Modern Notion Research Articles

Fitting and Fudging: On the Folly of Trying to Define Post-truth

AbstractI propose that the ‘post-truth condition’, i.e., the vulnerability of our institutions for establishing and negotiating what is true and worth knowing, is not primarily a pathology, a susceptibility to external manipulation or coercion, as tends to be stressed in the literature, but has first and foremost to do with the unraveling of certain epistemic assumptions. In analogy with T.S. Eliot’s modernist notion that the attempt to capture and concretize an experience or a state of mind requires ‘objective correlatives’ which it conveys, I argue that the trope of post-truth to express the embattled status of expertise can be understood in terms of failed symbolization. In the second section, I spell out what this means in terms of Donald Davidson’s discussion of the problem of defining truth. In the last section, I propose a ‘poetics of political theory’ for understanding the post-truth condition.

Edgar Allan Poe: Efemérides em trama

Edgar Allan Poe: Efemérides em trama

Templates for Authorship: American Women’s Literary Autobiography of the 1930s

Templates for Authorship: American Women’s Literary Autobiography of the 1930s

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

The Blessing of Whiteness in the Curse of Ham: Reading Gen 9:18–29 in the Antebellum South

This essay examines the antebellum history of interpretation surrounding the curse of Ham in Gen 9:18–29. It explores how modern notions of scientific racism were read into the story as a de facto justification for the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery in the antebellum South. However, more than simply being used as a prooftext for racist agendas, the curse of Ham provided a biblical foil for circumscribing a racial hierarchy where whiteness was positioned as superior in the figure of Japheth. By considering key features of the racist antebellum interpretation, I argue that the proslavery rationalization of Christian antebellum writers is rooted in a deracialized whiteness that was biblically produced and blessed with divine authority.

A New Embassy from Taiwan: The Zheng Regime as Extraterritorial Arbiter of Ethnic Peace in Manila, 1662–1683

Abstract In 1662, shortly after conquering Taiwan, Zheng Chenggong wrote to the Spanish governor of Manila, threatening to invade the Philippines if the Spanish did not swear vassalage to his new regime. Although the Spanish refused, Chenggong died before he could carry out his threat, and his successor Zheng Jing wrote a second letter offering terms for peace. These exchanges provide some of the only surviving direct recordings of the Zheng leaders’ beliefs regarding the rights, responsibilities, and boundaries of “Chinese” identity, in particular the relationship between Sangleys and Chinese rulers. Both Zhengs claimed rulership over Manila’s Chinese, but where Zheng Chenggong stated a right to direct rule over this population, Zheng Jing compromised by requesting changes to the Spanish laws which governed his “subjects” in the Philippines. These demands recall modern notions of citizenship and extraterritoriality, and provide a rare contemporary Chinese perspective on colonial Manila’s policies of ethnic segregation. The Zheng state’s active pressure, by contrast to Ming and Qing emperors’ customary disinterest in overseas Chinese, forced the Spanish to reduce their oppression of and reliance on the Chinese, but this also involved expelling thousands of migrants and enforcing long-ignored legal limits on immigration. I argue that this period of conflict clarified the Spaniard’s notion of where chinos fit into their empire’s particular ethno-legal system. This episode thus shows how the Chinese experience in the Philippines was shaped not just by European attitudes, but also by the nature of the Sangleys’ political links to China.

A British Sky: Imperial Networks and the Symbiotic Relationship Between Imperialism and Astronomy in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

Despite modern perceptions of science as an apolitical, irreligious, democratizing force, science has historically been a tool used by individuals and organizations for their own purposes. In the case of late European empires, science and scientific “progress” were valuable tools for agendas of Christianization and civilization. Moreover, scientists and scientific methods could be used to further the types of work needed to grow empire – such as a map-making and exploration. However, the relationship between science and empire was not limited to imperial domination. Scientists and scientific bodies could also use the tools of empire to further their scientific work. The Royal Astronomical Society is an excellent example of the “use” of empire – most of its funding came from imperial pundits looking to entrench British superiority. Among the various scientific disciplines practiced in the nineteenth century, astronomy played an interesting role in entrenching the relationship between science and empire – particularly as it was practiced on the fringes of the British empire.
 Growing empires necessitated the creation and proliferation of new technologies that in turn made practicing science in recently acquired colonies much easier. The interconnected web of new technologies, scientists, and imperial structures of power and politics combined with scientific desires, colonial ideals, race relations, and imperial economies of trade and knowledge to produce an incredibly complicated vision of science. Astronomy, in its looking to the heavens, reflected back upon earthly issues to ultimately reveal the tangled ideologies that permeated British imperial science at this time. This story of British imperial astronomy is meant to complicate modern notions of what science is and has been.

Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary

Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary

Role of matrix metalloproteinases in placental angiogenesis

The literature data indicate that the impaired expression of some types of metalloproteinases can result from different causes, both endogenous and exogenous. A modern notion of the role of matrix metalloproteinases in the processes of placental angiogenesis is analyzed. There was used literature research method according to the database PubMed for 19942021. The study of the activity and function of metalloproteinases in various gestational complications associated with the formation of primary placental insufficiency could have helped to search the diagnostic markers of these disorders.

