scholarly journals Toxic Sovereignty:Understanding Fraud as the Expression of Special Liberty within Late-Capitalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Tudor
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Consumer Engagement ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Consumer Sovereignty ◽  
Personal Freedom ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Neoliberal Economics ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Investment Fraud

As a result of the pressures exerted by neoliberal economics and consumer capitalism, late-capitalist subjects are forced to compete in increasingly brutal circumstances in order to avoid the fate of symbolic and material annihilation. Economic and consumer engagement are not, however, solely based on coercion but are simultaneously facilitated by seductive ideals such as sovereignty. Conversations with those convicted for their involvement in investment fraud indicate the centrality of the notion of sovereignty to their subjective experience and, in turn, their motivation for fraud. The notion of economic sovereignty was key to their understanding of economic enterprise whereby they carved out spaces of extreme personal freedom in which they were free to engage in acts of serious and sustained economic predation. Similarly, perspectives on consumer sovereignty were characterised by a degree of excess whereby the individual who self-governs consumptive choices was replaced by the individual who is characterised by the absolute right to pursue pleasure in an unrestrained way. As a consequence, many personal barriers against harm and criminality were eroded. Thus, whilst acts of economic predation were driven by the deep-seated cultures of anxiety and insecurity produced within contemporary capitalism, they were also facilitated by the cultural profusion of notions of sovereignty in this context which ultimately served as a means of obfuscating the reality of the individual’s relationship with capital.

The Ecologies of Film Noir

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Fay
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
American Film ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Human Happiness ◽  
Rental Property ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Artificial World

Postwar American film noir explores an artificial world that does not foster human happiness and growth, but leads to a kind of human incapacity to act and respond. Beyond merely depicting these negative environments, noir lays bare the attachments to bad living and unsustainable striving that underwrite the accumulating culture of the Anthropocene at midcentury. Positioning itself as the genre that critiques postwar peaceful prosperity, noir gives us the characters, places, and scripts for human expiration as the counter to both nuclear survivalism and consumer capitalism. The hospitality of film noir is rental property. Indeed, impermanent dwelling of the individual and humanity as a whole is one of noir’s lessons for the Anthropocene. American noir is an ecological genre that teaches us in the spirit of Roy Scranton’s book how “to die in the Anthropocene.”

A Turkish-German Critic of the ‘Parallel Society’: Necla Kelek

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-439
Author(s):  
Justin Stagl
Keyword(s):  
Personal Freedom ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Migrant Community ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Turkish German

A Turkish girl in Germany emancipated herself from her family in a long, bitter, almost deadly struggle. She fought for her education and gained it. Indignation at the disregard of personal freedom in her migrant community turned her into a writer and her success was amazing. However, it earned her the suspicion of all those who prefer the integrity of the group to the dignity of the individual. Told in this reduced manner, the story of Necla Kelek resembles one of Scheherazade’s tales. I will therefore try to tell it again in a more specific way.

scholarly journals Failure to collectively assess security surveillance technologies will inevitably lead to an absolute surveillance society.

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Mitchener-Nissen
Keyword(s):  
New Technology ◽  
Security Technology ◽  
Security Technologies ◽  
Small Rise ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Waking Up ◽  
Surveillance Society ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Security Surveillance ◽  
The Impact

When assessing any security technology which impacts upon privacy, whether this constitutes a new technology or the novel application of existing technologies, we should do so by examining the combined effect of all security interventions currently employed within a society. This contrasts with the prevailing system whereby the impact of a new security technology is predominantly assessed on an individual basis by a subjective balancing of the security benefits of that technology against any reductions in concomitant rights, such as privacy and liberty. I contend that by continuing to focus on the individual effect, as opposed to the combined effects, of security technologies within a society the likelihood of sleep-walking into (or indeed waking-up in) an absolute surveillance society moves from a possible future to the logically inevitable future. This conclusion is based on two underlying assertions. Firstly that assessing a technology often entails a judgement of whether any loss in privacy is legitimised by a justifiable increase in security; however one fundamental difference between these two rights is that privacy is a finite resource with identifiable end-states (i.e. absolute privacy through to the absolute absence of privacy) whereas security does not have two finite end-states (while there exists the absolute absence of security, absolute security is an unobtainable yet desired goal). The second assertion, which relies upon the validity of the first, holds that one consequence of absolute security being unobtainable yet desirable is that new security interventions will continuously be developed, each potentially trading a small measure of privacy for a small rise in security. Examined individually each intervention may constitute a justifiable trade-off. However this approach of combining interventions in the search for ever greater security will ultimately reduce privacy to zero.

