Journal articles on the topic 'Postmodern romanticism'

AbstractThis article examines and elaborates the nature of subjective experience by drawing on a variety of perspectives in recent philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis. The question of subjectivity has been much debated in each of these disciplines. In contrast with postmodern thinkers who wish to discard subjectivity altogether, I discuss alternative ways to understand and conceptualize subjectivity, or self-consciousness. I consider a tradition of thinkers that includes Sartre, Fichte, and the early German Romantics, who conceptualize self-consciousness as a "being-familiar-with-oneself" that is prior to all reflection. I argue that a developmental corollary to this approach can be found in the psychological research of Daniel Stern, who attributes to infants a "simple non-self-reflexive awareness," while Jacques Lacan's discussion of the specular misrecognitions of the self complicates any simply rendering of "mirroring." By thus combining epistemological, developmental, and phenomenological treatments of the self, I believe it is possible to achieve a conception of subjectivity that avoids the snares of Cartesian essentialism.

The article devoted to the genesis of the synthesis of the arts. The main research method is the cultural-historical approach, which allows considering this phenomenon in a historical perspective. Four stages were identified in the development of the arts: the primary syncretism of arts in primitive cultures; the separation of certain types of art and their acquisition of independence; the synthesis of the arts; the postmodern synesthesia of arts. The main ways of interaction of arts are determined: dominance, fusion, inclusion and juxtaposition. The authors of the article concluded that globalization, the development of technology, new types of communication contribute to the further complication and transformation of the synthesis of the arts, and such concepts close to it as “pluralism”, “interaction of arts”, “synesthesia” and “intermediality”. Broad prospects are opening up for the study of intermediality and multimedia as new heterogeneous semiotic systems.

The essence of the series of essays published by the magazine is that with a maximum compactness of presentation it provides a summary of the main phenomena of world artistic culture covered in general, both from the point of view of the general historical process, and in relation to the various forms of art (literature, the visual arts, architecture, music, theater and cinema). At the same time, the usual categorization of national schools and division into separate types of art with the genre specification inherent in each of them is overcome, which meets the positive trends of globalization and provides a holistic view of artistic phenomena. The following artistic and historical periods are considered in a stepwise manner: the Ancient world, Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque Period, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Post-Romanticism, the First Modern Period, the Second Modern Period, the Third Modern Period, the Postmodern Period, and as an afterword — “The Golden Age of Russian Artistic Culture”.

The reviewer analyses the monograph Problematic-Thematic Units and Philosophical­-Esthetical Parameters of the British Post-Postmodern Novel (Kyiv, 2020) written by Dmy­tro Drozdovskyi, a Ukrainian scholar from Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, member of The European Society for the Study of English (Bulgarian branch). In the monograph, the author has outli­ned the theory of the post-postmodern novel based on the analysis of the key novels of contemporary British fiction (David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Sarah waters, Mark Haddon, etc.). The review states that the Ukrainian scholar has developed the theory proposed by Fredric Jameson regarding the post-postmodern features of Cloud Atlas and also discusses the concept of meta-modernity as one of the sections in the post­-postmodern literary paradigm in the UK. Drozdovskyi argues that meta-modernism cannot be the only term that explains all the peculiarities of contemporary British fiction, which also cannot be outlined as meta-modern but as post-postmodern. The scholar provides a new theory of the novel based on the exploitation of real and unreal historical facts and imagined alternative histories and multifaceted realities. Further­more, the reviewer pays attention to the contribution this monograph has for world literary studies spotlighting the theory of literary meta-genre patterns, as Drozdo­vskyi provides a theory according to which literary periods can be divided into those in which the carnival is the dominant meta-genre pattern (like postmodernism) and those that exploit the mystery as the meta-genre pattern (post-postmodernism). The reviewer analyses the key thematic units explained by Drozdovskyi as the key ones that determine the semiosphere of the contemporary British novel (post-metaphysical and post-positivist thinking of the characters, medicalisation of the humanitarian di­scourse, and the representation of the temporal unity of different realities). The scho­lar also states that the post-postmodern British novel exploits the findings of German Romanticism and Kant’s philosophy.

This article examines the specificity of the formation of the culture of Spain, which is determined by its unique complex historical fate. The Iberian Peninsula was inhabited by various peoples, which determined the vector of the formation of Spanish culture as a mixture of mutually influencing cultures.The European culture traditional periodization, describing Western European countries' culture development, passing through Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the era of cultural and historical change, Modern and Postmodern, does not work on Spanish cultural material.The complexity, uneven development of the history of Spain, the history of Spanish culture for a long time left aside fundamentally important issues - Spanish culture specific culturalfeatures definition, that create its unique cultural code.

The author summarizes Blake studies of the 21st century. The beginning of the modern era of Blake studies can be considered with the paradigm of deconstruction. At the end of the 20th century, synthetic analysis took a special place in Blake studies, when Blake’s illuminated books were studied as an inseparable unity of verbal and visual. Blake’s legacy has undergone a significant evolution related to deconstruction and postmodern approaches, and linguistic research. The development of traditional areas of research, such as psychoanalysis, textual criticism of manuscripts, religious and mystical allusions, and comparative studies is also traced. Postmodernism, which owes much to the Romanticism (i.e. the concept of irony, fragmentation, the category of the exalted, the original lonely hero), brought new features to Blake studies and greatly contributed to its approval among canonical authors of the Romanticism. In modern Blake studies, such areas as gender studies, postcolonial studies, studies in digital reality environments are most actively developing. Starting from the 2000s, the main direction in Blake studies has become reception, that is, the cultural influence of Blake’s writings on later culture, including the culture of other countries: poetry, literature, music and cinema. Each new era reveals fundamentally similar features and adds meanings to Blake: this process is going from symbolism and psychoanalysis to the present day.

The author summarizes Blake studies of the 21st century. The beginning of the modern era of Blake studies can be considered with the paradigm of deconstruction. At the end of the 20th century, synthetic analysis took a special place in Blake studies, when Blake’s illuminated books were studied as an inseparable unity of verbal and visual. Blake’s legacy has undergone a significant evolution related to deconstruction and postmodern approaches, and linguistic research. The development of traditional areas of research, such as psychoanalysis, textual criticism of manuscripts, religious and mystical allusions, and comparative studies is also traced. Postmodernism, which owes much to the Romanticism (i.e. the concept of irony, fragmentation, the category of the exalted, the original lonely hero), brought new features to Blake studies and greatly contributed to its approval among canonical authors of the Romanticism. In modern Blake studies, such areas as gender studies, postcolonial studies, studies in digital reality environments are most actively developing. Starting from the 2000s, the main direction in Blake studies has become reception, that is, the cultural influence of Blake’s writings on later culture, including the culture of other countries: poetry, literature, music and cinema. Each new era reveals fundamentally similar features and adds meanings to Blake: this process is going from symbolism and psychoanalysis to the present day.

Summary This article presents a reading of Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s Samuel Zborowski in the context of Juliusz Słowacki’s poetic drama with the same title. The comparison of the two texts is intended to highlight their similarities and differences in their treatment of history and their use of Romantic and our modern episteme. The analysis looks at the following issues: 1/ the subjective perspective which organizes the hermeneutics of the past; 2/ the metaphysical premise which determines the status of the historical reconstruction; 3/ the historical reconstruction itself; and 4/ the nature of the communal project which signposts each writer’s reflection on the course of Polish history. The article argues that Rymkiewicz’s historical essay is an attempt at a reactivation of Romanticism within a postmodern (though with some modernist elements) framework.

The article deals with the turn of the poetry of linear narrative into three-dimensional shapes, while topography and other spatial disciplines becomes an important tool to understand the meaning of new hypertextual narrative. Relying on the metaphors of Ted Nelson, the creator of the concept of hypertext about the magical and oneiric nature of a nonlinear story, the article represents the relationships between the topography of the spiritual world of the British Romanticism, written media transformation to a three-dimensional spatial structure in Nelson’s hypertext project and postmodern practices of cultural dismantling. The article concludes that the traditional writing about hypertext is often not able to cover part of its features; the attention is drawn to the nature of hybrid art/scientific analysis of the new, intermedial “writing”.

The peculiarity of the series of essays published by the magazine is that with the maximum compactness of the presentation, it provides a summary of the main phenomena of world artistic culture, covered in General both from the point of view of the General historical process, and in relation to various types of creativity (literature, fne art, architecture, music, theater and cinema). At the same time, the usual categorization of national schools and the division into separate types of art with the genre specifcation inherent in each of them is overcome, which meets the positive trends of globalization and provides a holistic view of artistic phenomena. The following artistic and historical periods are considered in stages: the Ancient world, Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Postromanticism, Modern I, Modern II, Modern III, Postmodern, and as an afterword — «The Golden age of Russian artistic culture».

The problem-thematic unit “Finance” is outlined in the theoretical work “The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction” (2018). The importance of this unit is due to the presence of texts in which to understand the worldview of the characters it is important to take into account the socio-economic environment in which the characters live and which affects their behavior. In the novels “NW” (2012) by Zadie Smith, “Other People’s Money” (2011) by Justin Cartwright and “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim” (2010) by Jonathan Coe, the writers offer a new representation of the image of money, which distances money from the material world and becomes a transcendental value. Monetary processes are perceived as imaginary phenomena that the characters perceive speculatively. This leads to cataclysms and painful experiences arising from the loss of the characters of their work and the total banking crisis. The representation of money in the novels exploits the tendency that contemporary British authors discover trends related to German philosophy and the ideas of Kantianism. Money is not a form of achieving material goods, but a tool that shows that the characters are able to create another virtual world, which can exist as a speculative phenomenon. The presented range of novels confirms the ideas of B. Shalahinov that the sources of philosophical thought of German Romanticism were nourishing both for the Modern period and the Post-postmodern one, in particular exploited in the British post-postmodern novels.

The object of the proposed cycle of essays is that with a maximal compactness of presentment it presents a cumulative overview of the chief phenomena of world artistic culture, spanned in whole, both from the perspective of an overall historical process and in relation to the various arts (literature, the visual arts, architecture, music, theater and cinema). At the same time, it avoids the customary rubrication according to national schools and division into separate arts forms with the specifi cation of genre inherent to each one of them, which is in accord with the positive tendencies of globalization and provides an integral vision of artistic phenomena. A phased examination of the following periods of art history is foreseen: the Ancient World, Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque period, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the 1st Modern style, the 2nd Modern style, the 3rd Modern style, the Postmodern style, and as an afterword — “The Golden Age of Russian Artistic Culture.”

This paper deals with musical neoclassicism in the context of modernism, and shows that some neoclassical features, usually considered to be reactionary and retrograde, could and should be understood as modernist. This kind of contextualization is especially important when Serbian postwar music is in question. Neoclassicism in Serbian music began in a specific ideological milieu. Paradoxically, and despite its "call for order" characteristics, it turned out to be a kind of modernistic phenomenon. On one hand it received all typical shapes of European modernism, while on the other it remains as a typical idiom of postwar Serbian musical production, blending in perfectly with the postmodern. These issues are argued and proved through analysis of some pieces written by Dusan Radic during the 1950?s. We see a kind of "disguised" modernism in the composer's subversion of the norms of national romanticism and socialist realism in the neoclassical choir piece Gungulice (1953), a modernism that is based on Freud's "reaction-formation" notion. Then, a more radical kind of modernism is followed in the piece The List for chamber ensemble (1952? 1954), arguing the notion of radical in the context of Serbian music, and coming to the conclusion that different interpretations of this piece as avant-garde, radical, or neoclassical/modernist can occur as a consequence of the listener's position. In the case of The Tower of Sculls we observe the same kind of "disguised" modernism, but now directly interwoven with proto-postmodern elements, coming from popular music practices, which is also the case in other pieces by Dusan Radic. The composer?s nonconformity, lack of pretentiousness, and inclination toward the simplicity of everyday things form his modernistic identity.

The paper is based on the hypothesis that the motive of madness is very common in literary works starting from the literature of the old age to modern and postmodern literary production. Many famous world writers have worked on this motive in various literary epochs, genera and species. In antique comedy, man's insanity was portrayed in a witty, playful and humorous way, and the same poetic, approach to the treatment of this motive is also of later comedical works. In tragedy, madness is often the cause of starvation, but also the ability to get to know essential knowledge, truth and ideas. Sometimes madness is considered obsessive, sick, or just punishment. In Renaissance literature, this state of the human spirit is seen through the theory of human wonders, attributing melancholy to educated young men, and hysteria to young women. It was caused by disappointment, suffering, unrequited love or sin. In the focus of our research were found some of the world's renowned literary creators, moral psychologists, who along with each psychological portrait also offer ethical values that characterize character. The theme of this paper is the motive of madness in some literary works. This paper is an attempt to address the complex issues of insanity in world literature through literary research supported by psychology. The aim of the paper is to examine the presence of the motif of madness, its understanding and interpretation from the ancient Greek drama, through the literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, to modern and postmodern literary traditions. The image of madness is given through various manifestations of character behavior, that it is authentic or irradiated, and through the comments of other heroes, eyewitnesses and interpreters.

Alban Berg has long been seen as the most conservative member of the Second Viennese School, a ‘moderate modernist’, an accessible throwback to Romanticism for audiences afraid of the supposedly more radical innovations of Schoenberg or Webern, and hence for much of the 20th century has suffered from the stigma of a perceived lack of progressivism. Yet recent decades have witnessed a gradual shift in critical opinion on this issue, coinciding with a loosening of the claims of high modernity and arguably a move to a more ‘postmodern’ outlook. This paper explores further the relationship between the historical tendency in Berg’s music and the complex notion of modernity through an analysis of the early String Quartet op. 3, his first large-scale atonal composition, focusing on the idea of synthesis between old and new, conservative and progressive — the nature of the modernity which arises out of his music’s relationship with the past. This is the most problematic category in relation to advancing Berg’s credentials as a modernist but thus possibly the most interesting, and also useful since it can ultimately allow a critique of the whole notion of the modern imperative.

