Academic literature on the topic 'Benjamin Erastus'

Entre los días 8 y 11 de septiembre de 2018, y con la presencia de más de 270 asistentes (entre profesores nacionales e internaciona­les, estudiantes, líderes sociales, activistas de derechos humanos, jueces y otros miembros de la sociedad civil), se llevó a cabo el lanza­miento del proyecto ERASMUS OPT-IN y la creación de la Red de Stakeholders en inter­culturalidad, paz y derechos de la naturaleza. El evento tuvo lugar en las instalaciones de la Universidad Libre, sede Cartagena, en el auditorio Benjamín Herrera, y su objetivo era presentar un nuevo programa de posgrado para la formación de operadores transnacio­nales e interculturales para la defensa de la naturaleza y la construcción de la paz en la Comunidad Andina.

“Politeness” appears to be connected to a quite disparate set of related concepts, including but not limited to, “manners,” “etiquette,” “agreeableness,” “respect” and even “piety.” While in the East politeness considered as an important social virtue is present (and even central) in the theoretical and practical expressions of the Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist traditions, (indeed politeness has been viewed in these traditions as central to proper education) it has not featured prominently in philosophical discussion in the West. American presidents Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington all devoted discussion to politeness within the broader ambit of manners and etiquette, as too did Erasmus, Edmund Burke and Ralph Waldo Emerson but on the whole sustained philosophical engagement with the topic has been lacking in the West. The richest source for philosophical investigation is perhaps afforded by the centrality of the concept of respect in Immanuel Kant.However in this paper we will instead draw on the writings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to defend the centrality of “politeness” as an important and valuable moral virtue. Starting with an analysis of the broader Aristotelian arguments on the virtues associated with “agreeableness,” namely, friendliness, truthfulness and wit I will argue that “politeness” should be thought of as an important moral virtue attached to social intercourse (and by extension the vice of impoliteness). I then move to identify an even broader and more important account of politeness, drawing on the work of Aquinas, as intimately connected to the notion of pietas (piety) as a fundamental part of the virtue of justice.

In an article entitled "Palming the Planet", Ron Jasper, a marketing executive, is quoted describing his car trip from Seattle to Vancouver: "'The whole way up,' he says with glee ... 'I had my laptop [wirelessly connected to the office]. I was reading my e-mail. At the same time I checked my stock on this' -- he waves a new smart phone, sleek and easily palmed. 'At one point, I was talking on the phone, checking my stock on the laptop and steering with my knee'", he confided, "slightly embarrassed" by his admission. He concludes with the observation: "'These devices are making it possible for everyone to work in ways they never imagined before'". Leaving aside the obvious concerns over highway safety, I want to register the observation that Jasper's enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by his new phone and his elation over his ability to get more work done faster, are not in fact 'never-imagined' ways of working. Visions of efficiency and connectivity have been integral to the representations of communication technologies, especially the telephone, since the beginning of the twentieth century. Looking back on the images and descriptions of the telephone in the early 1900s reveals a similar fascination with the ability to transcend the mundane realities of time and space. The idea that 'faster is better' is not one born of our times, it is one that emerged and evolved out of the preoccupations of an earlier era. The contemporary obsession with faster connections and multiple function technologies is an amplification of a century-old preoccupation with speed and efficiency; just as the passion for "multi-tasking" is today's version of what a 1909 AT&T advertisement referred to as "the multiplication of power". The recurrence of similar utopic and dystopic themes seems to suggest that our hopes and fears about the possibilities of telephonic communication are regenerated with each technological advance. In this paper I explore some of the concepts which inform these representations and suggest that they function simultaneously as a critique and a celebration of the renewal of capitalism that seems to accompany technological progress. Capitalist Reveries In a speech to the New York Electric Club in 1889, Erastus Wiman, president of the Canadian telegraph system remarked: "if to accomplish things quickly, close transactions promptly, and generally to get through with things is a step toward a business man's millennium, then we must be nearing that heavenly expectation". He praises electricity, the telegraph, and the "most marvelous" telephone for making the businessman "almost divine in what he can achieve". Throughout the twentieth century, technology and technological developments have been embraced because they provided the means to radically improve speed, efficiency, and connectivity. As Wiman makes clear though, these attributes were not, and are not now, neutral or arbitrary values. Their worth is located in their application to the flow of goods, information, and ultimately to the circulation of capital. They are valuable because they facilitate a renewal of capitalism itself: the tremendous expansion of both capital and markets occurring at the end of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is not unrelated to the technological developments of these eras. In the Grundrisse, Marx writes that "Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange -- of the means of communication and transport -- the annihilation of space by time -- becomes an extraordinary necessity for it". Improvements in the speed and flexibility of communication 'renew' capitalism because they overcome the temporal disadvantages associated with distance and facilitate the expansion of markets in geographic space. Perhaps more than any other communication technology, the telephone has encouraged and anticipated capitalism's utopic fantasies. It is no coincidence that in early advertisements, its promoters referred to the telephone as the "annihilator of time and space". Whatever other benefits the telephone came to be seen as offering, its ability to instantaneously transfer information and credit was perceived and promoted as its most perfect attribute. Linking together buyers and sellers in cities all across the country, the telephone re-organised the 'playing field' of capitalism. By making distance an increasingly irrelevant factor in the transaction of business, the telephone rearranged space and distance "to fit the rather strict temporal requirements of the circulation of capital". Time and Money According to Marx, "economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself". Wiman's celebration of the telegraph and the telephone at the New York Electric Club in 1889 is not much different than Jasper's delight with his smart phone and laptop computer as he careens down the highway towards Vancouver. Simply understood, the ability to save time translates into a saving of money but the relationship between time and money is not a straightforward one. Time and money appear as commensurate albeit inverse values because of the effect of the velocity of circulation on the accumulation of capital. They had come to be linked with the rise of wage labour and the practice of paying workers by the hour and in this sense, "money appears as measure". When in the mid-1700s Benjamin Franklin proclaimed that "time is money", and went on to explain their enigmatic relationship, he was describing more than a simple ratio. He that can earn ten shillings in a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversions or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. Franklin not only equates time spent working with money, but also proposes a conception of unproductive time as a negative cost, a tangible loss against potential profit. Following the logic of his formula, if misspent time is perceived as a deficit, time saved can be counted as a profit. This way of thinking counts all time as potentially profitable in an economic sense and confers a speculative value on time. Telephone advertising in the first decades of the twentieth century made explicit use of this formula and, in so doing, not only asserted the value of the instrument but also provided a way of imagining time in terms of its market value. The text of a 1909 advertisement reads: The mere item of time actually saved by those who use the telephone means an immense increase in the production of the nation's wealth every working day in the year ... just counting the time alone, over $3,000,000 a day is saved by the users of the telephone! Which means adding $3,000,000 a day to the nation's wealth. (Italics in original) Contemporary representations of the telephone continue to employ the idea that savings of transaction time can be accumulated and converted into working