Journal articles on the topic 'Primordial embodiments'

Values are defined most oftenly as standards for determining levels of goodness or desirability. Values are generally loaded with affective thoughts about ideas, objects, behavior etc. India’s higher education system is one of the oldest systems of the world. In spite of this there is no uniform expansion & development in this field. Our primordial embodiments i.e. Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha, on which education was based, are not even completely realized by scholars today. This is the main reason for degrading the level of human values in higher education in India. On one hand, people are getting rich by the degrees full of knowledge about various fields, simultaneously, loosing values and ethics etc. We ourselves are to be blamed for this. Our existing environment including family system, education system and media including newspapers, T.V. etc is responsible for such poor conditions. This research paper aims at explaining the factors how & why human values are consistently degrading in India, as the time passes, although we are rich in culture & traditions, still our higher education is unable to cherish or enhance it.

This article examines the relationship between the French fin-de-siècle painter Paul Gauguin’s (1848-1903) anti-modernism and the ideology behind the colonial project. Setting out to refute the Western materialistic ‘civilisation’, Gauguin embraced the supposed savage, primitive, and pure ‘Other’. In paintings such as ‘Breton Calvary’ (1889) and ‘The Specter Watches Her’ (1892), Gauguin uses Breton farmers and Tahitian women as formal embodiments of his imagined ‘earthly paradise’ and the primordial ‘savage’ character. However, as the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) argues, there is always a relationship of power within a discourse. Through defining what is ‘primitive’ and what is ‘civilised’ from within a Western paradigm, Gauguin is testifying to a Western hegemony. Though Gauguin’s idealisation of the ‘primitive’ essentially sought to criticise the Western colonial discourse, it essentially reinforces its main ideological justification: the hierarchical dichotomy between the ‘primitive’ and the ‘civilised’.

Values are defined most oftenly as standards for determining levels of goodness or desirability. Values are generally loaded with affective thoughts about ideas, objects, behavior etc.
 India’s higher education system is one of the oldest systems of the world. In spite of this there is no uniform expansion & development in this field. Our primordial embodiments i.e. Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha, on which education was based, are not even completely realized by scholars today. This is the main reason for degrading the level of human values in higher education in India. On one hand, people are getting rich by the degrees full of knowledge about various fields, simultaneously, loosing values and ethics etc. We ourselves are to be blamed for this. Our existing environment including family system, education system and media including newspapers, T.V. etc is responsible for such poor conditions.
 This research paper aims at explaining the factors how & why human values are consistently degrading in India, as the time passes, although we are rich in culture & traditions, still our higher education is unable to cherish or enhance it.

AbstractDesign thinking as explored by Bernard Roth from the Stanford d.School, Roger Martin from the Rothman School of Management, and the IDEO merger trio by Tom and David Kelley, as well as current its CEO Tim Brown, dominates the narrative of the contemporary schools of design thinking since the late `90s. This article aims to investigate the underlying philosophies, authors, and events that laid the foundation in which these contemporary designers based their strategies on planning for complex environments. To satisfy this intent, the turbulent origin of design methods is explored, following the post-war environment that allowed these ideas to flourish, the generations of methods in design from the `60s to the `90s, and the encroachment of design methods to the embodiment of a commercialized design thinking methodology.

Explicit in the current construction of Alzheimer's disease is the assumption that memory impairment caused by cognitive deficiencies leads to a steady loss of selfhood. The insistence that selfhood is the exclusive privilege of the sphere of cognition has its origins in the modern western philosophical tradition that separates mind from body, and positions the former as superior to the latter. This dichotomy suggests a fundamental passivity of the body, since it is primarily cognition that is held to be essential to selfhood. In contrast to the assumed erasure of selfhood in Alzheimer's disease, and challenging the philosophical underpinnings of this assumption, this paper presents the findings of an ethnographic study of selfhood in Alzheimer's disease in a Canadian long-term care facility. It argues and demonstrates that selfhood persists even with severe dementia, because it is an embodied dimension of human existence. Using a framework of embodiment that integrates the perspectives of Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu, it is argued that selfhood is characterised by an observable coherence and capacity for improvisation, and sustained at a pre-reflective level by the primordial and socio-cultural significance of the body. The participants in this study interacted meaningfully with the world through their embodied way of ‘being-in-the-world’.

The paper explores the wide distribution of symbols whose religious and folklore interpretations are the same or similar among different cultures. The definition of symbols and their origin are considered, with reference to the theory of the "Mundus Imaginalis" of the orientalist Henry Corben, and its similarity with the "active imagination" of the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. The resemblances of the legends about the Cosmic man and the Centre of the world are followed through various mythologies, folklore traditions and cults. The Cosmic man – the first human being – who usually makes a sacrifice in order for the world to emerge and survive, in many cultures represents the embodiment of the highest virtues, towards which one should strive. The human form as the basis for temples or various sacral diagrams can be found in all ancient religious traditions and always symbolizes Imago Mundi – image of the world. At its center is the "navel" of the world, the Pillar of the Universe, Axis Mundi, which connects the earth with the sky and the underworld, and represents the axis around which the world revolves. Exploring these sets of symbols, we see that their essential aspect should not be understood as geographical places to be located, or personifications of some historical figures whose true identity needs to be interpreted. On the contrary, the symbols indicate that the search for meaning is, above all, internal; immersing ourselves in the domain of the archetype, we reflect on the essential questions of the purpose and origin of the universe, the nature of the self, kinship with the rest of humanity, which is why the symbolic layer of the human psyche helps us fight against the general alienation of the modern world.

Abstract There have been important advances in research on creativity that have provided a more inclusive view of everyday and ordinary creativity, including that of persons living with dementia. However, these developments are limited by a lack of engagement with scholarship on embodiment, relationality, and citizenship. We address these limitations by drawing on a relational model of citizenship that offers a critical rethinking of the nature of creativity and the imperative that these be supported in long-term dementia care. We draw on transcribed video-recorded interactions between elder-clowns and residents living with dementia in one long-term care home in central Canada. These are analyzed with reference to key theoretical tenets of the relational model of citizenship. Embodied selfhood (i.e., the primordial and socio-cultural dispositions of the body that are fundamental sources of self-expression and relationality), are identified as key to the creativity of persons living with dementia. We argue that creativity is not an individual cognitive trait but rather emerges from the complex intersection of enabling environments and the embodied intentionality of all involved. We conclude that creativity must be supported in everyday life through organizational practices and socio-political institutions that more fully support the relational, interpersonal, and affective dimensions of care.

The article attempts to highlight the peculiarities of Lesya Ukrainka's interpretation and transformation of the archetypal meanings of the mythologeme "water" in the extravaganza drama "Forest Song". The results of the study make it possible to state that the writer does not abandon the meanings of the water element produced by the folklore tradition as the embodiment of the primordial substance, the beginning, the idea of the androgynous fusion of the masculine and feminine in the ecstasy of love, metaphorical renewal, purification, the death of the old world and the creation of a new and, at the same time, the finitude of being. and a new rebirth. However, it can be noted the presence in the text of the author's symbolic, emotionally colored personal subtext, in which water symbolizes a transgression beyond the boundaries of everyday life in order to acquire the energy of creativity, without which art is impossible.

Translations of the native notion of shamanic agency of the Siona Indians of Colombia is explored throughout different historical and social contexts. The polysemic concept rau is central to the shaman’s capacity for establishing relations of exchange and negotiation with humans and non-humans. As the embodiment of his power, it fits within a semantic field that conveys the waxing and waning of life cycles. Sharing a series of qualities with the Melanesian concept of mana, rau should be understood as a social phenomenon whose use and meaning has transfigured through time and space. However, unlike the globalization of new mana, the important notion of Siona shamanic agency has been substituted by representations of the ritual substance of yajé as key symbol for power and knowledge as Siona rituals have been revitalized in their dialogue with the ethnic identity movement and the neo-shamanic network that associates sacred plants with primordial knowledge and agency.

“Beauty in front of the mirror”, “Statue in Tsarskoye Selo”, “Who grew the tender roses of Theocritus in the snow?” by Pushkin, as well as some anthological epigrams of his contemporaries). The ancient Greek epigram, distinguished by clear formal features and a wide variety of content, recorded, as a rule, only something static or instantaneous. This quality ensured, in the eyes of Pushkin’s contemporaries, the authenticity of the transmission and perception of the object depicted in the epigram. In anthological epigrams of the first third of the 19th century, deviations from such primordial features of the genre as the elegiac distich and the absence of rhyme were allowed, but the static nature, anti-narrativeness, and embodiment of an instantaneous, non-deployable state characteristic of ancient models were preserved. In connection with the last feature, the question arises as to whether a lyrical plot can be realized within the framework of such a genre. Using the example of Pushkin’s epigrams, which are not an inscription addressed to a really existing object, but create a convincing plastic image (creating their own denotation), it is shown that the event component of such texts (their lyrical plot) lies in the very act of embodiment of a visible object, in the act of its acquisition of existence. In a number of cases, this act becomes the subject of poetic reflection, the epigram comprehends itself and becomes self-referential. The substance of poetry, cleared of narration (Yu. N. Chumakov’s terms), is presented in such cases as a self-creating and self-interpreting principle.

KLENThe range of studies of Yurii Klen’s short stories has expanded signifi cantly recently. Among other aspects, researchers have focused on the archetypal nature of his prose. However, in this vector of studies of the author’s poetics, the interest in «psychological» archetypes still prevails – the Self, the Shadow, the Anima, the Animus, etc. Meanwhile, the writer’s active appeal to the fundamental im-ages of nature, the so-called archetypes of «primordial elements» is obvious. The study of their functional role in the authpor’s fi ctional system can lead to the solution in fundamental problems of Yurii Klen’s poetics.The peculiarities of the fi ctional world of the novel «Acacia» are largely deter-mined by the individual authorial embodiment of the archetypes of the primordial material elements, primarily Fire and Water. The author explains their dominant functions in accordance with the «mystical» plot of the novella and the intricate visionary and oneiric imagination of the main character. In the work, the arche-type of fi re is endowed with destructive and deadly power, while water embodies life-giving symbolism. Words and expressions related to the semantics of burning create an extremely wide fi eld in the text. This is «Fire» itself, and its equivalents, synonyms and derivatives. The motifs of heat, fl ame, fuel and the metaphors of burning, shining, explosion mediated by them become the variant-content realiza-tion of the archetype of the Fire. They echo in various plot situations and discursive representations, which receive an appropriate linguistic and stylistic design. The destructive element of the Fire in the text of the novella is opposed by various manifestations of the Water, which carries life-giving symbolism. The mediated collision of the Fire and the Water in the novella implies the idea of the eternal op-position of these two forces and a certain balancing sense of their interdependence. These key archetypes of primordial elements in the Yurii Klen’s fi ctional world perform the functions of expressing the fundamentals of Being, actualizing the dominants of life and death as a metaphysical vortex of all that exists

Abstract In nashat-loaded circles, the shikha, claiming the center of her pedestal, asks the question: ‘al-hlawa fin kayna?’ (sweetness, where is it?). She pauses tantalizingly and looks around, but no one offers an answer. She inquires again with a smile. As she proceeds, what seems like mere initiation into eroticism and sensuality becomes a deeply philosophical pursuit of the rather far-flung meanings of the female and her body. While the shikha is no academician, she constructs through dance and lyrics a body of thought that navigates across a constellation of dialectics: female prevailing/alternative realities, gaming/thinking, play/seriousness and representation/agency. This article discusses female performers not as the embodiment of the carnivalesque, parodism, playfulness, profanity and voyeurism but as potential theorists in the domain of nashat where speculations on the existence of sweetness can easily become about its absence, deficiency and lack. It also addresses shikhat as potential theory-makers and proto-philosophers oscillating between epistemic margins and centers while leading the popular musical and performative scenes with primordial advice, guidance, teaching and wisdom.

Although it is a relatively new phenomenon, the most popular descriptions of post-truth operate within the boundaries of the classical dichotomy between emotion and reason that dates back to Plato’s Phaedrus: both, to some extent, view emotions as impediments to knowledge and our ability to live morally upstanding lives (248a-b). Post-truth, which is seen as a threat to reason, social cohesion, and fact-based knowledge claims, is either viewed as the outcome of the failure of our cognitive apparatus, or a consequence of our unchecked thirst for stories that provoke dramatic feelings. From a feminist point of view, this should give us pause, since the arguments used to dismiss post-truth resemble those that dismissed women’s experiences and emotions as idiosyncratic or irrational. Have post-truth scholars been too hasty in their judgment of emotion-based knowledge claims? In this essay, I explore the transcendental role of emotion in its relationship to epistemic knowledge claims and argue that emotion should be given a more primordial status in the analysis of post-factuality. I do this by exploring the psychoanalytic and phenomenological analysis of affect, especially Sara Ahmed’s feminist phenomenology of embodiment.

AbstractAging is an integral part of human existence. The problem of aging addresses the most fundamental coordinates of our lives but also the ones of the phenomenological method: time, embodiment, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and even the social norms that grow into the very notion of aging as such. In my article, I delineate a phenomenological analysis of aging and show how such an analysis connects with the debate concerning personal identity: I claim that aging is not merely a physical process, but is far more significantly also a spiritual one as the process of aging consists in our awareness of and conscious relation to our aging. This spiritual process takes place on an individual and on a social level, whereas the latter is the more primordial layer of this experience. This complicates the question of personal identity since it will raise the question in two ways, namely who I am for myself and who I am for the others, and in a further step how the latter experience shapes the former. However, we can state that aging is neither only physical nor only spiritual. It concerns my bodily processes as it concerns the complex reflexive structure that relates my former self with my present and even future self.

The article is devoted to the formation of the problem field of social phenomenology. The author analyzed the works of the phenomenological and socio-constructivist directions of research and identified a common conceptual core. The authors (T. Luckman, M. Merleau-Ponty, M. Eldred) distinguish a previously undifferentiated communicative horizon in the field of interaction. The communicative horizon belongs to the primordial sphere of the subject and is the result of the demarcation of the homogeneous world according to the criterion of ability to communicate. The line of demarcation is determined by the behavior of beings and does not necessarily cover only the zone of human embodiment. It was established that the communicative aspect and the aspect of asking about oneself as a human being are closely related. The mobility of the boundaries of the meanings of the world objects, the subjectivity of judgment, the possibility of correlating with the help of socio-historical reality comprise the aggregate subject matter of social phenomenology. The author concludes that due to the lack of unambiguous criteria for establishing the framework of the social world, one should resort to the description of the phenomenal plan of sociality, which can help to qualitatively distinguish the levels of social reality in the long term.

Phenomenological research has focused on embodiment. This paper examines how the body is experienced in passive contemplation, understood as a finite province of meaning in Alfred Schutz’s sense. The six features characteristic of any province of meaning (epoché, form of spontaneity, tension of consciousness, sense of self, temporality, and sociality) function distinctively in each province of meaning and alter one’s experience of one’s body. In the foundational province of pragmatic everyday life, one transforms deliberately and bodily the surrounding world, but this experience undergoes modifications in the religious/spiritual contemplative province. To clarify passive contemplation, the paper develops, as a contrast, active contemplation, the active, restless pursuit of chains of appresentational symbols and images. In passive contemplation, one separates from everyday life, orients toward unity rather than dialogue with God, refrains from following appresentative chains, and relaxes one’s tension of the consciousness/body (e.g., through breathing), single-mindedly attending to God’s presence. One can trace passive contemplation genetically to a primordial entwinement with one’s mother’s body, in which subjective/objective boundaries are blurred (as in Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh”). In passive contemplation, one assumes an often-wordless social role (child, lover) toward God and abides tranquilly in the present rather than moving distractedly toward any future.

