Citizen-Subjectivity, Experiential Evaluation, and Activist Strategies: Explaining Algerian Violence and Polish Peace under Authoritarian Rule

This project explains Polish non-violence and Algerian violence under martial law following peaceful protests against comparable material deprivation and authoritarian political exclusion. From narratives of state formation, institutional performance, and social movement evolution in postwar Poland and postcolonial Algeria a conditional model derives violent and non-violent opposition strategies from divergent practical citizenship regimes in formally similar autocratic systems. It argues that distinct regimes of citizen-subjectivity under authoritarian governance foster divergent practices of resistance and evaluations of states before and during emergency conditions that reduce activists to biological life, tempting violence. Where citizenship regimes differentiate social resources (means of protest) from state resources (means or sovereignty), affording regime opponents actual or immanent systemic subjectivity, social agitation remains non-violent despite objectively comprehensive political and social dispossession; in contrast, by subordinating social to state resources, undifferentiated citizenship regimes under martial law wholly eliminate systemic subjectivity, provoking violence. Neither the formal political regime-type nor the immediate experience of social suffering or political abjection distinguishes violent from non-violent responses to despotism; rather, violent versus non-violent protest strategies express discrepant evaluations of regime coercion, reflecting the elimination versus endurance of the citizenship regime that formed the iterated systemic subjectivity of regime opponents. Poland's worker-based citizenship regime endured fiscal crisis and martial law because it provided differentiated social resources: regime opponents had means independent of state solvency to compel policy concessions by withdrawing labor power from industries pivotal to ruling-elite incumbency. But Algeria's client-based citizenship - based on undifferentiated resources - tied activists' systemic means of compulsion to state largesse. Differentiated citizenship regimes endure state crises because citizens retain the social resources, however suspended, of systemic-subjectivity that ground their evaluations of state actions, minimizing incentives to violent pressure on ruling classes. Undifferentiated citizenship regimes perish under state bankruptcy or force, eradicating social resources and channeling the recuperation of subjectivity to anti-systemic acts. In short, Polish workers could strike and threaten the state under martial law; Algerian clients were effectively expelled from political status. In forming opposition strategies, citizens judge state policies or legitimacy, but also their status as systemic subjects. Evaluations of systemic subjectivity reflect experiences in using social resources, not merely immediate material or political conditions. The research design does not test a general theoretical model linking citizenship-subjectivity regimes to experiential evaluations of objective dehumanization, but its conceptual and causal variable analyses may complement other studies of state institutions and social agitations by promoting subject formation over abstract human universals as the key mechanism in reliable social explanation

ISCRAM-Med 2016. Third International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management in Mediterranean Countries [Poster Papers]

Poster Papers of ISCRAM-Med 2016 Third International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management in Mediterranean Countries. October 26-28, 2016. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain)Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Vicerrectorado de Investigación y Transferenci

Night-glory: cut-up literature, anarchism, and the question of the subject

This dissertation examines the anarchic practices implicit to literary texts composed through the cut-up technique. It argues that the aleatory and processual experiments in Gertrude Stein's, William S. Burroughs', Kathy Acker's, and Kenji Siratori's cut-up works appeal to principles of embodiment, affect, and affinity foundational for anarchist practices of direct action, horizontal organization, and voluntary cooperation. Counter to anarchism’s individualist and socialist traditions, which consistently install the humanist subject at the center of radical thought, the form of those cut-up works represents a post-anarchist ethics that assumes the subject’s anarchic and unconditional relation to the figure of the neighbor. In other words, this dissertation argues that cut-up literature’s extreme literary approach and eccentric formal effects exhibit a revolutionary language without a subject — without an "origin" or a "ruler" — in which the other speaks first and foremost. Repositioning the place of the neighbor in relation to the anarchic subject, this other, alien, cut up language radically re-imagines familiar political terms (race, gender, and sexuality) for the hyperconnected, globalized 21st Century