capital. In a 1990 article on mobile offices in the financial magazine Money, a Los Angeles attorney is quoted as saying that his cell phone and mobile fax machine have "added two hours to my day and 25% to my annual gross". A 1993 survey of cell phone users by Motorola reported its findings in similar terms. Those canvassed claimed that a cellular phone "added 0.92 hours to their productive working day [and] increased their own or their company's revenues by 19 percent". This kind of temporal accounting involves two basic conceptual manoeuvres which can only occur if time is 'emptied' of its social value or meaning, leaving it available to take on a new and purely economic significance. First, in order to calculate time in terms of both its actual and speculative monetary value, it must be conceived in abstract terms, the value of each minute standardised and conceived as a unit of measurement. Second, and following from the first, because now each minute of the day has the same relative monetary value, the entire 24-hour day, not just the traditional 8-hour workday, comes to be imagined as zone for commercial activity. Prior to the telephone, the partition of the day into work and family time was safeguarded by the physical separation of the business and the domestic spheres. Even the telegraph, because its use was largely restricted to the workplace, did little to challenge the partition between public and private domains. The telephone, as it became increasingly ubiquitous in both offices and homes, disturbed these boundaries and expropriated time previously reserved for rest, relaxation and social activities for all manner of commercial uses. AT&T's declaration in an ad entitled "The Always-on-Duty Telephone" (1910) that "the whole Bell System is on duty 1440 minutes a day" also must have stirred anxiety with its conclusion that "if any of these minutes are not used, their earning power is irrevocably lost". As the "1440 minute" day expanded the potential for profit, it also increased competition and established new expectations. Social Anxieties The logic of capital's never-ending drive to renew itself dictates that time saved by technology is perceived not as "free time" but as potential profit, which must be reinvested or lost. Booster though he was of modern communication technologies, Wiman could not help but observe: One would think that the ability ... to talk freely over the telephone would so facilitate business pursuits and close up transactions so quickly that it would beget leisure, rest and quiet, but such is not the case. The thirst for achievement is so great ... that the more we do, the more we seek to do. We are no more encouraged to use the extra two or .92 hours gained by the cellphone for play or relaxation than we were when the telephone first began to speed up the tempo of our lives. Anxieties about the social effects of communications technologies are not new although they rarely manifest themselves in business discourse. Today, as business and technology publications celebrate each new communications innovation, general interest and women's magazines are more often questioning the impact of cell phones, pagers, palm pilots, and portable computers on family life and mental health. It is somehow both ironic and appropriate that during both periods, concerns about the social effects of telephone -- a medium of disembodied communication -- should manifest as anxieties about its negative corporeal effects. In 1889, an account in the British Medical Journal reported a new medical condition called "aural overpressure", an affliction suffered by those who used the telephone for extended periods of the work day. The "constant strain of the auditory apparatus" by prolonged telephone use was said to be responsible for "nervous excitability, buzzing in the ear, giddiness, and neuralgic pains". The Electrical Review recounted cautionary tales of individuals driven mad by the telephone's "constant ringing". In 2000, we find Scientific American and Time investigating the possible links between cellphone use and brain tumors. Despite the consistently inconclusive findings of multiple scientific studies, the British government ruled that cellphones sold in the United Kingdom must carry health notices that warn "people to be careful about where and how long they use them", and American cellphone retailers have voluntarily begun to include "a one page health-and-safety bulletin" with all cellphones they sell. Warren Susman suggests that examining the anxieties associated with any given technology can provide useful insight into the cultural values at stake for its users. According to the scientific experts of their day, both "aural overpressure" and brain tumors are avoided by reducing the amount of time spent on the telephone, perhaps less time working and possibly more time in the pursuit of other more socially oriented activity. It is possible to look at these panics around physical and mental well-being as a reassertion of the social, of the body, a sort of return of the repressed, at those historical moments the alienating effects of capitalism are being exacerbated by the uses to which we put technology. If, as Marx writes, the "circulation of capital constantly ignites itself anew" then it seems logical that the discourses which circulate around the telephone and communications technologies will continue to renew themselves at key historical moments. Advances in telecommunications at the end of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have inspired similar desires and elicited comparable anxieties because they have been driven by a common motive: the search for the competitive advantage that drives both capital and technological development alike. References Adam, B. Time and Social Theory. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Harvey, D. The Urbanization of Capital. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1985. Marvin, C. When the Old Technologies Were New. Oxford UP, 1988. Marx, K. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Vintage Press, 1973. Susman, W. I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Janin Hadlaw. "Plus Que Ça Change: The Telephone and the History of the Future." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/plus.php>. Chicago style: Janin Hadlaw, "Plus Que Ça Change: The Telephone and the History of the Future," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/plus.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Janin Hadlaw. (2000) Plus que ça change: the telephone and the history of the future. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/plus.php> ([your date of access]).

Perhaps the supreme quality of print is one that is lost on us, since it has so casual and obvious an existence (McLuhan 160). Print Machine (Thad Donovan, 1995) In the introduction to his book on 9/11, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek uses an analogy of letter writing to emphasize the contingency of post-9/11 reality. In the example, Zizek discusses the efforts of writers to escape the eyes of governmental censors and a system that used blue ink to indicate a message was true, red ink to indicate it was false. The story ends with an individual receiving a letter from the censored country stating that the writer could not find any red ink. The ambiguity and the duplicity of writing, suggested in Zizek’s tale of colored inks, is a condition of the contemporary world, even if we are unaware of it. We exist in an age in which print—the economization of writing—has an increasingly significant and precarious role in our lives. We turn to the Internet chat room for textual interventions in our sexual, political and aesthetic lives. We burn satanic Harry Potter books and issue fatwas against writers like Salman Rushdie. We narrate our lives using pictures, fonts of varying typeface and color, and sound on our personalized homepages. We throw out our printed books and buy audio ones so we can listen to our favorite authors in the car. We place trust of our life savings, personal numbers, and digital identity in the hands of unseen individuals behind computer screens. Decisively, we are a print people, but our very nature of being dependent on the technologies of print in our public and private lives leads to our inability to consider the epistemological, social and existential effects of print on us. In this article, I focus on the current manifestations of print—what I call “newprint”—including their relationships to consumerism, identity formation and the politics of the state. I will then consider the democratic possibilities of print, suggested by the personalization of print through the Internet and home publishing, and conclude with the implications of the end of print that include the possibility of a post-print language and the middle voice. In order to understand the significance of our current print culture, it is important to situate print in the context of the history of communication. In earlier times, writing had magical associations (Harris 10), and commonly these underpinnings led to the stratification of communities. Writing functioned as a type of black box, “the mysterious technology by which any message [could] be concealed from its illiterate bearer” (Harris 16). Plato and Socrates warned against the