Showing papers in "Diogenes in 2002"

Stalin and the Blue Elephant: Paranoia and Complicity in Postcommunist Metahistories

Abstract: as reincarnations, destined to unleash terrible events. Stalin, for example, is said by Buryat Mongol villagers to have been the reincarnation of a Blue Elephant which lived in ancient times in India. I examine local discussions around these stories to suggest that the narrators, themselves having been caught up in the seemingly objective and transparent, yet deeply irrational, accounts of the Party-State, do not (at any rate at present) confront actions in which they were both perpetrators and victims ’matter-of-factly’. Having been

Overview of the Feminist Movement in Contemporary Russia

Abstract: Feminist groups in Russia are rather recent initiatives. Most of them were organized in the very end of the cycle of mass protest mobilization in the end of 1989 beginning of 1990s. 1990 is a starting point for Russian feminism. Moscow is an unquestionable center of Russian feminism. There are also feminist groups in St. Petersburg, Tver, Naberezhnye Chelny, Myrny, Petroskoi and other cities of Russia industrial and educational centres.

Is Homo Donator a Homo Moralis

Abstract: Like many interested in the gift, I have to confess to having always experienced a certain attraction for methodological individualism. Through its way of approaching social actors, methodological individualism introduces the actor’s concern: what are the sound principles which account for the behaviour of the actors that are observed? This is the question which individualism compels us constantly to ask. Admittedly, its response is almost always the same: self-interest. As R.H. Frank wrote:

Visual Construction of Writing in the Medieval Book

Abstract: objects of knowledge, relationships between form and content, are a broad continuum whose interlinked facts require a transdisciplinary study.’ Nowadays, attempts to discern these links seem to concern two central groups of correlations, which have been analysed from the perspective of different disciplines. In the foreground of correlations we find the relationship between the material characteristics of the mediums and the methods of access to their contents; in this field of

Emblem of Minority, Substitute for Sovereignty: The Case of Buryatia

Abstract: districts of the Russian Federation (77,300 in Ust’-Orda in the province of Irkutsk to the west of Baikal and 66,100 in Aga in the province of Chita to the East).’ Russians have been living in Buryatia in large numbers for several generations and are dominant in every respect; however it is by no means certain that they can still claim the country as their own. Though their ancestors long ago conquered the people after whom the republic is named, the fall of the USSR has created a space in which Buryat emancipation has become at least a thinkable possiblity. Buryatia’s reaction to the collapse of the old certainties was rapid, unusual indeed unique in Siberia, though similar to some responses in Turkophone central Asia and paradoxical in content. It is at any rate from this perspective that I propose to examine here a process set in motion in 1990 and centring on Geser, the hero of a Buryat epic, whose aim was to construct an emblem for this republic with its Russian majority. The question I shall address is, can this initiative be seen as a reconstruction of identity, and if so, of whose?

The Art of Memory and the Art of Page Layout in the Middle Ages

Abstract: some guidance to principles of organization and cognitive layouts for the ’new’ science of information design, I am going to focus in my presentation on the design of memory storage, as it was taught and practiced in the Middle Ages. It is important to recognize that ’memory-art’ accompanied every aspect of education in the ancient trivium, though different aspects and capacities of human memory were emphasized as appropriate to its various disciplines. What is commonly now taken to be ’the art of memory,’ namely the advice to link powerful images of ’content’ (imagines rerum) together in dramatic scenes conceived

The View Held by the Other, the View Taken of the Other

Abstract: I hope I will not be accused of mental colonialism by attributing to Europe the role which belongs to it historically: that of the Self, which leaves the position of the Other for us. Consequently, this text ought to begin with the view taken of the Other (the European view of the Brazilians) and continue with the view held by the Other (the Brazilian view of the Europeans).1 The European view of the Brazilians was distorted by two myths, both of European origin: that of the noble savage and that of the bad savage. In Europe, its continent of origin, the prototype of the noble savage was the centaur Chiron, who looked after those who were ill and was also charged with the education of Achilles. In his human form, this savage lived close to nature and far from the corrupting influence of civilisation. The Scythians, Phrygians, and Thracians were noble savages, innocent peoples purer than the Athenians and the Romans. They were inhabitants of

Communism: Between Ideological Gift and the Gift in Everyday Life:

