The Problematics of Human Subjectivity: Gilles Deleuze and the Deweyan Legacy

This article is part of alarger project exploring the continuity betweentwo philosophical positions – that of Frenchpoststructuralist Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995)and John Dewey – that appear at first sight tobe separated by time, place and culture. Thescope of the present paper is necessarilylimited and focuses on one aspect of theproject, namely: the problematics ofsubjectivity, or subject formation, inDeleuze's philosophy. Deleuze's position isestablished as pragmatic by virtue of itssharing the value allotted by Dewey toexperiential and experimental inquiry inphilosophy. By drawing initial parallels with anumber of selected Dewey's excerpts, this paperaims to open up a space for the imaginarydialogue between two philosophical thoughts soas to consider a possibility for applyingDeleuze's philosophy to educational theory andpractice in the context of current debates andin a manner continuous with the Deweyan legacy.The paper concludes by affirming Deleuze'splace in the contemporary scholarship on Dewey.     

Resolving the Paradox of Phenomenology through Kant's Aesthetics: Between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

Commentators have claimed that the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze converge upon a spatial field of sensation which is prior to representation. This essay will contest these readings by showing that, for Deleuze, the pre-representational spatial field of intensity is fundamentally split from thought. This “gap” between sensation and thought is, for Deleuze, fundamentally temporal, in that thought is continually open and passive to being violated and transformed by the sensible and the sensible is continually being pushed beyond itself by a certain kind of thought. This violent exchange across the gap between thought and sensibility is found, by Deleuze, in Kant's notion of the aesthetic idea. On the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty, Kant's aesthetics imply a non-conceptual “ground” shared by both thought and sensibility. By contrasting these two readings of Kant's aesthetics, this paper reveals the basic divergence between the philosophies of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.     

Bergson's and Sartre's Account of the Self in Relation to the Transcendental Ego

The historico-political category of 'Continental philosophy' arose in the United State and includes such figures as Adorno, Arendt, Beauvoir, Cairns, Carr, Cavailles, Deleuze, Derrida, Fink, Foucault, Funke, Gadamer, Gurwitsch, Habermas, Heidegger, Held, Ihde, Jaspers, Jonas, Kersten, Kristeva, Ingarden, Landgrebe, Levinas, Lyotard, Marcel, Marcuse, Marx, Merleau- Ponty, Mohanty, Natanson, Ortega y Gasset, Pato?ka, Reinach, Ricoeur, Sartre, Scheler, Schutz, Seebohm, Sokolowski, Spet, Stein, Stroeker, and Waldenfels. What these diverse figures share is (a) an early but not necessarily continued critical involvement with Husserl's phenomenology and (b) subsequent intellectual interaction with others who also began that way. Some comments on relations with analytic philosophy are also included with this historical sketch.     

Cambridge's Collegiate Crisis: King Henry VIII and the Suppression of Colleges, 1546

Abstract

This article examines in detail the University of Cambridge's robust response to the threat of suppression from the time of the promulgation of the Chantries Act at Christmas 1545 until the foundation of Trinity College the following Christmas. Particular attention is paid to chronology. The university lobbied influential friends and alumni at court to ensure its continued existence. King Henry VIII's dissolution of religious foundations from 1535, and the infamous ‘Valor Ecclesiasticus,’ the great survey of their assets that preceded it, had cast a large shadow over the university and its endowments. Even if established for secular scholars rather than clergy, the colleges were nonetheless religious foundations, and were regarded as such for the purposes of taxation and during the visitation of the universities in 1535. When the king began surveying colleges and collegiate churches in late 1545 with a view to their suppression, for eight anxious weeks the university's existence was genuinely called into question, calling for a university survival strategy.     

Henry Cavendish and Asperger’s syndrome: A new understanding of the scientist

Although it has recently been suggested that Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) suffered from Asperger’s syndrome (James, 2005; Sacks, 2001), there has yet to be a systematic exploration of this claim. For various reasons, Cavendish is considered here through the diagnostic framework described by Gillberg (1989), with further support from the DSM-IV (APA, 1994). The potential for such a retro-diagnosis is evident, given Cavendish’s biographers’ lament of Cavendish as the ‘incomplete man’: the oddly misanthropic man characterised by negations. Such an impression is evident in the memoirs of Cavendish’s contemporaries but finds its best expression in Wilson’s (1851) biography. With a new and cautious interpretation from an Asperger’s syndrome perspective, this fragmented picture dissipates and Cavendish emerges as a man of remarkable intellect whose syndrome stunted his social development and expression, yet so crucially enabled his research into a paradoxically catholic taste of scientific study. Topics relevant to a ‘retro-diagnosis’ are first addressed, before Cavendish is compared to Gillberg’s and the DSM-IV criteria.     