negative effects of writing on the mind, including the erosion of memory (Ong 81). Though it once supplemented the communicational bases of orality, the written word soon supplanted it and created a dramatic existential shift in people—a separation of “the knower from the known” (Ong 43-44). As writing moved from the inconvenience of illuminated manuscripts and hand-copied texts, it became systemized in Gutenberg print, and writing then took on the signature of the state—messages between people were codified in the technology of print. With the advent of computer technologies in the 1990s, including personal computers, word processing programs, printers, and the Internet, the age of newprint begins. Newprint includes the electronic language of the Internet and other examples of the public alphabet, including billboards, signage and the language of advertising. As much as members of consumer society are led to believe that newprint is the harbinger of positive identity construction and individualism, closer analysis of the mechanisms of newprint leads to a different conclusion. An important context of new print is found in the space of the home computer. The home computer is the workstation of the contemporary discursive culture—people send and receive emails, do their shopping on the Internet, meet friends and even spouses through dating services, conceal their identity on MUDs and MOOs, and produce state-of-the-art publishing projects, even books. The ubiquity of print in the space of the personal computer leads to the vital illusion that this newprint is emancipatory. Some theorists have argued that the Internet exhibits the spirit of communicative action addressed by Juergen Habermas, but such thinkers have neglected the fact that the foundations of newprint, just like those of Gutenberg print, are the state and the corporation. Recent advertising of Hewlett-Packard and other computer companies illustrates this point. One advertisement suggested that consumers could “invent themselves” through HP computer and printer technology: by using the varied media available to them, consumers can make everything from personalized greeting cards to full-fledged books. As Friedrich Kittler illustrates, we should resist the urge to separate the practices of writing from the technologies of their production, what Jay David Bolter (41) denotes as the “writing space”. For as much as we long for new means of democratic and individualistic expression, we should not succumb to the urge to accept newprint because of its immediacy, novelty or efficiency. Doing so will relegate us to a mechanistic existence, what is referenced metaphorically in Thad Donovan’s “print machine.” In multiple contexts, newprint extends the corporate state’s propaganda industry by turning the written word into artifice. Even before newprint, the individual was confronted with the hegemony of writing. Writing creates “context-free language” or “autonomous discourse,” which means an individual cannot directly confront the language or speaker as one could in oral cultures (Ong 78). This further division of the individual from the communicational world is emphasized in newprint’s focus on the aesthetics of the typeface. In word processing programs like Microsoft Word, and specialized ones like TwistType, the consumer can take a word or a sentence and transform it into an aesthetic formation. On the word processing program that is producing this text, I can choose from Blinking Background, Las Vegas Lights, Marching Red or Black Ants, Shimmer, and Sparkle Text. On my campus email system I am confronted with pictorial backgrounds, font selection and animation as an intimate aspect of the communicational system of my college. On my cell phone I can receive text messages, and I can choose to use emoticons (iconic characters and messages) on the Internet. As Walter Ong wrote, “print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did … control of position is everything in print” (Ong 121). In the case of the new culture of print, the control over more functions of the printed page, specifically its presentation, leads some consumers to believe that choice and individuality are the outcomes. Newprint does not free the writer from the constraints imposed by the means of traditional print—the printing press—rather, it furthers them as the individual operates by the logos of a predetermined and programmed electronic print. The capacity to spell and write grammatically correct sentences is abated by the availability of spell- and grammar-checking functions in word processing software. In many ways, the aura of writing is lost in newprint in the same way in which art lost its organic nature as it moved into the age of reproducibility (Benjamin). Just as filters in imaging programs like Photoshop reduce the aesthetic functions of the user to the determinations of the software programmer, the use of automated print technologies—whether spell-checking or fanciful page layout software like QuarkXpress or Page Maker—will further dilute the voice of the writer. Additionally, the new forms of print can lead to a fracturing of community, the opposite intent of Habermas’ communicative action. An example is the recent growth of specialized languages on the Internet. Some of the newer forms of such languages use combinations of alphanumeric characters to create a language that can only be read by those with the code. As Internet print becomes more specialized, a tribal effect may be felt within our communities. Since email began a few years ago, I have noticed that the nature of the emails I receive has been dramatically altered. Today’s emails tend to be short and commonly include short hands (“LOL” = “laugh out loud”), including the elimination of capitalization and punctuation. In surveying students on the reasons behind such alterations of language in email, I am told that these short hands allow for more efficient forms of communication. In my mind, this is the key issue that is at stake in both print and newprint culture—for as long as we rely on print and other communicational systems as a form of efficiency, we are doomed to send and receive inaccurate and potentially dangerous messages. Benedict Anderson and Hannah Arendt addressed the connections of print to nationalistic and fascist urges (Anderson; Arendt), and such tendencies are seen in the post-9/11 discursive formations within the United States. Bumper stickers and Presidential addresses conveyed the same simplistic printed messages: “Either You are with Us or You are with the Terrorists.” Whether dropping leaflets from airplanes or in scrolling text messages on the bottom of the television news screen, the state is dependent on the efficiency of print to maintain control of the citizen. A feature of this efficiency is that newprint be rhetorically immediate in its results, widely available in different forms of technology, and dominated by the notion of individuality and democracy that is envisioned in HP’s “invent yourself” advertsiements. As Marshall McLuhan’s epigram suggests, we have an ambiguous relationship to print. We depend on printed language in our daily lives, for education and for the economic transactions that underpin our consumer world, yet we are unable to confront the rhetoric of the state and mass media that are consequences of the immediacy and magic of both print and new print. Print extends the domination of our consciousness by forms of discourse that privilege representation over experience and the subject over the object. As we look to new means of communicating with one another and of expressing our intimate lives, we must consider altering the discursive foundations of our communication, such as looking to the middle voice. The middle voice erases the distinctions between subjects and objects and instead emphasizes the writer being in the midst of things, as a part of the world as opposed to dominating it (Barthes; Tyler). A few months prior to writing this article, I spent the fall quarter teaching in London. One day I received an email that changed my life. My partner of nearly six years announced that she was leaving me. I was gripped with the fact of my being unable to discuss the situation with her as we were thousands of miles apart and I struggled to understand how such a significant and personal circumstance could be communicated with the printed word of email. Welcome to new print! References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1976. Barthes, Roland. “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. 134-56. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 2002. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Harris, Roy. The Origin of Writing. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986. Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1991. Tyler, Stephen A. “The Middle Voice: The Influence of Post-Modernism on Empirical Research in Anthropology.” Post-modernism and Anthropology. Eds. K. Geuijen, D. Raven, and J. de Wolf. Assen, The Neatherlands: Van Gorcum, 1995. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lukas, Scott A. "Nevermoreprint." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/04-lukas.php>. APA Style Lukas, S. (Jun. 2005) "Nevermoreprint," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/04-lukas.php>.