scholarly journals THE NEED FOR INFORMATION AND THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AS FACTORS OF CRITICAL AND UNCRITICAL DISSEMINATION OF PANDEMIC NEWS

2021 ◽  
pp. 170-195
Author(s):  
Elena I. Rasskazova ◽  
Galina V. Soldatova ◽  
Yulia Y. Neyaskina ◽  
Olga S. Shiriaeva
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Sociodemographic Factors ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Digital World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

Relevance. The modern society creates the image of a successful person as actively interacting with different information flows, including an impressive stream of news content. This paper assumes that there is a personal need for tracking and spreading news that develops in the interaction between person and digital world. The individual level of this need could explain the interaction with information (its critical and uncritical dissemination) and the subjective experience of its redundancy and inaccuracy, including those experiences and actions in a pandemic situation. The aim of the study was to reveal the relationship of the subjective need for news with personal values, beliefs about technologies (“technophilia”) and the dissemination of news about the pandemic. Method. 270 people (aged 18 to 61) filled out The short (Schwartz) Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ), Beliefs about New Technologies Questionnaire, Monitoring of Information about Coronavirus Scale as well as items on the subjective need for receiving and disseminating news, readiness for critical and non-critical dissemination of news about pandemics, subjective experiences of redundancy and distrust of pandemic-related information. Results. According to the results, the Need for News Scale allows assessing the subjective importance of receiving news and discussing them with other people and is characterized by sufficient consistency and factor validity. The need for regular news is more pronounced among men, older people, people with higher education, married people, people who have children, while the need to discuss news is not related to sociodemographic factors. For people, who are more prone to technophilia, it is more important to regularly receive and discuss news information with others, which, in turn, mediates the relationship between technophilia and monitoring news about coronavirus. The need for news dissemination mediates the relationship between technophilia and readiness for critical and non-critical dissemination of information about the pandemic.

scholarly journals “We Thought We Were Alone”: The Subjective Experience of the Siblings of Anorexic Adolescent Patients

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelo Persico ◽  
Salome Grandclerc ◽  
Catherine Giraud ◽  
Marie Rose Moro ◽  
Corinne Blanchet
Keyword(s):  
Support Group ◽  
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Interview Guide ◽  
Family Based ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Sibling Group

Objective: The siblings of patients suffering from Anorexia Nervosa (AN) are potentially affected by a disturbed emotional experience that often remains undetected. In order to bring them a psychological support, the Maison de Solenn proposed a support group program for these siblings. The current research explores their mental representations of AN and their emotional experience in the support group named “sibling group.”Method: This exploratory study is based on a phenomenological and inductive qualitative method. Four girls and three boys aged between 6 and 19 participating in the “sibling group” were included in a one-time focus group session using a semi-structured interview guide. The thematic data analysis was performed by applying the methods of interpretative phenomenological analysis.Results: Themes that emerged from the interview fall into four categories: AN explained by siblings; the individual emotional experience of siblings; the family experience of siblings and the experience inside the “sibling group.”Discussion: According to our participants, the “sibling group” thus functions as a good compromise between keeping an active role in the anorexic patient's care and taking a step back to avoid being eaten up by the illness. Sibling-group participants retrieved a sense of belonging, which is normally one of the functions of being a sibling. It is important to note that the “sibling group” is part of the comprehensive (or global) family-based approach included in an institutional multidisciplinary integrative care framework.

scholarly journals Grace of God: A Phenomenological Inquiry

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thangbiakching ◽  
Dr. Eric Soreng
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Middle Aged ◽  
Phenomenological Inquiry ◽  
Unconditional Love ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Essential Nature ◽  
Aged Individual ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
The Individual

