Historical Novelty Research Articles

BerlinUnter Grund: Vision beyond the surface city

AbstractThis article examines a selection of poetry and short prose depictingU‐Bahnjourneys in early 20th‐century Berlin. While the cultural imagination of Berlin's emergence as a modern metropolis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is closely intertwined with the historical novelty of exterior spaces in the city and the figure of the perambulating flaneur, the cityscape's underground, made up ofU‐Bahntunnels and thousands of passengers have figured much less prominently in scholarship on Berlin's modernity. The close readings focus on the texts’ mediation of the sensory experience of underground dwelling and the impact of the sudden shifts between above‐ and belowground environments on the passenger's perception of space. As the article shows, the visual imagination and literary tropes that we encounter in theU‐Bahnsignify not only modes of representing modern urban space but also hold significance for understanding the importance of threshold experiences in modernity.

PROBLEMS OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

PROBLEMS OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

Spiritual Origins of Aria, its Formation in Europe and China

The purpose of the work is to trace the genesis of the aria typology and its inherent expressiveness of aria singing in its pre- and non-opera existence, comparing relevant materials from the history of the genre in Europe and China. As a methodological basis, we put forward the intonation approach of B. Asafyev's school in Ukraine, as it developed in the works of O. Markova, O. Muravska, Liu Bing Jiang, with emphasis on hermeneutic and stylistic-comparative analysis. The scientific novelty of the study is caused by the historical novelty of emphasising symbolic and religious beginnings in culture and art, which was traditionally ignored in the classical for Europe period of New time, as well as by the fact that, for the first time in Ukrainian and Chinese musicology, about hymnographic and song-chant forming of syncretism are put in logical chain of receivership information, from which an aria was born in the 12th-13th centuries in China and the 15th-16th centuries in Europe, which was later absorbed into the opera at the level of an essential component of the composition. Conclusion. The culture of the aria as a finished expressive quality and arias as a type of singing developed into the spiritual activity in the diametrically opposed cultural formations of China and Europe. They are historically connected by their appearance only in them in the planetary scope of the operatic action by its singing saturation from the beginning to the end of the performance. For China, the concept of forming an aria from the ritual syncretism of a hymn-song-aria is proven. For the European thinking, the awareness of the aria as a derivative of the Byzantine hymnography and liturgical-canto song with vocality inseparable from it was the achievement of musicological developments of the last decades. The adoption of such a concept, developed in the presented work, significantly corrects the “generic emphasis” of the expressiveness of the aria, traditionally considered in the context of the specifics of the operatic action.
 Key words: aria, genre in music, opera, song, chant, hymn.

Wretched Subjectivity

This article rethinks critically a landmark work of the twentieth century—The Captive Mind, by Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. Published in 1953, the book sought to understand human subjectivity, or, as it put it, “how the human mind functions,” in Cold-War Eastern Europe. I argue that, while probing what Western intellectuals of that time saw as the historical novelty of totalitarianism, Miłosz formulates an analysis that is rather retro. He represents Eastern Europe in terms of colonialism and imperialism—as a colonized realm and a colonized mind. What is more, he casts his representation in the terms of what Edward Said famously called “Orientalism”—producing a distorted, Orientalist work. Finally, while intimating hope for overcoming Eastern Europe’s domination, Miłosz shows that hope as illusory.

Latentna katastrofa epoki atomu

This article puts forward a comparative approach between the works of Tadeusz Rozewicz and Inger Christensen in the context of the diagnosis of nuclear criticism. Briefly reconstructed variants of philosophical reflection are included in the conceptual framework created by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. The intention here is to capture the latent catastrophe, virtually existing, yet actually experienced. The historic novelty of the threat of collective suicide to the human species has turned into a specter that haunts all areas of our activity. Total nuclear war, according to Jacques Derrida, exists as a textual phenomenon, a “fairy tale.” It is so confused with reality that the pure reality of the atomic age cannot be distilled. Other philosophers write about the organized “system of disintegration” (Elsa Morante), about the system of deterrence, about the hyper-reality and simulacrality ( Jean Baudrillard), about the “supraliminal” phenomenon that shapes perception and thinking (Gunther Anders). This nonevent provokes a permanent crisis for all institutions, problematizes notion of temporality, rules of rationality and subjective identity. Spider-Web Shield and Alphabet are seen here as artistic expressions of this experience… Rozewicz creates a hybrid work and uses the collage technique. Ingersen, on the other hand, uses a formal rigor (abecedarium or alphabet book, alliteration) and a mathematical formula (Fibonacci sequence). They are both looking for an adequate form for a unique and elusive experience that determined the specific Stimmung (to add Gumbrecht’s terminology) of the post-war era.

