Search Results

This chapter examines media distribution within the context of sociotechnical systems. It begins with a discussion of the concept of recalcitrance and its relation to heterogeneous engineering before turning to technologies as parts of heterogeneous systems. It then considers the persistence of heterogeneous engineering in the world of online television news distribution, along with time delay as an example of how the route of online video is influenced by the various forces and architects involved in online and social television news distribution. It also describes the distribution system developed by MSNBC for online television news in the years leading up to 2010 by tracing how a typical cable news program is brought to online audiences.

This chapter examines Newsvine.com's attempt to design a dual-purpose platform that simultaneously powered both MSNBC's mainstream media sites and its own social news venture. It also considers the changes to how MSNBC content was delivered after its acquisition of Newsvine and how the original social news site functioned; the role of MSNBC.com as an actor in the system that Newsvine was constructing; what MSNBC.com was hoping to do with Newsvine; and what the acquisition of Newsvine accomplished for the heterogeneous engineers at MSNBC.com. Finally, it explores how the addition of MSNBC.com as a corporate parent affected Newsvine and its user community, the advantages that MSNBC.com ultimately provided to Newsvine, and what changes were necessitated to cope with Newsvine's recalcitrance.

This chapter presents future directions on the international law of the sea. The author believes that problems faced by each nation are global in nature, and transcend political boundaries. Sea borne commerce is expected to quadruple in the near future, making the freedom and the security of the sea imperative. The Third UNCLOS resolved most of the contradictions plaguing the earlier law of the sea, including the reconciliation of movement on the sea with the exploitation of its under water environment; reconciling laws regulating the movement of ships on the waters with those relating to the appropriation of the waters; reconciling freedom of the seas with the demands of sovereignty; and reconciling rules for universal regimes with rules serving regional interests. The author feels that archipelago transit and straits used for international navigation will remain potential flash points. He also feels that many developing countries are not yet ready to take advantage of their marine potential, and discusses their inability to take action against the factory fishing methods of major maritime powers intruding in their territories. Marine officers need to be specially educated in international maritime laws. The author concludes by focusing on the ‘invisible enemy of terrorism’, and US intransigence in not becoming party to the Third UNCLOS because of its seabed mining provisions. Soviet reservations of the conclusions of the Third UNCLOS are also discussed.

This epilogue offers a brief synopsis of each previous chapter and the overall arguments of the book. It also ponders how subaltern subjects, before the democratization of who can record and disseminate their worldview, refused or in some way manipulated the interpellating, imperial gaze. Though most of the book is concerned with how Dominican subjects negotiate being ghosted from various Western imaginaries, the epilogue considers the power of not being legible and not being recorded for posterity. It considers a short film and a photograph to muse on the difference between being recognized as a full human and as a citizen subject with full rights and being surveilled and quantified. I argue that the short film—which advertises a designer brand— and a rare 1904 photograph of a young Dominican girl, show a third space in which subaltern subjects were recorded as they refused the label of Otherness.

This chapter analyzes the different disturbances of writing scenes in Jean Paul's novel Siebenkäs. It explains that this novel contains several scenes of writing in which the precarious relationship between body, technology, and writing is negotiated and it relates how the protagonist Firmian Siebenkäs copes with the competing demands of his marriage, his career, and his writing. This chapter also discusses the aesthetic, philosophical, and psychological strategies employed by Siebenkäs and other characters in order to deal with the recalcitrance of the “imaginary materiality of writing,” the most prominent of which are models of Stoic self-government, psychosomatic treatments, and idyllic and humorous modes of representation in literary writing.

The first chapter analyzes David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghost in relation to the way in which recent scholars of the African Atlantic have wrestled with the perennial problem of the “example” as a representational form, in which particular acts of violent atrocity must stand in for extended, systematic, and non-singular event(s) of modernity.