Grace, in the Christian understanding, is the unconditional love, the free, and undeserved favor of God. Grace, in this context, is not of man, but of the Divine through which the knowledge of truth is gained— truth that surpasses man’s natural knowledge and experience; by which the soul is likened to the Divine. In this paper, an attempt is made to decipher (through phenomenological inquiry) the experience of grace in the life of a middle-aged individual and how it provide resilience in the functioning of ones’ everyday life. The paper also discusses the possibility of the essential nature of the experience of Gods’ grace as it look into the subjective experience of the individual.

scholarly journals Professional improvising musicians couple more closely in timing and tonality when simultaneously rather than successively recording

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Setzler ◽  
Robert Goldstone
Keyword(s):  
Joint Action ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Common Goal ◽  
Mutual Adaptation ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Adaptive Condition

Joint action (JA) is ubiquitous in our cognitive lives. From basketball teams to teams of surgeons, humans often coordinate with one another to achieve some common goal. Despite this ubiquity, the individual mechanisms and group-level dynamics of complex, sophisticated JA are poorly understood. We examine coordination in a paragon domain for creative joint expression: improvising jazz musicians. Coordination in jazz music is improvised and subserves an aesthetic goal: the generation of a collective musical expression comprising coherent, highly nuanced musical structure (e.g. rhythm, harmony). In this study, dyads of professional jazz pianists improvised in a "coupled", mutually adaptive condition, and an "overdubbed" condition which precluded mutual adaptation, as occurs in common studio recording practices. Using a model of musical tonality, we quantify the flow of rhythmic and harmonic information between musicians as a function of interaction condition, and show that mutually responsive dyads produce more consonant harmonies, an ability which increases throughout the course of improvised performance. These musical signatures of coordination were paralleled in the subjective experience of improvisers, who preferred coupled trials despite being blind to condition. We present these results and discuss their implications for music technology and JA research more generally.

scholarly journals Hegelian Phenomenology of Spirit and Boxing Fight

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-54
Author(s):  
Jerzy Kosiewicz
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Human Individual ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Low Culture ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Absolute Synthesis

Abstract In the presented text the author points out to anthropological as well as axiological foundations of the boxing fight from the viewpoint of Hegel’s philosophy. In the genial idealist’s views it is possible to perceive the appreciation of the body, which constitutes a necessary basis for the man’s physical activity, for his work oriented towards the self-transformation and the transformation of the external world, as well as for rivalry and the hand-to-hand fight. While focusing our attention on the issue of rivalry and on the situation of the fight - and regarding it from the viewpoint of the master - slave theory (included in the phenomenology of spirit), it is possible to proclaim that even a conventionalised boxing fight - that is, restricted by cultural and sports rules of the game - has features of the fight to the death between two Hegelian forms of selfknowledge striving for self-affirmation and self-realisation. In the boxing fight, similarly as in the above mentioned Hegelian theory, a problem of work and of the development of the human individual (that is, of the subject, self-knowledge, the participant of the fight) appears. There appears also a prospect of death as a possible end of merciless rivalry. The fight revalues the human way in an important way, whereas the prospect for death, the awareness of its proximity, the feeling that its close and possible, saturates the life with additional values. It places the boxer, just like every subject fighting in a similar or a different way, on the path towards absolute abstraction - that is, it brings him closer to his self-fulfilment in the Absolute, to the absolute synthesis. The Hegelian viewpoint enables also to appreciate the boxing fight as a manifestation of low culture (being in contrast with high culture), to turn attention to the relations which - according to Hegel - take place between the Absolute and the man, as well as to show which place is occupied by the subject both in the process of the Absolute’s self-realisation and in the German thinker’s philosophical system. Independently of the dialectical, simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic overtone of considerations connected with the very boxing fight (regarding destruction and spiritualisation on a higher level), it is possible to perceive farreaching appreciation of the human individual in Hegel’s philosophy since the Absolute cannot make its own self-affirmation without the individual, without the human body, without the fight aimed at the destruction of the enemy and without the subjective consciousness and the collective consciousness which appear thanks to this fight. Thus, it is justified to suppose that the foundation of the whole Hegel’s philosophy is constituted by anthropology and that in the framework of this anthropology a special role is played by the fight and by work, which changes the subject and his(her) environment. Admittedly Hegel does not emphasise it explicitly, nevertheless his views (with their centre, which, according to Hegel himself and his interpreters, is constituted by the Absolute) have, as a matter of fact, an anthropocentric character and the main source of the subject’s development is the struggle which, irrespectively of its result, always primarily leads to the destruction or even to the death of one of the sides, just like in the boxing fight. However, it is also a germ of the positive re-orientation of the subject, the beginning and a continuation of that what the phenomenology of the spirit describes as a movement towards absolute abstraction.

