Impossible Question Research Articles

Problem realizmu w polskiej myśli politycznej na uchodźstwie po II wojnie światowej – pytania i tezy

Problems of political realism in Polish political thought in exile after World War II – questions and theses
 The study is devoted on the problem of political realism in Polish political thought in exile after World War II (1945‑1989). The author concludes that the categories of “political realism” and “political idealism” are generally inadequate to the history of Polish political thought. There is rather difficult to find the “political realism” or “political idealism” in a clear substantial phenomenon. Very often, political ideas incorporate idealism and realism. Realist analysis of the realities could lead to a moral capitulation under the conviction that the change of the conditions is impossible. Sometimes it permit to keep the “idealist” aims but also avoiding the hopeless decisions (insurrections). Obviously, a future restoration of Polish independence after Yalta required a great geopolitical revolution in Europe. Poles had no means to achieve this aim acting in isolation. They also had no idea to reconcile themselves with the realities of Soviet domination. Polish political thought after Yalta was an exercise in resolving the impossible questions. The most prominent Polish political writer in exile Juliusz Mieroszewski argued that the categories of “realism” and “idealism” are changing in history. Their real sense depends on geopolitical constellation of a given nation in a given time. A perfect policy is idealist in the sphere of aims and realist in the domain of methods as Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski thought. Political thinkers of Polish emigration tried to reconsider the lesson of the past – especially from the tragedy of Warsaw Uprising of 1944 – and not to permit for a new insurrection in 1956. Significant internal autonomy of the Polish People’s Republic after 1956 was considered not as a final achievement but only an “stage” on the rather long way to future independence. Mieroszewski’s „evolutionism” was not a sort of reconciliation with the communist order and the dependence on the USSR but a conception based on the conviction that only the internal changes inside the communist regime could bring the real progress in the fight for independence.

Between Hope and Cynicism: A Dogged Call to Action

Between Hope and Cynicism: A Dogged Call to Action Erin Wunker (bio) “Quiet dog bites hard.” Mos Def In the spring of 2010, I used an esc Readers’ Forum to publicly come out as a hopeful precariat. Noam Chomsky has described the precariat as one of “those people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society,” although he is quick to point out that the periphery is a myth. Many of us are members of the precariat. We are the necessary abject: needed to provide a powerful state that will “bail out the plutonomy when it gets into trouble, but other than that [the members of the precariat] have no function” (np). Here in the academy this means, among other things, that courses are increasingly taught by sessional workers and tenure-track jobs are being replaced by limited term appointments. My 2010 paper, was, among other things, about hope: how it is important, how it is naïve, how it is necessary. Now, though, I’m not so sure. Recently, I saw a mural by contemporary Australian artist Brad Buckley. The piece is from Buckley’s larger Slaughterhouse Project, which curator Brett Levine describes as a suite of works “which calls into question the roles and responsibilities of cultures to consider and address diverse [End Page 17] concerns” (np). The piece was comprised of the word “hope” hovering over a group of human silhouettes. Never mind that Levine is talking about contemporary art and I am talking about the academic institution: hope gets harnessed in service of something. “Doing something,” in Sara Ahmed’s estimation, is as an impossible demand often framed as a question (“What can I do?”). Impossible, but imperative. We need to ask impossible questions, she claims, because impossible questions are future-oriented ones (183). “The future is both a question mark and a mark of questioning,” writes Ahmed. “The question of the future is an affective one; it is a question of hope for what we might yet be, as well as fear for what we could become” (184). Indeed, this forum considering cynicism as one of the affective by-products of contemporary academic work is itself a call to do something. But what can we do? What can I do? In 2010 my answer would have been cautiously hopeful. As a member of the growing precariat I am no stranger to hope as a politically affective tool. Hope is what propels me forward into each graduate and undergraduate supervision I take on, each late night or weekend I spend working on my own research rather than whatever else it is that people do when they are not teaching or prepping or marking. I tell myself that it is hope that fuels the conference papers I submit, the service work I do that is beyond the job description in my contract, and the innumerable hours of emotional labour I (mostly) happily take on because I believe in the profession and, more so, I believe there will be a place for me in it. I hope, in other words, that the work I do is visible not just in the lines of my cv, but in its gaps as well. Hope is what sustains me through each blog post I write for Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe. Hope plugs its fingers in my ears when I am sitting in a Council of Chairs meeting as the Program Director for Canadian Studies and hear that my institution is in an unofficial hiring freeze until 2015. Hope tells me not to worry. I have been compelled in my academic and public work by the outward-reaching characteristics of hope, what Ernst Bloch describes as a broadening out of the self (3). As I turned to Buckley’s large-scale mural last fall, these senses of hope turned with me. But guess what? Buckley’s mural has a subtitle. “hope” I read, “is still a four-letter word.” Cynicism, by contrast, is not a four-letter word, but it, too, is about the future. For the classical Cynics theirs was a path to “the life worth living”; walking that path meant embodying rather than extolling ethics...

