Alien Elements Research Articles

Capitalism Expands but the Discourse is Radicalized: Whither ‘21st Century Venezuelan Socialism’?

‘Protagonistic democracy’, ‘initiative from below’, or ‘autonomous agency’ is presented by critical left supporters of Venezuelan socialism as counter-balancing Chavez’s statist top-down tendencies. Why should it only counter-balance and not go beyond Chavismo and any reified state power? This has to do with presenting it, often unwittingly, as an undifferentiated bloc, albeit internally highly democratic and empowering. What therefore needs to be highlighted is internal contradiction and differentiation within protagonistic democracy, so that what Marx in the Communist Manifesto once called ‘a line of march’ of the movement as a whole is emphasized – something overlooked by scholars like Michael Lebowitz. Without a ‘line of march’, the most radical democratic practices can get boxed into a ‘bloc’ fighting a reified, externalized enemy. ‘Class struggle’ gets reduced to a populist fight against ‘alien elements’, ‘conspiratorial foreign oligarchs’ and so on – is this not the experience of ‘21st century humanist socialism’ so far?

Ex(or)cising the Spirit of Japan: Ringu, The Ring, and the Persistence of Japan

In the adaptation of non-English language cinema for the American and global markets, studios often endeavour to excise alien cultural elements to endear texts to their new audiences. The example of Hideo Nakata's Ringu films and their American counterparts, The Ring series, illustrates the manner in which such adaptations can give form to normally unarticulated assumptions about national cultures, which can reemerge in extratextual criticism and positioning. The understanding of Japan implied in these instances of adaptation is investigated through a comparative analysis and argued to be indicative of the persistence of an Orientalist vision of Japan, which is symptomatic of the historical role of Japanese cinema in the context of film studies.

Asceticism and Empire

In this article, the author attempts to clarify the motivation and goals of early Christian ascetics by treating asceticism as a political concept. By reading the ascetic tracts of Isaac of Nineveh (7th century), and drawing on some views on the role of the body in the practice of resistance in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the author argues that ascetics like Isaac used their bodies to resist the control of ancient society and to create a tangible image – or icon – of a different way of living and of a different kind of society – the kingdom of God. Using a threefold typology of asceticism as transformative, performative and bodily, and focusing especially on the role of the body, a new way of understanding Christian asceticism emerges that, on the one hand, clearly distances itself from earlier models that viewed asceticism as an alien element in the Christian tradition; and, on the other hand, makes it possible to use the concept of asceticism to understand present day forms of resistance.

The Study of the Elements of Work Alienation: A Case Study of the Urmia White Cement Factory, Western Azarbayjan Province, Iran

This paper studies the elements of work alienation in the Urmia White Cement Factory. Nowadays, along with technical and industrial developments, we observe extensive changes in the field of work. Industrial developments, work division, and development as well as some phenomena like mechanization and automation have changed work qualities. As a result, the atmosphere of work in our time, too, has suffered from these phenomena. Considering the organizational, socio-cultural, and individual elements, this paper explains the condition of work alienation in the Urmia White Cement Factory with the aim of identifying those elements affecting work alienation in that industrial unit. Using survey as research method, we prepared some questionnaire according to the Sorel scale for gathering data. Our statistical population consisted of 200 workers and personnel serving in that factory. As our sample, 90 people were selected. Our findings indicated that work alienation had a meaningful relationship with geographical origin, marital state, type of work, satisfaction with wages and incomes, quality of human relationships with other workers and managers, uncertainty, confliction, and stress of role.

