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Journal articles on the topic 'Christian anarchism'

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1

Marling, Raili, and William Marling. "Reparative Reading and Christian Anarchism." Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 32, no. 2 (April 3, 2021): 99–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1901200.

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Мadej-Cetnarowska, M. "Christian “anarchism” of three cosmists (st. Francis of Assisi, N.F. Fedorov, Pope Francis)." Solov’evskie issledovaniya, no. 1 (March 31, 2021): 42–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.17588/2076-9210.2021.1.042-057.

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The philosophy of three prominent Christian thinkers is considered: St. Francis of Assisi, Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov and Pope Francis. Despite the time distance, each of them sets forth common ideas. It is claimed that the link between these individuals is the philosophy of cosmism. A typical representative of this trend is Nikolai Fedorov, but thinking in the categories of cosmism is also noted in the works of St. Francis of Assisi and Bishop of Rome. It is proposed to call them Christian anarchists who violate the fossilized structure of the church and society. The specificity of their anarchism is emphasized, devoid of negative features, built in the image of Christ and leading to the renewal of the sacred space, the Earth. The basic concepts of each of the three Christian anarchists are considered. The analysis of their philosophy allows for the formulation of the thesis that the ideas they propose to restructure the world and society are based on the principle of Christ – “not by force, but by love”.
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Barnhill, David Landis. "A Community of Love: Kenneth Rexroth's Organic Worldview." Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 15, no. 1 (2011): 1–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853511x553796.

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AbstractKenneth Rexroth was a poet and cultural critic who developed a complex organic worldview. Influenced by both Christian and Buddhist metaphysics, he presented the world as dynamic and interrelated, with the sacred wholly immanent in phenomenal reality. He strongly criticized capitalism and the nation state, and he praised anarchists who resisted centralized power. His ideal was communitarian anarchism characterized by a feeling of unlimited responsibility for all. However, he eventually lost revolutionary hope, and his later poetry focused on mystical moments in communion with nature.
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Davis, Richard. "Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel." Political Theology 13, no. 4 (March 2012): 498–500. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/poth.v13i4.498.

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Megoran, Nick. "On (Christian) anarchism and (non)violence: a response to Simon Springer." Space and Polity 18, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 97–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.879788.

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Moltmann, Jürgen. "Terrorismus und politische Theologie." Evangelische Theologie 75, no. 5 (October 1, 2015): 358–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.14315/evth-2015-0506.

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Abstract Bakunin’s anarchism on the one hand and Carl Schmitt’s State-God on the other mirror each other. Either concept is about the non-accountable, »absolute« political decision. Both modern terrorism and the political reaction to it in the »security state« follow the alternative Bakunin-Schmitt. By contrast, the »open society« of democracy needs the Christian, intelligent love of enemies to deal with its enemies without self-destruction.
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Duggan, Daniel. "Book Review: General Politics: Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel." Political Studies Review 11, no. 2 (April 16, 2013): 231–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1478-9302.12016_7.

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Kniss, Katrina. "Beyond Revolution, Beyond the Law: Christian Anarchism in Conversation with Giorgio Agamben." Political Theology 20, no. 3 (October 13, 2018): 207–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1462317x.2018.1533200.

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9

Koroleva, Svetlana. "Soul — Anguish — Perfection: Oscar Wilde’s Dialogue with Kropotkin and Dostoevsky." Nizhny Novgorod Linguistics University Bulletin, no. 52 (December 30, 2020): 112–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2020-52-4-112-126.

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Much has already been said about the ‘Russian theme’ in Oscar Wilde’s works. Yet the question concerning Russian sources of the motifs of anguish and the soul’s way to perfection has not yet been cleared up sufficiently. The article aims at defining the particular character of appropriating Petr Kropotkin’s philosophy of anarchism in Wilde’s works in the context of its reference to the notions of ‘Nihilism’ and ‘self-sacrifice’, and through them, to Dostoyevsky’s novels. The basic material of the research is Wilde’s essay ‘Man’s Soul under Socialism’ and his early play ‘Vera; or, The Nihilists’. The key method used in the research is comparative analysis (in the way it is used in comparative literature). The author argues that in these texts, the motifs of Christian self-sacrifice and anguish bring Nihilism (understood as Kropotkin-style anarchism) together with the spiritual psychology of Dostoyevsky and that the way to inner perfection in Wilde’s philosophy of individualism is connected with the concepts of soul, man, and society the writer formulates based on Kropotkin and Dostoevsky. Bringing the notion of ‘soul’ close to the notion of ‘socialism,’ defining Christ as a perfect personality, treating pain and anguish in contemporary society as a way to this sort of person-ality, and opposing inner feelings to outer morals, Wilde combines the philosophy of individ-ualism with the pathos of Kropotkin’s doctrine of anarchism: moral, even Christian at its core. He also adheres to the idea of resurrecting inner morals through anguish and compassion: the idea he appropriated from Dostoyevsky. As a result, in Wilde’s essay the doctrine of individ-ualism turns into a doctrine of the soul’s natural Christianity (holiness) and of resurrection in perfection through a ‘true Socialism.’ In Wilde’s play ‘Vera; or, The Nihilists’ the motifs of personal love and social pain, connected with social disorder and common unhappiness, con-stitute the very image of contemporary man’s way to personal perfection that is philosophical-ly described in his essay nearly ten years later.
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Cvetkovic, Aleksandra. "PERSONALISTIČKO-RELIGIJSKI POJMOVI SLOBODA, DUH, LIČNOST U FILOZOFIJI NIKOLAJA BERĐAJEVA." Lipar 22, no. 74 (2021): 145–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.46793/lipar74.145c.

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In this paper article we will present the rebellion of Nikolai Berdyaev against ”ut- most objectivization of human essence” under ”extreme ideals of communism and anarchism”. This rebellion, in the philosophy and theosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev will be enveloped with the analysis of his version of christian personalism rooted in his understanding of personality, spirit, freedom, love and creativity, and their intercon- nectivity in the works Freedom and the Spirit. Apology of Christianity (1928), and Human slavery and Freedom.Essay on personalistic philosophy (1939). With fenomenological and hermeneutic method we will place a special focus on a seamingly paradoxal position of the autor himself between heresy and apology of the Orthodox Church. Philosophy of Nikolai Berdyayev will be placed between hellenism, christian personalism and western philosophy. This article seeks the answer on the following: What is hereti- cal in the teachings of Berdyayev apart his theachings of Ungrund? Can heresy of Berdyayev be found apart the mentioned teaching? And, finaly through relations of personality and history we will see the constant modernity of Berdyayev’s thought.
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Schweitzer, Don. "Dalit Theology and Christian Anarchism. By Keith Hebden. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xiii + 171. $99.95." Religious Studies Review 38, no. 3 (September 2012): 147. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-0922.2012.01620_17.x.

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Damier, Vadim. "Isabelo de los Reyes and the Beginning of the Labour Movement in the Philippines." Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2 (2022): 69. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s013038640018556-9.

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The article focuses on the activities of the Filipino publicist, ethnographer, public, religious and political figure Isabelo de los Reyes (1864–1938). For the first time in Russian historiography, drawing upon de los Reyes' own works, it highlights his role in the movement for Philippine independence from Spain, in the formation of the labour movement, and in the initial dissemination of socialist ideas in the archipelago. A talented and prolific journalist, he rose to prominence among the progressive “ilustrados” - the educated class in the Spanish colony of the Philippines - at a very young age. Arrested by the colonial authorities after the outbreak of the 1896 anti-colonial rebellion, de los Reyes was exiled to Spain. While in prison in Barcelona, he was influenced by left-leaning fellow prisoners – anarchists, syndicalists and socialists. He was greatly impressed by his acquaintance with socialist literature. After his release from prison in 1898, de los Reyes took part in the activities of the Philippine emigration and the campaign against the capture of the Philippine Islands by the United States. In 1901 he returned to his homeland, bringing with him the works of anarchist and socialist theorists and propagandists, to which he introduced the country's leading labour activists. In 1902, at their request, he helped organise the Unión Obrera Democrática (UOD), which emerged as the first trade union association not only in the Philippines but also in the whole of Southeast Asia. At that time De los Reyes held socialist views, incorporating elements of Christian socialism, anarchism, and reformist syndicalism. He also initiated the creation of the Philippine Independent Church. After a major wave of strikes in 1902, de los Reyes was arrested by the US authorities in the Philippines and resigned as head of the UOD. After his release from prison, he published the organ of the labour movement, the newspaper “La Redención del obrero”. In the following years, de los Reyes withdrew from the trade union movement, focused on topics related to the Philippine Independent Church, and then became actively involved in political activities, being elected municipal councilor and senator.
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Stevanus, Kalis. "Tujuh Kebajikan Utama Untuk Membangun Karakter Kristiani Anak." BIA': Jurnal Teologi dan Pendidikan Kristen Kontekstual 1, no. 1 (June 30, 2018): 79–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.34307/b.v1i1.21.

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Character is something that is very important for human progress, both individually and in a nation. This article motivated by the decline of the character of society that appears in the rampant crime, anarchism, vigilante, radicalism, hatred, intolerance, disrespect, terrorism, injustice which is causing violence in various human relationships. Individual and social clashes occurred which are always based on the society background, such as ethnicity, religion and social condition. It cannot be denied if it is said that the root of all this is caused by character problem. Character influences ethical and moral judgment and decision making. By this context, Christian families are called to participate in building the nation through education in family. Christian families become character educators for their children. This article aims to describe seven virtues main, namely compassion, empathy, self-mastery, respect, tolerance, fairness, and patriotism to build child Christian character. AbstrakKarakter adalah suatu hal yang sangat penting bagi kemajuan manusia, baik secara individual maupun suatu bangsa. Tulisan ini dimotivasi oleh merosotnya karakter masyarakat yang nampak dalam maraknya tindakan kejahatan, anarkhis, main hakim sendiri, radikalisme, kebencian, intoleransi, rasa tidak hormat, terorisme, ketidakadilan, sehingga menyebabkan membudayanya kekerasan dalam berbagai relasi. Terjadi perbenturan-perbenturan individual dan social yang masih selalu terkait dengan latar belakang masyarakat, seperti etnis, agama dan keadaan social. Tidak dapat disanggah bila dikatakan akar penyebab semua itu disebabkan oleh problem karakter. Karakter memengaruhi pertimbangan dan pengambilan keputusan etis dan moral. Dalam konteks inilah keluarga Kristen dipanggil untuk turut serta membangun bangsa melalui pendidikan di keluarga. Keluarga Kristen menjadi pendidik karakter bagi anak-anaknya. Tulisan ini bertujuan mendiskripsikan tujuh kebajikan utama, yaitu belas kasih, empati, penguasaan diri, rasa hormat, toleransi, adil, dan cinta tanah air, untuk membangun karakter Kristiani anak.
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Zohrab, Irene. "‘Characterisation of Belinsky’ by M.P. Pogodin Published by F.M. Dostoevsky in The Citizen in Response to the First Issue of A Writer’s Diary. (With a Translation)." Dostoevsky Journal 20, no. 1 (June 19, 2019): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/23752122-02001001.

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M.P. Pogodin’s essay on ‘Characterisation of Belinsky’ was published in The Citizen (Grazhdanin) under F.M. Dostoevsky’s editorship in response to his first issue of A Writer’s Diary (Dnevnik pisatelia) launched on January 1, 1873. Dostoevsky represents Belinsky, his former mentor, as an impassioned atheist and socialist, who tried to convert him to his materialist belief. By implication Belinsky becomes the scapegoat for Dostoevsky’s earlier involvement with the socialist-orientated Petrashevsky Circle that resulted in his arrest and sentence for reading Belinsky’s banned letter to Gogol. Pogodin disputes Dostoevsky’s representation of Belinsky by demonstrating the critic’s commitment to Christian faith, whose ‘live’ voice affected his audience due to ‘particular circumstances’ (censorship) and whose changeability was natural. Dostoevsky’s partisan allusions to Belinsky (including verbal to Vs. Solov’ev), while not providing any context to Belinsky’s pronouncements, nor engagement with socio-philosophical ideas, such as individual anarchism (Max Stirner), undermine not only Belinsky, but subvert a wide range of Western philosophical humanist principles espoused at various times by him, from ‘love of humanity’ and ‘personal freedom’, to individualism.
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Emerson, Caryl. "Leo Tolstoy on Peace and War." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 124, no. 5 (October 2009): 1855–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2009.124.5.1855.