Even in a hospice, there is no answer to ‘how long?’

Gay Lee says ‘How long have I got?’ is an impossible question to answer in end of life care (reflections April 14), while Amelia Ashford argues (letters April 28) that giving patients a timescale for death is a great service.

Centering Prayer and Attention of the Heart

Centering Prayer and Attention of the Heart Cynthia Bourgeault In the thirty years now since Centering Prayer first moved beyond the walls of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Massachusetts and became a lay groundswell, it has certainly implanted itself deeply and (one hopes) permanently in the canon of Christian contemplative practice. Yet it still jostles somewhat uneasily against the walls of received tradition. I am not speaking here of fundamentalist‐generated fear (“The devil will get you if you make your mind a blank”), but rather, of serious reservations on the part of some deeply formed in the Christian contemplative tradition that this prayer is somehow “breaking the rules.” In its classic presentations, Christian prayer is “progressive”; it passes through stages. And the contemplative stage is traditionally regarded as the highest, or most subtle. In the concluding words of a recent, thoughtful article by a well‐prepared commentator, “One does not take the kingdom by force.”1 Contemplation is approached by a gradual path leading from purgative to illuminative to unitive; from cataphatic to apophatic. The “ladder” of spiritual ascent is so deeply engrained on the Christian religious imagination that it seems virtually impossible to conceive of the journey in any other way. Contemplative prayer is “higher,” and it is approached only gradually through a long journey of purification and inner preparation. But is this in fact really so? “You have to experience duality for a long time until you see it’s not there,” said Thomas Merton at a conference given to the nuns of the Redwoods shortly before boarding the plane to Asia on the last leg of his human journey. “Don’t consider dualistic prayer on a lower level. The lower is higher. There are no levels. At any moment you can break through to the underlying unity which is God’s gift in Christ. In the end, Praise praises. Thanksgiving gives thanks. Jesus prays. Openness is all.”2 Certainly, these words of unitive, realized mastery make it clear that Merton “got there.” But how? Was this breakthrough insight the result of his long tread up the traditional ladder of ascent—in other words, is he “exhibit A” of the assertion that the classic monastic model works? Or is his unitive awakening something more akin to Dorothy in the final scene of The Wizard of Oz, when she realizes that all along the shoes that would carry her home have been right there on her feet? This is, of course, an impossible question to answer, and I do not intend to do so directly; only to use it as a kind of leverage. In the words of the poet Philip Booth, “How you get there is where you arrive,” and Merton’s journey could only have been Merton’s. And yet the door, once he found it, can only be seen as the timeless and universal gate. Like a few others before him and a few significant monastic others following in his wake (Thomas Keating most prominently), he simply, in my estimate, came upon that hidden back door or “wormhole” within the Christian path that transports one out of the “progressive” journey in linear time into the instantaneous, seamless fullness from which prayer is always emerging. And he found it in the same way that all who find it do so: in the gathering awareness that the cave of the heart is entered not only or even primarily through purification and concentration, but through surrender and release. This is this hidden, backdoor path that I wish to explore in the following essay. My thesis is that there has always been an alternative within Christian spiritual practice to the “ladder of ascent”: perhaps not as well known, but fully orthodox and in the end even more reliable, since it derives, ultimately, from the direct teaching and self‐understanding of Jesus himself. It is from this alternative pathway that Centering Prayer derives its legitimacy and its powerful capacity to heal and unify. Centering prayer as self‐emptying love First, let me give a quick summary of Centering Prayer, for those unfamiliar with its somewhat unusual methodology. As a method of meditation situated within the Christian contemplative tradition, Centering Prayer...