Creeping Secularism

The Islamic revolution in Iran at the closing decades of the twentieth century was a shocking, unexpected phenomenon in the context of modern history. Its religious emblem, the presence of the Shiite clerics as it's mobilizing motor for mass demonstrations and, eventually, the bizarre composition of Islam and revolution—an amalgam of two conceptually alien elements, with unprecedented ideological claims— created a new peculiar model of state and statecraft. The substitution of a fundamentalist regime for a semisecular monarchy replaced the crown with the turban as the paramount symbol of the Iranian national sovereignty, under the fundamentalist formulation of the “governance of the canonist” (velayat-e faqih). This new state manifesting itself through specific signs, symbols, slogans, discourses, and behaviors, as well as by appropriation of modern means of ideological propaganda, the use of revolutionary violence, and organized terror, embodied in the very structure of a state, addressed itself to the world as a new militant ideological and political power aiming, once again, to change the world. How could this extremely unexpected event happen? Explanations are various and they focus either on the dictatorial manners and erroneous actions of the shah, alongside the role played by the Western powers, specifically the United States, or on the presence and the political role of Shiism and its clergy in Iranian history. However, a few fundamental questions remain unanswered. How could a radically traditionalist religious establishment, which was normally marked by modern revolutionaries as reactionary, merge with the most radical revolutionary groups and views? What are the universal results of such a “chemical” composition for both the otherworldly religionism and secular revolutionism? How do they essentially differ in action and discourse from what they had been previously? What were the innermost historical forces that made possible this seemingly impossible phenomenon?

Squatting and Urban Renewal: The Interaction of Squatter Movements and Strategies of Urban Restructuring in Berlin

Squatting as a housing strategy and as a tool of urban social movements accompanies the development of capitalist cities worldwide. We argue that the dynamics of squatter movements are directly connected to strategies of urban renewal in that movement conjunctures occur when urban regimes are in crisis. An analysis of the history of Berlin squatter movements, their political context and their effects on urban policies since the 1970s, clearly shows how massive mobilizations at the beginning of the 1980s and in the early 1990s developed in a context of transition in regimes of urban renewal. The crisis of Fordist city planning at the end of the 1970s provoked a movement of "rehab squatting" ('Instandbesetzung'), which contributed to the institutionalization of "cautious urban renewal" ('behutsame Stadterneuerung') in an important way. The second rupture in Berlin's urban renewal became apparent in 1989 and 1990, when the necessity of restoring whole inner-city districts constituted a new, budget-straining challenge for urban policymaking. Whilst in the 1980s the squatter movement became a central condition for and a political factor of the transition to "cautious urban renewal," in the 1990s large-scale squatting — mainly in the eastern parts of the city — is better understood as an alien element in times of neoliberal urban restructuring.

Vienna Around 1900 and the Crisis of Public Art: On Text and Music in Klimt, Mahler, and Schnitzler

Scholarship often has emphasized the importance of the notion of crisis for understanding the dynamics underlying the culture and literature of fin-de-siecle Vienna. The following essay rethinks this notion, taking as its point of departure the ‘crisis of public art’—the idea that art has lost its public function—that manifests itself in Vienna around 1900. The paper examines Klimt’s Beethoven-frieze, Schnitzler’s novella Leutnant Gustl, and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, focusing in particular on the nexus between text and music in each of these works. While these works of art on a textual level indeed each document an element of alienation in the relation between art and its public, this essay argues that they also conceive of the relationship between art and its audiences in new ways: they reconsider how art addresses the public. Music plays a key role in the debate on the public function of art because it invites audiences not only to experience art directly, but also to participate in its creation.

Domain organization of the ORF2 C-terminal region of the German cockroach retroposon R1

Using cosmid vector, a gene library of German cockroach Blattella germanica was constructed. From this library, clones containing full-length copies of two subfamilies of R1 retroposons were selected. Retroposons R1 of German cockroach belonging to different subfamilies were shown to be different in domain organization of the ORF2 C-terminal region. For the first time, retroposons transmembrane domains were identified in the sequences of R1. It was demonstrated that two retroposon R1 subfamilies of German cockroach arose as a result of intragenomic divergence rather than via horizontal transfer of alien mobile element into cockroach genome. The differences in domain organization appeared not as a result of saltatory recombination processes, but as a consequence of gradual mutation accumulation, which led to either degeneration, or to domain formation.

Speculators, swindlers and other Jews: regulating trade in revolutionary White Russia

The Bolshevik Revolution introduced sweeping campaigns for social and economic regulation in the geographic region of the former Pale of Settlement. Focusing on the policing and rhetorical construction of the economic crime of “speculation,” this article examines the effort to reconstruct Jewish economic practices in the early Soviet period of the New Economic Policy. Based on archival material from the National Archive in Minsk, Belarus, and from the contemporaneous Yiddish Press in Minsk, the article concludes that the campaign to regulate speculation and economic practices constituted a primary front in the attempt to construct post‐revolutionary Soviet Jewish culture. At the same time, this article suggests that campaigns to regulate speculation served to reinscribe Jewish actors as socially alien elements in post‐revolutionary society.

