numerous consequences felt by the victim itself, sexual offenses also cause anxiety, fear and insecurity among the public, under whose pressure strict punishment of sex offenders is demanded. In addition to the punishment itself, little attention is paid to the treatment and needs of criminals in the institutions where they serve the sanction. The goal of this paper is to point out certain solutions and treatment programs that have given positive results in penitentiary institutions around the world, as well as the need for specialization of treatment that is lacking in our penal institutions. Through a review of the existing domestic and foreign scientific literature, using quantitative and qualitative content analysis, comparative analysis and comparative and historical methods, we would like to point out the research results that in this area have influenced the reduction of recidivism in sexual offenses. The results of the research point to the need for specialization in the treatment of sex offenders in penal institutions, which would primarily reduce the rate of recidivism, but also improve resocialization after leaving the institution.

Previous articleNext article FreeAnn Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton. Edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+306.William JunkerWilliam JunkerUniversity of St. Thomas Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton, editors Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton gather eleven essays (and an afterword by Nigel Smith) from established and up-and-coming scholars in early modern literary studies. The book opens with three theoretically oriented essays—by Andrew Hadfield, Michael McKeon, and Marshall Grossman—followed by a “series of focused historicist studies” arranged thematically under four subheadings: “Historicism and Theology,” “Dramatic Histories,” “Milton and the Problems of History,” and “Gendering Historicism” (12). As stated in the introduction, the goals of Rethinking Historicism are threefold: “to examine the potential problems of historicism in literary criticism, to provide a brief sense of the history of the practice from its roots in the Renaissance…and to offer examples of historicist work that will not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology, but also suggest new directions for research” (11). While every one of these essays illumines its object in new and interesting ways, in most cases the essays do not rethink historicism so much as provide exemplary instances of its current period style. A few essays examine “potential problems” in historicism, but only Marshall Grossman’s adopts a truly critical stance toward it, and only one essay—Fulton’s own—argues in sustained fashion for the Renaissance roots of historicism. Rethinking Historicism thus achieves its third goal most ably, while its pursuit of the other goals meets with less success. It is a mark of the volume’s strength, however, that its blind spots no less than its insights convey the “continuing vitality” of historicism, while underscoring two or three issues that continue to vex its methodology and practice.Of course, the realization that there are “potential problems” in historicism is not a new one. Some of the most trenchant criticisms of the New Historicism—a label that this volume tends to eschew in favor of the less contentious but correspondingly more vague “historicism”—had appeared well before the close of the last century. But aside from the occasional reference to Fredric Jameson and Alan Liu, the volume does not engage these earlier criticisms at any length.1 Rethinking Historicism does not respond to those scholars who, while skeptical of historicism, nonetheless claim to be resolutely historical in their own work.2 Nor, for that matter, does it address recent attacks on historical periodization itself.3 Rather, and a bit oddly, the book takes as its main target the New Presentism.At issue between the New Presentists and the historicists is the very availability of the past from the perspective of the present. Where historicists argue that historical difference is real and knowable, New Presentists argue that every discovery of a significant historical difference is motivated by the interests of the present. But as Andrew Hadfield points out in “Has Historicism Gone Too Far; or, Should We Return to Form?,” these claims are not logically exclusive (28–29). This observation, combined with the notorious difficulty in specifying when the present begins and the past ends, has rightly made New Presentism appear problematic to most scholars—even to those who are in other respects critical of historicism. In “The New Presentism and Its Discontents: Listening to Eastward Ho and Shakespeare’s Tempest in Dialogue,” Paul Stevens observes that not even the contributors to Grady and Hawkes’s Presentist Shakespeares are true believers in the movement.4 Presentist Shakespeares, Stevens writes, is “a collection quite extraordinary for the way in which the subversive asides of its contributors routinely deflate the larger claims of its editors” (136).At several points in the volume, though, New Presentist objections to historicism are conflated with the very different objections of Stanley Fish. Unlike the New Presentists, Fish’s objection to historicism is not that it holds historical