The Centralisation of Prudential Supervision in the Euroarea: The Emergence of a New ‘Conventional Wisdom’ and the Establishment of the SSM

This article provides an account of how, after the Eurozone sovereign crisis, the centralisation of banking prudential supervision in the Euroarea became ‘conventional wisdom’. But it also contends that the transition to a new centralising conventional wisdom is still partial and incomplete. To this end, the article analyses the legal prudential obstacles still preventing the emergence of a truly single prudential jurisdiction, coincident with the single monetary jurisdiction. The article is divided into five sections. Section 1 briefly describes the “historical novelty” of a single currency area comprising many separate prudential supervisory jurisdictions and its “permanence” until the Eurozone sovereign crisis. Section 2 analyses the legal framework applicable to the new Single Supervisory Mechanism and the degrees of legal variance in the applicability of prudential requirements across participating Member States. Section 3 summarily analyses one specific aspect of this legal variance: “national powers”. Section 4 briefly deals with the exercise of Options and Discretions available in Union Law within the SSM. Section 5 concludes. Centralised Prudential supervision, Single Supervisory Mechanism, European Central Bank, European Integration, National Competent Authorities, Capital Requirements Regulation, Legal Framework, Banking Union, Euroarea, Single Currency

Scrambling for the Centre: Ghana’s New Churches as an Alternative Ideology and Power

The effort expended by religious groups in Ghana to access and influence political power is not a historic novelty. Most clearly manifested in organizational strategies and the pronouncements of religious leaders, sectional ambitions in respect of political access and influence have recently gained ascendancy in response to the relatively rapid and large-scale growth of religious diversity across the nation and within its growing conurbations. This scramble for access and influence has also been fueled by the overt participation of some political leaders in religious activities, which are perceived to grant certain groups an enviable presence in the public sphere and favoured access to the corridors of state power. Focusing on two of Ghana’s New Churches, both Pentecostal–charismatic organizations, as case studies, this paper explores the strategies and motivations of religious groups striving to access and influence political society in an increasingly diverse socio-cultural context.

World-ecology: a global conversation

Jason W. Moore replies to Gennaro Avallone’s questions and succeeds in simultaneously providing an introductory presentation of world-ecology’s fundamental concepts and a critical discussion of some problematic issues recently emerged within the political ecology interna-tional debate. Amongst these latter are his relationship with the theorists of metabolic rift and the historical novelty represented by negative-value.

Editor's Introduction

It sounds like a setup, but it is adult film history: three women filmmakers meet in an adult novelty store in Coconut Grove, Florida. The year is 1994. One is Peggy Ahwesh, the New York–based avant-garde filmmaker. In works like Martina's Playhouse (1989), The Scary Movie (1993), and The Deadman (1989), her feminist, sexually provocative, Bataillean, punk-inflected cinema embraces bricolage, found footage, performance, and portraiture, often of women in states of abandon, refusal, and jouissance . With her is M. M. Serra, experimental filmmaker, curator, teacher, director of the Film-Makers' Cooperative, and advocate of and pedagogue on the cinematic possibilities of female sexuality. They are there to see the third: sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman, then a historical novelty for a coterie of cult video collectors. Wishman had been profiled in the RE/Search book Incredibly Strange Films (1986) and was one of few women working in the largely male-helmed cottage industry of New York–based sexploitation production in the 1960s.1 Beginning with a copious string of nudist-camp romance films in the early 1960s, Wishman steadily proceeded to make sex melodramas with the quotients of nudity that sexploitation's box-office formula required, yet infused them with her own preoccupations and sensibilities, delighting in the promise of a unique title, premise, or gimmick. Her films often featured women trapped in scenarios of maddeningly patriarchal design, taken to dysphoric, absurdist extremes. Swirling, spiraling camerawork; a copious array of women sporting black lace undergarments; cutaways to shoes, stockings, and marginal decorative objects; and loose post-synching produced films with great dynamism and a touch of delirium. Wishman's works were testimony to the ways women's bodies and spirits were shaped by the demands of a rigid patriarchal order, internalized as ineluctable law. Over the course of the next four decades Wishman produced thirty sex films, varying across genres …