Games offer an aesthetics of self-reflection, where players appreciate the aesthetic qualities in their own activities. They are part of what we can call the process arts, where the audience is supposed to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of their own activity, in response to an artifact. This chapter provides an account of the process arts in general, and situates games inside them. The process arts are contrasted with the more familiar object arts, where the audience is supposed to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the artifact itself. The process arts offer a greater distance between artist and effect. Thus, the medium of games can be understood by thinking about the unique challenges it presents to the artist. The chapter focuses on the characteristic challenge of the medium of agency: the game designer must cope with agential distance. Game designers must achieve their aesthetic effects through the agent of the player, making room for the player’s choices, creativity, and variable skill. But game designers have a special tool for coping with that agential distance. They can designate the basic shape of the player’s agency in the game.

This chapter analyzes a political vice that is represented by the closing of one’s ears or mind to the claims of others: political recalcitrance. The purpose of this chapter is to show how and why recalcitrance is a political vice, and to offer some ideas about how citizens interested in sustaining a just and inclusive political order might best contend with this sensibility. The way in which the recalcitrant hold their truth claims in politics is insufficiently political and this makes recalcitrance unjust and potentially cruel. The essential aim of a democratic response to recalcitrance is not to subvert the articulation of truth or identity claims in politics, but to sustain a relentlessly deliberative orientation to the claims and beliefs that ground political judgment and motivate public action. Socrates remains both an exemplar and an ongoing challenge for contemporary democratic societies that struggle with entrenched forms of political recalcitrance.

Key aspects of the disparity between homo sapiens and homo philosophicus are identified and discussed. These include ‘fast thinking’ in Kahneman’s sense, belief-perseverance, attitude-recalcitrance, self-ignorance, and a bias to believe. Belief-perseverance and attitude-recalcitrance are easily confused but are different phenomena. Recalcitrance is a form of irrationality in Scanlon’s sense but belief-perseverance as such isn’t irrational. Subjects whose reasoning is impeccable can still be open to rational criticism in cases where their attitudes have an undermining non-epistemic explanation in terms of character traits such as gullibility. Such undermining non-epistemic explanations of a subject’s beliefs are unacceptable to the believer. In such cases of self-ignorance the subject knows what he believes but lacks a proper understanding of why he believes what he believes.

Behavioural economists like Ariely claim than humans are predictably irrational. However, not being homo philosophicus does not make us irrational, and what Ariely describes as irrationality is more plausibly understood as self-ignorance. Self-ignorance and irrationality are different things. As Scanlon argues, irrationality in the clearest sense occurs when a person’s attitudes fail to conform to his or her own judgements. In this sense, attitude recalcitrance is irrational but belief perseverance is not. A distinction is drawn between an attitude’s being irrational and its being open to rational criticism, and it is argued that fewer of our choices and attitudes are irrational than behavioural economists and some philosophers such as Stich would have us believe.

The final chapter addresses a central issue in contemporary theorizing about emotional experience, namely the sense in which emotions are intelligible. The chapter focuses on an experiential and first-person sense of emotional intelligibility. This notion of emotional intelligibility is developed in terms of the intrinsic rational intelligibility of emotional experience. It is argued that we sometimes experience the felt valenced attitude component of an emotion as an appropriate response to the ‘demand’ of the value to be recognized, as a response to the ‘power’ the value is experienced as possessing (resulting in the values as affective powers view, or VAP). Cases of emotional recalcitrance, and their phenomenology of affective persistence, are then discussed. Finally, pathological cases are considered in which such intelligibility goes missing, and it is suggested that the combination of the feeling-towards-value view and the VAP can account for such cases.

The first chapter develops the Perceptual Theory of emotions by contrasting it with its main competitors, such as Judgmental Theories, according to which emotions are or involve evaluative or normative judgments. One central feature of the proposed theory is that it claims that emotions represent the world as being a certain way, but that their contents are non-conceptual. The chapter presents the arguments in favor of the Perceptual Theory. In particular, it spells out the many analogies between emotions and sensory perceptual experiences, such as phenomenal qualities or absence of direct control by the agent. The chapter ends with a discussion of the main objections to the Perceptual Theory, such as the objection that by contrast with sensory perceptions, emotions can be irrational.