difference to be real and knowable but that it tends—in theory and in practice—to forget that what literary critics discover about the past should be ancillary to, rather than substitute for, their illumination of the “aesthetic structure” of the text or performance (135). In fact, Fish’s argument is conceptually closer to that of the historian Gabrielle Spiegel, who is quoted in the volume’s introduction. For Spiegel, the fundamental problem in New Historicism is the “refusal to differentiate text from context or to establish an intelligible relation between them that does not lead to their mutual implication in a textually conceived universe” (7).5 In other words, literary critics who repudiate the primacy of aesthetic structures in their pursuit of historical knowledge are likely to approach history itself as though it possessed its own kind of aesthetic structure. Downplaying the poetic integrity of individual texts paradoxically gives rise to the “textually conceived universe” of cultural poetics.Perhaps Rethinking Historicism directs itself against this strange hybrid of New Presentism and Stanley Fish’s brand of formalism because historicist scholarship has already assimilated most of the earlier charges that have been leveled against it. Several of the essays suggest as much. In “Historicizing Satisfaction in Shakespeare’s Othello,” for example, Heather Hirschfield begins by arguing that a classic complaint about the New Historicism—its “neglect of the role of religion in the daily life as well as in the politics of the period” (113)—is belied by the “recent cottage industry of studies on literature and religion” that have emerged over the past two decades (114). In the remainder of her insightful essay, Hirschfield proceeds in supererogatory fashion to show how Reformation controversies over the theological concept of satisfaction inform the language and plot of Shakespeare’s Othello. Likewise, essays by Martin Dzelzainis and Michael McKeon show that contemporary historicist practice has moved beyond the old contention that New Historicism depends on a synchronous or structuralist depiction of history in which social energies are circulated but change is never made. In his provocative essay, “Milton, Foucault, and the New Historicism,” Dzelzainis acknowledges the partial truth of this contention but argues, following Catherine Belsey, that it reflects the influence of Talcott Parsons and Clifford Geertz rather than, as is usually maintained, the Foucault of The Order of Things (1973) and Discipline and Punish (1977).6 And Michael McKeon, whose “Theory and Practice in Historical Method” is the most challenging of the volume’s essays and one of its best, offers a subtle reconstruction of Marx’s own historical method in which “diachronic and synchronic analyses are not ‘absolute’ but dialectically intertwined” (59).Finally, the two most intellectually rewarding essays of the volume show that historicist literary scholarship does not preclude, but draws strength from, plain old-fashioned close reading—what Reuben Brower called “reading in slow motion.”7 Thomas Fulton’s piece, “The Politics of Renaissance Historicism: Valla, Erasmus, Colet, and More,” traces the fascinating process whereby the humanist reception of classical authors, and Seneca in particular, gave rise to a series of novel interpretations of Romans and other politically sensitive biblical texts that, in turn, informed Erasmus’s and More’s theorization of panegyric. And Sharon Achinstein’s “Medea’s Dilemma: Politics and Passion in Milton’s Divorce Tracts” looks to “the rhetoric of citation in one of Milton’s polemical title pages” (182). The passage from Euripides’s Medea that precedes Milton’s Tetrachordon, she argues, implies an entire “aesthetic of citation” that bears directly on Milton’s passionate defense of human freedom (182).These two essays impress not only because of the analytic pressure that Fulton and Achinstein bring to bear on their texts. Additionally—and relatedly—both authors stretch the temporal boundaries of these texts’ “historical context,” a phrase that the volume as a whole might have subjected to greater scrutiny. We discover that Paul, Nero, and Seneca are as much a part of Erasmus’s world as are Henry VIII and Thomas More and that Euripides’s words weigh as heavily on Milton’s mind as do those of his more temporally proximate opponents. The radical extension of context in these two essays never loses sight of the contemporary pressures of the early sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Instead, Fulton and Achinstein persuasively demonstrate the complexity and range of ideas communicated by authors of the caliber of Erasmus, More, and Milton. And so when Fulton, in an obvious rejoinder to Fish, claims near the end of his essay that “neither historicism nor politics is guilty of diminishing the value of the text as an interpretive object,” it is hard to disagree with him, at least in theory (105).In practice, however, the truth of Fulton’s assertion is less certain. For a historicism that emphasizes “the text as an interpretable object” to the extent that Fulton’s and Achinstein’s does lays bare the inadequacy of what, in other historicist scholarship, continues to pass for the historical context of the text itself. Fundamentally, this tension within historicism