Beyond a socio-centric concept of culture: Johann Arnason's macro-phenomenology and critique of sociological solipsism

This essay unpacks Johann Arnason’s theory of culture. It argues that the culture problematic remains the needle’s eye through which Arnason’s intellectual project must be understood, his recent shift to foreground the interplay of culture and power (as the religio-political nexus) notwithstanding. Arnason’s approach to culture is foundational to his articulation of the human condition, which is articulated here as the interaction of a historical cultural hermeneutics and a macro-phenomenology of the world as a shared horizon. The essay discusses Arnason’s elucidation of his theory of culture as a contribution to debates on the ‘meaning of meaning’. It traces its beginnings from his critique of Habermas’s theory of modernity to its development via a trialogue with Max Weber, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Cornelius Castoriadis. It argues that Arnason's theory of culture moves beyond socio-centric perspectives, and, in so doing, offers a critique of what we might call sociological solipsism. In decentring society/anthropos, a more nuanced understanding of the human condition as a unity in diversity is achieved. The essay concludes with a discussion of some tensions in Arnason’s understanding of culture, and argues for the importance for incorporating a qualitative notion of ‘movement’ in order to make sense of historical novelty and social change.

Mapping the theme of Creativity in Cornelius Castoriadis’s and Paul Ricoeur’s Social Imaginaries

This paper elucidates the notion that action is creative through the social imaginaries perspective. Hans Joas’s critique of sociological theories on action developed in The Creativity of Action (1996 [1992]) argued that creativity is an essential concept to better understand social action. Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur employ an understanding of action as being inextricably connected to the social imaginary and capable of bringing forth historically novel forms of being and doing. An elucidation of Castoriadis’s dichotomy between the instituted and instituting imaginaries and Ricoeur’s distinction of the ideological and utopian poles of the cultural imagination bring to the surface points of convergence and divergence in their respective understandings of the social imaginary and historical novelty. Inspired by Joas’s critique of sociological theories of action through pragmatism, which is underlined by a critique of the philosophical anthropological assumptions held by structuralism, this essay argues that Castoriadis’s and Ricoeur’s distinct insights on the creative dimension of social action and the way in which social reality emerges can elucidate further an anti-structuralist philosophical anthropology that can help inform sociological theories of action.

Consumer studies as critical social theory

A fundamental concern of all critical social theory has been relating economic action to socio-political action when explaining social change. Along with critical theories of socio-political praxis and critical theories of production and reproduction, critical consumer studies has at times sought to demonstrate how narrowly productivistic solutions to this problem can be updated or supplemented to fit better with observable historical events. However, consumer studies itself lacks conceptual coherency and is split between extending and rejecting major productivistic assumptions, making the wider significance of this literature difficult to identify. I argue that consumption and production are best understood conceptually as related moments in the material and symbolic circulation of value in circuits of market exchange, redistribution and reciprocity. Whether consumer action functions to reproduce anterior productive arrangements is a matter of historical contingency. The real benefit of consumer studies is the capacity to question and modify existing historical narratives, while serving also to generate its own insights. Consumer studies can help to systematically reveal the extent to which collective social action is patterned by class divisions, but it can also identify forms of collective association that do not reveal a basically class logic. Likewise, consumer action may reinforce the ‘distinction’ that Pierre Bourdieu has helped to theorize, but it can equally create the ‘mutuality of being’ of which Marshall Sahlins speaks. Moreover, consumer demand may indeed reproduce certain productive arrangements, as consumer critiques have always pointed out, but production is often a response to prior consumer demand, and rises or falls in relation to this. Instead of a priori assumptions about the manipulability of consumer demand, which make it easy to evade this enormous problem, situated analyses of specific fields of consumption are required that show how, when and where consumer action leads to reproduction or to real historical novelty.