The affective politics of policy making spaces: Gendered and racial embodiments of neoliberal deservingness and power in a city council meeting

Bringing together feminist works on affect, neoliberalism, and the racial dimensions of dependency discourse, this paper discusses affective politics in policy making spaces by examining a Durham (North Carolina, USA) City Council meeting. We focus on a 2017 Housing Needs Hearing where bodily gestures and speech acts were crucial parts of emotional interactions that defined, maintained, and challenged subject positions and power structures. We argue that embedded within legacies of racial and gender inequality, neoliberal sensibilities work through embodied emotional performances that impact policy conversations. Our analysis reveals how, despite progressive aspirations and accomplishments in Durham, the meeting's extractive set up perpetuates inequities by positioning those seeking assistance to prove their worth through a contradictory performance of desperation and self-actualization while enabling supporters of housing affordability, including city officials, to adopt the role of caring advocates. We find that a performance of pain and the rhetorical proof of self-responsibility opens up potential access to affordable housing and in doing so reveals both the limits and impact of a broken housing system. We thus extend analysis of the neoliberal condition of US housing inequality by deepening understanding of how neoliberal deservingness is embodied and shapes racialized, classed, and gendered subject positions.     

Missing what was true: Problems of seeing and knowing in Henry James's The wings of the dove

The author examines a central theme in this late novel by Henry James in relation to current psychoanalytic ideas that link the Oedipus complex with the child's developing perception of reality (both psychic and external), specifi cally through the experience of seeing and being seen. Britton visualises the oedipal triangle as a psychic structure through which the child may achieve recognition not only of its parents' sexual relationship, from which it is excluded, but also of itself being observed by one parent while the child is with the other. Thus, it both observes and is observed. The differing perspectives achieved‐of subjectivity and objectivity‐ promote the perception of objective reality, as the world of relationships grows and becomes more complex. James captures with great subtlety and penetration the experience of three characters living out a symbolic oedipal relationship in which the truth is evaded or perverted. A young couple in love exploit the situation of a dying heiress whose vulnerability is intensifi ed by her reluctance to acknowledge the truth about their relationship. At the same time, she shrinks from the gaze of others and consigns herself to isolation and ultimate despair. The author presents three signifi cant scenes in which seeing and being seen are central to the development. In each, the dying woman is forced to face, if momentarily, her exclusion from the sexual relationship. Increasingly this connects with her approaching death‐but also with the anguished recognition that the couple have cruelly befriended her only to betray her. It is suggested that James's late style and novelistic technique require the reader to tolerate confusion and uncertainty. As the perspective shifts from one protagonist to another, we ourselves are in danger of ‘missing what is true’ in this characteristic Jamesian scenario, where relationships are gradually perverted by manipulation, evasion and lies. In psychoanalytic theory, this would represent a failure to work through the oedipal situation, where the struggle of the child to face reality is met by a parental relationship that is too weak or too perverse to contain the pain and confl ict.     

The Otherness of Children as a Hint of an Outside: Michel Foucault,Richard Yates and Karl Barth on Suburban Life

Abstract

The essay shows how the ordinary life of children might save suburbia from itself. Disenchanted with contemporary existence, temptations of ideality tend to both vilify and verify suburban life as banal, yet to the extent that suburban life means life with children, profound possibilities subsist in that strange world. The argument unfolds in three parts. Beginning with Michel Foucault, the author shows how power courses through every form of life, colonizing depth such that desire reveals power's most fundamental expression. Secondly, Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road exemplifies power's machinations as Yates compassionately portrays the tragedy of belittling ordinary life. Finally, the author turns to Karl Barth in order to resituate Foucault's account of immanence within a larger horizon where children might be embraced as the aleatory play of difference of God's peace and patience.     