An earliest Givetian “Lilliput Effect” in the Paraná Basin, and the collapse of the Malvinokaffric shelly fauna

An earliest Givetian ''Lilliput Effect'' at So´tio Wolff and Sao Bento in the ParanaBasin occurred after an extinction event, possibly related to the latest Eifelian KAC y AK Event. The Malvinokaffric fauna was reduced from 65 genera before the extinction event to eight genera after the event. However, the abundance of the individual taxa is high. The size reduction of the surviving taxa was up to 90%. The palynomorphs during the extinction and post-extinction (''Lilliput Effect'') events are scarce. Nor- mal palynomorph abundance and diversity is restored later in the early Givetian immediately after the post-extinction event. The relictual fauna in the beds with the ''Lilliput Effect'' at So´tio Wolff and Sao Bento constitute the last survivors of the classical Malvinokaffric shelly fauna in the ParanaBasin, and are at these sites mixed with immigrants and alien elements (e.g. orthoconic nautiloids).

Estudios sobre Rubiáceas Mexicanas XXVII. Una revisión breve y cuatro especies Nuevas del GéneroDeppea(Hamelieae)

The monographic treatment of the genus Deppea Schltdl. et Cham. published in 1988 by Lorence and Dwyer turned to be a broad sense approach with 23 species, including several alien elements and forming a polyphyletic unit. It was criticised by Borhidi et al . (2004) excluding 6 species belonging to 5 different genera. Since that time a number of real Deppea species of original sense has been discovered and described. Actually, the genus comprises 31 species without the excluded ones. In this volume 6 new species, in this paper 4 new ones: D. foliosa , D. nitida , D. rubrinervis , D. tubaeana and a new combination, D. arachnipoda are published, followed by a rectified generic description and a new analytic key.

Regular and chaotic growth in a Hicksian floor/ceiling model

In some previous papers the present authors reassembled the Hicksian trade cycle model in a new way. The floor was tied to depreciation on capital, itself the cumulative sum of past net investments, for which the principle of acceleration provided an explanation. Hence no alien elements were needed to include capital, and so close the system. The resulting model created a growth trend along with growth rate cycles, which could be periodic or quasiperiodic. In the current paper, the ceiling, using capital stock as a capacity limit for production, is added. It then turns out that pure growth no longer exists, and chaos and multistability become possible, which they were not in the previous model. A variety of bifurcation scenarios is explored, and a full understanding of the working of the four-piece, originally three-dimensional, piecewise smooth map, is attained, using a reduction to a one-dimensional return map.

“Скажи мне, кто Твой Враг…”: “Антифинляндский дискурс” в Пространстве Общественно-Политической Коммуникации Российской Империи Конца XIX – начала ХХ вв.

SUMMARY: In her article, Aleksandra Petukhova suggests looking at the escalation of the “Finnish Question” during the last decades of imperial Russia as a particular intertextual media discourse generated by the metropolitan imperial elites in a certain historical context. The author turns her attention to the group of conservative intellectuals, such as K. F. Odrin, M. M. Borodkin, N. N. Korevo, and K. N. Iakubov, who assumed the role of ideologues in cultivating a “national way of thinking” at a time when the ruling elites faced the challenges of uneven modernization in the imperial center and arguably in more developed national peripheries. Petukhova analyzes the language of anti-Finnish rhetoric of these publicists in polar categories of “unity” and “national threat,” and makes parallels to earlier rhetoric of anti-Polish discourse that emerged after the uprising of 1863. The former category accentuated the universalistic nature of the Russian people, whereas the latter singled out alien elements, “inner enemies” that did not differ from immoral revolutionaries. The metaphoric devices and vivid pejorative idioms employed in anti-Finnish propaganda facilitated the construction of virtual borders between “us” and “them,” Russians and Finns, and had the unintended consequence of invigorating separatist tendencies in Finland. It is still unclear whether the imperial authorities actively encouraged the anti-Finnish media campaign, yet what is definitely clear, as Petukhova demonstrates, is that it missed not only its goal, but even the domestic audience. The rhetoric of “friends vs. enemy” was consumed mostly by conservatives and the autocracy and was less popular with the general imperial public.