arises from two different approaches to literary or poetic form, which Michael McKeon helpfully defines as “the more or less ostensible patterning of…language” within a text (44). To be sure, one of historicism’s chief accomplishments has been to alert us to the ways in which a text’s form registers and responds to the historical pressures surrounding its time of composition. But, as Fulton and Achinstein illustrate, it sometimes happens that closely attending to the form of a text results in our having to alter, rather than simply appeal to, what we thought we knew about its context. On the basis of the essays collected in Rethinking Historicism, though, I think it is fair to say that mainstream historicist scholarship continues to privilege the explanatory resources of context over the formal capacity of texts to test its adequacy. Why should this be the case?The volume suggests that an adequate response to this question requires that we understand contemporary historicist scholarship both in light of its own methodological development and in light of the disciplinary and institutional contexts within which its practice is embedded. I will treat each in turn. As has often been noted, the ambitious claims of New Historicist work in the 1980s and 1990s depended on a constriction of both the temporal and ideational aspects of context. This allowed the New Historicists to discover a small but compelling set of issues that, at a given moment in time, were said to have structured the cultural productions of a society at every level. Later, in response to criticism issuing from within and without the field, New Historicism limited the scope of its argument and gradually abandoned its theoretical basis in the historiography of early Foucault (pace Dzelzainis). The earlier New Historicist conception of con-text as formally indistinguishable from text came to be replaced with a much weaker, but simultaneously more determinative, conception of context as the set of conditions that preexists the text and yet is temporally contiguous with the moment of its creation—what used to be called its background. Contemporary historicism is thus marked by recurring attempts to specify a conception of context that neither is overly determined by a particular theory of historiography—structuralist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer, feminist, and so on—nor reduces to a naive appeal to the brute facts.Something of the resulting dynamic is captured in Paul Stevens’s nimble discussion of the interplay between theory and fact in recent interpretations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—a play that looks very different when read through a historicism informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism rather than through one informed by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British travelogues. Stevens’s essay excellently models what he calls the “dialogic relationship between historical research and theory,” in which each is employed to offset the limitations of the other (153). However, without minimizing his achievement, I think it bears noting that it is only after Stevens adjudicates the claims of theoretical sophistication and historical fact that he mentions “the rhetorical constitution or ‘literariness’ of texts,” which, it turns out, is also important for our discipline (153). Stevens’s essay reaffirms “what makes our discipline so distinctive” at the same time that it relegates—not, I think, intentionally—the problems posed for historicism by the “‘literariness’ of texts” to second place.Indeed, in the current volume only McKeon seems fully to acknowledge that the methodological problem of context is both intrinsic to and yet potentially debilitating for historicist literary scholarship. He admits, for example, that there exists within literary studies a burgeoning dissatisfaction with “the reifying tendencies of periodization,” but he responds by attributing such dissatisfaction to a misconception of historical contextualization or categorization, which—he explains—is not a “dogmatic strategy for closing down understanding” but is rather “the first step in opening it up to questions that otherwise would never be asked” (60). McKeon’s summation of the important role of contextualization is as good as we are likely to get, but it might itself be accused of idealizing the professional context within which historicist scholarship actually takes place.This point is brought home in Andrew Hadfield’s realist assessment of the disciplinary pressures at work in historicism’s continuing dominance over the field. Some opponents of historicism, Hadfield notes, claim that the ongoing production of narrowly historicist scholarship is a function of junior academics’ “anxious quest for intellectual honors and preferment” (24). After all, part of the power of historicist methodology is that “it can be learned, repeated, and endlessly reproduced,” so that anybody needing another publication on her curriculum vitae might, for example, “rea[d] through The Faerie Queene one more time to find yet another possible allusion to kern, gallowglasses, or a crannog in Coleraine that Spenser might once have seen when he possibly traveled north with Lord Grey who might have taken him with him” (24–25). This wonderfully absurd hypothetical concludes with an