Abstract: This attempt to interpret Communist society through the total social fact of the gift takes up Mauss’s strategy, which attempted to explain social reproduction without written laws or state institutions. It was a culture of chronic revolution (’revolution’ in the etymological sense), where the rules of the game changed with each party congress, institutions were in a state of permanent reform, science discovered new truths every five years, and yesterday’s heroes became the traitors of today. The very concept of living in a transitory society’ renders every social form temporary and unreal starting with the proclaimed disappearance of the State, the family, and private property. To understand how such chaos could last for decades, I will put forward the hypothesis that, under Communism, with the systematic destruction of contractual relations, the foundation of the social bond slipped towards premodern gift-exchange, as it were, the gift in the age of its technical reproducibility. In this article I shall therefore try to reconstruct the Communist imaginary and interpret the strange post-Communist depression in this

Ways of Looking at Prehistoric Rock Art

Abstract: or in the open-air exists in all but a couple of countries of the world [Bahn, 1998]. It spans a period from at least 35,000 years ago to historic times, comprises many millions of images from hundreds of thousands of sites, and thus constitutes the vast majority of the world’s art, and art history. It is a phenomenon that has seen a huge upsurge of interest in the last few decades, with not only numerous publications and conferences, but also a proliferation of calendars, T-shirts, mugs, jewellery, and garments bearing rock art images. Many people who are famous for other things have worked on or published rock art for example, scholars such as Mary Leakey or authors like Joy Adamson or Erle Stanley Gardner. Rock art studies have always been the domain of the &dquo;amateur&dquo; as well as the &dquo;professional&dquo;, and amateurs remain of huge importance in this field. Indeed, most of the principal rock art organisations, along with their journals, were created by, are run by, and consist largely of amateur enthusiasts who include some of the world’s foremost specialists. The growing popularity of the art brings an ever-increasing risk of pollution, damage, and vandalism, as well as outright thefts of wall or cave images. The rock art associations are dedicated to the discovery, recording, and conservation of rock art, and play a major role in striving to teach schoolchildren and adults alike about the incalculable importance of this irreplaceable, universal heritage and about the need to respect and protect it.

The Russian Financial System's Unsteady Transition:

Abstract: The financial crisis that began on 17 August 1998 confirmed any fears that we might have had as to the robustness of the Russian banking system and more generally its financial system. It also pointed up the organic link between the confidence essential to the working of the banking system and the State’s ability to guarantee the legality of it. Although improvements have been seen since then, the fundamental issue remains. International bodies have often asked questions about the issue in Russia of the rela-

Is the Democratic Ideal Conceivable Without the Notion of Human Nature? On John Dewey's Democratic Humanism

Abstract: Does the existing order have any better justification than the argument that it is ’natural’? In most of its guises the ’nature’ argument in fact arises more often than not from an argument whose authority is questionable, since it has been used to back up many forms of tyranny, oppression and exclusion. In this sense we are quite rightly wary of this notion of human nature as used to explore the democratic ideal. If the democratic ideal is associated with the modem experience of the indeterminate and the ’dissolution of fixed markers of certainty’ (Lefort), it seems to imply the idea of the plasticity of human nature rather more than the hypothesis of an objective human essence. As the feminist and ecology movements have taught us, the question of nature has to remain open in demo-

The Third Party: Power, Disappearances, Performances

Abstract: have just taken their place on the stage and the enthusiastic audience is applauding, the women have started singing accompanied by a guitar, but they cannot be heard, for the audience is still applauding. One of the women gets up. Like the others, she is wearing a white blouse and a long black skirt, she is old and her hair is grey. She moves to the front of the stage, chooses her place and stops, her eyes search the horizon but do not wander aimlessly, her eyes are fixed somewhere between the here and the hereafter. When she finds what she is looking for, she raises her right hand to wave a white handkerchief, and the dance begins. The audience, suddenly attentive, watches. And what do they see? Not the woman alone on the stage, but the empty space which she traces. The empty space disturbs us, as Chilean spectators, because the cueca, the national folklore dance, is danced by two people, or it is not danced at all. The invisible other is invoked by this woman’s every gesture and we do not smile when faced with the absence of her man because we have

