A Glut Of Faces

The face is a bodily surface that visually, historically and politically locates identity. Under the scrutiny of facial recognition and biometric software, the face can take the place of a whole identity, becoming a rigid singular representation. This paper draws connections between the increasing trends in surveillance and biometric technologies, and their manifestation within contemporary art practices. Specifically, I look to artworks that engage traditional portraiture and representations of the face, all the while manipulating expectations of the face-as-portrait. Artworks included in this project are Ursula Johnson’s L’nuweltik (We are Indian), Gillian Wearing’s Self Portrait at Twenty Seven Years Old and Anthony Cerniello’s Danielle. How has the face come to be represented in contemporary portraiture, and might these representations suggest a shifting logic of identity, away from the face? Art as visual expression is considered in relation to surveillance as another outcome of visual culture that highlights a continuing desire to categorize the subject within a social order.

Dynamic Response of Three-Dimensional Multi-Domain Piezoelectric Structures via BEM

In this paper, a Laplace domain boundary element method is applied for transient dynamic analysis of three-dimensional multi-domain linear piezoelectric structures. Piezoelectric materials of homogeneous sub-domains may have arbitrary degree of anisotropy. The boundary element formulation is based on a weakly singular representation of the piezoelectric boundary integral equations in the Laplace domain. To compute the time-domain solutions a convolution quadrature formula is applied for the numerical inversion of Laplace transform. Presented multi-domain boundary element method is tested on a three-dimensional problem of nonhomogeneous column which is made of two dissimilar piezoelectric materials and subjected to dynamic impact loading.

Reference and Representation in Thought and Language

The chapters in this volume deal with our devices for singular reference and singular representation, taking them in different ways. The precise relation between using a linguistic expression to refer to an object and our mental representation of it has always been, and still is, one of the key topics of debate in philosophy of language, linguistics, and the cognitive sciences. Most essays focus specifically on singular terms, that is, linguistic expressions that, at least prima facie, are used to refer to particular objects, persons, places, and so on. They include proper names (“Mary,” “John”), indexicals (“I,” “tomorrow”), demonstrative pronouns (“this,” “that”) and perhaps (some uses of) definite and indefinite descriptions (“the queen of England,” “a medical doctor”), as well as complex demonstratives (“that woman”). Some of the essays do not directly deal with reference but with representation: the ways we represent objects in thought, especially the first-person perspective and a particular object of representation—the self. And there is also an essay that explores a notion common to reference and representation: salience. Salience is a pervasive notion in language and thought, and it is approached here from an intercultural perspective. The volume includes the latest views on these complex topics, expounded by some of the most prominent authors in linguistics and philosophy of language.

Dialogism and the psyche: Bakhtin and contemporary psychology

The authors argue that dialogical philosophy, and particularly the work of the Bakhtin circle, offers psychology a way to conceptualize and study human experience such that the notion of psyche is preserved and enriched. The authors first introduce the work of the Bakhtin circle and then briefly outline some of the most influential theories of self and psyche. The implications of dialogism for theories of the self are then discussed, focusing on six basic principles of dialogical thought – namely, the principles of relationality, dynamism, semiotic mediation, alterity, dialogicality, and contextuality. Together, these principles imply a notion of psyche that is neither an isolated homunculus nor a disembodied discourse, but is, rather, a temporally unique, agentive enactment that is sustained within, rather than against, the tensions between individual and social, material and psychological, multiple and unified, stable and dynamic. The authors also discuss what this dialogical conception of psyche implies for research, arguing first that dynamic relations, rather than static entities, are the proper unit of psychological study and, second, that a dialogical research epistemology must conceive of truth as a multi-voiced event, rather than as a singular representation of fact. Finally, the authors introduce this special issue and outline the other contributions.