The lab and the woods: science and myth in Les Yeux sans visage

With its blend of modern sf and mythic horror, Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face; France/Italy 1959) rivals not only the greatest variations on the Frankenstein theme but also the best of speculative film. However, almost five decades after its release, it remains generally unknown in the US, where it was circulated in a badly dubbed and miscut version and attracted a cult following under the ridiculous title The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus. Fortunately, an international re-release in 1995 made the original film available for Anglophone critical attention, and in 2004 it was finally given a clean DVD release by Criterion, confirming its status as a transgenre European masterpiece. Thus, over the last decade, Les Yeux has found a place within scholarship, much of it perceptively justifying the film's niche in the cinematic pantheon by focusing on the psychological and historical implications of the horror within its narrative.1 But what draws my attention to Les Yeux is the astounding force of its vision, which sees through the fabrications of both science and mythology with equal directness. For Franju's film castigates both the modern obsession with science as a means of defying nature and the mythic invocation of lyricism in the inevitability of death. In so doing, this film evokes within its audience a kind of grand despair seldom felt in cinematic art. Today, Les Yeux remains fundamentally disturbing, a solemn, awesome revelation.An important figure in the history of French cinema, Georges Franju (1912-1987) co-founded, with Henri Langlois, the celebrated archival arthouse known as La Cinematheque Francaise in 1936. He worked tirelessly for the recognition of serious film throughout his life, but his own creative work was never really acknowledged for its achievements. It may be that his vision - the unique nature of which was clearly revealed in his first notable film, Le Sang des betes (Blood of the Beasts; France 1949)2 - was simply more than most audiences could accept. Images in this documentary quietly silhouette the cinematically enhanced beauty of post-war Paris, the simple joy of its children at play, the quiet dignity of the city's manual labourers - and the efficient butchery of the Parisian slaughterhouse in which they work. Watching men kill calves and sheep, one is grateful for the black-and-white photography, lilting music and quiet shots of the pleasant world outside the abattoir - the fantasy of harmony that shelters the mind from the facts of the food chain. Coalescing, food chain and harmony create the contradictory truth of life, and in Franju's own words, 'only the truth matters' ('Franju le visionnaire').3 Franju deliberately chose to shoot in black and white, hoping for an aesthetic response from his audience, since to have to see what he shows in colour would have been 'repulsive' ('Franju le visionnaire'). Here, at the core of this early rehearsal for Les Yeux, is Franju's determination to make us see, and ten years later he redirects our vision from the truth of animal meat to the truth of human flesh. In both cases, horror is not without beauty and beauty cannot deny horror. To ignore either or to pretend that the one can preclude the other is to close one's eyes to truth.But which part of the truth has more value? Which runs deeper - the science of the abattoir, so necessary to feed humanity, or the mythology of the harmonic universe, seemingly intrinsic to the human imagination? At the centre of Franju's artistic vision is this impossible question: is the truth of science more or less valid than the truth of myth? Jack P. Rawlins defines fantasy and sf as the aesthetic genres that best illustrate the antipodal beliefs within scientific and mythic perspectives. In fantasy, reason cuts us off from the instinctive wisdom of the irrational. In sf, reason liberates us from the narrowness of our humanity. So fantasy and sf, inseparable companions though they may be, are more than different: they are natural enemies (168). …

Bric-a-Brac: The Everyday Work of Tom Friedman

Georges Perec's epic novel La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual) opens with a preamble about the “art of jigsaw puzzles” in which he documents the peculiarities of the process of assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Instead of keeping in mind the finished image when putting the puzzle together, connecting the parts to the whole, one must negotiate a series of part-to-part relationships in which “the only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces.” The jigsaw pieces, Perec continues, “are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing—just an impossible question, an opaque challenge.”1 The mode of making Perec invokes here, in which the bigger picture makes sense only through careful attention to the piecemeal and fragmented puzzle pieces, is a small, playful entry in his own bigger picture, a novel composed of short vignettes that narrate the story of a Parisian apartment block.

A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson (review)