The phenomenology of sociality responds to the dilemma of other minds by presuming the primordially intersubjective and embodied nature of intentional communicative acts. I propose, then, to consider the phenomenology of digital sociality as the field of research dedicated to investigate the specificity of the nature of intersubjectivity and embodiment constituted by digital communication media. By dividing the discussed variety of descriptive phenomenological accounts regarding digitally mediated embodied relationships (including Shanyang Zhao, Lucy Osler and Dan Zahavi, Rebecca A. Hardesty and Ben Sheredos and others) into the trajectories of extension (digitally mediated communication as the eidetic variation of generally embodied communicative acts) and pluralism (epistemology as well as ontology and socially normative practices intrinsic to the specific digital communication platform) I aim to demonstrate the topical tendencies and explanatory strategies that are developed in the attempts to deliver digital communication platform-sensitive phenomenological descriptions, often with the help of Alfred Schutz’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts.

The article is devoted to the formation and development of artistry of the newly written Nenets literature. The main goal was to determine the origins and reveal the ethnocodes of artistic concepts and conceptosphere. Among the tasks was the manifestation of their role and significance in the creation of the image system. There was also a search for methodological approaches to comprehending the complex and little-studied literary process that takes place in peculiar conditions of transculturation. Interdisciplinary, historical-cultural and comparativist approaches were substantiated and activated, and analytical and synthetic reading of texts was used. The research was conducted on the material of Yuri Vella's texts written both in Nenets and Khanty languages and translated into Russian, and those created by him in Russian. The author's active search for peculiar genres and his aspiration to preserve his ancestral ethnicity in the process of transculturation are noted. The specificity of symbolism of a number of transformed and embodied primordial images (archetypes) is revealed. The difference between cognitive and artistic concepts is outlined. It is shown how artistic concepts and the conceptosphere, including mental signs and phenomena preserved by the historical memory of Nenets, participate in the creation of images and the development of plots, in the embodiment of the chosen idea and the disclosure of the theme.

A significant place in the legacy of Andrey Bitov (1937−2018), a contemporary Russian writer, is occupied by analytical essayist prose. His natural philosophy tetralogy “The catechumen” (1971−2011) portrays the travels of the protagonist as a metaphor for the sensory and mental comprehension of reality and the world picture embodiment in the text. The story “Man in the landscape” (1983) involves an acquaintance with an artist, who leads the lyrical hero, a travel writer, into provocative “Socratic dialogues” interpreted as a space of metaphysical quests. The marginal adventures turn out to be a philosophical experiment, a revelation of free thought in the circles of the search for truth. This version of the evolution of artistic forms, starting from primordial mimetism and Renaissance humanism, comprehends the non-classical worldview of the 20th century. This happens not in iconic postmodern art but in the modernist transcendence of the Here-Being. The sequence of loci of the journey takes the hero from the sacred space to the infernal, increasing the semantics of the art phenomenon not only with creative but also with destructive aspects (“art” as “temptation”), strengthening the existential anxiety as a “concern for being.” Salvation is seen as the path of grateful contemplation of the Creation, embodying the essence of the Creator’s plan and testament, helping Him overcome his loneliness. The Being comprehends itself in the mirror of the text, understood as an act of acceptance of life.

This paper attempts to highlight the paurānic ("mythical") or religious story of the temple of Goddess Shaileshwarī of Silgadhi, Doti under Seti zone, Nepal with Northrop Frey's theories of Myth Criticism, Archetypal Criticism, and the Quest-Myth so that the people of Nepal and India would know about the temple's mythical and religious importance. By spreading the temple's mythical story in Nepal and India, we could promote the religious tourism of Nepal, especially of the local area. The story of Goddess Shaileshwarī goes back to the Satya Yuga when Shiva and Pārvatī got married as mentioned in the "Mānas Khand" of The Holy Skanda Purān. After Their marriage, They stayed in the temple area to enjoy Their divine honeymoon for some time. Then, Brahmā (the Creator) came to this temple and prayed to Pārvatī, now known as Shaileshwarī or Shilādevī. Similarly, two Indian Brāhmans and Lord Rām―all three from India― visited the temple, worshipped, and prayed to Shiva and Pārvatī, and were blessed by Her in the Tretā Yuga." Shaileshwarī is the Goddess of the universe who fulfils Her devotees' desires. Shiva and Pārvatī are the archetypal symbols or primordial images of creation, destruction, re-creation, power, knowledge, and a sacred sexual union. Every male and female creature is a living embodiment of Shiva and Pārvatī. Also, Shiva and Pārvatī live in each other's body as Ardhanārīshwara ("Lord Shiva whose left part is of Goddess Pārvatī "). So, every male and female is divine and both have each other's qualities, too.

The aim of this research is to identify the specific characteristics of the realization of archetypal traits in the image of the mother in L. S. Petrushevskaya’s horror stories. It is important to demonstrate that, in creating female characters, the author relies not so much on the research tradition of Sigmund Freud, but rather on the ideas of his opponents (Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner), who insist that the foundation of primordial spiritual reality is Christian. The article examines key trends in the development of the latest literature as a whole, and the specific features of the embodiment of the archetypal image of the mother in the works of L. S. Petrushevskaya as crucial to the writer’s worldview. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that, for the first time, a comprehensive study of the image of the mother in the author’s artistic world is conducted, taking into account the genre features of horror stories and the specifics of the writer’s worldview. The image of the mother is understood as a symbol of mercy, preserving not only the family, but also the integrity of the universe at its ultimate limit. The results of the study show that the figure of the mother in Petrushevskaya’s horror stories – significant from the point of view of the development of this theme – is one of the structure-forming elements, embodying the main idea of the author’s philosophy: the idea of compassion, mercy, and responsiveness to the pain of others, upon which the world stands.

This article analyses the terrible in the works of Adamist poets to identify common features and patterns in their creative work. Adamism is both a synonym for Acmeism and the designation of its left wing, represented by S. Gorodetsky, V. Narbut, and M. Zenkevich. Accepting the basic postulates of Gumilyov’s Acmeism (supported by A. Akhmatova and O. Mandelstam) about the primordial attitude to reality, the priority of objectivity in the composition of the artistic world which sought to acquire earthly contours and outlines, Adamists were much more resolute about the possibility of considering a wide range of everyday phenomena and everyday things worthy of artistic comprehension. Physiologism, the animal nature in humans, and primitive savage impulses also became a favorite basis for Adamists for their naturalistic pictorial solutions. This vitalist approach was combined with an interest in the spontaneous, pagan, and folklore and ethnographic. The bearers of the terrible in V. Narbut are disgusting and ugly things, people, animals, representatives of folk demonology, mystical creatures, and zombies. Their appearance and existence are associated with a violation of the norm, deformity or disfiguring disease, the appearance of evil spirits, and the domination of death and decay. All this, for the characters and the lyrical subject himself, was a manifestation of the Otherworldly and the intrusion of a frightening Other into everyday life. The material and biological basis presented through the prism of coarse physiology, animal struggle for existence, and aggressive struggle of the sexes determines the interpretation of the terrible in M. Zenkevich’s poetry. The article examines how any layers of culture collapse and terrible crimes and murders are committed when primitive animal and wild subconscious instincts are released. The evolution of the terrible in Zenkevich is related to the movement from the eschatology of the natural-cosmic catastrophism of the Earth to the eschatology of personality, the comprehension of the tragedy of the individual’s existence. Gorodetsky’s poetry is associated with the folk poetic element, ethnographic excursions, interest in social issues, and anti-urbanism. Many thematic sections of the terrible combine Gorodetsky’s work with the work of literary brothers in Adamism: interest in the primary and primordial, folk demonology, nightmares, and death. The peculiarity of Gorodetsky’s approach to the problem of the terrible manifests itself in the artistic embodiment of the motif of the mask, hiding the conflict between the deceptive phenomenon and the essence of things: for the poet, the loss of individuality, facelessness, and alienation are terrible.

The current stage of historical development is characterized by the tendency of an increasing value and ideological crisis, directly related to the crisis of legal understanding, spiritual, moral, civilizational and cultural disorientation of jurisprudence. The unifying humanity and the legal values it has suffered have been shaken by the policy of single-vector globalization, which has called into question national identity and the primordial possibility of peoples to self-determination. The methods of dictate, unilateral sanctions, and hybrid forms of aggression that have entered into current international use, based on ideas about the exclusivity and dominance of a certain form of legal culture and civilization, destroy the sovereign equality of states, and have nothing to do with the laws of natural history development. The need to form a new global legal paradigm and substantiate the intrinsic value of domestic law as the normative embodiment of Russian civilization require the mobilization of domestic fundamental jurisprudence, which is currently experiencing a number of difficulties and is characterized by negative development trends. This concerns, in particular, the disclosure in our jurisprudence of the historical, civilizational and cultural factors of the Russian legal system, the development of the ideological and philosophical potential of the national legal heritage, the establishment of systematic work to update the methodology of legal cognition, taking into account fundamental changes in the world and in the national worldview, thematic and substantive consistency of research work with the priorities of state development. Increasing the role of fundamental disciplines in legal education and its constitutionalization, revealing the unity of the Russian state and law, the original foundations of our legal system, focusing on a predictive approach that allows us to form advanced models of legal regulation, coordinating the topics of scientific and legal research in accordance with national priorities — key areas in the field of fundamental jurisprudence.

In the frames of creative-recursive concept of settling, after investigation in antecedent articles meaningful issues concerning compositional trigger-schemes and assembly-schemes for urban landscape accomplishment, the third part of general theoretical research of technological kernel of logos-system explication mechanism of cultural forms of the settling reality was presented. It was shown that given research naturally and expectedly makes apparent the metaphysical foundations for transcendent activity (autopoesis) of planning technologies ensemble for accomplishment of settling, that demonstrates the analysis of broad spectrum of philosophical and methodological opinions concerning the source for "primordium" of transcendent technologies of accomplishment of reality phenomena, which reveal "the truth of being". 
 The research results in domain of technics philosophy were examined, where the historical horizon concerning technological notions was given, which determines ontological place of technics (technique) as a subjective ability coming into being and transformation of things and as an object, which anticipates using the instructions concerning transformations. As an intermediate conclusion concerning technological constituents of logos-system mechanism is an assertion about the possibility for insulation strictly "executive" two-part module of instructive-instrumental planning technologies and reflexive-methodical duplex-block for the accompaniment of ontical and existential matrix planning principles of primordium and configurative matrices for an application of sense-meaning (content) of that technologies.
 On the base of surveying of treatments the character of operation and meaning for feedback mechanisms (schemes) for self-regulation and achievement of object entirety was determinated one of the central discursive points of the configuration of "sum" of transcendent planning technologies, its ontoconstructional role and specific character of working.
 The ontological context of thematication for the content issue that technologies was written in maximum frames of ontic "pattern of universe" (settling) for positioning the agents for transcendent activities and fixing onto-sense support points of conceptual uncovering recursive content of technological working. The ontological model was elaborated to demonstrate working subordination of planning technologies as compositional cascade participation (mutually adjustedness from matrix autopoesis source-prototechnology) concerning synthesis-planning explication of reality forms. The specific role of technological aggregates for planning (practical-regulative) technologies and invariant agents of stability accomplishment of settling phenomena, that is ensured owing to working of logos-system composition aggregate was exhibited. In the analytical context of problems and conceptions concerning management of city planning processes, principles of application appropriate planning technologies and also problems of rate setting for urban landscape phenomena the suitable ontological model was treated. It is the model of singular "genome" (primordium) of transcendent planning technologies, which secure mastering and realization (or their possibility to be used) mental and physical city planning technologies in the sphere of concerted action (processing) power and unpower constituents of logos-system mechanism.
 The statements of two propound ontological models were examined in affiliation to determine the essence of immanent-transcendent working of configurator (as cultural form-logoses attribute) on the base of ensemble (association) of transcendent planning technologies, order of priority to put through acting, predominant succession and adaptatiogenesis of coordination – compatible resource-embodiment and resource-circulation of topoform personification. In total number of the given thematic (subject) research there are meaningful characteristics of ensemble of four transcendent planning technologies of becoming and transformation of landscape (process-environment) phenomena of settling (poetics, architectonics, figuralistics, temporalistics) as logos-system processing of configurating of precondition harmonic action (environment) concerning accomplishment of the basic processes (accordingly) reproduction, development, forming, functioning of the landscape whole with using instructional directives as to harmonization the parameters for embodiment of landscape phenomena attributes, process trigger-instruments as to coming out of four base processes of settling on firstly established trends, and also instrumental trigger-schemes as to regulation conditional parameters of appropriate environment attributes of settling (regular alteractions, properties, arrangement, functions).
 As a conclusion theoretical-methodological statement is manifested: city planning designing decisions must not contradict to the laws of discovering the universe and to the technologies for explication mechanism of cultural forms of reality and also to the principles of becoming and transformation of the settling landscape phenomena. The aggregate compositional totality of instructive installing schemes (assemblers) together with appropriate instrument trigger-schemes create the articulational directive-methodical kernel of four theoretical and practical city planning designing technologies with distinguishing adequate feasible types of strategical planning.

Completion of modern generates a question, that, actually, is reality and whether it is possible in general according to her theoretical description. In a background it there is various postmodern reinterpretations of social – from a statement about disappearance of social to his rescue through radical rethinking. Anthony Giddens belongs to the philosophers that try to "prolong" the lives of modern through his radical rethinking in the epoch of globalization. And a philosopher does it through the radicalization of one of the basic foundations of modernity – through radicalization of reflection, that is investigated in the article. The dynamism of social life destabilizes an everyday life that already is not provided in a complete measure by the mechanisms of tradition but needs, in the opinion of philosophers, an all greater reflection. Giddens's postmodernism is the globalists of risks, uncertainty, the end of the direct power of traditions, and radical reflection that outpoured into the reflexive proactivity of the self and needs an articulated and conceptually defined imagined in Castoriadis. Cornelius Castoriadis reacts somewhat differently to the realities of a rapidly changing world. Dissociating himself from the functionalist mainstream of social theory, from the tradition of "interpretive sociology", trying to conceptualize the dynamic environment as it is, which constantly generates various forms of social life, the philosopher problematizes and absolutizes the concept of the imaginary, which keeps the rational in itself in a primordial and infinite indistinctness. The social concept of Cornelius Castoriadis involves the criticism of "naive realism" in the perception of social life, the separation from the "functional-economic" view as an exemplary embodiment of "real-rational" thinking and the identification of the symbolic component of social "things" and the understanding of institutions as functional and symbolic networks. So, if the dynamism of postmodern social life prompts Giddens to radicalize reflection, then the loss of stability and intelligibility leads Castoriadis to thematize the imaginary, virtual dimension of social life, to develop a metaphorical ontology of the "magma" of social imaginary meanings.

The article analyzes the concept of Englishness in the scientific studies of foreign and domestic researchers. Englishness is defined as a component of national identity. The concept of Englishness is studied from different approaches. At the social level, the intellectuals are responsible for the forms of Englishness embodiment, as they organize society in a ’modern’ way. The ethno-cultural approach forms the first ideas about the nature of the national, which are defined as primordial, so the organicist approach to the problems of the national forms the idea that the nation and national identity are phenomena given to the people “by nature”, they depend on the existence of the nation-state. The concept of national identity thus becomes the main component of the ethno-cultural approach. The modernist approach was developed in the mid-twentieth century. It emphasizes the political nature of the national, asserts that nations arise under certain social conditions and disappear over time, the era of nation-states is over, and changes in historical conditions lead to the transformation of nation-states into a cosmopolitan common state. The 80s and 90s of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the postmodern concept of the national, which, unlike the politically-centered approach of the previous theory, is culture-centered, and the nation is interpreted as an “invented” or “imaginary” concept. At the same time, it is not the desire to create a holistic concept of the nation that is important, but the study of various forms of marginalization and hybridization that characterize the modern “post-national” era. National communities are characterized by the following features: they engage in joint activities, which consist of interpreting differences, forming borders, searching for traditions, creating communities, and constructing interests. “Englishness” is separated from the concept of nationalism; its study touches upon the socio-cultural sphere; this type of research examines the peculiarities of national behavior and way of thinking.