Bihrer, Andreas / Miriam Czock / Uta Kleine (Hrsg.), Der Wert des Heiligen. Spirituelle, materielle und ökonomische Verflechtungen (Beiträge zur Hagiographie, 23), Stuttgart 2020, Steiner, 234 S. / Abb., € 46,00. (Carola Jäggi, Zürich) Leinsle, Ulrich G., Die Prämonstratenser (Urban Taschenbücher; Geschichte der christlichen Orden), Stuttgart 2020, Kohlhammer, 250 S. / Abb., € 29,00. (Joachim Werz, Frankfurt a. M.) Gadebusch Bondio, Mariacarla / Beate Kellner / Ulrich Pfisterer (Hrsg.), Macht der Natur – gemachte Natur. Realitäten und Fiktionen des Herrscherkörpers zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Micrologus Library, 92), Florenz 2019, Sismel, VI u. 345 S. / Abb., € 82,00. (Nadine Amsler, Berlin) Classen, Albrecht (Hrsg.), Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age. Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Toys, Games, and Entertainment (Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 23), Berlin / Boston 2019, de Gruyter, XIII u. 751 S. / Abb., € 147,95. (Adrina Schulz, Zürich) Potter, Harry, Shades of the Prison House. A History of Incarceration in the British Isles, Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, XIII u. 558 S. / Abb., £ 25,00. (Gerd Schwerhoff, Dresden) Müller, Matthias / Sascha Winter (Hrsg.), Die Stadt im Schatten des Hofes? Bürgerlich-kommunale Repräsentation in Residenzstädten des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Residenzenforschung. Neue Folge: Stadt und Hof, 6), Ostfildern 2020, Thorbecke, 335 S. / Abb., € 64,00. (Malte de Vries, Göttingen) De Munck, Bert, Guilds, Labour and the Urban Body Politic. Fabricating Community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300 – 1800 (Routledge Research in Early Modern History), New York / London 2018, Routledge, XIV u. 312 S. / Abb., £ 115,00. (Philip Hoffmann-Rehnitz, Münster) Sonderegger, Stefan / Helge Wittmann (Hrsg.), Reichsstadt und Landwirtschaft. 7. Tagung des Mühlhäuser Arbeitskreises für Reichsstadtgeschichte, Mühlhausen 4. bis 6. März 2019 (Studien zur Reichsstadtgeschichte, 7), Petersberg 2020, Imhof, 366 S. / Abb., € 29,95. (Malte de Vries, Göttingen) Israel, Uwe / Josef Matzerath, Geschichte der sächsischen Landtage (Studien und Schriften zur Geschichte der sächsischen Landtage, 5), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 346 S. / Abb., € 26,00. (Thomas Fuchs, Leipzig) Unverfehrt, Volker, Die sächsische Läuterung. Entstehung, Wandel und Werdegang bis ins 17. Jahrhundert (Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte, 317; Rechtsräume, 3), Frankfurt a. M. 2020, Klostermann, X u. 321 S., € 79,00. (Heiner Lück, Halle) Jones, Chris / Conor Kostick / Klaus Oschema (Hrsg.), Making the Medieval Relevant. How Medieval Studies Contribute to Improving Our Understanding of the Present (Das Mittelalter. Beihefte, 6), Berlin / Boston 2020, VI u. 297 S. / graph. Darst., € 89,95. (Gabriela Signori, Konstanz) Lackner, Christina / Daniel Luger (Hrsg.), Modus supplicandi. Zwischen herrschaftlicher Gnade und importunitas petentium (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 72), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 224 S. / Abb., € 40,00. (Jörg Voigt, Rom) Andermann, Kurt / Enno Bünz (Hrsg.), Kirchenvogtei und adlige Herrschaftsbildung im europäischen Mittelalter (Vorträge und Forschungen, 86), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 469 S., € 55,00. (Markus Müller, München) Deigendesch, Roland / Christian Jörg (Hrsg.), Städtebünde und städtische Außenpolitik. Träger, Instrumentarien und Konflikte während des hohen und späten Mittelalters. 55. Arbeitstagung in Reutlingen, 18.–20. November 2016 (Stadt in der Geschichte, 44), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 322 S. / Abb., € 34,00. (Evelien Timpener, Gießen) Müller, Monika E. / Jens Reiche, Zentrum oder Peripherie? Kulturtransfer in Hildesheim und im Raum Niedersachsen (12.–15. Jahrhundert) (Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter-Studien, 32), Wiesbaden 2017, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 544 S. / Abb., € 88,00. (Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, Bonn) Hill, Derek, Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century. The Manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich (Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages, 7), Woodbridge 2019, York Medieval Press, X u. 251 S., £ 60,00. (Thomas Scharff, Braunschweig) Peltzer, Jörg, Fürst werden. Rangerhöhungen im 14. Jahrhundert – Das römisch-deutsche Reich und England im Vergleich (Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte (Neue Folge), 75), Berlin / Boston 2019, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 150 S. / Abb., € 64,95. (Kurt Andermann, Karlsruhe / Freiburg i. Br.) Wilhelm von Ockham, De iuribus Romani imperii / Das Recht von Kaiser und Reich. III.2 Dialogus. Lateinisch – Deutsch, 2 Bde., übers. und eingel. v. Jürgen Miethke (Herders Bibliothek der Philosophie des Mittelalters, 49), Freiburg i. Br. / Basel / Wien 2020, Herder, 829 S., € 54,00 bzw. € 58,00. (Christoph Mauntel, Tübingen) Dokumente zur Geschichte des Deutschen Reiches und seiner Verfassung 1360, bearb. v. Ulrike Hohensee / Mathias Lawo / Michael Lindner / Olaf B. Rader (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, 13.1), Wiesbaden 2016, Harrassowitz, L u. 414 S., € 120,00. (Martin Bauch, Leipzig) Dokumente zur Geschichte des Deutschen Reiches und seiner Verfassung 1361, bearb. v. Ulrike Hohensee / Mathias Lawo / Michael Lindner / Olaf B. Rader (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, 13.2), Wiesbaden 2017, Harrassowitz, VI u. 538 S. (S. 415 – 952), € 140,00. (Martin Bauch, Leipzig) Forcher, Michael / Christoph Haidacher (Hrsg.), Kaiser Maximilian I. Tirol. Österreich. Europa. 1459 – 1519, Innsbruck / Wien 2018, Haymon Verlag, 215 S. / Abb., € 34,90. (Jörg Schwarz, Innsbruck) Weiss, Sabine, Maximilian I. 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(Benjamin Durst, Augsburg) Rohrschneider, Michael (Hrsg.), Frühneuzeitliche Friedensstiftung in landesgeschichtlicher Perspektive. Unter redaktioneller Mitarbeit v. Leonard Dorn (Rheinisches Archiv, 160), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2020, Böhlau, 327 S. / Abb., € 45,00. (Benjamin Durst, Augsburg) Richter, Susan (Hrsg.), Entsagte Herrschaft. Mediale Inszenierungen fürstlicher Abdankungen im Europa der Frühneuzeit, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 223 S. / Abb., € 45,00. (Andreas Pečar, Halle) Astorri, Paolo, Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1520 – 1720) (Law and Religion in the Early Modern Period / Recht und Religion in der Frühen Neuzeit, 1), Paderborn 2019, Schöningh, XX u. 657 S., € 128,00. (Cornel Zwierlein, Berlin) Prosperi, Adriano, Justice Blindfolded. The Historical Course of an Image (Catholic Christendom, 1300 – 1700), übers. v. John Tedeschi / Anne C. Tedeschi, Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, XXIV u. 260 S., € 105,00. 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Siblings, Family, and Society in Early Modern England, Oxford / New York 2018, Oxford University Press, 222 S., £ 60,00. (Margareth Lanzinger, Wien) Huber, Vitus, Die Konquistadoren. Cortés, Pizarro und die Eroberung Amerikas (C. H. Beck Wissen, 2890), München 2019, Beck, 128 S. / Abb., € 9,95. (Horst Pietschmann, Hamburg) Stolberg, Michael, Gelehrte Medizin und ärztlicher Alltag in der Renaissance, Berlin / Boston 2021, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, VIII u. 580 S. / Abb., € 89,95. (Robert Jütte, Stuttgart) Lüneburg, Marie von, Tyrannei und Teufel. Die Wahrnehmung der Inquisition in deutschsprachigen Druckmedien im 16. Jahrhundert, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2020, Böhlau, 234 S. / Abb., € 45,00. (Wolfgang Reinhard, Freiburg i. Br.) Krey, Alexander, Wirtschaftstätigkeit, Verwaltung und Lebensverhältnisse des Mainzer Domkapitels im 16. Jahrhundert. Eine Untersuchung zu Wirtschaftsstil und Wirtschaftskultur einer geistlichen Gemeinschaft (Schriften zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 35), Hamburg 2020, Dr. Kovaç, 530 S. / graph. Darst., € 139,80. (Maria Weber, München) Fuchs, Gero, Gewinn als Umbruch der Ordnung? Der Fall des Siegburger Töpfers Peter Knütgen im 16. Jahrhundert (Rechtsordnung und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 19), Tübingen 2019, Mohr Siebeck, XIII u. 195 S. / Abb., € 59,00. (Anke Sczesny, Augsburg) Lotito, Mark A., The Reformation of Historical Thought (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XX u. 542 S. / Abb., € 160,00. (Andreas Bihrer, Kiel) Georg III. von Anhalt, Abendmahlsschriften, hrsg. v. Tobias Jammerthal / David B. Janssen (Anhalt‍[er]‌kenntnisse), Leipzig 2019, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 440 S., € 48,00. (Eike Wolgast, Heidelberg) Bauer, Stefan, The Invention of Papal History. 