Contingent Encounters Research Articles

Encounters with the Absolute – The Absolute as Encounter

Abstract This article explores the contingency of the encounter between Jesus of Nazareth as representative of YHWH and Mary Magdalene that occurs at Jesus’s tomb. It interprets two important passages from the Gospel of Mark (Mk 16:1–8) and the Gospel of John (Jn 20:11–18) in order to reflect upon the Absolute which arises from this encounter. In Mark’s Gospel, the result of the encounter is the reference to a never-derivable and unrepresentable beginning, on which the text of Mark is built. The Gospel of John, which refers to Mark, concretizes this as the beginning of love and the covenant partnership between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It is a contingent encounter because there is no external necessity for it. The crucial point is that the event of God only manifests itself in unforeseen encounters. Therefore the experience of an encounter which sets a new beginning in motion and the existence of God are inextricably linked.

What Noise Does a Psychotic Door Listen To? Information, Intermediality, and Guo Baochang's Peking Opera Film Dream of the Bridal Chamber

The Chinese opera film criticism of the late 1950s coincided with the introduction of cybernetics to China. Echoing cybernetics’ emphasis on the homeostasis of an artificial or living machine archived by filtering noise from information in the environment, film critics aimed no less at maintaining the steady states of Chinese culture (epitomized by traditional opera) when taking on the treacherous milieu called modernization (in the form of cinema). The whole problematic of opera films—in which one is forced to choose filtering out formulaic operatic gestures or realistic cinematic mise-en-scène as noise to maintain a self-cohesive cultural system—follows from the mistake of essentializing media specificities as prior to the contingent encounter among different mediums. However, an alternative approach lies in treating noise not as interference that must be eliminated but as surplus information that introduces system errors, triggers phase shifts, and brings about random changes for genuine self-organization, allowing us to confront control with the noise in its own channels. A revamping of cybernetics in this regard opens up new possibilities of understanding opera films through the peculiar prism of Guo Baochang's 2005 opera film Chungui meng 春閨夢 (Dream of the Bridal Chamber). And that prism particularly takes the form of a series of moon gates (yueliang men 月亮門), an architectural trope invoked throughout the film signifying the cybernetic circuit of gateways that at once exerts control over and yet is disturbed and reshaped by the noisy signals arising from the mutual interferences among opera, film, and, ultimately, television.

Contingent Encounters: Understanding the Relationship Between Homophily and Polarisation within Social Media

We are witnessing a polarisation of opinions and political groupings across the world, as evidenced by the rise of populism, conspiracy theories and an increasing distrust of authority. One common theme which runs through this polarisation is the mediation of social media. I thus ask, what is it about social media that creates polarisation, and how can a philosophy of the encounter help remedy it? I argue existing understandings of polarisation online such as the filter bubble hypothesis are technologically deterministic. This determinism, I argue is confusing academic critiques of the sociological principle of homophily. To counter this position and extend our critique of homophily in network science, I propose to turn to Louis Althusser’s ‘The underground current of the materialism of the encounter’ in which he argues that contingency and openness is the material basis for freedom, thinking and the encountering of the world. With an emphasis on contingency, we can correctly ascertain how technology distorts and intervenes in the encounter. This paper aims to build on such a critical stance for analysing digital networks by reclaiming the contingency which defines true encounters and arguing that to understand polarisation means to move beyond the filter bubble hypothesis. This in turn enables a clearer understanding of the role homophily plays in causing polarisation within social media. The implications of these findings instruct us to look outside of algorithmic structure of social media and into the wider societal causes of polarisation.

Teaching as Improvisation

In this article, we discuss the centrality of improvisation for teaching, based particularly on readings of Cassin (2014, 2020), Rancière (1991, 1999, 2013, 2020), and Bailey (1992). Our starting point is that there simply can be no teaching without improvisation, i.e., the delicate practice of responding to, situating, and attuning to events within educational encounters that cannot be foreseen, but constantly call for attention and action through the finest virtue of our intellect at play. In the article, we go along with the early Sophists for whom improvisation meant to be able to speak about everything by allowing oneself to be led by opportunity (Cassin 2014). We will be claiming that improvisation of the sophist teacher is both an intellectual and bodily virtue, requiring discipline as well as poêsis and technê as well as praxis. In short, improvisation as a specific form of educational performativity. Together with Rancière (1991, 2020), diPiero (2020), and Bailey (1992) we intend to show how improvisation in teaching speaks to our senses and sets into motion simultaneously the sharing and uniqueness of sensing as such, captured by Rancière’s understanding of le partage du sensible. Improvisation, we conclude, can be understood as the product of contingent encounters between subjects, objects, and environments, where it emerges in the rupture between form and content (diPiero 2020). As such, it allows for other ways of speaking and being in the world than those desired by the institutionalisation of a certain police orderand therefore becomes, we suggest, a central element in a democratic realization of the teaching practice.