The purpose of the study.The transitional period, marked by globalization, value searches and changes, also affects the rethinking of the views of mankind on cultural archetypes, which are the embodiment of primordial representations in the cultural evolution process. It should be noted that the cultures dialogue is constantly in the being of a modern person and it appears by the means of mutual understanding between cultures. The culture of any people is a living organism with its generic features, which preserves the memory and traditions of ancestors. Each culture is characterized by its own individual cultural code, the cultural unconscious, which is determined by a set of images that are associated with any concept in human consciousness. This is something that is hidden from a human understanding of one’s own, but is manifested in actions. Therefore, the essential aspect of our research is the identification of the conditions for the formation of the creative personality of the prominent Ukrainian director, scriptwriter and operator Yurii Illienko. Research methodology. The systematic approach, which is based on the analysis of the peculiarities of the formation of the Yu. Illienko creative personality was carried out, it has become the main in the article. Also, the problem-historical method, the descriptive-comparative approach, methods of analysis, art studies, and comparative-historical, descriptive methods have been used. Scientific novelty consists in the basis of analysis of the genre-thematic and artistic-aesthetic variety of Yu. Illienko the creative work, the features of his creative personality were explored. The practical significance of the results is that Y. Illienko’s creative work is considered in the context of the problems of national specificity in both Ukrainian cinema and the whole cinema as a whole. Conclusions. In accordance with the stated goal, it was determined that cinema art, being a special type of art at the present stage, is intended to preserve the memory of cultural and historical realities. For a long time, traditional culture was the only one that developed along with human development. That is why understanding the features of the Yu. Illienko creative personality as a director, operator and scriptwriter is very important for determining the national context and domestic cinematographers traditions.

The main problem of this research is how is the Religious Implication of 2017 DKI Jakarta Election (Review of Siyasah Syar'iyah)? The subject matter is divided into three sub-problems, namely: 1) Is choosing a community leader based on religion a form of actualization of religious freedom? 2) What are the perceptions of the DKI Jakarta community in choosing community leaders? The type of research used is qualitative research with a normative approach and also socio-legal research with an empirical descriptive approach. Methods of general data collection, interviews and documentation, processing techniques and data analysis carried out through three stages, namely Data Reduction, Presentation and Conclusion. The results of this study indicate that: 1) choosing public leaders based on religion is a form of actualization of religious freedom. The form of worship that is actualized in choosing leaders is the right of every citizen promoted by the constitution. Actualization and explosion of choosing community leaders based on religion or Islamic leadership dogma cannot be intervened and is limited. 2) Perception of the people of DKI Jakarta about choosing community leaders after religion cannot be separated from the pros and cons. The existence of primordial (religious) sentiments certainly has an influence in the political contestation of the DKI Jakarta Election. Not to mention people who like and cannot choose non-Muslim leaders. But apart from that, people's hopes for DKI Jakarta continue to be echoed. 3) Religious attitudes in the DKI Jakarta Regional Election in the Syari'ah Siyasah Perspective relating to aspects of morality as an embodiment of Islamic values. The foundation for choosing leaders is not only in the name of ordinary religion, but religious values can also be discussed. Like honesty, justice, benefit, equality, and prosperity. The implications of this study are 1) choosing based on religion is no longer reviewed as a form of intolerance. Because basically choosing (choosing, expanding choices) is part of the form of worship promoted by the constitution. 2) This research aims to open insight into the importance of understanding the essence of leadership in Islam. Either from the revision of the verse book or Siyasah Syariyyah. 3) Regarding how the Sharia Siyasah Perspective in choosing public leaders is religious, then of course people must understand in choosing aspects to prioritize aspects of morality, these leaders must be fair and trustworthy towards the people they lead.

The article is devoted to folk culture, in particular, clothing as a powerful factor of national consolidation and expression of the mentality of Ukrainians in the war unleashed by russia. The pseudo-scientific narratives of russian scientists with the aim of destroying the identity and changing the consciousness of modern Ukrainians in support of the modern fascist regime of russia are considered. Emphasis is placed on the social (as a basic) criterion for understanding the role of the national dress, the embroidered shirt, in uniting our people during the Orange Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity, and russia’s war against Ukraine. In traditional culture, social and aesthetic functions in the contrast “friend or foe” embodied collective norms and aesthetics. This marking has acquired a new public, social meaning. Clothing is a representative of a person and their mentality. During the Revolution of Dignity, the embroidered shirt became an expression of the unity and resistance of the people of Ukraine on a national scale. In this period, the iconic function of national clothing, which defines Ukrainian belonging, is actualized. Using the example of the stories of the embroidery masters of Donetsk region, it is shown how the ethnic memory found a practical embodiment in the conditions of the war. They are united by a civic stance – to show that their land is primordially Ukrainian with a rich culture of folk clothing. For clothing researchers, these are very important facts as a source of understanding the modern functions of clothing. In particular, the informative function of embroidery is its cultural and social context, the author’s position regarding the russian war. This socio-cultural phenomenon powerfully characterises Ukrainian continuity and self-identity, and is therefore perceived by the occupiers as a weapon, just like the language and the entire heritage. Vyshyvanka is a symbol of indomitability and faith in victory for immigrants and those who survived the occupation. The article highlights the tendency to increase the value of the local heritage of the Little Motherland with its identification codes, which has determined the activities of many masters.

On the basis of meaningful analysis concerning the condition of treatment the foundation of city planning theory is ascertained a historical delay in evolutional transition from empirical stage to build descriptive-assessed notions as regards the basis of city planning (as generalization of present practical experience) to theoretic-constructive stage of treatment (formulation) the concepts, understanding and synthetical conceptions (notions) concerning the subject (thing) and object of city planning activity as comprehensive meaningful (sensible) whole phenomenon of settling. Following the analysis of this problems the prolonged delay on empirical-descriptive stage produces (in logical and semantic relation) mistaken whether declarative approaches (notions) toward the decision of city planning problems or their groundless simplification for "convenient understanding" and practical (but short-sighted) using "accessible knowledge", that often has negative results. Amongst such notions – so-called "spatial development": but space may "form" together with the thing (where space – its attribute), but not "develop by itself" irrespectively to the characteristics of things; likewise concerning the concept "stable (sustainable) development": here also "development" can not be "stable", "balanced" or "for the sake of future generation" – the development is happening at the present time concerning exactly present things-phenomena, it is adequate to available conditions and (attention!) the staunchness of work of the mechanisms for embodiment of reality forms. Perhaps the authors and adherents of such approach try to talk about the processes of reproduction, but such understanding definitely has not been appeared. In that context was demonstrated the actual meaning of theoretical concept (which was treated in the framework of creative-recursive conception of settling) concerning the genome of transcendent planning technologies (immanent construct) inherent the logos-system mechanism as to form-embodiment (fulfilment) of settling phenomena, and concerning the sense-meaning configurative matrices (as constituents of genome) – as agents of adequate identificational aim-attaining of the whole. The comparison of empirical and constructive discoursive links (which has been conducted in the article) shows the existing available restriction of semantic content (and basis principles) of elaborated now city planning theories. The markers of such state of affairs is fixed treating of city as artificial ("architectural" or "material-spatial") surroundings, natural-technical or social-natural complex, which directs to far-fetched (but dangerous) oppositions: "nature – city", "person – city" and etc. The similar marker is also a prolonged using of a concept "system" with a very wide collection of adjectives and their combinations – here certain, but seeming "theoretical loading" is carrying the term-substitute "system" (or "structure"), – semantically hollow substitution of concept of every kind things outside whichever conceptual picture of universe, and nothing cognitively new does not add in comparison with concept "complex". More over an architectural aspect of city planning is supposed to remain a narrowly spatial attribution (dimensions, organization, perception), but at the same time an integral concept-categorial apparatus has been being, as a rule, outside the sphere of attention or readdressing to adjacent sciences for elaboration. The analysis of available theoretical "luggage" (research works of K. Linch, V.O. Timokhin, A.V. Baburov, M.M. Habrel) was revealed, that the problem of expanding of theoretical thought in city planning sphere has international character. Herewith the increasing meaning of the attraction for the solution of the most complicated city planning tasks such categories (spheres of knowledge) as innermost world, ontics, metaphysics and also – integral conceptions of the completeness of the existence of phenomenon and mechanism of its sustaining, of heterogeneous settling phenomenon and symbiotic unity of cultural of reality has been defined. The necessity of metaphysical approach to ascertainment (uncovering) of transcendental-immanent semantic content of things (phenomena) of settling reality, that is not "grasped" in descriptive-assessed characteristics of empirical scientific theories has been demonstrated. There fore the attention was concentrated on senses and meanings of real things and their ideal cultural forms; the results of linguistic-phenomenological researches were used as "parallel" discourse. On the basis of wide-format investigation of the title theme the construction of "beginning" for sense-meaning continuum of settling reality was grounded, this version was approbated in the current of thematic additional studying the determinant work by Aristotel "Metaphysics", and also with the consideration of not numerous experience of "tangent" treatments, and our basic treating creative-recursive (four-process-environment) phenomenon of settling reality. The resultative part of this labour was submitted in three tables (tabular format for matrices), which demonstrate the construction and content of two sense-meaning configurative matrices ("A" and "B"), that polar-counterly operate (in the frame of genome concerning transcendent planning technologies) in interactive mode as horizons for implication and explication of sense-meaning continuum of reality. The first configurative matrix of technological genome (is lettered as "A") – the matrix of scales and measures for sense-meaning of explication of settling forms attributes (fractal plotting ensuring) – it may be treated as the source (nucleus) of representation and divergence/convergence of logos-implicative universal (creative producing) attributive sense-meanings (the language of forms predicates) the possibilities of acting (creating the singular projects of intention concerning the whole, capable of aim-directed replication) of logos-system mechanism for embodiment of denominated reality forms (valuable navigation for autopoesis and purpose-oriented tracking) on the base of implementation the principles of aleatoric and sufficient whole. The second configurative matrix of technological genome (is lettered as "B") – the matrix of gradients concerning, the dynamics of implicational indexes of condition for settling phenomena (ensuring the recurrent planning) – it may be treated as the source (nucleus) of approbation, appropriation and variative application (formulating) of explicational-immanent unique (of recursive primordium) attributive sense-meanings (the language of things predicates) for the necessity of accomplishment (optimizational regulation for planning decisions and aim-attainment condition) of denominated phenomena of settling reality (values-purpose-oriented diapasons of scales and measures for planning strategies concerning existential onward) on the basis of implementation the principles such as aleatoric and superposition. Matrix "A" (table 1) which is assigned for the accompaniment of instructive work of planning technologies (which is named "Trancendent sense-meaning metric continuum of explicational representation of the form-embodiment and becoming of things of settling reality – process-environment references of the whole") it may be also examined as plotting-format of content of the task for the treatment of technological ensuring for researches and modelling of the city planning decisions of general strategical planning of settling phenomena. Matrix "B" (table 2) which is assigned for the accompaniment of instrumental work of planning technologies (which is named "Immanent gradients and manners (re)transmission, expanding and existential unpacking (factor-classified field) of the identification senses and complexing the meanings of fulfilment form-logoses of settling reality") it may be also examined as methodological-technological contour and thesaurus of principle content for treatment of general strategical planning decisions and also as thematic (subject) sphere of appropriate city planning applied researches. The intercorrelative work of polar-binary matrices "A" and "B" in interactive mode (congruent dialogue, table 3) has been also followed for the ensuring of integral staunch of technological work of form-embodiment mechanisms (that table is named "Creative-recursive planning sense-meaning horizons of explication of cultural forms and the accomplishment of settling reality phenomena"), and that may be also examined as the meaningful "registration points" (vector) for thematication of actual fundamental city planning researches. In such a manner the mentioned matrices demonstrate the definite well-founded concepts concerning the content of understanding-categorial apparatus of fundamental city planning theory.

The purpose of this article is to identify the individual originality of Lvov in the poetic understanding of the images of the elements. The purpose stipulates the usage of methods of both contextual (in the context of the scientific and aesthetic trends of the era) and immanent (addressed to the individual creative principles and features of Lvov’s worldview) analysis of the author’s poetic texts. The article examines the artistic semantics of the images of the primary elements – fire, water, air and earth – in the poetry of N. Lvov. This problem is investigated both in relation to the dominant tendencies of the poetic embodiment of the elements in the literature of the 18th century, and with the installation to identify the individual originality of Lvov’s imagery associated with the elements of fire, water, earth and air. In the semantics and symbolism of natural elements, the dominant meanings are revealed, the frequency of the appearance in the poetic world of Lvov of representations of each of the primary elements is traced, the spectrum of its specific figurative incarnations is outlined. In particular, it was established that the element of air differs in Lvov mainly in allegorical semantics associated with the erotic sphere. In rare but expressive cases, the wind is endowed with the meaning of threat and destruction, and can also symbolize the dynamic forces of history, the fickleness of fate, the power of chaos and chance, which corresponds to the perception of the world at the end of the 18th century as a transitional cultural era characterized by an exacerbation of the feeling of instability and the rapidity of change. The semantics of fire in Lvov receives a noticeably individual sound where it is included in the number of characteristics of the Russian national character: Lvov emphasizes in it not the Nordic component, namely ardor, fervor and seething energy. In general, the specificity of the semantics of fire in Lvov is due to the fact that among the traditional connotations of this element the poet chooses mainly positively colored ones – fire almost never appears in L’vov in its catastrophic, destructive hypostasis, with the exception of the poem “On a coal fire”. The specificity of the figurative representations of the elements of the earth in L’vov differs in that in them the allegorical and literal plans coexist on equal terms, complement and reinforce each other, in general, forming the image of the earth as the embodiment of archaic, primordial power, the element in which beginnings and births are rooted, and death (mother’s womb and grave). The element of water is presented most modestly in the poetic world of Lvov (mainly in the form of a stream or pack as elements of an idyllic landscape). Water gets a brighter semantic coloring in those paintings where the poet depicts different, primarily opposite, elements in their interaction. At the same time, Lvov uses the oxymoronic combination of water and fire most often and variedly. Meeting in contexts of different genres and styles, this figurative unity is also filled with different meanings – from erotic to patriotic. As for the degree of individualization of this figurative opposition, in Lvov’s poetry it also ranges from absolute traditionalism (in “Idyll”) to completely author’s semantics (for example, in the poem “Fever”). As a result, it was concluded that the images of the primary elements in Lvov, coinciding in a number of characteristics with the tendencies of the era (allegorism, playing with contrasts), in their semantics demonstrate not only tradition, but also individual content. In particular, as the analysis shows, Lvov tends to reduce the negative meanings of the images of the elements – including the eschatological meaning widespread in his time – and to emphasize the spectrum of meanings associated with harmonious, positive principles (love, creativity, vital energy, harmony of the world order). The originality of the poet’s worldview is also reflected in the frequency ratio and combinations of the images of the elements in his poetry: fire is the most frequent and semantically diverse element here, followed by the wind, which in general imparts lightness and dynamism to Lvov`s poetic picture of the world, and the systematically repeated combination of fire and water (ice) acts as its basic opposition, which also reinforces dynamism as its leading characteristic. The work was carried out on the basis of the original poetic works of Lvov, without involving its translated and dramatic corpus of texts.