Reviewed by: A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson Logan Esdale (bio) Thomas Gardner . A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. $45.00 A Door Ajar continues Thomas Gardner's interest in poetic influence and in conversations between artist and critic. An early book (1989) was on Whitman and poetry of the 1960s-70s; in Regions of Unlikeness (1999), he included interviews with poets whose work he was explaining. Here he couples essays and interviews again, this time with Marilynne Robinson, Charles Wright, Susan Howe and Jorie Graham at the microphone—one chapter on the work, as it relates to Dickinson, followed by a conversation with the writer. Gardner asks for their personal histories with Dickinson (first encounters), and how living with her work has informed their own. The analysis chapters were written before the interviews took place, and the latter "press," Gardner claims, "sometimes forcefully, against my initial arguments" (231). If that sequence had been reversed, he might have responded to their comments. For example, Howe mentions that Dickinson's letters are the model for her prose style, but the letters are nowhere discussed in his analysis chapter, which focuses on her prose books My Emily Dickinson (1985) and The [End Page 115] Birth-mark (1993). I wonder as well about the accuracy of his claim—in my reading there are few ripples of disagreement. But if gaps exist between some of what A Door Ajar claims to do—which is reconfigure the academic book by unsettling the critic's authority through dialogue with the artists—and what it actually does, the attempt must still be applauded. To measure Dickinson's influence on four writers, Gardner defines the significance of her work rather generally: they have all learned from how she invokes that which cannot be "fully known." Each of them arrives at a line of circumference that separates the known world from a spiritual condition that can be experienced only momentarily. On the subject of that line there is the book's central poem, "I cannot live with You," and the first three lines of its final stanza: "So we must meet apart - / You there - I - here - / With just the Door ajar." (Graham's Swarm [2000], the main subject of Gardner's essay on her, was "animated" throughout by this poem.) As Gardner says, "For Dickinson, to track one's experience with a beloved is no different from tracking one's encounter with poetry [since] both seem to follow the same pattern of coming overpoweringly near and then moving inexplicably away" (9). He suggests the phrase "responsive brokenness" as pertinent to the work of all four; and punctuating the book are summaries, such as "Like Robinson's 'imperfectly partial' analogies, Wright's scoured attention to what refuses him access, and Howe's improvised soundings of the unknown, Graham's enactments of vertigo open her language to a wilderness, something other, that can be inhabited but never mastered" (168). Fraying this thread run among the writers, however, is a lurking and perhaps impossible question: how is it that Dickinson appeals to writers (of both genders) along the aesthetic spectrum? This book for Gardner is less about his view of Dickinson and more about inviting three poets and a novelist into the critical discussion. Having four perspectives on Dickinson does produce many luminous moments. And it must be noted that the analysis chapters are extensions of the interviews because in them Gardner quotes the writers at length. But Gardner himself, when his turn comes, offers too steadily just one Dickinson in an effort to provide a Dickinson that they could share in common. He suggests that "their at times opposed aesthetic commitments must have blinded us" to their mutual conversations with Dickinson, yet leaves us to discern for ourselves (in the respective interviews especially) what those various commitments are (229). Wright will admit that he took "nothing stylistically" from Dickinson—"It was all content," he says (105)—and we can see that Howe is positioned otherwise. [End Page 116] "Such distances under her fingertips!" says Wright of Dickinson, whose "There's a certain Slant of light" (Fr320) has been the "ur-poem in...

The Truman Show: A Symptom of our Times? Or, a Cure for an Escape Attempt!

This essay argues from a Lacanian perspective as to why “reality television” has become so pervasive in postmodern consumerist society. Against the widely held claim that such reality programming is democratically therapeutic in its effects to provide citizens a public forum to be seen and heard, another thesis is presented: such television programs reinforce the very perversity they claim to cure. By focusing on the film, The Truman Show, this perversity is exposed through a Lacanian reading of its redemptive fantasy. The essay ends with the question of impossibility: to what extent can the fantasy of “reality television” be traversed?

Directing Shakespeare: a scholar onstage

An Impossible Question From A Chinese Actor - Why is Shakespeare eternal? - drove Sidney Homan after fifty years in the theater to ponder just what makes Shakespeare...well, Shakespeare. The result, Directing Shakespeare, reflects the two worlds in which Homan operates - as a scholar and teacher on campus, and as a director and actor in professional and university theaters. His concern is the entire process, beginning in the lonely period when the director develops a concept and moving into increasingly larger realms: interaction with stage designer; rehearsal; and public performances in which the audience's response further shapes the play. Homan recounts the experience of staging King Lear accompanied by a musical score for piano, violin, and cello played live onstage. He discusses the challenge of making and trying to justify cuts in Hamlet. A casual remark from an actress leads to a feminist production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. He describes the delicate collaboration between director and performer as he works with actors preparing for The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Hamlet. Other chapters treat a set designer's bold red drapes that influenced the director's concept for Julius Caesar and the cross-influence of back-to-back runs of Stoppard's Rozencrantz and Guildentsern Are Dead and Hamlet. In a highly personal concluding chapter, Homan tells of joyously working with a spontaneous young actor playing Puck and with an audience of unruly teenagers who wept at a performance of Lear, Delightfully written, and filled with practical insights, Directing Shakespeare draws together scholars, critics, and those who work to bring the written word to life.

