Theatrical Immanence: The Deus ex Machina after the Death of God

The appearance of supernatural creatures on the theatrical stage, like the deus ex machina, directly intervening in the flow of the events has not ceased with the “Death of God”. It can be viewed from two perspectives, first as a meta-theatrical device through which the theatrical medium self-reflexively, sometimes even playfully, examines its own conditions and limits, as an integral aspect of the theatrical apparatus, or its dispositive; and secondly from a philosophical or theological perspective, raising the question why it has continued to serve as a powerful metaphor not only for an open-ended futurity through which Utopian notions are critically reflected and refigured, but also for ideological, social and personal conflicts, frequently even involving strong components of excess, violence and cruelty. The article discusses these theoretical issues and exemplifies with The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann

‘Suddenly a Stranger Appears’: Walter Benjamin’s Readings of Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre

My contribution to the the NTS issue on Theatre and Continental Philosophy discusses a particular aspect of the complex intellectual and creative dialogue between the work and thinking of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, beginning in 1929, the year they became close friends. Benjamin is no doubt the first critic of Brecht’s epic theatre, even planning to write a book about his artistic contributions. By examining the notion of the “Interruption” (Die Unterbrechung) and the sudden appearance of a stranger in three of Benjamin’s texts about Brecht’s epic theatre, I want to draw attention to Benjamin’s philosophical understanding of this ‘critical’ figure’ (the interrupting stranger), as one of the central aspects of the epic theatre. The essay is a prolegomenon for a more comprehensive study of this topic

Le cadre. La scène d’ouverture d’une élégie vidéographique

Cet essai examine la première séquence de la vidéo de Wilson, de façon à montrer comment elle établit ses propres paramètres génériques fondamentaux, l’inscrivant expressément comme une élégie. Le sujet explicite de cette élégie est MoLièRe, mais son objet implicite est Heiner MüLleR, qui a écrit et colligé les textes de cette vidéo. L’article porte aussi sur la façon dont la vidéo utilise des images de cadres à des fins autoréférentielles, de façon à se présenter explicitement comme une élégie pour « M-L-R ».This article analyses the first sequence of the video film with the aim of showing that it sets up its basic genre parameters, literally framing it as a kind of elegy. The overt subject of this elegy is MoLieRe, but its implicit subject is Heiner MüLleR, who wrote and collected the texts for the video. The article also focuses on the ways in which the video uses images of frames as a selfreferential method to frame itself generically as an elegy for “M-L-R”

Bursts generate a non-reducible spike pattern code

At the single-neuron level, precisely timed spikes can either constitute firing-rate codes or spike-pattern codes that utilize the relative timing between consecutive spikes. There has been little experimental support for the hypothesis that such temporal patterns contribute substantially to information transmission. By using grasshopper auditory receptors as a model system, we show that correlations between spikes can be used to represent behaviorally relevant stimuli. The correlations reflect the inner structure of the spike train: a succession of burst-like patterns. We demonstrate that bursts with different spike counts encode different stimulus features, such that about 20% of the transmitted information corresponds to discriminating between different features, and the remaining 80% is used to allocate these features in time. In this spike-pattern code, the what and the when of the stimuli are encoded in the duration of each burst and the time of burst onset, respectively. Given the ubiquity of burst firing, we expect similar findings also for other neural systems

Towards a Global Urban Geopolitics: Inhabiting Violence

This introduction to the special section explores geopolitical dimensions of conflict and violence in cities, pointing at the need to continue learning from marginal urban settings. It broadens the scope across differentiated approaches, such as the francophone and anglophone urban geopolitical traditions. By opening up a wider perspective, the emphasis is not on cities as part of a matrix of global hierarchies of geographical power but on the multiscalar relational significance of urban geopolitical inquiry. The introduction positions the special section articles within a wider review of urban geopolitical provocations outlining a new political vocabulary of urban conflict and violence. It concludes with a general call for a methodological and empirical broadening of the field of urban geopolitics as part of a broader de-colonial social and spatial science research agenda bridging the disciplines of political geography, urban studies, architecture and planning