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“War always interested me,” wrote the twenty-three-year-old Leo Tolstoy in “the raid” (1853), an early story inspired by his personal experience of a brutal border skirmish in the Caucasus. “Not war in the sense of maneuvers devised by great generals … but the reality of war, the actual killing” (1). The focus of Tolstoy's interest here remained absolute throughout his long and brilliantly inconsistent life. As a second lieutenant during the Crimean War in 1854–55, he wrote three “Sevastopol Stories” about that city under siege, which were so cannily constructed and voiced that the new tsar, Alexander II, deeply touched, decreed that they be translated into French so that Russian courage would reach a European audience—whereas other readers took these tales as critical of the imperial war effort, even as subversive. Tolstoy revealed his own chauvinist side in the mid-1860s while writing the final books of War and Peace. Napoléon was a caricature from the start, of course, but, in a rising arc of patriotic disdain, Tolstoy proceeded to ridicule almost every alien nation's soldiers, generals, and tacticians; only simple Russian peasants, partisans, Field Marshal Kutuzov, and the occasional clear-seeing field commander were exempt from the author's scorn. By the end of his life, Tolstoy professed radical Christian anarchism and pacifism, preaching nonviolent resistance to evil and urging young men to oppose the military draft. But he never lost his fascination with close-up “actual killing.” The greatest literary achievement of Tolstoy's final decade, the Caucasus novel Hadji Murad, ends with such graphic slaughter, so many grotesque hackings and mutilations, and even the beheading of the hero described at such epic leisure that it is difficult to believe Tolstoy ever doubted the veracity of languages of violence.
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Carvalho, Alexandre Filordi de, and Silvio Gallo. "É preciso defender a amizade." Educação e Filosofia 36, no. 78 (January 4, 2023): 1763–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.14393/revedfil.v36n78a2022-66281.

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Este artigo homenageia a atualidade do curso A hermenêutica do sujeito, proferido por Foucault no Collège de France em 1982. Sabe-se que o tema central do curso é o cuidado de si como tekhné tou biou, examinado pelo filósofo nos momentos socrático-platônico, helenístico e cristão. Porém, tomaremos a questão da amizade, que atravessa as técnicas de si antigas analisadas por Foucault, para problematizar nosso presente. Após discutir a recepção que fazemos do curso quarenta anos depois, discutimos o atual momento do neoliberalismo e as políticas de inimizade por ele engendradas, de modo a pensar a prática da amizade como contraconduta, como prática de resistência. A amizade anarquista como forma de associação é tomada como máquina de guerra possível contra as atuais políticas de inimizade neoliberais. Palavras-chave: amizade; técnicas de si; ética; política; anarquismo. In defense of friendship: life’s proofs in the subjecvity wars of the contemporary enmity policies Abstract: This article pays homage to the actuality of the course The hermeneutics of the subject, given by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1982. It is known that the central theme of the course is the care of the self as tekhné tou biou, examined by the philosopher in three moments: Socratic-Platonic, Hellenistic, and Christian. However, we will take the question of friendship, which crosses the ancient techniques of the self analyzed by Foucault, to problematize our present. After discussing our reception of the course forty years later, we discuss the current moment of neoliberalism and the enmity policies engendered by it, in order to think about the practice of friendship as a counter-conduct, as a practice of resistance. Anarchist friendship as a form of association is taken as a possible war machine against current neoliberal policies of enmity. Key words: friendship; techniques of the self; ethics; politics; anarchism. En defensa de la amistad: pruebas de vida en las guerras de subjetividad de las políticas de enemistad contemporáneas Resumen: En este artículo prestamos homenaje a la actualidad del curso La hermenéutica del sujeto, presentado por Foucault en 1982 en el Collège de France. Se sabe que el tema que es el centro del curso ha sido la inquietud de sí como tekhné tou biou, examinada por el filósofo en tres momentos de la antigüedad: el socrático-platónico, el helenístico y el cristiano. Aún así, tomamos la cuestión de la amistad, que es transversal a las técnicas de sí antiguas analizadas por Foucault, para problematizar nuestro tiempo presente. Después de discutir la recepción que nosotros hacemos del curso cuarenta años más tarde, ponemos en debate el momento actual del neoliberalismo y sus políticas de enemistad, de manera a pensar la práctica de la amistad como contra conducta, como práctica de resistencia. Tomamos la amistad anarquista como como forma de asociación como posible maquina de guerra contra las políticas de enemistad neoliberales actuales. Palabras clave: amistad; técnicas de sí; ética; política; anarquismo Data de registro: 10/07/2022 Data de aceite: 26/10/2022
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ZHENG, Xuejun. "Scientism, Nationalism, and Christianity: The Spread and Influence of Kotoku Shusui’s On the Obliteration of Christ in China." Cultura 16, no. 2 (January 1, 2019): 135–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/cul022019.0009.

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Owing to Zhu Zhixin’s introduction and Liu Wendian’s translation, Japanese anarchist Kotoku Shusui’s On the Obliteration of Christ came to have a great impact on China’s Anti-Christian Movement following the May Fourth Movement. What these three texts oppose is not only Christian authority, but also political power. In a continuous line, these writings lay the basic framework for Chinese anti-Christian speech in the 1920s, as the combination of scientism and nationalism began to shape people’s perception of Christianity.
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Jones, Peter J. A. "Laughing with Sacred Things, ca. 1100–1350: A History in Four Objects." Church History 89, no. 4 (December 2020): 759–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009640721000019.

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Exploring the range of circumstances in which medieval Christians laughed with, against, at, and through religious topics, this article investigates four objects: an ivory cross, an ampulla of a saint's blood, a preaching codex, and a pilgrim's badge. While these objects are taken to illustrate a diversity of attitudes to religious humor, they are also, in light of recent work citing the productive power of medieval matter, scrutinized as agents in their own right. The article suggests two significant patterns. On the one hand, the objects point to laughter's use as a unique mode of spiritual practice. Through amusing miracles, through the provocative work of comic sermons, and through the playful humor of pilgrimage badges, Christians from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries were able to use humor to relate to their faith in sophisticated and often counterintuitive ways. Yet as the four objects and their use also attest, these modes of comic relation were also subjected to clerical reduction and regulation. Harnessing the pedagogical potential of laughter especially, preachers, hagiographers, and clerics all worked to redirect more anarchic forms of religious humor toward functional ends. While tracing how laughter with Christian topics was increasingly encouraged, the article suggests that the price of this encouragement was that laughter was often brought into a more policed domain of orthodox Christian practice.
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McCain, Carmen. "Censorship, citizenship and cosmopolitan unity in Muslim and Christian creative responses to repression in northern Nigeria." Africa 92, no. 5 (November 2022): 739–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0001972022000651.

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AbstractNigeria is often portrayed as having a ‘Muslim north’ and a ‘Christian south’. Such representations oversimplify the complicated interrelationships between the two religious communities and their geographic locations. Similarly, while much has been written on the conflict between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, there has been less scholarly attention to the philosophical and communal relationships between adherents of the two religions in northern Nigeria. I argue that there are parallels in the way in which Hausa-speaking Muslim artists responded to a censorship crisis in Kano State in 2007–11 and in the way in which Hausa-speaking Christian musicians from Nigeria’s north-east responded a few years later to the Boko Haram crisis. I examine Muslim filmmaker Hamisu Lamido Iyantama’s response to the Kano State Censorship Board, alongside Christian musician Saviour Y. Inuwa’s response to Boko Haram. Iyantama and Inuwa both counter repressive forces by expressing parallel understandings of their identities as citizens in the pluralistic state of Nigeria and as righteous members of universal religious communities that emphasize God’s justice in the end times. I argue that these Hausa-language artists present a vision of cosmopolitan unity across ethnicity and religion, as an alternative to the repressive forces of both state censorship and the anarchic violence of Boko Haram.
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Ziegler, Nora. "Power Relations in Grassroots Organising: An Anarchist Dialectics." Anarchist Studies 30, no. 2 (September 16, 2022): 55–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.3898/as.30.2.03.

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This paper conceptualises power as a radical open-ended dialectic of political and anti-political moments. Drawing on anarchist, intersectional feminist, Black radical, critical, and Christian personalist theory, I explore an anarchist dialectics that accounts for both the dichotomy and the mutually constitutive relationship between politics and anti-politics, sustaining creative tensions between the two. Based on this framework, I argue that tensions between different traditions, groups and tactics in grassroots movements are rooted in differences of power. These tensions can only be reconciled through reciprocal collaboration between groups and people across differences of power. I explore coalitions and diversity of tactics as ways of organising that can reconcile and radically transform power relations.
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Van den Belt, H. "Synodale machteloosheid en mystieke vrijzinnigheid: Louis A. Bähler (1867-1941) en de Gereformeerde Bond." Theologia Reformata 62, no. 3 (September 1, 2019): 223–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.21827/5d359594c55f2.

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The publication of Buddhist mission: ‘Christian’ barbarism in Europe, translated by Louis Adriën Bähler (1867­1941), a Christian anarchist and pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, led to the founding of the Reformed League in the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk). The classis censured Bähler, but Synod rehabilitated him and therefore the orthodox Reformed within the church charged that Synod’s actions revealed its powerlessness to maintain doctrinal discipline. Bähler’s Buddhist leanings have drawn much attention. This article places Bähler’s sympathy for pietism and mysticism in the broader context of his theology, one characterized by a spiritualization and moralization of the Gospel.
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Steenbuch, Johannes Aakjær. "A Christian anarchist? Gregory of Nyssa's criticism of political power." Political Theology 17, no. 6 (June 10, 2016): 573–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1462317x15z.000000000144.

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Van Vleet, Jacob E., and Jacob Marques Rollison. "Jacques Ellul: A Companion to His Major Works." Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 73, no. 3 (September 2021): 181–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.56315/pscf9-21vanvleet.

