5,681 research outputs found

    Endogenous measures for contextualising large-scale social phenomena: a corpus-based method for mediated public discourse

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    This work presents an interdisciplinary methodology for developing endogenous measures of group membership through analysis of pervasive linguistic patterns in public discourse. Focusing on political discourse, this work critiques the conventional approach to the study of political participation, which is premised on decontextualised, exogenous measures to characterise groups. Considering the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of decontextualised approaches to large-scale social phenomena, this work suggests that contextualisation using endogenous measures might provide a complementary perspective to mitigate such weaknesses. This work develops a sociomaterial perspective on political participation in mediated discourse as affiliatory action performed through language. While the affiliatory function of language is often performed consciously (such as statements of identity), this work is concerned with unconscious features (such as patterns in lexis and grammar). This work argues that pervasive patterns in such features that emerge through socialisation are resistant to change and manipulation, and thus might serve as endogenous measures of sociopolitical contexts, and thus of groups. In terms of method, the work takes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of data from the Twitter messaging service whereby patterns in users’ speech are examined statistically in order to trace potential community membership. The method is applied in the US state of Michigan during the second half of 2018—6 November having been the date of midterm (i.e. non-Presidential) elections in the United States. The corpus is assembled from the original posts of 5,889 users, who are nominally geolocalised to 417 municipalities. These users are clustered according to pervasive language features. Comparing the linguistic clusters according to the municipalities they represent finds that there are regular sociodemographic differentials across clusters. This is understood as an indication of social structure, suggesting that endogenous measures derived from pervasive patterns in language may indeed offer a complementary, contextualised perspective on large-scale social phenomena

    Grasping nothing: a study of minimal ontologies and the sense of music

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    If music were to have a proper sense – one in which it is truly given – one might reasonably place this in sound and aurality. I contend, however, that no such sense exists; rather, the sense of music takes place, and it does so with the impossible. To this end, this thesis – which is a work of philosophy and music – advances an ontology of the impossible (i.e., it thinks the being of what, properly speaking, can have no being) and considers its implications for music, articulating how ontological aporias – of the event, of thinking the absolute, and of sovereignty’s dismemberment – imply senses of music that are anterior to sound. John Cage’s Silent Prayer, a nonwork he never composed, compels a rerethinking of silence on the basis of its contradictory status of existence; Florian Hecker et al.’s Speculative Solution offers a basis for thinking absolute music anew to the precise extent that it is a discourse of meaninglessness; and Manfred Werder’s [yearn] pieces exhibit exemplarily that music’s sense depends on the possibility of its counterfeiting. Inso-much as these accounts produce musical senses that take the place of sound, they are also understood to be performances of these pieces. Here, then, thought is music’s organon and its instrument

    Towards a sociology of conspiracy theories: An investigation into conspiratorial thinking on Dönmes

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    This thesis investigates the social and political significance of conspiracy theories, which has been an academically neglected topic despite its historical relevance. The academic literature focuses on the methodology, social significance and political impacts of these theories in a secluded manner and lacks empirical analyses. In response, this research provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for conspiracy theories by considering their methodology, political impacts and social significance in the light of empirical data. Theoretically, the thesis uses Adorno's semi-erudition theory along with Girardian approach. It proposes that conspiracy theories are methodologically semi-erudite narratives, i.e. they are biased in favour of a belief and use reason only to prove it. It suggests that conspiracy theories appear in times of power vacuum and provide semi-erudite cognitive maps that relieve alienation and ontological insecurities of people and groups. In so doing, they enforce social control over their audience due to their essentialist, closed-to-interpretation narratives. In order to verify the theory, the study analyses empirically the social and political significance of conspiracy theories about the Dönme community in Turkey. The analysis comprises interviews with conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theory readers and political parties, alongside a frame analysis of the popular conspiracy theory books on Dönmes. These confirm the theoretical framework by showing that the conspiracy theories are fed by the ontological insecurities of Turkish society. Hence, conspiracy theorists, most readers and some political parties respond to their own ontological insecurities and political frustrations through scapegoating Dönmes. Consequently, this work shows that conspiracy theories are important symptoms of society, which, while relieving ontological insecurities, do not provide politically prolific narratives