A Concise Interpretation of Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law

The principal value of the pure theory of law is that it presents the subject of its study, that is, positive law such as it is, without any unfamiliar additions. It is not only that the methodological doctrine of great heuristic possibilities is in question, but system learning as well that within its investigations ends to embrace the universal legal order interwoven in the composition of which are certain ideas of natural law all contained in many international law documents of general or regional character. Thus, the pure theory of law of Hans Kelsen, regardless of its principled negative relation towards the natural law teaching, starting exactly from the attitude that law must be presented such as it is, is forced, whether it wants to or not, also to deal with the study of the corresponding contents of natural law, which in present times under the name “human rights make an essential integral part of the existing international law. One cannot say that Hans Kelsen was totally wrong in classifying law as pure and impure. H.L.A. Hart, a later positivist, though criticized Kelsen to some extent for the exclusion of “alien elements,” derived the rule of recognition from Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law. Hart viewed the concept of rule of recognition as an evolution from Kelsen's Grundnorm. Kelsen’s pure theory of Law had a far reaching impact on the later positivists like Tony Honore and Hart. Kelsen made original, striking and valuable contribution to jurisprudence and he considerably influenced the modern legal thought.

Rethinking Biopolitics, Race and Power in the Wake of Foucault

This article examines the ambivalences in Foucault’s elaboration of the concept of biopower and biopolitics. From the beginning, he relates the idea of a power over life to struggle and war, and so to race. In the period of the formation of the nation-state, threats to the unity and strength of the population were thought to come from a contagion by an alien element. In this context, tropes of race became aligned with the ‘sciences and technologies of the social’ that were emerging as part of biopolitics. They became part of the new rationality of the state, finding expression in projects such as public hygiene and eugenics, and, at the extreme, in Nazism.

THE INTERCONNECTIONS OF DISCRIMINATION

ABSTRACT Relations between race, nation, class, and gender as categories of social inclusion and exclusion have been subject to contemporary international debates in the social sciences. Critically reflecting upon these debates, this article examines the complex interplay of patterns of discrimination based on race, nation, gender, and class in an international racist campaign in the early 1920s. It was conducted by a wide range of organisations and individuals from different backgrounds in objection to the use of black French colonial troops in the Allied Rhineland occupation. These were denounced as a ‘Black Shame’, a primitive alien element in ‘civilized’ Europe. Patterns of inclusion and exclusion referring to the four categories were not strung together in a purely summative way. Gender, race, nation and class presented flexible, interlocking categories, and could even substitute for one another, when the ‘Black Shame’ was condemned as French aggression against white womanhood, the German nation, European civilisation, and the white race, and used as an ideological call for the cohesion of all Germans and ‘Whites’. I focus on the central role of the category gender in the campaign, and argue that campaigners used the German woman figuratively as an embodiment of the German nation and white race, seemingly threatened by desecration. German women, who refused to play this role and had relationships with black soldiers, were socially excluded from both imagined communities – nation and race. The discourse on the ‘Black Shame’ is an example of the intensive connections of the categories race, nation, gender, and class in modern racism and racist discrimination. My research advocates their conceptually combined and historically reflexive analysis.

Anti-Semitism in the Finnish Academe: rejection of Israel-Jakob Schur's PhD dissertation at the University of Helsinki (1937) and Åbo Akademi University (1938)1

The primary goal of this article is to present anti-Semitism as the underlying reason for the rejection of Israel-Jakob Schur's PhD dissertation at the University of Helsinki and at Åbo Akademi University in the late 1930s. The article analyzes the different stages of the processes and the ideological background and motives underpinning the rejections. Schur's antagonists were right-wing professors, some of whom sympathized with National Socialism and/or maintained contacts with eminent German anti-Semitic ideologues. The article analyzes the rhetoric of the written statements, which contain ideas of Christian anti-Semitism as well as other anti-Jewish stances. Moreover, the article demonstrates that Schur was regarded as an alien element in the Finnish academe, and the topic of his research – circumcision – was considered non-national from the perspective of Finnish science.

