Serialization in the age of finance capitalism

International audienceHow might we critically approach the television series in a way that accounts for the nature of its form, a form which carries both ideological and economic ramifications? Few would deny that series fit awkwardly into an academic framework, by reason of their industrial volume, and because audience interest declines rapidly once they have disappeared from the screen. One could try to constitute a canon as in literary or film studies, but it is nevertheless difficult, if not impossible, to fully circumscribe a "work" sometimes extending to hundreds of episodes. 1 The choice made here is a synthesis, in very general terms, which encompasses the more commercial network series and the "quality" series produced by cable television, and which integrates on an equal basis the three terms evoked in the opening sentence: ideology , economy, and … form. Any direct attempt to relate the ideological and economic dimensions of a particular series is more or less doomed to the reductionism of the base/superstructure model. We would do well to remember, however, that the very principle of seriality in its two historical forms, the serial and the series, was determined from the outset by commercial factors, beginning with the serialized publications, both in 1836, of Balzac's La Vieille Fille in France, and of Dick-ens' The Pickwick Papers in Britain. In effect, serialization was invented to increase and consolidate the circulation of the periodic press. For similarly commercial reasons, the recurring main character was a mainstay of popular genre literature, especially the detective novel. 2 For the sake of argument, in purely formal terms, the television series can be seen as a derivative of what was originally a literary form. Seriality in its different guises has never existed outside of considerations of economic rationality (unless one wants to stretch a point). The daytime serial and the weekly series were present at the beginning of the television medium as privileged forms that enabled the advance sale of advertising time on the basis of relatively predictable audience levels. I propose therefore to explore the link between the economic and the ideological through the mediation of form, especially through the internal variations within the series form. For my purposes, the internal form adopted by the series at a given historical moment preempts the analysis of the content of any particular series (and thus, a fortiori, of any particular episode) Three theoretical suppositions anchor my argument. First, Adorno's claim that "form … is itself sedimented content" (Adorno, Adorno, and Tiedeman, 1997; see also the discussions in Jameson, 1990, 1992). The context here is a philosophical argument about the autonomy of "authentic" art, and Adorno would surely not have approved of its application to products o

Energy balance of a laboratory population of Ostrea Edulis (L)

Includes bibliographical references.The energy balance components of a laboratory population of juvenile Ostrea edulis, fed on Tetraselmis seucica at 15°C and 35%, were investigated. The results show that filtration rate is a power function of body size and is dependent on food concentration. The relationship between food concentration and filtration rate closely approximated a theoretical model proposed for copepods, which was therefore adapted to suit bivalves. Filtration rate showed no selection of particles on the basis of size. However, oysters are probably able to recognise algae on a chemosensory basis and reject undesirable particles. Routine metabolism was found to be proportional to the 1,09 power of body mass. This agrees with expected values of the mass exponent predicted in the literature for animals of this size. No evidence of energy loss as dissolved organic carbon was recorded

Cost-effectiveness of a European preventive cardiology programme in primary care: A Markov modelling approach

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license.OBJECTIVE: To investigate the longer-term cost-effectiveness of a nurse-coordinated preventive cardiology programme for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) compared to routine practice from a health service perspective. DESIGN: A matched, paired cluster-randomised controlled trial. SETTING: Six pairs of general practices in six countries. PARTICIPANTS: 1019 patients were randomised to the EUROACTION intervention programme and 1005 patients to usual care (UC) and who completed the 1-year follow-up. OUTCOME MEASURES: Evidence on health outcomes and costs was based on patient-level data from the study, which had a 1-year follow-up period. Future risk of CVD events was modelled, using published risk models based on patient characteristics. An individual-level Markov model for each patient was used to extrapolate beyond the end of the trial, which was populated with data from published sources. We used an 11-year time horizon and investigated the impact on the cost-effectiveness of varying the duration of the effect of the intervention beyond the end of the trial. Results are expressed as incremental cost per quality-adjusted life-year gained. RESULTS: Unadjusted results found the intervention to be more costly and also more effective than UC. However, after adjusting for differences in age, gender, country and baseline risk factors, the intervention was dominated by UC, but this analysis was not able to take into account the lifestyle changes in terms of diet and physical activity. CONCLUSIONS: Although the EUROACTION study achieved healthier lifestyle changes and improvements in management of blood pressure and lipids for patients at high risk of CVD, compared to UC, it was not possible to show, using available risk equations which do not incorporate diet and physical activity, that the intervention reduced longer-term cardiovascular risk cost-effectively. Whether or not an intervention such as that offered by EUROACTION is cost-effective requires a longer-term trial with major cardiovascular events as the outcome.This study is sponsored solely by AstraZeneca through the provision of an unconditional educational grant