    The temporality of rhetoric: the spatialization of time in modern criticism

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    Every conception of criticism conceals a notion of time which informs the manner in which the critic conceives of history, representation and criticism itself. This thesis reveals the philosophies of time inherent in certain key modern critical concepts: allegory, irony and the sublime. Each concept opens a breach in time, a disruption of chronology. In each case this gap or aporia is emphatically closed, elided or denied. Taking the philosophy of time elaborated by Giorgio Agamben as an introductory proposition, my argument turns in Chapter One to the allegorical temporality which Walter Benjamin sees as the time of photography. The second chapter examines the aesthetics of the sublime as melancholic or mournful untimeliness. In Chapter Three, Paul de Man's conception of irony provides an exemplary instance of the denial of this troubling temporal predicament. In opposition to the foreclosure of the disturbing temporalities of criticism, history and representation, the thesis proposes a fundamental rethinking of the philosophy of time as it relates to these categories of reflection. In a reading of an inaugural meditation on the nature of time, and in examining certain key contemporary philosophical and critical texts, I argue for a critical attendance to that which eludes those modes of thought that attempt to map time as a recognizable and essentially spatial field. The Confessions of Augustine provide, in the fourth chapter, a model for thinking through the problems set up earlier: Augustine affords us, precisely, a means of conceiving of the gap or the interim. In the final chapter, this concept is developed with reference to the criticism of Arnold and Eliot, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and the philosophy of cinema derived from Deleuze and Lyotard. In conclusion, the philosophical implications of the thesis are placed in relation to a conception of the untimeliness of death

    Rewriting the Ending: Malachi\u27s Threat and the Destruction of the Temple in the Gospel of Mark

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    This is a study of the presence of the OT book of Malachi in the Gospel of Mark. The Gospel begins (1:2–3) with a conflated quotation of Mal 3:1; Exod 23:20; and Isa 40:3. Recent studies have judged that Isa 40:3 is hermeneutically influential on Mark’s presentation of Jesus. Similarly, I aim to show that Mal 3:1, with its promise of a messenger who would proceed Yahweh’s sudden arrival at the temple, is hermeneutically influential in ways heretofore not commonly recognized. The heart of my proposal is that Mark 1–13, that is, roughly three-quarters of the Gospel, is framed by an inclusio that opens with a reference to the first half of Mal 3:1 in 1:2b and closes with a reference to the second half of the same verse in 13:35–36. In Chapter One, I examine the first half of this inclusio. While some have minimized the significance of Mal 3:1 in Mark’s opening quotation, I argue that Mark’s conflation of these three verses is a development of an intertextuality already present in Malachi. In Chapter Two, I investigate the second half of the inclusio, making the case that Mark alludes to Mal 3:1b in the Parable of the Porter at the end of ch. 13. As I shall document, despite lexical similarities between these two texts, this possible allusion has gone largely, although not entirely, unrecognized. Chapters Three and Four explore some of these implications. In Chapter Three, I propose that Mal 3:1 provides the narrative logic for chs. 11–12. In Chapter Four, I give a summary reading of Mark 13 that anticipates the allusion to Malachi’s threat at the end of the discourse. Through close attention to Mark’s allusions to the OT, I attempt to show that Jesus’s prediction of the temple’s destruction is the dominant theme throughout the discourse. As one of Israel’s prophets, Malachi had promised an end to Israel’s story—end as both goal and fulfillment. In his Gospel, especially in chs. 1 and 13, Mark is rewriting that ending

    JESUS AND THE VISIBILITY OF GOD: SIGHT AND BELIEF IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL

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    This thesis establishes the value of the physical incarnation of God for belief. It asserts that the theological nature of belief derives from a God who can make himself physically visible in the world. While scholars have often debated the relationship between the empirical senses and belief in John, few have queried the presuppositions about God’s invisibility that inform their positions. In response, this thesis argues across six chapters that unless God becomes physically visible in Jesus, belief does not obtain. Chapter 1 shows that God himself is ultimately the cause, content, and consequence of the belief that John 20:30-31 describes as the purpose of the Gospel. It establishes the theological nature of belief and thus the fact that the Gospel endeavours to draw humanity close to God via faith in Jesus. The remaining five chapters argue that seeing God in Jesus is both possible and desirable. Chapter 2 re-evaluates the metaphysics of divine visibility in Early Judaism and in John and concludes that God can be physically visible in Jesus’s body. John does not regard divinity as invisible in itself; rather, he claims that seeing Jesus is seeing God. Two long chapters follow and substantiate the claims of Chapter 2. They point up the entwined nature of divine presence and material reality by arguing that Jesus’s body is a divine place. This fact – coupled with John’s depiction of Jesus as a man in divine places – stresses his divinity on earth even as it reveals his localized humanity. Chapter 5 argues that sight itself is the primary catalyst for belief in John. Although human hearts occlude proper vision, seeing remains key to human apprehension of God and belief in him. Chapter 6 draws the foregoing together by arguing that seeing Jesus is seeing God across the Johannine narratives, both despite and because of their deeply counterintuitive climax in the crucifixion