Intervals of inner flight: Chantal Akerman's News From Home

In this paper, I reframe film theorist Stephen Heath's analysis of avant-garde filmmaker, Chantal Akerman's, News From Home (1976). In 1981 Heath claimed that Akerman's use of 'absence' in the static camera images and the voiceover, which features the filmmaker reading letters her mother sent her when she lived in New York, posited 'the impossible question of a woman's desire', i.e. that female desire is unrepresentable. In my paper, I reformulate this question of desire in terms of possibility. I particularly analysed the final sequences of the film where the voiceover disappears and the camera, mounted on the Staten Island ferry, pulls out from the city, shots of which comprise the film, and reframes the horizon. This links to my research interest in how a singular moment in a film might have a particular affect on a viewer. I used philosopher Gilles Deleuze's writing on subjectivity in his book Difference and Repetition in conjunction with his work on cinema in Cinema 2: The Time-Image to reconsider the movement and affectivity of water in this image, as continuous rather than fixated on 'absence.' Re-read in the twenty-first century, News From Home, viewed in the light of a Deleuzian approach rather than Heath's psychoanalytic one, can be read as liberating female subjectivity as a state of continuous affective movements. In terms of the scene of spectatorship, this state is coterminous with a form of narration closer to the inner movements of feelings as they pass through and are accumulated by the body, a state that Nathalie Sarraute writes about in the introduction to her novel, Tropisms. Key to my reading is the concept of duration as a qualitative movement of differentiation, which is found in the philosophy of Henri Bergson.

United States Policy on Terrorism: Where Are We Going and How Are We Getting There?

An almost impossible question to answer, but the author succeeds in demarcating the road ahead and the roadblocks erected along the way. The journey will be perilous, he suggests, and fraught with second-guessing, fear, and even the possibility that the overarching commitment to fight terrorism will be abandoned during the protracted period required to fulfill it.

Ambiguity

Ambiguity

What is a good re-entry programme? What are the key-question?--J. Douglas Miller Memorial Lecture.

What does it take to make a good rehabilitation service? At first sight, this seems a simplistic, even impossible question to answer. After all, rehabilitation is delivered in many different situations, at different times after injury, and by very different groups of people. Furthemore, as rehabilitation professionnals often point out, patients with acquired brain injury (ABI) form a very diverse group with different needs, and there is no one “golden rule” for rehabilitation.

What is Tradition?

In her opening essay to the wonderful catalog of the exhibition Memory and Imagination: Legacy of Maidu Indian Artist Frank Day, Rebecca Dobkins (1997:1) asks the almost impossible question are the meanings of'tradition'? What a question! She might as well have asked is life? And at the Memory and Imagination in Twentieth-Century Native American Art Symposium on April 19, 1997, Frank LaPena and I were supposed to answer this question in our thirty minute presentations. Just as life has death as its opposite, so is often said to be opposite to innovation. But just as within Christianity and other religions there is life in or after death, so there is a tradition of innovation, as in contemporary Western art traditions, or there may equally be the innovation of as in the commonly referred to invention of latter topic has been the subject of a growing body of literature in the last two decades, following the publication of Hobsbawm and Ranger's book by that title (1984). In my discussion of tradition, I am indebted to the work of Alice Horner, whose Ph.D. dissertation in anthropology, The Assumption of Tradition, is perhaps the best thing ever written on the topic (see Horner 1990). Horner reminds us that refers both to theprocess of handing down from generation to generation, and some thing, custom, or thought process that is passed on over time. Thus we can say, for instance, that a multi-generational dance is an item of custom, a performance, and at the same time, such a dance is an occasion for the passing of the technique and the feeling of the performance from older to younger generations. Until recently, this handing on was a natural , unself-conscious part of the dance. Until the continuity was threatened, until the possibility of the inability to hand things down arose, people were not so self-conscious of the process of the handing on of tradition. This takes us back to the origin of the concept of in the European world, but I want to make it clear that we can probably draw parallels in most of the rest of the world: a consciousness of arose primarily only in those historical situations where people were aware of change. Tradition was the name given to those cultural features which, in situations of change, were to be continued to be handed on, thought about, preserved and not lost. Although it is somewhat of an exaggeration, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1966:233-34) has divided up societies into two types: those that believe that every generation recreates the past and that time is a series of cycles, which he calls cold societies, and those that are conscious of change and of the irreversible direction of history, which he labels hot societies. In a lecture given at Berkeley in 1984, he tried to trace the emergence of one kind from the other by reference to ninth-to-eleventh century Japanese Heian court society. During that period the usual marriage rule requiring the marriage of men to their cross-cousins (mother's brother's daughters or father's sister's daughters) broke down when people began to break the rules and marry strategically for status and personal gain. He was able to show how the former kind of society, found traditionally in much of the world, is one that reproduces the social structures every generation (so that men fell into the same positions as their fathers and grandfathers, and women, their mothers and grandmothers). Whereas in the latter kind, every generation is different and, according to the literature of that age, more exciting, so that new family relationships and kinship structures were formed every time. This kind of excitement and period of intrigue he called The Birth of Historical Societies. Originally the concept of tradition, literally from the Latin meaning something handed over, in slowly changing societies was almost equivalent to inheritance. Tradition was both the means of