Contingency, Opacity, Belief: Ethics in The Wings of the Dove

The Wings of the Dove brings out a fierce desire to know—a desire the text often refuses to satisfy. I argue that this denial of knowledge acts ethically: drawing on unexpected common ground between Davidson and Levinas, I see knowledge-formation as fitting new information into existing schema. Wings marks the inadequacy of those schema, instead proposing a particularized, contingent encounter with characters who escape our grasp. Crucially, this is not an ethics grounded only in denial: even as James forecloses access to characters' consciousness, his stylistic choices attest to their inner lives as unavailable yet not empty.

Machiavelli, Epicureanism and the Ethics of Democracy

Abstract Recent scholarship on the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has demonstrated the extent to which the latter's republicanism is of a populist type, and a potentially important resource for contemporary democratic theory. Although work has been produced on the constitutional form of the Machiavellian republic, less effort has been made to articulate the theoretical assumptions upon which the advocacy of such a republic is ethically grounded. Here, I attempt to locate the democratic ethical imperative in the affirmation of a fundamental human difference. Influenced by the Epicurean tradition, Machiavelli's natural philosophy considers material entities as absolute singularities lacking internal teleological direction, their movement the productive result of contingent encounters. One cannot assume a natural or pre-social identity of desire between persons. Democracy is the ethically preferred regime because it is the one that is capable of facilitating the expression of this human uniqueness.

The technopolitics of security: Agency, temporality, sovereignty

This introduction to the special issue on ‘the technopolitics of security’ outlines key concepts and engages debates pertaining to the relationship between techno-materiality, security governance and struggles over sovereignty. ‘Technopolitics’ refers to the strategic practice of designing and using technologies to enact political goals, producing hybrid forms of power that combine cultural, institutional and technological dimensions. These technopolitical practices give rise to new forms of agency, producing effects unintended by their designers that may alter logics of political contestation and allow technologies to be reappropriated for different political purposes. To illustrate the distributed forms of agency and contingent encounters that the technopolitics approach evokes, the article develops three key aspects of technopolitics in its relationship to security governance: (1) an understanding of agency as distributed between human and non-human actors, but also asymmetric in that human intentionality plays an assembling role that is frequently overrun by the unintended effects; (2) the temporal horizons of imagination and action over which technopolitical interventions unfold, identifying the importance of logics of anticipation and eventization; and (3) the relationship between technopolitics and sovereignty, arguing that it encourages a decentred and materialized understanding of how claims to sovereignty are made and contested.

Unplanned links, unanticipated outcomes: Urban refugees in Halba (Lebanon)

Much of the literature covering forced population displacement has neglected spatial implications, dealing with place as mere context. Building on a case study of the city of Halba (Lebanon) where it maps a process of contingent encounters through which disparate resources, individuals, and groups are stitched together to generate large-scale housing projects that shelter refugees, this paper demonstrates the importance of studying displacement through a grounded reading of the spatial transformations it implicates. The paper maps multiple private and public actors who exploit cracks and connect seemingly disparate material flows (e.g., humanitarian aid, public housing subsidies) and institutional systems (e.g., humanitarian, public, private, religious) in ways that catalyze and accelerate the production of housing in order to derive profit from the opportunities afforded by the refugee crisis. Thus, developers, buyers, residents, brokers, public agents, and other actors all support a flow of informal profitable exchanges that are far from seamless economic transactions, mixing instead capitalist profiteering with human solidarity, religious morality, or kinship obligations that all buttress the possibility of these encounters and their materialization into new configurations of urban quarters. The arrangements formed through these processes, the paper shows, are strongly reflective of existing social hierarchies and inequalities.