Colonial Ideology and Legacy and Feminine Resistance in Jamaica Kincaid

[À l'origine dans / Was originally part of : Thèses et mémoires - FAS - Département d'études anglaises]Mon mémoire "Colonial Ideology and Legacy and Feminine Resistance in Jamaica Kincaid" est une lecture féminine de la colonisation. Il définit, en premier lieu, l'idéologie coloniale comme une idéologie manichéiste et déshumanisante. Étant critique de cette idéologie binaire et réductrice, mon mémoire déchiffre et propose une résistance féminine, riche et diverse, à travers quelques écrits eux même divers de l'écrivaine Jamaica Kincaid. Ce mémoire conteste toute idée reçue sur la femme, en s'appuyant sur des théories anticoloniales et féministes. Il s'agit en effet d'un travail déconstructif où je vise inlassablement à décortiquer et à délégitimer ces hiérarchies qui habitent nos pensées et nos corps, et qui, entravent l'épanouissement de l'être humain. Les trois chapitres qui forment le corps de mon mémoire sont organisés à chaque fois en terme d'oppression et de résistance; de déshumanisation et humanisation, où le sujet colonisé essaie de se libérer des différentes formes d'oppression pour vivre pleinement son humanité. Cette relation hiérarchique est représentée métaphoriquement à travers la relation mère-fille, une relation que j'étudie dans le deuxième chapitre. Le troisième chapitre s'intéresse au mouvement du corps féminin, qui devient l'espace de résistance à une identité limitatrice.My thesis "Colonial Ideology and Legacy and Feminine Resistance in Jamaica Kincaid" analyzes, criticizes and deconstructs the foundations of colonial ideology. It examines how colonial Manichaeanism oppresses the woman, and explores the sites of feminine resistance for (formerly) colonized women. In the first chapter, I define colonial ideology as based on Colonial Manichaeanism. I argue that the colonizer-colonized relationship is reductive and dehumanizing. I explicate and criticize Frantz Fanon's analysis of this relationship of superiority and inferiority and his understanding of violence. I also study Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, which reproduces this relationship and extends it to the present through the tourist/native relationship. In the second chapter, I study the mother as a colonial figure in Annie John. The mother-daughter relationship offers another re-enactment of the colonizer-colonized relationship, which is highlighted through images of heaven and hell. I also develop the metaphor of death and I argue that love and Obeah are resistance strategies to colonial figures. The last chapter engages the corporal in colonial oppression, and feminine resistance. I scrutinize the female body in its wavering between veiling and exposure in Lucy. I analyze the movement of the female body as emblematic of the fluidity of feminine identity and as such, an identity which is misrepresented by colonial and patriarchal discourse

ACHIEVING AUTONOMIC SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE USING CASE BASED REASONING

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables composition of large and complex computational units out of the available atomic services. However, implementation of SOA, for its dynamic nature, could bring about challenges in terms of service discovery, service interaction, service composition, robustness, etc. In the near future, SOA will often need to dynamically re-configuring and re-organizing its topologies of interactions between the web services because of some unpredictable events, such as crashes or network problems, which will cause service unavailability. Complexity and dynamism of the current and future global network system require service architecture that is capable of autonomously changing its structure and functionality to meet dynamic changes in the requirements and environment with little human intervention. This then needs to motivate the research described throughout this thesis. In this thesis, the idea of introducing autonomy and adapting case-based reasoning into SOA in order to extend the intelligence and capability of SOA is contributed and elaborated. It is conducted by proposing architecture of an autonomic SOA framework based on case-based reasoning and the architectural considerations of autonomic computing paradigm. It is then followed by developing and analyzing formal models of the proposed architecture using Petri Net. The framework is also tested and analyzed through case studies, simulation, and prototype development. The case studies show feasibility to employing case-based reasoning and autonomic computing into SOA domain and the simulation results show believability that it would increase the intelligence, capability, usability and robustness of SOA. It was shown that SOA can be improved to cope with dynamic environment and services unavailability by incorporating case-based reasoning and autonomic computing paradigm to monitor and analyze events and service requests, then to plan and execute the appropriate actions using the knowledge stored in knowledge database

Digital Marketing and the Culture Industry: The Ethics of Big Data

Instead of the steady march of the one percent growth in ecommerce as compared to total retail revenues in the last decade (to comprise about nine percent of the industry at the close of 2019), we have witnessed leaps now to over twenty percent in just the last year. Scott Galloway marks the pandemic as an accelerant not just of digital marketing posting a year of growth for each month of quarantine but as an accelerant of each major GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) firm from market dominance to total dominance (Galloway 2020). Viewing these trends from the standpoint of critical marketing requires revisiting first-generation critical theorist reflections on the American dominance of the global culture industry. Insofar as GAFA digital marketing practices highlight their transition from mere neutral platforms to shapers, creators, and drivers of cultural content, we need to complement marketing’s praiseworthy achievements in statistical modeling (like SEM) with a sufficiently critical and theoretical contextualization. In this sense, while my investigation of big data will certainly countenance and explore its statistical (as algorithmic) innovations, what I capitalize as Big Data connotes the manners in which these large reserves of behavioral exhaust shape culture—domestic and global, home and workplace, private and public. The focus on ethics in each of these three articles follows not just moral norms, social practices, and associated virtues (or vices), but also the important ethical domains of compliance, basic rights, and juridical precedent. In the first article, I focus most exclusively on the manners in which GAFA algorithmic personalization tends to employ the alluring promise of individual tailoring of service convenience at the social costs of echo chambers, filter bubbles, and endemic political polarization. In the second article, I seek to devise a data theory of value as the wider context for my proposal to advance a new marketing mix. My tentative argument is that the classical subject as constructed by these platform domains has now juxtaposed the consumer and firm relationship. The true value creators of the workforce of the digital marketplace are its users as prosumers: an odd mixture of consumer, producer, and product. While the production era took nature as the collateral damage to its claims upon mining limited raw materials, the onset of a consumption driven economy harvests psychic and behavioral data as its new unlimited raw material with its own trails of collateral damage that constitute the birth of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). In the third article, I turn to systemic racism in American sport with the focus on the performative rituals sanctioned, censored, and sold by the NFL as its foremost culture industry. In this last article, I also seek to develop a revamped epistemology for critical marketing that places a new primacy on the voices and experiences of those most systemically marginalized as the best lens from which to advance theories and practices that can disclose forms of latent domination often hidden behind otherwise an uncritical acceptance of the NFL culture industry as fundamentally apolitical leisurely entertainment