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JACQUES ELLUL: A Companion to His Major Works by Jacob E. Van Vleet and Jacob Marques Rollison. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020. 187 pages. Paperback; $25.00. ISBN: 9781625649140. *Jacques Ellul stands as a towering figure in this discourse on theology, politics, violence, and technology. Ellul was a professor of history and sociology of institutions at the University of Bordeaux in France, but he is most known in the English-speaking world as a technological critic and lay theologian. Over the course of his life, he wrote over fifty books and over one thousand essays on topics ranging from cultural critique to biblical exegesis. In his early life, Ellul was influenced by the French personalist movement, especially by his friend Bernard Charbonneau, and played a role in the French Resistance during World War II. As an academic, thinker, and commentator he considered his three main intellectual influences to be--perhaps a strange mixture--Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth. Throughout his life, he was a committed member of the Reformed Church in France although, in significant ways, his thought diverged from both historic Calvinism and varieties of modern, liberal Protestantism. *In Jacques Ellul: A Companion to His Major Works, Jacob E. Van Vleet and Jacob Marques Rollison take readers through succinct, well-ordered summaries of eleven of Ellul's most important works, including a one-chapter summary of his theological ethics. Both scholars are well versed in Ellul's corpus. Van Vleet, a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College in California, has already published at least two books on Ellul. Rollison, an independent scholar in Strasbourg, France, has published on Ellul and edited some of his work. The authors divide their book into two main sections: the first, reviewing Ellul's theological works; and the second, his sociological works. They borrow from Ellul the image of train tracks, "separate but parallel, moving toward the same goal," to describe the relationship between theology and sociology in his body of work (p. 2). The two disciplines have different frameworks and methodologies, but the authors argue that examining both in a "dialectical" way is necessary to understanding the heart of Ellul's thought. *In the first five chapters, the authors review what they consider to be Ellul's most important theological works. Chapter 1 reviews the book Presence in the Modern World, published originally in French in 1948; in English in 1951. That book introduces the main concerns of Ellul's project: a critical analysis of society and an approach to Christian engagement with society through the category of "presence." Cautious, for theological reasons, about creating explicit ethical systems, Ellul instead gives readers a general commentary on how to "live in the world, but not of the world"--a world marked by an idolatrous concern for efficiency, quantification, and bureaucratic control. Chapter 2 does a good job summarizing the book Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, first published in 1969. Critiquing both uncritical acceptance of violence and traditional just-war theory, Ellul outlines instead his own defense of Christian nonviolence. In chapter 3, the authors review Ellul's masterful work The Meaning of the City. This book is an extended meditation on the theme of the city in the Bible as both a symbol of human sin and hubris, and a symbol of hope. Jerusalem, in particular, becomes a sign of God's willingness to meet humanity on our own terrain. *Chapter 4 deals with the book that Ellul considered to be his greatest theological work, Hope in Time of Abandonment. The book puts forward the thesis that, while God "perhaps ... still speaks to the heart of [an individual]," he no longer speaks or is present at the level of society's institutions or its history (p. 47). In the context of God's marked absence, Christians are called to a peculiar practice of hope marked by perseverance, prayer, and a disciplined, fearless realism. Chapter 5 explores Ellul's commentary on the book of Revelation published in English as Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in 1978. The book follows some sort of personal religious transformation for Ellul, and in it, he boldly proclaims his hope for universal salvation. Against interpretations of Revelation that see the book as a promise that evil people will be judged and defeated, he sees in it instead a promise that God will be victorious over evil powers--the spiritual systems and sociological forces that rule our lives. *Chapter 6 ends the theological section of the book. Unlike the chapters before and after, this chapter does not look at a single book but instead looks at Ellul's theological ethics. The authors admit that, while Ellul wrote both theology and biblical commentaries, none of these were his specialty. "It is most correct," they argue, "to view Ellul as a theological ethicist (rather) than a theologian" (p. 70). His theological ethics are marked by a refusal (most explicitly in his book The Ethics of Freedom) to set up any kind of moral system, universal solutions, or rules for Christians. He writes, "We can only put the problems as clearly as possible and then, having given the believer all the weapons that theology and piety can offer, say to him: ‘Now it is up to you'" (p. 69). Van Vleet and Rollison do not explore the historical or theological circumstances that led Ellul to such a unique approach to Christian ethics. If I were to hazard a guess, it seems that this particular approach was influenced by Kierkegaard's existentialism and Barth's theology of revelation. Such an atypical vision for Christian ethics, to my mind, deserves more contextual explanation than Van Vleet and Rollison afford it. *The next six chapters deal with Ellul's sociological writings, in particular, on the topics of technology, politics, and communications. Chapter 7 deals with the book The Technological Society, arguably his most famous work. Van Vleet and Rollison argue that in this book Ellul does for twentieth-century technology what Karl Marx did for nineteenth-century capitalism--namely, identify the key systemic forces that shape our lives. While much of The Technological Society deals with Ellul's analysis of "technique" as an all-encompassing cultural phenomenon, a more intriguing dimension of his analysis is his application of "the sacred" as a sociological concept to our relationship with technology. Humans cannot live without the sacred and, in our supposedly post-religious world, we have transferred religious feelings and behaviors onto technology itself. Chapter eight deals with one particular facet of the technological society, mass media. Ellul's book Propaganda: The Formation of Man's Attitudes was first published in 1965 and looks at how the powers-that-be use mass media to fashion public opinion and manipulate human behavior. After analyzing the social and psychological effects of mass media and propaganda, Ellul suggests that it is imperative for human beings to "wake up" to this reality as the first and most important step in resisting it. *In chapter 9, the authors review the book The Political Illusion, also published in 1965. In that book, Ellul condemns the expansion of the state, the increased politicization of everyday life, and society's self-defeating political illusions. Once again, he counsels a kind of existentialist resistance, encouraging individuals to "question clichés" and (implicitly) suggesting the impossibility of any kind of collective, systemic reform. Chapter 10 builds on this political critique with a review of the book Autopsy of Revolution. In Autopsy, Ellul questions the continued hope among some for a revolution that will solve our political and economic problems. Tracing the history of the concept of revolution from before and after 1789, he specifically critiques the Marxist conception of revolution as no longer viable, particularly pointing out how modern hopes for revolution tend to "absorb all the religious emotions" that have nowhere else to go in a secular society. In chapter 11, Ellul's critical analysis of both technology and politics is brought together in the book The New Demons. Once again drawing upon the concept of "the sacred," Ellul argues that our collective religious inclinations have not disappeared but have focused themselves instead on science, technology, and politics. While none of these things are bad in themselves, they have become idols in need of spiritual dethroning. The final chapter in this volume deals with the book The Humiliation of the Word. That book begins with a discussion about the different functions of both hearing and seeing in human perception. An ideal society would balance hearing and seeing, the word and image, but, in our society, the image dominates. Cataloguing the negative effects of this imbalance, Ellul urges us to revive an appreciation for the word. The word, he argues, brings qualities of discussion, paradox, and mystery--qualities we desperately need as individuals and as a society. *Overall Jacques Ellul: A Companion to His Major Works fulfills its promise of providing short, readable summaries of Ellul's most important works. Van Vleet and Rollison are to be commended for their discerning choice of eleven books that represent well both the sociological and theological dimensions of his corpus. Furthermore, they competently identify and trace core themes that appear book after book so that readers gain an impression of Ellul's overall thought and how his discrete ideas form parts of a coherent whole. The only book that seemed conspicuously absent from the volume is the book Anarchy and Christianity (although it is referenced on occasion). This seemed a regrettable omission given the importance of Ellul's anarchism for both his faith and his politics. *When introducing a major thinker and their body of thought, the choice of framework is critical. In this volume, Van Vleet and Rollison chose to present Ellul's work as a collection of sociological and theological writings, with each book contextualized (for the most part) in reference to his other writings. For some readers, this might make an excellent choice, but others may find it unsatisfying for their purposes. For example, I came to the book as someone widely read in political theology, strategic nonviolence, and the appropriate technology tradition (Schumacher, Illich, and others). With every chapter I was left with an unsatisfied desire to understand Ellul in reference to these larger traditions. How do Ellul's thoughts on violence connect to other Christian reflections on violence (Niebuhr, Yoder, etc.) or broader conceptions of strategic nonviolence (Gandhi, Sharp, Chenoweth, etc.)? How does his critique of the technological society compare and contrast to Ivan Illich's vision in Tools for Conviviality or E. F. Schumacher's work on appropriate technology? *On the whole, I found this book to be an accessible, useful introduction to the work of Jacques Ellul. That being said, an introductory chapter situating Ellul's thoughts within the larger intellectual traditions would have been helpful. *Reviewed by Isaiah Ritzmann, Community Educator, The Working Centre in Kitchener, ON N2G 1V6.
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Radner, Ephraim. "“I Contain Multitudes”: The Divine Basis for the Theological Interpretation of Scripture." Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 31, no. 2 (March 7, 2022): 142–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/10638512221084579.

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Theological interpretation of Scripture has often been understood in terms of method. This essay, drawing on Christian, Jewish, and Islamic reflection, as well as the anarchic metaphysics of Paul Feyerabend, argues that the category of “method” or “methodology” does not apply to theological interpretation, which ought instead to be understood as a human posture of receiving divine speech. This receptive posture is shaped especially by the infinitely complex character of divine speech that the Scripture constitutes, and it is just this character that subverts “method” itself as an adequate conceptuality for defining how one hears and understands God's Word.
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Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre. "Jesus Christ Against Westphalian Leviathans: A Christian Anarchist Critique of Our Coercive, Idolatrous, and Unchristian International Order." Global Discourse 1, no. 2 (January 1, 2010): 41–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2010.10707856.

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Manoussakis, John Panteleimon. "The Anarchic Principle of Christian Eschatology in the Eucharistic Tradition of the Eastern Church." Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 1 (January 2007): 29–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017816007001411.

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Theology in the 20th century witnessed a shift in emphasis: The talk about the last things did not have to come last any more as the traditional handbooks of systematic theology would have it; eschatology was no longer one branch of theology among others but lay at the center of our understanding of the Christian faith. My purpose in this essay is to go a step further than this rearrangement in theological discourse and examine a reversal within the theological understanding of eschatology itself. In the wake of the work of the Metropolitan of Pergamon John (Zizioulas), a different understanding of eschatology has emerged, one that recognizes in the Parousia not only the event that stands at the end of history (the apocalyptic closure of time with which certain Christian groups have always had a fascination), but also as that event that, grounded in the Eucharist, flows continuously from the and permeates every moment in history. In the following discussion I wish to trace and spell out the implications of such a novel understanding of eschatology for our theologies today. As my guides in this exploration, I take the theology of John Zizioulas and certain insights that recent research in phenomenology has placed at theology's service. This association might seem strange to the reader: What does the theology of things-to-come have in common with the philosophy of things-themselves? I would like to propose that phenomenology, especially as it has been recently formulated by a new generation of phenomenologists, such as Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and Richard Kearney, can be a very helpful instrument in the hands of eucharistic eschatology in its effort to rescue eschatology from the twin risks of either immanentizing it or relegating it to an end-of-times utopia. Furthermore, the structure of an “inverted intentionality,” as exemplified by certain liturgical forms such as hymnology and iconography, will be suggested as the precise point of phenomenology's convergence with eucharistic eschatology. I write with the conviction that eschatology is in essence a “liberation” theology (freeing us from the moralistic and sociological constellations of this world) and that, as my concluding remarks illustrate, it has real, practical, day-to-day consequences for the ways we conduct our lives and our relationships with others.
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Liu, Yuanlin. "The Possessed: Dostoevsky’s Conscientious Monarchy." English Language and Literature Studies 11, no. 1 (January 19, 2021): 31. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v11n1p31.

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In the mock apocalypse of The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky references biblical imagery to advocate for a conscientious monarchy as the ideal government to lead the Russian masses from deception. While Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin’s oppression of Stepan Trofimovich Verhovensky is similar to the Babylonian kings’ exploitation of the Jews in Daniel, the love between them and Dostoevsky’s eventual glorification of Stepan Trofimovich as the Russian prophet suggest the longevity of a conscientious monarchy, one in which the monarch takes responsibility for the welfare of its subjects and enforces Christian morality. Additionally, Dostoevsky’s description of the young anarchist revolutionaries, Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin and Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky, echos imagery of the beast and harlot in Revelation. Through the parent-child relationship between the monarchists and revolutionaries, Dostoevsky argues that the revolutionaries take root in the traditional social hierarchy yet betray it. This paper analyzes how Dostoevsky uses the biblical parallelisms in The Possessed to foreshadow the end to nihilism and defend traditional morality and the tsar as Russia’s God-ordained ruler.
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Pasang, Agustina. "Tanggapan Etika Kristen terhadap Terorisme." HARVESTER: Jurnal Teologi dan Kepemimpinan Kristen 4, no. 2 (January 2, 2020): 122–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.52104/harvester.v4i2.15.

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The problems that occur in various cities in Indonesia are not only caused by public dissatisfaction with the economic, political, social, cultural and so on, because often the problems spread to most sensitive problems to SARA (ethnic, religious, racial and intergroup). If the problems arise only because of economic problems it certainly will not have an impact on the burning of churches or acts of anarchist actions that discredit certain ethnic or religious groups that lead to the crime of terror or terrorism. The article is a literature review using reference books that contain a discussion about terror and terrorism in the Christian ethical perspective by applying descriptive methods. The conclusion is that the church and believers need to be aware of and increase their social sensitivity and concern about the problems that surround them that it is part of the Christian faith.Abstrak: Persoalan-persoalan yang terjadi di berbagai kota di Indonesia ternyata bukan saja disebabkan oleh ketidakpuasan masyarakat terhadap soal ekonomi, sosial, politik, budaya dan sebagainya, karena seringkali persoalan itu justru merembet ke masalah yang paling sensitif yakni SARA (Suku, Agama, Ras dan Antar Golongan). Artikel ini merupakan kajian literatur atau kajian pustaka dengan menggunakan buku-buku referensi yang memuat bahasan mengenai teror, teroris dan terorisme dalam pandangan etika Kristen dengan menerapkan metode deskriptif. Kesimpulannya, Gereja dan orang percaya perlu menyadari dan meningkatkan kepekaan dan kepedulian sosialnya akan masalah-masalah yang ada di sekitarnya, bahwa masalah adalah bagian dari iman Kristen. Itu sebabnya gereja perlu mengadakan seminar yang membahas teror, teroris dan terorisme secara utuh sehingga jemaat memiliki pemahaman yang benar mengenai hal ini. Demikian halnya dalam khotbah dan pembinaan jemaat mau tidak mau menyinggung masalah-masalah teroris secara terbuka. Di samping itu perlu bersikap bijaksana dalam menyikapi masalah terorisme.
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Lopes, Maria José Ferreira. "Visões do coletivo e da partilha em Homero e Aquilino: entre a convergência e a diferença." Revista Portuguesa de Humanidades 26, no. 1 (December 30, 2022): 105–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.17990/rph/2022_26_1_105.

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Andam faunos pelos bosques stands out in Aquilino Ribeiro’s vast work for the supposedly supernatural dimension created by a disruptive “mystagogic entity” embodying the power of Eros over humans, whose alleged assaults on beautiful girls impact the life of rich and poor alike in some bucolic villages of Beira Alta. There, everyday life includes many celebrations, more or less opulent, that constitute spaces of relevant social and personal interaction, and, ultimately, of hospitality, community and communion with nature. Collective feasting (“agape”) stands out among these moments of simple happiness, particularly the multitudinous picnic that closes the otherwise unsuccessful hunting journey for the mysterious creature. Its location in Chapter II and the presentation of a catalogue of hunters that parodistically evokes the Achaean Catalogue in the second canto of the Iliad, together with the use of Homeric allusions, allow the parallel between the countryside agape and the numerous feasts narrated in the Homeric poems, along with their concept of hospitality and happiness, expressed in some of the scenes engraved on Achilles’ shield. The parody involves the inversion of some fundamental features of Homer’s heroic world, with the valorisation of popular figures and the subversion of serious moments, such as the epic speech or song at the end of the feast, attributed not to a Nestor or Demodocus, but to a disgusting beggar, who takes the opportunity to deliver an anarchist sermon, with evangelical overtones.Thus, and in line with his thought, Aquilino blends the classical and Christian heritage, achieving at the end of the chapter a moment of communion between humans and also with nature, which was after all the goal of the “mystagogic entity” and his human avatars.
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Hevel, Michael S. "Preparing for the Politics of Life: An Expansion of the Political Dimensions of College Women's Literary Societies." History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 4 (November 2014): 486–515. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/hoeq.12080.

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One week before the 1908 U.S. presidential election, the women of the Hesperian Literary Society at the State University of Iowa (SUI, now the University of Iowa) presented “a unique program” in the form of a mock political rally. Imagining that they lived in a town where women had “been honored by the legislature with the ballot,” the “Hep” members divided into clubs that supported various candidates and causes. Several women formed the Utopian Club, which promoted William Jennings Bryan's presidential candidacy, while the members who comprised the Women's Culture Club supported William Howard Taft. Heps who pretended to belong to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) argued for prohibition. Portraying the era's political dynamism, other Heps represented anarchists, socialists, and independents. A woman from each group spoke in support of her cause in front of a crowd that included “a lot of” college men. SUI senior and Hep member Ione Mulnix described the rally in a letter to her parents: “[T]he speeches were of course very ridiculous. The reasons why each was the best were very feminine and would hardly convince aman.” She explained that the Utopian Club representative “argued for Bryan because he was the best looking.” The Heps ended their program by setting loose a toy mouse, causing the actors to scream and scatter. Finding the fictitious rally “awfully funny,” Mulnix noted that the Hep women “acted their parts to perfection” and that the college men “seemed to appreciate it immensely.”
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Nae, Andrei. "The “Pure” Romanian: (Re)writing Romanian National Identity in Dan Puric’s Romanian Soul." Journal of Romanian Studies 4, no. 2 (October 1, 2022): 187–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/romanian.2022.13.