?Neo-medievalism? has become well known concept in contemporary social theory. It is widely used by historians, sociologists of culture and international relations theorists, not only for the critical reconsideration of heritage from ?historical? Middle Ages, but also for the easier and more accurate distinguishing of their cultural-historical and international-political aspirations through analogies with contemporary social processes. This paper deals with the emergence of ?neo-medieval motives? in social theory and philosophy since Romanticism, throughout ?catholic cultural renewal? and ?Russian religious renaissance?, up to their influences on ?theories of crisis of modernity? from the first half of 20th century and on significant works of Spengler, Toynbee, Ortega y Gasset and Pitirim Sorokin. Then, author follows the revival of interests for Middle Ages in the seventies of the last century along with the onset of postmodernism, and also the first use of ?neo-medieval model? for explanation of international relations transformation (in the work of Hedley Bull and his followers). Finally, contemporary ?neo-medieval? tendencies in scientific approaches are being observed - from the systemic transformation from a modern to a postmodern political economy, throughout urban studies, sociology and philosophy seeking again the indisputable epistemological support in religion and tradition.

The article reveals some features of postmodern aesthetics that were borrowed by modern literature from romantics, and are now undergoing a period of criticism. It is shown how a fiction reflects the continuity between contemporary literature and previous literary phenomena, which consists in the perception, transformation, and critical rethinking of aesthetic ideas and concepts. For this purpose, the genesis of Norminton’s novel Arts and Wonders was traced and a literary technique such as ekphrasis, that means a verbal description of a painting, was researched. An analysis of the two most significant ekphrasises – Vertumn and The Librarian – showed that the author of the novel raises the problem of copy or plagiarism, which today has gained particular relevance both in the world of art and in the academic environment. It was showed that Norminton solves this issue by referring to the traditional concept of mimesis. Despite the declaration of the need to imitate nature, Arts and Wonders demonstrates that the contemporary author asserts his right to free creative imagination, including the interpretation of historical facts and figures. The literary text refers to the artifacts which are presented in the arsenal of culture that are freely combined according to a kaleidoscope principle. Raising the question of the dialectical unity of such aesthetic categories as “beauty” and “ugliness”, Norminton enters into a polemic with the forerunner of postmodernism – romanticism. At the same time, the writer also poses questions about the correlation in the artist’s work of parts and the whole, about the need to achieve a balance of proportions between the elements that make up a work of art. Determining the genre originality of the novel, the author of the article concludes that it is a complex synthetic form that combines the features of picaresque novel, a biographical novel, a travel book, a historical novel, an artist's novel, and a Bildungsroman, which as a result forms a new genre variety – an adventure novel about the artist.

This article tackles what seems to be a revival of fragmentary fiction in English in the 21st century. It briefly traces the lineage of critical interest in the fragment from German Romanticism through Bertolt Brecht and Modernism to postmodern film studies, in an attempt to highlight not only the temporal, but also the spatial and visual dimension of discontinuity evinced by recent fragmentary fiction. Six novels published between 2005 and 2017 are discussed sequentially, in a manner redolent of cinematic movement: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder 2005, Anne Enright’s The Gathering 2007, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing 2016, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West 2017, Ali Smith’s Autumn 2016, and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo 2017. The formal fragmentariness of these novels is read in connection to their recurrent themes: trauma, loss, death, grief, exile, displacement, memory and violence. In the process, the opposition between fragmentariness on the one hand and realism on the other is challenged; the argument draws on William Burroughs, Tom McCarthy and Fernand Léger. Although they are fragmentary in very different ways, all of the novels under scrutiny are what one may term “mainstream” novels, most of them boasting large readerships and having either won or been shortlisted for literary prizes such as the Booker Prize, thus seemingly confirming Ted Gioia’s contention that “mainstream literary fiction is falling to pieces”.

The formation of a new dominant type of culture at the beginning of the 21st century – metamodernism – required the creation of psychological images of a person that would face the challenges of the modern diverse and contradictory world with its all-pervasive virtualization and the creation of previously unseen simulacra of very high orders. Due to these, arose the need for a holistic syncretic reconstruction of psychology as a contradictory unity of science, art and craft. Metamodernism suggests that psychology go on to describe the nature of the psyche and human behavior, using the language of a new aesthetic form – pragmatic romanticism without ideologies. Why shift the research focus from studying a person’s attitude to self, activities and to other people, to expressing this attitude so that one begins to see the study of psychological problems presented by a person, the way one expresses one’s attitude to them, based on true scale of their meaning for one’s personality. The transition happens from studying “attitude to the problem” to studying “expression of the attitude to the problem” consequently excluding provocativeness and irony from psychological tools, which are replaced by a warm human attitude, which is supported by self-reflection, intertextuality and by various references to other cultural forms of expression of the attitude to the problem. Metamodern psychology does not choose a modernist romantic claim to a deep knowledge of the psyche and human behavior, or a postmodern superficiality of such knowledge, but a metamodern depthlessness, in which the presence of a depth of the psyche is recognized, acknowledging that psychology can occasionally peer into, sometimes revealing things previously unseen by it. Guided by the principle of “fluctuation,” it explores as objects of study trivial psychic and behavioral mechanisms and phenomena that, from a modernist and postmodern aesthetic point of view, habitually seem unattractive, simplistic or trivial to view their always existing natural beauty without irony and change them attitude. It suggests starting to view the psychologist as a go-between the client’s inner world, containing a variety of forms hidden in its movements, and psychological concepts, as a result of which it tightly connects the psychological plan formed in the process of such interaction with its implementation.

The article highlights the essence of the concept «ethnodesign». Features of using ethnodesign tools in creative socio-cultural projects of artistic institutions by future and leading designers are considered. The following etnotematics are rethinking: national motives of folk culture, fine and decorative arts, architecture, interest in traditional decoration and colors. The author analyzes the concepts of ethnodesign and the specifics of its use in different time periods. Cosmopolitanism of design solutions and internationality of figurative language make design products understandable for the masses, regardless of religious, national, ideological, etc. Therefore, there is a need for national identity in society, the need to promote the product on the international market as a national brand, there is a rethinking of the reference to cultural heritage. In modern artistic institutions, ethnodesign encourages future designers to engage in creative, research, analytical, and cognitive activities.Modern ethnodesign should successfully combine elements of traditional decorative and applied art solutions, as well as a combination of aesthetically related colorful and graphic properties. Understanding the complexity of national traditions and bold experiments of design students shows the polystylistic variety of author's interpretations in the General line of postmodern ethnic romanticism. The ethnodesign inspires by folk art and ethnic motives. It is applied the stylistic and decorative techniques for folk art and crafts development in interior design, graphic works, landscape design, industrial design, and clothing design. Despite the freedom in global design, the national design space remains an insufficiently formed model of national design, so further development is a priority for Ukrainian design theorists and practitioners

Abstract In the diverse space of contemporary music, the fascinating and controversial personality of the Welsh composer Karl Jenkins, which is surprising from several perspectives, stands out. Open to assimilating and processing music from various sources (academic, liturgical, folk, entertainment, oriental, exotic), the all-round musician Karl Jenkins impresses the public with unexpected artistic choices, giving up the hypostasis of instrumentalist of the jazz-rock band Nucleus and of the group Softmachine in favour of the postmodern creator he has become today, synthetizing trends from musical compositions of the last decades of the 20th century. Once with the return to the functional system, either through minimalism or through neo-romanticism, the artist has successfully covered a potential sonority path of modern opposites, also evoking references to creative models of the past. We are referring to the musical valorizing of the sacred in a synthetic vision between tradition and innovation, in the works included in the Adiemus cycle, in the opus choir Missa for Peace and, more particularly, in the Requiem (2005), a significant score in the contemporaneity. The manner in which the composer, while resorting to a musical genre originating from the Roman Catholic cult and drawing on the liturgical text of the Mass for the dead, inserted Japanese poetry, written following the structure of haiku, belonging to representative authors - Gozan Koshigaya, Issho Kosughi, Hokusai Katsushika, Kaga-no-Chiyo, is highly surprising. This study aims to highlight the interweaving imagined by Karl Jenkins between the two cultures as well as to conduct a semantic analysis of an opus in which the relationships between music and words entail a highly emotional response.

The article attempts to highlight the traces of memory in the theory, history and practice of architecture. The subject of research is the existing forms of memory in architecture. It is traditionally accepted that the “history of architecture” as a science is the main repository of knowledge about the evolution of architecture. Facts and artifacts, descriptions of monuments and cities are retained in it. The article emphasizes that the traditional “history of architectural objects” is not the only form of memory. Another equally important and complicated aspect of the architectural memory is detected during the decoding of the evolution of project activity and its language. Analysis of the evolution of architecture allowed us to differentiate the epochs in which historical thinking prevails: the Renaissance, Romanticism, Eclecticism, Art Deco, Postmodernism. They are characterized by such ways of thinking as dialogical, historical and typological, historical and associative. They are opposed to design approaches in which abstract thinking dominates (Art Nouveau and Modernism). The article shows that the concept of architectural memory has many shades and manifests itself in a variety of different forms of professional consciousness. As historical knowledge, memory exists in such forms as: a chronological description, science of history, evolutionary studies, catalog of styles, museum, archive. In designing and its language, memory is represented in such forms as canon, dialogue with bygone era, norm, architectural fantasy, remembrance, historical association, reconstruction, restoration and others. It is shown that the most important way of storing and transferring information is the architectural language and compositional logic. Postmodern consciousness raised the problem of loss of memory and the development of architectural language and communication of culture.

The article examines the school of integral traditionalism as an intellectual phenomenon of European culture of the XX-XXI centuries. An excursion was made into the history of the formation of this phenomenon, an overview of its directions, personalities and key concepts. The connection of traditionalism with idealistic philosophy, Romanticism, right-wing ideologies and academic religious studies is traced. The study concluded that integral traditionalism, as a special form of Western esotericism, is an organic part of European culture. Its place in the space of the latter can be represented in the form of a diagram consisting of three circles. The largest of them will represent idealistic philosophy as a whole (from the origins to the present day). The circle of a smaller diameter inscribed in it will be perennialism – a system of ideas about Philosophia perennis as a common source and secret (esoteric) content of different religions and spiritual teachings. An even smaller circle inscribed in the second circle will be integral traditionalism itself as the most "concentrated" form of perennialism, characterized by a high degree of rationalization and self-removal from the semantic codes of Modern and Postmodern. Moreover, all the three circles can be divided into two parts – connected with a living spiritual tradition (through initiation) and devoid of such a connection. As a form of Western esotericism, integral traditionalism claims a fundamentally "gnostic" status. This feature separates it both from religion, in which, in the words of R. Guenon, "intellectual elements are mixed with emotional", and from secular science, which, with all its rigor and objectivity, remains entirely a "profane" phenomenon. At the same time, the principles of traditionalism, distinguished by their "holistic" character, have prospects of application to various fields of humanitarian knowledge.

Taking into account the factual material, research methods, and tasks, the authors trace the evolution/changes in Georgian comparative studies. It is notable that typological approaches, along with contact-genetic ones, are now actively used. These changes become firmly established due to the studies of iconic figures and periods, which attract the special attention of the scholars. Eurocentric concepts give place to other ones that have their basis in the study of the national literature and include philosophical, anthropological, psychological, and religious factors in the field of research. A lot of attention has been given to the principles of selecting literary texts for translation. The field of Georgian comparative studies has been remarkably changed/updated in the late 20th — early 21st centuries. Along with historians of literature, the theorists, critics, translators, and specialists in European and Oriental languages have been involved, which affected the level of comparative studies. Among the raised issues are reception, imagology, typology of anti-colonial narratives, genre transformations, postmodern discourse, etc. The character of Georgian-Ukrainian comparative studies changed drastically: it is obvious in the approaches/assessments of literary translation and in all connecting issues in general. Comparative studies came as close as possible to the theory of literature, which let the researchers (R. Khvedelidze, N. Naskidashvili, S. Chkhatarashvili, I. Mchedeladze) update the methodology and intensify their work on the diff erent levels of research, regardless of the presence/absence of contexts. The present surge in Georgian comparative studies started in the 2010s. It is connected to the organization of effective specialized research centers. Of great interest are the comparative studies aiming to show the history of Georgian literature as an individual version of the world literature (I. Ratiani), to identify the features of the Georgian literary canon based on the three main literary models (Middle Ages, Romanticism, post-Soviet), with a focus on the combination of ‘canonical’ and ‘non-canonical’ in innovative writing.

Dentro de su clasificación genérica, La La Land fue etiquetada como musical romántico. Aunque no hay duda de que se trata de un musical, el artículo pretende reflexionar sobre su consideración como obra romántica, ya que también se pueden encontrar rasgos antirrománticos dentro del contexto postmoderno en el que fue creada. Para ello, se hará una introducción a los conceptos de Romanticismo y antirromanticismo y luego se abordará el estudio de la película desde tres ángulos distintos que parecen convivir en ella: desde aquellas películas que narran los sueños de un personaje por ser una estrella del mundo artístico, el melodrama romántico y el difícil equilibrio entre vida personal y carrera profesional. Se trata solo de tres de algunos de los géneros o tipos de películas que inspiran el guion de La La Land que, como pastiche postmoderno, busca un mensaje original y actual partiendo de la cinefilia, el homenaje y la nostalgia.