The article aims to study the poetic means of reproducing models of intergenerational dialogue in the parameters of “conflict/solidarity”. The material of the study is the novel “Bonjour tristesse” (“Hello Sadness”) by Françoise Sagan, which demonstrates models of intergenerational relations within and around one family. The objective of the research is to study the existential model of “friend or foe” in intergenerational relations, the peculiarities of generational identification and self-identification, to clarify the mythopoetic interpretation of the archetype of Mother, Eros and Thanatos, and the gender focus of intergenerational relations. The study uses the methodology of literary gerontology, existential interpretation of a literary text, mythocriticism, psychoanalysis, sociological and psychoanalytic works related to age anthropology. Historical, cultural, comparative historical and typological methods are used to study the embodiment of age-related aspects, as well as to establish thematic, figurative, and compositional features of the functioning of intergenerational dialogue in a literary text. The result of the study shows that the intergenerational dialogue in the novel takes place within the framework of the models of “solidarity” and “conflict”. The figurative and motivational complex “solidarity” is characteristic of Cécile and Raymond’s relationship with elements of the idealisation of the father. The model of “solidarity” with elements of manipulation prevails in the relationships of Cécile-Elsa and Cécile-Cyril. During the story, these relationships do not have a deep emotional connection. The “conflict” model is expressed in the Cécile-Anne interaction. Anne makes the mistake of taking her role as a mother to Cécile to heart. Thus, she breaks the established ties in the family, trying to impose “foe” roles on the father and daughter, and on the other hand, she attempts to try on the sacred image of a mother, which leads to Anne’s death. The novel presents an artistic interpretation of the Mother archetype in several projections. First of all, in the variation “patronage as a maternal function”, the Mother archetype is characteristic of Anne. However, if Anne’s patronage as a “foe” is acceptable to Cécile, she does not plan to see her as her father’s wife, or her mother (stepmother). The Cécile-Anne conflict can also be seen in the mythological tradition of the stepmother-stepdaughter. Another variation of the Mother archetype, the “sacrificing mother”, is characteristic of Cyril’s mother, but Cécile negatively perceives the type of “woman in the family kinkeeper role”. The mythopoetics of the conflictual parallel of Eros and Thanatos in the novel is closely related to the motif of the intergenerational relationship between Raymond and Elsa. Here, the connection between an older man and a young lover is a necessary confirmation of a man’s physical and emotional state. The line of mutual love between 40-year-old Anne and Raymond provides an example of harmonious ageing. However, the destructive conflict between Cécile and Anne becomes a modulated energy aimed at eliminating the threat (Anne). In this way, the author’s intention reveals the ontological problem of playing with death, the unconscious realisation of the primordial instinct of destructiveness. The motif of Thanatos is immanently present in the novel because of the death of Cécile’s mother. The relationship between Raymond and Anne causes Cécile’s rejection and ends in Anne’s suicide. Anne’s attempt to take her mother’s sacred place ends in death.

Problematic field, objectives and methodology of the study. The “star” figure of A. Zholdak, one of the most shocking directors intriguing with his unpredictability, cannot be overlooked in the sky of modern theatrical art. True, not of national art, but Western European or Russian – the stage productions of the avant-garde director resonate with the priority world trends in theatrical culture. This also applies to musical performances, where the staging process in last time has been carried out under the sign of the “Regio-Theater”, under the director’s concept, which is often radical and revisionist in relation to the author’s source and the interpretive experience of critics and the public. This is evidenced by the A. Zholdak’s “operatic opuses”, namely, “Eugene Onegin” (St. Petersburg, Mikhailovsky’s Theater, 2012–2013 season), “Love drink” (Poznan, Teatr Wielki named after Stanislav Moniuszko, 2018–2019 season), The “Enchantress” (Lyon, Opera National de Lyon, 2018–2019 season). “Opera opuses” by A. Zholdak, being in the “European trend”, remain unknown in Ukraine, not mastered by domestic scientists and, in general, are ignored by the theatrical community. This also applies to the production of Р. Tchaikovsky’s opera “Iolanta” in the 2018–2019 season at the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg, one of the last, carried out by the director. Like any other “director’s” production, A. Zholdak’s performance touches upon problem areas of the modern musical and drama theater. The first of them is the definition of a system of principles that are guided by contemporary directors, embodying their “radical” concepts on stage. The second is related to the choice of interpretive methodology that is commonly used in the process of radical stage expression’s interpretation. The present study, using the parameters of culturological and theatrical critic analysis, aims to determine the conceptual ideological attitudes, aesthetic paradigms, features of the organization of the narrative in the aforementioned production by A. Zholdak. The results of the study. The first of above-mentioned problem is solved through the understanding of the fact that the libretto and the musical text, i.e. the source material, remain indestructible for any modern opera director. On its basis, a director (co-authored with a playwright and an artist) creates a new narrative with the help of own stage means: set design, costumes, light equipment, video etc. As a result, a “radical reading” effect provokes a conflict of interpretations. The second problem, owning or mastering interpretative mechanisms, is related to the processes of sensing text in the receiving area. It refers to the level of development of skills of “unlocking” the text, skillful possessing (often not possessing) the “keys”, which are appropriate for using in work with a text of modern musical theater.These very problems are actualized by P. Tchaikovsky’s opera “Iolanta” embodiment, performed by A. Zholdak on the stage of the Mikhailovsky’s Theater. As the staging practice of the last decade shows, it is the composer’s work that is undergoing a radical conceptual rethinking. The plot of “Iolanta”, its system of characters and basic metaphors, are completely meeting with the aesthetic principles of symbolism. This explains A. Zholdak’s transfer of opera’s action to the end of XIX and early XX centuries, that is, into the period of establishing symbolism as a worldview and artistic dominant of the era. Aesthetically, the visual decision of the performance of the Mikhailovsky’s Theater (artistic directors – Andriy Zholdak and Daniel Zholdak, director of multimedia and author of light design – Gleb Filshtinsky) meets the criteria of postmodernism. At the same time, the stage story is a parallel unfolding of two autonomous stories: blindness, love and insight of Iolanta and the story of the eponymous P. Tchaikovsky’s opera’s creation. For staging the stories, A. Zholdak chooses the principles of the novel genre with its story linearity, psychological reasoning, obligatory causation. At the same time, the director, not refusing basic (symbolist) expressive means, adds to the novel narrative the “visible symbols” of holiness of the main character Iolanta (the nimbus, the interior of the Orthodox church with its exaggerated Byzantine richness and luxury), which are in fact a purely external expression of this internal idea, which is very difficult for scenic implementation. As a consequence, there is a complication of the characters’ system, the restructuring of the primordial playwriting and re-montage of the opera score. The scale of the stage narrative does not fit into the author’s timing of a one-act opera, and therefore P. Tchaikovsky’s musical material is “added to the load” with the fragments borrowed from other works of the composer (for example, from “Nutcracker’). All this leads to a violation of the unbreakable ethical law of the “Regio-Theater” − the inviolability of the author’s (verbal and musical) text. The story of P. Tchaikovsky’s creation of his last opera opus is not convincingly staged. Considering the nature of the theater and its expressive capabilities, it is impossible to reveal on the stage the visual equivalent of the creative process and the artist who is in it. Therefore, in A. Zholdak’s play, the actor depicting the composer in the process of working on “Iolanta” performs the row of consistent physical actions, which only demonstrates his professional movement skills, imitating the convulsive-ecstatic tension of the creator. Conclusions. Thus, A. Zholdak attempts “to open” P. Tchaikovsky’s latest opera score by “the key of symbolism” by working with universal ideas and refining hidden meanings. The hints at this grandiose design are the postponement of the opera action in appropriate “epoch” − the end of XIX to the beginning of XX centuries, in the era of active functioning of symbolism in artistic culture, and the emergence of the “Alter Iolanta” as a new character. But the ideas of symbolism do not have their proper implementation. A. Zholdak tries to presents two stories at the same time (blindness, love and insight of Iolanta and the story of P. Tchaikovsky’s creation of the eponymous opera) based on the principles of the novel genre, which leads to the substitution of “the ideas’ history” on “the human stories”. The result is an artistically contradictory stage build up, which provokes conflict interpretative relationships both by the audience and by the professional criticism.

The aim of this paper is to advance, within the framework of enactivism, towards a more radically embodied and situated theory of emotions and, in general, of affectivity. Its starting point is that of discussing the well-established notion of bodily resonance (Fuchs 2013, Fuchs & Koch 2014, Fuchs 2018) and the primordial affectivity approach (Colombetti 2014). I will incorporate John Dewey’s theory of emotions, and recent models and empirical finding from cognitive science on the relation between perception and bodily activity (Azzalini, Rebollo & Tallon-Baudry 2019; Allen et al. 2019). The novel element proposed in this paper is taking into consideration the role of bodily oscillatory activity in the perceptual side of cognition through phenomena of relative coordination. This concept from dynamical systems theory allows for an enactivist view of emotions as temporal episodes triggered by a tension that affects the rhythmic interaction between brain, body, and environment. By defending the importance of this enacted rhythm, the body emerges as a truly active agent, gating and modulating affectivity during all the stages of the sensorimotor circuit from perception to action.

Given the holistic and phenomenological character of Gestalt therapy, the body has a primordial role in enhancing the here and now experience of the client. In order to examine the role of embodiment in therapeutic interventions more closely, this article applies Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of corporeality and its development in the embodied and enactive cognitive sciences to the study of therapeutic interventions. Taking Merleau-Ponty’s theory of Fundierung as starting point, the article describes the enactive idea of sense-making as the movement from prereflective to reflective consciousness, a movement that is driven by the primordial valence of affectivity and e-motion. As a process of participatory sense-making, mutual regulation between therapist and client can happen at different levels of consciousness. Here, in addition to the well-known declarative (reflective level) and resonance-based (prereflective level) interventions, I will focus on interventions that operate between levels which constitute a genuine modality of embodied therapeutic interventions. I introduce the notion of cross-salience as the prefigurative participation of the therapist’s reflective consciousness in the client’s sense-making process. I will illustrate this idea by the analysis of an intervention extracted from Fritz Perls’ work Gestalt Therapy Verbatim.

In this era when the whole world is in a psychotic recession, where Covid-19 feeds on human substrate unprepared for the "pandemic state", the only real salvation is listening to one's metabolism. It is not a title from Hollywood, it is a real lockdown of the human race which, once again in history, demonstrates its ineptitude which, by syllogism, would mean a lack of resilient property. A resilience not in relation to a material, but metaphorically projected to a reflection where man, the only protagonist endowed with intellect, once again makes the same mistakes by entering the usual loop that punctually repeats itself every decade. Mind and body seem to be no longer distinguishable and have lost the structuring quality that their role determined and made possible constructive actions on the world. The distance between observer and observed, between mind and matter, has faded as if to cruelly provoke a loss of consciousness and identity crisis, hindering the creation of new models, theories and correlations that allow to act in this world. Neuroscience is shedding light on crucial aspects of the nervous system, such as the modalities of neuronal growth and selection of unused synapses (Edelman 1987), as well as the effects of learning or repeated and recorded experiences, on metabolism and cellular gene transcription ( Kandel, Schartz, Jessel, 1991). Psychosomatics with a view to multifactoriality and interdependence for mind-body study are the key points for the study presented here.

In this era when the whole world is in a psychotic recession, where Covid-19 feeds on human substrate unpreparedfor the “pandemic state”, the only real salvation is listening to one’s metabolism. It is not a title from Hollywood, itis a real lockdown of the human race which, once again in history, demonstrates its ineptitude which, by syllogism,would mean a lack of resilient property. A resilience not in relation to a material, but metaphorically projected to areflection where man, the only protagonist endowed with intellect, once again makes the same mistakes by enteringthe usual loop that punctually repeats itself every decade.Mind and body seem to be no longer distinguishable and have lost the structuring quality that their role determinedand made possible constructive actions on the world. The distance between observer and observed, between mindand matter, has faded as if to cruelly provoke a loss of consciousness and identity crisis, hindering the creation of newmodels, theories and correlations that allow to act in this world. Neuroscience is shedding light on crucial aspects ofthe nervous system, such as the modalities of neuronal growth and selection of unused synapses (Edelman 1987), aswell as the effects of learning or repeated and recorded experiences, on metabolism and cellular gene transcription( Kandel, Schartz, Jessel, 1991). Psychosomatics with a view to multifactoriality and interdependence for mind-bodystudy are the key points for the study presented here.

Through examining childbearing in California’s Silicon Valley, this article describes how seeking “self-actualization” has become a rite of passage for contemporary childbearing people. This approach undermines distinctions between “technological” and “natural” approaches to birth, as people are coached to leverage both logistical and animalistic capacities to produce “self-knowledge” and enact new feminist ways of doing embodiment. Based on fieldwork conducted as a doula, this article describes new rituals, anxieties, and aspirations that draw from both the idea that self-authenticity stems from an unadulterated, primordial nature and that self-realization is enabled by a very modern, reflexive strategy of self-design. In this community, the way reproduction comes to matter has less to do with realizing gendered expectations and kinship relations than with creative self-optimization. This approach facilitates women’s self-determination, while simultaneously introducing new forms of pressure and advancing a dominant cultural discourse that minimizes thinking about structural conditions and mutual accountability.

In this article, I will present Merleau-Ponty’s idea of embodiment and apply it to demonstrate two attributes of the on-screen virtual world, which suggest that the videogaming situation is projected in a contextual sense and flattened in a spatial sense. According to Merleau-Ponty, humans are primordially situated body subjects taking up the world in and through movement. He views bodily movements as correlated and solicited by situations that the body subject encounters. Building on this, I argue that, because of the projected and flattened videogaming situation, playing video games always involves an abstract attitude; and it always involves a determined and constrained pattern of bodily movements in the present, as well as limited possibilities for future movement development.

Among the archaic cosmologic and cosmogonic concepts of cultures worldwide and across time the metaphor of the world as a giant living entity is significant. People cultures considered the universe to be e.g. an animal, a giant human, or an egg. The anatomy of certain creatures, in particular of the human being, served as an excellent model for the world"s spatial construction, time–factored changes and cycles of reproduction. The giant cosmic living being showed a form of metabolism, respiration, and reproduction, appearing e.g. as wind currents, water cycle, seasons, tides, lifecycles of plants, animal, and humans, linked to celestial phenomena. People especially considered heaven and earth to act like the human reproductive organs and identified the cosmos with a giant womb. Moreover, the cosmogonic first and essential dichotomy, which causes the world"s diversities, was compared with a kind of primordial sacrifice of a giant cosmic living entity. People regarded the landscape, a cave, a dwelling, a cultic building, or a settlement as an embodiment of the cosmic living entity in miniature, reflecting the characteristics of the macrocosmic being. This study gives an overview of ideas considering the world as a living entity, with respect to cultures through the ages. Concepts of iatromancy are included. The methodology uses approaches of comparative mythology, studies of religions, archaeology, anatomy, medicine, and social anthropology.

In the primordial Chinese classic, Dao De Ching, opposites are a consistent and universal theme – Yin and Yang permeate the Cosmos. Even the title exemplifies this – in the word “De” 德. As Western acculturated individuals our experience with “de” comes from the French word for “of”… A little word with a little meaning. In contrast, one little word in Chinese has one big meaning – the illusionary and polar state of nature summed up in the word “De”. For the Chinese, “De” connotes a profound concept, the concept of Virtue. Dao De Ching literally means “The Way (or Path) of Virtue Classic”. “De” is the embodiment of Virtue in the individual. Virtue includes both the values of honest living and the resulting power derived from it – particularly the power of healing. The character, or pictogram (德), representing “De” is composed of three parts. On the left is a person walking (progress or action), on the top right is a symbol meaning “something observed from all angles or directions shows no deviation” (being perfectly right), and a symbol on the bottom right representing the character for “Xin” (the Heart). The imagery can be interpreted as a virtuous person’s behavior perfectly reflects their heart. For the practitioner the incorporation of “Xin” underscores the importance of utilizing both the heart and mind in daily practice. The ability to combine one’s mind (thoughts) with one’s heart (intuition) will refine one’s being as a healer. Further, it implies “the ability to directly bypass one’s mind and know spontaneously with one’s heart, the heart of all things.”

