Dreaming Denationalized Law: Scholarship on Autonomous International Arbitration as Utopian Literature

A completely denationalised law is of course a utopia. But it is a utopia not just in the broad sense of being unrealistic, at least for the present, and perhaps also for the future. No, it is a utopia in the very literal sense of the word. Recall what utopia means in Greek: no place. Delocalised arbitration, non-state law, is, quite literally, no-place law. It thus makes up a utopia in the central meaning of the term. International Commercial Arbitration should be just about money. But its scholarship is full of invocations of dreams, visions, faith, utopia. These are not merely ornamental. Rather, they invite us to read the scholarship as utopian literature. Doing so yields unexpected insights into the state of globalised law, and the precarious place of arbitration within i

Fear appeal construction in the Daily Mail Online:a critical discourse analysis of ‘Prime Minister Corbyn and the 1000 days that destroyed Britain’

The rhetorical fear appeal is a technique of political communication that seeks to elicit an emotional response in receivers with the intention of provoking them to political action desired by the rhetor. This paper examines a single example of fear appeal construction in the British press, the Mail Online’s ‘Prime Minister Corbyn and the 1000 days that Destroyed Britain’ (2015), through analysis of its use of two defining political myths, a conservative myth of declinism, and the utopia/anti-utopia binary myth. I firstly examine the origins and contemporary uses of fear appeals as techniques of political persuasion, before going on to examine how these are constructed. I then go on to analyse the Mail Online article’s use of these two powerful political myths, one, declinism, which I argue is utilised descriptively for the purposes of discourse construction, and the other, utopia/anti-utopia, which is utilised instructively. Finally, I propose a method of analysis combining recent approaches to the critical discourse analysis of myth with the cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion drawn from social psychology, in order to show how the Mail Online article is constructed as a discursive fear appeal

E-topia: Utopia after the Mediated Body

open access journalA custom-made media installation, diplorasis, will be used to explore the body in digital media. This mediated body attempts to re-think how the Deleuzian time-image is translated from its cinematic confinement to the space of new media. In diplorasis the digitized time-image becomes more directly incorporated with-in the bodily schema. Consequently, the thinking of the virtual and actual space of the body in diplorasis enables a questioning of bodily space-time, and particularly the relation between self and digitized self-image. It is thus crucial to re-frame how this digitized mediated body is distinct from a conventional notion of a metric and habitual space—one that is reinforced by, for example, the medium of linear perspective. The articulation of the mediated body will be used to in-form and extend Elizabeth Grosz’s paradoxical reading of embodiment and utopia, by revisiting the notions of utopia as eu-topic/ou-topic. The spatio-temporality of the topos must be re-considered before utopia. Foucault’s analogy of the mirror will then serve to superimpose the dual and slippery relations between utopia and the heterotopic. The digitized mediated body will thus seek to explore emerging ways by which to consider the utopic by conflating embodiment, time and space within an electronic topos. It is argued that as the sensing and cognitive body becomes increasingly pliable in relation to technological mediations, our very understanding of space-time is changing

Analysing development to shape the future

This article links theory and politics in a systematic way by proposing Is-Shall-Do as a didactical model for analysing a concrete conjuncture, relating it to the desired future in the form of a concrete utopia. Aware of structural limits and potential space of manoeuvre for political agency adequate practical steps to implement the concrete utopia are elaborated. The paper is divided in a first section which exposes three interwoven aspects of development: the the idea of a good life, the complexity and multi-dimensionality of development and the relationship of knowledge and power. Section two exposes the model of Is-Shall-Do abstractly, while section 3 exemplifies it by exposing the challenges for the European left. The analysis of conjuncture as a concrete analysis of a concrete situation is centred in Europe today on the topic of inequality produced by finance-based accumulation. As the concrete utopia of a good life , the authors propose the values of the French revolution, freedom, equality and solidarity which are unfulfilled promises of European development. The paper ends with a plea for organising democratic and egalitarian alternatives. (...) (authors' abstract)Series: SRE - Discussion Paper

An axiomatization of the Euclidean compromise solution

The utopia point of a multicriteria optimization problem is the vector that specifies for each criterion the most favourable among the feasible values. The Euclidean compromise solution in multicriteria optimization is a solution concept that assigns to a feasible set the alternative with minimal Euclidean distance to the utopia point. The purpose of this paper is to provide a characterization of the Euclidean compromise solution. Consistency plays a crucial role in our approach.Consistency; Euclidean compromise solution; Multicriteria optimization

Etherotopia or a country in the mind: bridging the gap between utopias and nirvanas

Joyce Hertzler concludes his History of Utopian Thought with the phrase ‘Utopia is not a social state it is a state of mind’. Other utopian scholars would argue that the truth is exactly the opposite, that utopia is a purely social matter. There seems to be a false dilemma here where one must choose between two, seemingly conflicting, schools of utopian thinking: social utopias and private ones. In John Carey’s words, ‘Whereas most utopias reform the world, some reform the self’. He says of the later that these ‘solitary utopians are Robinson Crusoes of the mind, inventing islands for themselves to inhabit’ and that they are very unlike ‘normal, public-spirited utopians’. In this essay Christos Callow Jr explores the potential of a utopia that reforms both world and self and proposes Etherotopia as its name.N/

Between the Visionary and the Archaic: Iannis Xenakis's Cosmic City

Almost parallel with his groundbreaking theoretical work Musiques formelles (Xenakis, 1963), the late composer and architect Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) published “The Cosmic City” (Xenakis, 1965). In this urban proposal, 5 million inhabitants are housed in a single megastructure, a hyperbolic paraboloid of more than 3000 meters high and 50 meters wide. This form is inspired by Xenakis’s concept of “volumetric architecture”, as exemplified in the famous Philips Pavilion in 1958. Totally independent from climatic conditions and topography, the Cosmic City includes homes, places of work, schools and other facilities, while the distribution of the population in the urban fabric is organized according to the same statistical laws and stochastic principles that form the basis of Xenakis’s musical composition. Apart from situating the Cosmic City in Xenakis’s oeuvre, this paper will offer a critical reading and an investigation of its reception in the writings of Françoise Choay and Louis Marin. Both authors have conceptualised the notion of utopia and discussed Xenakis’s project in that context. For Choay, speaking from an anthropologic viewpoint, the Cosmic City is not only a perfect example of “Technotopia”, i.e., a sort of “reduced” utopia (Choay, 1965), but also, despite its visionary intentions, archaic and even irrelevant today (Choay, 2000). However, Marin places Xenakis’s project in a long literary and semiotic tradition. For him, the Cosmic City is a projection of More’s utopia of the New World into the Space Age (Marin, 1973). This paper considers the Cosmic City as a case study of avant-garde urbanism in France in the 1960s, and discusses the opposite appreciation by Choay and Marin as exemplary of its ambiguous reception.status: publishe