Morphogenesis – “The Riddles of Form” in Twenty-First Century Science

Morphogenesis – “The Riddles of Form” in Twenty-First Century Science

The “Heritage-isation” of Photographs: The Ethel John Lindgren Collection and the Orochen Ethnic Minority in Northeast China

ABSTRACT In this paper I present a case of visual repatriation amongst the Orochen ethnic minority in Northeast China. I describe what happens when a photo collection - the Ethel John Lindgren Collection at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge - is returned to a host community who are an officially-recognised ethnic minority in China and, as a result, are subject to particular policies, discourses, and funding strategies associated with cultural heritage (wenhua yichan). My main argument is that visual repatriation always has an “after-life” - or “after-lives” - and that there is a never case of pure visual or photoreturn. Instead, as I will show in the case of the Orochen, it is always mediated through an existing context of social relations, including particular hierarchies of authority and expertise, and refracted through culturally-specific notions of tradition, modernity, and value. While my ethnographic focus is on China and one specific ethnic minority, I suggest this has implications for other cases of visual repatriation and photo-return, particularly in minority, subaltern, and postcolonial contexts.

On the Translatability of Cultural Phenomena: Modernismo and Modernism within and without Mass Culture

Abstract “Spanish American modernismo,” wrote Octavio Paz in 1972, “has no connection to what in English is called ‘modernism.’” Indeed, for a long time there was consensus in both critical traditions that “despite some parallels,” as Astradur Eysteinsson put it, “the differences between the two concepts are too many to warrant their critical coalescence.” In recent years, however, it has become the rule to discuss Latin American and Spanish modernismos within the Anglo-Germanic notion of modernism, as part of the broader concept of “global modernisms.” But how did two of the most important aesthetic concepts of the twentieth century from two distinct traditions go from misleading cognates to variants of the same phenomenon? This article offers a comparative history to explain the conditions of their mutual (un)translatability. It presents their divergent beginnings, briefly surveys their independent developments, and finally argues that, in the past few decades, both have similarly turned from differential to relational concepts mainly by transforming their relationship to mass culture. They have thus gone from high-literary ideologies of exclusion to fields of research on the networks and dynamics of modern culture. As they did, however, their standing within their respective critical traditions has changed in opposite ways.

The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary

The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary

The polyphony of nature

The polyphony of nature

‘There Was Modernism. Then There Was Digital:’ Kenneth Goldsmith and the Updating of Literature

The notion of literature as an obsolete form, out of sync with its own time, has been a familiar one ever since modern media displaced the literary from its previous centrality in culture. Expounding on poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s express ambitions of bringing literature up to date with contemporary media culture, this article engages the larger stakes of his work with a view to an ‘updated literature’ – a literature, as it is here considered, 'beyond textuality.' Informed by the theoretical perspectives of Friedrich Kittler and the broader field of media archeology, the article posits literature’s turn toward the generalized ‘informational milieu’ of contemporary network culture and its concomitant break with modernist notions of medium specificity. Although the provocations of both Goldsmith and Kittler have received much previous attention; in seeking here to bring them together in a committed way, this article also moves beyond the limits of their approaches to rethink the problem of literature’s dubious distinctness in our age of networks.

The origin, definition and nature of the transconscious in the spirituality of Father Stăniloae

In his important work, Orthodox Spirituality, Father Dumitru Stăniloae considers that, besides the real existence of the subconscious, there exists in man another reality as well, comprising the superior divine energies found in the human heart and which he defined by using the modern notion of transconscious or supraconscious.Contribution: The present study emphasises on the origin, definitions and content of this concept in the work of Father Stăniloae and its great importance in defining a way to know God and his salvation works, from the perspective of an anchorite and Christian mystic, engaged in the existential tension of communion with God.

Main Directions of Modernization of Services in Uzbekistan

The essence of the notion of modernization and the specifics of service sector modernization are described in this article. The essential directions for Uzbekistan's service sector modernization are also proposed

Modernist Art in Ethiopia

Modernist Art in Ethiopia

Fashioning an Imperial Metropolis at the 1896 Berliner Gewerbeausstellung

AbstractThe 1896 Berliner Gewerbeausstellung was a transformative moment for city and nation alike. The exhibition announced Berlin's pre-eminence as a scientific and industrial city and bolstered an emergent German national identity. Including displays of Egypt and Germany's formal colonies also revealed Germany's competence as a colonial power. By illustrating its skill in both aggressive conquest and subtle intervention, city and nation thought themselves capable of competing with European rivals at home and abroad. However, the two visions of colonialism, cloaked in the guise of mass entertainment, have rarely been brought into conversation with one another. This article seeks to discuss this colonial–Oriental dichotomy by focusing on tensions between education and entertainment in display techniques, particularities of racial difference in ethnographic display, the use of advertising, and the insertion of new technologies. Contributing to a deeper understanding of race, empire, and modernity in the German context, the Gewerbeausstellung offers a jumping off point for further comparison to other local, regional, and international exhibitions and an avenue to explore how notions of modernity factored into formal and informal imperial arrangements. Ultimately, it sheds light on how an exhibition helped to fashion a global, imperial city at the turn of the twentieth century.

Defending Shame: Its Formative Power in Paul’s Letters

Defending Shame: Its Formative Power in Paul’s Letters