Origins of language Ed. by Jürgen Trabant (review)

BOOK NOTICES 433 ence to rules of turn-taking or to formal models of dialogue of any kind. The linguistics of this book is decidedly humane. The common theme is that language used to express culture is not determined by an idealized speakerhearer saying just what he or she wants but rather in situations where no one participant is totally privileged . This contrasts with the presumed objective authority of the coding rules for a translation, the text ofa dictated narrative, the ex post facto synthesis by a linguist or ethnographer making sense of what has been observed. Instead, the authors emphasize quite the opposite extreme as the ideal. So, as among Quechua speakers, formal mythical narratives come up only in the context of conversation, and in that culture they may never be abstracted from it [Alton Becker and Bruce Mannheim]; and so, although apparently effaced by many famous ethnographers, the transaction situation ('dialogue') between an ethnographer and his or her subjects may be essential for third parties to understand what the ethnographer has to say [Dennis Tedlock]. The real strength of this collection is that it looks beyond dialogue form and retains its focus on the fresh things that can be learned from real dialogues. On the way, we learn that it may be easier for an old Mexican to find the words in Náhuatl to speak of the murder of his son than of business ethics [Jane H. Hill], and that it is often dialogue that triggers a change in our life-path (and as much, it seems, in linguistic fieldwork as in conversations among good friends) [John Attinasi & Paul Friedrich], [Nicholas Ostler, Lmguacubun Ltd, Bath.] Origins oflanguage. Ed. by Jürgen Trabant . (Collegium Budapest workshop series no. 2.) Budapest: Collegium Budapest , 1996. Pp. 219. This volume contains seven papers plus an 'Introduction to a most unlikely dialogue about an impossible question'. Whether or not the question is impossible, this is certainly an unlikely collection. Viewpoints range from the most scientific and positive to the most literary and sceptical. At the scientific end, Maria Ujhelyi discusses the relevance to language evolution of territorial song and duetting among gibbons, suggesting that preconditions for language may have included notjust complex social networks, as emphasized by Robin Dunbar, but also territorial marking and pair-bond maintenance. Eors Szathmáry offers an adaptationist view similar in spirit to Steven Pinker's; his piece covers ground similar to the final chapter of his and John Maynard Smith's book The major transitions in evolution (Oxford: W. H. Freeman, 1995). That chapter is criticized as reductionist and determimst by a literary contributor, Patrick Quillier, who emphasizes the emotive and poetic aspects of language. Bizarrely misreading the authors' summary of Bickerton's opinions, Quillier attributes to them the view that double negation, as in French and Hungarian, belongs to a primitive linguistic stage, antecedent to 'le langage dûment constitué'. Not surprisingly , he is offended. Henri Meschonnic, too, is indignant at the scientists; he complains that asking how language originated is the same as asking how time originated because there is a contradiction in using language to talk about a time when there was no language. Is one meant to take this argument seriously ? To ask that question is, I suspect, to reveal oneself a phihstine in Meschonnic's eyes. Thomas Sebeok is perhaps trying to bridge the literary-scientific gap when he says that 'semiosis' is 'coterminous with the emergence oflife'. Connoisseurs of withering sarcasm will relish what he says about the linguistic achievements of Kanzi the bonobo , but this denunciation contributes nothing to the issue of what the ape language experiments really show. The bridging job is done better in T' s account of how, as a historian of ideas, he has come to terms with biological approaches to language. He reaches the reassuring conclusion that, even if language is innate, 'we should not consider this a blow against the domain of the humanities or the social sciences'. Finally, Eva Jablonka and Geva Rechav invite us to take part in a thought-experiment involving a time 5,000 years hence when children are brought up to learn to read, even without formal instruction, by...

Language and society in early modern England: Selected essays, 1981-1994 By Vivian Salmon (review)