This paper aims to explore Peter Shaffer’s ritualistic play Equus (1973) by means of utilising Nietzsche’s interpretation of ancient Greek tragedy which is based on the collision between the Apollonian impulse and the Dionysian impulse. Equus tells the story of Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist, who struggles to treat a young man, Alan Strang, who has a mystical fascination with horses and blinds six horses. This study argues that Alan represents the Dionsyian principle while Martin embodies the Apollonian principle, and that the clash between the two forces leads to tragedy. The Dionysian impulse is an urge towards obliteration of boundaries, dissolution of individual selves, excess, intoxication, and ecstatic experience of oneness whereas the Apollonian impulse gestures toward drawing and maintaining boundaries, individuality, distinction and discreteness. Alan is a Dionysian character who ecstatically experiences a sense of oneness with horses through bacchic frenzy. By contrast, Martin is an Apollonian character who attemtps to give a form to this chaotic force and whose sense of purpose as a psychiatrist is disrupted by his patient’s mystical experience of primordial unity with horses. As an antagonistic force that shatters Martin’s sense of meaning in life, Alan and his Dionysiac state compel Martin to rethink about his life and his profession. This paper contends that Martin is the protagonist of this play who, as the embodimentof the modern subject, experiences the battle between the Dionsyian impulse and the Apollonian impulse and thus undergoes a tragic moment in his life.

In his recent Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis emphasizes “the importance of understanding evangelization as inculturation. Grace supposes culture,” he writes, “and God’s gift becomes flesh in the culture of those who receive it” (EG 115). Expressing themes that have recurred throughout his life and ministry, Francis proceeds to lauds the role of popular piety in the life of a people, maintaining that its accessible, incarnate features exemplify the embodiment of an evangelical faith in culture. Echoing Aparecida, Francis describes popular piety as a “spirituality incarnated in the culture of the lowly” and “the people’s mysticism” (EG 124).It would be difficult to find a more significant example of the convergence of these themes than the celebrated image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to which Francis himself expresses devotion. What is it about this symbol that has captivated the hearts of so many? Using Francis’ words in Evangelii Gaudium as a point of departure, this paper analyzes the Guadalupan image and event as a potential model for inculturation. It focuses upon three key features of the image from which can be gleaned broader principles for inculturation, namely: (1) its interlacing of cultural and revelational symbols in such a way that the cultural symbols are affirmed as well as transformed, (2) the use of inculturated symbol as a way of maximizing what Rahner refers to as “the overplus of meaning” communicated through “primordial” words and symbols that evoke deeper, transcendental aspects of human experience, and (3) finally the use of inculturated symbol to mediate interpersonal faith-encounters that can be shared through the renewed culture and the bonds of community.

В статье на основе герменевтического подхода к трудам о. Александра Меня сделана попытка реконструкции его социально-философских воззрений. В основе его взглядов – понимание общества как процесса и результата воплощения высшего смысла жизни людей. В качестве исходного пункта размышлений об обществе мыслитель избрал феномен человека. «Социальное» в человеке и обществе определено его духовной и этической природой как «образа и подобия Божьего». Согласно А.В. Меню, развитие общества начинается с первоначальных отношений человека с Другим человеком, и проблема Другого создала общество как особую сферу борьбы между добром и злом. Используя модель А. Бергсона, Мень описывает «открытый» и «закрытый» типы бытия обществ, которые избирают позитивное либо негативное отношение к Другим народам и культурам, В истории обществ прогресс возможен как развитие человеческого духа в свободе избирать добро. Реконструкция позволяет увидеть о. Александра Меня как социального мыслителя, предлагающего позитивные решения общественных проблем XXI века с христианской точки зрения. The attempt of reconstruction of A. Men’s social-philosophical views is presented in the article based on hermeneutical approach to his works. The foundation of A. Men’s views is an understanding of society as process and result of embodiment of high meaning in peoples’ life. The thinker has chosen a phenomenon of human being as the starting point of his reflection on a society. Based on Biblical notions and thoughts, ‘social’ in human and society is determined by human’s spiritual and ethical nature as ‘the image and likeness of God’. According to A. Men, development of the society begins from primordial relations of human to Other human, and the Other problem had created the society as special sphere of a struggle between good and evil. Using Henri Bergson’s model, Men described ‘open’ and ‘closed’ types of societies’ life (being), which choose either a positive relation to Other peoples and cultures, or negative one. In a history of societies the progress is possible as development of human spirit in freedom of good choice. The problematic of being of peoples, cultures and civilization is determined by a fight against an evil. The proposed reconstruction permits to see Alexander Men as social thinker, who proposes – from Christian point of view – positive solutions for social problems in XXI century.

Пожалуй, самая глубинная из кардинальных сущностей отечественной музыки начала XX века состояла в движении к истокам бытия. Подразумевается художественное освоение корневой системы существования мира и человека, стремление проникнуть в изначальные пласты жизненной материи. Данный процесс получил самое разноплановое преломление. Возникшее устремление к субстанции извечной, даже вселенской c восхождением к категориям всеприродного и надвременнóго означало устремление к макрокосмосу. Один из путей постижения макрокосмоса пролегал через воплощение образов природы, которая начинает рассматриваться не только как фактор, сопутствующий жизни людей, но и как нечто самоценное, выходящее за рамки человеческого мира, что в пределе вело к пантеизму. Иная форма соприкосновений с макрокосмосом была связана с постижением надвременны´х категорий, что не раз происходило в лучших образцах духовной музыки, которая пережила в начале XX века свой ренессанс, а также в формах органного необарокко. С другой стороны, наблюдалось погружение в глубины микромира с выходом на уровень первичных, порой эмбриональных жизненных проявлений, и осуществлялось в том числе путем освоения сферы подсознания. Тенденции «макро» и «микро» представляются на первый взгляд прямо противоположными, однако между ними существовал определенный параллелизм. Наиболее показательный момент их сближения был связан с деструктивными процессами, которые были прямо или косвенно связаны с возвращением к праосновам бытия. На той же почве произрастала и стихийность – качество, присущее как микромиру, так и макрокосмосу, принадлежащее сфере изначального ввиду того, что являет собой идущее из недр природы и человеческой натуры. Perhaps the deepest of the cardinal essences of Russian music of the early XX century was the movement to the origins of life. It implies the artistic development of the root system of existence of the world and man, the desire to penetrate into the original layers of life matter. This process has received the most diverse refraction. The resulting aspiration to the eternal substance, even universal c climbing to the categories of natural and naturalnogo meant the aspiration to the macrocosm. One of the ways to comprehend the macrocosm was through the embodiment of images of nature, which begins to be considered not only as a factor accompanying people's lives, but also as something self-valuable, beyond the human world, which in the limit led to pantheism. A different form of contact with the macrocosm was associated with the comprehension of the above-time categories, which happened more than once in the best examples of spiritual music, which experienced its Renaissance at the beginning of the XX century, as well as in the forms of organ neo-Baroque. On the other hand, there was a dive into the depths of the microcosm with access to the level of primary, sometimes embryonic manifestations of life, and was carried out including through the development of the subconscious. At fi rst glance, the trends of macro and micro seem to be directly opposite, but there was a certain parallelism between them. The most signifi cant moment of their rapprochement was associated with destructive processes that were directly or indirectly related to the return to the primordial life. On the same soil and spontaneity grew-a quality inherent in both the microcosm and the macrocosm, belonging to the sphere of the original due to the fact that it is coming from the depths of nature and human nature.

The philosophy of cosmism traces its origins back to the philosophical traditions of Ancient Greece. The philosophy of cosmism encompasses various dimensions, including religious-philosophical, mystical, artistic, aesthetic, and scientific aspects. Within this philosophical framework, the concepts pertaining to human beings and mankind are interconnected, forming a cohesive community. The term “Cosmism” originates from the Greek term (κόσμος) "kosmos," which refers to a harmoniously organized world. The earliest views on this subject are found in Hesiod's Theogonia (The Birth of the Gods). The conception of the universe in the texts of ancient Greek thought was shaped by questioning the relationship between the phenomenon and the noumena realm within the framework of the archaea problem. It is possible to see how Plato and Aristotle constructed these metaphysical relations in their cosmology. The cosmological knowledge of medieval philosophy also exhibits the impact of Greek cosmology. Ptolemy systematically addresses Greek cosmology. During the 16th century, significant advancements were made in cosmology, encompassing a wide range of concepts and hypotheses. The scientific discoveries and theories of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton not only presented a scientific viewpoint but also prompted inquiries regarding humanity's position and significance within the context of history and intellectual development. Russian Cosmism emerged relatively late in global philosophy, specifically around the mid-19th century. According to Solovyov, the human mind, which serves as the guiding force in the functioning of the world, is engaged in a perpetual struggle against the primordial state of disorder and confusion. He asserted that this world's spirit and nature had a covert agreement. The mind (logos) is responsible for creating this magnificent existence within the realm. The process called “Creation” encompasses two interconnected objectives, general and particular in nature. The general purpose is the embodiment of an actual idea, i.e., light and life in various forms of natural beauty; however, the special purpose is the creation of man, i.e., the most incredible physical beauty also represents the highest inner potential of light and life. Solovyov calls this phenomenon as self-consciousness. Solovyov contends, by highlighting this beautiful creation of man, that man is no longer merely a participant in the action of cosmic principles but also a being capable of understanding the purpose of this action and, as a result, working meaningfully and freely toward its accomplishment. Solovyov analyzed Islamic issues from different angles in his Works titled The Three Forces, Philosophical Principles of Holistic Knowledge, and other works such as Christian Politics and the History and Future of Theocracy, Muhammad, Her Life, and Religious Teachings. As a religious philosopher, Solovyov's aim in addressing these issues was to try to solve the problems of Christian thought within the framework of the philosophy of cosmism he developed. The main aim of this article is to examine Solovyov's thoughts on the position of man in Islam and Western Christianity and the shortcomings of his criticisms on this subject. In this article, Solovyov's thoughts on the place of man in Islam and Western Christianity and some of the shortcomings of his critical views are analyzed. Solovyov's criticisms of the Western Church and its adverse effects on the development of the individual's free personality were investigated. The methodological ties of the ontological structure of Solovyov's theories of 'God,' 'Spirit,' 'Soul,' and 'Sophia' with ancient and Western philosophy are emphasized. As a result, it has been determined that Solovyov's criticism of Islam and the West is approached from the perspective of his own beliefs and that his thoughts have excessive subjective interpretation.

“Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still” (Beckett, Short Fiction 471). 1. Introduction – Wherefore to ‘still’?HIRST: As it is?SPOONER: As it is, yes please, absolutely as it is (Pinter, 1971-1981 77). These first lines of Harold Pinter’s play No Man’s Land are indeed the first lines: they were the first lines that came to Pinter, existing as the spark that drove the play into being. Pinter overhead the words ‘As it is’ whilst in a taxi cab and was struck by their poetry and utter uncertainty. That was it. In the play, they are referring to having a scotch – i.e. as it is, without ice. Here, they refer to the ‘still’ – the incessant constitutive moment of being in the world ‘as it is’. In this short paper I want to essay the phenomenon of ‘still’ as it is; as in there is ‘still’, and as in the ‘there is’ is the ‘still’ between presencing and absencing (as in No Man’s Land: two bodies in a room, a question, and a moment of comprehension). Three points need to be outlined from this desire to essay the phenomenon of ‘still’. First, it should be remembered and noted that to essay is to weigh something up in thought. Second, that ‘still’ is to be considered as a phenomena, both material and immaterial, and not as a concept or state, and where our endeavour with phenomenology here is understood as a concern with imagining ‘a body’ and ‘a place’ where there is neither – in this I want to think the vital and the vulnerable in non-oppositional terms “to work against conventional binaries such as stasis–movement, representation–practice (or the non-representational), textual–non-textual, and immaterial–material” (Merrimen et al 193). Third, that I was struck, in the call for papers for this issue of the Journal of Media and Culture, by the invocation of ‘still’ over that of ‘stillness’, or rather the persistent use of ‘still’ in the call focussing attention on ‘still’ as a noun or thing rather than as an adjective or verb. This exploration of being through the essaying of ‘still’ as a phenomenon will be exampled in the work of Samuel Beckett and Pinter and thought through in the philosophical and literary thought of the outside of Maurice Blanchot. Why Beckett? Beckett because he precisely and with distilled measure, exactitude and courage asks the question of being through the vain attempt to stage what remains when everything superfluous is taken away (Knowlson 463): what remains may well be the ‘still’ although this remainder is constitutive of presencing and not a relic or archive or dead space. Why Pinter? Pinter because, through restoring “theatre to its basic elements - an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue” (Engdaht), he staged a certain vision of our life on earth which pulls on the very logic and power of silence in communication: this logic is that of ‘still’ – saying something while doing nothing; movement where stillness is perceived. Why Blanchot? Blanchot because he understood and gave expression to the fact that that which comes to be written, the work, will not succeed in communicating the experience that drives the writing and that as such the written work unworks the desire that brought it into being (see Smock 4). This ‘unworking’, this putting into question, is the ‘still’. * * * Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened? If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday, one can treat the present in the same way. We won’t know until tomorrow or in six months’ time, and we won’t know then, we’ll have forgotten, or our imagination will have attributed quite false characteristics to today. A moment is sucked away and distorted, often even at the time of its birth. We will all interpret a common experience quite differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that there’s a shared common ground, a known ground. I think there’s a shared common ground all right, but that it is more like a quicksand (Pinter, Voices 22). The ‘still’: treating the present in the same manner as the difficulty of knowing the past; seeing the present as being sucked away and distorted at its inception; taking knowing and the constitution of being as grounded on quicksand. At stake then is the work that revolves around the conceptualizations and empirical descriptions of the viscerally engraved being-there and the practical and social formations of embodiment that follow. I am concerned with the ways in which a performative re-emphasizing of practice and materiality has overlooked the central point of what ‘being-there’ means. Which is to say that what ‘being-there’ means has already been assumed in the exciting, extensive and particular engagements which concern themselves more with the different modes of being-there (walking, sitting, sleeping), the different potentialities of onto-technical connections connecting (to) the world (new image technologies, molecular stimulants, practised affecting words), and the various subjectivities produced in the subsequent placements being considered and being made in such connections whether materially or immaterially (imaginary) real (attentive, bored, thoughtful, exhausted). Such engagements do far more than this paper aims for, but what I want for this paper is for it to be a pause in itself, a provocation that takes a step back. What might this step back entail? Let’s start by pivoting off from a phrase that addresses the singular being-there of any performative material moment and that is “the event of corporeal exposure” alluded to by Paul Harrison in his paper ‘Corporeal Remains’ (432). Key to the question of ‘still’ or ‘stillness’ is the tension between thinking the body, embodiment and a sense of life that forms the social when what we are talking about or around is ‘a body. Where none. … A place. Where none’. What briefly do I mean by this? First, what can be said about the presencing of the body? Harrison, following Emmanuel Levinas, both inherits and withdraws from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology primarily because, and this is what we want to move away from, the key concept of Dasein both covers up the sensible and vulnerable body in being discerned as a disembodied subjectivity and is too concerned forthwith with a sense of comprehension in a teleological economy of intent(ion) (429-430). Second, what is a stake in the ephemeral presence of place? Harrison signals that the eventhood of corporeal existence exists within a “specific relation between interior and exterior”, namely that of “the ‘sudden address from elsewhere’” (436). The Beckettian non-place can be read as that specific relation of the exterior to the interior, of the outside being part of that which brings the sense of self into being. In summary, these two points question the arguments raised by Harrison: ‘What is encountering'? if it isn’t quite the body as nominally thought. And ‘What is encountering?’ if such encountering is a radical asymmetrical address which nonetheless gives some orientation (placement) of comprehension for and of ourselves? 2. What is encountering? Never present still: ‘Say a body. Where none.’Literature is that experience through which the consciousness discovers its being in its inability to lose consciousness, in the movement whereby it disappears, as it tears itself away from the meticulousness of an I, it is re-created beyond consciousness as an impersonal spontaneity (Blanchot, Fire 331-332). I have used the textual extracts from literature and theatre because they present that constitutive and continual tearing away from consciousness (that sense that one is present, embodied, but always in the process of finding meaning or one’s place outside of one’s body). The ‘still’ I want to depict is then the incessant still point of presencing, the moment of disappearance and re-creation: take this passage in Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure where the eye of the protagonist, Thomas, becomes useless for seeing in the normal way. Read this as a moment where the body doesn’t just function and gain definition within an economy of what we already know it can do, but that it places us and displaces us at the same time towards something more constitutive, indeterminate and existential because it is neither entirely animate flesh nor inanimate corpse but also the traced difference of the past and the differing affirmation of the future:Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision. It saw as object that which prevented it from seeing. Its own glance entered into it as an image, just when this glance seemed the death of all image (Blanchot, Reader 60). This is the ‘dark gaze’ that Kevin Hart unveils in his excellent book The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred, which he defines as: “the vision of the artist who sees being as image, already separated from the phenomenal world and yet not belonging to a separate order of being” (12). Again this quivering and incessant becoming of ‘a body where none and a place where none’ pushes us towards the openness and exposure of the ‘stilling’ experience of a ‘loss of knowledge’, a lack of comprehension and yet an immediate need for orientation. The ‘still’, shown for Blanchot in the space of literature, distinguishes “itself from the struggle of which it is the dazzling expression … and if it is an answer, the answer to the destiny of the man that calls himself into question, then it is an answer that does not suspend the question” (Blanchot, Fire 343).Thus the phenomenological hegemony that produces “a certain structuring and logos of orientation within the very grammar geographers use to frame spatial experience” (Romanillos 795) is questioned and fractured in the incessant exposure of being by an ever inaccessible outside in which we ironically access ourselves – in other words, find out who or what we are. This is indeed a performance of coherence in always already deconstructing world (Rose). So for me the question of ‘still’ is a question that opens our thought up to the very way in which we think the human, and how we then think the subject in the social in a much more existential and embodied manner. The concern here is less with the biology of this disposition (although I think ultimately such insights need to go in lockstep with the ones I wish to address here) than its ontological constitution. In that sense I am questioning our micro and immediate place-making embodiment and this tasks us to think this embodiment and phenomenological disposition not in a landscape (more broadly or because this concept has become too broad) but in-place. The argument here operates a post-phenomenological and post-humanist bent in arguing for this ‘–place’ to be the neutral ‘there is’ of worlding, and the ‘in-’ to be the always exposed body. One can understand this as the absolute separation of self or other in terms of a non-dialectical account of intersubjectivity (see Critchley 18). In turning to Blanchot the want of the still, “where being ceaselessly perpetuates itself as nothingness” (Blanchot, Space 243), is in ‘showing/forcing us to think’ the strangeness, openness and finitudinal terror of this non-dialectical (non-relational) interhuman relation without the affirmations Levinas makes of an alterity to be understood ethically in some metaphysical sense and in an interpretation of that non-relation as ultimately theological (Critchley 19). What encounters is then the indeterminate, finite and exposed body. 3. What is encountering? The topography of still: ‘A place. Where none’.One of the autobiographical images for Beckett was of an old man holding a child’s hand walking down a country road. But what does this say of being? Embodied being and being-there respectively act as sensation and orientation. The touch of another’s hand is equally a touch of minimal comprehension that acts as a momentary placement. But who is guiding who? Who is pre-occupying and giving occupation to whom? Or take Pinter and the end of No Man’s Land: two men centred in a room one hoping to be employed by the other in order to employ the other back into the ‘land of the living’ rather than wait for death. Are they reflections of the same person, an internal battle to will one’s life to live, or rather to move one’s living fleshy being to an occupation (of place or as a mode by which one opens oneself up to the surroundings in which you literally find oneself – to become occupied by something there and to comprehend in doing so). Either way, is that all there is? Is this how it is? Do we just accept ‘life’ as it is? Or does ‘life’ always move us?HIRST: There is nothing there. Silence SPOONER: No. You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent. Silence HIRST: I’ll drink to that (Pinter, Complete Works 157). Disingenuously, taking Pinter at face value here, ‘no man’s land’ is impossible for us, it is literally a land within which no human can be: can you imagine a place where nothing moves, never changes, never ages, but remains forever? Of course you can: we can imagine such a place. The ‘still’ can be made tangible in artistic expressions partly because they provide a means of both communicating that of which we cannot speak and showing the communication of silence when we do not speak. So in the literary spaces of Beckett, Blanchot, and Pinter, “literature as experience is valuable not so much for what it tells us about literature but for what it reveals about experience” (Hart 139-140). So what we have is a communication that reveals but doesn’t define, and that therefore questions the orientation and certainty of subject positions: The literary renderings of certain landscapes, such as those presentations of spatialities outside-the-subject, of the anonymous there is of spaces, contribute to a dismantling and erasure of the phenomenological subject (Romanillos 797). So what I think thinking through ‘still’ can do is bring us to think the ‘neutral presence of life itself’ and thus solicit from us a non-oppositional accounting of vitalism and passivity. “Blanchot asked me: why not pursue my inner experience as if I were the last man?” – for Bataille the answer became a dying from inside without witness, “an impossible moment of paralysis” (Boldt-Irons 3); but for Blanchot it became a “glimpse into ‘the interminable, the incessant’” (ibid) from outside the dying. In other words we, as in humans that comprehend, are also what we are from outside our corporeal being, be that active or passively engaged. But let’s not forget that the outside is as much about actual lived matter and materialized worlds. Whilst what enables us to instil a place in the immaterial flow of absent-presencing or present-absencing is our visceral embodied placement, it is not the body per se but its capacity that enables us to relate or encounter that which is non-relational and that which disrupts our sense of being in place. Herein all sorts of matter (air, earth, water, fire) encounter us and “act as a lure for feeling” (Stengers; after Anderson and Wylie). Pursuing the exposing nature of matter under the notion of ‘interrogation’ Anderson and Wylie site the sensible world as an interrogative agent itself. Wylie’s post-phenomenological folding of the seer and seen, the material and the sensible (2006), is rendered further here in the materialization of Levinas’ call to respond in Lingis’ worlding imperative of “obedience in sensibility” (5) where the materialization is not just the face of the Other that calls but matter itself. It is not just about living, quivering flesh then because “the flesh is a process, not a ‘substance’, in the sense of something which is simply there” (Anderson and Wylie 7). And it is here that I think the ontological accounting of ‘still’ I want to install intervenes: for it is not that there is ever a ‘simply there’ but always a ‘there is’. And this ‘there is’ is not necessarily of sensuality or sensibility, nor is it something vitally felt in one form or another. Rather it persists and insists as a neutral, incessant, interminable presencing that questions us into being: ‘what are we doing here?’ Some form of minimal comprehension must ensue even if it is only ephemeral or only enough to ‘go on’ for a bit more. I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain (Beckett, Unnameable 414). In a sense the question creates the questioner: all sorts of imperatives make us appear. But my point is that they are both of corporeal sensibility, felt pain or pleasure a la Lingis, and minimal comprehension of ontological placement, namely (as shown here) words as they say us, never ours and never finished. The task of reading such stuttering yet formative words is the question ‘still’ presents to social scientific explanation of being bodies in social formations. There is something unreal about the idea of stillness and the assertion that ‘still’ exists as a phenomenon and this unreality rests with the idea that ‘still’ presents both a principle of action and the incapacity to act (see Bissell for exemplary empirics on and theoretical insights into the relational constitution of activity and inactivity) – ‘I can’t go on, you must go on’. There is then a frustrated entitlement of being pre-occupied in space where we gain occupation not in equipmental activity but in the ontological attunement that makes us stall in fascination as a moment of comprehension. Such attunements are constitutive of being and as such are everywhere. They are however more readily seized upon as graspable in those moments of withdrawal from history, those moments that we don’t include when we bio-graph who we are to others, those ‘dull’ moments of pause, quiet, listlessness and apathy. But it is in these moments where, corporeally speaking, a suspension or dampening of sensibility heightens our awareness to perceive our being-there, and thus where we notice our coming to be inbetween heartbeat and thought. Such moments permanently wallpaper our world and as such provide room for perceiving that shadow mode of ‘stillness’ that “produces a strange insectlike buzzing in the margins” (Blanchot, Fire 333). Encountering is then the minimal sense of going on in the face of the questions asked of the body.Let us change the subject. For the last time (Pinter, Dramatic Works 149). Conclusion: ‘For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No out.’Thinking on ‘still’ seems to be a further turn away from vitalism, but such thinking acts as a fear (or a pause and therefore a demand to recognize) that what frightens us, what stills us, is the end of the end, the impossibility of dying (Blanchot, Fire 337): why are we here? But it is this fright that enlivens us both corporeally, in existing as beings, and meaningfully, in our ever ongoing encounter with the ‘there is’ that enables our sense of orientation, towards being something that can say/feel ‘there’.A human being is always on the way toward itself, in becoming, thwarted, thrown-into a situation, primordially ‘‘passive,’’ receptive, attuned, exposed …; far from limiting him, this exposure is the very ground of the emergence of a universe of meaning, of the ‘‘worldliness’’ of man (Žižek 273). The ‘still’ therefore names “the ‘site’ in which the event of Being occurs” (Calarco 34). It comes about from “glimpsing the abyss opened up by the recognition of the perspectival character of human knowledge and the concomitant awareness of … [its] limits” (Calarco 41) – that yes we are death-subjected beings and therefore corporeal and finite. And as such it fashions “a fascination for something ‘outside’ or other than the human” (Calarco 43) – that we are not alone in the world, and the world itself brings us into being. This counterpointing between body and place, sensation and meaning, exists at the very heart of what we call human: namely that we are tasked to know how to go on at the limits of what we know because to go on is the imperative of world. This essay has been a pause then on the circumflexion of ‘still’. If Levinas is right in suggesting that Blanchot overcomes Heidegger’s philosophy of the neuter (Levinas 298) it is because it is not just that we (Dasein) question the ontological from the ontic in which we are thrown but that also the ontological (the outside that ‘stills’ us) questions us:What haunts us is something inaccessible from which we cannot extricate ourselves. It is that which cannot be found and therefore cannot be avoided (Blanchot, Space 259). Thus, as Hart writes, we are transfixed “and risk standing where our ‘here’ will crumble into ‘nowhere’ (150).Neither just vital nor vulnerable, it is about the quick of meaning in the topography of finitude. The resultant non-ontological ethics that comes from this is voiced from an unsuspecting direction in a text written by Jacques Derrida to be read at his funeral. On 12th October 2004 Derrida’s son Pierre gave it oration: “Always prefer life and never cease affirming survival” (Derrida, quoted in Hill 7). Estragon: ‘I can’t go on like this’Vladimir: ‘That’s what you think’ (Beckett, Complete Works 87-88). ReferencesAnderson, Ben, and John Wylie. “On Geography and Materiality.” Environment and Planning A (advance online publication, 3 Dec. 2008). Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. New York: Grove P, 1958. ———. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. ———. Samuel Beckett, Volume 4: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism. New York: Grove/Atlantic P, 2006. Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1995. ———. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. ———. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown: Station Hill P, 1999. Bissell, David. “Comfortable Bodies: Sedentary Affects.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 1697-1712. Boldt-Irons, Lesile-Ann. “Blanchot and Bataille on the Last Man.” Angelaki 11.2 (2006): 3-17. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia U P, 2008. Critchley, Simon. “Forgetfulness Must: Politics and Filiation in Blanchot and Derrida.” Parallax 12.2 (2006): 12-22. Engdaht, Horace. “The Nobel Prize in Literature – Prize Announcement.” 13 Oct. 2005. 8 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/announcement.html›. Hart, Kevin. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Harrison, Paul. “Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living On after the End of the World.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 423-45. Hill, Leslie. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1999. Lingis, Alphonso. The Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana University P, 1998. Knowlson, John. Damned to Fame: Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997.Merriman, Peter. et al. “Landscape, Mobility, Practice.” Social & Cultural Geography 9 (2008): 191-212. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Being-With of Being-There.” Continental Philosophical Review 41 (2008): 1-15. Pinter, Harold. 1971–1981 Complete Works: 4. New York: Grove P, 1981 ———. Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2005. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Romanillos, Jose Lluis. “‘Outside, It Is Snowing’: Experience and Finitude in the Nonrepresentational Landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet.” Environment and Planning D 26 (2008): 795-822. Rose, Mitch. "Gathering ‘Dreams of Presence’: A Project for the Cultural Landscape." Environment and Planning D 24 (2006): 537–54.Smock, Ann. "Translator’s Introduction.”The Space of Literature. Maurice Blanchot. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. 1-15. Wylie, John. “Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject.” Environment and Planning D 24 (2006): 519-35. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: The MIT P, 2006.

