Lyn Gorman

Bio: Lyn Gorman is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Demon. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 43 citations.

The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork

Abstract: It is through remarkable yet quotidian episodes that Ben Kafka develops his book on the demon of writing. Referring to the reproduction of paperwork as such, Kafka goes back to the start of the French Revolution, where bureaucracy was applied as the tool for the representative government, the new kind of political system that the revolution introduced in the end of the XVIII century in Europe. Kafka, hence, leans on those episodes and through the historical characters, he illustrates the topics to address about the essential role paperwork took in society and why, after all, it would still be to blame for the problems of the State. Edme-Etienne Morizot is the fi rst important character in the book, and he is the one that represents the revolution of paperwork that the episode of 1789 brought to France. As he was fi red from his job in the Ministry of Finance, a year before the revolution, the real reasons for his dismissal were yet legitimate for the time: he was replaced by the son-in-law of the king’s aunt’s chambermaid. Unsatisfi ed with his circumstances, the following years for Morizot were marked by his claims to get his job back, or at least a fi nancial compensation, but the French Revolution had transformed the whole offi cial sphere: Morizot, trying to fi nd someone to help him, could only fi nd paperwork and processes in a depersonalized system that “gave a damn to his problem”, as Kafka points out. The representativeness the revolution sought to settle in France came with bureaucracy, and accountability was the key word. Making a contrast to

Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences

Abstract: This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration,' and rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does not merely advocate interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships between brains, minds, and environments requires a delicate, playful and genuinely experimental interdisciplinarity, and this book shows us how it can be done. This book is open access under a CC-BY license and funded by The Wellcome Trust.

The Computer in the Garbage Can: Air-Defense Systems in the Organization of US Nuclear Command and Control, 1940-1960

Abstract: During the late 1950s, the United States Air Force initiated development on nearly twodozen military “command and control systems.” What they shared in common was a novel application of digital electronics to the problem of nuclear warfare. Most of these systems descended, in some fashion, from a program called “SAGE,” the Semiautomatic Ground Environment, which gathered data from a network of radar stations for processing at large Air Defense Direction Centers, where digital computers assisted human operators in tracking, identifying, and, potentially, intercepting and destroying hostile aircraft. Although histories of SAGE have been written before, they have tended to stress digital computing as a rationalist response to the threat of mass raids by nuclear-armed Soviet bombers. Nevertheless, organizational sociology suggests that large bureaucratic organizations, such as the United States Air Force, often defy our intuition that decisions, technological or otherwise, must follow a perceived problem to its potential solution. According to the so-called “garbage-can model of organizational choice,” problems and solutions may, in certain circumstances, arise independently and join together unpredictably, because the basic social phenomena do not conform to bureaucratic ideals. This dissertation argues that SAGE, and indeed, the entire ColdWar project of nuclearand-command, can be understood as a sequence of “garbage-can-like” decisions, resulting in a conglomeration of independent systems whose behavior appeared reasonable from the perspective of the using organization, but which nonetheless failed to cohere against the far greater danger of a global thermonuclear exchange. They did, however, succeed at satisfying the government’s need to act by projecting uncomfortable questions of political organization onto popular technology programs.

Pathways to God: The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin

Abstract: In fall of 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected and West Germany, the Bundesrepublik, initiated a guest worker program with Turkey. These two events would dramatically reshape Berlin, as many immigrants settled just west of the Berlin Wall— especially in the boroughs of Wedding, Kreuzberg, and Neukölln—transforming, augmenting, and adapting to local cultural life. Among these transformations, new sonic cultures emerged, with Islam, in all its diversity, playing a crucial role in that process. The Islamic acoustics that continues to thrive today in Berlin raises significant questions about the nature of sound in Islamic practice: How does Islam sound? In what ways does sound articulate and generate difference both between Muslims and non-Muslims, but also among different Muslim communities? How can an acoustics of Islam help elucidate the workings of a metropolis like Berlin, and vice-versa? Turning to Islamic thought as a theoretical framework, I consider how indigenous notions of pathways enunciate these sonic processes and their material manifestations. After sketching a brief sonic history of Turkish Berlin, I attempt to sonically map some of these Islamic pathways through the city. Charting a route through these major diasporic neighborhoods, I focus on a single religious community, or pathway, in each chapter, along with a particular material aspect of sound as a sacred articulation of difference. I begin with an exploration of the voice in Cerrahi Sufi zikr ceremonies in Wedding, where reciting God’s names becomes an act of tasting (Chapter 1). Then in Kreuzberg, I consider the relationship of bodies (especially

A Colonial Cartographic Economy: the Contested Value of Mapping in Northern Rhodesia, 1915-1955”

Abstract: This thesis addresses the production and use of cartography in Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia), under colonial rule between 1915 and 1955. The predominant narrative has previously been one of ‘absence’: that mapping in British colonial Africa was side-lined due to a lack of available resources. However, this narrative evidences a strategy that has been critiqued, the use of technical failure as an explanation to mask positive political choices. It also treats cartography teleologically, with full, modern ‘state’ mapping as an inevitable endpoint. This endpoint was not achieved in Northern Rhodesia (arguably never has been), and yet colonial rule was maintained. What then, the thesis asks, was the relationship between mapping and colonisation? Whilst colonial cartography in Northern Rhodesia failed to meet ‘universal’ cartographic ideals, hybrid, ad hoc forms of mapping emerged. These forms were determined by thoroughly local social, material and political conditions. I propose that investment in cartography was weighed against the potential value of a map; its symbolic value, utility, and financial cost. I use ethnographic archival analysis to reveal these local discussions of resources and values across multiple sites. Those discussions are then brought together within the framework of a ‘cartographic economy’. In addition to developing this theoretical approach, the thesis makes three further contributions. Firstly, it supplements the scant available description of the practices of colonial survey in the early twentieth century. Secondly, it differentiates the influence of an expanded range of actors and processes on Northern Rhodesian cartography going well beyond ‘survey experts’ to include; private enterprise, indigeneous authorities, scientists, rural adminstrators, and African labour. Thirdly, it innovates the historiography of cartography by contrasting the use of maps with alternative nondocumentary governance practices, such as peripatetic administration, and the embedding of colonial knowledge within local populations.