Humanity, Inhumanity, and Closeness in the Look

Abstract: The newborn opens its eyes when it comes into the world. We close the eyes of the dead because they are no longer part of the world of the living. It is through looking that we enter the world, that we take possession of it, and that we leave it. We open or close our eyes to the living beings and things that surround us. Of prime importance among these living beings are other humans, who may resemble or be different from us, but whose eyes also look. From this perspective, to live is to look at other people and at ourselves. Artists, particularly those who work with light and looking, such as painters, photographers, or film-makers, show us that art is above all seeing life: we look at the other who has been painted, photographed, or filmed. At the same time a photograph or painting of this other tells us who we are and what type of relationship we have with the world. For looking is never neutral. Every look, from wherever it comes, is imbued with culture. In art, looking is part of writing. But, when we look at others, how do we see them? Do we see them? The blind may have poor sight, yet, because they have bodies, sensibilities, minds, and other faculties that enable them to enter into relations with others, they have a way of looking. All looking is primarily an action of the eye, but it also involves our bodily position in relation to other bodies, other living beings, in relation to the things around us, in relation

On the Supposed Neo-Structuralism of Hypertext

Abstract: A technique widely used today Hypertext encompasses a particular aspect of the virtual book that is playing an increasingly important part with the expansion of the Internet and the web. The success of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) – attests to its dynamism. Nowadays it seems so natural and so usual that we manipulate it with ease and we discover its ancestors among medieval cabalists or among other commentators of sacred texts. Every indexation, every note and every comment suggest a potential rudimentary hypertext. However, before its expansion over the entire planet, with the network of worldwide telecommunication, before being programmed on to every PC, hypertext took form in the minds of a few learned visionaries. We will refer to two of them.

The Art of the Spectator: Seeing Sounds and Hearing Visions:

Abstract: Even before Erving Goffman, in his studies of interaction, develops and makes the most of the metaphor of a daily life entirely composed of representation, or even stage acting,l sociology had already stolen from theatre a number of terms and modes particular to it: the concept of &dquo;role&dquo;, to take the most classic example, but also the term &dquo;actor&dquo;, which sociology in fact translates as social actor. However, for &dquo;spectator&dquo; no such borrowing or transfer occurred: for instance, social spectator does not exist, even though it is the part played most often nowadays in daily life especially if we consider the much reduced number of seats for &dquo;social actors&dquo; as

Man: Natural or Self-Fabricated?

Abstract: What is humanity? I do not claim to answer this question; more simply, I will seek to bring to light the now-problematic character of the very concept of humanity. I will start from a basic established fact: today we cannot conceive the notion of humanity without starting from a dual tension, between a distant past and a future which is either more or less near or very remote. In whatever direction one turns, the concept of humanity is confused. It is still more confused if we seek to embrace past and future together.

The Monstrous as the Paradigm of Modernity? Or Frankenstein, Myth of the Birth of the Contemporary:

Abstract: About fifteen years ago I took a journey through the famous work of Mary Shelley, and the interpretation of her warning call. Let me say briefly why I am interested in Mary Shelley. At the beginning of the 80s I was invited by a journal to reflect on what was totally new at that time: the birth of children conceived asexually and outside the body by in vitro fertilization. At that time very little work existed on these issues, though they were soon to generate a great deal of ink. The only publications to have appeared were Jacques Testart’s very first book, De l’orouvette au bebe spectacle (From the test tube to the miracle baby), and Rene Frydman’s L’irresistible disir de naissance (The irresistible desire for birth). Just like the general public, I had heard of the sensational stories, but I did not know

What We Have Lost with Religion

Abstract: stripped the Christian churches of most of the hold they still retained over European society. Because it goes without saying, in today’s thinking, that religion is a question of personal choice, individual participation and private belief. This is not the kind of religion I am talking about. The thesis I should like to advance is that, whatever our beliefs, church or degree of involvement, until quite recently all of us used to owe something to religion, and that we have all lost something in the enormous change which has carried us with it over the last thirty years and which, among other things, is currently completing its liquidation of the vestiges of religious organisation that remained among us. This something is directly related to the ’dehumanisation of the world’ with which we are now