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Die Vorträge der Tagung des Instituts für kunst- und musikhistorische Forschungen der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, des Niederösterreichischen Instituts für Landeskunde und des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung der Universität Wien, Krems, 28. bis 29. Oktober 2016 (Studien und Forschungen aus dem Niederösterreichischen Institut für Landeskunde, 71), St. Pölten 2018, Verlag Niederösterreichisches Institut für Landeskunde, 432 S. / Abb., € 25,00. (Markus Friedrich, Hamburg) Die „litterae annuae“ der Gesellschaft Jesu von Otterndorf (1713 bis 1730) und von Stade (1629 bis 1631), hrsg. v. Christoph Flucke / Martin J. Schröter, Münster 2020, Aschendorff, 154 S. / Abb., € 24,90. (Markus Friedrich, Hamburg) Como, David R., Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War, Oxford 2018, Oxford University Press, XV u. 457 S. / Abb., £ 85,00. (Torsten Riotte, Frankfurt a. M.) Corens, Liesbeth, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe, Oxford / New York 2019, Oxford University Press, XII u. 240 S. / Abb., £ 60,00. (Ulrich Niggemann, Augsburg) Asche, Matthias / Marco Kollenberg / Antje Zeiger (Hrsg.), Halb Europa in Brandenburg. Der Dreißigjährige Krieg und seine Folgen, Berlin 2020, Lukas, 244 S. / Abb., € 20,00. (Michael Rohrschneider, Bonn) Fiedler, Beate-Christine / Christine van den Heuvel (Hrsg.), Friedensordnung und machtpolitische Rivalitäten. Die schwedischen Besitzungen in Niedersachsen im europäischen Kontext zwischen 1648 und 1721 (Veröffentlichungen des Niedersächsischen Landesarchivs, 3), Göttingen 2019, Wallstein, 375 S. / Abb., € 29,90. (Niels Petersen, Göttingen) Prokosch, Michael, Das älteste Bürgerbuch der Stadt Linz (1658 – 1707). Edition und Auswertung (Quelleneditionen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 18), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 308 S. / Abb., € 50,00. (Beate Kusche, Leipzig) Häberlein, Mark / Helmut Glück (Hrsg.), Matthias Kramer. Ein Nürnberger Sprachmeister der Barockzeit mit gesamteuropäischer Wirkung (Schriften der Matthias-Kramer-Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Fremdsprachenerwerbs und der Mehrsprachigkeit, 3), Bamberg 2019, University of Bamberg Press, 221 S. / Abb., € 22,00. (Helga Meise, Reims) Herz, Silke, Königin Christiane Eberhardine – Pracht im Dienste der Staatsraison. Kunst, Raum und Zeremoniell am Hof der Frau Augusts des Starken (Schriften zur Residenzkultur 12), Berlin 2020, Lukas Verlag, 669 S. / Abb., € 70,00. (Katrin Keller, Wien) Schaad, Martin, Der Hochverrat des Amtmanns Povel Juel. Ein mikrohistorischer Streifzug durch Europas Norden der Frühen Neuzeit (Histoire, 176), Bielefeld 2020, transcript, 249 S., € 39,00. (Olaf Mörke, Kiel) Overhoff, Jürgen, Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724 – 1790). Aufklärer, Pädagoge, Menschenfreund. Eine Biografie (Hamburgische Lebensbilder, 25), Göttingen 2020, Wallstein, 200 S. / Abb., € 16,00. (Mark-Georg Dehrmann, Berlin) Augustynowicz, Christoph / Johannes Frimmel (Hrsg.), Der Buchdrucker Maria Theresias. Johann Thomas Trattner (1719 – 1798) und sein Medienimperium (Buchforschung, 10), Wiesbaden 2019, Harrassowitz, 173 S. / Abb., € 54,00. (Mona Garloff, Innsbruck) Beckus, Paul, Land ohne Herr – Fürst ohne Hof? Friedrich August von Anhalt-Zerbst und sein Fürstentum (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte Sachsen-Anhalts, 15), Halle 2018, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 604 S. / Abb., € 54,00. (Michael Hecht, Halle) Whatmore, Richard, Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans. The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution, Princeton / Oxford, Princeton University Press 2019, XXIX u. 478 S. / Abb., £ 34,00. (Ronald G. Asch, Freiburg i. Br.) Elster, Jon, France before 1789. The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime, Princeton / Oxford 2020, Princeton University Press, XI u. 263 S. / graph. 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Being a celebrity sure ain’t what it used to be. Or, perhaps more accurately, the process of maintaining a stable star persona isn’t what it used to be. With the rise of new media technologies—including digital photography and video production, gossip blogging, social networking sites, and streaming video—there has been a rapid proliferation of voices which serve to articulate stars’ personae. This panoply of sanctioned and unsanctioned discourses has brought the coherence and stability of the star’s image into crisis, with an evermore-heightened loop forming recursively between celebrity gossip and scandals, on the one hand, and, on the other, new media-enabled speculation and commentary about these scandals and gossip-pieces. Of course, while no subject has a single meaning, Hollywood has historically expended great energy and resources to perpetuate the myth that the star’s image is univocal. In the present moment, however, studios’s traditional methods for discursive control have faltered, such that celebrities have found it necessary to take matters into their own hands, using new media technologies, particularly Twitter, in an attempt to stabilise that most vital currency of their trade, their professional/public persona. In order to fully appreciate the significance of this new mode of publicity management, and its larger implications for contemporary subjectivity writ large, we must first come to understand the history of Hollywood’s approach to celebrity publicity and image management.A Brief History of Hollywood PublicityThe origins of this effort are nearly as old as Hollywood itself, for, as Richard DeCordova explains, the celebrity scandals of the 1920s threatened to disrupt the economic vitality of the incipient industry such that strict, centralised image control appeared as a necessary imperative to maintain a consistently reliable product. The Fatty Arbuckle murder trial was scandalous not only for its subject matter (a murder suffused with illicit and shadowy sexual innuendo) but also because the event revealed that stars, despite their mediated larger-than-life images, were not only as human as the rest of us, but that, in fact, they were capable of profoundly inhuman acts. The scandal, then, was not so much Arbuckle’s crime, but the negative pall it cast over the Hollywood mythos of glamour and grace. The studios quickly organised an industry-wide regulatory agency (the MPPDA) to counter potentially damaging rhetoric and ward off government intervention. Censorship codes and morality clauses were combined with well-funded publicity departments in an effort that successfully shifted the locus of the star’s extra-filmic discursive construction from private acts—which could betray their screen image—to information which served to extend and enhance the star’s pre-existing persona. In this way, the sanctioned celebrity knowledge sphere became co-extensive with that of commercial culture itself; the