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This paper investigates Romania’s auto-image as described by Dan Puric in his book Suflet Românesc (Romanian Soul). By employing imagology, this article first shows how Romanian national identity is constructed in opposition to Western culture and modernity. And by drawing on imagology and Hayden White’s approach to historiography, I provide a discursive analysis of the Romanian auto-image provided in the text. I show that Puric’s writing of Romanian national identity is a Romantic one rendered in the anarchist mode. The author alleges that Romanians are born with a “Romanian soul,” which guarantees their adherence to a Christian Orthodox worldview, one to which Western culture and modernity are inimical. The dominant metaphor used to represent Romanianness is the folktale, whose main traits—being set in illo tempore, a focus on a stark moral antithesis between good and evil where the former prevails, and favouring intuition over reason—are allegedly shared by “pure” Romanians. After revealing the pillars of Romanianness in Puric’s view, I trace the intellectual and cultural continuities between his Romanian auto-image and Romania’s far-right views on nation and nationhood, as well as the national communist view on Romanianness. As far as the former is concerned, I highlight the structural similarities between Puric’s nationalism and anti-Semitic discourse. With respect to the latter, I draw attention to Puric’s reliance on two of the several national communist myths identified by Romanian historian Lucian Boia: the myth of continuity and the myth of conspiracy. Puric’s book dovetails with national communist discourse by postulating the alleged continuity between the peoples and cultures that have existed in Romania’s current geographic location across the centuries and retains its communist fears of foreign conspiracy.
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Likhomanov, Igor. "N.A. Berdyaev’s Chiliastic “Mirage” and Eurasianism." Ideas and Ideals 14, no. 1-2 (March 25, 2022): 408–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.17212/2075-0862-2022-14.1.2-408-427.

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The article is devoted to the problem of N. A. Berdyaev’s ambiguous and contradictory attitude to Eurasianism - the ultra-right political trend of Russian emigration in the 1920s and 1930s. The author sees the reasons for Berdyaev’s rapprochement with the Eurasians in the collapse of the religious and mystical ideal that captured the philosopher’s imagination during the First World War. Under the influence of religious excitement that seized part of the Russian intelligentsia in the pre-war period, he believed in the nearness of the end of history and the onset of the millennial Kingdom of God on earth. According to Berdyaev, Russia was called upon to fulfill its historical mission in this final act of the world drama. This role (the “Russian Idea”) was to unite the East and the West in a global religious and cultural synthesis. The revolution of 1917 destroyed Berdyaev’s eschatological ideal and forced him to radically reconsider his view. From a Christian anarchist, he turns into a statesman, a defender of conservative values and social hierarchy. During this period, his social philosophy is very close to the ideology of fascism. But fascism was a pan-European phenomenon and in each country had its own original versions. The Eurasian movement was one of the varieties of Russian fascism. Berdyaev’s political sympathies brought him closer to this movement and became the main reason for long-term cooperation with its leaders. However, the commitment to the values of individual freedom and Christian personalism as the basis of his worldview did not allow Berdyaev to go far in his passion for right-wing conservative ideas. In the late 1920s, he sharply criticized the totalitarian features of the Eurasian ideology. After the National Socialists came to power in Germany, Berdyaev gets the opportunity to compare European far-right regimes and creates a general theory of totalitarianism. In this theory, he uses Eurasian concepts and terminology. Thus, Eurasianism becomes a model for him, on the basis of which he develops his theory of totalitarianism. After the end of the Second World War, the philosopher got deeply disappointed. After the end of the Second World War, the disappointment of the philosopher was due to the failure of his hopes for a softening of the political regime in the USSR. He was again seized by gloomy forebodings of an unsuccessful end to human history. And although the hope for a favorable outcome of the struggle between good and evil did not leave Berdyaev until the end of his life, a sense of realism weakened those hopes and faith in the feasibility of the “Russian Idea”.
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Menshikova, E. R. "Justification of meanness, or The method of the cynic (digitalization of Cortez)." Voprosy kul'turologii (Issues of Cultural Studies), no. 11 (November 26, 2021): 989–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.33920/nik-01-2111-03.

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The violentia that Caesar confessed and applied to the Gallic (and others) tribes, and that he conducted as a principle of human existence, and that was not introduced in usage by him into use and was successfully applied in the historical specifics of the “origin of the species” before him, but he only invented a way to justify such violent paradigm — “eyewitness notes”, in which violence was rooted in the ordinariness of the language, accustomed to act rather than explain, expanding the subject-shaped series, Roman Latin retained, dissolving the body of their verbs of directional action in languages Indo-European group (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Czech, etc.), changing the principle of thinking, survived like a virus, preparing the ground for the accession of Christian ideology: depriving freedom of comprehension and introducing a system of subordination, the aggressive code becomes the summumbonum that will swaddle the whole world, promising universal happiness, which is always relative, but legitimizing the pirate lifestyle as a guarantee of instability and incredible prosperity, and as a systemic Chaos that is controlled, shows its vitality, like virulence, to the new millennium. The unfolded concept of "Trojan terrorism" testifies that the Idea, having acquired the Image of the Сoncept: capture as a formality, owns society as a sovereign, establishing its Principle, demonstrating not only quasi and ultra anarchic freedom of will (as dogma and credo) of everyone, but also quite Martian chronicles of existence in every state on the planet, wills and completely the Martian chronicles of existence, relying on the 'multiple unity' of Consciousness in the context of total human (humanistic) impoverishment.
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Menshikova, E. R. "Justification of meanness, or The method of the cynic (digitalization of Cortez)." Voprosy kul'turologii (Issues of Cultural Studies), no. 10 (October 1, 2021): 892–902. http://dx.doi.org/10.33920/nik-01-2110-04.

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The violentia that Caesar confessed and applied to the Gallic (and others) tribes, and that he conducted as a principle of human existence, and that was not introduced in usage by him into use and was successfully applied in the historical specifics of the “origin of the species” before him, but he only invented a way to justify such violent paradigm — “eyewitness notes”, in which violence was rooted in the ordinariness of the language, accustomed to act rather than explain, expanding the subject-shaped series, Roman Latin retained, dissolving the body of their verbs of directional action in languages Indo-European group (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Czech, etc.), changing the principle of thinking, survived like a virus, preparing the ground for the accession of Christian ideology: depriving freedom of comprehension and introducing a system of subordination, the aggressive code becomes the summumbonum that will swaddle the whole world, promising universal happiness, which is always relative, but legitimizing the pirate lifestyle as a guarantee of instability and incredible prosperity, and as a systemic Chaos that is controlled, shows its vitality, like virulence, to the new millennium. The unfolded concept of "Trojan terrorism" testifies that the Idea, having acquired the Image of the Сoncept: capture as a formality, owns society as a sovereign, establishing its Principle, demonstrating not only quasi and ultra anarchic freedom of will (as dogma and credo) of everyone, but also quite Martian chronicles of existence in every state on the planet, wills and completely the Martian chronicles of existence, relying on the 'multiple unity' of Consciousness in the context of total human (humanistic) impoverishment.
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Gilley, Sheridan. "Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan: Priest and Novelist." Studies in Church History 48 (2012): 397–422. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0424208400001479.

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‘The primary object of a novelist is to please’, said Anthony Trollope, but he also wanted to show vice punished and virtue rewarded. More roundly, Somerset Maugham declared that pleasing is the sole purpose of art in general and of the novel in particular, although he granted that novels have been written for other reasons. Indeed, good novels usually embody a worldview, even if only an anarchic or atheist one, and the religious novel is not the only kind to have a dogma at its heart. There is the further issue of literary merit, which certain modern Catholic novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have achieved, giving the lie to Newman’s assertion that in an English Protestant culture, a Catholic literature is impossible. But Newman and his fellow cardinal Wiseman both wrote novels; Wiseman’s novel, Fabiola, with its many translations, had an enthusiastic readership in the College of Cardinals, and was described by the archbishop of Milan as ‘a good book with the success of a bad one’. Victorian Ireland was a predominantly anglophone Catholic country, and despite poor literacy rates into the modern era, the three thousand novels in 1940 in the Dublin Central Catholic Library indicate a sizeable literary culture, comparable to the cultures of other Churches. The ‘literary canons’ who contributed to this literature around 1900 included the Irishman Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan, the subject of this essay; another Irishman, Canon Joseph Guinan, who wrote eight novels on Irish rural life; Canon William Barry, the son of Irish immigrants in London, whose masterpiece was the best-selling feminist novel, The New Antigone; Henry E. Dennehy, commended by Margaret Maison in her classic study of the Victorian religious novel; and the prolific Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, the convert son of an archbishop of Canterbury. Catholic writers were often ignored by the makers of the contemporary Irish literary revival, non-Catholics anxious to separate nationalism from Catholicism (sometimes by appealing to the nation’s pre-Christian past), but this Catholic subculture is now being studied.
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Šota, Stanislav. "Treća životna dob kao subjekt pastoralnoga djelovanja – mogućnosti i perspektive." Diacovensia 26, no. 3 (2018): 483–504. http://dx.doi.org/10.31823/d.26.3.7.

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Given that the population in Europe and Croatia is increasingly getting older, and the pastoral work of people in the third age is a relatively new term, the article firstly analyzes the question why people of this age group are partially put (left) aside by pastoralists and pastoral workers in pastoral discourse in Croatia. The nature and characteristics of the third age in life presented in the first part show that the third age pastoral care includes the pastoral work with the most mature middle-aged people struggling with many life difficulties and stresses: separation from their children, the need for making personal and lifestyle adjustments, especially after retirement, after children moving out or after the loss of a life partner, as well as experiencing fast and progressive weakening of biological, psychological and mental health dimensions, a drop in life energy, strength, and general decline in vital and all other functions. Old age as a gift and possibility is depicted through several biblical characters as an evangelizing and pastoral possibility, opportunity and call to a God filled and more meaningful life. The second part presents the third age in the world and in the mentality of the society and the Church. By looking at the contemporary life context, we can state that words like old age, dying and death have become foreign in everyday discourse and that is just one of the many reasons why the third age people are often left to the side, and forsaken by their own families, society, friends and relatives, and partially forgotten also by the Church. In the world of the dictatorship of relativism, materialism, secularization, anarchism, atheism, subjectivism, individualism, and the selfie-culture, it is extremely difficult and demanding to accomplish the pastoral of the third age people. The Church, especially in Croatia, doesn't have a sufficiently designed, thought out, planned out and programmed systematic pastoral care which would include third age people. The new concept of pastoral discourse regarding the pastoral of the third age should develop in two basic directions: the first direction should consider to what extent can the third age be a subject of pastoral activity, and the second direction, based on pastoral sociology and demographic trends, should strive to recognize the third age as an object of pastoral activity. Besides the object, the third age can also be the subject of pastoral activity at different levels, areas and dimensions, especially at the parish level, the deanery level in some ways, at the regional level and (arch)diocesan level, in areas of apostolate, parish pastoral councils, charitable activities, liturgy, families, religious associations and movements, and work with Christians that have distanced themselves.
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Locklin, Reid B. "Book Review: Dalit Theology and Christian Anarchism." Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies 26, no. 1 (November 19, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1554.

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Palamaris, Rosa. "De la fonction aliénante de l’amour au désir anarchiste : posture ironique et mise en scène comique chez Christiane Rochefort." @nalyses. Revue des littératures franco-canadiennes et québécoise, May 1, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.18192/analyses.v1i2.458.

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Entre dominante réaliste et dominante utopiste, les romans de Christiane Rochefort semblent extrêmement divers. Toutefois, un point de convergence peut être décelé : « Je dois faire un aveu : tous mes livres sont contre l’amour. » Formulation simple, presque lapidaire, qui met en évidence le ton rochefortien, parfois badin, parfois cocasse, le plus souvent direct, dont le dessein premier est de remettre en cause cette évidence, culturelle : l’amour. Forme du pouvoir, l’amour annihile le désir comme voie permettant d’accéder à la conscience. Rochefort attaque les diverses institutions qui tentent de contraindre le désir, non pour subvertir une norme sociale, mais pour créer un espace utopique propice à son expansion. Aussi l’amour apparaît-il comme un lieu de croisement où posture ironique et mise en scène comique correspondraient aux différentes modalités de remise en cause, réalistes et utopiques.AbstractChristiane Rochefort’s novels constantly sway between a realistic and a utopian dominant. That is why they seem to be extremely varied. However, a meeting point can be detected: « To be honest, all my books are against love. » A simple, almost terse phrase that highlights Rochefort’s tone: it is sometimes playful, sometimes funny, mostly straightforward. Its main aim is to question a highly cultural evidence: love. A form of power, love destroys desire as a way to reach consciousness. Rochefort attacks the various institutions that stifle desire, not to subvert social standards but to create a utopian space propicious to its development. Love thus appears as a crossroads where ironical attitude and comical performance could match the questioning modes, both realistic and utopian.
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"Buchbesprechungen." Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung: Volume 48, Issue 2 48, no. 2 (April 1, 2021): 311–436. http://dx.doi.org/10.3790/zhf.48.2.311.