Conceptualising the Reconstruction of Identities in the Postcommunist Countries

Abstract: the phenomena of reconstructed identities in general, in the context of their relationship to the period of globalisation in which we now find ourselves. The notion of space is complementary to the historical perspective of the analysis proposed here, which conceptualises the interaction between spatial groups (nations, states, ’natural groups’) and social groups (classes) in terms of paradigms. It also has the advantage of postulating the existence of a ’substratum’ capable of accepting different forms of identity. The emphasis is on the current reconstruction of identities, religions and politics in the global space as it relates the economic and social identities of particular contexts. We shall consider what remains in place, as well as those aspects which are reconstructed ; we shall look at the interaction or possible interference between the various cultural and political traces in each society; these traces, both old and not so old, become superimposed, combining in a peculiar alchemy. Beneath the surface, between what was there before and what has now been reconstructed, is a process we can identify in terms of the prefixes ’de’, ’dis’ or ’un’: de-construction, dis-integration, the un-writing of the reference points built up under communism, which had itself disintegrated and reconstructed what was there before.

Principles of HyperNietzsche

Abstract: ’One thing, however, seems certain: the manuscripts should be completely deciphered and transcribed, and studied as a group, as an individual manuscript, as an individual page (in many cases!), and then put in chronological order. For example: yesterday I carefully examined the results of the page by page transcription of the manuscripts of Daybreak. I drew a sort of diagram of all the aphorisms in Daybreak following their appearance in the different manuscripts. Two things came out of this, which are basically the two sides of the same coin, that is: 1) the evolution of

Dehumanization or the Disappearance of Pluralism

Abstract: The ’dehuman’ and the inhuman are not, even partially, exterior to the human, as are the material and the living, the animal and the bestial; they represent rather the extremes, the very limits of the human. The inhuman forms the interior facet of the boundary which makes us human and concerns us as such. In that sense, it is never exterior to us. The inhuman is the exclusive potentiality of the human as a human which is the cultural shift of natural evolution it is first and foremost alienation. Indeed the human is not a condition of complete immobility but the very movement that projects the living members of this species into the impossible transfer of their world into words. The inhuman is the human pushed to extremes, and, since the human is the alienation of the living by culture, the inhuman is thus the extreme of alienation. As malaise and as alienation, culture is the overt tension, never stabilized, between the real and the symbolic, with the latter never able to catch up with the former, in truth, even if it always achieves this in practice. The extreme of alienation and thus of the inhuman is the shift of this tension to the point where culture would abolish itself, eliminating itself as malaise. Thus there necessarily exist two absolute forms of the inhuman:

Photography from West to East: Clichéd Image Exchange and Problems of Identity

Abstract: What are the preferred subjects of mass photography? We will not go far wrong if we hazard this reply: the Self and the Other. The popular practice of photography does not much go in for nuance: it has taken as its watchword the distinction between gens de Soi and gens de 1&dquo;Autre which Robert Jaulin once used as the title of one of his books on ethnology The self, that is, one’s own, those close to one, familial space and the familiar space of identity and recognition. The other, in other words, strangers, the space of distant parts, and the space of displacement where tourism increasingly frequently leads the inhabitants of richer countries. Here, in the first space, one is among one’s own kind, &dquo;among ourselves&dquo;, part of the same family through kinship or part of the same community through lifestyle and nationality; here, connivance rules, the unspoken word and the wink with the photographer who is &dquo;one of us&dquo;, and so one does not generally hesitate to expose oneself, that is, open up to their lens. There, in the second space, one is in a foreign country, amongst others, whose costumes and customs are photographed;’ there, the more polite rule of the smile and the presentation of the self for others holds sway, one is more engaged in the process of representation and adopts a pose for the photographer rather than exposing oneself to their lens. The most widely disseminated version of this dual polarity of popular photography is the souvenir photos of the family album, on the one hand, and the holiday photos brought back by tourists from their various excursions abroad, on the other; a version which illustrates one of the most spontaneously practised photographic montages, consisting of having oneself photographed in a distant country against a typical scenic background or emblematic monument of the country visited. These photographs basically say only one thing, that the space between the self and the other is so well demarcated that there could be no place there for journeys other than those which brought Ulysses back to Ithaca, to that land of home and family where the faithful Penelope’s hope triumphed over the seductive song of foreign sirens. Is that really the case? Is it really the same Ulysses who returns to Ithaca, and is it the same shore he reaches at the end of his odyssey? We know only Ulysses’ version of his journey, the epic account of his legendary travels which is simultaneously that of his people: in short, we know only the Greek version. But what happens when the gaze of the self and the other makes a detour via the foreigner’s gaze? This question of transformations brought about by the encounter with the other can, it seems to us, be enriched by a detour

