'Surf Life, ou l’excès à l’ère du numérique' [Surf Life: Excess in the Age of Information]

« Surf Life » is term that attempts to describe some of the characteristics and consequences of what I suggest is a new ecology of remembering and forgetting. The forms it takes, and the consciousness it seems to give rise to, cannot be separated from the ways in which we come to live in, and with, time and place as they are conditioned by the new digital technologies that suffuse everyday life. In relation to the everyday habits of contemporary western life, in particular, this « surf life » might be thought of as a kind of « surfacing » – a disengagement from the consequences of living through an excess of present moments that are quickly rendered obsolete by the arrival of new fascinations

Duchamp’s Wager: Disguise, the Play of Surface and Disorder

This article considers the notion of ‘play’ in the plastic arts, its relation to the materiality of the art object, and the way in which such a conception relied on a notion of aesthetic order broke down in the wake of Marcel Duchamp. I argue that Duchamp’s readymades force a re-evaluation of artistic ‘play’. It is further argued that Duchamp achieved this by employing strategies of disguise in order to trade on an epistemic play of surfaces, revealing the contingency of knowledge and identity

Valuing disorder: perspectives on radical contingency in modern society

This thesis explores the relationship between social and individual forms of ordering social life on one hand, and the emergence of a number of ‘spheres’ of disorder in the experience of life on the other. In modern society such evidence of disorder can only be characterised in terms that reinforce the negative or formless experience of the human confrontations with disorder. Manifestations of radical contingency (taken as the cognitive residue of such disorder) in experience are thus contrasted with the progress and limits of reason and desire (which create the ‘valuable’ part of life), and these are further examined within a language of being that establishes the discordant nature of the relationship. It is argued that reason and desire, in creating value, always construct an edifice of social and personal expectation that is justified on the basis of the reliability of causal relations between phenomena in lived experience, and in so doing ‘make’ an objective and orderly social world. Several notions central to an understanding of the accumulation of categories of being in modern society are examined as the positive expression of the conditions of autonomous action, and thus as crucial determinants of value and identity. The central relationship is further investigated through the elaboration of three negative categories of experience, which are seen to contain individual and social forms of action that forcefully remove, or contradict order and autonomous freedom as it is here defined. The thesis is therefore divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the loss of autonomy through gambling, and specifically through the singular experience of the wager, which is seen to be an intensification of the motion that constitutes life, but that boldly refuses to be contained, as rational autonomy would dictate. Part 2 deals with the atomisation of knowledge and experience in modern society, looking specifically at instances of ‘non-representational’ art of the twentieth century as the residue of developments that had as a positive aim the refinement of experience. Part 3 deals with the material exclusion of various kinds of garbage resulting from both social and technological progress, and from the emergence of a multiplicity of opportunities for the establishment of self-identity that are seen as both a product of dividing the world of experience into ever smaller categories (i.e., the refinement of the ‘objective’ world) and of the subjective relationship between the individual in modern society and the world of objects

Antitrust: The Emerging Legal Issues (Symposium Introduction)

SYMPOSIUM: Antitrust Issues In Amateur Sports, held at the Indiana University School of Law - March 198

Antitrust: The Emerging Legal Issues (Symposium Introduction)

SYMPOSIUM: Antitrust Issues In Amateur Sports, held at the Indiana University School of Law - March 198

A View from the United States - Social, Economic, and Legal Change, the Persistence of the State, and Immigration Policy in the Coming Century

In this article, Professor Scanlan argues that in spite of recent trends toward globalism, traditionally composed nation-states, especially the United States, will continue to exercise localized control over immigration and receiving nations may pursue increasingly restrictive policies. The author begins with a history of recent U.S. and European Union (EU) immigration policies, positing that State self-interest has always played a central role. Next, he traces the post-World War II development of the international refugee regime as well as the development of the European Union\u27s open - labor market. Professor Scanlan predicts that international agencies will become less efficacious for several reasons, including the loss of their galvanizing force, the fight against communism. Next he argues that though labor moves relatively freely throughout EU Member States, the EU\u27s stance on immigration from non-EU States has become more and more restrictionist. Further, to the extent the labor market is open, the situation developed out of circumstances peculiar to post-War Europe, and therefore the EU example provides little hope that North America will become similarly unified. The author concludes with a prediction that with the possible exception of concerted responses to emergencies, the nation-states of the developed world will continue to pursue self-interested immigration policies, including the vigorous guarding of their borders

Gambling in Mythical Temporality: Ontological Excess and Virtual Reality

This paper looks at certain features of games of chance to examine in greater detail the ways in which they thrive in a ‘mythical’ temporality. By examining the origins of modern gambling in the emergence of reason and its creation of an ontological excess that we refer to as ‘chance’, I argue that in order to understand the real significance of gambling in an age of virtual reality and virtual gaming, we must be able to grasp its existential dimensions and the ecstatic ‘disappearance’ it permits. I suggest that the ways in which chance has been manifested as the non-human or automatic in gambling draw us closer to the essence of its existential character. Games of chance are explored as encounters with the sacred or divine which, in their connection to a mythic temporality, are seen as precursors of virtual gaming, whose technologies are now driving the growth of gambling

Power in Soviet Policy Over the Next Ten Years

In evaluating the role that power will play in Soviet policy over the next ten years one should keep in mind that we are dealing with a dynamic and continually expanding Soviet Russian empire which since 1917 has justified its expansion both to itself and to the world in Marxist-Leninist terms. Marx declared that the communists would gain their ends by peaceful means, but if they could not, they would achieve them by force of arms