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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. (Mathias Schmoeckel, Bonn) Ceglia, Francesco Paolo de (Hrsg.), The Body of Evidence. Corpses and Proofs in Early Modern European Medicine (Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy and Science, 30), Leiden / Boston 2020, Brill, X u. 355 S., € 154,00. (Robert Jütte, Stuttgart) Río Parra, Elena del, Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain. Taxonomic and Intellectual Perspectives (The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World, 68), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XI u. 218 S. / Abb., € 95,00. (Ralf-Peter Fuchs, Essen) Moreno, Doris (Hrsg.), The Complexity of Hispanic Religious Life in the 16th–18th Centuries (The Iberian Religious World, 6), Leiden / Boston 2020, Brill, 225 S. / Abb., € 165,00. (Joël Graf, Bern) Kaplan, Benjamin J., Reformation and the Practice of Toleration. Dutch Religious History in the Early Modern Era (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, IX u. 371 S. / Abb., € 128,00. 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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.) 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(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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Hill, Wes. "The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin." M/C Journal 21, no. 2 (April 25, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1382.

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IntroductionThe American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations common to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Named by New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s” (84), Trecartin’s works are like high-octane domestic dramas told in the first-person, blending carnivalesque and horror sensibilities through multi-layered imagery, fast-paced editing, sprawling mise-en-scène installations and heavy-handed digital effects. Featuring narcissistic young-adult characters (many of whom are played by the artist and his friends), Trecartin’s scripted videos portray the self as fundamentally performed and kaleidoscopically mediated. His approach is therefore exemplary of some of the key concepts of automediality, which, although originating in literary studies, address concerns relevant to contemporary art, such as the blurring of life-story, self-performance, identity, persona and technological mediation. I argue that Trecartin’s work is a form of automedial art that combines camp personas with what Sianne Ngai calls the “zany” aesthetics of neoliberalism—the 24/7 production of affects, subjectivity and sociability which complicate distinctions between public and private life.Performing the Script: The Artist as Automedial ProsumerBoth “automedia” and “automediality” hold that the self (the “auto”) and its forms of expression (its “media”) are intimately linked, imbricated within processes of cultural and technological mediation. However, whereas “automedia” refers to general modes of self-presentation, “automediality” was developed by Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser to explicitly relate to the autobiographical. Noting a tendency in literary studies to under-examine how life stories are shaped by their mediums, Dünne and Moser argued that the digital era has made it more apparent how literary forms are involved in complex processes of mediation. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in response, called for an expansion of autobiography into “life writing,” claiming that automediality is useful as a theoretical frame for contemplating the growth of self-presentation platforms online, shifting from the life-narrative genre of autobiography towards more discursive and irresolute forms of first-person expression (4). One’s life story, in this context, can be communicated obliquely and performatively, with the choice of media inextricably contributing to the subjectivity that is being produced, not just as a tool for rendering a pre-existent self. Lauren Berlant conceives of life writing as a laboratory for “theorizing ‘the event’” of life rather than its narration or transcription (Prosser 181). Smith and Watson agree, describing automediality as the study of “life acts” that operate as “prosthetic extension[s] of the self in networks” (78). Following this, both “automedia” and “automediality” can be understood as expanding upon the “underlying intermedial premises” (Winthrop-Young 188) of media theory, addressing how technologies and mediums do not just constitute sensory extensions of the body (Mcluhan) but also sensory extensions of identity—armed with the potential to challenge traditional ideas of how a “life” is conveyed. For Julie Rak, “automedia” describes both the theoretical framing of self-presentation acts and the very processes of mediation the self-presenter puts themselves through (161). She prefers “automedia” over “automediality” due to the latter’s tendency to be directed towards the textual products of self-presentation, rather than their processes (161). Given Trecartin’s emphasis on narrative, poetic text, performativity, technology and commodification, both “automedia” and “automediality” will be relevant to my account here, highlighting not just the crossovers between the two terms but also the dual roles his work performs. Firstly, Trecartin’s videos express his own identity through the use of camp personas and exaggerated digital tropes. Secondly, they reflexively frame the phenomenon of online self-presentation, aestheticizing the “slice of life” and “personal history” posturings found on YouTube in order to better understand them. The line between self-presenter and critic is further muddied by the fact that Trecartin makes many of his videos free to download online. As video artist and YouTuber, he is interested in the same questions that Smith and Watson claim are central to automedial theory. When watching Youtube performers, they remind themselves to ask: “How is the aura of authenticity attached to an online performance constructed by a crew, which could include a camera person, sound person, director, and script-writer? Do you find this self-presentation to be sincere or to be calculated authenticity, a pose or ‘manufactured’ pseudo-individuality?” (124). Rather than setting out to identify “right” from “wrong” subjectivities, the role of both the automedia and automediality critic is to illuminate how and why subjectivity is constructed across distinct visual and verbal forms, working against the notion that subjectivity can be “an entity or essence” (Smith and Watson 125).Figure 1: Ryan Trecartin, Item Falls (2013), digital video stillGiven its literary origins, automediality is particularly relevant to Trecartin’s work because writing is so central to his methods, grounding his hyperactive self-presentations in the literary as well as the performative. According to Brian Droitcour, all of Trecartin’s formal devices, from the camerawork to the constructed sets his videos are staged in, are prefigured by the way he uses words. What appears unstructured and improvised is actually closely scripted, with Trecartin building on the legacies of conceptual poetry and flarf poetry (an early 2000s literary genre in which poetry is composed of collages of serendipitously found words and phrases online) to bring a loose sense of narrativization to his portrayals of characters and context. Consider the following excerpt from the screenplay for K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009)— a work which centres on a CEO named Global Korea (a pun on “career”) who presides over symbolic national characters whose surnames are also “Korea”:North America Korea: I specialize in Identity Tourism, ?Agency...I just stick HERE, and I Hop Around–HEY GLOBAL KOREA!?Identifiers: That’s Global, That’s Global, That’s GlobalFrench adaptation Korea: WHAT!?Global Korea: Guys I just Wanted to show You Your New Office!Health Care, I don’t Care, It’s All WE Care, That’s WhyWE don’t Care.THIS IS GLOBAL!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGlobal Korea: Global, Global !!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFigure 2: Ryan Trecartin, K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), digital video stillTrecartin’s performers are guided by their lines, even down to the apparently random use of commas, question marks and repeated capital letters. As a consequence, what can be alienating on the page is made lively when performed, his words instilled with the over-the-top personalities of each performer. For Droitcour, Trecartin’s genius lies in his ability to use words to subliminally structure his performances. Each character makes the artist’s poetic texts—deranged and derivative-sounding Internet-speak—their own “at the moment of the utterance” (Droitcour). Wayne Koestenbaum similarly argues that voice, which Trecartin often digitally manipulates, is the “anxiety point” in his works, fixing his “retardataire” energies on the very place “where orality and literacy stage their war of the worlds” (276).This conflict that Koestenbaum describes, between orality and literacy, is constitutive of Trecartin’s automedial positioning of the self, which presents as a confluence of life narrative, screenplay, social-media posing, flarf poetry and artwork. His videos constantly criss-cross between pre-production, production and postproduction, creating content at every point along the way. This circuitousness is reflected by the many performers who are portrayed filming each other as they act, suggesting that their projected identities are entangled with the technologies that facilitate them.Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)—a frenetic straight-to-camera chronicle of the coming-out of a gay teenager named Skippy (played by the artist)—was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, after which time his work became known around the world as an example of “postproduction” art. This refers to French curator and theorist Nicholas Bourriaud’s 2001 account of the blurring of production and consumption, following on from his 1997 theory of relational aesthetics, which became paradigmatic of critical art practice at the dawn of Web 2.0. Drawing from Marcel Duchamp and the Situationists, in Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud addressed new forms of citation, recycling and détournement, which he saw as influenced by digital computing, the service economies and other forms of immaterial social relations that, throughout the 1990s, transformed art from a subcultural activity to a key signifier and instrument of global capitalism.Because “word processing” was “indexed to the formal protocol of the service industry, and the image-system of the home computer […] informed and colonized from the start by the world of work” (78), Bourriaud claimed that artists at the start of the twenty-first century were responding to the semiotic networks that blur daily and professional life. Postproduction art looked like it was “issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly” (19). However, whereas the artists in Bourriaud’s publication, such as Plamen Dejanov and Philippe Parreno, made art in order to create “more suitable [social] arrangements” (76), Trecartin is distinctive not only because of his bombastic style but also his apparent resistance to socio-political amelioration.Bourriaud’s call for the elegant intertextual “scriptor” as prosumer (88)—who creatively produces and consumes, arranges and responds—was essentially answered by Trecartin with a parade of hyper-affective and needy Internet characters whose aims are not to negotiate new social terrain so much as to perform themselves crazy, competing with masses of online information, opinions and jostling identities. Against Bourriaud’s strategic prosumerism, Trecartin, in his own words, chases “a kind of natural prosumerism synonymous with existence” (471). Although his work can be read as a response to neoliberal values, unlike Bourriaud, he refuses to treat postproduction methods as tools to conciliate this situation. Instead, his scripted videos present postproduction as the lingua franca of daily life. In aiming for a “natural prosumerism,” his work rhetorically asks, in paraphrase of Berlant: “What does it mean to have a life, is it always to add up to something?” (Prosser 181). Figure 3: Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), digital video stillPluralist CampTrecartin’s scripts direct his performers but they are also transformed by them, his words acquiring their individualistic