equally wonderful quip: “The logic of the past conditional can become very wearying” (25). But is Hadfield here speaking in the voice of his opponents or in his own voice? It is difficult to tell.Hadfield presents the opposition as holding that “young academics” trained by historicists “realize that they should not rock the boat if they desire a foot on the lowest rung of the ladder, let alone professional success” (24). And yet, on the next page, we encounter a much bolder set of academics: “The need to find obscure allusions in texts in order to get published, the need to specialize too narrowly, and the absence of the bigger picture has led many to revolt against what they see as the prevailing professional ethos in the present” (25). The tension between these two sentences resolves itself in the realization that those who are in “revolt” against “the prevailing professional ethos” are a different class of scholars from those “young academics” who—the revolutionaries claim—realize they should not rock the boat. Those in revolt are themselves senior members of the profession, scholars who at least approximate the status that Hadfield (rightly) enjoys. On the one hand, it is not surprising that the battles waged over historicism should be fought by senior scholars—for these scholars are, all things considered, better equipped to fight them. On the other hand, though, the instability of Hadfield’s voice over these pages might suggest that, whether or not those senior scholars who are in revolt against historicism are right about its methodological limitations, their perception of the institutional conditions that reinforce its present influence—especially on younger academics—is truer than we would like to admit. The conservative effects of professionalization combined with the ever-increasing expectations of scholarly production might very well ensure the continuing relevance of historicism regardless of whatever problems it faces or avoids having to face.As I noted above, the single essay in the volume that does not end up defending historicism is penned by Marshall Grossman, who passed away before Rethinking Historicism was published. It seems fitting, then, to conclude by acknowledging the challenge posed by Grossman’s “Limiting History” for contemporary historicist scholarship. In large part a development and refinement of “the ethics of reading” Grossman has long championed, “Limiting History” posits a qualitative distinction between “understanding the historical nature of literary texts”—a task that requires placing “renewed emphasis on an artistic hearing of literature that attends to the exigent and nonsystematic experiences of writing and reading”—and “the recent preoccupation with historicizing literary texts,” which, Grossman states, “renders art documentary and instrumental when it should be proactive” (66).8 This distinction turns, finally, on the question of agency: understanding the “historical nature of literary texts” requires that we affirm their capacity to act on us in the present, whereas “historicizing” a literary text requires that we bracket the capacity of the text to so act. The historicized text is reduced to an “instrument” or “document” that “witnesses, records, and pretends to transparency” but that is no longer proactive for us readers (70).One of Grossman’s concerns is that a pedagogy dominated by historicist concerns is self-defeating. As he puts it, “helping students become aware of” Paradise Lost’s deep investment in seventeenth-century political and religious controversy is “part of the substance and pleasure of teaching them, but the case for them taking the trouble to learn these things must stand on the premise that, embedded though the poem may be in the time and place of its production, there remains also a poem to be read in our time and place” (68). Why should students bother learning to read Milton in the first place, in other words, if all that his poetry does is “witness the context of its own creation” (68)?More important, though, is Grossman’s argument that historicist methodology often ignores what is perhaps the central mystery of a literary text’s actual “historical nature.” The mystery is that texts like Paradise Lost and the Odyssey continue to move us when we read them in the present and that they do so even if we have no particular stake in the controversies of seventeenth-century European Christianity or in the development of archaic Greek paganism. “What is it,” Grossman asks, “about literary works that remains active and potent after the historical facts have been naturalized?” (69). To ask such a question is not, for Grossman, to seek out an ahistorical formalism; quite the opposite, it is to inquire after the conditions—in the literary work, in us, and in the history of each—that make possible our experience of being moved, intellectually and emotionally, by a piece of writing from the past. To do this is to practice an ethics of reading: “What I am proposing as the proper work of literary criticism makes an ethical turn toward understanding the mechanisms that facilitate the transfer of the seductions of the will at the limit of history, from writer to text to reader and to writer as reader” (77). Grossman’s own account of these “mechanisms,” which emerges through his microanalysis of Milton’s language, is not