On the milieu of security

Critical analysis of security presents processes of securitization as sinister threats to public values such as accountability, inclusion and transparency. By questioning some of the theoretical premises of this view of the milieu of security, it is argued that practices of securitization might be understood less as an assertive medium for the constitution of the social field and more as a responsive mode of problematization of the temporalities of concerted public action. The argument proceeds in stages. First, two ways in which publicness is figured in the critique of security are identified and the spatiality of securitization associated with them elaborated. Second, this view of the spatiality of securitization is then linked to two modes of temporality that apparently define the historical novelty of contemporary security practices. It is argued that uncovering the pernicious politics of security depends on identifying putative subject effects sought and achieved by programmes of rule. In contrast to this approach, an alternative inflection of the genealogical perspective on security is identified. This inflection seeks to diagnose problematizations to which security initiatives are a response, suggesting a reorientation of critical attention to investigating the reconfiguration of public life around various temporal registers of uncertainty, adjustment and repair. The article closes by arguing that the specific public values at stake in securitization should be given more credence.

Ice, fire and flood

Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst conservative politicians and journalists, there is a near-consensus amongst scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to possibly disastrous effect. Like the hole in the ozone layer as described by Bruno Latour, global warming is a ‘hybrid’ natural-social-discursive phenomenon. And science fiction (SF) seems to occupy a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. This paper takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom dubs ‘cli-fi’. It seeks to describe how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. It argues against the view that ‘catastrophic’ SF is best understood as a variant of the kind of ‘apocalyptic’ fiction inspired by the Christian Book of Revelation, or Apokalypsis, on the grounds that this tends to downplay the historical novelty of SF as a genre defined primarily in relation to modern science and technology. And it examines the narrative strategies pursued in both print and audio-visual SF texts that deal with anthropogenic climate change.

Reinventing the wheel? Or adding new air to old tires?

Brett Christophers’ nuanced critique of the concept of financialization provides a useful check on its exuberant adoption within human geography and other disciplines. While acknowledging the article’s important and timely intervention, I question Christophers’ overriding concern with financialization’s lack of novelty. Drawing examples from the financialization of land, I argue that the (undeniable) existence of historical parallels and prior theorizations does not automatically invalidate the term. Instead, the central challenge for researchers is how to place the current wave of financialization within historical context, acknowledging both continuity and novelty.

Controvérsias analíticas sobre a turistificação da musicalidade diamantinense : o caso das vesperatas = Analytical disputes on the Diamantina’s musicality’s touristification : the case of vesperatas

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar teórica e empiricamente a turistificação da tradição musical diamantinense. Tomando como referência as vesperatas, principal atrativo do município mineiro de Diamantina, procura-se, num primeiro momento, problematizar as análises que buscam explorar a relação entre turismo e tradição musical em termos de descaracterização ou hibridismo cultural. Num segundo momento, objetiva-se mostrar que as vesperatas são tão somente um produto turístico, uma vez que a referência ao tradicional é uma forma de tornar legível uma dada mercadoria lançada ao público consumidor. Apoiando-se no argumento de que a novidade histórica trazida pela globalização é a formação de um imaginário coletivo internacional, as vesperatas são entendidas como uma mercadoria cujo consumo se fundamenta na produção de signos ligados à indústria fonográfica mundial e ao imaginário criado em torno das cidades históricas mineiras.