AbstractIn response to what postmodern thinkers have called 'homelessness' and to the increasing destruction of the natural environment, some thinkers have suggested that humans should organise themselves into bioregional communities. These communities will be self-governing, relatively autonomous, small groups based on watersheds, river drainages, lakeshores, or other bioregional features. Their core values will be identification with, and care for, the land. I explore a form of this viewpoint, called 'homely bioregionalism'. I argue that this position has little real connection with postmodern thoughts on place and home, it has totalitarian overtones and, even when interpreted as an empirical recommendation, incorporates an optimistic and romanticised conception of 'home'. The phenomenon of ignoring or denying our environmental surroundings is, I argue, a real one, and can be called 'bioregional denial'. Homely bioregionalism, however, does not constitute a workable alternative to bioregional denial.

Background. From the era of romanticism to the present day there is a stable interest of world-renowned virtuoso musicians to such kind of creativity as transcription, which makes it possible to speak not only as a performer, but also to express themselves in the composer’s perspective. Many prominent pianists of different eras have made a significant contribution to this branch of musical art, we need only recall the names of F. Liszt, K. Tausig G. von Bulow, F. Busoni, L. Godowsky, Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould. Among artists of our time, it should be noted the Canadian piano virtuoso and composer Marc-Andre Hamelin, for which transcriptions are characterized by a harmonious combination of technical complications and modernization of the selected thematic material, which provides his music a wide audience. A striking confirmation of this are the thousands of views of his transcriptions on the channel in YouTube. Perhaps one of the secrets of such popularity is not only the actualization of the musical language of the original, but also The article is devoted to the specifics of the ironic, as one of the manifestations of the comic, in creative heritage of the world-famous Canadian pianist and composer Marc-André Hamelin On material Of “Variations on a Theme of Paganini”, which are the most illustrative example in this perspective, the features of the artist’s work with a quote thematic material. Identifies certain dominants of the composer’s style, among them: the destruction elected canons, their modification and approach to the aesthetics of the modern world perception through the use of the musical language of the XX–XXI centuries, as well as the desire for harmonious unification, combining styles of different eras within one work. Objectives. The object of research is a musical composition; its subject of research is the identification of the specifics of the irony in the composer’s style. The purpose of the article is to consider the trends of manifestation of irony and the stylistic orientations in the composer’s work of Hamelin, referring to the most indicative in this aspect of the work “Variations on a Theme of Paganini”. Methodology. Structural-functional and genre-style methods are applied in the consideration of the compositional and stylistic specificity of “Variations on a Theme of Paganini”. To identify the peculiarities of the composer’s work with quotations, the method of comparative analysis was used. The methodological basis consists of the concepts of postmodern citation put forward by such leading researchers and representatives of postmodernism as Umberto Eco and Sigmund Bauman. Presenting the main material. The figure of Niccolo Paganini, enveloped in a mysterious halo, attracted the attention of contemporaries and many artists of subsequent generations, and his creative heritage found a significant response in the musical environment. One of the most famous works of N. Paganini has a cycle “Twenty-four capris” for solo violin, among which the most frequently used for a variety of composer’s interpretations was the theme of Caprice No. 24. Interesting is the fact that it remains relevant, continuing even in the twenty-first century to attract attention. A striking example of this is the Hamelin’s “Variations on a Theme of Paganini” (2011). This work, written for solo piano, is a dedication to the American composer, pianist, conductor, teacher Yehud Weiner and his wife Susan Dewen-Weiner. In his interpretation of Caprice 24, the composer chooses a free interpretation of his figurative and substantial side. This is evidenced not only by the increase in the number of variations (14 instead of 11), but also many other aspects that appear at different levels of composition of the whole. It turns out the specificity of the composer’s work with the quote material, which permeates the whole work, the tendency to its ironic interpretation, as well as harmonious coexistence within the work of styles of different eras, their combination. Results. This work is one of the most striking embodiments of the ironic in the work of the Canadian artist. Here is typical for his style work with the used material quote, the basis of which – the destruction of the selected sample, bringing atypical for the original harmonic, melodic, rhythmic turns. Most often such “curvature” is used at the first posted quote topics. The composer tends to synthesize several styles within the framework of the work, this is often achieved by combining one of the styles of past eras with the styles of modernity, while not contrasting, isolating, contrasting them, but creating a melodic, tonal-harmonic and compositional integrity. Conclusion. Hamelin’s “Variations on a Theme of Paganini” represent a vivid manifestation of the ideas of postmodern worldview in music, which is based on the ironic attitude to the sample of the past.

Even in today’s “postmodern” world, Norwid cannot be reduced to a single formula. He is rather a “constellation,” requiring that readers join the “continual discussion” on issues specific to a given era. His focus is on humanity, which he regards from a dualist perspective that necessitates pursuing a synthesis of matter and spirit under the sign of ethical universalism. Norwid refers to the “cupola of ‘a monologue-that-keeps-parabolizing-itself’” andregards culture as the parable of the world. His original aesthetics of “whiteness” refers, as it were, to the biblical “gentle gust of wind,” which announces God’s presence and indicates the rejection of the Romantic veneration for volcanoes, which he contrasts with the importance of work. This kind of philosophy, developed by Brzozowski, Tischner and John Paul II, has led to the self-limiting revolution of Solidarity in the years 1980-81, and ultimately to the de-legitimization and fall of communism; finally, after the bloody myth of the French Revolution reigned for two hundred years, this philosophy altered the paradigm of historical changes around the world. Norwid elaborated on the industrial-era Romanticism and opposed martyrological messianism, developing the original idea of a “messianism of work,”linking it with a vision of human Church, which “burns through the Globe with conscience.”He would contrast the global church with the parochial “church-turned-living-room.”Human beings count more than institutions, he argued, just like goodness prevails over formal sacraments. With the ultimate goal defined as the resurrection of the world, art becomes a church of work. Norwid embraced an anthropocentric perspective, in which human beings are called upon “to un-make” [od-poczynać] the mistakes of the past, and thus to begin afresh at a whole new level. With his language and style Norwid was constructing a new social stratum: intelligentsia (Łapiński), understanding it as the nation’s copula, i.e. the unifying force of conscienceand the collective consciousness. It would form an interpersonal, horizontal transcendence spanning the length and breadth of societies. The opposite of nation and its culture is “empire” – the root of subjugation – which particularly enslaved Central and Eastern Europe. Of special importance is the clash between Asian civilization and the “Roman” one, i.e. Christianity or Western Europe. However, the poet opposes Slavs to both the Westerners and the Easterners, emphasizing the processualand not the essentialistcharacter of national cultures. The question whether Norwid’s work is fundamentally dialogic or monologic in character continues to divide scholars. However, Norwid is in a way a Master or teacherwho embodies the Other and incarnates Wisdom in his Voice and Gesture. The nature of Wisdom is anthropocentric because man is a priest, although “involuntary / And immature,” which abolishes the distinction between the sacred and the profane. Through his ethical universalism Norwid provides a solution to the Enlightenment crisis of universal reason. Emancipation of the individual should not entail abandoning a sense of belonging, which is something that Norwid’s modernism shares with that of Central Europeans (Ch. Delsol). Understood as the expression of collective desires, cultures shape responsibility and a sense of belonging, at the same time constituting an answer to the crisis of narcissistic individualism characteristic for our times.

El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar la concepción de la identidad cultural europea que se derivade la visión deconstruccionista postmoderna. En el artículo se rastrean los orígenes ilustrados yrománticos de esta corriente de pensamiento, así como su actual componente anti-metafísico, que lohace contrario a toda idea sustantiva de una identidad cultural europea. La "ideología de la diferencia",que subyace a este planteamiento teórico-cultural, se analiza igualmente en su trasvase al discursopolítico-cultural dominante dentro del actual proceso de integración de la "Nueva Europa". Por elcontrario, se apunta a los orígenes clásicos (grecorromanos) y cristianos como raíces histórico-axiológicas de la auténtica identidad europea y como base desde la que superar la decadencia espiritualy cultural que sufre hoy la "Vieja Europa".

Abstract From a social-constructionist standpoint, emotional expressions are constitu-ents of lived narratives, and gain their meaning from their position within these narratives. These special forms of narrative, termed emotional scenarios, are themselves lodged within a broader cultural and historical landscape. This article compares major features of romantic love scenarios as they have changed from 19th century romanticist culture, through 20th century modern-ism, and into the contemporary postmodern context. We identify major ways in which the individual participant in romantic scenarios may identify the self, gender variations in performance, the character of sequencing in the scenario, and the vocabulary of emotional expression as these have evolved over the past century. Such transformations allow enormous freedom of expression to the contemporary "romantic," but also result in simultaneous loss in both the sense of authenticity and security. (Social Psychology)

Taking into account the fact that, throughout history, certain artworks have been considered as “worth of watching” (according to the Greek etymon ἀξιοϑέατος / aksioteatos), preservation, or theorizing, while others were not, one is led to investigate the various types of evaluative descriptions. Those artworks that are more valuable than others, or simply valuable in themselves on the basis of rather specific features, have always represented the paradigmatic model for the evaluator, thus revealing the identitary nature of value as different from one epoch to another. Our aim has been to discern, with regard to this starting point, the way in which the process of evaluating artworks fits the general matrix of the universal theory of value, with its clearly distinguished levels of evaluation, beginning with value descriptions, continuing through the features of evaluation or abstract qualities of values extracted from these descriptions, and ending with value norms or systems of accepted generalizations in evaluation. Value standpoints in such an evaluation matrix represent dispositions or preferences in procedures, which reflect the norms or signifying concepts of the time. Corresponding procedures, or applications of the hierarchicized signification of artworks, are manifested in all known forms of artwork assessment: attribution, institutionalization, and setting of priorities in terms of exhibition, conservation, acquisition, restoration, and so on. Research in the history of European art-historical ideas has corroborated the hypothesis that, prior to the late 18th century, clear normative patterns were applied when it came to the evaluation of artworks. However, with the emergence of early Romanticism, this could no longer be done in the traditional way. Before the period in question, visual art was created (regardless of some stylistic discrepancies between individual authors) and classified according to well-defined thematic areas and functions. Such qualifications made it possible to distinguish clearly between major stylistic periods, creating the impression of development regardless of the later evaluative classifications of individual cycles in historical production thus understood. A comparison between the axiological matrix and the features of individual historical periods has revealed, on the one hand, a stable relationship between the functionally nomological features of artistic productions and the cultural instrumentalizations of art, and on the other a stable relationship between the overtly semantic conceptualizations in the epoch of modernism and the ostensibly structural mode of artistic expression. In the postmodern period, all that was once understood as the stylistic language of form, or the autonomy of the artefact, has been transformed in the evasive media multiplication of the postindustrial epoch into a whole series of reproductive languages, replicas, transfers, copies, or simulacra, and forced into a relationship of permanent detachment with regard to the “original” (source). Thus, instead of an artwork in context, the context itself is now presented as an artwork, structured all over again according to some of the possible principles in the theoretical choice of interpretation. The impossibility of defining precisely the boundaries of the medium, and its increasing dematerialization, have made it more difficult to apply universal evaluative criteria to a particular artwork, which has led to a conflict between cultural evaluation and the subjection of experience to the semantic functions of evaluations. Nevertheless, recent research on perception in the field of neuroscience has indicated that the sensory perception of the external world and the assignation of meaning to those perceptions indeed happen simultaneously, and that these processes cannot take place separated from one another. The conclusion shows that the modern evaluation conflicts are largely a consequence of an irreversible and entropic state of culture in the 21st century. We should therefore aim at a revision, not so much of the hitherto accepted and standardized values, but rather of the present systems of evaluation and the ensuing evaluative descriptions of art.

“The New Epoch” as a compensating category. Methodological challenges of description and the case of twentieth-century MacedoniaThis article depicts the functions and possible means of describing Macedonian historiosophic and cultural visions stemming from the political transformations of 1991. These are presented against the backdrop of changes in collective consciousness in the 20th century. Issues of research methodology and the identity of the new beginning idea (and its components) in four contexts (genetic, onthological, axiological and processual) are depicted. Within the first of these, attention is drawn to the problems of retrospective temporal orientation, assimilation of the past, “synchrony of history” and reflection of prototypes, a new conceptual network of reconstructed meanings, and selection of causalities. The second context relates to the deliberate-beneficent idea of time, the domination of “structural history”, the constructive application of previous – mainly romantic – historiosophic categories: a nation’s moral predestination (Hegel), crisis as a factor of change (Burckhardt), subordination of the category of history towards freedom in the succession of epochs (Fichte), breakthrough as a stopping of the process of decay (corso – ricorso – Vico), and the importance of periodisation and turning points. The third context includes the following items: the bond of descent towards a claim of newness and liberation, “correcting the lack of fulfilment” of the past, the “positive Apocalypse” of perpetual national revolution, the heroisation of everyday life, the politisation of culture and re-interpretation of tradition: antiquity (the sphere of archaeology), the Middle Ages, folklore, revolts and national renaissance; and the romanticism of sacrifice and lynching in the light of a postmodern neutralisation of heroism. The fourth context consists of socially-compensated elements themselves: a) national (with four indications), state-political (institutional), c) historical-cultural (identifying-imagological), and d) material-economic (pragmatic). The various scenarios for restoring their memory are also present in this part: cleansing in the past, establishment in the present and liberation in the future. Their image is made complete by a short presentation of heritage canonisation patterns and ethnocentric re-evaluation of methodologies in the Macedonian humanities after 1991. „Nowa epoka” jako kategoria kompensacyjna. Metodologiczne wyzwania opisu a casus dwudziestowiecznej MacedoniiW artykule przedstawia się funkcje i możliwe sposoby opisu macedońskich wizji histo­riozoficznych i kulturowych wyrosłych na gruncie politycznego przełomu 1991 roku – ujęte na tle przemian kolektywnej świadomości w XX wieku. Problemy metodologii badań oraz tożsamości idei nowego początku (i jej części składowych) ukazane są w czterech kontek­stach: genetycznym, ontologicznym, aksjologicznym i procesualnym. W ramach pierwszego z nich zwraca się uwagę na takie zagadnienia jak retrospektywna orientacja temporalna, asymilacja przeszłości, „synchronia historii” i odbicia prototypów, nowa konceptualna sieć rekonstruowanych znaczeń, selekcja związków przyczynowych. Drugi kontekst odnosi się do celowościowo-zbawczego wyobrażenia czasu, dominacji „historii strukturalnej”, twórczego zastosowania dawnych – głównie romantycznych – kategorii historiozoficznych: moralnej predestynacji narodu (Hegel), kryzysu jako czynnika zmiany (Burckhardt), podrzędności kategorii historii wobec wolności w następstwie epok (Fichte), przełomu powstrzymującego proces rozkładu (corso – ricorso – Vico), znaczenia periodyzacji i cezur. W trzecim kontekście zawierają się między innymi następujące problemy: więź pochodzenia a roszczenie nowości i wyzwolenia, „korekta niespełnienia” przeszłości, „pozytywna apokalipsa” permanentnej rewolucji narodowej, heroizacja codzienności, polityzacja kultury i interpretacja związku „natura – duch”, reinterpretacja tradycji: antyk (sfera archeologii), średniowieczne, folklor, powstania i odrodzenie narodowe; romantyzm ofiary i samosądu a ponowoczesna neutralizacja heroizmu, nowy epos i tragedia. Na ostatni kontekst składa się omówienie zespołu samych pierwiastków społecznie kompensowanych: (a) narodowego (z czterema wyznacznikami), (b) polityczno-państwowego (instytucjonalnego), (c) historyczno-kulturowego (identyfikacyjno­-imagologicznego), (d) materialno-ekonomicznego (pragmatycznego). Obecne są w nim także różne scenariusze rewindykacji tych pierwiastków: oczyszczenie pamięci – w przeszłości, fundacja pamięci – w teraźniejszości, i wyzwolenie pamięci – w przyszłości. Ich obraz uzupełnia krótkie przedstawienie schematów kanonizacji dziedzictwa i etnocentrycznego przewartościowania metodologii humanistycznych w macedońskiej nauce po 1991 roku.

