Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture is soliciting papers for a special themed issue on visualisation and narrative–with special reference to filmmaking, information design, and computing.

Visualisation consists of the visual representation and analysis of processes over time, in dynamically changing information spaces. As filmmaking has moved to digital formats in writing screenplays, making images and sounds and editing and manipulating those images, all filmmaking processes are actually or potentially subject to visualisation. This has led to new metaphors–for example the timeline, and the possibility of applying techniques such as data mining and network
mapping to other areas of film production.

Papers looking at current and possible application of visualisation techniques to the writing, realising and editing of films are particularly encouraged. Papers can for example look at the influence of interface design and visualisation on film practice and aesthetics. This will include the effect of non-linear editing and effects and the introduction of the timeline as a dominant metaphor for visualisation in film. We would also like to encourage contributions from scientific disciplines where visualisation has transformed the understanding of the process, or enabled a different perception of narrative.

Film is particularly interesting as a focus of study, because as well as being an industrial and aesthetic practice which can be differently approached and understood through visualisation, it is itself a form of visualisation, which transforms social relationships and events into image-based narrative developing over time. Film language is therefore the ultimate source of many of the techniques of visualisation. We see potential for a productive dialogue between disciplines which looks at the changes that visualisation can or will bring to filmmaking but also looks at what film language and film techniques have to contribute to visualisation and the dynamic relationship between visualisation and narrative.

Completed papers are are to be submitted by December 15, 2007 to Lina Khatib lina.khatib@rhul.ac.uk. Revisions will be due in March 2008; publication expected in October 2008.

Guest Editors: Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib

Link

A review of Thomas Aquinas: Disputed Questions on the Virtues

The development of “virtue ethics” in the English philosophical world, as a reaction to various forms of consequentialism, deontology, and moral skepticism, has been well under way for some time. In retrospect, it can now be seen that Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) and Geach’s The Virtues (1977) were the first swallows announcing the spring that began with Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981). It was only a matter of time before translators began to offer the wisdom of pre-modern Greek and Latin virtue theorists, for in the dawning post-modern era the hold of “modern” Western thought is rapidly waning.

Link

Cross X Forum has posted some etexts: Derrida’s Ear of the Other, MP’s Phenomenology of Perception, and Deleuze’s Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities.

I have not checked them out but the poster on the forum warns that they are large files. Update: I am told that this is not the newest edition of the Phenomenology of Perception.

By Steven Helmling

This essay is part of a larger study about how Adorno writes, and how self-consciously he writes: about how his thinking and his writing are functions of each other, implicated in each other, how indeed they produce each other. My premise is that in Adorno’s usage such terms as “constellation,” “dialectic,” “concept,” “negation,” and “immanent critique”[1] exert their force as much on questions of (to adapt Gertrude Stein) “how the writing of critique should be written”–how Adorno’s own writing is written–as on questions of critical or cognitive motives or purposes. Their point-d’appui is how to write as much as, maybe more than–or perhaps simply as–how to think. It is usual in this connection to cite Adorno’s mid-1950s essay, “The Essay as Form,” because it is so patently a manifesto for Adorno’s own work as a writer-critic. Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s Exact Imagination, for the most prominent example, makes “The Essay as Form” the centerpiece of her chapter on “Configurational (sc. “Constellational”) Form” (103-36; see especially 105-13, 123-30). I want here, however, to treat an essay much more charged and thus more suggestive for Adorno’s writing practice and for his view of language, the important late text dating from 1963, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel”–an essay not only about reading Hegel, but about the problems of philosophical writing and expression in practice, and specifically about Adorno’s own critical practice.[2]

Continue reading here

Via Wood’s Lot

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The Relationship Between the Unconscious and Consciousness - A Comparison of Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism: Siegfried Zepf

Two Bodies in the Room: An Intersubjective View of Female Objectification: Catherine Baker-Pitts

Organizational Change and the Analytic Third: Locating and Attending to Unconscious Organizational Psychodynamics: Michael A Diamond

Englishness, the Country, and Psychoanalysis: Kenelm Averill

Psychoanalysis and Cuba: An Interview with Maureen Katz: Jan Haaken

Some Notes on Hate in Teaching: Sara Matthews

A review of Greek Political Thought (Ancient Cultures)

In the Introduction to Greek Political Thought, Balot states that his new book is meant to accomplish three goals: it should (1) help students by filling the vacant niche of introductions to Greek political thought, (2) teach students how to read ancient texts by using a method that is both historical and normative, and (3) demonstrate to scholars that the whole of Greek political thought can be fruitfully read from a virtue ethics perspective — indeed, that we can think of the Greeks as engaged in a “virtue politics” that is not only intrinsically interesting, but directly relevant to contemporary thought. He seeks to meet these goals over the course of eight chapters in which interpretations of all major and important minor figures are provided, as well as analyses of major themes in ancient political history.

Like his wonderful Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens, this book clearly shows that Balot has an absolute command over a very wide range of subjects, and that he has continued to develop his extremely interesting intuition that it is through the ancient conception of justice and its centrality in political life that ancient thinkers are particularly relevant to contemporary thought. But beyond continuing this theme, Greek Political Thought is brimming with new insights, filled with genuinely helpful connections, and I found it to be a pleasure to read. Given that this work is primarily intended as an introduction to a diverse range of topics, rather than a sustained defense of one specific thesis, I will begin by providing a very brief gloss of each chapter to give readers a sense of what they would be recommending to their students by assigning this book or any of its chapters, and then end the review by critically evaluating how well Balot meets his own three stated goals.

The rest

e-text via the unique Cross-X forum.

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THE CLASH BETWEEN THEATER AND FILM: Germaine Dulac, André Bazin and La Souriante Madame Beudet
Author: Charles Musser

WALTER BENJAMIN’S SHELL-SHOCK: Sounding the acoustical unconscious
Author: Robert G. Ryder

THINGS THAT COME AFTER ANOTHER
Author: András Bálint Kovács

CONSTRUCTING MOVEMENT IN THE CINEMA
Author: Nick Redfern

CRITICS, CLONES AND NARRATIVE IN THE FRANCHISE BLOCKBUSTER
Author: Bradley Schauer

THE PLANET AT THE END OF THE WORLD FREE ACCESS FREE ACCESS: ‘Event’ cinema and the representability of climate change
Author: Gill Branston

EVERYDAYNESS IN FILM ETHICS
Author: Wim Staat

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to draw your attention to the forthcoming TSCF conference
on Ethnic Diversity and Social Capital.

The conference will take place in Hawaii on November 15-19.

You are kindly invited to submit .

To register, please go to
http://www.socialcapital-foundation.org/conferences/2007/registration%20and%20fees.htm.

Best wishes,

Jessika L. Folkerts
Secretary-General