star became meaningful only by knowing how she spent her leisure time and the type of make-up she used. The star’s identity was not found via unsanctioned intrusion, but through studio-sanctioned disclosure, made available in the form of gossip columns, newsreels, and fan magazines. This period of relative stability for the star's star image was ultimately quite brief, however, as the collapse of the studio system in the late 1940s and the introduction of television brought about a radical, but gradual, reordering of the star's signifying potential. The studios no longer had the resources or incentive to tightly police star images—the classic age of stardom was over. During this period of change, an influx of alternative voices and publications filled the discursive void left by the demise of the studios’s regimented publicity efforts, with many of these new outlets reengaging older methods of intrusion to generate a regular rhythm of vendible information about the stars.The first to exploit and capitalize on star image instability was Robert Harrison, whose Confidential Magazine became the leading gossip publication of the 1950s. Unlike its fan magazine rivals, which persisted in portraying the stars as morally upright and wholesome, Confidential pledged on the cover of each issue to “tell the facts and name the names,” revealing what had been theretofore “confidential.” In essence, through intrusion, Confidential reasserted scandal as the true core of the star, simultaneously instituting incursion and surveillance as the most direct avenue to the “kernel” of the celebrity subject, obtaining stories through associations with call girls, out-of-work starlettes, and private eyes. As extra-textual discourses proliferated and fragmented, the contexts in which the public encountered the star changed as well. Theatre attendance dropped dramatically, and as the studios sold their film libraries to television, the stars, formerly available only on the big screen and in glamour shots, were now intercut with commercials, broadcast on grainy sets in the domestic space. The integrity—or at least the illusion of integrity—of the star image was forever compromised. As the parameters of renown continued to expand, film stars, formally distinguished from all other performers, migrated to television. The landscape of stardom was re-contoured into the “celebrity sphere,” a space that includes television hosts, musicians, royals, and charismatic politicians. The revamped celebrity “game” was complex, but still playabout: with a powerful agent, a talented publicist, and a check on drinking, drug use, and extra-marital affairs, a star and his or her management team could negotiate a coherent image. Confidential was gone, The National Inquirer was muzzled by libel laws, and People and E.T.—both sheltered within larger media companies—towed the publicists’s line. There were few widely circulated outlets through which unauthorised voices could gain traction. Old-School Stars and New Media Technologies: The Case of Tom CruiseYet with the relentless arrival of various news media technologies beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the present, maintaining tight celebrity image control began to require the services of a phalanx of publicists and handlers. Here, the example of Tom Cruise is instructive: for nearly twenty years, Cruise’s publicity was managed by Pat Kingsley, who exercised exacting control over the star’s image. With the help of seemingly diverse yet essentially similar starring roles, Cruise solidified his image as the cocky, charismatic boy-next-door.The unified Cruise image was made possible by shutting down competing discourses through the relentless, comprehensive efforts of his management company; Kingsley's staff fine-tuned Cruise’s acts of disclosure while simultaneously eliminating the potential for unplanned intrusions, neutralising any potential scandal at its source. Kingsley and her aides performed for Cruise all the functions of a studio publicity department from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Most importantly, Cruise was kept silent on the topic of his controversial religion, Scientology, lest it incite domestic and international backlash. In interviews and off-the-cuff soundbites, Cruise was ostensibly disclosing his true self, and that self remained the dominant reading of what, and who, Cruise “was.” Yet in 2004, Cruise fired Kingsley, replaced her with his own sister (and fellow Scientologist), who had no prior experience in public relations. In essence, he exchanged a handler who understood how to shape star disclosure for one who did not. The events that followed have been widely rehearsed: Cruise avidly pursued Katie Holmes; Cruise jumped for joy on Oprah’s couch; Cruise denounced psychology during a heated debate with Matt Lauer on The Today Show. His attempt at disclosing this new, un-publicist-mediated self became scandalous in and of itself. Cruise’s dismissal of Kingsley, his unpopular (but not necessarily unwelcome) disclosures, and his own massively unchecked ego all played crucial roles in the fall of the Cruise image. While these stumbles might have caused some minor career turmoil in the past, the hyper-echoic, spastically recombinatory logic of the technoculture brought the speed and stakes of these missteps to a new level; one of the hallmarks of the postmodern condition has been not merely an increasing textual self-reflexivity, but a qualitative new leap forward in inter-textual reflexivity, as well (Lyotard; Baudrillard). Indeed, the swift dismantling of Cruise’s long-established image is directly linked to the immediacy and speed of the Internet, digital photography, and the gossip blog, as the reflexivity of new media rendered the safe division between disclosure and intrusion untenable. His couchjumping was turned into a dance remix and circulated on YouTube; Mission Impossible 3 boycotts were organised through a number of different Web forums; gossip bloggers speculated that Cruise had impregnated Holmes using the frozen sperm of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. In the past, Cruise simply filed defamation suits against print publications that would deign to sully his image. Yet the sheer number of sites and voices reproducing this new set of rumors made such a strategy untenable. Ultimately, intrusions into Cruise’s personal life, including the leak of videos intended solely for Scientology recruitment use, had far more traction than any sanctioned Cruise soundbite. Cruise’s image emerged as a hollowed husk of its former self; the sheer amount of material circulating rendered all attempts at P.R., including a Vanity Fair cover story and “reveal” of daughter Suri, ridiculous. His image was fragmented and re-collected into an altered, almost uncanny new iteration. Following the lackluster performance of Mission Impossible 3 and public condemnation by Paramount head Sumner Redstone, Cruise seemed almost pitiable. The New Logic of Celebrity Image ManagementCruise’s travails are expressive of a deeper development which has occurred over the course of the last decade, as the massively proliferating new forms of celebrity discourse (e.g., paparazzi photos, mug shots, cell phone video have further decentered any shiny, polished version of a star. With older forms of media increasingly reorganising themselves according to the aesthetics and logic of new media forms (e.g., CNN featuring regular segments in which it focuses its network cameras upon a computer screen displaying the CNN website), we are only more prone to appreciate “low media” forms of star discourse—reports from fans on discussion boards, photos taken on cell phones—as valid components of the celebrity image. People and E.T. still attract millions, but they are rapidly ceding control of the celebrity industry to their ugly, offensive stepbrothers: TMZ, Us Weekly, and dozens of gossip