INCIDENCIAS DEL PROCESO HISTÓRICO EN EL PROCESO EDUCATIVO ARGENTINO

El artículo aporta una relación panorámica y conceptual sobre la educación argentina. En él se presentan los inicios de las propuestas educativas, la presencia de la visión positivista, la legislación sobre la educación en el siglo XIX, la presencia estudiantil universitaria, la incidencia de la dictadura militar, un proyecto posterior de país que tendía al desarrollo industrial y la correspondiente legislación federal de educación. La metodología empleada, en este artículo, consiste en recurrir a datos históricos -sin hacer una historia de la educación- del proceso educativo formal en Argentina a fin de sostener la hipótesis de que éste se ha constituido sobre una doble vertiente cuya sombra se extiende hasta el presente. Para lograr este objetivo y corroborar esta hipótesis se ponen de manifiesto: a) cómo las situaciones históricas, a través de sus pensadores y políticos y de su legislación más representativa, b) inciden en el presente del proceso educativo argentino, referido especialmente al nivel primario y secundario, c) generando una forma de ser sociocultural peculiar. No se pretende, pues, hallar una novedad histórica; sino una forma de lectura diferente, haciendo tomar conciencia acerca de cómo: a) las decisiones políticas y culturales, b) tomadas en el pasado c) no han sido inofensivas, d) lo que es una lección para el presente. Estas referencias históricas hacen visibles las pugnas que, dentro de la misma sociedad argentina, los bandos protagonistas iban generando. Éstos fueron primeramente pro religiosos o pro laicos; y luego estos bandos se convirtieron en el federal y el unitario, no exento de corrupción, que perduran hasta el presente, en una no siempre fácil convivencia nacional.

Ehebruch als Ehehindernis. Das impedimentum adulterii im protestantischen Eherecht der Wittenberger Reformation

The impediment of adultery, one of the two basic kinds of the impediment of crime, is fairly unknown by today. This paper will first speak about the impediment of adultery in its medieval form as laid down in the law of the Catholic Church. Its focus will be on the reformatory circle of Wittenberg around Martin Luther. A legal picture of the protestant marriage as well as the changes connected with it is drawn, because literature and theology had to struggle with numerous subsequent problems due to the new understanding of marriage – which now also could be divorced. In doing so, Luther and the reformatory jurists were not always uniform in their respective views. Finally, the impediment of culpable divorce because of adultery, being a historic novelty, will be analyzed.

Las disputas interreligiosas bajomedievales. Sus presupuestos teóricos: Ramón Llull / Interfaith Mediaeval Disputes. Theoretical Budgets: Raymond Llull

In the late Middle Ages and especially in the ss. xiv and xv, we see a proliferation of interfaith disputes between Christians, Muslims and Jews, that although somewhat reissue previous practices have, for quantity, quality theoretical and practical consequences, a historical novelty. Can be classified as 1. preaching, 2. education and 3. dispute. Ramon Llull can be considered a pioneer of interreligious dialogue between Western monotheisms, in the sense of having proposed a new approach to the controversies that had centuries of experience when he wrote. While all his work, in a sense, it contributes to the idea of basing the rationality of Christian belief several works specifically devoted to interreligious dialogue, including Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men (Llibre del gentil e dels tres savis, 1274-1276) posed —fictional— as the reason and purpose of their efforts. An important reason to be interested in thinking luliano is that, in some respects, the problems involved in the dialogue are repeated throughout the centuries until today. There are three aspects of his thought that are interesting for their originality and the ability to compare and draw analogies and differences with the current project: 1.Integrate the debate in the context of rationality, but in a broader way than syllogistic correction or that the question of the truth or falsity of assertions isolated. 2.Find a specific objective, clear and can be shared by the partners. 3.Give agnosticism own space.

Event, Abyss, Excess: The Event of Women in Chinese Commercial Advertisement, 1910s-1930s

This essay solders together a historical case study of advertising on the China mainland in the early twentieth century with a series of generalizable appraisals and determinations to establish how the catachresis woman is evental. The event of women emerged historically in part because commercial advertising alleges that it did, and in part because at roughly the same time a subjective claim—“I am a woman”—began to be voiced. Although registered orthographically, woman 女性 is not simply a rhetorical category or a natural fact; it is not the effect of abyssal sex difference or an array of performatively accreted social subjects. It is a historical novelty. This essay universalizes a case rooted in Chinese- and Japanese-language archives and historical specificities, particularly the international advertising ephemera that presents a multiple (Badiou’s language for a set or “context”) or site where a historical event could have erupted and, in this case, did erupt. Ephemera are useful in historical analysis, as Walter Benjamin suggested a century ago, because historical events lie immanent in detritus as potential dialectical images, which the determined historian can extricate. Reading Badiou’s philosophy creatively, the essay makes the case that women or woman is an emergent, historical, modern, and universal truth; direct critique of Badiou also drives home the point that philosophy (or “theory”) is vulnerable to history and that historically, factually, actually, and in truth, women and feminism are foundations of modernity no matter how modernity is qualified.