e article explores the diversity of narrative techniques in Orhan Pamuk’s novel A Strangeness in My Mind. The main idea is that the drama of a private life is told against the background of the drama of the life of Istanbul. To do this, the novel parallels the biographical ‘I’ of the main character and the historical ‘He’ of the City. This comparison provokes the idea of the novel’s close relation to the history of Istanbul and Turkey over the last fifty years. Orhan Pamuk does not spare the reader any of the specific, purely "Turkish problems" with the Kurds and Greeks, as well as the radical and conservative moods and public discontent from the 1950s to the 1980s. The narrative line is developed slowly and minutely,owing to the author's intention to authenticate real events through the perspective of fictional characters and vice versa - to romanticize cultural and purely civilizational processes in the last half century of the development of this part of the border between Europe and Asia. This is the only way to explain the presence of the problem of women's emancipation and the lack of that misunderstood "patriotism" which often prevents the depiction of purely national processes in life. This refutes the widespread opinion that A Strangeness in My Mind is a postmodern novel.

Background. The problem of self-determination of an artist who apprehends oneself as a representative of a certain nation, but is forced to selfactualize in the cultural space of a multinational empire, remained relevant for a long period for the majority of representatives of the Polish creative intelligentsia. Among them, it is appropriate to recall, in first, Karol Szymanowski, whose creative development took place in a multicultural environment. The outstanding musician was feeling his involvement not only in the European tradition in general, but also in the Antique, Eastern, Polish, Russian, and, especially, Ukrainian culture, because his life for 36 years was related with Ukraine. The temporal distance that has formed between the eras, the changes in cultural paradigms that have now taken place, encourage us to rethink the approaches to the various cultural-creating activities of artists in past eras, to evaluate them from modern positions. If we consider multiculturalism in a positive sense – as a phenomenon of social life characterized by coexistence and active interaction within one society of many cultures, then the analysis of Szymanowski’s creative evolution in this context looks relevant for modern cultural figures. At the same time, in Ukraine, there has not yet been a steady interest of scientists in the work by K. Szymanowski, although certain steps are being taken in this direction: PhD theses by Anatolii Kalynychenko, Hanna Seredenko, Oleksandr Serdiuk, Dmitriy Poliachok have appeared that explore some aspects of the Polish artist’s creativity, taking into account modern methodological tools. An important function of stimulating interest in the creative figure of Szymanowski is performed, in particular, by the “Kropyvnytskyi Museum of Musical Culture named after K. Szymanowski” (headed by Olexandr Polyachok) that initiates various projects related to the popularization of Shimanovsky’s creative heritage, including holding scientific conferences and publishing. A significant contribution to the study of various aspects of the K. Szymanowski’s creative activity was made by Polish scientists, in particular, Malgorzata Komorowska, Zofia Helman, Teresa Chilińska, but their works are in a greater degree focused on the analysis of the musician’s creativity in the Polish cultural context. Objectives of the study. This article is destined to examine the creative personality of the Polish artist in a new problematic field. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the creative formation and growth of K. Szymanowski in the context of multiculturalism. The object of analysis is the creative activity of K. Szymanowski; the subject, on which the attention is focused, is the peculiarities of cultural and creative attitudes formation, the principles of artistic activity, the means of cultural communication of K. Szymanowski in the conditions of multiculturalism. Research results. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the identification of little-known facts of the creative biography of K. Szymanowski and their new interpretation, the formation of new ideas about the specifics of his creative approaches both in composing and literary work. The important role of self-education in his creative development, the ability for self-development, conscious cultural pluralism formed in the context of multicultural conditions, a tendency to innovate (for example, intense interest in new artistic and stylistic trends) are emphasized. Attention is drawn to the originality of Szymanowski’s relationships with various cultural environments, with which he was closely linked by fate. After all, his formation as a personality took place under the influence of several cultures, the features of which were intertwined, coexisting in the everyday life of his family estate in the Ukrainian village Timoshivka and Elisavetgrad, the city of his childhood and youth. The significant influence of regular visits to European cultural centers and travels to the countries of the Arab East on the formation of the cultural identity of the artist is also noted. The analysis of archival materials, in particular, comments in the margins of the pages of books from the family library, showed the enormous influence of literary texts on the composer’s cultural identity. Szymanowski carefully read, thought over and discussed with his close ones literary works, various works of philosophers and art historians. Szymanowski’s archives contain notes on the history of art of Ancient Greece in French, the history of the culture of Ancient Rome in German and Russian, extracts from the history of the origins of Christianity, the culture of Sicily and the life of King Roger II, notes from the letters by Seneca, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, works of Novalis, studies on oriental culture, etc. The composer was fascinated by the ideas of the synthesis of cultures (Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, Byzantine, Arabic, Proto-Slavic), of religious syncretism in various forms (Christian modernism, paneroticism, etc.). Embodying his creative intentions, Szymanowski went through a fascination with a wide variety of aesthetic ideas. In the process of realizing artistic synthesis, along with the idea of cultural syncretism, signs of aesthetics of romanticism and impressionism, symbolism and modernism, expressionism and neo-folkloric trend often coexisted and intersected in his works. As a conclusion, we note: the creative formation and evolution of K. Szymanowski took place in multicultural conditions. Realizing himself a descendant of the Polish gentry family, he was at the same time a citizen of the Russian Empire and was formed as a person under the influence of many cultures, which were intricately intertwined in the space where the formation of his individuality took place, which, eventually, determined the multicultural profile of his artistic work. Szymanowski’s cultural positioning we propose to consider, to a certain extent, according to the formula: “one of our own among strangers, a stranger among our own”, because his creative searches, in which the polylogue of cultures acquired signs of multiculturalism, were not always perceived adequately by his contemporaries, especially in those cultural centers, where the traditional values of the national culture were considered priority. The artistic, aesthetic and cultural paradigms of the 21st century turn out to be largely consonant with those that determined the creative preferences of the Polish artist, which leads to the actualization of the creativity of the latter in the conditions of the dominance of the postmodern situation in the contemporary cultural space.

The article aims to explain Karl Barth’s hermeneutical legacy against the background of the influence of the Enlightenment in philosophy and theology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It consists of a discussion of a “hermeneutic chart”, mapped by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Bultmann, Ebeling, and Ricoeur. This “map” is introduced in the foreword by outlining mileposts and concluded by pointing to the so-called postmodern “hermeneutic critique against hermeneutics”. The cord that keeps the fragments of individuals’ contributions together in the article is the function of the notion “hermeneutic circle” and, especially, how this notion had been adapted since the Enlightenment through Romanticism until Dialectic Theology, conducing to present-day Postmodernity.

Karl Barth’s hermeneutic legacy prolonged Western Christian tradition, especially influenced by Hegelian philosophy of history. This led to Barth’s “theological exegesis” instead of a historic-critical exegesis. In a preceding article Barth’s understanding of the notion “hermeneutic circle” is discussed against the background of the Enlightenment and its counter-movement in Romanticism. In this article Barth’s attitude to the place and role of historical criticism is explained in light of his dialectic distinction between “scientific” and “practical” interpretation. The article aims to show that Barth, with his dialectics, continues Schleiermacher’s realism. In conclusion, the positivistic traits in the Barth legacy are raised once again, in order to open the door to Jürgen Habermas and other deconstructionist thinkers of the postmodern era in hermeneutics.

The role and influence of Modernism is the focus of this article. Modernism’s lasting and unforeseeable influence is due to its key importance to the development of the general conditions of art within modernity. Along with Modernism, the implications of the modern system of art became visible for real. Modernism produced the necessity of rethinking the distinction between “art” and “the aesthetic,” based on their original foundations in the 18th century, respectively – a call for a “divorce” after the long-lived marriage between the two, installed by Romanticism. Furthermore so-called postmodernism and today’s contemporary art have in fact not, as often assumed, really broken with high Modernism. What we see is rather a transformation of a time-based modus into a more spatially defined approach. The interpretations of Modernism itself are thus being altered, when regarded with a postmodern awareness of its surrounding enunciative space. The interrelationship between the modernisms, and what followed, is therefore achieving the character of an entanglement rather than that of a straight and clear development. Modernism’s influence, it is finally asserted, is seemingly not at its conclusion, but rather at its reoccurring beginning.

Water has enjoyed an enduring place as subject matter in western musical works for centuries. And what Douglas Kahn calls “discursive” water has streamed in ‘traditional’ musical works from Handel’s Water Music from 1717 through Romanticism, “albeit in the harmonic gushes that repulsed Cage”. In the ‘experimental’ genres, the early to middle parts of the twentieth century were splattered by various engagements with water and sound, with Percy Grainger’s Free Music innovations sparked by gazing at the waves in the Victorian waters of his childhood from as far back as the late nineteenth century. Water in Surrealist art of the mid-twentieth century often featured live women inhabiting large fish-tank/window displays of sound and water — but their own voices were silent. Kahn wonders whether water for the Surrealist men represented “the vaunted maternal voice proffered in certain psychoanalytic scenarios”. But as Kahn also comments, “since the early 1960s, innumerable artists have combined sound, fluidity and water in every way imaginable”. Two examples of postmodern Sound Art, “Tears”, from Passion (1998), by Andrée Greenwell and The Gordon Assumption (2004) by Wax Sound Media artists David Chesworth and Sonia Leber, have traversed a sizable slab of historico-cultural ground in their use of water (via toilets!) as a major component since mid-century modernism. Through select psychoanalytic theories, it is fascinating to witness how they grapple with the themes of water, woman’s voice and transcendence — “discursively”, with a re-examination of the notions and possibilities of “harmonic gushes”, as well as using modernist-based technology.