Enjoyment as a mediator in the relationship between task characteristics and work effort: An experience sampling study

We studied the mediating role of enjoyment in the relationship between task characteristics and work effort. To this end, an experience sampling study was implemented in which 50 employees reported on the characteristics of the task they were performing, their level of enjoyment, and their level of work effort five times a day for five working days. Results revealed that, at the concurrent level, task characteristics related to changes in task enjoyment, and that these changes were related to changes in work effort. Moreover, the relationships did not disappear when controlling for the three critical psychological states of the job characteristics model (i.e., experienced meaningfulness, experienced responsibility, and knowledge of the results). No cross-lagged relationships were found between enjoyment and work effort. Implications for studies on effort and motivation as well as practical implications are discussed.     

Disinformation as the weaponization of cruel optimism: A critical intervention in misinformation studies

Over the past five years there has been an explosion of mis- and disinformation, with negative social and political impacts felt around the globe. The spread of misinformation has also generated huge scholarly interest but, unfortunately, critical theory has not played a strong role in driving or organizing this research. This paper argues that scholars of emotion and affect should play a stronger role within misinformation studies, providing theoretical frameworks that help to highlight the structural and social aspects of misinformation, to integrate work across disciplines, and to guard against overly techno-solutionist interventions in misinformation. The paper makes this argument by reviewing core areas of study within misinformation studies and placing current research into conversation with Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism. It demonstrates that all aspects of misinformation – from the structural changes that engender it to the disinformation campaigns that weaponize it – are undergirded by powerful affective tools. Unless solutions to misinformation account for these affective geographies, they risk failing or even making the political impact of misinformation worse.     

社交网站中的自我呈现对生活满意度的影响:积极情绪和社会支持的作用

采用社交网站中的积极自我呈现和真实自我呈现问卷、积极情绪量表、领悟社会支持量表和生活满意度问卷对武汉某高校645名在校大学生进行调查,探讨了社交网站中的积极自我呈现、真实自我呈现对个体生活满意的影响以及积极情绪和社会支持在其中的中介作用,结果发现:(1)社交网站中的积极自我呈现和真实自我呈现与积极情绪、社会支持和生活满意度都呈显著正相关;(2)真实和积极自我呈现对生活满意度都有显著的直接预测作用;此外,真实自我呈现还可以通过社会支持的中介作用对生活满意度产生影响,而积极自我呈现不仅可以通过积极情绪的单独中介作用对生活满意度产生影响,还能通过积极情绪-社会支持的链式中介作用对生活满意度产生影响。     

Atmospheres of street performance in Taipei: Affect and emotion as dynamic,simultaneous, more-than-representational experiences

Studies of street performance have highlighted its potential for creating vibrant and inclusive urban places, yet have largely neglected its atmospheric, affectual and emotional dimensions. Building on a growing body of work on atmospheres and dynamics of affect and emotion, I examine the formation of atmospheres by street performances in Taipei and its affectual and emotional resonance on space and people. I used an experimental more-than-representational methodology, including implementing a live survey questionnaire through the audience's smartphones during a performance. An atmosphere of street performance is generated through the lively interactions between the street performer, members of the audience, performance objects and the wider urban environment. Performance objects and the urban streetscape are vitalised as part of street performance, and have excessive potential in producing atmospheres. The spatio-temporal dimension of performance atmosphere is significant in generating memories and creating a therapeutic atmospheric space, experienced affectually and emotionally. I suggest that it would be helpful to see atmosphere and its affectual and emotional impact as dynamic, simultaneous experiences that people encounter as they are enmeshed within an atmosphere, such as in more-than-individual experiences or unexpected events. Within a changing atmosphere, there are multiple layers of affective and emotional outcomes, whether felt and emerging individually, and/or felt and emerging collectively.     

Miracle boats and other wonders: Locating affect in the narratives of recovery and removal of Japanese post-disaster debris

This paper investigates how affective space is located and constructed in post-disaster places. In elaborating this concept, we observe the media narratives developed around the debris created by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the Tohoku region of Japan. The tsunami waves washed away over 20 million tons of debris, some of which was retrieved in foreign countries and brought back to Japan to be memorialized. We contend that the media narratives on the journey back home of these debris items represents a valuable example to assess how affect emerges and is localized in space. We do so by drawing on geographical theories of space and affect, as we analyse how media narratives follow three broadly defined movements: (i) the displacement of the object, its disappearance from home on March 11, 2011; (ii) the discovery of the object years after, on the other side of the Pacific; (iii) the return home for the purpose of memorialization.     