BOOK NOTICES 433 ence to rules of turn-taking or to formal models of dialogue of any kind. The linguistics of this book is decidedly humane. The common theme is that language used to express culture is not determined by an idealized speakerhearer saying just what he or she wants but rather in situations where no one participant is totally privileged . This contrasts with the presumed objective authority of the coding rules for a translation, the text ofa dictated narrative, the ex post facto synthesis by a linguist or ethnographer making sense of what has been observed. Instead, the authors emphasize quite the opposite extreme as the ideal. So, as among Quechua speakers, formal mythical narratives come up only in the context of conversation, and in that culture they may never be abstracted from it [Alton Becker and Bruce Mannheim]; and so, although apparently effaced by many famous ethnographers, the transaction situation ('dialogue') between an ethnographer and his or her subjects may be essential for third parties to understand what the ethnographer has to say [Dennis Tedlock]. The real strength of this collection is that it looks beyond dialogue form and retains its focus on the fresh things that can be learned from real dialogues. On the way, we learn that it may be easier for an old Mexican to find the words in Náhuatl to speak of the murder of his son than of business ethics [Jane H. Hill], and that it is often dialogue that triggers a change in our life-path (and as much, it seems, in linguistic fieldwork as in conversations among good friends) [John Attinasi & Paul Friedrich], [Nicholas Ostler, Lmguacubun Ltd, Bath.] Origins oflanguage. Ed. by Jürgen Trabant . (Collegium Budapest workshop series no. 2.) Budapest: Collegium Budapest , 1996. Pp. 219. This volume contains seven papers plus an 'Introduction to a most unlikely dialogue about an impossible question'. Whether or not the question is impossible, this is certainly an unlikely collection. Viewpoints range from the most scientific and positive to the most literary and sceptical. At the scientific end, Maria Ujhelyi discusses the relevance to language evolution of territorial song and duetting among gibbons, suggesting that preconditions for language may have included notjust complex social networks, as emphasized by Robin Dunbar, but also territorial marking and pair-bond maintenance. Eors Szathmáry offers an adaptationist view similar in spirit to Steven Pinker's; his piece covers ground similar to the final chapter of his and John Maynard Smith's book The major transitions in evolution (Oxford: W. H. Freeman, 1995). That chapter is criticized as reductionist and determimst by a literary contributor, Patrick Quillier, who emphasizes the emotive and poetic aspects of language. Bizarrely misreading the authors' summary of Bickerton's opinions, Quillier attributes to them the view that double negation, as in French and Hungarian, belongs to a primitive linguistic stage, antecedent to 'le langage dûment constitué'. Not surprisingly , he is offended. Henri Meschonnic, too, is indignant at the scientists; he complains that asking how language originated is the same as asking how time originated because there is a contradiction in using language to talk about a time when there was no language. Is one meant to take this argument seriously ? To ask that question is, I suspect, to reveal oneself a phihstine in Meschonnic's eyes. Thomas Sebeok is perhaps trying to bridge the literary-scientific gap when he says that 'semiosis' is 'coterminous with the emergence oflife'. Connoisseurs of withering sarcasm will relish what he says about the linguistic achievements of Kanzi the bonobo , but this denunciation contributes nothing to the issue of what the ape language experiments really show. The bridging job is done better in T' s account of how, as a historian of ideas, he has come to terms with biological approaches to language. He reaches the reassuring conclusion that, even if language is innate, 'we should not consider this a blow against the domain of the humanities or the social sciences'. Finally, Eva Jablonka and Geva Rechav invite us to take part in a thought-experiment involving a time 5,000 years hence when children are brought up to learn to read, even without formal instruction, by...

Missing Links: Canadian Theoretical Discourse

This volume is a selection of 18 essays from the Association for conference on Theoretical Discourse in the Intellectual Community held in Saint - Jovite, Quebec in September 1992. Like all multidisciplinary and the - matic collections of this sort, the essays range over a multitude of topics and are difficult to assemble into a comprehensive and coherent framework. This is perhaps especially true in this case, given the very large scope of the topic. The difficulty of circumscribing the of any one discipline, such as literature, folklore, sociology or geography, is notorious enough: one tends to achieve coherence precisely to the extent that one is willing to rule certain approaches actually present in the discipline out of one's scheme and thereby to risk disciplining in Foucault's sense. Especially in the case of multidisciplinary collections and interdisciplinary inquiries the task of classification seems impossible. None the less, it is important to this collection beyond all others. This conference, and the collection of essays assembled from it, attempted to define in Canada. What is a community of scholars? ask the editors in the first sentence of their introduction. Perhaps it is an impossible question to answer, but it is inevitably of great interest to anyone who is committed to the investigation of Canada. One cannot avoid the question, vexing as it is, of distinctiveness. While a question such as this virtually drips with hubris, the distinctiveness it seeks must be articulated, or at least implicitly assumed, in any defence of Studies. The explicit asking of this question is thus an index of the maturity of Studies, a willingness to risk the possibility of an insufficient answer - or perhaps a gamble that even a lack of definitiveness will produce a rich enough to stimulate further investigation. Studies, whether considered as an interdisciplinary association or as a teaching and research enterprise based in universities, drew upon the left - nationalist that preceded it for justification. It is notable that this had sufficient appeal not only in university circles, but also in government and to some extent in business, labour and public ones, to generate sources of funding and benefits that often provided a wedge against recalcitrant university administration and faculty. Staple theory political economy, combined with cultural nationalism, argued that history was unique enough to be worth investigating and salient enough to our identity to matter intellectually. Harold Innis and George Grant were the stars around which many others could be arranged in this firmament, such as Marxist critiques of staples theory and socialist critiques of Grant's conservatism. Put together with an individual's own interests (often formed in a particular discipline), this combination proved diverse and persistent enough to sustain the of Studies that has emerged over the last 25 years or so. Left - nationalism's vision of a conservative past and a socialist future opened a complex discursive space for investigation that, interestingly, excluded liberal themes and writers from its purview. Thus, when Jill Vickers finds that Innis and Grant were often cited in publications, and only very rarely others such as Frye, Trudeau, Scott and McLuhan, one is hardly surprised (356, 360). Many of the papers in this volume reconsider this founding left - nationalist discourse, which is both a timely and important task for thinking about and where it might go in the future. In order to confront this task, one must first define a theoretical discourse as well as what specifically characterizes the Canadian one. The richness and diversity of this volume is an excellent place to start. …