tics, traits and nuances. As such, his self-presentations are a long way from Frederic Jameson’s account of pastiche as a neutral practice of imitation—“a blank parody” (125) that manifests as an addiction rather than a critical judgement. Instead of being uncritically blank, we could say that Trecartin’s characters have too much content and too many affects, particularly those of the Internet variety. In Ready (Re’Search Wait’S) (2009-2010), Trecartin (playing a character named J.J. Check, who wants to re-write the U.S constitution) states at one point: “Someone just flashed an image of me; I am so sure of it. I am such as free download.” Here, pastiche turns into a performed glitch, hinting at how authentic speech can be composed of an amalgam of inauthentic sources—a scrambling of literary forms, movie one-liners, intrusive online advertising and social media jargon. His characters constantly waver between vernacular clichés and accretions of data: “My mother accused me of being accumulation posing as independent free will,” says a character from Item Falls (2013)What makes Trecartin’s video work so fascinating is that he frames what once would have been called “pastiche” and fills it with meaning, as if sincerely attuned to the paradoxes of “anti-normative” posturing contained in the term “mass individualism.” Even when addressing issues of representational politics, his dialogue registers as both authentic and insipid, as when, in CENTER JENNY (2013), a conversation about sexism being “the coolest style” ends with a woman in a bikini asking: “tolerance is inevitable, right?” Although there are laugh-out-loud elements in all of his work—often from an exaggeration of superficiality—there is a more persistent sense of the artist searching for something deeper, perhaps sympathetically so. His characters are eager to self-project yet what they actually project comes off as too much—their performances are too knowing, too individualistic and too caught up in the Internet, or other surrounding technologies.When Susan Sontag wrote in 1964 of the aesthetic of “camp” she was largely motivated by the success of Pop art, particularly that of her friend Andy Warhol. Warhol’s work looked kitsch yet Sontag saw in it a genuine love that kitsch lacks—a sentiment akin to doting on something ugly or malformed. Summoning the dandy, she claimed that whereas “the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves” (292).As an artistic device, camp essentially wallows in all the bad fetishisms that Frankfurt School theorists lamented of capitalism. The camp appropriator, does, however, convey himself as existing both inside and outside this low culture, communicating the “stink” of low culture in affecting ways. Sontag viewed camp, in other words, as at once deconstructive and reconstructive. In playing appearances off against essences, camp denies the self as essence only to celebrate it as performance.In line with accounts of identity in automediality and automedia theory, camp can be understood as performing within a dialectical tension between self and its representation. The camp aesthetic shows the self as discursively mediated and embedded in subjective formations that are “heterogeneous, conflictual, and intersectional” (Smith and Watson 71). Affiliated with the covert expression of homosexual and queer identity, the camp artist typically foregrounds art as taste, and taste as mere fashion, while at the same time he/she suggests how this approach is shaped by socio-political marginalization. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the criticality of camp is “additive and accretive” rather than oppositional; it is a surplus form that manifests as “the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products” (149).Trecartin, who identifies as gay, parodies the excesses of digital identity while at the same time, from camp and queer perspectives, he asks us to take these identifications seriously—straight, gay, transsexual, bisexual, inter-sexual, racial, post-racial, mainstream, alternative, capitalist or anarchist. This pluralist agenda manifests in characters who speak as though everything is in quotation marks, suggesting that everything is possible. Dialogue such as “I’m finally just an ‘as if’”, “I want an idea landfill”, and “It reminds me of the future” project feelings of too much and not enough, transforming Warhol’s cool, image-oriented version of camp (transfixed by TV and supermarket capitalism) into a hyper-affective Internet camp—a camp that feeds on new life narratives, identity postures and personalities, as stimuli.In emphasising technology as intrinsic to camp self-presentation, Trecartin treats intersectionality and intermediality as if corresponding concepts. His characters, caught between youthhood and adulthood, are inbetweeners. Yet, despite being nebulous, they float free of normative ideals only in the sense that they believe everybody not only has the right to live how they want to, but to also be condemned for it—the right to intolerance going hand-in-hand with their belief in plurality. This suggests the paradoxical condition of pluralist, intersectional selfhood in the digital age, where one can position one’s identity as if between social categories while at the same time weaponizing it, in the form of identity politics. In K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), Global Korea asks: “Who the fuck is that baby shit-talker? That’s not one of my condiments,” which is delivered with characteristic confidence, defensiveness and with gleeful disregard for normative speech. Figure 4: Ryan Trecartin, CENTER JENNY (2013), digital video stillThe Zaniness of the Neoliberal SelfIf, as Koestenbaum claims, Trecartin’s host of characters are actually “evolving mutations of a single worldview” (275), then the worldview they represent is what Sianne Ngai calls the “hypercommodified, information saturated, performance driven conditions of late capitalism” (1). Self-presentation in this context is not to be understood so much as experienced through prisms of technological inflection, marketing spiel and pluralist interpretative schemas. Ngai has described the rise of “zaniness” as an aesthetic category that perfectly encapsulates this capitalist condition. Zany hyperactivity is at once “lighthearted” and “vehement,” and as such it is highly suited to the contemporary volatility of affective labour; its tireless overlapping of work and play, and the networking rhetoric of global interconnectedness (Ngai, 7). This is what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have termed the “connexionist” spirit of capitalism, where a successful career is measured by one’s capacity to be “always pursuing some sort of activity, never to be without a project, without ideas, to be always looking forward to, and preparing for, something along with other persons, whose encounter is the result of being always driven by the drive for activity” (Chiapello and Fairclough 192).For Ngai, the zany—epitomized by Jim Carrey’s character in Cable Guy (1996) or Wile E. Coyote from the Looney Tunes cartoons—performs first and asks questions later. As such, their playfulness is always performed in a way that could spin out of control, as when Trecartin’s humour can, in the next moment, appear psychotic. Ngai continues:What is essential to zaniness is its way of evoking a situation with the potential to cause harm or injury […]. For all their playfulness and commitment to fun, the zany’s characters give the impression of needing to labor excessively hard to produce our laughter, straining themselves to the point of endangering not just themselves but also those around them. (10)Using sinister music scores, anxiety-inducing editing and lighting that references iconic DIY horror films such as the Blair Witch Project (1999), Trecartin comically frames the anxieties and over-produced individualism of the global neoliberalist project, but in ways that one is unsure what to do with it. “Don’t look at me—look at your mother, and globalize at her,” commands Global Korea. Set in temporary (read precarious) locations that often resemble both domestic and business environments, his world is one in which young adults are incessantly producing themselves as content, as if unstable market testers run riot, on whose tastes our future global economic growth depends.Michel Foucault defined this neoliberal condition as “the application of the economic grid to social phenomena” (239). As early as 1979 he claimed that workers in a neoliberal context begin to regard the self as an “abilities-machine” (229) where they are less partners in the processes of economic exchange than independent producers of human capital. As Jodi Dean puts it, with the totalization of economic production, neoliberal processes “simultaneously promote the individual as the primary unit of capitalism and unravel the institutions of solidaristic support on which this unit depends” (32). As entrepreneurs of the self, people under neoliberalism become producers for whom socialization is no longer a byproduct of capitalist production but can be the very means through which capital is produced. With this in mind, Trecartin’s portrayal of the straight-to-camera format is less a video diary than a means for staging social auditions. His performers (or contestants), although foregrounding their individualism, always have their eyes on group power, suggesting a competitive individualism rather than the countering of normativity. Forever at work and at play, these comic-tragics are ur-figures of neoliberalism—over-connected and over-emotional self-presenters who are unable to stop, in fear they will be nothing if not performing.ConclusionPortraying a seemingly endless parade of neoliberal selves, Trecartin’s work yields a zany vision that always threatens to spin out of control. As a form of Internet-era camp, he reproduces automedial conceptions of the self as constituted and expanded by media technologies—as performative conduits between the formal and the socio-political which go both ways. This process has been described by Berlant in terms of life writing, but it applies equally to Trecartin, who, through a “performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity,” facilitates “a performance of being” for the viewer “made possible by the proximity of the object” (Berlant 25). Inflating for both comic and tragic effect a profoundly nebulous yet weaponized conception of identity, Trecartin’s characters show the relation between offline and online life to be impossible to essentialize, laden with a mix of conflicting feelings and personas. As identity avatars, his characters do their best to be present and responsive to whatever precarious situations they find themselves in, which, due to the nature of his scripts, seem at times to have been automatically generated by the Internet itself.ReferencesBourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction: Culture as a Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lucas & Stenberg, 2001.Chiapello, E., and N. Fairclough. “Understanding the New Management Ideology: A Transdisciplinary Contribution from Critical Discourse Analysis and New Sociology of Capitalism.” Discourse and Society 13.2 (2002): 185–208.Dean, Jodi. Crowds and Party. London & New York: Verso, 2016.Droitcour, Brian. “Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet.” Rhizome 27 July 2001. 18 Apr. 2015 <http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/jul/27/making-word-ryan-trecartin-poet/>.Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien [Automediality: Subject Constitution in Print, Image, and New Media]. Munich: Fink, 2008.Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.Prosser, Jay. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Biography 34.1 (Winter 2012): 180- 87.Rak, Julie. “Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab.” Biography 38.2 (Spring 2015): 155-180.Schjeldahl, Peter. “Party On.” New Yorker, 27 June 2011: 84-85.Smith, Sidonie. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.———, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 2010———, and Julia Watson. Life Writing in the Long Run: Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, 2016.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001.Trecartin, Ryan. “Ryan Trecartin.” Artforum (Sep. 2012): 471.Wayne Koestenbaum. “Situation Hacker.” Artforum 47.10 (Summer 2009): 274-279.Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Hardware/Software/Wetware.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and M. Hansen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
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41

