Inside and outside legality: A pluralistic and social construction of law

What is inside and what is outside the law? A question that is not easy to answer and that forces legal theory to ask itself about which are today the forms of normative production and which are the boundaries of law. Through the analysis of the deep transformations of the global legal order and of the issues related to the boundaries of law and to the forms of hybrid legality, the essay offers a pluralist and dynamic interpretation of the social genesis of law.¿Qué es lo que está dentro y lo que está fuera del derecho? Es un dilema difícil de solucionar, que obliga a la teoría jurídica a interrogarse acerca de las actuales formas de producción normativa y de los mismos confines del derecho. A través del análisis de las profundas transformaciones del orden jurídico global y de las problemáticas que atañen a los confines del derecho y a las formas de juridicidad híbrida, este ensayo se presenta como una lectura pluralista y dinámica de la génesis social del derecho

Rhetorics of Invitation and Refusal in Terry Tempest Williams\u27s The Open Space of Democracy

This essay aims to break through an impasse in scholarship about the uses and limits of invitational rhetoric for social change. After analyzing the arguments about invitational approaches to communication, the essay focuses on a case (concerning freedom of expression after September 11) wherein invitations to listen have been refused. In examining the refusal stage of the invitational encounter, I find that what interlocutors chose to do after being refused is as important as the gesture of invitation itself. The choice to publicize refusals to listen, for example, reveals previously unconsidered ways that invitational rhetoric succeeds in getting marginalized points of view heard, and reinvigorating democratic practice. Using the example of Terry Tempest Williams\u27s book The Open Space of Democracy, the online journal she kept during her book tour, and student activism surrounding her campus visit at Florida Gulf State University, I examine ways out of binary constructions of rhetorical modes in their conceptual, isolated forms, and into studying the dynamic ecologies of modes like invitational rhetoric

Georges Sorel’s Diremption: Hegel, Marxism and Anti-Dialectics

Georges Sorel’s use of the term diremption to describe his method has long been found obscure. This paper shows that the term was associated with Hegel, and that interpreting it in this light can help us make sense of Sorel’s method. Sorel, this is to say, in his revision of Marxism and his social theory more generally, was engaging specifically with Hegelian philosophy. In addition to clarifying Sorel’s method, this perspective allows us both to place Sorel more clearly in his fin-de-siècle context and to draw connections between his work and more recent marxisant theory

An Objection to Naturalism and Atheism from Logic

I proffer a success argument for classical logical consequence. I articulate in what sense that notion of consequence should be regarded as the privileged notion for metaphysical inquiry aimed at uncovering the fundamental nature of the world. Classical logic breeds necessitism. I use necessitism to produce problems for both ontological naturalism and atheism

Dromoeconomics: Towards a Political Economy of Speed

In this article we present an alternative theoretical perspective on contemporary cultural, political and economic practices in advanced countries. Like other articles in this issue of parallax, our focus is on conceptualising the economies of excess. However, our ideas do not draw on the writings of Georges Bataille in The Accursed Share, but principally on Virilio’s Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology and Marx’s Capital and the Grundrisse.4 Using a modest synthesis of tools provided by these theorists, we put forward a tentative conceptualisation of ‘dromoeconomics’, or, a political economy of speed

Digitalization and Innovation

Developments in digital technology offer new opportunities to design new products and services. However, creating such digitalized products and services often creates new problems and challenges to firms that are trying to innovate. In this essay, we analyze the impact of digitalization of products and services on innovations. In particular, we argue that digitalization of products will lead to an emergence of new layered product architecture. The layered architecture is characterized by its generative design rules that connect loosely coupled heterogeneous layers. It is pregnant with the potential of unbounded innovations. The new product architecture will require organizations to adopt a new organizing logic of innovation that we dubbed as doubly distributed innovation network. Based on this analysis, we propose five key issues that future researchers need to explore.innovation, innovation, product architecture, design rules

Squeezing, bleaching, and the victims’ fate: wounds, geography, poetry, micrology