Editors’ Note: Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis ★ ★ ★

Editors’ Note: Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis ★ ★ ★

The micropolitical life of energy projects: A collaborative exploration of injustice and resistance to small hydropower projects in the Wallmapu, Southern Chile

This article contributes to an emerging body of literature about the micropolitics of the transition to renewable energy by examining how community leaders, in order to protect their territories, contest the energy transition. We present findings from two ethnographic case studies of small hydropower plants (SHPs) in indigenous Mapuche territory. As SHPs up to 20 MW are considered renewable projects by law, Chilean national authorities consider them as a non-invasive eco-friendly solution and, consequently, most of these projects are approved without carrying out an indigenous consultation and, thus, ignoring community leaders’ demands for territorial autonomy. Following a micropolitical ecology approach, this paper analyses community leaders’ resistance towards SHPs in Mapuche territories by discussing three key aspects: 1) access to information, 2) participation in decision-making processes, and 3) changes in community politics. These are different dimensions of the ‘micropolitical life of SHPs’, a heuristic tool, defined in collaboration with community leaders to explore the contentious political dynamics that community leaders experience in their resistance against SHPs on the one hand, and to describe how community leaders’ political practices shape and are shaped by contingent encounters and alliances in specific historical and territorial settings on the other. We conclude that despite the anguish that SHPs cause, community leaders bring about hope that may create possibilities to transform their territories.

Deleuze and Rorty on hope: Educating hope against neoliberalism

The introduction of corporate mode into universities with the widespread of neoliberalism has posed threats to intellectuals’ academic creativity and political sensitivity. To respond to the threats, I argue that it is high time we talk about educating hope. Moreover, I contend that Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze’s theories on hope can be of great help in understanding the complexity and exquisiteness of hope—non-representational and non-metaphysical, dependent on contingent encounters, transformative and political.

A Lacanian supplementation to love in L\u2019Immanence des v\xe9rit\xe9s

In L’Immanence des vérités, Alain Badiou rewrites the Platonic allegory of the cave. As the book’s structure reveals, Badiou’s central claim is that truths are absolute, for they are constituted by the dialectic between finitude and infinity, the consequence of which lies in the creation of the œuvre. Although love is often affected by individual difference, family, money, and social norms, philosophy calls for a rupture with these instances of finitude, awakening us to the truth that love is open to the possibility of infinity embodied by contingent encounter, amorous declaration, and the faithful construction of the Two. Badiou calls for subjectivization of this possibility in the form of the amorous œuvre, through and beyond the Lacanian impasse of the sexual non-relationship. This article supplements Badiouian love with Lacanian psychoanalysis by developing five points. First, the binary framework “Lacanian finitude vs Badiouian infinity” can be misleading. Second, Badiou himself regards the unconscious and the analytic discourse as inscribed by the dialectic between finitude and infinity. Third, Lacan allows us to recognize that the œuvre and the waste are not opposed, but rather supplementary to each other. Fourth, for both Lacan and Badiou, love constitutes the interlacing of the non-relationship and the Two. Fifth, the Badiouian amorous absolute must deal with the real of the absolute as the fusional One and thus, can be supplemented by the Lacanian problematic of the sexual relationship in its fantasmatic form of the One. Based on these points, this article elaborates such concepts as the amorous labor, the dialectic between œuvre and waste, and the artisan of love.

Marx and Spinoza? On Kordela's Epistemontology as the Latest Systematic Program of Spinozist Marxism