blogs. Importantly, a publicist may be able to induce a blogger to cover their client, but they cannot convince him to drop a story: if TMZ doesn’t post it, then Perez Hilton certainly will. With TMZ unabashedly offering pay-outs to informants—including those in law enforcement and health care, despite recently passed legislation—a star is never safe. If he or she misbehaves, someone, professional or amateur, will provide coverage. Scandal becomes normalised, and, in so doing, can no longer really function as scandal as such; in an age of around-the-clock news cycles and celebrity-fixated journalism, the only truly scandalising event would be the complete absence of any scandalous reports. Or, as aesthetic theorist Jacques Ranciere puts it; “The complaint is then no longer that images conceal secrets which are no longer such to anyone, but, on the contrary, that they no longer hide anything” (22).These seemingly paradoxical involutions of post-modern celebrity epistemologies are at the core of the current crisis of celebrity, and, subsequently, of celebrities’s attempts to “take back their own paparazzi.” As one might expect, contemporary celebrities have attempted to counter these new logics and strategies of intrusion through a heightened commitment to disclosure, principally through the social networking capabilities of Twitter. Yet, as we will see, not only have the epistemological reorderings of postmodernist technoculture affected the logic of scandal/intrusion, but so too have they radically altered the workings of intrusion’s dialectical counterpart, disclosure.In the 1930s, when written letters were still the primary medium for intimate communication, stars would send lengthy “hand-written” letters to members of their fan club. Of course, such letters were generally not written by the stars themselves, but handwriting—and a star’s signature—signified authenticity. This ritualised process conferred an “aura” of authenticity upon the object of exchange precisely because of its static, recurring nature—exchange of fan mail was conventionally understood to be the primary medium for personal encounters with a celebrity. Within the overall political economy of the studio system, the medium of the hand-written letter functioned to unleash the productive power of authenticity, offering an illusion of communion which, in fact, served to underscore the gulf between the celebrity’s extraordinary nature and the ordinary lives of those who wrote to them. Yet the criterion and conventions through which celebrity personae were maintained were subject to change over time, as new communications technologies, new modes of Hollywood's industrial organization, and the changing realities of commercial media structures all combined to create a constantly moving ground upon which the celebrity tried to affix. The celebrity’s changing conditions are not unique to them alone; rather, they are a highly visible bellwether of changes which are more fundamentally occurring at all levels of culture and subjectivity. Indeed, more than seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin observed that when hand-made expressions of individuality were superseded by mechanical methods of production, aesthetic criteria (among other things) also underwent change, rendering notions of authenticity increasingly indeterminate.Such is the case that in today’s world, hand-written letters seem more contrived or disingenuous than Danny DeVito’s inaugural post to his Twitter account: “I just joined Twitter! I don't really get this site or how it works. My nuts are on fire.” The performative gesture in DeVito’s tweet is eminently clear, just as the semantic value is patently false: clearly DeVito understands “this site,” as he has successfully used it to extend his irreverent funny-little-man persona to the new medium. While the truth claims of his Tweet may be false, its functional purpose—both effacing and reifying the extraordinary/ordinary distinction of celebrity and maintaining DeVito’s celebrity personality as one with which people might identify—is nevertheless seemingly intact, and thus mirrors the instrumental value of celebrity disclosure as performed in older media forms. Twitter and Contemporary TechnocultureFor these reasons and more, considered within the larger context of contemporary popular culture, celebrity tweeting has been equated with the assertion of the authentic celebrity voice; celebrity tweets are regularly cited in newspaper articles and blogs as “official” statements from the celebrity him/herself. With so many mediated voices attempting to “speak” the meaning of the star, the Twitter account emerges as the privileged channel to the star him/herself. Yet the seemingly easy discursive associations of Twitter and authenticity are in fact ideological acts par excellence, as fixations on the indexical truth-value of Twitter are not merely missing the point, but actively distracting from the real issues surrounding the unsteady discursive construction of contemporary celebrity and the “celebretification” of contemporary subjectivity writ large. In other words, while it is taken as axiomatic that the “message” of celebrity Twittering is, as Henry Jenkins suggests, “Here I Am,” this outward epistemological certainty veils the deeply unstable nature of celebrity—and by extension, subjectivity itself—in our networked society.If we understand the relationship between publicity and technoculture to work as Zizek-inspired cultural theorist Jodi Dean suggests, then technologies “believe for us, accessing information even if we cannot” (40), such that technology itself is enlisted to serve the function of ideology, the process by which a culture naturalises itself and attempts to render the notion of totality coherent. For Dean, the psycho-ideological reality of contemporary culture is predicated upon the notion of an ever-elusive “secret,” which promises to reveal us all as part of a unitary public. The reality—that there is no such cohesive collective body—is obscured in the secret’s mystifying function which renders as “a contingent gap what is really the fact of the fundamental split, antagonism, and rupture of politics” (40). Under the ascendancy of the technoculture—Dean's term for the technologically mediated landscape of contemporary communicative capitalism—subjectivity becomes interpellated along an axis blind to the secret of this fundamental rupture. The two interwoven poles of this axis are not unlike structuralist film critics' dialectically intertwined accounts of the scopophilia and scopophobia of viewing relations, simply enlarged from the limited realm of the gaze to encompass the entire range of subjectivity. As such, the conspiratorial mindset is that mode of desire, of lack, which attempts to attain the “secret,” while the celebrity subject is that element of excess without which desire is unthinkable. As one might expect, the paparazzi and gossip sites’s strategies of intrusion have historically operated primarily through the conspiratorial mindset, with endless conjecture about what is “really happening” behind the scenes. Under the intrusive/conspiratorial paradigm, the authentic celebrity subject is always just out of reach—a chance sighting only serves to reinscribe the need for the next encounter where, it is believed, all will become known. Under such conditions, the conspiratorial mindset of the paparazzi is put into overdrive: because the star can never be “fully” known, there can never be enough information about a star, therefore, more information is always needed. Against this relentless intrusion, the celebrity—whose discursive stability, given the constant imperative for newness in commercial culture, is always in danger—risks a semiotic liquidation that will totally displace his celebrity status as such. Disclosure, e.g. Tweeting, emerges as a possible corrective to the endlessly associative logic of the paparazzi’s conspiratorial