In the television series Sex and the City, there is a scene which illustrates a familiar contempt for suburban life as dull and boring. Implicit is the oppositional view that urban life by comparison, is the more exciting one. Charlotte (one of four women whose sexual and romantic relationships are the focus of the series), has spent time with her in-laws in an upper middle class suburban enclave, and is confessing to her three girl friends her fantasies and ultimate sexual encounter with her in-law's hunk of a gardener. She's racked with guilt over the incident, not least because she is married to the sexually non-performing Trey. At this point in the conversation, Samantha, whose voracious appetite for men is her hallmark, dismisses Charlotte's concerns with the retort: 'well honey really, what's the point of living in the suburbs if you can't fuck the gardener?' Ergo, a life of suburban mediocrity deserves some kind of compensation, preferably an exciting sexual antidote. Samantha's remark draws on a wealth of discourses which reinforce the opposition between the city and the suburbs, and the city and the country, where the city is the crucible for adventure, opportunity and sometimes danger. For these New York women, it is precisely excitement and the possibility of sex and romance that holds them to the metropolis. The association of sexual opportunity for women and the metropolis is something of a departure from earlier narratives of the city. Gender and sexual identity - through discourse, narrative, image and metaphor are inscribed in spatial landscapes, with a rich source to be found in articulations of the city. Inscriptions are contingent on social, economic and cultural forces which shift over time and place, often defining and redefining utopian and dystopian visions. The rise of the great nineteenth century European cities, for instance provoked both utopian and dystopian discourse. Industrialization, overcrowding and poverty were issues which provided representations of the city as menacing and deleterious (as represented in the writing of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe), while the practice of the flaneur--a nineteenth century male who observed and chronicled the new cities of nineteenth century Europe--confirmed the metropolis as a storehouse of aesthetic and experiential delights. The contemporary zeitgeist is largely utopian, the postmodern city is desirable, uber-cool: sexy. Look at any advertising for inner city apartment living to confirm this. The city's erotic potential is characterized by one of the fundamental conditions of urban life: the close proximity in which we all live among strangers (see also Patton 1995). On a psychic, if not material level, this might provide opportunity for reinvention and renewal of self, for an individual freedom and expression denied to those living in smaller and closer communities. This is the attraction and romanticism of the city. The proximity of strangers gives urban life its erotic possibilities, the capacity for anonymity, that chance meetings with strangers, who we so often live and work among. Lawrence Knopp (1995) describes this aspect of city life as: a world of strangers, a particular life space with a logic and sexuality of its own. The city's sexuality is described as an eroticisation of many of the characteristic experiences of modern urban life: anonymity, voyeurism, exhibitionism, consumption, authority (and challenges to it), tactility, motion danger, power, navigation and restlessness. (151) I've been collecting metaphors of the city and these reveal the congruence between eros and the city. I have yet to find one that is masculine. For instance, journalist Harold Nicholson summing up three European cities used woman as metaphor: 'London is an old lady - Paris is a woman - But Berlin is a girl in a pullover, not much powder on her face' (Petro 1989, 21). Jean Baudrillard's description of Las Vegas as 'that great whore' is similarly feminized and sexualized, and metropolises like New York where aggressive advertisements are like 'wall to wall prostitution.' For Baudrillard, in New York, the plumes of smoke are reminiscent of 'girls wringing out their hair after bathing' (in Docker 1995, 106). Author and journalist John Birmingham described Sydney as 'a tart, loud and brash'. I should add to the list a straw poll of metaphors I conducted for Brisbane, my favourite being Brisbane as a 'middle aged woman in resort wear' (thanks to Maureen Burns for this contribution). But maybe, with the focus on urban development, she might be getting younger. For a (heterosexual) man the city can be alluring, dangerous and feminine. Eros, the city, femininity and danger all collide in the film noir genre, in films such as Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Lawrence Kasden's Body Heat, where beautiful femme fatales lead men astray, or further down the path of corruption. Woman as stranger is alluring and seductive for men, but for woman the chance encounter with a male stranger might signal caution and fear. For women, the dangers are clear: the threat of sexual danger, the chance encounter with a male whose intentions may not be benign. `Reclaim the Night' marches are testament to women's concerns about safety and access to public space, particularly at night. Although research shows that the overwhelming majority of assaults upon women occur in the home, by a person known to the woman, this sober fact does not prevent the cautionary strategies most women employ while out at night. Nor does it diminish the fear and limitations which are the reality of women's experience in public space, particularly at night. Historically, women's role in the public space of the city has been an ambivalent one. A number of analyses of women's role in the nineteenth century city identify the ways in which women in public space were managed and regulated by social and economic interests. Courted on the one hand as consumers for the new department stores and a burgeoning capitalist economy, women were also subject to strict codes of conduct, lest their virtue be in question. Judith Walkowitz in The City of Dreadful Delights examined the ways in which public discourse of danger in nineteenth century London, including the account of Jack the Ripper, as malevolent male stranger, function as a form of moral regulation for women in these newly created city spaces. Both Walkowitz and cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson argue that the metropolis of the nineteenth century, eroded the boundaries between private and public spheres and divisions of labour between men and women. A disquiet and concern over women entering these new public spaces manifested in a discourse of danger and morality, underpinned by the idea that women were at the mercy of their passions and required control and guidance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Freud had something to say about this. He speculated that the condition of agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, (which for Freud was an intrinsically female neurosis), was linked to a repressed inner desire to walk the streets, to be streetwalkers (Vidler 1993, 35). But times have changed: the contemporary postmodern city, is celebrated, promoted and regulated as one of diversity, inclusivity and liveablity. Access and amenity are the buzzwords of local and state government policy. In the postmodern city everyone ostensibly is made welcome and a plethora of infrastructure support different interests and lifestyles. Cafés culture has provided a social space for women in particular, previously denied wholesale access to that other Australian social space, the pub. Women's earning capacity means that many of their interests are represented culturally and socially and that they are more firmly inserted into the fabric of city life. Television series and sit-coms located in the city, where groups of friends sometimes live together; Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City reinforce the perception of city living as a place of opportunity and fun for younger women and men. Promotional literature is quick to exploit this image. A tourism brochure for the inner city Sydney (non!) suburb of Newtown, describes the attractions of the area: `some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney's blessed with Newtown, a cosmopolitan neighbourhood.' As if Cabramatta, Fairfield or Parramatta, all outer suburban areas of Sydney, weren't cosmopolitan. A billboard in Brisbane's urban renewal area of Newstead, advertises apartment living as 'Urban living NOT suburban'. Drawing upon the rhetoric of opposition and expressing the familiar anti-suburban sentiment which for Australia, originated in the bohemian movement of the late nineteenth century (see also Kinnane 1998). This tradition probably reached its apotheosis with Barry Humphries in the 1960s whose comedic alter ego, Edna Everage signified everything that was despicable and mindless about suburbia. Edna's obsession with housing décor, cooking and recipes, social status and the minutiae of domesticity was portrayed with a venomous satire that depended upon a trivialization of traditional feminine competencies. Is there a connection between the anti- suburban tradition of cultural elites and the suburbs' close association with the domestic and feminine sphere of life? Patrick White in describing the mythical suburb of Sarsaparilla claimed it as 'a geographical hell ruled by female demons' (in Duruz 1994). American historian Lewis Mumford in his seminal work The City in History wrote that the suburbs are not 'merely a child centred environment: it is based on a childish view of the world which is sacrificed to the pleasure principle' (1961). Little wonder that today, younger women are fleeing the suburbs and flocking to the city, attracted by its possibility of adventure and eros. The other day I picked up my teenage daughter from her school to which she had returned after a five day camp in the bush. 'Aaaagh', she sighed with a sense of relief, as we approached our densely populated inner city suburb, 'buildings again… and not too many trees'. The following morning we were out in the lush and fecund Samford Valley, this time at her first soccer match for the season. As we drove further into the bush she yelled out, 'Oh no, not all these trees again!' Is this the response of a typical twenty- first century urban woman? References Docker, John. (1995) Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A cultural history. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Duruz, Jean. (1994) 'Romancing the Suburbs?' in Katherine Gibson and Sophie Watson (eds) Metropolis Now. Sydney, Pluto Press. Kinnane, Gary. (1998) 'Shopping at Last!:History, Fiction and the Anti-Suburban Tradition.' Australian Literary Studies: Writing the Everyday, Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia, 18. 4: 41-55. Knopp, Lawrence. (1995) 'Sexuality and Urban Space: a framework for analysis' in David Bell and Gill Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire. London, Routledge. Mumford, Lewis. (1961) The City in History, Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. London, Penguin. Patton, Paul. (1995) 'Imaginary Cities' in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (eds) Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers. Petro, Patrice (1989) Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimer Germany. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Vidler, Anthony (1993) 'Bodies in Space/Subjects in the City: Psychopathologies of Modern Urbanism.' Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 5.3: 31-51. Walkowitz, Judith. (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in late Victorian London. Chicago, Chicago University Press. Watson, Sophie and Gibson, Katherine. (1995) Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Wilson, Elizabeth. (1991) The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, The Control of Disorder and Women. London: Virago. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Felton, Emma. "The City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php>. Chicago Style Felton, Emma, "The City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Felton, Emma. (2002) The City. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php> ([your date of access]).