Contribution des services dirigés par l’ontologie pour l’interopérabilité de la gestion opérationnelle multi-acteurs des situations des crises

La gestion opérationnelle de situations de crise nécessite, selon l’importance et l’étendue de la crise, la mobilisation rapide et la coordination des différents services de secours. Malheureusement, cette coordination interservices est un exercice très délicat du fait de la diversité des acteurs intervenant sur le terrain et de l’hétérogénéité des différentes organisations. Aujourd’hui, il y a un manque de coordination, l’information n’est que très peu partagée entre les acteurs opérationnels et la communication n’est pas formalisée. Ces inconvénients conduisent au dysfonctionnement des réponses aux situations de crise. Afin de mieux répondre aux situations de crise, nous proposons POLARISC, une plateforme interopérable de coordination interservices pour la gestion opérationnelle de catastrophes visualisant en temps réel le théâtre des opérations. L’objectif de POLARISC est d’aider à la décision quel que soit le niveau de commandement. Pour atteindre ces objectifs, le premier enjeu de cette thèse est de garantir une interopérabilité sémantique entre les différents acteurs métiers pour assurer l’échange et le partage des informations. À cet égard, l’idée est de formaliser sémantiquement les connaissances des acteurs métiers de la gestion opérationnelle à l’aide des ontologies. En effet, nous proposons une approche fédérée qui représente les données, les services, les processus et les métiers de chaque acteur. Nous avons modélisé les connaissances des acteurs de secours en développant une ontologie modulaire (POLARISCO) comportant un module ontologique pour chaque acteur de secours et intégré ces derniers pour proposer un vocabulaire partagé. L’utilisation des ontologies de haut niveaux et des ontologies intermédiaires, respectivement « Basic Formel Ontology » et « Common Core Ontologies », facilitent l’intégration de ces modules et de leurs mappings. Le deuxième enjeu est d’exploiter ces ontologies afin de diminuer l’ambigüité et d’éviter la mal interprétation des informations échangées. Par conséquent, nous proposons un service de messagerie appelé PROMES transformant sémantiquement le message envoyé par un acteur émetteur selon le module ontologique de l’acteur destinataire. En effet, PROMES se base sur l’ontologie POLARISCO et sert à enrichir sémantiquement le message pour éviter tout type d’ambiguïté. Le fonctionnement de PROMES est basé principalement sur deux algorithmes ; un algorithme de transformation textuelle, et par la suite, un algorithme de transformation sémantique. Ainsi, nous avons instancié l’ontologie POLARISCO avec des données réelles de la réponse aux attaques terroristes de Paris en 2015 afin d’évaluer l’ontologie et le service de messagerie. Le troisième et dernier enjeu est de proposer un service d’aide à la décision multicritère qui permet de proposer des stratégies d’évacuation des victimes après le lancement du plan blanc. L’objectif est de trouver les structures hospitalières les plus adaptées à l’état de la victime. Le choix de l’hôpital le plus approprié dépend de la durée du transport, et surtout de la disponibilité des ressources matérielles et humaines, de façon à prendre en charge les victimes le plus rapide que possible. Notre étude comprend deux étapes : la première étape consiste à développer un module ontologique qui associe à chaque pathologie les ressources indispensables pour une meilleure prise en charge des victimes selon leurs états. La deuxième étape consiste à développer un algorithme qui permet de vérifier la disponibilité des ressources nécessaires, calculer le temps d’attente pour que la victime soit prise en charge dans chaque hôpital et par la suite choisir l’hôpital le plus appropri