The System of Employment Dispute Resolution in the Russian Federation

It is possible to say that at present the system of consideration and resolution of employment disputes in the Russian Federation is still under development. Its structure and size, as well as a scope of competence of its particular participants, etc. are still changing. At the same time it is important to note that employees and employers no longer regard a court to be an alien element of the process of protecting their employment rights. They actively use all options given to them by contemporary Russian labour and employment legislation. Nevertheless, some procedures and mechanisms used in the Russian system of employment dispute resolution have not yet been developed well enough. This makes their usage considerably more difficult. It's also worth mentioning that Russian employment environment does not have any stable culture of settling employment disputes through negotiations, including engagement of mediators in this procedure. There are no provisions on mediation process and almost no specialists who are able to provide professional mediation services for the settlement of individual employment disputes. At the same time it seems to be proved that current reform of Russian legislation which has been carried out for the last several years must lead to identifying and further elaboration of a more effective methods and ways of settling employment disputes.

Islamist violence and regime stability in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia, homeland of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers of September 11, 2001, experienced low levels of internal violence until 2003, when a terrorist campaign by ‘Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula’ (QAP) shook the world's leading oil producer. Based on primary sources and extensive fieldwork in the Kingdom, this article traces the history of the Saudi jihadist movement and explains the outbreak and failure of the QAP campaign. It argues that jihadism in Saudi Arabia differs from jihadism in the Arab republics in being driven primarily by extreme pan-Islamism and not socio-revolutionary ideology, and that this helps to explain its peculiar trajectory. The article identifies two subcurrents of Saudi jihadism, ‘classical’ and ‘global’, and demonstrates that Al-Qaeda's global jihadism enjoyed very little support until 1999, when a number of factors coincided to boost dramatically Al-Qaeda recruitment. The article argues that the violence in 2003 was not the result of structural political or economic strains inside the Kingdom, but rather organizational developments within Al-Qaeda, notably the strategic decision taken by bin Laden in early 2002 to open a new front in Saudi Arabia. The QAP campaign was made possible by the presence in 2002 of a critical mass of returnees from Afghanistan, a clever two-track strategy by Al-Qaeda, and systemic weaknesses in the Saudi security apparatus. The campaign failed because the militants, radicalized in Afghan camps, represented an alien element on the local Islamist scene and lacked popular support. The near-absence of violence in the Kingdom before 2003 was due to Al-Qaeda's weak infrastructure in the early 1990s and bin Laden's 1998 decision to suspend operations to preserve local networks. The Saudi regime is currently more stable and self-confident—and therefore less inclined to democratic reform—than it has been in many years.

Lying, or Storytelling, as Antidote to Unhappiness in Robin Klein’s Hating Alison Ashley and Anne Fine’s A Pack of Lies and Goggle-eyes


 
 
 Lying and poetry are arts – arts, as Plato saw, not unconnected with each other – and they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion. — Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
 A great man – a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style – what is he? ... He rather lies than tells the truth; it requires more spirit and will. — Nietzsche, Will to Power
 Wilde and Nietzsche posit lying as an artistic form of self-expression, done knowingly, purposefully and with attention given to form and detail. Lying frees the liar from the constraints of truth, moving him or her into the higher realms of deliberately-conceived art and away from the grim realities of unpolished nature. In Robin Klein’s Hating Alison Ashley (1984) and Anne Fine’s Goggle-eyes (1989), this grim reality comes in the form of the introduction of an alien element into the young protagonists’ families: the boyfriend, and potential husband, of their mother. For both Erica and Kitty, lying, spinning a good yarn or telling tales constitutes their chosen way of mitigating the unhappiness that results from this unwanted addition to their families. Storytelling allows the girls to create a space within which to negotiate their relationships with their soon-to-be extended family, and ultimately integrate into the family circle the person whom they feel has threatened the stability of their family. This space for negotiation is humorous, and takes the form of an imaginatively constructed alternative or exaggerated reality: a space of liberating make-believe, in which the girls can distance, and de-familiarise, themselves from the truth of their situations. I am drawing here on the account of ‘make-believe’ offered by Eric Prenowitz:
 Make-believe is not a mode of measured philosophical enquiry. It is not for real, only a game. Something children do, for the fun of it. Readers likewise, and theatergoers. It engages knowingly in untruth and a certain artificial reality. One never makes believe unintentionally or by mistake. It therefore supposes a conscious, self-present, responsible subject—but only to divide itself, to absent itself, without any possible response, from itself. (2006, p.148)