indset. In other words, through Twitter, the celebrity seeks to arrest meaning—fixing it in place around their own seemingly coherent narrativisation. The publicist’s new task, then, is to convincingly counter such unsanctioned, intrusive, surveillance-based discourse. Stars continue to give interviews, of course, and many regularly pose as “authors” of their own homepages and blogs. Yet as posited above, Twitter has emerged as the most salient means of generating “authentic” celebrity disclosure, simultaneously countering the efforts of the papparazzi, fan mags, and gossip blogs to complicate or rewrite the meaning of the star. The star uses the account—verified, by Twitter, as the “real” star—both as a means to disclose their true interior state of being and to counter erastz narratives circulating about them. Twitter’s appeal for both celebrities and their followers comes from the ostensible spontaneity of the tweets, as the seemingly unrehearsed quality of the communiqués lends the form an immediacy and casualness unmatched by blogs or official websites; the semantic informality typically employed in the medium obscures their larger professional significance for celebrity tweeters. While Twitter’s air of extemporary intimacy is also offered by other social networking platforms, such as MySpace or Facebook, the latter’s opportunities for public feedback (via wall-posts and the like) works counter to the tight image control offered by Twitter’s broadcast-esque model. Additionally, because of the uncertain nature of the tweet release cycle—has Ashton Kutcher sent a new tweet yet?—the voyeuristic nature of the tweet disclosure (with its real-time nature offering a level of synchronic intimacy that letters never could have matched), and the semantically displaced nature of the medium, it is a form of disclosure perfectly attuned to the conspiratorial mindset of the technoculture. As mentioned above, however, the conspiratorial mindset is an unstable subjectivity, insofar as it only exists through a constant oscillation with its twin, the celebrity subjectivity. While we can understand that, for the celebrities, Twitter functions by allowing them a mode for disclosive/celebrity subjectivisation, we have not yet seen how the celebrity itself is rendered conspiratorial through Twitter. Similarly, only the conspiratorial mode of the follower’s subjectivity has thus far been enumerated; the moment of the follower's celebrtification has so far gone unmentioned. Since we have seen that the celebrity function of Twitter is not really about discourse per se, we should instead understand that the ideological value of Twitter comes from the act of tweeting itself, of finding pleasure in being engaged in a techno-social system in which one's participation is recognised. Recognition and participation should be qualified, though, as it is not the fully active type of participation one might expect in say, the electoral politics of a representative democracy. Instead, it is a participation in a sort of epistemological viewing relations, or, as Jodi Dean describes it, “that we understand ourselves as known is what makes us think there is that there is a public that knows us” (122). The fans’ recognition by the celebrity—the way in which they understood themselves as known by the star was once the receipt of a hand-signed letter (and a latent expectation that the celebrity had read the fan’s initial letter); such an exchange conferred to the fan a momentary sense of participation in the celebrity's extraordinary aura. Under Twitter, however, such an exchange does not occur, as that feeling of one-to-one interaction is absent; simply by looking elsewhere on the screen, one can confirm that a celebrity's tweet was received by two million other individuals. The closest a fan can come to that older modality of recognition is by sending a message to the celebrity that the celebrity then “re-tweets” to his broader following. Beyond the obvious levels of technological estrangement involved in such recognition is the fact that the identity of the re-tweeted fan will not be known by the celebrity’s other two million followers. That sense of sharing in the celebrity’s extraordinary aura is altered by an awareness that the very act of recognition largely entails performing one’s relative anonymity in front of the other wholly anonymous followers. As the associative, conspiratorial mindset of the star endlessly searches for fodder through which to maintain its image, fans allow what was previously a personal moment of recognition to be transformed into a public one. That is, the conditions through which one realises one’s personal subjectivity are, in fact, themselves becoming remade according to the logic of celebrity, in which priority is given to the simple fact of visibility over that of the actual object made visible. Against such an opaque cultural transformation, the recent rise of reactionary libertarianism and anti-collectivist sentiment is hardly surprising. ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1994.Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Jenkins, Henry. “The Message of Twitter: ‘Here It Is’ and ‘Here I Am.’” Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 23 Aug. 2009. 15 Sep. 2009 < http://henryjenkins.org/2009/08/the_message_of_twitter.html >.Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984.Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. New York: Verso, 2007.

The study of literature and medicine in the Romantic period is an established and expanding field. However, scholars have tended to focus on a few canonical writers and a small number of texts, thereby obscuring the age’s huge diversity of medical writing. This chapter takes a wider view, presenting five case studies of medically trained or medically connected writers who demonstrate the broad intersection between medical and literary culture: John Aikin, Benjamin Rush, Joanna Baillie (sister of the physician Matthew Baillie), Erasmus Darwin, and John Keats. The chapter uses these case studies to show what is distinctive or innovative about interactions between literature and medicine in the period. The case studies also represent different genres of medical literature, or different genres that became in some sense medicalized: biography, autobiography, drama, didactic poetry, and epic. Each case study includes some consideration of the reception history of the genre in question.

This book begins with the observation that, during the English Reformation, holy things taken from churches and monasteries were on occasion not smashed or burned but instead given to children as toys. Iconoclasm has tended to feature prominently in narratives of modernity as a process of disenchantment, sometimes understood as the cultural diminution of playfulness: this book asks how these narratives might have to change once we recognize that iconoclasm and child’s play were periodically one and the same. Each chapter begins with an example of iconoclastic child’s play in practice--from locations in England, Germany, and East Asia, involving objects from broken crucifixes to wooden sculptures. The chapters then move outward from these starting points to ask what iconoclasm as child’s play can tell us about the ways in which children, their play, and objects more broadly are made to assume meanings. In pursuing these questions the book draws consistently on major and minor sixteenth-century figures--Erasmus, Bruegel, Spenser--but also ranges backward and forward to consider biblical, classical, and patristic understandings of play, as well as more recent thinkers including Walter Benjamin, D. W. Winnicott, T. W. Adorno, Alfred Gell, Ian Hacking, and Michael Taussig. These figures are used not so much to theorize iconoclasm as child’s play as to consider how this phenomenon might inflect the ways in which we seek to interpret and to organize children, play, and the past.