A qualitative exploration of young people and prison officers’ experiences of empathy within a young offenders’ institution

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Anne Tarrant ◽  
Alison Torn
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Institutional Investment ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Factors ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Purpose This study aims to explore the ways in which young people and prison staff (Prison Officers) within a youth custodial establishment experience empathy. Previous research tends to view empathy as a stable trait and one which people can develop through individual-centred therapy. There has been little consideration of the impact of relationship factors and context in relation to empathy experience and expression. The current study aims to address this by exploring the role of the custodial context in shaping empathy, including the potential impact of relationships, environmental factors and culture. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative approach was used to enable breadth and depth in the exploration of this area. Individual, semi-structured interviews were carried out with a purposive sample of three young people and three Prison Officers. Data was analysed using inductive thematic analysis informed by the guidelines of Braun and Clarke (2006) and King and Horrocks (2010). Findings Constructed themes included “constructions of empathy”, “recipe for empathy”, “institutional investment”, “the value of empathy” and “doing empathy”. Together, they provide detailed insight into the interplay of personal and wider contextual factors influencing the experience of empathy in a custodial setting. The findings suggest that the way in which young people and staff experience empathy in the custodial environment is unique. The findings suggest that empathy takes place within the context of relationships and is influenced by the nature of those relationships, along with the wider social context within which it occurs. Practical implications The findings of the current study support a move away from understanding empathy as an individual personality trait and instead viewing it as a dynamic experience that is changeable based upon the relationship and the context within which it occurs. The findings suggest that interventions aiming to develop empathy should look beyond the level of the individual and the relationship and focus upon developing environments that are supportive of empathy. Originality/value This study provides unique insights into the subjective experience of empathy in a custodial setting, presenting as one of the first to take a more holistic approach to understand this phenomenon.

Cyrenaics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Voula Tsouna
Keyword(s):  
No Value ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Physiological Characteristics ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Actual Time ◽  
Philosophical School ◽  
External Objects ◽  
The Individual

The Cyrenaic school was a Greek philosophical school which flourished in the fourth and early third centuries bc. It took its name from the native city of its founder, Aristippus of Cyrene, a member of Socrates’ entourage. His most important successors were his grandson, Aristippus the Younger, and Theodorus, Anniceris and Hegesias, the heads of three separate Cyrenaic sects. The basis of Cyrenaic philosophy is physiological and psychological. It focuses on the individual feelings of pleasure and pain which are classed as pathē, experiences produced in a subject by its contact with an object. They are described, respectively, in terms of smooth and rough movements, of the flesh or of the soul. A third category of pathē, described as intermediate between pleasure and pain, is also defined as movements and related to one’s perception of individual properties or qualities. All pathē are short-lived and have no value beyond the actual time of their occurrence. These physiological characteristics are encountered both in the ethics and in the epistemology of the school. Although the Cyrenaics differed in their ethical doctrines, all of them attributed a central role in their systems to the individual bodily pleasure experienced in the present moment, and some of them considered it the moral end: it is pursued for its own sake, whereas happiness, conceived as the particular collection of pleasures that one experiences during a lifetime, is sought for the sake of its component pleasures. The goodness of individual pathē of pleasure is supported by an elaborate epistemological doctrine whose central claims are that we are infallibly and incorrigibly aware of the occurrence and content of our own pathē, but that we cannot apprehend the properties of external objects. A striking feature of this doctrine is the neologisms designating the perception of qualities, such as ‘I am whitened’ and ‘I am affected whitely’. This, and other features of Cyrenaic subjectivism, anticipate some modern philosophical analyses of subjective experience.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document