Literary history can be viewed alternately in a perspective of continuities or discontinuities. In the former perspective, what I perversely call postmodernism is simply an extension of modernism [which is], as everyone knows, a development of symbolism, which … is itself a specialisation of romanticismand who is there to say that the romantic concept of man does not find its origin in the great European Enlightenment? Etc. In the latter perspective, however, continuities [which are] maintained on a certain level of narrative abstraction (i.e., history [or aesthetic description]) are resisted in the interests of the quiddity and discreteness of art, the space that each work or action creates around itself. – Ihab Hassan Ihab Hassan’s words, published in 1975, continue to resonate today. How should we approach art? Can an artwork ever really fully be described by its critical review, or does its description only lead to an ever multiplying succession of terms? Michel Foucault spoke of the construction of modern sexuality as being seen as the hidden, irresolvable “truth” of our subjectivity, as that secret which we must constantly speak about, and hence as an “incitement to discourse” (Foucault, History of Sexuality). Since the Romantic period, the appreciation of aesthetics has been tied to the subjectivity of the individual and to the degree an art work appeals to the individual’s sense of self: to one’s personal refinement, emotions and so on. Art might be considered part of the truth of our subjectivity which we seem to be endlessly talking about – without, however, actually ever resolving the issue of what a great art work really is (anymore than we have resolved the issue of what natural sexuality is). It is not my aim to explicate the relationship between art and sex but to re-inject a strategic understanding of discourse, as Foucault understood it, back into commonplace, contemporary aesthetic criticism. The problems in rendering into words subjective, emotional experiences and formal aesthetic criteria continue to dog criticism today. The chief hindrances to contemporary criticism remain such institutional factors as the economic function of newspapers. Given their primary function as tools for the selling of advertising space, newspapers are inherently unsuited to sustaining detailed, informed dialogue on any topic – be it international politics or aesthetics. As it is, reviews remain short, quickly written pieces squeezed into already overloaded arts pages. This does not prevent skilled, caring writers and their editorial supporters from ensuring that fine reviews are published. In the meantime, we muddle through as best we can. I argue that criticism, like art, should operate self-consciously as an incitement to discourse, to engagement, and so to further discussion, poetry, et cetera. The possibility of an endless recession of theoretical terms and subjective responses should not dissuade us. Rather, one should provisionally accept the instrumentality of aesthetic discourse provided one is able always to bear in mind the nominalism which is required to prevent the description of art from becoming an instrument of repression. This is to say, aesthetic criticism is clearly authored in order to demonstrate something: to argue a point, to make a fruitful comparison, and so on. This does not mean that criticism should be composed so as to dictate aesthetic taste to the reader. Instead, it should act as an invitation to further responses – much as the art work itself does. Foucault has described discourse – language, terminologies, metaphorical conceits and those logical and poetic structures which underpin them – as a form of technology (Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and History of Sexuality). Different discursive forces arise in response to different cultural needs and contexts, including, indeed, those formulated not only by artists, but also by reviewers. As Hassan intimates, what is or is not “postmodernism”, for example, depends less on the art work itself – it is less a matter of an art work’s specific “quiddity” and its internal qualities – but is, rather, fundamentally dependent upon what one is trying to say about the piece. If one is trying to describe something novel in a work, something which relates it to a series of new or unusual forms which have become dominant within society since World War Two, then the term “postmodernism” most usefully applies. This, then, would entail breaking down the “the space that each work … creates around itself” in order to emphasise horizontal “continuities”. If, on the other hand, the critic wishes to describe the work from the perspective of historical developments, so as to trace the common features of various art works across a genealogical pattern running from Romanticism to the present day, one must de-emphasise the quiddity of the work in favour of vertical continuities. In both cases, however, the identification of common themes across various art works so as to aid in the description of wider historical or aesthetic conditions requires a certain “abstraction” of the qualities of the aesthetic works in question. The “postmodernism”, or any other quality, of a single art work thus remains in the eye of the beholder. No art work is definitively “postmodern” as such. It is only “postmodern” inasmuch as this description aids one in understanding a certain aspect of the piece and its relationship to other objects of analysis. In short, the more either an art work or its critical review elides full descriptive explication, the more useful reflections which might be voiced in its wake. What then is the instrumental purpose of the arts review as a genre of writing? For liberal humanist critics such as Matthew Arnold, F.R. Leavis and Harold Bloom, the role of the critic is straight forward and authoritative. Great art is said to be imbued with the spirit of humanity; with the very essence of our common subjectivity itself. Critics in this mode seek the truth of art and once it has been found, they generally construct it as unified, cohesive and of great value to all of humanity. The authors of the various avant-garde manifestoes which arose in Europe from the fin de siècle period onwards significantly complicated this ideal of universal value by arguing that such aesthetic values were necessarily abstract and so were not immediately visible within the content of the work per se. Such values were rather often present in the art work’s form and expression. Surrealism, Futurism, Supremacism, the Bauhaus and the other movements were founded upon the contention that these avant-garde art works revealed fundamental truths about the essence of human subjectivity: the imperious power of the dream at the heart of our emotional and psychic life, the geometric principles of colour and shape which provide the language for all experience of the sublime, and so on. The critic was still obliged to identify greatness and to isolate and disseminate those pieces of art which revealed the hidden truth of our shared human experience. Few influential art movements did not, in fact, have a chief theoretician to promote their ideals to the world, be it Ezra Pound and Leavis as the explicators of the works of T.S. Eliot, Martin Esslin for Beckett, or the artist her or himself, such as choreographers Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham, both of whom described in considerable detail their own methodologies to various scribes. The great challenge presented in the writings of Foucault, Derrida, Hassan and others, however, is to abandon such a sense of universal aesthetic and philosophical value. Like their fellow travellers within the New Left and soixante huit-ièmes (the agitators and cultural critics of 1968 Paris), these critics contend that the idea of a universal human subjectivity is problematic at best, if not a discursive fiction, which has been used to justify repression, colonialism, the unequal institutional hierarchies of bourgeois democratic systems, and so on. Art does not therefore speak of universal human truths. It is rather – like aesthetic criticism itself – a discursive product whose value should be considered instrumentally. The kind of a critical relationship which I am proposing here might provisionally be classified as discursive or archaeological criticism (in the Foucauldian sense of tracing discursive relationships and their distribution within any given cross-section or strata of cultural life). The role of the critic in such a situation is not one of acknowledging great art. Rather, the critic’s function becomes highly strategic, with interpretations and opinions regarding art works acting as invitations to engagement, consideration and, hence, also to rejection. From the point of view of the audience, too, the critic’s role is one of utility. If a critical description prompts useful, interesting or pleasurable reflections in the reader, then the review has been effective. If it has not, it has no role to play. The response to criticism thus becomes as subjective as the response to the art work itself. Similarly, just as Marcel Duchamp’s act of inverting a urinal and calling it art showed that anyone could be an artist provided they adopted a suitably creative vision of the objects which surrounded them, so anyone and everyone is a legitimate critic of any art work addressed to him or her as an audience. The institutional power accorded to critics by merit of the publications to which they are attached should not obfuscate the fact that anyone has the moral right to venture a critical judgement. It is not actually logically possible to be “right” or “wrong” in attributing qualities to an art work (although I have had artists assert the contrary to me). I like noise art, for example, and find much to stimulate my intellect and my affect in the chaotic feedback characteristic of the work of Merzbow and others. Many others however simply find such sounds to constitute unpleasant noise. Neither commentator is “right”. Both views co-exist. What is important is how these ideas are expressed, what propositions are marshalled to support either position, and how internally cohesive are the arguments supplied by supporters of either proposition. The merit of any particular critical intervention is therefore strictly formal or expressive, lying in its rhetorical construction, rather than in the subjective content of the criticism itself, per se. Clearly, such discursive criticism is of little value in describing works devised according to either an unequivocally liberal humanist or modernist avant-garde perspective. Aesthetic criticism authored in this spirit will not identify the universal, timeless truths of the work, nor will it act as an authoritative barometer of aesthetic value. By the same token though, a recognition of pluralism and instrumentality does not necessarily entail the rejection of categories of value altogether. Such a technique of aesthetic analysis functions primarily in the realm of superficial discursive qualities and formal features, rather than subterranean essences. It is in this sense both anti-Romantic and anti-Platonic. Discursive analysis has its own categories of truth and evaluation. Similarities between works, influences amongst artists and generic or affective precedents become the primary objects of analysis. Such a form of criticism is, in this sense, directly in accord with a similarly self-reflexive, historicised approach to art making itself. Where artists are consciously seeking to engage with their predecessors or peers, to find ways of situating their own work through the development of ideas visible in other cultural objects and historic aesthetic works, then the creation of art becomes itself a form of practical criticism or praxis. The distinction between criticism and its object is, therefore, one of formal expression, not one of nature or essence. Both practices engage with similar materials through a process of reflection (Marshall, “Vertigo”). Having described in philosophical and critical terms what constitutes an unfettered, democratic and strategic model of discursive criticism, it is perhaps useful to close with a more pragmatic description of how I myself attempt to proceed in authoring such criticism and, so, offer at least one possible (and, by definition, subjective) model for discursive criticism. Given that discursive analysis itself developed out of linguistic theory and Saussure’s discussion of the structural nature of signification, it is no surprise that the primary methodology underlying discursive analysis remains that of semiotics: namely how systems of representation and meaning mutually reinforce and support each other, and how they fail to do so. As a critic viewing an art work, it is, therefore, always my first goal to attempt to identify what it is that the artist appears to be trying to do in mounting a production. Is the art work intended as a cultural critique, a political protest, an avant-garde statement, a work of pure escapism, or some other kind of project – and hence one which can be judged according to the generic forms and values associated with such a style in comparison with those by other artists who work in this field? Having determined or intuited this, several related but nominally distinct critical reflections follow. Firstly, how effectively is this intent underpinning the art work achieved, how internally consistent are the tools, forms and themes utilised within the production, and do the affective and historic resonances evoked by the materials employed therein cohere into a logical (or a deliberately fragmented) whole? Secondly, how valid or aesthetically interesting is such a project in the first place, irrespective of whether it was successfully achieved or not? In short, how does the artist’s work compare with its own apparent generic rules, precedents and peers, and is the idea behind the work a contextually valid one or not? The questions of value which inevitably come into these judgements must be weighed according to explicit arguments regarding context, history and genre. It is the discursive transparency of the critique which enables readers to mentally contest the author. Implicitly transcendental models of universal emotional or aesthetic responses should not be invoked. Works of art should, therefore, be judged according to their own manifest terms, and, so, according to the values which appear to govern the relationships which organise materials within the art work. They should also, however, be viewed from a position definitively outside the work, placing the overall concept and its implicit, underlying theses within the context of other precedents, cultural values, political considerations and so on. In other words, one should attempt to heed Hassan’s caution that all art works may be seen both from the perspective of historico-genealogical continuities, as well as according to their own unique, self-defining characteristics and intentions. At the same time, the critical framework of the review itself – while remaining potentially dense and complex – should be as apparent to the reader as possible. The kind of criticism which I author is, therefore, based on a combination of art-historical, generic and socio-cultural comparisons. Critics are clearly able to elaborate more parallels between various artistic and cultural activities than many of their peers in the audience simply because it is the profession of the former to be as familiar with as wide a range of art-historical, cultural and political materials as is possible. This does not, however, make the opinions of the critic “correct”, it merely makes them more potentially dense. Other audiences nevertheless make their own connections, while spectators remain free to state that the particular parallels identified by the critic were not, to their minds, as significant as the critic would contend. The quantity of knowledge from which the critic can select does not verify the accuracy of his or her observations. It rather enables the potential richness of the description. In short, it is high time critics gave up all pretensions to closing off discourse by describing aesthetic works. On the contrary, arts reviewing, like arts production itself, should be seen as an invitation to further discourse, as a gift offered to those who might want it, rather than a Leavisite or Bloom-esque bludgeon to instruct the insensitive masses as to what is supposed to subjectively enlighten and uplift them. It is this sense of engagement – between critic, artist and audience – which provides the truly poetic quality to arts criticism, allowing readers to think creatively in their own right through their own interaction with a collaborative process of rumination on aesthetics and culture. In this way, artists, audiences and critics come to occupy the same terrain, exchanging views and constructing a community of shared ideas, debate and ever-multiplying discursive forms. Ideally, written criticism would come to occupy the same level of authority as an argument between an audience member and a critic at the bar following the staging of a production. I admit myself that even my best written compositions rarely achieve the level of playful interaction which such an environment often provokes. I nevertheless continue to strive for such a form of discursive exchange and bibulous poetry. References Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. London: Macmillan, 1903-27, published as 2 series. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. by Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt, 1978. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen Lane. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1972. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963. Esslin, Martin. Theatre of the Absurd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. ———. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1990. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin, 1992. Graham, Martha. Blood Memory. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Hassan, Ihab. “Joyce, Beckett and the Postmodern Imagination.” Triquarterly 32.4 (1975): 192ff. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Dominant of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. Leavis, F.R. F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents. Eds. Ian MacKillop and Richard Storer. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Malevich, Kazimir. In Penny Guggenheim, ed. Art of This Century – Drawings – Photographs – Sculpture – Collages. New York: Art Aid, 1942. Marshall, Jonathan. “Documents in Australian Postmodern Dance: Two Interviews with Lucy Guerin,” in Adrian Kiernander, ed. Dance and Physical Theatre, special edition of Australasian Drama Studies 41 (October 2002): 102-33. ———. “Operatic Tradition and Ambivalence in Chamber Made Opera’s Recital (Chesworth, Horton, Noonan),” in Keith Gallasch and Laura Ginters, eds. Music Theatre in Australia, special edition of Australasian Drama Studies 45 (October 2004): 72-96. ———. “Vertigo: Between the Word and the Act,” Independent Performance Forums, series of essays commissioned by Not Yet It’s Difficult theatre company and published in RealTime Australia 35 (2000): 10. Merzbow. Venereology. Audio recording. USA: Relapse, 1994. Richards, Alison, Geoffrey Milne, et al., eds. Pearls before Swine: Australian Theatre Criticism, special edition of Meajin 53.3 (Spring 1994). Tzara, Tristan. Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Trans. by Barbara Wright. London: Calder, 1992. Vaughan, David. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. Ed. Melissa Harris. New York: Aperture, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Marshall, Jonathan. "Inciting Reflection: A Short Manifesto for and Introduction to the Discursive Reviewing of the Arts." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/08-marshall.php>. APA Style Marshall, J. (Oct. 2005) "Inciting Reflection: A Short Manifesto for and Introduction to the Discursive Reviewing of the Arts," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/08-marshall.php>.