Ali, Kawsar. "Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy." M/C Journal 24, no. 3 (June 21, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2786.

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Abstract:
The Alt Right Are Not Alright Academic explorations complicating both the Internet and whiteness have often focussed on the rise of the “alt-right” to examine the co-option of digital technologies to extend white supremacy (Daniels, “Cyber Racism”; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise”; Nagle). The term “alt-right” refers to media organisations, personalities, and sarcastic Internet users who promote the “alternative right”, understood as extremely conservative, political views online. The alt-right, in all of their online variations and inter-grouping, are infamous for supporting white supremacy online, “characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes. Alt-righters eschew ‘establishment’ conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethnonationalism as a fundamental value” (Southern Poverty Law Center). Theoretical studies of the alt-right have largely focussed on its growing presence across social media and websites such as Twitter, Reddit, and notoriously “chan” sites 4chan and 8chan, through the political discussions referred to as “threads” on the site (Nagle; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise”; Hawley). As well, the ability of online users to surpass national boundaries and spread global white supremacy through the Internet has also been studied (Back et al.). The alt-right have found a home on the Internet, using its features to cunningly recruit members and to establish a growing community that mainstream politically extreme views (Daniels, “Cyber Racism”; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise; Munn). This body of knowledge shows that academics have been able to produce critically relevant literature regarding the alt-right despite the online anonymity of the majority of its members. For example, Conway et al., in their analysis of the history and social media patterns of the alt-right, follow the unique nature of the Christchurch Massacre, encompassing the use and development of message boards, fringe websites, and social media sites to champion white supremacy online. Positioning my research in this literature, I am interested in contributing further knowledge regarding the alt-right, white supremacy, and the Internet by exploring the sinister conducting of Zoom-bombing anti-racist events. Here, I will investigate how white supremacy through the Internet can lead to violence, abuse, and fear that “transcends the virtual world to damage real, live humans beings” via Zoom-bombing, an act that is situated in a larger co-option of the Internet by the alt-right and white supremacists, but has been under theorised as a hate crime (Daniels; “Cyber Racism” 7). Shitposting I want to preface this chapter by acknowledging that while I understand the Internet, through my own external investigations of race, power and the Internet, as a series of entities that produce racial violence both online and offline, I am aware of the use of the Internet to frame, discuss, and share anti-racist activism. Here we can turn to the work of philosopher Michel de Certeau who conceived the idea of a “tactic” as a way to construct a space of agency in opposition to institutional power. This becomes a way that marginalised groups, such as racialised peoples, can utilise the Internet as a tactical material to assert themselves and their non-compliance with the state. Particularly, shitposting, a tactic often associated with the alt-right, has also been co-opted by those who fight for social justice and rally against oppression both online and offline. As Roderick Graham explores, the Internet, and for this exploration, shitposting, can be used to proliferate deviant and racist material but also as a “deviant” byway of oppositional and anti-racist material. Despite this, a lot can be said about the invisible yet present claims and support of whiteness through Internet and digital technologies, as well as the activity of users channelled through these screens, such as the alt-right and their digital tactics. As Vikki Fraser remarks, “the internet assumes whiteness as the norm – whiteness is made visible through what is left unsaid, through the assumption that white need not be said” (120). It is through the lens of white privilege and claims to white supremacy that online irony, by way of shitposting, is co-opted and understood as an inherently alt-right tool, through the deviance it entails. Their sinister co-option of shitposting bolsters audacious claims as to who has the right to exist, in their support of white identity, but also hides behind a veil of mischief that can hide their more insidious intention and political ideologies. The alt-right have used “shitposting”, an online style of posting and interacting with other users, to create a form of online communication for a translocal identity of white nationalist members. Sean McEwan defines shitposting as “a form of Internet interaction predicated upon thwarting established norms of discourse in favour of seemingly anarchic, poor quality contributions” (19). Far from being random, however, I argue that shitposting functions as a discourse that is employed by online communities to discuss, proliferate, and introduce white supremacist ideals among their communities as well as into the mainstream. In the course of this article, I will introduce racist Zoom-bombing as a tactic situated in shitposting which can be used as a means of white supremacist discourse and an attempt to block anti-racist efforts. By this line, the function of discourse as one “to preserve or to reproduce discourse (within) a closed community” is calculatingly met through shitposting, Zoom-bombing, and more overt forms of white supremacy online (Foucault 225-226). Using memes, dehumanisation, and sarcasm, online white supremacists have created a means of both organising and mainstreaming white supremacy through humour that allows insidious themes to be mocked and then spread online. Foucault writes that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and danger, to cope with chance events, to evade ponderous, awesome materiality” (216). As Philippe-Joseph Salazar recontextualises to online white supremacists, “the first procedure of control is to define what is prohibited, in essence, to set aside that which cannot be spoken about, and thus to produce strategies to counter it” (137). By this line, the alt-right reorganises these procedures and allocates a checked speech that will allow their ideas to proliferate in like-minded and growing communities. As a result, online white supremacists becoming a “community of discourse” advantages them in two ways: first, ironic language permits the mainstreaming of hate that allows sinister content to enter the public as the severity of their intentions is doubted due to the sarcastic language employed. Second, shitposting is employed as an entry gate to more serious and dangerous participation with white supremacist action, engagement, and ideologies. It is important to note that white privilege is embodied in these discursive practices as despite this exploitation of emerging technologies to further white supremacy, there are approaches that theorise the alt-right as “crazed product(s) of an isolated, extremist milieu with no links to the mainstream” (Moses 201). In this way, it is useful to consider shitposting as an informal approach that mirrors legitimised white sovereignties and authorised white supremacy. The result is that white supremacist online users succeed in “not only in assembling a community of actors and a collective of authors, on the dual territory of digital communication and grass-roots activism”, but also shape an effective fellowship of discourse that audiences react well to online, encouraging its reception and mainstreaming (Salazar 142). Continuing, as McBain writes, “someone who would not dream of donning a white cap and attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting might find themselves laughing along to a video by the alt-right satirist RamZPaul”. This idea is echoed in a leaked stylistic guide by white supremacist website and message board the Daily Stormer that highlights irony as a cultivated mechanism used to draw new audiences to the far right, step by step (Wilson). As showcased in the screen capture below of the stylistic guide, “the reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points” (Feinburg). The result of this style of writing is used “to immerse recruits in an online movement culture built on memes, racial panic and the worst of Internet culture” (Wilson). Figure 1: A screenshot of the Daily Stormer’s playbook, expanding on the stylistic decisions of alt-right writers. Racist Zoom-Bombing In the timely text “Racist Zoombombing”, Lisa Nakamura et al. write the following: Zoombombing is more than just trolling; though it belongs to a broad category of online behavior meant to produce a negative reaction, it has an intimate connection with online conspiracy theorists and white supremacy … . Zoombombing should not be lumped into the larger category of trolling, both because the word “trolling” has become so broad it is nearly meaningless at times, and because zoombombing is designed to cause intimate harm and terrorize its target in distinct ways. (30) Notwithstanding the seriousness of Zoom-bombing, and to not minimise its insidiousness by understanding it as a form of shitposting, my article seeks to reiterate the seriousness of shitposting, which, in the age of COVID-19, Zoom-bombing has become an example of. I seek to purport the insidiousness of the tactical strategies of the alt-right online in a larger context of white violence online. Therefore, I am proposing a more critical look at the tactical use of the Internet by the alt-right, in theorising shitposting and Zoom-bombing as means of hate crimes wherein they impose upon anti-racist activism and organising. Newlands et al., receiving only limited exposure pre-pandemic, write that “Zoom has become a household name and an essential component for parties (Matyszczyk, 2020), weddings (Pajer, 2020), school and work” (1). However, through this came the strategic use of co-opting the application by the alt-right to digitise terror and ensure a “growing framework of memetic warfare” (Nakamura et al. 31). Kruglanski et al. label this co-opting of online tools to champion white supremacy operations via Zoom-bombing an example of shitposting: Not yet protesting the lockdown orders in front of statehouses, far-right extremists infiltrated Zoom calls and shared their screens, projecting violent and graphic imagery such as swastikas and pornography into the homes of unsuspecting attendees and making it impossible for schools to rely on Zoom for home-based lessons. Such actions, known as “Zoombombing,” were eventually curtailed by Zoom features requiring hosts to admit people into Zoom meetings as a default setting with an option to opt-out. (128) By this, we can draw on existing literature that has theorised white supremacists as innovation opportunists regarding their co-option of the Internet, as supported through Jessie Daniels’s work, “during the shift of the white supremacist movement from print to digital online users exploited emerging technologies to further their ideological goals” (“Algorithmic Rise” 63). Selfe and Selfe write in their description of the computer interface as a “political and ideological boundary land” that may serve larger cultural systems of domination in much the same way that geopolitical borders do (418). Considering these theorisations of white supremacists utilising tools that appear neutral for racialised aims and the political possibilities of whiteness online, we can consider racist Zoom-bombing as an assertion of a battle that seeks to disrupt racial justice online but also assert white supremacy as its own legitimate cause. My first encounter of local Zoom-bombing was during the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) Seminar titled “Intersecting Crises” by Western Sydney University. The event sought to explore the concatenation of deeply inextricable ecological, political, economic, racial, and social crises. An academic involved in the facilitation of the event, Alana Lentin, live tweeted during the Zoom-bombing of the event: Figure 2: Academic Alana Lentin on Twitter live tweeting the Zoom-bombing of the Intersecting Crises event. Upon reflecting on this instance, I wondered, could efforts have been organised to prevent white supremacy? In considering who may or may not be responsible for halting racist shit-posting, we can problematise the work of R David Lankes, who writes that “Zoom-bombing is when inadequate security on the part of the person organizing a video conference allows uninvited users to join and disrupt a meeting. It can be anything from a prankster logging on, yelling, and logging off to uninvited users” (217). However, this beckons two areas to consider in theorising racist Zoom-bombing as a means of isolated trolling. First, this approach to Zoom-bombing minimises the sinister intentions of Zoom-bombing when referring to people as pranksters. Albeit withholding the “mimic trickery and mischief that were already present in spaces such as real-life classrooms and town halls” it may be more useful to consider theorising Zoom-bombing as often racialised harassment and a counter aggression to anti-racist initiatives (Nakamura et al. 30). Due to the live nature of most Zoom meetings, it is increasingly difficult to halt the threat of the alt-right from Zoom-bombing meetings. In “A First Look at Zoom-bombings” a range of preventative strategies are encouraged for Zoom organisers including “unique meeting links for each participant, although we acknowledge that this has usability implications and might not always be feasible” (Ling et al. 1). The alt-right exploit gaps, akin to co-opting the mainstreaming of trolling and shitposting, to put forward their agenda on white supremacy and assert their presence when not welcome. Therefore, utilising the pandemic to instil new forms of terror, it can be said that Zoom-bombing becomes a new means to shitpost, where the alt-right “exploits Zoom’s uniquely liminal space, a space of intimacy generated by users via the relationship between the digital screen and what it can depict, the device’s audio tools and how they can transmit and receive sound, the software that we can see, and the software that we can’t” (Nakamura et al. 29). Second, this definition of Zoom-bombing begs the question, is this a fair assessment to write that reiterates the blame of organisers? Rather, we can consider other gaps that have resulted in the misuse of Zoom co-opted by the alt-right: “two conditions have paved the way for Zoom-bombing: a resurgent fascist movement that has found its legs and best megaphone on the Internet and an often-unwitting public who have been suddenly required to spend many hours a day on this platform” (Nakamura et al. 29). In this way, it is interesting to note that recommendations to halt Zoom-bombing revolve around the energy, resources, and attention of the organisers to practically address possible threats, rather than the onus being placed on those who maintain these systems and those who Zoom-bomb. As Jessie Daniels states, “we should hold the platform accountable for this type of damage that it's facilitated. It's the platform's fault and it shouldn't be left to individual users who are making Zoom millions, if not billions, of dollars right now” (Ruf 8). Brian Friedberg, Gabrielle Lim, and Joan Donovan explore the organised efforts by the alt-right to impose on Zoom events and disturb schedules: “coordinated raids of Zoom meetings have become a social activity traversing the networked terrain of multiple platforms and web spaces. Raiders coordinate by sharing links to Zoom meetings targets and other operational and logistical details regarding the execution of an attack” (14). By encouraging a mass coordination of racist Zoom-bombing, in turn, social justice organisers are made to feel overwhelmed and that their efforts will be counteracted inevitably by a large and organised group, albeit appearing prankster-like. Aligning with the idea that “Zoombombing conceals and contains the terror and psychological harm that targets of active harassment face because it doesn’t leave a trace unless an alert user records the meeting”, it is useful to consider to what extent racist Zoom-bombing becomes a new weapon of the alt-right to entertain and affirm current members, and engage and influence new members (Nakamura et al. 34). I propose that we consider Zoom-bombing through shitposting, which is within “the location of matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)” to challenge the role of interface design and Internet infrastructure in enabling racial violence online (Costanza-Chock). Conclusion As Nakamura et al. have argued, Zoom-bombing is indeed “part of the lineage or ecosystem of trollish behavior”, yet these new forms of alt-right shitposting “[need] to be critiqued and understood as more than simply trolling because this term emerged during an earlier, less media-rich and interpersonally live Internet” (32). I recommend theorising the alt-right in a way that highlights the larger structures of white power, privilege, and supremacy that maintain their online and offline legacies beyond Zoom, “to view white supremacy not as a static ideology or condition, but to instead focus on its geographic and temporal contingency” that allows acts of hate crime by individuals on politicised bodies (Inwood and Bonds 722). This corresponds with Claire Renzetti’s argument that “criminologists theorise that committing a hate crime is a means of accomplishing a particular type of power, hegemonic masculinity, which is described as white, Christian, able-bodied and heterosexual” – an approach that can be applied to theorisations of the alt-right and online violence (136). This violent white masculinity occupies a hegemonic hold in the formation, reproduction, and extension of white supremacy that is then shared, affirmed, and idolised through a racialised Internet (Donaldson et al.). Therefore, I recommend that we situate Zoom-bombing as a means of shitposting, by reiterating the severity of shitposting with the same intentions and sinister goals of hate crimes and racial violence. References Back, Les, et al. “Racism on the Internet: Mapping Neo-Fascist Subcultures in Cyber-Space.” Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture. Eds. Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjørgo. Northeastern UP, 1993. 73-101. Bonds, Anne, and Joshua Inwood. “Beyond White Privilege: Geographies of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism.” Progress in Human Geography 40 (2015): 715-733. Conway, Maura, et al. “Right-Wing Extremists’ Persistent Online Presence: History and Contemporary Trends.” The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague. Policy Brief, 2019. Costanza-Chock, Sasha. “Design Justice and User Interface Design, 2020.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Association for Computing Machinery, 2020. Daniels, Jessie. “The Algorithmic Rise of the ‘Alt-Right.’” Contexts 17 (2018): 60-65. ———. “Race and Racism in Internet Studies: A Review and Critique.” New Media & Society 15 (2013): 695-719. ———. Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights. Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. First ed. U of California P, 1980. Donaldson, Mike. “What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?” Theory and Society 22 (1993): 643-657. Feinburg, Ashley. “This Is The Daily Stormer’s Playbook.” Huffington Post 13 Dec. 2017. <http://www.huffpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-style-guide_n_5a2ece19e4b0ce3b344492f2>. Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Ed. A.M. Sheridan Smith. Pantheon, 1971. 215-237. Fraser, Vicki. “Online Bodies and Sexual Subjectivities: In Whose Image?” The Racial Politics of Bodies, Nations and Knowledges. Eds. Barbara Baird and Damien W. Riggs. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 116-132. Friedberg, Brian, Gabrielle Lim, and Joan Donovan. “Space Invaders: The Networked Terrain of Zoom Bombing.” Harvard Shorenstein Center, 2020. Graham, Roderick. “Race, Social Media and Deviance.” The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance. Eds. Thomas J. Holt and Adam M. Bossler, 2019. 67-90. Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. Columbia UP, 2017. Henry, Matthew G., and Lawrence D. Berg. “Geographers Performing Nationalism and Hetero-Masculinity.” Gender, Place & Culture 13 (2006): 629-645. Kruglanski, Arie W., et al. “Terrorism in Time of the Pandemic: Exploiting Mayhem.” Global Security: Health, Science and Policy 5 (2020): 121-132. Lankes, R. David. Forged in War: How a Century of War Created Today's Information Society. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Ling, Chen, et al. “A First Look at Zoombombing, 2021.” Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Oakland, 2021. McBain, Sophie. “The Alt-Right, and How the Paranoia of White Identity Politics Fuelled Trump’s Rise.” New Statesman 27 Nov. 2017. <http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/11/alt-right-and-how-paranoia-white-identity-politics-fuelled-trump-s-rise>. McEwan, Sean. “Nation of Shitposters: Ironic Engagement with the Facebook Posts of Shannon Noll as Reconfiguration of an Australian National Identity.” Journal of Media and Communication 8 (2017): 19-39. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies 2 (2012): 2-22. Moses, A Dirk. “‘White Genocide’ and the Ethics of Public Analysis.” Journal of Genocide Research 21 (2019): 1-13. Munn, Luke. “Algorithmic Hate: Brenton Tarrant and the Dark Social Web.” VoxPol, 3 Apr. 2019. <http://www.voxpol.eu/algorithmic-hate-brenton-tarrant-and-the-dark-social-web>. Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books, 2017. Nakamura, Lisa, et al. Racist Zoom-Bombing. Routledge, 2021. Newlands, Gemma, et al. “Innovation under Pressure: Implications for Data Privacy during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Big Data & Society July-December (2020): 1-14. Perry, Barbara, and Ryan Scrivens. “White Pride Worldwide: Constructing Global Identities Online.” The Globalisation of Hate: Internationalising Hate Crime. Eds. Jennifer Schweppe and Mark Austin Walters. Oxford UP, 2016. 65-78. Renzetti, Claire. Feminist Criminology. Routledge, 2013. Ruf, Jessica. “‘Spirit-Murdering' Comes to Zoom: Racist Attacks Plague Online Learning.” Issues in Higher Education 37 (2020): 8. Salazar, Philippe-Joseph. “The Alt-Right as a Community of Discourse.” Javnost – The Public 25 (2018): 135-143. Selfe, Cyntia L., and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones.” College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 480-504. Southern Poverty Law Center. “Alt-Right.” <http://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right>. Wilson, Jason. “Do the Christchurch Shootings Expose the Murderous Nature of ‘Ironic’ Online Fascism?” The Guardian, 16 Mar. 2019. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/do-the-christchurch-shootings-expose-the-murderous-nature-of-ironic-online-fascism>.
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Holmes, Ashley M. "Cohesion, Adhesion and Incoherence: Magazine Production with a Flickr Special Interest Group." M/C Journal 13, no. 1 (March 22, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.210.

