The compass of possibilities: re-mapping the suburbs of Los Angeles in the writings of D.J. Waldie

This article uses the works of the writer, memoirist, and Lakewood, California public official, D. J. Waldie to deepen our concept of “region” and to re-assess many of the stereotypical discourses associated with the American suburbs. In the fashionable parlance of Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, Los Angeles has become defined by its “suburban badlands”; however, Waldie‘s work takes a different view in which his suburban home in LA is the focus for a more complex, multi-faceted approach to post-war suburbia. Typified by his re-assessment of the suburban grid as a “compass of possibilities,” his writings encourage a more nuanced and layered view of the communities and cultures fostered in such places. His key work Holy Land is an argument about why a disregarded place, an ordinary place like suburbia, can in fact contain qualities of life that are profound and reassuring. Through examining his work in its cultural and theoretical context this article looks below the expected “grid” of suburbia to demonstrate the rich life beyond its apparent anonymity

A New Gentleness: Affective Ficto-Regionality

Using affective critical regionality to enable a re-valuing of the local as a powerful means to appreciate the everyday and the overlooked as vital elements within a more inclusive understanding of how we live.N/

Post-Westerns

During the post-World War II period, the Western, like America’s other great film genres, appeared to collapse as a result of revisionism and the emergence of new forms. Perhaps, however, as theorists like Gilles Deleuze suggest, it remains, simply “maintaining its empty frame.” Yet this frame is far from empty, as Post-Westerns shows us: rather than collapse, the Western instead found a new form through which to scrutinize and question the very assumptions on which the genre was based. Employing the ideas of critics such as Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière, Neil Campbell examines the haunted inheritance of the Western in contemporary U.S. culture. His book reveals how close examination of certain postwar films—including Bad Day at Black Rock,The Misfits, Lone Star, Easy Rider, Gas Food Lodging, Down in the Valley, and No Country for Old Men—reconfigures our notions of region and nation, the Western, and indeed the West itself. Campbell suggests that post-Westerns are in fact “ghost-Westerns,” haunted by the earlier form’s devices and styles in ways that at once acknowledge and call into question the West, both as such and in its persistent ideological framing of the national identity and values

The fine structure of condensed ring compounds

This thesis deals with the fine structure of the aromatic hydrocarbons and the heterocyclic compound indazole. The author's contributions are given in the attached reprints from the Journal of the Chemical Society, while the typescript gives an account of the theories involved as well as some work not yet published.Certain considerations outlined in the publications are expanded.Part I gives a general survey of the subject, and Part II deals more particularly with those topics related to the author's work

Physicalism, Supervenience, and Dependence: A Reply to Botterell

Andrew Botterell (this volume) has offered a fine response to my article “Supervenience and Psycho-Physical Dependence” (Campbell 2000). In my original article, I argued that Donald Davidson’s brand of supervenience should be understood as a relation between predicates rather than properties, that this formulation captures a form of psycho-physical dependence that eludes other forms of supervenience, and that, as such, it might be useful to revisit Davidsonian supervenience as a means of expressing a plausible form of physicalism. Botterell’s reply centres on offering support for the following two claims: (1) that the distinction between properties and predicates “is irrelevant to issues concerning physicalism and supervenience” (Botterell 2002, p. 155); and (2) that predicate supervenience1 is unhelpful to formulating a plausible form of physicalism. I think the first claim is false, but not for reasons that are readily apparent in the original article. My reaction to the second claim is more complicated

Supervenience and Psycho-Physical Dependence

Debates about supervenience have cooled off over the past few years. Those that remain tend to focus either on technical points concerning the modal force of—or connections between—different formulations of the relation, or on issues of reduction. Strangely enough, the more interesting question (at least for its application to the philosophy of mind has received little attention. The question is whether psycho-physical supervenience expresses the dependence of the mental on the physical. In light of the fact that many philosophers believed supervenience could capture a form of physicalism, and that the dependence of the mental on the physical is a minimal condition for such physicalism, this lack of attention is very surprising. Of course, how we answer this question will depend largely on how supervenience is understood and formulated. While the concept of supervenience captures the idea of dependence (after all, together with the denial of reduction, that is what it was introduced to do), it is not clear that the existing formulations of this relation live up to the concept behind them. Jaegwon Kim has argued convincingly that the standard formulations of supervenience (strong, weak, and global) fail to capture the idea of psycho-physical dependence they were initially taken to express. While I think Kim is essentially correct about this, there is room for elaboration and debate on this topic. The following discussion is divided into two parts. In the first section, I review Kim’s reasons for denying that the standard forms of supervenience describe relations of dependence. In the second part, I question Kim’s rejection of Davidson’s version of weak supervenience as a candidate for the expression of psycho-physical dependence. More specifically, I argue that Kim’s failure to appreciate the difference between conceiving of the relation as one that holds between properties and one between predicates reopens the possibility that Davidson’s version of supervenience describes a relation of dependence

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Brokeback Book: From Story to Cultural Phenomenon\u3c/i\u3e edited by William R. Handley

The Brokeback Book\u27s subtitle suggests that it aims to be something more comprehensive than a collection of essays on Annie Proulx\u27s story or director Ang Lee\u27s film. In this respect, this impressive book works well to bring together some previously published essays, such as those by David Leavitt and Daniel Mendelsohn, which took particular positions on the debates around the gayness of the film, and places them alongside direct and indirect responses to such critical readings. Hence we have the producer of the film James Schamus\u27s reply to Mendelsohn in which he argues that through mainstreaming gayness we disturb the given sites-some closeted, some not-from which gay identities struggle for recognition, or new essays such as Mun-Hou Lo\u27s discussion of forbearance, Vanessa Osborne\u27s piece on Marxist notions of the laboring body, or Judith Halberstam on queering the Western. Thus the book clearly interests itself in the phenomenon of both story and film, revealing the intense cultural politics of a circulating text that has had an incredible significance to the lives of gay and straight communities

Permissive consent:a robust reason-changing account

There is an ongoing debate about the “ontology” of consent. Some argue that it is a mental act, some that it is a “hybrid” of a mental act plus behaviour that signifies that act; others argue that consent is a performative, akin to promising or commanding. Here it is argued that all these views are mistaken—though some more so than others. We begin with the question whether a normatively efficacious act of consent can be completed in the mind alone. Standard objections to this “mentalist” account of consent can be rebutted. Here we identify a much deeper problem for mentalism. Normatively transformative acts of consent change others’ reasons for acting in a distinctive—“robust”—way. Robust reason-changing involves acts aimed at fulfilling a distinctive kind of reflexive and recognition-directed intention. Such acts cannot be coherently performed in the mind alone. Consent is not a mental act, but nor is it the signification of such an act. Acts of consent cannot be “completed” in the mind, and it is a mistake to view consent behaviour as making known a completed act of consent. The robust reason-changing account of consent developed here shares something with the performative theory, but is not saddled with a label whose home is philosophy of language. Certain kinds of performative utterance may change reasons robustly, but not all robust reason-changing involves or requires acts of speech, and consent can be effected by a wide range of behavioural acts