This article opens a dialogue between geohumanities and poetry—or, more broadly, creative writing—around the subject matters of violence and wounding. It considers what kinds of “poetry” might be usefully enrolled by the geoliterary critic, or even authored by the geographer-poet, in response to such subject matters. Difficult questions abound about what it means to author, hear, and read poetry that is engaged and enraged by instances of violence, trauma, and victimhood. One horizon for these questions is Adorno’s ([1966] 1973) claim that “there can be no more poetry after Auschwitz,” and more particularly his elaboration and partial retreat from this claim in Negative Dialectics. Here, wary of attempts “at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate” (Adorno [1966] 1973, 361), he nonetheless concluded that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man to scream; hence it may be wrong to say that after Auschwitz you can no longer write poems” (363). This article explores Adorno’s position, chiefly pursuing his arguments about the need for poetry—and indeed philosophy—that strives not for “purity” but precisely to be “soiled” and “spoiled,” never comforting, always disconcerting, never idealistically “transcendent,” always materialistically “micrological.” Including reference to a short story by Borges and critique of poetry by the geographer Wreford Watson, the argument is further advanced by attending to Adorno’s claims about another poet, Heine, sometimes regarded as a particularly “geographical” poet. The article concludes with final notes on possible implications for recasting work on wounded geographies as a species of applied micrology

Categorical Ontology of Complex Systems, Meta-Systems and Theory of Levels: The Emergence of Life, Human Consciousness and Society

Single cell interactomics in simpler organisms, as well as somatic cell interactomics in multicellular organisms, involve biomolecular interactions in complex signalling pathways that were recently represented in modular terms by quantum automata with ‘reversible behavior’ representing normal cell cycling and division. Other implications of such quantum automata, modular modeling of signaling pathways and cell differentiation during development are in the fields of neural plasticity and brain development leading to quantum-weave dynamic patterns and specific molecular processes underlying extensive memory, learning, anticipation mechanisms and the emergence of human consciousness during the early brain development in children. Cell interactomics is here represented for the first time as a mixture of ‘classical’ states that determine molecular dynamics subject to Boltzmann statistics and ‘steady-state’, metabolic (multi-stable) manifolds, together with ‘configuration’ spaces of metastable quantum states emerging from complex quantum dynamics of interacting networks of biomolecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids that are now collectively defined as quantum interactomics. On the other hand, the time dependent evolution over several generations of cancer cells --that are generally known to undergo frequent and extensive genetic mutations and, indeed, suffer genomic transformations at the chromosome level (such as extensive chromosomal aberrations found in many colon cancers)-- cannot be correctly represented in the ‘standard’ terms of quantum automaton modules, as the normal somatic cells can. This significant difference at the cancer cell genomic level is therefore reflected in major changes in cancer cell interactomics often from one cancer cell ‘cycle’ to the next, and thus it requires substantial changes in the modeling strategies, mathematical tools and experimental designs aimed at understanding cancer mechanisms. Novel solutions to this important problem in carcinogenesis are proposed and experimental validation procedures are suggested. From a medical research and clinical standpoint, this approach has important consequences for addressing and preventing the development of cancer resistance to medical therapy in ongoing clinical trials involving stage III cancer patients, as well as improving the designs of future clinical trials for cancer treatments.\ud \ud \ud KEYWORDS: Emergence of Life and Human Consciousness;\ud Proteomics; Artificial Intelligence; Complex Systems Dynamics; Quantum Automata models and Quantum Interactomics; quantum-weave dynamic patterns underlying human consciousness; specific molecular processes underlying extensive memory, learning, anticipation mechanisms and human consciousness; emergence of human consciousness during the early brain development in children; Cancer cell ‘cycling’; interacting networks of proteins and nucleic acids; genetic mutations and chromosomal aberrations in cancers, such as colon cancer; development of cancer resistance to therapy; ongoing clinical trials involving stage III cancer patients’ possible improvements of the designs for future clinical trials and cancer treatments. \ud \u