Marx and Spinoza?On Kordela's Epistemontology as the Latest Systematic Program of Spinozist Marxism Simon Hajdini (bio) A. Kiarina Kordela's approach to topics discussed in her latest monograph, Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan, is significantly marked by her arguably unusual choice of the book's title. Easily misread, misspoken, and miswritten—and unless misread, misspoken, or miswritten—the tongue-twisting title strikes the attentive reader as a Freudian slip, that is, as an instance of those tiny linguistic mishaps with drastic consequences examined by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (2001 [1901]). And, I should like to claim, very rightly so. It is such a reading of the title that provides the reader with perhaps the simplest of entries into Kordela's new book. The title should be viewed and read in terms of a deliberate deployment of the mechanism of "distortion," or Entstellung (to use Freud's term), as constitutive of the innermost workings of the unconscious. In line with the commanding wager of Freudian psychoanalysis, and owing to their contingent sonic likenesses, words are liable to mutual contaminations that give rise to ostensibly nonsensical formations such as slips of the tongue. These contingent encounters, however nonsensical they may appear, are productive of another—unexpected or symptomatic—sense that lingers at the edges of the neatly discerned molecules of language, in turn giving voice to their elusive, and linguistically disruptive, affinities. Accordingly, "epistemontology" should be read as a philosophical slip of the tongue, with Kordela's Epystemontology figuring as its whopping book-length commentary. In an attempt to shed light on the foreclosed common ground of ontology and epistemology, Kordela stages a mutually contaminating [End Page 103] encounter between these two distinct philosophical disciplines, in turn introducing the reader to "epistemontology" as their at once condensed and distorted offspring. Lacking any substantial footing, or a realm of its own, the in-between of epistemology and ontology forms "an Other scene," einen anderen Schauplatz, to use Fechner's term deployed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (2001 [1900], IV, 48). It forms an Other scene that can be grasped only by way of an epistemontological short circuit. The focal points of this short circuit are indicated in the second part of Kordela's title, consisting of a series of proper names, arranged into a hyphenated chain rather than neatly discerned by the customary use of commas. If the book's main title, Epistemontology, is to be read as mirroring one aspect of the Freudian distortion, namely the unconscious mechanism of "condensation," or Verdichtung, standing for an overlapping fusion of two distinctive signifiers into seemingly indistinct nonsense, its second part should be read as mirroring the second of the two mechanisms of the unconscious, that of Verschiebung, or "displacement." The hyphenated sequence of proper names suggests a metonymically persisting, yet elusively displaced, presence of epistemontology yet to be uncovered in the theories of Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and Lacan. Therefore, the two linguistic molecules that make out Kordela's title are to be interpreted as ciphers of the two chief mechanisms of the unconscious, which Jakobson famously linked to the two fundamental axes of language as defined by Saussure, thus establishing a structural homology between the Freudian couplet of condensation and displacement, on the one hand, and the linguistic duality of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations (or of metaphor and metonymy), on the other. It is well known that this Jakobsonian linking—mediated through the work of Lévi-Strauss—was instrumental in setting off Lacan's "return to Freud," the gist of which is captured in his famous motto: "the unconscious is structured like a language" (1993, 167). The metaphorical condensation of "epistemontology" and the hyphenated metonymical chain of "Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan" thus mirror and mobilize the two basic operations not only of language but of structurality as such. In this way, they enable us to make sense of the subtitle of Kordela's book: "The (bio)power of structure." Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and Lacan occupy an Other scene as the scene of structurality, and are "coupled" solely by it.1 [End Page 104] It is precisely the notion and logic of structure, ultimately modeled upon...

Living in a Toxic World

While the proliferation of industrial toxic substances over the past century has had drastic environmental and bodily effects, conventional methods of measuring and mitigating those effects continue to produce uncertainty. The project of living in a toxic world entails ethical, technical, and aesthetic efforts to understand toxicity as a contingent encounter among beings, systems, and things, rather than as a fundamental characteristic of particular substances. Anthropologists do not just observe such encounters; they live and work within them. This review examines recent anthropological research on toxicity, proposing that responses to toxic disaster and occupational exposure, as well as acts of familial, state, or corporate care, are all modes of “toxic worlding.” The review concludes with a summary of recent research in collaborative and engaged anthropology, suggesting that such approaches are essential not so much for purifying or detoxifying the world as for making it otherwise.

Anomalous Forms in Computer Music

Anomalous Forms in Computer Music

Materiality, Contingency and Emergence of Compositional Material

If there is one idea that unites the manifold and often evasive conceptions of materialism, it is the immanence of form. Materialism, thus conceived, is the idea that matter is not shaped into form by something external to it, but rather itself harbours formal potential. Aesthetic, musical, biological, physical, and social forms can be understood as the product of emergent material processes. They can be conceived as contingent encounters that have taken form. Such a notion of materialist morphogenesis challenges anthropocentric assumptions about the nature of creative processes, relinquishing the idea of artistic practice as mastery over the material. This article focuses on compositional approaches to sound that explore the emergent material generation of form. It proposes a notion of materiality as a non-monist, non-hierarchical, and unpredictable interaction of different temporal, material, spatial and conceptual levels. By discussing works by Georges Aperghis, Helmut Lachenmann, Ashley Fure, and Aaron Cassidy, it deals with ways in which compositional practices, understood as situated and relational explorations of material potentials, embrace material contingency and the emergence of form.