always fully persuasive. But in a volume in which the project of rethinking historicism often becomes the project of it, Grossman’s essay out simply for having posed a question that no one thought to Liu, “The of The New Historicism,” The argument of this essay is in on Historicism and the of Press, Fredric of the New Historicism may be in or, The of York: and Renaissance of Press, in Renaissance and Its York: For a discussion of the issues by and see “What New “The in After and of and is the most of the many essays in this issue of the of and also and and Renaissance in University Press, Grady and Presentist Shakespeares, on Shakespeare York: editors from Gabrielle Spiegel, Historicism, and the of the Text in the “Historicizing New Historicism,” in Grady and Presentist Shakespeares, in in In of A to Reuben Brower and York: Marshall Grossman, Renaissance in Renaissance Marshall Grossman York: Previous articleNext article by on this For to no articles this

Background. The modern world is undergoing a period of profound and dynamic transformations, which prompts individuals to seek sources of stability, confidence in the future, and understanding of their place in society, thereby reinforcing the role of social groups. Within this system of collective identities, national and religious identities retain significant positions both in individuals’ personal lives and in the global context of interactions among various social groups. The aim of the study was to examine the interrelationship between national and religious identities and their mutual impact, based on the examples of Italy and Poland. Methods. General scientific and special research methods were used, in particular: theoretical and methodological analysis, comparative method, historical method, and content analysis. Results. The theoretical basis of national identity and religious identity was outlined and examined, a comparative analysis of the relationship between nation and religion was conducted based on the examples of Italy and Poland, relying on historical information about the interaction between the nation and Catholicism in the respective countries, as well as on the content analysis of the state and religious anthems of both countries as symbolic attributes. Potential variants of interaction and mutual impact of national and religious identities were outlined. Conclusions. A connection between national and religious identity in Poland and Italy was identified, and the influence they exert on the symbolic attributes of each society was outlined. As a result of comparative analysis, two variants of interaction between these identities were highlighted: the factor of strengthening national identity through religion (the example of Poland) and the factor of conflict formation (the example of Italy). Based on historical analysis, it has been proven that in the case of conflict (Italy), national identity prevailed with the simultaneous transformation of religious identity, rather than its destruction.

The purpose of the article is to identify the features of the formation of projection mapping as a synthesis of technology and art; consider the specifics of development and trends in the use of 3D-mapping technology in historical retrospective. Methodology. To achieve this goal and solve the problems caused by it, an integrated approach to studying the genesis of video mapping, as well as methods of modern art history, in particular, the historical method (to study the features of using video projections in the space of social art in retrospect) was applied; evolutionary method (to consider the dynamics of the development of video mapping as a synthesis of art and technology); typological method (to identify the features of using 3D-mapping, in accordance with the specifics of modern multimedia technologies) and other. Scientific novelty. The formation and development of 3D Video Mapping, as a unique direction in audiovisual art, is investigated; The features of the use of media technologies in the second half of the XX - beginning of the XXI century are revealed and characterized; the evolution of video mapping at the present stage and the specifics of the use of projection mapping in innovative multimedia technologies of the present, in particular the augmented reality space, are examined. Conclusions. The history of world art shows that innovative artists have always relied on innovative methods, tools, and materials, in order to express their creative vision. At the present stage, 3D Video Mapping operates in accordance with the specifics of the modern space of social art and media landscape. However, digital culture and new media are only typical for the end of the XX - beginning of the XXI century. the background of this art form, which actually has a long cultural tradition. At the present stage, video art can be created and displayed on the screen by adding various interfaces and instruments as part of the production or installations. Video installations of the beginning of the XXI century form the relationship between space (external or internal walls of buildings, stage space, etc.) and materials that are video-louvered and displayed on a specific surface. In accordance with the specifics, space plays an active role in the process of demonstration and recognition of innovative art forms in public space.