Nixon's “full-speech”: imaginary and symbolic registers of communication

Communicative interchanges play a foundational role in establishing the social. This being said, communicative behaviour can also lead to stalemates and conflict in which demands of recognition outweigh the prospect of hearing or saying anything beyond what is thought to be known. This paper foregrounds a dimension of communication often neglected by approaches prioritizing mass communications and new media technologies, namely the psychical and inter-subjective aspects of communicative exchange. More directly, this paper introduces and develops a Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of two interlinked registers of communicative behaviour. The first of these is the imaginary: the domain of one-to-one inter-subjectivity and behaviour that serves the ego and functions to consolidate the images subjects use to substantiate themselves. The second - far more disturbing and unpredictable - is the symbolic. It links the subject to a trans-subjective order of truth, it provides them with a set of socio-symbolic co-ordinates, and it ties them into a variety of roles and social contracts. In an elaboration of these two registers, illustrated by brief reference to Nixon’s admission of guilt in his interviews with David Frost, I pay particular attention to both the potentially transformative symbolic aspect of communicative behaviours and the ever-present prospect that such relations will ossify into imaginary impasses of mis-knowing (méconnaissance) and aggressive rivalry

Being in-sync: A multimodal framework on the emotional and cognitive synchronization of collaborative learners

Collaborative learners share an experience when focusing on a task together and coevally influence each other’s emotions and motivations. Continuous emotional synchronization relates to how learners co-regulate their cognitive resources, especially regarding their joint attention and transactive discourse. “Being in-sync” then refers to multiple emotional and cognitive group states and processes, raising the question: to what extent and when is being in-sync beneficial and when is it not? In this article, we propose a framework of multi-modal learning analytics addressing synchronization of collaborative learners across emotional and cognitive dimensions and different modalities. To exemplify this framework and approach the question of how emotions and cognitions intertwine in collaborative learning, we present contrasting cases of learners in a tabletop environment that have or have not been instructed to coordinate their gaze. Qualitative analysis of multimodal data incorporating eye-tracking and electrodermal sensors shows that gaze instruction facilitated being emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally “in-sync” during the peer collaboration. Identifying and analyzing moments of shared emotional shifts shows how learners are establishing shared understanding regarding both the learning task as well as the relationship among them when they are emotionally “in-sync.

On topics today

This article surveys the state of so-called topic theory today. It charts its development through two generations of topic theorists. The first is constructed around three influential texts: Leonard Ratners seminal book that established the discipline in its own right, Classic music: expression, form and style (1980); Wye Allanbrooks. Rhythmic gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (1983); and Kofi Agawus. Playing with signs: a semiotic interpretation of classical music (1991). The second comprises significant advances in topic theory essayed through two further pairs of texts: Robert Hattens Musical meaning in Beethoven: markedness, correlation, and interpretation (1994) and Interpreting musical gestures, topics, and tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (2004); and Raymond Monelles Linguistics and semiotics in music (1992) and The sense of music: semiotic essays (2000). Topic Theory's role as the soft hermeneutic sub-field of music semiotics (relative to the harder, formalist practices of Nattiezs neutral level analysis) is portrayed here as navigating a number of treacherous polemical paths. These wend their way between referential style (expression) and structural syntax (form); historical reconstruction and hermeneutic construction; and heightened sensitivity to social meanings and imposed acts of creative interpretation. This existence of topic theory in a continuous dialogue between structural formalism and the semantics of expressive discourse is held responsible for its marginal position both to the dominant strains of contemporary postmodern musicology and to the dying embers of formalist analysis. The failure of topic theory to strike a fashionable text-context balance thus highlights why musicology continues to view semiotics with scepticism. Ratner presents his thesaurus of style labelssomewhat dubiouslyas the historically authentic ready-to-hand materials (types and styles) of eighteenth-century expressive musical rhetoric. But it is Agawus combination of this universe of topics with a Schenker-influenced beginning-middle-end paradigm that establishes the hallmark of first generation topic theory on which the first half of this paper focuses. Agawus delicate equation between extroversive and introversive semiosis is essayed as a pivotal turning point in topic theorys ability to transcend the mere passive ascription of rhetorical labels. Out of this equation, expressive meanings can ariseas much from the non-congruence, as the congruence, of signs and structure. Hatten's critique of Agawu for neglecting the full interpretative consequences of his signifieds is the springboard for his more hermeneutically replete brand of topic theory and the emergence of the second generation topic theorists. Hattens use of troping (a kind of musical metaphor), is one of many interpretative tools that are responsible for broadening the arena of topic theorysome of his others being: expressive genres, emergent meanings and markedness theory. These are deployed across a variety of musical parameters as Hattens attention increasingly turns to the prototypicality of topics in their euphoric and dysphoric states. Hattens interpretative work is shown to transcend historical reconstruction to comprise creative interpretation built on a much broader definition of expressive gestures, of which topics are only a constituent part. The article concludes with Monelles expos of the dubious historical underpinnings of Ratners topic theory foundations. This does not render this vibrant branch of semiotics redundant but, on the contrary, charts its future direction as one calling out for far deeper historical investigation and cultural criticism. Monelles enlightening forays into the more replete expressive meanings of such topics as the horse and pianto make this point abundantly clear. The future of topics today, if not musicology in general, is one of cultural criticism

Feminisms and activisms: reflections on the politics of writing and the editorial process

This article addresses the questions and dilemmas that each of us has brought to the project. It traces their modulation, refinement and manifestation as they became part of a shared creative dynamic and thus subject to our personal experience and reflection thereon. The initial idea was to produce one text with multiple voices, yet considering our theoretical diversity, the geographical distance between us and the short time at hand we realized this, for the moment, was a too ambitious project. Hence as a tribute to the diversity of our perspectives and reflecting the actual dilemma of seeking to "speak in one powerful voice" while allowing heterogeneity, this article presents itself as a tentative pastiche of our four distinct yet overlapping and intersecting contributions

ON COMMON GOOD, MONEY AND CREDIT

As Kosick maintained, homo oeconomicus is not only a theoretical aberration, it is an aberration of reality. The idea of human beings that Neo-classical Economics portrays is, without a doubt, a degeneration, and does little as the explicative axis of current society and even less in relation to the structural crisis in which we are living

The malleability of disciplinary identity

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017This paper tracks the progress of a beginning undergraduate writer's disciplinary becoming. Much research in disciplinary identity focuses on graduate students and advanced undergraduate writers; however, sites of disciplinary identity formation also occur early on during the required first-year writing course. These sites are crucial because they inform the student writer's entrance into the academic conversation, and reveal the extent to which early assumptions about disciplinary roles affects further disciplinary identity formation. Drawing from Ivanič's framework of writer identity, this case study reveals the ever-shifting tensions of "disciplinary becoming." The analysis captures how a writer's discursive self shifts from a static disciplinary identity to a more malleable disciplinary identity through a cross-analysis of two separate writing assignments in order to learn how the student's petroleum engineer identity is performed, contradicted and re-negotiated. I argue that this shift will enable writing knowledge transfer and overall identity formation