Dalla letteratura alla filosofia. Il Proust di Deleuze

The present paper traces some of the main articulations of the book Marcel Proust and the signs (1964), in which the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze affirms the superiority of literature on classical rationalist philosophy in the search for truth. Proust’s work rivals the philosophy itself, since it brings into play the involuntary nature of memory and intelligence – a condition which lies at the beginning of every thought – which can grasp the truth only solicited and forced by chance encounters. Classical rationalist philosophy as a methodical exercise, induced by the good will of the thinker, can instead reach only abstract and conventional truths. The paper underlines how, according to Deleuze, Proust’s work will represent the model of authentic philosophy, the one that comes to produce with violence new concepts forced by problems and urgencies that impose themselves from outside. In fact, in Difference and Repetition (1968), the characteristics ascribed to the Proustian Recherche are explicitly attributed to a philosophy of Difference, which is posited by the author as the real need of his own time. In 1991, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari posed the question: What is philosophy? The attributes previously assigned to the literature, reappeared in the answer to such a question. A paradoxical necessity – reached through contingent encounters on one side, and the involuntary nature of thought on the other side – will appear at the center of the book that closes the theoretical trajectory of Deleuze: such a paradox shows itself as the only condition for the “invention of concepts”, which is at the same time the definition and ultimate task of philosophical practice.

Improvisation as Contingent Encounter, Or: The Song of My Toothbrush

This article hazards a definition of improvisation as a "contingent encounter," not in order to settle definitional debates, but in order to productively re-evaluate questions around improvisation as an aesthetic and socio-political force. Here, I argue that thinking improvisation through contingency highlights several key characteristics while leaving behind a set of problematic assumptions that often accompanies thinking improvisation in social spaces. First, I outline these characteristics, establishing what it might mean to bring contingency to bear on a musical performance. Subsequently, I compare two instances of "transatlantic improvised music": Eric Dolphy's "Out to Lunch," and "Waves, Linens, and White Light" by contemporary free improvisers, Mr. K. I conclude by sketching some of the implications of taking this experimental definition seriously, arguing that it re-orients improvisation away from a rarefied behavior and more towards a potentiality hidden inside each moment.

The geopolitics of sport beyond soft power: event ethnography and the 2016 cycling world championships in qatar

State leaders in the Arabian Peninsula have increasingly sought to host globalized sporting events to broadcast a cosmopolitan and modern image of the region. These efforts are typically interpreted as examples of states exercising ‘soft power’. This article challenges the state-centric assumptions built into the soft power approach by employing an event ethnography of the 2016 UCI Road Cycling World Championships in Doha. Advancing a more grounded geopolitics of elite sport in the Gulf, I examine how geopolitical identity narratives about Qatar, and the Gulf region more broadly, circulate at various scales and through countless contingent encounters at the event. I ask specifically how these identity narratives are constructed and challenged, both materially and discursively by athletes, spectators and urban residents. Sporting events, I argue, are key sites of geopolitical encounter: where subjects and spaces are not predetermined, but actively constituted through people’s interactions in the host cities and countries.

The Golden Helix: Origins, ethnicity and preconception genetic screening in Israel

The unique Israeli nation-wide programme of voluntary, free-of-charge programme of “population genetic screening for reproductive purposes” screens for “frequent and severe” genetic diseases. It is grounded in the observation that specific groups in Israeli population carry “founder mutations”: changes in DNA appearing with a high frequency in a given population. The Israeli enthusiasm for genetic testing and screening was linked with the Zionist ideology, traditional Jewish valorization of the family, a shared understanding of difficulties of life in Israel, fear of disastrous consequences of a pregnancy and, for some, also a lingering influence of eugenic ideas. This article proposes a somewhat different view. It argues that the development of state-sponsored genetic screening in Israel was to an important extent a result of a partly contingent encounter between a national ideology, a traditional Jewish respect for science – or for some the absence of a critical view of science – the development of new biomedical technologies, and the multilevel professional interests of physicians and geneticists: from curiosity and a wish to help mutation carriers – Jewish and non-Jewish – to have healthy children, to financial interests in the development of genetic testing and a widespread apprehension of juridical pursuits.