In the 1980s, an extremely successful Nescafé Gold Blend coffee advertising campaign dared to posit, albeit subliminally, that a love relationship was inextricably linked to coffee. Over several years, an on-again off-again love affair appeared to unfold onscreen; its ups and downs narrated over shared cups of coffee. Although the association between the relationship and Gold Blend was loose at best, no direct link was required (O’Donohoe 62). The campaign’s success was its reprisal of the cultural myth prevalent in the West that coffee and love, coffee and relationships, indeed coffee and intimacy, are companionate items. And, the more stable lover, it would seem, is available on the supermarket shelf. Meeting for coffee, inviting a potential lover in for a late-night cup of coffee, or scheduling a business meeting in an espresso bar are clichés that refer to coffee consumption but have little to do with the actual product. After all, many a tea-drinker will invite friends or acquaintances “for coffee.” This is neatly acknowledged in a short romantic scene in the lauded feature film Good Will Hunting (1997) in which a potential lover’s suggestion of meeting for coffee is responded to smartly by the “genius” protagonist Will, “Maybe we could just get together and eat a bunch of caramels. [...] When you think about it, it’s just as arbitrary as drinking coffee.” It was a date, regardless. Many in the coffee industry will argue that coffee—rather than tea, or caramel—is legendary for its intrinsic capacity to foster and ignite new relationships and ideas. Coffee houses are repeatedly cited as the heady location for the beginnings of institutions from major insurance business Lloyd’s of London to the Boston Tea Party, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series of novels, and even Western Australian indie band Eskimo Joe. This narrative images the coffee house and café as a setting that supports ingenuity, success, and passion. It is tempting to suggest that something intrinsic in coffee renders it a Western social lubricant, economic powerhouse, and, perhaps, spiritual prosthesis. This paper will, however, argue that the social and cultural production of “coffee” cannot be dissociated from feeling. Feelings of care, love, inspiration, and desire constellate around “coffee” in a discourse of warm, fuzzy affect. I suggest that this blooming of affect is not superfluous but, instead, central to the way in which coffee is produced, represented and consumed in Western mass culture. By exploring the currently fashionable practice of “direct trade” between roasters and coffee growers as represented on the Websites of select Western roasting companies, the repetition of this discourse is abundantly clear. Here, the good feelings associated with cross-cultural friendship are figured as the condition and reward for the production of high quality coffee beans. Money, it seems, does not buy happiness—but good quality coffee can. Good (Colonial) Feelings Before exploring the discursive representation of friendship and good feeling among the global coffee community with regard to direct trade, it is important to account for the importance of feeling as a narrative strategy with political affects and effects. In her discussion of “happy objects,” cultural theorist of emotion Sara Ahmed argues that specific objects are associated with feelings of happiness. She gives the telling example of coffee as an object intimately tied with happy feeling within the family. So you make coffee for the family, and you know “just“ how much sugar to put in this cup and that. Failure to know this “just“ is often felt as a failure of care. Even if we do not experience the same objects as being pleasurable, sharing the family means sharing happy objects, both in the sense of sharing knowledge (of what makes others happy) and also in the sense of distributing the objects in the right way (Ahmed, Promise 47). This idea is derived from Ahmed’s careful consideration of affective economies. She suggests emotions neither belong to, or are manufactured by, discrete individuals. Rather, emotions are formed through social exchange. Relieved of imagining the individual as the author of affect, we can consider the ways in which affect circulates as a product in a broad, vitalising economy of feeling (Ahmed, Affective 121). In the example above, feelings of care and intimacy attached to coffee-making produce the happy family, or more precisely, the fleeting instant of the family-as-happy. The condition of this good feeling is not attributable to the coffee as product nor the family as fundamentally happy but rather the rippling of happy feeling through sharing of the object deemed happy. A little too much sugar and happiness is thwarted, affect wanes; the coffee is now bad(-feeling). If we return briefly to the Nescafé Gold Blend campaign and, indeed, Good Will Hunting, we can postulate following Ahmed that the coffee functions as a love object. Proximity to coffee is identified by its apparent causation of love-effects. In this sense, “doing coffee” means making a fleeting cultural space for feeling love, or feeling good. But what happens when we turn from the good feeling of consumption to the complex question of coffee production and trade? How might good feeling attach to the process of procuring coffee beans? In this case, the way in which good feeling seems to “stick to” coffee in mass culture needs to be augmented with consideration of its status as a global commodity traded across sociopolitical, economic, cultural and national borders. Links between coffee and colonialism are long established. From the Dutch East India Company to the feverish enthusiasm to purchase mass plantations by multinational corporations, coffee, colonialism and practices of slavery and indentured labour are intertwined (Lyons 18-19). As a globally traded commodity across a range of political regimes and national borders, tracing the postcolonial and neocolonial relations between multinational companies, small upscale boutique roasters, plantation owners, coffee bean co-ops, regulatory bodies, and workers is complex at best. In what may appear a tangential approach, it is nonetheless instructive to consider that colonial relations are constituted through affective components that support and fuel economic and political exchange (Stoler, Haunted). Again, Ahmed offers a useful context for the relationship between the imperative toward happiness and colonial representation. The civilizing mission can be redescribed as a happiness mission. For happiness to become a mission, the colonized other must be first deemed unhappy. The imperial archive can be described as an archive of unhappiness. Colonial knowledges constitute the other as not only an object of knowledge, a truth to be discovered, but as being unhappy, as lacking the qualities or attributes required for a happier state of existence (Ahmed, Promise 125). The colonising aspect of the relations Ahmed describes includes the “mission” to construct Others as unhappy. Understood as happiness detractors, colonial Others become objects that threaten the radiant appeal of happiness as part of an imperial moral economy. Hence, it is the happiness of the colonisers that is secured through the disavowal of the feelings of Others. Moreover, by documenting colonial unhappiness, colonising forces justify the sanctity of happiness-making through violence. As Ann Stoler affirms, “Colonial states had a strong interest in affective knowledge and a sophisticated understanding of affective politics” (Carnal 142). Colonising discourses, then, are inextricably linked to regimes of sense and feeling. Stoler also writes that European-ness was established through cultivation of an inner sense of self-worth associated with ethics, individuality and autonomy (Haunted 157). The development of a sense of belonging to Europe was hence executed through feeling good in both moral and affective senses of the word. Although Stoler argues her case in terms of the affective politics of colonial sexualities and desire, her work is highly instructive for its argument that emotion is crucial to structures of power in colonial regimes. Bringing Stoler’s work into closer proximity with Ahmed’s postulation of State happiness and its objects, I am now going to suggest that coffee is a palimpsestic cultural site at which to explore the ways in which the politics of good feeling obscure discomforting and complex questions of power, exploitation, and disadvantage in global economies of coffee production and consumption. Direct Trade In the so-called “third wave” specialty coffee market that is enjoying robust growth in Australia, America, and Europe, “direct trade” across the globe between roasters and plantation owners is consistently represented as friendly and intimate despite vast distances and cultural difference. The “third wave” is a descriptor that, as John Manzo describes in his sociological exploration of coffee connoisseurship in privileged Western online and urban fora, refers to coffee enthusiasts interested in brewing devices beyond high-end espresso machines such as the cold drip, siphon, or pour-over. Jillian Adams writes further that third wavers: Appreciate the flavour nuances of single estate coffee; that is coffee that is sourced from single estates, farms, or villages in coffee growing regions. When processed carefully, it will have a distinctive flavour and taste profile that reflects the region and the culture of the coffee production (2). This focus on single estate or “single origin” coffee refers to beans procured from sections of estates and plantations called micro-lots, which are harvested and processed in a controlled manner.The third wave trend toward single origin coffees coincides with the advent of direct trade. Direct trade refers to the growing practice of bypassing “middlemen” to source coffee beans from plantations without appeal to or restriction by regulatory bodies. Rather, as I will show below, relationships and partnerships between growers and importers are imagined as sites of goodwill and good feeling. This focus on interpersonal relationships and friendships cannot be disarticulated from the broader cross-cultural context at stake. The relationships associated with direct trade invariably take place across borders that are also marked by economic, cultural and political differences in which privileged Western buyers engage with non-Western growers on low incomes. Drawing from Ahmed’s concern that the politics of good feeling is tied to colonial nostalgia, it is compelling to suggest that direct trade is haunted by discourses of colonisation. At this point of intersection, I suggest that Western mass cultural associations of coffee with ease, intimacy and pure intentions invite consumers to join a neocolonial saga through partaking in imagined communities of global coffee friends. Particularly popular in Australia and America, direct trade is espoused by key third wave coffee roasters in Melbourne, Portland and Seattle. Melbourne Coffee Merchants are perhaps the most well-known importers of directly traded green bean in Australia. On their Web page they describe the importance of sharing good feelings about high quality coffee: “We aim to share, educate, and inspire, and get people as excited about quality coffee as we are.” A further page describing the Merchants’s mission explains, “Growers are treated as partners in the mission to get the worlds [sic] finest beans into the hands of discerning customers.” The quality of excitement that circulates through the procuring of green beans is related to the deemed partnership between Merchants and the growers. That is, it is not the fact of the apparent partnership or its banality that is important, but the treating of growers as partners that signifies Merchants’s mission to generate good feeling. This is a slight but crucial distinction. Treating the growers as partners participates in an affective economy of excitement and inspiration—how the growers feel is, presumably, in want of such partnership.Not dissimilarly, Five Senses Coffee, boutique roasters in Melbourne and Perth, offer an emotional bonus with the purchase of directly traded coffees. “So go on, select one of our Direct Trade products and bask in the warm glow you get knowing that the farmer who grew the beans that you’re enjoying is reaping the rewards too!” The rewards that the growers are deemed to be receiving are briefly explained in blog posts on the Five Senses news Web page. I am not suggesting that these friendships and projects are not legitimate. Rather, the willingness of Five Senses to negotiate rates with growers and provide the community with an English teacher, for example, fuels an economy of Westerners’s good feelings and implies conventional trading produces unhappiness. This obscures grounds for concern that the provision of an English teacher might indeed serve the interests of colonising discourses. Perhaps a useful entry point into this narrative form is founded in the recently self-published book Coffee Trails by Toby Smith, founder of boutique Australian roaster Toby’s Estate. The book is described on the Toby’s Estate Web page as follows:Filled with personal anecdotes and illustrating his relationships developed over years of visiting the farmers to source his coffee beans, Smith’s commentary of his travels, including a brush with Jamaican customs officials and a trip to a notoriously dangerous Ethiopian market, paints an authentic picture of the colourful countries that produce the second most traded product in the world. [...] Coffee Trails has been Smith’s labour of love over the past two years and the end product is a wonderfully personal account of a man fulfilling his lifelong dream and following his passion across the world. Again, the language of “passion” and “love” registers direct trade coffee as a happy object. Furthermore, despite the fact that coffee is also grown in Australia, the countries that are most vivid in the epic imagination are those associated with “exotic” locations such as Ethiopia and Jamaica. This is arguably registered through the sense that these locations were where Smith encountered danger. Having embarked on a version of the quintessential hero’s journey, Smith can be seen as devoted to, and inspired by, his love-object. His brushes with uncivilised authorities and locations carry the undertones of a colonial imaginary, in which it can be argued Smith’s Western-ness is established and secured as goodwill-invoking. After all, he locates and develops relationships with farmers and buys their coffee which, following the logic of happy objects, disperses and shares good feelings.Gloria Jean’s Coffees, which occupies a similar market position in Australia to the multinational “specialty” coffee company Starbucks (Lyons), also participates in the dispersal of coffee as a happy object despite its mass scale of production and lack of direct trade capability (not unexpectedly, Starbucks hosts a Relationships campaign aimed at supporting humanitarian initiatives and communities). Gloria Jean’s campaign With Heart allocates resources to humanitarian activities in local Australian communities and worldwide in coffee-growing regions. Their Web page states: “With Heart is woven throughout Gloria Jeans Coffee houses and operations by the active participation of Franchise Partners, support office and team members and championed across Australia, by our With Heart Ambassadors.“ The associative message is clear: Gloria Jean’s Coffees is a company indissociable from “heart,” or perhaps loving care, for community.By purchasing coffee, Gloria Jean’s customers can be seen to be supporting heartening community projects, and are perhaps unwittingly working as ambassadors for the affective economy in which proximity to the happy object—the heart-centred coffee company—indicates the procurement of happiness for someone, somewhere. The sale of good feeling enables specialty coffee companies such as Gloria Jean’s to bypass market opportunities associated with Fair Trade regulatory provisions, which, as Carl Obermiller et al. find in their study of Fair Trade buying patterns, also profit from consumers’ purchase of good feeling associated with ethically-produced objects. Instead, assuring consumers of its heart-centredness, Gloria Jean’s Coffees is represented as an embodiment not of fairness but kindness, and perhaps love, for others. The iconography and history of direct trade coffee is most closely linked to Intelligentsia Coffee of Chicago in the USA. Intelligentsia describes its third wave roasting and training business as the first to engage in direct trade in 2003. Its Web page includes an image of an airplane to which the following pop-up is linked: “Our focus is not just identifying quality coffee, but developing and rewarding it. To do this means preserving and developing strong relationships despite the considerable distance. At any given time, there is at least one Intelligentsia buyer at origin.” This text raises the question of what constitutes quality coffee. It would appear that “quality coffee” is knowledge that Intelligentsia owns, and which is rewarded financially when replicated to the satisfaction of Intelligentsia. The strength of the relationships in this interaction is closely linked to the meeting of clear conditions and expectations. Indeed, we are reassured that “at any time” an Intelligentsia buyer is applying these conditions to the product. Quality, then, is at least in part achieved by Intelligentsia through its commitment to travelling long distances to oversee the activities and practices of growers. This paternalistic structure is figured in terms of “strong relationships” rather than, perhaps, a rigorous and shrewd business model (which is assumedly the province of mass-market Others).Amid numerous examples found in even a cursory search on the Web, the overwhelming message of direct trade is of good feeling through care. Long term relationships, imagined as virtuous despite the opacity of the negotiation procedure in most cases, narrates the conviction that relationship in and of itself is a good in what might be called the colonial redramatisation staked by an affective coffee economy. Conclusion: Mourning CoffeeIn a paper on happiness, it might appear out of place to reference grief. Yet Jacques Derrida’s explication of friendship in his rousing collection The Work of Mourning is instructive. He writes that death is accommodated and acknowledged “in the undeniable anticipation of mourning that constitutes friendship” (159). Derrida maintains close attention to the productivity and intensity of Otherness in mourning. Thus, friendship is structurally dependent on impending loss, and it follows that there can be no loss without recognising the Otherness of the other, as it were. Given indifference to difference and, hence, loss, it is possible to interpret the friendships affirmed within direct trade practices as supported by a kind of mania. The exuberant dispersal of good feeling through directly traded coffee is narrated by emotional journeys to the primordial beginnings of the happy-making object. That is, fixation upon the object’s brief survival in “primitive” circumstances before its perfect demise in the cup of discerning Western clientele suggests a process of purification through colonising Western knowledges and care. If I may risk a misappropriation of Sara Ahmed’s words; so you make the trip to origin, and you know “just” what to pay for this bean and that. 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Gus Van Sant. Miramax, 1997. Intelligentsia Coffee. “Direct Trade.” 28 Feb. 2012 ‹http://directtradecoffee.com/›. Lyons, James. “Think Seattle, Act Globally: Specialty Coffee, Commodity Biographies and the Promotion of Place.” Cultural Studies 19.1 (2005): 14-34. Manzo, John. “Coffee, Connoisseurship, and an Ethnomethodologically-Informed Sociology of Taste.” Human Studies 33 (2010): 141-55. Melbourne Coffee Merchants. “About Us.” 27 Feb. 2012 ‹http://melbournecoffeemerchants.com.au/about.asp›. Obermiller, Carl, Chauncy Burke, Erin Tablott and Gareth P. Green. “’Taste Great or More Fulfilling’: The Effect of Brand Reputation on Consumer Social Responsibility Advertising for Fair Trade Coffee.” Corporate Reputation Review 12.2 (2009): 159-76. O’Donohoe, Stephanie. “Advertising Uses and Gratifications.” European Journal of Marketing 28.8/9 (1993): 52-75. Smith, Toby. Coffee Trails: A Social and Environment Journey with Toby’s Estate. Sydney: Toby Smith, 2011. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. California: U California P, 2002. -----. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Toby’s Estate. “Toby Smith’s Coffee Trails.” 27 Feb 2012 ‹http://www.tobysestate.com.au/index.php/toby-smith-book-coffee-trails.html›.