During his speech in Plato’s The Symposium, Aristophanes explains that humans were originally round, composed of two people joined together in a perfect sphere with four arms, four legs, and two faces. Unfortunately, humans grew arrogant and ambitious; as a result, Zeus punished them by cleaving them in two. Now altered from their natural form, humans yearn for their former selves: “It is from this situation, then, that love for one another developed in human beings. Love collects the halves of our original nature, and tries to make a single thing out of the two parts so as to restore our natural condition. Thus, each of us is the matching half of a human being, since we have been severed like a flatfish, two coming from one, and each part is always seeking its other half” (191d). So it is that what we call “love” is but the “desire for wholeness” (193a). Love is not, for Aristophanes, a union but a re-union/reuniting. While Aristophanes’ account is simultaneously comedic and horrific, and consequently also absurdly ridiculous, there persists an undercurrent of some nebulous tickle, a recognition of something tangibly familiar in his myth, even now. Were space-time not linear and Plato could have Barbara Streisand speak next at that Athenian table (though of course he wouldn’t, as she’s a woman), he would undoubtedly have her sing “People”: “Lovers are very special people. They’re the luckiest people in the world. With one person, one very special person, a feeling deep in your soul, says you were half, now you’re whole.” “You complete me,” Jerry (played by Tom Cruise) says to Dorothy (played by Renée Zellweger) in the movie Jerry Maguire. How many lovers today claim their relationship with their beloved was meant to be? Even in a postmodern world, we seemingly have not strayed far from the Platonic ideal in which “lovers are incomplete halves of a single puzzle, searching for each other in order to become whole” (Ackerman 95). Implied by this model—described by Irving Singer as the “idealist tradition” (Modern 12)—is an uncomplicated conception of self. A self posited as fundamentally incomplete must be viewed as fixed and virtually invariable; otherwise, a multiplicity of ways in addition to a soul mate might be found to give the impoverished self what it needs. Viewed as yearning for his or her “other half,” the individual is positioned outside of/separated from the wider culture because only the “one true love” can make the person “whole.” Even biological impulses and psychological factors can be dismissed as irrelevant or possibly even dangerous distractions when all that truly matters is finding one’s “better half.” A self thus conceived also suggests a rather simplistic view of romantic love, which becomes merely the desire to achieve wholeness by connecting—or reconnecting, as Plato’s Aristophanes would have it—with a complementary lover. Unfortunately, the idealist model’s emphasis on deficiency codifies an ontology of lack that tends to foster omissions, oversimplifications, and misinterpretations. But, as numerous influential thinkers have convincingly argued, identity is neither uniform nor stable—nor even uncontested. Subjectivity is more accurately characterised by complexity and multiplicity than by simplicity and singularity. What, then, of romantic love? Is romantic love in contemporary Western cultures similarly complex, and if so, so what? How would (re)conceptualising romantic love as complex extend our knowledge and understanding of complex systems? I want to contribute to this themed issue of M/C Journal on complex by approaching romantic love as a point of departure, as an analytical methodology. I maintain that a critical study of romantic love—one that begins rather than concludes with romantic love’s complexity—helps illustrate the productive nature of complex and the utility of employing complex as a conceptual/theoretical point of origin and inquiry. Crucially, my formulation configures complex as a productive process that is itself a product. In other words, complex can be usefully defined as an effect that produces other effects—including potentially subversive ones. While other definitions are certainly valid, conceiving complex as an outcome that generates further outcomes not only emphasises the dynamic, multifaceted nature of systems but also helps to explain that multifaceted dynamism. Romantic love illustrates well this conception of complex (as productive product) because romantic love only has meaning, only works, because it is complex to begin with. In this manner, romantic love is a process of creating complexity from complexity. An examination that begins from a point of complexity gains much, I feel, by beginning with a historicisation of that complexity, for complex, as outcome/effect, is always already contextualised, situated, and diachronic. Historicising romantic love is particularly crucial because the idealist model tends to dismiss the past (what matters the past once one has finally met the love of one’s life?) and confuse history—especially its own—with nature (as with the supposedly natural passivity of the feminine). According to Singer, the idealist tradition, first codified by Plato, was taken up by medieval theologians who, drawn by the tradition’s ideal of merging, sought to produce a mystical oneness with the divine (Courtly 23). Emphasis eventually moved from merging to the experience of merging, a move that facilitated the rise of courtly love. Transmuting religious reverence into human devotion, courtly love introduced such revolutionary and potentially heretical notions as the belief that “love is an intense, passionate relationship that establishes a holy oneness between man and woman” (23). The desire for oneness appears even more prominently in the Romanticism of the 19th century (288). Importantly, erotic love becomes for the first time conjoined with romantic love in a causal rather than antithetical or consequential relation: “To the Romantic, sexual desire is usually more than just a vehicle or concomitant of love; it is a prerequisite” (Modern 10). Little wonder, given such a trajectory, that romantic love today has virtually no meaning independent of sexual love (though sexual desire may or may not be linked to romantic love). Little wonder as well that romantic love is so complex. But there’s more. As Stephanie Coontz explains, marriage in the West was until only about two centuries ago a political and economic institution having little or nothing to do with romantic love (33). Anthony Giddens also points out the relatively recent shift from an economic to a romantic basis for marriage (26). Giddens associates this shift with the emergence of what he terms “plastic sexuality”: “decentered sexuality, freed from the needs of reproduction” (2). Plastic sexuality resulted from a combination of factors, most notably societal trends toward limiting family size coupled with advances in contraceptive and reproductive technologies (27). Allowing for greater freedom and pleasure (especially for women), plastic sexuality is for Giddens linked not only to romantic love but also, intrinsically, to self-identity (2, 40). This connection—along with the plastic sexuality that undergirds it—creates narratives of self (and other) that can project “a course of future development” (45), lead to greater reflexivity for the body and the self (31), and transform intimacy in ways potentially subversive and emancipative (3, 194). In any case, our (inter)personal existence is currently undergoing active transfiguration, Giddens asserts, to the point that “personal life has become an open project, creating new demands and anxieties” (8). My reading of Giddens places this continuous, reflexive project of self (what one might alternatively term the ongoing production of selves-in-process) against the plastic sexuality and pure relationships that engendered the project. Only a view of romantic love as productive, evolving, and full—in other words, complex—can account for the complex transformations of intimacy and self described by Giddens. Viewed more broadly, romantic love corresponds—in both the analogous and communicative meanings of the term—to/with the very poststructural/postmodern subject it helps to enact. Tamsin Lorraine’s lucid articulation of embodied subjectivity is worth quoting at length in this context: I assume that the selves we experience as our own are the product of a historically conditioned process involving both corporeal and psychic aspects of existence, that this process needs to be instituted and continually reiterated in a social context in order to give birth to and maintain the subject at the corporeal level of embodiment as well as the psychic level of self, and that language and social positioning within a larger social field play a crucial role in this process. In taking up a position in the social field as a speaker of language, a human being takes up a perspective from which to develop a narrative of self. (ix-x) Others have theorised identity as a narrative construct (Holstein and Gubrium; Rosenwald and Ochberg). What is significant here in reading Lorraine’s embodied subjectivity through the interpretative lens provided by Giddens is the particular kind of narrative suggested by such a reading. After all, not just any narrative will do. The “perspective” taken up by the reflexive subject (as described by Giddens) in the process of constructing a storied self necessarily requires a productive integration of the many “aspects of existence.” Otherwise, no such “position” could be taken, no agency established; the particular self would not even be. As such, the perspective is a product of complexity even as it attempts to compose its own complex product (a narrative identity). Additionally, romantic love conceived as complex, as a productive force, opens up possibilities for new stories and new selves, even when, as in Lacanian theory, desire is correlated with lack. Lacan maintains that “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference which results from the subtraction of the first from the second—the very phenomenon of their splitting” (287). Lack presented thusly is positive inasmuch as lack causes desire, which in turn produces the subject as a subjectivity. “Without lack,” Bruce Fink asserts, “the subject can never come into being, and the whole efflorescence of the dialectic of desire is squashed” (103). For clarification, Fink provides a simple illustration: “Why would a child even bother to learn to speak if all its needs were anticipated?” (103). Desire here is correlated with lack in a manner that suggests movement and change, bringing to mind Anne Carson’s famous quip, “Desire moves. Eros is a verb” (17). Keeping in mind that romantic love has become inextricably entwined with sexual desire in the West, designs that interrogate desire vis-à-vis lack (a strategy that also characterises the approaches taken by Hegel and Sartre) operate equally well in regards to self-identities formed via romantic love. Certainly, then, if desire constituted as lack can produce complexity by remaining unsatisfied and unfilled, what then of an approach that configures desire itself as production? Such a theoretical grounding is central to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. For them, “everything is production” (Anti-Oedipus 4). In this view, life, the self, and even the body are not unified things but rather processes characterised by flow and multiplicity. Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the dynamic process of various sorts of “becoming” (Thousand 279). Becoming, in relation to romantic love and to other processes, involves not just individuals but assemblages. In this, Deleuze and Guattari present a collaborative conception of self involving the multiplicity of the two selves as well as the multiplicity “formed through the collaboration” (Lorraine 134). As Deleuze and Guattari explain, multiplicity “is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities” (Thousand 249). To my mind, this “string” of multiplicities directly parallels the complex. Luce Irigaray’s project similarly views subjectivity as embodied, potentially collaborative, and creative. Specifically, however, Irigaray seeks to challenge the masculine specular subjectivity that fosters divisive dualisms and a sexual division of labour that privileges the masculine. She critiques the subject-object distinction that has always defined female sexuality “on the basis of masculine parameters” (This 204) and relegated the feminine to the role of other to the masculine subject. One of the more interesting aspects of Irigaray’s enterprise is her project of symbolic transformation, an attempt to symbolise an alternative feminine subjectivity: “Irigaray insists that we need to acknowledge two genders and work on providing the hitherto impoverished gender the symbolic support it needs to become more than the counterpart of masculinity. If the feminine were given the support of a gender in its own right, then feminine subjectivity could finally emerge” (Lorraine 91). What Irigaray advocates is a dialectical interaction between subjects that embraces both difference and corporeality, that is temporal, playful, reciprocal, and mutually nourishing (I Love 148). Elizabeth Grosz’s refiguring of desire somewhat echoes Irigaray’s stance. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattarai, Grosz also conceptualises desire as productive and full. She insists that in order to understand this expanded conception of desire we must first “abandon our habitual understanding of entities as the integrated totality of parts, and instead focus on the elements, the parts, outside their integration or organisation; we must look beyond the organism to the organs comprising it” (78). Totalities remain and must be recognised, but an understanding of the dynamics of those totalities is better accomplished through an investigation of the parts rather the whole. In her privileging of parts I see reflections of Irigaray’s respect for difference and dialectical creation. Indeed, one can easily see themes of fluidity and multiplicity running through the work of the theorists we have examined. This thematic/analytical consistency, I would argue, is at least partially explained by their active engagement in the complexity of romantic love. How not to theorise subjectivities formed via narratives of romantic love in a manner that resists dualisms when romantic love itself overflows with multiplicities? This is not, of course, to downplay the role of other factors, contingencies, and motivations. Still, that some feminists are critical of certain aspects of Foucauldian theory (his failure to adequately account for unequal power relations; his seeming denial that one group or class may dominate another) strikes me as directly related to issues located (if not exclusively) within the contemporary concept of romantic love (see Hartsock; Ramazanoğlu; Sedgwick). That such is the case is, for me, no surprise. Ultimately, in spite of its long history of repression and inequity, romantic love’s ever-increasing complexity points to possible future transformations (as Giddens details). My optimism stems from the fact that romantic love’s productive force can potentially open up whole new ranges of (complex) possibilities. In the theories of Giddens, Deleuze, Irigaray, Grosz, and numerous others, we witness some of these emerging possibilities. Framing complex as an outcome that produces other complex outcomes allows me to envision the possibility of even more possibilities—something akin to Irigaray’s “expanding universe” (This 209). In the final (for now) analysis, let us follow Grosz’s lead and privilege parts over the whole. Viewed from this perspective, a given system cannot be considered as a complex thing, as though it were an isolated singularity. Focusing on the specific, the particular, and the concrete serves to highlight the contingencies, fragments, flows, shifts, multiplicities, instabilities, and relations that constitute and produce the complex. In saying this, I am not simply asserting a tautology: the complex is complex. Because the components of something complex interact in ways both provisional and productive, the complex must inevitably produce new components, parts that constitute and change the system, as well as other parts that eventually form and/or alter other complex systems. Put another way, the individual parts of a complex are themselves complex. Consequently, a deeper understanding can be gained by stepping back and re-visioning the parts-to-the-whole paradigm as complexoutcomes-ofcomplex-outcomes. Romantic love, I believe, is such an example, and an especially ubiquitous and influential one at that. Only by beginning with an understanding of love as complex can we adequately explain how it operates and produces the kinds of effects that it does. Nothing simple could produce such profoundly complex effects as identities, discourses, and material objects. Something simple may very well produce simple outcomes that eventually conjoin into something complex, a whole composed of many individual parts. But only something already complex (i.e., an existing outcome of outcomes) can produce complex outcomes instantly and automatically as a matter of course in an intricate unfolding of relationships that, like love, circulate, bond, motivate, and potentially transform. References Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of Love. New York: Random House, 1994. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1986. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. ———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. Giddens, Anthony. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Refiguring Lesbian Desire.” The Lesbian Postmodern. Ed. Laura Doan. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 67-84. Hartsock, Nancy. “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda J. Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1990. 157-175. Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper, 1967. Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium. The Self We Live By: Narrating Identity in a Postmodern World. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1996. ———. “This Sex Which Is Not One.” 1985. A Reader in Feminist Knowledge. Ed. Sneja Gunew. New York: Routledge, 1991. 204-211. Jerry Maguire. Dir. Cameron Crowe. Columbia/Tristar, 1996. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. 1966. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. Lorraine, Tamsin. Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1999. Plato. The Symposium and The Phaedrus. Trans. William Cobb. New York: SUNY P, 1993. Ramazanoğlu, Caroline, ed. Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1993. Rosenwald, George C., and Richard L. Ochberg, eds. Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1956. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Singer, Irving. The Nature of Love: Courtly and Romantic. Vol. 2. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984. ———. The Nature of Love: The Modern World. Vol. 3. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987. Streisand, Barbra. “People.” By Bob Merrill and Jule Styne. People. Columbia, 1964. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Carpenter, Richard. "The Heart of the Matter: Complex as Productive Force." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/02-carpenter.php>. APA Style Carpenter, R. (Jun. 2007) "The Heart of the Matter: Complex as Productive Force," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/02-carpenter.php>.

After balaclava-clad Zapatistas seized control of a handful of southern Mexican towns on New Year’s Eve, 1993, and soon after became implicated in the first wide-scale use of the Internet in a warlike scenario, it was thought that the age of postmodern Internet warfare had arrived. However, while the centrality of the Internet to the movement’s relative success evokes romantic images of Zapatista rebels uploading communiqués onto the World Wide Web from remote mountain hideaways, these myths are dispelled when the impoverished living conditions of its indigenous Maya constituents are taken into account. Instead, the Zapatistas’ presence on the Internet is mediated by NGOs and other support groups who electronically publish hand-written Zapatista communiqués. While this paper demonstrates the political utility of information-age communication strategies for localised struggles for cultural autonomy, it is shown that, for the Zapatistas, these strategies work with, rather than against, traditional print culture. The Zapatistas, NGOs and the Internet Soon after the Zapatista uprising began, the New York Times, prompted by the movement’s rapid acquirement of an Internet presence, declared that the world’s first “postmodern revolutionary movement” had appeared in the unlikely location of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas (Burbach 116). Other analyses that investigate the significance of the Internet in the uprising define the EZLN as the world’s “first informational guerrilla movement” (Castells 79), and the “first social netwar” (Ronfeldt et al. 1). After such descriptions were assigned to the EZLN, an image of Zapatista rebels typing e-mails on laptops in remote mountain hideaways featured in many initial media reports. These ideas were still dominating much of the media a year after the uprising when the Mexican President ordered a raid on suspected EZLN hideouts in an attempt to capture the movement’s mestizo spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos. Media reports at the time claimed that in some of the raids “they found as many computer disks as bullets”. There were also claims that “if Marcos is equipped with a telephone modem and a cellular phone [he could] hook into the Internet [directly] even while on the run, as he is now” (Knudson 509). However, while the Internet contributed significantly to the advance of the EZLN struggle, this romanticised and mythologised imagery is far removed from the material impoverishment that led to the movement’s uprising and which still characterises the lives of its constituents. Indeed, the Marcos that I saw addressing a crowd in the Mexican city of Puebla during the EZLN’s 2001 March for Indigenous Dignity read his speech from an old-tattered notebook—the old-fashioned printed kind, not one from the Toshiba range. He stumbled over some sections, telling the crowd that it had been smudged by the rain earlier in the day. This may have been a move calculated to enhance the charismatic appeal of the pipe-smoking, poet-guerrilla, but it is also consistent with the impoverished circumstances from which the Zapatistas emanated and within which they continue to struggle. There is a glaring anomaly between descriptions of the Zapatistas as postmodern or as the initiators of informational guerrilla warfare, or netwar, and the movement’s location in the most remote regions of an impoverished state, which has Internet hubs in only two of its towns and “no telephone or electricity at all in most of the rural areas” (Froehling 291). Indeed, the Zapatistas’ relationship with the Internet is mediated via a support network that, most significantly, includes NGOs. For the Zapatista word to reach a national and international audience the movement had to firstly rely on hand-written documents and old-fashioned means of covert communication whereby messages were passed secretly from hand to hand, galloped inside a saddle satchel, hidden in a cyclist’s bag, slipped into a backpack, or perhaps thrust inside a sack of beans, then propped in the back of an open truck, crammed with indigenous villagers who make the hours-long journey to the closest market, or doctor, and our messenger to a contact person with Internet access. (Ponce de León xxiii) The journey of the EZLN’s communiqués from the remote Chiapan highlands to a world-wide audience via its Internet-connected support network has created what Cleaver calls a “Zapatista effect” (1998). This effect demonstrates that by establishing an international electronic web of support, particularly between marginalised groups and NGOs, dominant political, economic and social policies can be effectively opposed and alternatives articulated. The Zapatista uprising marks the first time that the electronic media have been used as a strategy in their own right, producing “an electronic fabric of opposition to much wider policies”, rather than simply facilitating the “traditional work of solidarity” (Cleaver 622). Cleaver claims that this “Zapatista effect” has the potential to permeate and inform social struggles throughout the world and reweave “the fabric of politics” by demonstrating the ability of grassroots movements to form national and international collectives to challenge the power of the nation-state (637). Investigation into the usefulness of new communication technologies in times of war and struggle has also been the focus of studies conducted for the US army, leading to the development of the concept of “netwar” (Ronfeldt et al. iii). Ronfeldt et al. contend that, as a result of what they claim is the increasing dependency of contemporary society on information, “more than ever before, conflicts are about ‘knowledge’—about who knows (or can be kept from knowing) what, when, where, and why” (7-8). The study concludes that the EZLN’s development of an NGO support network that could rapidly disseminate reports on human rights abuses, information about the intolerable living conditions endured by indigenous Chiapans, and the EZLN’s communiqués has been crucial to developing the movement’s support base. However, the movement’s establishment of an electronically wired NGO support network able to circulate information about the EZLN, its struggle and its aims relies on the movement’s ability to convey information to them, the “what, when, where, and why”, before it can appear on the Internet and in other media forms. It is not simply the publication and distribution of figures relating to disease, impoverishment and human rights violations that have contributed to people’s interest in, and support for, the Zapatistas. Rather, the intriguing content and style of their discourse, which is heavily indebted to the charismatic figure of Subcomandante Marcos, has also played a crucial role. The writings of Marcos are rich with poetic imagery, humour, symbols of Mayan mythology and references to Latin American and Spanish literary figures and styles, particularly magic realism. Zapatista Narratives Marcos’ innovative and engaging discursive style is particularly evident in the stories he tells of Don Durito, a beetle named Nebuchadnezzar who has assumed the nom de guerre of Durito, which literally means the little strong or hard one, a reference to his shell, fighting spirit and his status as a ladies’ man (Subcomandante Marcos 9). Don Durito has made the floor of the Southern Mexican Lacandón jungle his home, but in Marcos’s stories he often travels the world as a knight-errant, reminiscent of Cervantes’s delusional do-gooder Don Quijote. Durito also intermittently assumes the role of a detective and that of a political analyst, and it is in this guise that he first meets Marcos. This occurs when Marcos, unable to find tobacco to fill the pipe he is never seen without, notices a trail of the dried black leaves weaving away from his hammock. After following the trail for a few metres Marcos sees, behind a stone, a bespectacled beetle clenching a tiny pipe, sitting at a tiny desk studying, as we soon discover, neoliberalism “and its strategy of domination for Latin America” (Subcomandante Marcos 12). Marcos, unfazed by the discovery of a literate, smoking beetle is taken aback by his investigation of neoliberalism. Durito explains that his scholarly interest is quite pragmatic for it stems from a desire to know how long and how successful the Zapatista struggle will be so as to ascertain “how long us beetles are going to have to be careful that you [Marcos and the other members of the Zapatista army who are based in the jungle] aren’t going to squash us with your big boots” (Subcomandante Marcos 12). In these encounters with Durito the political analyst, Marcos is given lessons in politics and economics from an inhabitant of the jungle floor, from a beetle who recognises that the danger of being squashed by “big boots” in his small patch of land is intimately linked to the global issue of neoliberalism and its much bigger boots. Through these stories, Marcos highlights the detrimental impact that global economic policies have had on the Maya of Chiapas. The character of Durito also enables him to demonstrate the potential for small, seemingly insignificant individuals or groups to radically challenge these policies and articulate alternatives. Conclusion Such entertaining and lyrical prose enables the EZLN to present itself as a new style of social revolutionary movement, far removed from traditional Latin American revolutionary struggles. This has, arguably, broadened the movement’s international support network, a situation facilitated by the circulation and publication of these writings and communiqués on the Internet by the movement’s NGO support network. However, while the use of information-age technology to stimulate the creation of collective transnational support networks presents as a useful strategy for contemporary social struggles, it does not guarantee the procurement of significant political, economic and social change. Indeed, after more than a decade of struggle, the Zapatistas have not precipitated the radical reconstruction of the Mexican political system that they had hoped for. References Burbach, Roger. Globalization and Postmodern Politics: From Zapatistas to High-Tech Robber Barons. London: Pluto Press, 2001. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume II: The Power of Identity. Malden, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Cleaver, Harry M. Jr. “The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric.” Journal of International Affairs 51.2 (1998): 621-40. Froehling, Oliver. “The Cyberspace ‘War of Ink and Internet’ in Chiapas, Mexico.” The Geographical Review 87.2 (1997): 291-307. Knudson, Jerry W. “Rebellion in Chiapas: Insurrection by Internet and Public Relations.” Media, Culture and Society 20.3 (1998): 507-18. Ponce de León, Juana. “Editor’s Note: Travelling Back for Tomorrow.” Our Word Is Our Weapon. Ed. Juana Ponce de León. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001. xxiii-xxxi. Ronfeldt, David, et al. The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico. Santa Monica, California: RAND, 1998. Subcomandante Marcos. Don Durito de La Lacandona. San Cristóbal de Las Casas Chiapas: Centro de Información y Análisis de Chiapas, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Turner, Bethaney. "Information-Age Guerrillas: The Communication Strategies of the Zapatistas." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/01-turner.php>. APA Style Turner, B. (Jun. 2005) "Information-Age Guerrillas: The Communication Strategies of the Zapatistas," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/01-turner.php>.