    In her own words: exploring the subjectivity of Freud’s ‘teacher’ Anna von Lieben

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    This project is inspired by Roy Porter (1985), who draws attention to the patient-shaped gap in medical history, and Rita Charon (2006), who emphasises the need to bring the patient’s narrative to the fore in the practice of medicine. The principal aim was to devise a means of accessing the lived experience of a patient who is no longer alive in order to gain an understanding of her narrative. Anna von Lieben was identified as a suitable subject as she wrote a substantial quantity of autopathographical poetry suitable for analysis and her status as Freud’s patient makes her a person of significant interest to the history of medicine. The poems were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), an idiographic and inductive method of qualitative research, based on Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology, which explores the lived experience of individuals and is committed to understanding the first-person perspective from the third-person position. The main findings from the IPA study reveal that Anna experienced a prolonged period of malaise, starting in late adolescence which she believed to result, at least partly, from a traumatic experience which occurred at that time. The analysis also indicates that Anna suffered from deep and lasting feelings of guilt and shame. The discovery of additional family documentation enabled me to contextualise and add substance to the findings of the IPA study. Anna’s husband’s diaries in particular reveal that Anna: ‱ had a severe and longstanding gynaecological disorder ‱ suffered from severe morphinism ‱ did not benefit from Freud’s treatment which seemed neither to ease her symptoms nor identify any cause ‱ was treated in Paris, not by Jean-Martin Charcot as previously supposed, but by a French hydrotherapist, Theodore Keller, who appears to have become a person of considerable significance in her life. The above findings led me to investigate Anna’s comorbidities (gynaecological disease and morphinism) and to show how those could be responsible for much of the symptomatology identified by Freud as ‘hysteria’. I then explore the possibility that her psychotic-like experiences could have been iatrogenically induced by her treatment first by Keller and then by Freud. Finally, I propose a fourfold set of hypotheses as an alternative to Freud’s diagnosis of hysteria

    The Politics of Intermediality: Late Modernist Circulations of the Event

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    This dissertation examines late modernist, intermedial representations of events, considering art as an event and how art depicts and circulates events. Through cross-media close readings and interdisciplinary theories and methods derived from media studies, music and sound studies, intermedial theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and literary theory, I study multimedia opera, civilian bombardments during the Spanish Civil War, the 1943 Harlem riot, and the atomic bombing of Japan in order to evaluate media practices from a range of cultural and historical contexts. Employing eventalization, my research illuminates intersections of media, gender, race, nation, and sexuality. Some of the artists I engage with include Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Ann Petry, Mina Loy, John Hersey, Shda Shinoe, and Nagai Takashi. The four chapters comprising this project take up fluctuating interactions among sonic, verbal, and visual mediations that were produced between 1927 and 1949, juxtaposing various newer media (photojournalism, radio, and others) with works of art (poetry, fiction, and painting). Stein and Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, transposed first into a staged opera and then as a radio broadcast, highlights how its many remediations offer formal innovation while reinforcing historical inequities. Picasso and Woolf's collage-like responses to war in Spain demonstrate hypermediacy and immediacy—remediation's twinned impulses—with each artist treating public and private divisions (as materials and as politics) differently. In their depictions of state violence against Black Americans, Hughes, Lawrence, and Petry draw differently on sonic, visual, and verbal modes. Hughes and Petry's fictional rioters publicly express dissatisfaction and challenge the containment strategies used during the actual riot. My concluding chapter also considers how intermediality resists containment, tracing the disparate availability of media in North America and Japan. Simultaneously empty and excessive, these atomic media reveal the ways knowledge and power produce nuclear subjects. My findings reveal that late modernism offers a particularly resonant set of texts and contexts from which to evaluate literature as a medium. Moreover, literature's porous borders enable multiple movements and engagements. The eventalization of these circulations reveal the political stakes and uses of intermediality
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