The technical apparatus is, then, being made at home with the rest of our world. And that's a thing that's routinely being done, and it's the source of the failure of technocratic dreams that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine, the world will be transformed. Where what happens is that the object is made at home in the world that has whatever organisation it already has. -- Harvey Sacks (Lectures on Conversation Vol. 2., 548-9) Chatting, or having a conversation, has long been a favourite activity for people. It seemed so ordinary, if not to say trivial, that it has for almost equally long not been studied in any dedicated way. It was only when Harvey Sacks and his early collaborators started using the tape recorder to study telephone conversations that 'conversation' as a topic has become established (cf. Sacks, Lectures Vol. 1). Inspired by Harold Garfinkel, the perspective chosen was a procedural one: they wanted to analyse how conversations are organised on the spot. As Sacks once said: The gross aim of the work I am doing is to see how finely the details of actual, naturally occurring conversation can be subjected to analysis that will yield the technology of conversation. (Sacks, "On Doing 'Being Ordinary'" 411) Later, Sacks also started using data from audio-recorded face-to-face encounters. Most of the phenomena that the research on telephone conversation unearthed could also be found in face-to-face data. Whether something was lost by relying on just audio materials was not clear at the beginning. But with video-based research, as initiated by Charles Goodwin in the 1970s, one was later able to demonstrate that visual exchanges did play an essential role the actual organisation of face-to-face conduct. When using telephone technology, people seemed to rely on a restricted set of the interactional procedures used in face-to-face settings. But new ways to deal with both general and setting-specific problems, such as mutual identification, were also developed. Now that an increasing number of people spend various amounts of their time 'online', chatting with friends or whoever is available, it is time to study Computer-Mediated Conversation (CMC), as we previously studied face-to-face conversation and Telephone (Mediated) Conversation, using the same procedural perspective. We may expect that we will encounter many phenomena that have become familiar to us, and that we will be able to use many of the same concepts. But we will probably also see that people have developed new technical variations of familiar themes as they adapt the technology of conversation to the possibilities and limitations of this new technology of communicative mediation. In so doing, they will make the new technology 'at home in the world that has whatever organisation it already has.' Space does not allow a full discussion of the properties of text-based CMC as instantiated in 'chat' environments, but comparing CMC with face-to-face communication and telephone conversations, it is obvious that the means to convey meanings are severely restricted. In face-to-face encounters, many of the more subtle aspects of the conversation rely on visual and vocal productions and perceptions, which are more or less distinguishable from the 'text' that has been uttered. Following the early work of Gregory Bateson, these aspects are mostly conceived of as a kind of commentary on the core communication available in the 'text', that is as 'meta-communication'. While the 'separation' between 'levels' of communication, that these conceptualisations imply may distort what actually goes on in face-to-face encounters, there is no doubt that telephone conversations, in which the visual 'channel' is not available, and text-based CMC, which in addition lacks access to voice qualities, do confront participants with important communicative restrictions. An important aspect of text-based computer-mediated chatting is that it offers users an unprecedented anonymity, and therefore an unprecedented licence for unaccountable action, ranging from bland banality to criminal threat, while passing through all imaginable sexual 'perversities'. One upshot of this is that they can present themselves as belonging to any plausible category they may choose, but they will -- in the chat context -- never be sure whether the other participants 'really' are legitimate members of the categories they claim for themselves. In various other formats for CMC, like MUDs and MOOs, the looseness of the connections between the people who type messages and the identities they project in the chat environment seems often to be accepted as an inescapable fact, which adds to the fascination of participation1. The typists can then be called 'players' and the projected identities 'characters', while the interaction can be seen as a game of role-playing. In general chat environments, as the one I will discuss later, such a game-like quality seems not to be openly admitted, although quite often hinted at. Rather, the participants stick to playing who they claim they are. In my own text, however, I will use 'player' and 'character' to indicate the two faces of participation in computer-mediated, text-based chats. In the following sections, I will discuss the organised ways in which one particular problem that chat-players have is dealt with. That problem can be glossed as: how do people wanting to 'chat' on the Internet find suitable partners for that activity? The solution to that problem lies in the explicit naming or implicit suggestion of various kinds of social categories, like 'age', 'sex' and 'location'. Chat players very often initiate a chat with a question like: "hi, a/s/l please?", which asks the other party to self-identify in those terms, as, for instance "frits/m/amsterdam", if that fits the character the player wants to project. But, as I will explain, categorisation plays its role both earlier and later in the chat process. 'Membership Categorisation' in Finding Chat Partners The following exploration is, then, an exercise in Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA; Hester & Eglin) as based on the ideas developed by Harvey Sacks in the 1960s (Sacks, "An Initial Investigation", "On the Analyzability of Stories", Lectures on Conversation Vol. 1). An immense part of the mundane knowledge that people use in living their everyday lives is organised in terms of categories that label members of some population as being of certain types. These categories are organised in sets, called Membership Categorisation Devices (MCDs). The MCD 'sex' (or 'gender'), for instance, consists of the two categories of 'male' and 'female'. Labelling a person as being male or female carries with it an enormous amount of implied properties, so called 'category-predicates', such as expectable or required behaviours, capacities, values, etc. My overall thesis is that people who want to chat rely mostly on categorical predications to find suitable chat partners. Finding a chat partner or chat partners is an interactive process between at least two parties. Their job involves a combination of presenting themselves and reading others' self presentations. For each, the job has a structure like 'find an X who wants a Y as a partner', where X is the desired chat character and Y is the character you yourself want to play. The set of XY-combinations varies in scope, of course, from very wide, say any male/female combination, to rather narrow, as we will see. The partner finding process for chats can be loosely compared with partly similar processes in other environments, such as cocktail parties, poster sessions at conferences, and telephone calls. The openings of telephone calls have been researched extensively by conversation analysts, especially Schegloff ("Sequencing", "Identification", "Routine"; also Hopper). An interesting idea from this work is that a call opening tends to follow a loosely defined pattern, called the canonical model for telephone openings. This involves making contact, mutual identification/recognition, greetings and 'how-are-you?'s, before the actual business of the call is tackled. When logging on to a chat environment, one enters a market of sorts, where the participants are both buyers and sellers: a general sociability-market like a cocktail party. And indeed some writers have characterised chat rooms as 'virtual cocktail parties'. Some participants in a cocktail party may, of course, have quite specific purposes in mind, like wanting to meet a particular kind of person, or a particular individual, or even being open to starting a relationship which may endure for some time after the event. The same is true for CMC chats. The trajectory that the partner-finding process will take is partly pre-structured by the technology used. I have limited my explorations to one particular chat environment (Microsoft Chat). In that program, the actual partner-finding starts even before logging on, as one is required to fill in certain information slots when setting up the program, such as Real Name and Nickname and optional slots like Email Address and Profile. When you click on the Chat Room List icon, you are presented with a list of over a thousand rooms, alphabetically arranged, with the number of participants. You can select a Room and click a button to enter it. When you do, you get a new screen, which has three windows, one that represents the ongoing general conversation, one with a list of the participants' nicks, and a window to type your contributions in. When you right-click on a name in the participant list, you get a number of options, including Get Profile. Get Profile allows you to get more information on that person, if he/she has filled in that part of the form, but often you get "This person is too lazy to create a profile entry." Categorisation in Room Names When you log in to the chat server, you can search either the Chat Room List or the Users List. Let us take the Chat Room List first. Some room names seem to be designed to come early in the alphabetically ordered list, by starting with one or more A's, as in A!!!!!!!!!FriendlyChat, while others rely on certain key words. Scanning over a thousand names for those words by scrolling the list might take a lot of time, but the Chat Room List has a search facility. You can type a string and the list will be shortened to only those with that string in their name. Many room names seem to be designed for being found this way, by containing a number of more or less redundant strings that people might use in a search. Some examples of room names are: A!!!!!!!!!FriendlyChat, Animal&Girls, Australia_Sydney_Chat_Room, christian evening post, desert_and_cactus_only, engineer, francais_saloppes, francais_soumise_sub_slave, german_deutsch_rollenspiele, hayatherseyeragmensürüyor, holland_babbel, italia_14_19anni, italia_padania_e_basta, L@Ros@deiVenti, nederlandse_chat, sex_tr, subslavespankbondage, Sweet_Girl_From_Alabama, #BI_LES_FEM_ONLY, #Chinese_Chat, #France, #LesbiansBiTeenGirls_Cam_NetMeeting, #polska_do_flirtowania, #russian_Virtual_Bar?, #tr_%izmir, #ukphonefantasy. A first look at this collection of room names suggests two broad classes of categorisation: first a local/national/cultural/ethnic class, and second one oriented to topics, with a large dose of sexual ones. For the first class, different kinds of indicators are available, such as naming as in Australia_Sydney_Chat_Room, and the use of a local language as in hayatherseyeragmensürüyor, or in combination: german_deutsch_rollenspiele. When you enter this type of room, a first function of such categorisations becomes apparent in that non-English categorisations suggest a different language practice. While English is the default language, quite a few people prefer using their own local language. Some rooms even suggest a more restricted area, as in Australia_Sydney_Chat_Room, for those who are interested in chatting with people not too far off. This seems a bit paradoxical, as chatting in a world-wide network allows contacts between people who are physically distant, as is often mentioned in chats. Rooms with such local restrictions may be designed, however, to facilitate possible subsequent face-to-face meetings or telephone contacts, as is suggested by names like Fr@nce_P@ris_Rencontre and #ukphonefantasy. The collection of sexually suggestive names is not only large, but also indicative of a large variety of interests, including just (probably heterosexual) sex, male gay sex, female lesbian or bi-sexuality. Some names invoke some more specialized practices like BDSM, and a collection of other 'perversities', as in names like 'francais_soumcateise_sub_slave', 'subslavespankbondage', 'golden_shower' or 'family_secrets'. But quite often sexual interest are only revealed in subsequent stages of contact. Non-sexual interests are, of course, also apparent, including religious, professional, political or commercial ones, as in 'christian evening post', or 'culturecrossing', 'holland_paranormaal', 'jesussaves', 'Pokemon_Chat', 'francais_informatique', and '#Russian_Philosophy_2918'. Categorisation through Nicknames Having selected a room, your next step is to see who is there. As chatting ultimately concerns exchanges between (virtual) persons, it is no surprise that nicknames are used as concise 'labels' to announce who is available on the chat network or in a particular room. Consider some examples: ^P0371G , amanda14, anneke, banana81, Dream_Girl, emma69, ericdraven, latex_bi_tch1 , Leeroy, LuCho1, Mary15, Miguelo, SomeFun, Steffi, teaser. Some of these are rather opaque, at least at first, while others seem quite ordinary. Anneke, for instance, is an ordinary Dutch name for girls. So, by using this nick name, a person at the same time categorises herself in two Membership Categorisation Devices: gender: 'female' and language: 'Dutch'. When using this type of nick, you will quite often be addressed in Dutch, for instance with the typically Dutch chat-greeting "hoi" and/or by a question like "ben jij Nederlandse?" ("are you Dutch?" -- female form). This question asks you to categorise yourself, using the nationality device 'Dutch/Belgian', within the language category 'speaker of Dutch'. Many other first names like 'amanda' and 'emma', do not have such a language specificity and so do not 'project' a specific European language/nationality as 'anneke' does. Some French names, like 'nathalie' are a bit ambiguous in that respect, as they are used in quite a number of other language communities, so you may get a more open question like "bonjour, tu parle francais?" ("hi, do you speak French?"). A name like 'Miguelo' suggests a roman language, of course, while 'LuCho1' or 'Konusmaz' indicate non-European languages (here Chinese and Turkish, respectively). Quite often, a first name nick also carries an attached number, as in 'Mary15'. One reason for such attachments is that a nick has to be unique, so if you join the channel with a nick like 'Mary', there will mostly be another who has already claimed that particular name. An error message will appear suggesting that you take another nick. The easiest solution, then, is to add an 'identifying detail', like a number. Technically, any number, letter or other character will do, so you can take Mary1, or Mary~, or Mary_m. Quite often, numbers are used in accord with the nick's age, as is probably the case in our examples 'Mary15' and 'amanda14', but not in 'emma69', which suggests an 'activity preference' rather than an age category. Some of the other nicks in our examples suggest other aspects, claims or interests, as in Dream_Girl, latex_bi_tch1, SomeFun, or teaser. Other examples are: 'machomadness', 'daddyishere', 'LadySusan28', 'maleslave', 'curieuse33', 'patrickcam', or 'YOUNG_GAY_BOY'. More elaborate information about a character can sometimes be collected from his or her profile, but for reasons of space, I will not discuss its use here. This paper's interest is not only in finding out which categories and MCDs are actually used, but also how they are used, what kind of function they can be seen to have. How do chat participants organise their way to 'the anchor point' (Schegloff, "Routine"), at which they start their actual chat 'business'? For the chatting environment that I have observed, there seems to be two major purposes, one may be called social, i.e. 'just chatting', as under the rubric 'friendly chat', and the other is sexual. These purposes may be mixed, of course, in that the first may lead to the second, or the second accompanied by the first. Apart from those two major purposes, a number of others can be inferred from the room titles, including the discussion of political, religious, and technical topics. Sexual chats can take various forms, most prominently 'pic trading' and 'cybersex'. As becomes clear from research by Don Slater, an enormous 'market' for 'pic trading' has emerged, with a quite explicit normative structure of 'fair trading', i.e. if one receives something, one should reciprocate in kind. When one is in an appropriate room, and especially if one plays a female character, other participants quite often try to initiate pic trading. This can have the form of sending a pic, without any verbal exchange, possibly followed by a request like 'send also'. But you may also get a verbal request first, like "do you have a (self) pic?" If you reply in a negative way, you often do not get any further reaction, or just "ok." A 'pic request' can also be preceded by some verbal exchanges; social, sexual or both. That question -- "have a pic?" or "wanna trade" -- can then be considered the real starting point for that particular encounter, or it can be part of a process of getting to know each other: "can i c u?" The second form of sexual chats involves cyber sex. This may be characterised as interactionally improvised pornography, the exchange of sexually explicit messages enacting a sexual fantasy or a shared masturbation session. There is a repertoire of opening moves for these kinds of games, including "wanna cyber?", "are you alone?" and "what are you wearing now?" Functions of Categorisations Categorisations in room names, nicks and profiles has two major functions: guiding the selection of suitable chat partners and suggesting topics. Location information has quite diverse implications in different contexts, e.g. linguistic, cultural, national and geographical. Language is a primordial parameter in any text-based activity, and chatting offers numerous illustrations for this. Cultural implications seem to be more diffuse, but probably important for some (classes of?) participants. Nationality is important in various ways, for instance as an 'identity anchor'. So when you use a typically Dutch nick, like 'frits' or 'anneke', you may get first questions asking whether you are from the Netherlands or from Belgium and subsequently from which region or town. This may be important for indicating reachability, either in person or over the phone. Location information can also be used as topic opener. So when you mention that you live in Amsterdam, you often get positive remarks about the city, like "I visited Amsterdam last June and I liked it very much", or "I would die to live there" (sic) from a pot-smoking U.S. student. After language, age and gender seem to be the most important points in exploring mutual suitability. When possible partners differ in age or gender category, this quite often leads to questions like "Am I not too old/young for you?" Of course, age and gender are basic parameters for sexual selection, as people differ in their range of sexual preferences along the lines of these categories, i.e. same sex or opposite sex, and roughly the same age or older/younger age. Such preferences intersect with straight or kinky ones, of which a large variety can be found. Many rooms are organised around one or another combination, as announced in names like '#LesbiansBiTeenGirls_Cam_NetMeeting', 'Hollandlolita' or '#Lesbian_Domination'. In some of these, the host makes efforts to keep to a more or less strict 'regime', for instance by banning obvious males from a room like '#BI_LES_FEM_ONLY'. In others, an automated welcome message is used to lay out the participation rules. Conclusion To sum up, categorisation plays an essential role in a sorting-out process leading, ideally, to small-group or dyadic suitability. A/S/L, age, sex and location, are obvious starting points, but other differentiations, as in sexual preferences which are themselves partly rooted in age/gender combinations, also play a role. In this process, suitability explorations and topic initiations are intimately related. Chatting, then, is text-based categorisation. New communication technologies are invented with rather limited purposes in mind, but they are quite often adopted by masses of users in unexpected ways. In this process, pre-existing communicational purposes and procedures are adapted to the new environment, but basically there does not seem to be any radical change. Comparing mutual categorisation in face-to-face encounters, telephone calls, and text-based CMC as in online chatting, one can see that similar procedures are being used, although in a more and more explicit manner, as in the question: "a/s/l please?" Footnote These ideas have been inspired by Schaap; for an ethnography focussing on the connection between 'life online' and 'real life', see Markham, 1998. References Hopper, Robert. Telephone Conversation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Hester, Stephen, and Peter Eglin, eds. Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorisation Analysis. Washington, D.C.: UP of America, 1997. Markham, Annette H. Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space. Walnut Creek, London, New Delhi: Altamira P, 1998. Sacks, Harvey. "An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology." Studies in Social Interaction. Ed. D. Sudnow. New York: Free P, 1972. 31-74. ---. Lectures on Conversation. Vol. 1. Ed. Gail Jefferson, with an introduction by Emanuel A. Schegloff. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992. ---. Lectures on Conversation. Vol. 2. Ed. Gail Jefferson, with an introduction by Emanuel A. Schegloff. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992. ---. "On Doing 'Being Ordinary'." Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Ed. J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 413-29. ---. "On the Analyzability of Stories by Children." Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. Ed. John. J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes. New York: Rinehart & Winston, 1972. 325-45. Schaap, Frank. "The Words That Took Us There: Not an Ethnography." M.A. Thesis in Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, 2000. <http://fragment.nl/thesis/>. Schegloff, Emanuel A. "Identification and Recognition in Telephone Conversation Openings." Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. Ed. George Psathas. New York: Irvington, 1979. 23-78. ---. "The Routine as Achievement." Human Studies 9 (1986): 111-52. ---. "Sequencing in Conversational Openings." American Anthropologist 70 (1968): 1075-95. Slater, Don R. "Trading Sexpics on IRC: Embodiment and Authenticity on the Internet." Body and Society 4.4 (1998): 91-117. Ten Have, Paul. Doing Conversation Analysis: A Practical Guide. Introducing Qualitative Methods. London: Sage, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul ten Have. "Computer-Mediated Chat: Ways of Finding Chat Partners." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/partners.php>. Chicago style: Paul ten Have, "Computer-Mediated Chat: Ways of Finding Chat Partners," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/partners.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul ten Have. (2000) Computer-mediated chat: ways of finding chat partners. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/partners.php> ([your date of access]).