Neither Enemy Nor Friend: Nature as Creation in the Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas

This paper traces three paradigmatic responses to the presence of evil in nature. Thomas Henry Huxley depicts nature as the enemy of humanity that morality combats "at every step." Henry Drummond views nature as benevolent, a friend of humanity, and the ultimate basis for morality. The paper argues that a third view, that of Thomas Aquinas, regards nature as creation, capable of being neither enemy nor friend of humanity but rather the context within which relations of enmity or friendship develop between human beings and God.     

Affective consequences of optimism and pessimism in the face of failure: Evidence of a moderation by attribution

The present experiment set out to investigate the affective consequences of dispositional optimism and attribution in performance settings. Optimistic and pessimistic participants (N = 42 each) experienced failure at solving two cognitive tasks in an alleged team setting. The failure could either be attributed to themselves (internal condition) or a teammate (external condition). We found disordinal interactions of optimism and attribution on the feelings of success and feelings of failure. While the affective state of optimists deteriorated significantly if they attributed the failure internally compared to externally, pessimists were emotionally unaffected by the locus of attribution. Moreover, optimists experienced affective benefits compared to pessimists when they attributed the outcome externally. The reverse was true if they had attributed internally. Affective consequences of optimism and pessimism after failure therefore seem to differ depending on attributions. Furthermore, pessimists seemed to be unresponsive to the affective effects of attribution in our study. This insensitiveness implies differences in the cognitive processing of outcomes, a trait × cognition interaction that should be investigated further.     

Above and below the streets: A musical geography of anti-nuclear protest in Tokyo

Affects such as anger, fear and love have compelled Tokyoites to take to the streets in protest in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011. One of the characteristic forms these protests have taken has been the anti-nuclear “sound demonstrations” in which bands, DJs and rappers perform from the backs of trucks that lead demonstrators through the streets. Projecting their emotive music through urban space with the aid of powerful sound systems, these demonstrations disrupt the everyday noises of the neoliberal city and create a public space for the vocalisation of dissent. After the demonstrations, these same artists and demonstrators move to the underground live houses and social centres that constitute a subterranean backbone to the visible demonstrations in the street. Expressing emotions through musical protest is a powerful motor for what Stevphen Shukatitis has called affective composition, the process via which collective political subjectivities are formed through the expression of shared emotions. This paper outlines the emotional geography of anti-nuclear music in post-Fukushima Tokyo. It examines the dynamic interplay between aboveground political protest and the city's subterranean network of musical performance spaces.     

Mood congruent memory in dysphoria: the roles of state affect and cognitive style

Biases in incidental memory for self-referent adjectives and intentional memory were compared across nondysphoric (ND; n=48), experimentally induced dysphoric (EXP; n=49), and naturally dysphoric (NAT; n=48) individuals. Negative biases, "evenhandedness", and positive biases were demonstrated among NAT, EXP and ND participants, respectively, in terms of incidental memory. Correlation analyses suggested that the effects of cognitive style (self-esteem, dysfunctional attitudes, and attributional style) are limited to negative stimuli. Memory for incidental positive stimuli was only predicted by state affect. Groups did not differ in performance on an intentional memory task. Implications for network and schema models of depression are explored.     

Lifeboat politics in the Pacific: Affect and the ripples and shimmers of a migrant saturated future

Affect is explored in relation to the governance of irregular migrants and asylum seekers that turn such vulnerable individuals into a feared category. How are emotions as practices developed, fostered and enacted? The examples developed in the article focus on ‘illegal maritime arrivals’ (asylum seekers arriving by boat) and the emotionally charged response to them in Australia. The article argues that the state, far from embodying a detached and neutral arbiter utilising various steering mechanisms of care and due process, instead governs through fear and anxiety generated in relation to outsiders. The state draws on, and indeed creates, dispositions and feelings, generating a distinct politics of affect. The motif of the lifeboat is an example of a diversion from the anxieties and fears in everyday life; a metaphor for scarcity and a battle for survival. The asylum seeker as ‘illegal maritime arrival’ (boat person) is the exemplar of such a lifeboat politics in the Australian case.