Nature, Norms and Democracy:

Abstract: a priori the topic of eugenics from political debate. However, I personally very much doubt that the notions of nature and democracy are themselves in crisis. In my view they simply give rise to semantic confusion and false problems that certain basic twentieth-century discoveries in the field of physics, anthropology and political science ought to be able to clear up, if they were better known. We shall just touch on a few thinkers whose work may give us some pointers to a clearer, calmer view of things. First a philosopher, Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987), and an economist, Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), two of whose key ideas this paper will combine: a neo-Aristotelian conception of nature, implying the existence of regulating principles and norms, to which humans and their societies, like everything else, are subject;’ a procedural conception of democracy that says it is not an end in itself but, under certain conditions, an appropriate means of making political decisions and settling disputes.2 And in addition some anthropologists, who helped either to put human beings back into a neo-Aristotelian world, or to define more accurately the essence of the political: Claude L6vi-Strauss, whose structuralism gave back its full importance to the notion of formal cause and even to the idea of final cause,3 and Andr6 Leroi-Gourhan, who confirmed that ’art imitates nature’ by demonstrating that technical skill is a natural extension of life, whose processes and results it mimics;’ Arthur Maurice Hocart, who demonstrated the ritual origin of all institutions, particularly political ones.’ Although they were to a great extent independent of one another, all these ideas fit

History Teaching in Romania

Abstract: The study focuses on the post-communist nation-building processes through the reform of secondary school curricula in Eastern Europe. The case study is the political and parliamentary debate that surrounded the publication in Romania of alternative history textbooks at the end of the 1990s.

Electronic Publishing in France: Closed [Temporarily] for Stock-Taking

Abstract: In May 2000 a group of researchers, university teachers and publishers met to consider the impact of the new media for knowledge transmission on the intellectual world and listed the projects ongoing in France for publishing content electronically. Eighteen months later no one is able to say whether there will one day be a significant body of electronic publishing with French content. Such a transformation calls for a moment’s consideration. So what has happened? In the mid 1990s, encouraged both by researchers accustomed to American practices and by the construction of a large new national library explicitly designed to be digital, people began to think about the use of the new technologies in humanities research and teaching. At the same time some publishers, attracted by the new commercial buzz-word appearing on the horizon, the ’mass-audience cultural CD’, started with government support to issue titles for sale in retail shops. During this same period a few content publishers set about publishing on CD-ROM full-text large databases in the humanities. The point was soon reached where a PC with CD-ROM drive was becoming a widely available item of mass consumption, largely because of falling prices for components. This brief retrospective gives us some idea of the identity of those who might play a part in the future of electronic publishing in France and the external factors likely to determine its structure. These factors include the American lead in the field, the changes in the working methods and careers of researchers and teachers, the attempts made by French publishers of academic content to find new fields of activity, given the industry’s difficulties, which had started roughly since the death of Sartre and Barthes. Thus everything was conspiring to encourage people to explore new forms. Only two reservations remained. One came from academics, who had not yet taken computing to their hearts how many of them had email then, or even a computer? the other came from publishers, who were badly short of the capital needed to launch yet another bookshop revolution. The solution to this situation came from two different developments: the rapid initiation into computing of university teachers, who progressed from suspicion to childlike

The Paradigm of the Human and Modernity

Abstract: The most burning question we are faced with, in our anxiety about the possible dehumanization of the world, concerns the nature of modernity. Today’s erasure of and uncertainty about norms relating to the definition of the human only go to confirm this. Indeed this is a typically modern question because it is in this civilization, which is unique in human history and which is replacing heaven with earth in the order of values, that human beings have been able to observe themselves from the outside and think that humanity could be outside itself to the extent that the idea of the ’death of man’, the ’end of humanity’ and now even a ’posthumanity’ can be entertained. If we believe that the human is likely to disappear because of the activities of our contemporaries, this is because we think modernity which has carried us up to the present time, contained a paradigm of the human whose existence we recognize by its absence. This discovery can only take place amid amazement and indirectly, since the