Futuristic fiction almost by definition enters into a dialogue with the present as a future past. As a consequence, history haunts even the most inane visions of the future in often quite subtle ways. An excellent prompt to speculate on this issue is provided by Luc Besson's popular film The Fifth Element (1997). Like many science-fiction films, it is about a future troubled by its own promises. It almost goes without saying that while not specifically figured around Y2K, the attention to dates and time in the film combined with its late '90s release date also inscribe it within Millennial anxieties about the end of the world. History plays a series of roles in The Fifth Element. In common with many science-fiction fables, the film stages an inverted fictional genealogy, in which the viewer is actively encouraged to revel in identifying extrapolated features and concerns of the present. This heralds a basic historicity: that is, it invites us to grasp our present as history through its defamiliarisation. Moreover, like another futuristic film of the same year, Gattaca, it is aesthetically marked by the pathos of what might be called millennial "nostalgia for the future" -- that lost utopian real of Modernist aesthetic desire which seems to haunt these "post-post-apocalyptic", Space-Age futures1. This is only enhanced by quoting generously from earlier moments of the science fiction genre (such as Blade Runner). Striking, however, is that despite all of this, everyday America -- globalised and projected two hundred and fifty years hence -- is not so much dystopian or utopian as just ordinary. People still smoke, but filters makes up three-quarters of a cigarette's length; we still get stuck in chaotic traffic, even if it flies above the ground; we still eat Chinese takeaway, only now the restaurants fly to you; and cops still eat take-away at drive-through McDonald's, which are now floating fixtures in the cityscape. That individuals are so stylish (thanks to costume design, everyone is wearing Jean-Paul Gaultier) also seems significant, because this aestheticised ordinariness helps focus attention on the lived time of everyday utopian yearnings. In these ways and more, our contemporary moment is immanent in the film. However, at certain other crucial moments in the film, History is directly presented as an excess. Let me explain. Two hundred and fifty years into the future, a "Supreme Being" -- Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) -- is genetically reconstructed by scientists. Dubbed the missing "fifth element", she belongs to a highly developed extra-terrestrial species who have a protectoral relation to humanity. In the beginning, Leeloo is cut off from human language -- speaking in a tongue that combines a mixture of European dialects with baby-speak (her favourite phrase, as anyone who has seen the film will recall, is "[Big] badda-boo!"). She speaks what a priest in the film calls the "Divine language", "spoken before time was time" -- evoking the theological dream of a universal pre-symbolic language, of a pure speech that speaks the world rather than speaks of it. Her very first English word is "Help!" -- which she reads off a taxi sticker advertisement for starving black orphans. And it is perhaps no accident that she identifies with this future's expropriated. Leeloo is a body cast into marginality. Caged as an exhibit from the moment of her arrival on Earth, with her exotic appearance, wide-eyed wonderment and capacity for mimicry, she displays all the tropes of the infantilised and sexualised Other. Romanticised as a primitivist fantasy, she represents a classically vulnerable redemptive figure2. Two hundred and fifty years into the future, a "Supreme Being" -- Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) -- is genetically reconstructed by scientists. Dubbed the missing "fifth element", she belongs to a highly developed extra-terrestrial species who have a protectoral relation to humanity. In the beginning, Leeloo is cut off from human language -- speaking in a tongue that combines a mixture of European dialects with baby-speak (her favourite phrase, as anyone who has seen the film will recall, is "[Big] badda-boo!"). She speaks what a priest in the film calls the "Divine language", "spoken before time was time" -- evoking the theological dream of a universal pre-symbolic language, of a pure speech that speaks the world rather than speaks of it. Her very first English word is "Help!" -- which she reads off a taxi sticker advertisement for starving black orphans. And it is perhaps no accident that she identifies with this future's expropriated. Leeloo is a body cast into marginality. Caged as an exhibit from the moment of her arrival on Earth, with her exotic appearance, wide-eyed wonderment and capacity for mimicry, she displays all the tropes of the infantilised and sexualised Other. Romanticised as a primitivist fantasy, she represents a classically vulnerable redemptive figure2. Leaving aside for the moment the perhaps inevitably romantic resolution to this predicament, we can interpret this scene as a critique of the Enlightenment pretension to "total History". The "arbitrary" order of alphabetisation, which replaces the seemingly determined disorder of historical narratives, is akin to the Kantian dream of a cosmopolitan state of "universal history". Think, too, of the aging Hegel, writing in 1830: We witness a vast spectacle of events and actions, of infinitely varied constellations of nations, states and individuals, in restless succession. ... Everywhere we see a motley confusion ... But ... we grow weary of particulars and ask ourselves to what end they all contribute. We cannot accept that their significance is exhausted by their own particular ends; everything must be part of a single enterprise. (325-7) Leaving aside for the moment the perhaps inevitably romantic resolution to this predicament, we can interpret this scene as a critique of the Enlightenment pretension to "total History". The "arbitrary" order of alphabetisation, which replaces the seemingly determined disorder of historical narratives, is akin to the Kantian dream of a cosmopolitan state of "universal history". Think, too, of the aging Hegel, writing in 1830: We witness a vast spectacle of events and actions, of infinitely varied constellations of nations, states and individuals, in restless succession. ... Everywhere we see a motley confusion ... But ... we grow weary of particulars and ask ourselves to what end they all contribute. We cannot accept that their significance is exhausted by their own particular ends; everything must be part of a single enterprise. (325-7) If The Fifth Element critiques the universal history lesson, it also revolves around a dialectical relation between past and present. Although the opening scene in late colonial Egypt locates the film's narrative historically, these later scenes suggest a break with conventional, clean historiographical separations between the past and the present5. Leeloo's reading of History implies that embodied historical reception is in a perpetual in-between state. Not only the representation of the past as History but the experience of Time itself becomes less a matter of chronology than of a Freudian retroactivity, a "present past" with everyday variations which belong as much to future possibilities as to what we perceive as the present. The necessary absence of a determinate "past object" (referent) in historical understanding means that historicity is a traumatic process of deferral. In psychoanalytic terms, Leeloo's forced recognition of the unnatural deaths of Others is a traumatic encounter which generates a hole in the symbolic order of Leeloo's "real". Leeloo's traumatised body metaphorically becomes the singular "truth" of the symbolic world6. A global history is in fact nobody's history in particular -- belonging to everybody and nobody. This is the fate of the CD-ROM: a "memory" overwhelmingly composed of media images, and an allegory for our own situation of image saturation (whose stereotypical symbol is the isolated individual glued to a flickering screen). Yet when Leeloo enters history with a kiss, a fragile dialogical exchange in which her own life "story" begins, the fate of media images is to become socialised as part of non-synchronous particular narratives7. The grand "nightmare" of History has become comprehensible through her particular access to universal History -- and the result is an appropriated, ongoing experience with an undisclosed future. The Fifth Element thus presents a distinctly everyday solution to the problem of historical time -- and is this not how media history is experienced? No doubt in the future no less than the present, history will be less a matter of the Past itself, than of the allegorical reverberation of events documented and encountered in the everyday mediasphere. Footnotes Mark Dery recently berated the trend for retro-futurism as a Wallpaper-inspired plot, poised to generate a nostalgia for ironic dreams of fading technological utopias, while revealing the banality of design fashions that demand the ever new. See "Back to the Future", posted to Nettime (5 Sep. 1999) It is also worth noting the sublime role of the Diva in the film, whose pained operatic performance embodies what Slavoj Zizek once called the jouissance of modernity. Humanity's potential will to "creative destruction" has previously been embodied in Gary Oldman's evil business figure of Zorg, who undoubtedly represents the excesses of corporate capitalism (he illustrates his Ayn Rand-style vitalist philosophy at one point by letting a glass fall from his desk and shatter on to the ground: gleefully watching as a team of mechanical robots whiz around the floor sweeping it up, he croons: "see -- a lovely ballet ensues, adding to the great chain of life -- by creating a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life". See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Vol. 10, Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984; Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994. Historiographical time can be distinguished from psychoanalytic time on the basis of two different ways of organising the space of memory. While the former conceives the temporal relation as one of succession and correlation, the latter treats the relation as one of imbrication and repetition. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. Vol. 17, Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 4. An interesting sf intertext here is Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, in which a woman who is a projection of a man's memory unsuccessfully attempts to kill herself to prove that she is made of historical reality. In this traumatic scene, she consumes liquid nitrogen and writhes on a metallic floor in a frozen state until she gradually thaws into human movement. Leeloo is finally brought into the "un-Historical" time of everyday embodied subjectivity with a single kiss. To borrow the language of psychoanalytic film studies, her "screen memories" are reconfigured by an imaginary resolution in the present. I use the term screen memories with a nod to both the computer screen and Freud's compelling if problematic account of repressed mnemic material. Freud writes: "As the indifferent memories owe their preservation not to their own content but to an associative relation between their content and another which is repressed, they have some claim to be called 'screen memories'". Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Vol. 5, The Pelican Freud Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. 83. References Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books, 1992. Hegel, G.W.F. "The Philosophical History of the World: Second Draft (1830)." German Idealist Philosophy. Ed. Rüdiger Buber. London: Penguin, 1997. 317-39. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Daniel Palmer. "Nostalgia for the Future: Everyday History and The Fifth Element." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/nostalgia.php>. Chicago style: Daniel Palmer, "Nostalgia for the Future: Everyday History and The Fifth Element," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/nostalgia.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Daniel Palmer. (2000) Nostalgia for the future: everyday history and The Fifth Element. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/nostalgia.php> ([your date of access]).