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Abstract:
This paper provides embedded, reflective practice-based insight arising from my experience collaborating to produce online and print-on-demand editions of a magazine showcasing the photography of members of haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts group (hereafter referred to as haphazart!). The group’s online visual, textual and activity-based practices via the photo sharing social networking site Flickr are portrayed as achieving cohesive visual identity. Stylistic analysis of pictures in support of this claim is not attempted. Rather negotiation, that Elliot has previously described in M/C Journal as innate in collaboration, is identified as the unifying factor. However, the collaborators’ adherence to Flickr’s communication platform proves problematic in the editorial context. Some technical incoherence with possible broader cultural implications is encountered during the process of repurposing images from screen to print. A Scan of Relevant Literature The photographic gaze perceives and captures objects which seem to ‘carry within them ready-made’ a work of art. But the reminiscences of the gaze are only made possible by knowing and associating with groups that define a tradition. The list of valorised subjects is not actually defined with reference to a culture, but rather by familiarity with a limited group. (Chamboredon 144) As part of the array of socio-cultural practices afforded by Web 2.0 interoperability, sites of produsage (Bruns) are foci for studies originating in many disciplines. Flickr provides a rich source of data that researchers interested in the interface between the technological and the social find useful to analyse. Access to the Flickr application programming interface enables quantitative researchers to observe a variety of means by which information is propagated, disseminated and shared. Some findings from this kind of research confirm the intuitive. For example, Negoecsu et al. find that “a large percentage of users engage in sharing with groups and that they do so significantly” ("Analyzing Flickr Groups" 425). They suggest that Flickr’s Groups feature appears to “naturally bring together two key aspects of social media: content and relations.” They also find evidence for what they call hyper-groups, which are “communities consisting of groups of Flickr groups” ("Flickr Hypergroups" 813). Two separate findings from another research team appear to contradict each other. On one hand, describing what they call “social cascades,” Cha et al. claim that “content in the form of ideas, products, and messages spreads across social networks like a virus” ("Characterising Social Cascades"). Yet in 2009 they claim that homocity and reciprocity ensure that “popularity of pictures is localised” ("Measurement-Driven Analysis"). Mislove et al. reflect that the affordances of Flickr influence the growth patterns they observe. There is optimism shared by some empiricists that through collation and analysis of Flickr tag data, the matching of perceptual structures of images and image annotation techniques will yield ontology-based taxonomy useful in automatic image annotation and ultimately, the Semantic Web endeavour (Kennedy et al.; Su et al.; Xu et al.). Qualitative researchers using ethnographic interview techniques also find Flickr a valuable resource. In concluding that the photo sharing hobby is for many a “serious leisure” activity, Cox et al. propose that “Flickr is not just a neutral information system but also value laden and has a role within a wider cultural order.” They also suggest that “there is genuinely greater scope for individual creativity, releasing the individual to explore their own identity in a way not possible with a camera club.” Davies claims that “online spaces provide an arena where collaboration over meanings can be transformative, impacting on how individuals locate themselves within local and global contexts” (550). She says that through shared ways of describing and commenting on images, Flickrites develop a common criticality in their endeavour to understand images, each other and their world (554).From a psychologist’s perspective, Suler observes that “interpersonal relationships rarely form and develop by images alone” ("Image, Word, Action" 559). He says that Flickr participants communicate in three dimensions: textual (which he calls “verbal”), visual, and via the interpersonal actions that the site affords, such as Favourites. This latter observation can surely be supplemented by including the various games that groups configure within the constraints of the discussion forums. These often include submissions to a theme and voting to select a winning image. Suler describes the place in Flickr where one finds identity as one’s “cyberpsychological niche” (556). However, many participants subscribe to multiple groups—45.6% of Flickrites who share images share them with more than 20 groups (Negoescu et al., "Analyzing Flickr Groups" 420). Is this a reflection of the existence of the hyper-groups they describe (2009) or, of the ranging that people do in search of a niche? It is also probable that some people explore more than a singular identity or visual style. Harrison and Bartell suggest that there are more interesting questions than why users create media products or what motivates them to do so: the more interesting questions center on understanding what users will choose to do ultimately with [Web2.0] capabilities [...] in what terms to define the success of their efforts, and what impact the opportunity for individual and collaborative expression will have on the evolution of communicative forms and character. (167) This paper addresseses such questions. It arises from a participatory observational context which differs from that of the research described above. It is intended that a different perspective about online group-based participation within the Flickr social networking matrix will avail. However, it will be seen that the themes cited in this introductory review prove pertinent. Context As a university teacher of a range of subjects in the digital media field, from contemporary photomedia to social media to collaborative multimedia practice, it is entirely appropriate that I embed myself in projects that engage, challenge and provide me with relevant first-hand experience. As an academic I also undertake and publish research. As a practicing new media artist I exhibit publically on a regular basis and consider myself semi-professional with respect to this activity. While there are common elements to both approaches to research, this paper is written more from the point of view of ‘reflective practice’ (Holmes, "Reconciling Experimentum") rather than ‘embedded ethnography’ (Pink). It is necessarily and unapologetically reflexive. Abstract Photography Hyper-Group A search of all Flickr groups using the query “abstract” is currently likely to return around 14,700 results. However, only in around thirty of them does the group name, its stated rules and, the stream of images that flow through the pool arguably reflect a sense of collective concept and aesthetic that is coherently abstract. This loose complex of groups comprises a hyper-group. Members of these groups often have co-memberships, reciprocal contacts, and regularly post images to a range of groups and comment on others’ posts to be found throughout. Given that one of Flickr’s largest groups, Black and White, currently has around 131,150 members and hosts 2,093,241 items in its pool, these abstract special interest groups are relatively small. The largest, Abstract Photos, has 11,338 members and hosts 89,306 items in its pool. The group that is the focus of this paper, haphazart!, currently has 2,536 members who have submitted 53,309 items. The group pool is more like a constantly flowing river because the most recently added images are foremost. Older images become buried in an archive of pages which cannot be reverse accessed at a rate greater than the seven pages linked from a current view. A member’s presence is most immediate through images posted to a pool. This structural feature of Flickr promotes a desire for currency; a need to post regularly to maintain presence. Negotiating Coherence to the Abstract The self-managing social dynamics in groups has, as Suler proposes to be the case for individuals, three dimensions: visual, textual and action. A group integrates the diverse elements, relationships and values which cumulatively constitute its identity with contributions from members in these dimensions. First impressions of that identity are usually derived from the group home page which consists of principal features: the group name, a selection of twelve most recent posts to the pool, some kind of description, a selection of six of the most recent discussion topics, and a list of rules (if any). In some of these groups, what is considered to constitute an abstract photographic image is described on the group home page. In some it is left to be contested and becomes the topic of ongoing forum debates. In others the specific issue is not discussed—the images are left to speak for themselves. Administrators of some groups require that images are vetted for acceptance. In haphazart! particular administrators dutifully delete from the pool on a regular basis any images that they deem not to comply with the group ethic. Whether reasons are given or not is left to the individual prosecutor. Mostly offending images just disappear from the group pool without trace. These are some of the ways that the coherence of a group’s visual identity is established and maintained. Two groups out of the abstract photography hyper-group are noteworthy in that their discussion forums are particularly active. A discussion is just the start of a new thread and may have any number of posts under it. At time of writing Abstract Photos has 195 discussions and haphazart! — the most talkative by this measure—has 333. Haphazart! invites submissions of images to regularly changing themes. There is always lively and idiosyncratic banter in the forum over the selection of a theme. To be submitted an image needs to be identified by a specific theme tag as announced on the group home page. The tag can be added by the photographer themselves or by anyone else who deems the image appropriate to the theme. An exhibition process ensues. Participant curators search all Flickr items according to the theme tag and select from the outcome images they deem to most appropriately and abstractly address the theme. Copies of the images together with comments by the curators are posted to a dedicated discussion board. Other members may also provide responses. This activity forms an ongoing record that may serve as a public indicator of the aesthetic that underlies the group’s identity. In Abstract Photos there is an ongoing discussion forum where one can submit an image and request that the moderators rule as to whether or not the image is ‘abstract’. The same group has ongoing discussions labelled “Hall of Appropriate” where worthy images are reposted and celebrated and, “Hall of Inappropriate” where images posted to the group pool have been removed and relegated because abstraction has been “so far stretched from its definition that it now resides in a parallel universe” (Askin). Reasons are mostly courteously provided. In haphazart! a relatively small core of around twelve group members regularly contribute to the group discussion board. A curious aspect of this communication is that even though participants present visually with a ‘buddy icon’ and most with a screen name not their real name, it is usual practice to address each other in discussions by their real Christian names, even when this is not evident in a member’s profile. This seems to indicate a common desire for authenticity. The makeup of the core varies from time to time depending on other activities in a member’s life. Although one or two may be professionally or semi-professionally engaged as photographers or artists or academics, most of these people would likely consider themselves to be “serious amateurs” (Cox). They are internationally dispersed with bias to the US, UK, Europe and Australia. English is the common language though not the natural tongue of some. The age range is approximately 35 to 65 and the gender mix 50/50. The group is three years old. Where Do We Go to from Here? In early January 2009 the haphazart! core was sparked into a frenzy of discussion by a post from a member headed “Where do we go to from here?” A proposal was mooted to produce a ‘book’ featuring images and texts representative of the group. Within three days a new public group with invited membership dedicated to the idea had been established. A smaller working party then retreated to a private Flickr group. Four months later Issue One of haphazart! magazine was available in print-on-demand and online formats. Following however is a brief critically reflective review of some of the collaborative curatorial, editorial and production processes for Issue Two which commenced in early June 2009. Most of the team had also been involved with Issue One. I was the only newcomer and replaced the person who had undertaken the design for Issue One. I was not provided access to the prior private editorial ruminations but apparently the collaborative curatorial and editorial decision-making practices the group had previously established persisted, and these took place entirely within the discussion forums of a new dedicated private Flickr group. Over a five-month period there were 1066 posts in 54 discussions concerning matters such as: change of format from the previous; selection of themes, artists and images; conduct of and editing of interviews; authoring of texts; copyright and reproduction. The idiom of those communications can be described as: discursive, sporadic, idiosyncratic, resourceful, collegial, cooperative, emphatic, earnest and purposeful. The selection process could not be said to follow anything close to a shared manifesto, or articulation of style. It was established that there would be two primary themes: the square format and contributors’ use of colour. Selection progressed by way of visual presentation and counter presentation until some kind of consensus was reached often involving informal votes of preference. Stretching the Limits of the Flickr Social Tools The magazine editorial collaborators continue to use the facilities with which they are familiar from regular Flickr group participation. However, the strict vertically linear format of the Flickr discussion format is particularly unsuited to lengthy, complex, asynchronous, multithreaded discussion. For this purpose it causes unnecessary strain, fatigue and confusion. Where images are included, the forums have set and maximum display sizes and are not flexibly configured into matrixes. Images cannot readily be communally changed or moved about like texts in a wiki. Likewise, the Flickrmail facility is of limited use for specialist editorial processes. Attachments cannot be added. This opinion expressed by a collaborator in the initial, open discussion for Issue One prevailed among Issue Two participants: do we want the members to go to another site to observe what is going on with the magazine? if that’s ok, then using google groups or something like that might make sense; if we want others to observe (and learn from) the process - we may want to do it here [in Flickr]. (Valentine) The opinion appears socially constructive; but because the final editorial process and production processes took place in a separate private forum, ultimately the suggested learning between one issue and the next did not take place. During Issue Two development the reluctance to try other online collaboration tools for the selection processes requiring visual comparative evaluation of images and trials of sequencing adhered. A number of ingenious methods of working within Flickr were devised and deployed and, in my opinion, proved frustratingly impractical and inefficient. The digital layout, design, collation and formatting of images and texts, all took place on my personal computer using professional software tools. Difficulties arose in progressively sharing this work for the purposes of review, appraisal and proofing. Eventually I ignored protests and insisted the team review demonstrations I had converted for sharing in Google Documents. But, with only one exception, I could not tempt collaborators to try commenting or editing in that environment. For example, instead of moving the sequence of images dynamically themselves, or even typing suggestions directly into Google Documents, they would post responses in Flickr. To Share and to Hold From the first imaginings of Issue One the need to have as an outcome something in one’s hands was expressed and this objective is apparently shared by all in the haphazart! core as an ongoing imperative. Various printing options have been nominated, discussed and evaluated. In the end one print-on-demand provider was selected on the basis of recommendation. The ethos of haphazart! is clearly not profit-making and conflicts with that of the printing organisation. Presumably to maintain an incentive to purchase the print copy online preview is restricted to the first 15 pages. To satisfy the co-requisite to make available the full 120 pages for free online viewing a second host that specialises in online presentation of publications is also utilised. In this way haphazart! members satisfy their common desires for sharing selected visual content and ideas with an online special interest audience and, for a physical object of art to relish—with all the connotations of preciousness, fetish, talisman, trophy, and bookish notions of haptic pleasure and visual treasure. The irony of publishing a frozen chunk of the ever-flowing Flickriver, whose temporally changing nature is arguably one of its most interesting qualities, is not a consideration. Most of them profess to be simply satisfying their own desire for self expression and would eschew any critical judgement as to whether this anarchic and discursive mode of operation results in a coherent statement about contemporary photographic abstraction. However there remains a distinct possibility that a number of core haphazart!ists aspire to transcend: popular taste; the discernment encouraged in camera clubs; and, the rhetoric of those involved professionally (Bourdieu et al.); and seek to engage with the “awareness of illegitimacy and the difficulties implied by the constitution of photography as an artistic medium” (Chamboredon 130). Incoherence: A Technical Note My personal experience of photography ranges from the filmic to the digital (Holmes, "Bridging Adelaide"). For a number of years I specialised in facsimile graphic reproduction of artwork. In those days I became aware that films were ‘blind’ to the psychophysical affect of some few particular paint pigments. They just could not be reproduced. Even so, as I handled the dozens of images contributed to haphazart!2, converting them from the pixellated place where Flickr exists to the resolution and gamut of the ink based colour space of books, I was surprised at the number of hue values that exist in the former that do not translate into the latter. In some cases the affect is subtle so that judicious tweaking of colour levels or local colour adjustment will satisfy discerning comparison between the screenic original and the ‘soft proof’ that simulates the printed outcome. In other cases a conversion simply does not compute. I am moved to contemplate, along with Harrison and Bartell (op. cit.) just how much of the experience of media in the shared digital space is incomparably new? Acknowledgement Acting on the advice of researchers experienced in cyberethnography (Bruckman; Suler, "Ethics") I have obtained the consent of co-collaborators to comment freely on proceedings that took place in a private forum. 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Magazine/Discuss/image selections…” [discussion post]. 2009. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/haphazartmagazin/discuss/72157613147017532/>. Xu, Hongtao, Xiangdong Zhou, Mei Wang, Yu Xiang, and Baile Shi. “Exploring Flickr’s Related Tags for Semantic Annotation of Web Images.” CIVR ’09. ACM, 2009.
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