Investigation of strategic capacity issues in the aerospace sector

The business environment is changing fast and radically. Traditional capacity planning has limitations in today’s dynamic environments, particularly from a strategic perspective in the aerospace sector. This document sets out to identify the unique characteristics of the aerospace industry and compare the traditional views of capacity planning and modern concepts in SCP relevant to the sector. Key findings are summarised from an analysis of the literature on strategic capacity planning. The importance of considering demand uncertainty, technology uncertainty and supply uncertainty is highlighted. Two case studies in the aero- engine sector are presented. A collaborative virtual organisation requires Strategic Capacity Planning (SCP) that focuses not only on economies of scale but also on coordination, flexibility and responsiveness. An integrated framework for addressing SCP in the aerospace industry is presented

Le débat sur l’automatisation : un enjeu décisif pour la théorie marxienne ?

Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work, (Verso, Londres), 2020. Trad. Fr. par Léa Nicolas-Teboul, L’Automatisation et le futur du travail (Editions Divergences, Paris), 2022. Jason E. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work (Reaktion, Londres), 2020. Trad. Fr. par Laure Deslandes, Les capitalistes rêvent-ils des moutons électriques ? (Editions Grevis, Caen), 2021. À quoi ressemblera le monde du travail de demain ? Chacun à sa manière, les deux livres sus-mentionnés contestent le disc..

Une lecture adornienne des séries télévisées

S’agissant de l’analyse des séries télévisées, y aurait-il un intérêt à revenir sur les quelques textes courts écrits par Theodor W. Adorno sur la télévision, passablement oubliés en raison de leur statut objectivement daté ? En effet, Adorno écrit sur un médium encore émergeant dont le modèle économique et les formes endogènes ne sont pas encore fixés. Si on veut rendre justice à l’article publié aux États-Unis en 1954 (Adorno, 1990), et accouché dans un contexte très difficile pour la pensé..

The Impact of Striatal Neuropeptides and Topography on Action Sequence Selection

Many common behaviours are a sequence of several actions. As action sequences are learned their activation often becomes habitual, allowing smooth, rapid, and semi-automatic execution; learning and performing action sequences is central to normal motor function. The striatum is the primary input nucleus for the basal ganglia and receives glutamatergic cortical afferents. These afferents innervate localised populations of medium spiny neurons (MSNs) and may encode 'action requests'. Striatal interactions ensure that only non-conflicting, high salience requests are selected, but the mechanisms enabling clean, rapid switching between sequential actions are poorly understood. Substance P (SP) and enkephalin are neuropeptides co-released with GABA by MSNs preferentially expressing D1 or D2 dopamine receptors respectively. SP facilitates subsequent glutamatergic inputs to target MSNs while enkephalin has an inhibitory effect. We construct models of these glutamatergic effects and integrate them into a basal ganglia model to demonstrate that diffuse neuropeptide connectivity enhances action selection. For action sequences with an ordinal structure, patterning SP connectivity to reflect this ordering enhances the selection of correctly–ordered actions and suppresses disordered selection. We also show that selectively pruning SP connections allows context–sensitive inhibition of specific undesirable requests that otherwise interfere with action group selection. We then construct a striatal microcircuit model with physical topography and show that inputs to this model generate oscillations in MSN spiking. Input salience and active neuronal density have differentiable impacts on oscillation amplitude and frequency, but the presence of oscillations has little effect on the mean MSN firing rate or action selection. Our model suggests that neuropeptide interactions enhance the contrast between selected and rejected action requests, and that patterned SP connectivity enhances the selection of ordered sequences. Our model further suggests that striatal topography does not directly impact action selection, but that evoked oscillations may represent an additional form of population coding that could bind together semantically related MSN groups

Activement soumis : réseaux sociaux et capitalisme

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La forme de la série de télévision comme contenu sédimenté

Dans sa Théorie esthétique, Adorno parle de la forme de l’œuvre d’art comme « contenu sédimenté ». Cet article cherche à appliquer ce concept aux séries télévisées, même si Adorno n’eût jamais envisagé de traiter les produits de la Kulturindustrie comme des œuvres d’art. Il est, en effet, difficile d’intégrer les séries télévisées dans les analyses universitaires en raison de leur volume, et du nombre même des épisodes, et le fait que l’intérêt du public, même pour une série à grand succès, s..

LE LIEU DU FANTASME : LE COMMENTAIRE SUR IMAGES DANS LES MAGAZINES DE REPORTAGE À LA TÉLÉVISION FRANÇAISE 1960-92 -DAVID BUXTON

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