What Happens in the Eucharist?

The eucharist or holy communion or mass or Lord's supper is probably the ritual most participated in and most discussed in human history. It is the principal act of worship of the majority of the billion and a half or so Christians in the world today and has some importance for most of the minority. Simply as an inquiry about what happens around the world at present my title would clearly be an impossible question to answer with anything approaching thoroughness. But that might seem an odd way to take it. In theology the question usually leads in to discussing real presence, eucharistic sacrifice, valid ministry and so on. Those are of course important, but I am reluctant to forget about inquiry into actual practice. I will not be able to contribute much on the subject, but it is a significant part of the imaginative context of this paper. So I will start by trying to begin to do justice to it. That will be the springboard for an attempt in Part 2 to redescribe the Eucharist in relation to some New Testament statements, without pretending that the intervening thousands of years that have generated all that diversity have not occurred. The main concerns there will be imperatives, especially the imperative of death, and Jesus as an agent of incorporation, a critical concept being that of non-identical repetition. Part 3 will take up some of the suggestions of Part 2 in order to develop one aspect of the Eucharist and transformation: what might some characteristics of a ‘eucharistic self’ be? The conclusion will then try to summarise the answer that has emerged to the title question.

Socioscientific evidence and supreme court numerology: When justices attempt social science

AbstractIn Stanford v. Kentucky, in which two juveniles sentenced to death raised an Eighth Amendment challenge, Justice Scalia's plurality opinion set the ground rules for deciding juvenile death penalty cases. He ruled „socioscientific”︁ evidence and philosopher‐king decisions out of bounds. Scalia argued that the Court must do its own social science analysis of the objective indicia to gauge whether community sentiment finds such a punishment cruel and unusual. In determining whether a „national consensus”︁ exists, Justice Scalia transformed the empirical question into an impossible question, requiring that a categorical aversion must be shown. Petitioners lost, but so too did social science jurisprudence, as „statistical magic”︁ and „numerology”︁ reigned supreme.

Naive Mereology, Admissible Valuations, and Other Matters

David Sanford says a great many things in his paper.1 A reply that included everything I wanted to say in response would be many times longer than his paper. I must therefore be selective. I begin with his contention that the Special Composition Question (SCQ) is an question. Well, perhaps so. In Material Beings (p. 68), I conceded that it might have no answer that anybody but God could know. I suppose that a question that had no answer that anybody but God could know could appropriately be described as an question. But I don't see any reason to think that the SCQ is in fact impossible. The question whether the 10100th digit in the binary expansion of 7c is '0' or '1' is an impossible question (although it is perfectly meaningful and God knows the answer to it), and I have good reasons for thinking that it is, reasons that will be immediately evident to the numerate. When I examine SCQ, however, I find no reason to think that it is impossible. Probably the best way to find out whether it was would be to try to answer it and see what happened-a project that I, of course, recommend. Secondly, I want to say something about naive mereology and the transitivity of parthood.2 (I am not going to discuss Sanford's attempt to undermine his readers' confidence in the principle that mutual parthood entails identity. I am not going to do this because examples drawn from literary fantasy are essential to his argument, and, in my view, one may not use examples from fantasy in conceptual investigations. The reason is simple: the author of a fantasy has the power to confer truth in the story on known conceptual falsehoods. I could, for example, write a fantasy in which there were two mountains that touched at their bases but did not surround a valley. A fortiori, the author of a fantasy has the power to