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This chapter examines the project of astrobiology and its object, the “signature of life,” by drawing on the work of Hillel Schwartz, particularly his writing on time in Century's End, on duplication in The Culture of the Copy, and on signification in “De-Signing.” Schwartz's work can provide a fresh angle on the doublings, redoublings, definitions, and redefinitions at the heart of astrobiology's quest for extraterrestrial life. His crabwise approach offers provocative paratactical techniques for traversing the networks of association, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that support the concept of the signature of life. The chapter first considers the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), through the optic of Schwartz's writings on copying and his work on noise before discussing astrobiology's notion of the signature of life. It also offers suggestions for thwarting the overreaching of the theoretical impulse in both life sciences and humanities.

Politically conservative Christians are animate by a mythic ideal concerned with the “right-ordering” of society. They want the world in which they live reflect their own likeness. A legacy of a Christian origin is understood as providing a sense of ownership over America and “radical secularists” have taken this away. The effect is harming to America, and people of faith, marginalizing them in public life. Their response has been one of political engagement, often conflating Christian faith and national identity in the political imagination. There are changes occurring among the Religious Right. However, though the tactics have expanded to include worldview and culture, the logic at work—that America has been taken over by secularists, that it is time to “take back the culture” for Christ—is identical to the longstanding approach of the Christian Right. This is because the underlying myth that defines their goals and strategy of action has not changed.

This chapter examines how a person's ideological values affect his institutional support. The first part of the chapter argues that the original formulation of the congruence postulate in Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture actually contains two versions and that these variants complicate the discussion between culturalists and institutionalists. The chapter then uses the ideological performance axiom to develop hypotheses that are tested in the second part of the chapter. The chapter addresses one controversial debate in the democratic transition literature: is congruence necessary between citizens' ideological values and existing institutions? Or is the performance of institutions the main source of political stability? The chapter suggests of a way to bridge separate strands of the democratic transition literature by focusing on the relationship between ideological values and performance evaluations. The chapter concludes that performance evaluations and ideological values jointly influence citizens' views about democracies, both in Germany and East-Central Europe.

This chapter recounts how Banks began to get his first novels of the Culture published under the name Iain M. Banks. It examines the way that the central characters are either hostile to the Culture, or else are bored by it, so, right from the start of his career, it suggests an ambivalence about the supposed utopian characteristics of the Culture. The chapter also recounts how, with input from Ken MacLeod, the earliest of his Culture novels, Use of Weapons, became one of the most structurally complex of all of his novels.

At the height of his career, Banks abandoned the Culture for two very different science fiction novels. Against a Dark Background presented an extreme capitalism that was a deliberate contrast to the communist character of the Culture; while Feersum Endjinn presented a structurally complex and linguistically dense account of a world in collapse. Civil war as a political manifestation of Laing’s divided self would also inform subsequent works of the Scottish fantastic, notably Whit and A Song of Stone. His return to the Culture with Excession and its companion Look to Windward were, it is proposed, intended to end the sequence by addressing the Sublime as a form of the death of civilization.

This chapter explores David Garland's intellectual life-course, from his first publications dealing with the history of penal-welfare strategies and the birth of criminology to his work on The Culture of Control. This book grew out of a sense of bewilderment. Next, the chapter offers a discussion of some of the defining aspects of his scholarship. It then closes with an explanation on how Garland has given flesh to the relationship between his social roles as scholar in an academic environment on the one hand, and as citizen in a political community on the other. In addition, it discusses how his Foucauldian treatment of criminology and the methodological and descriptive choices he made in The Culture of Control have created a number of blind spots. It traces the changes in Garland's critical position, then briefly returns to the lack of clear-cut exit scenarios in his work and how this follows from his particular way of making sense of penal change. It concludes with a discussion of Garland's very own ‘personal’ adaptation strategy.

Changes in his personal life, in particular separation from his first wife and the death of his trusted editor James Hale, brought a change in Banks’s fiction. The Algebraist ran directly counter to the innovations he had introduced to space opera. The chapter shows how his best late-period novel, Transition, was written in dialogue with The Steep Approach to Garbadale. It then examines the religious issues underlying the last Culture trilogy, in which the Culture is often peripheral to the action, while ideas about the nature of God, the afterlife and religious texts are central to the novels.

Xia Yan, the underground leader of the left-wing films in the 1930s and top official of the film industry in the PRC since 1954, embodied the cultural history of the CCP. A brief biography of this Communist feminist artist leader disrupts the reductive dichotomy of the Party vs. artists in film studies and illuminates a tension-ridden history of socialist filmmaking that constituted a highly contentious site in the socialist revolution. Situating his politically engagingartistic creativity inside ashiftingpolitical process, this chapter traces Xia Yan’s major role in transmitting the New Culture agenda of transforming a patriarchal culture in socialist cultural production and delineatesdiverse and contradictory politicalpositions and artistic preferences in artists’ innovative experimentsofcreating a socialist new culture. It also analyzes his films that continued the paradigm of revolutionary heroines.

This chapter intensifies the problem of the animal organism’s over-determination by external variables. The chapter concentrates on Hegel’s analyses of eating, sex, violence, sickness and, ultimately, death. These phenomena exemplify how the animal organism is perpetually given over to external circumstances that threaten its self-perpetuating activity. Taken together they indicate, for Hegel, the truth of organic life: it must die. Organic life must prove a necessary yet insufficient condition for the life of conceptuality proper. In other words, the life of spirit requires embodiment and more. Conceptuality can only come into a robust self-relation in something that is, simultaneously, anticipatorily grounded in nature and yet, irreducible to those grounds. The space in which such self-mediation occurs is what Hegel refers to as the life of spirit (Geist). The self-grounding system of thought proper does not find sufficient existence in the natural world because the radical exteriority of the latter is hostile to the auto-dictates of conceptuality, its self-grounding basis. The chapter concludes with a question: what must this ‘monstrous’ conception of nature mean for human culture, specifically finite subjectivity and socio-political freedom?

This chapter is about a prehistoric Chamorro man from the island of Tinian whose osteobiography suggests that he was a stone worker-one of the elite masons who constructed the huge latte stone sets that are the cultural symbol of the Chamorro. His stature and robusticity lend truth to the legends about the physical prowess of the ancient chiefs and the descriptions of “giants” by early Spanish visitors to the Marianas.

Created in 1782, the Royal Field—or Sanam Luang—is a large open space located at the heart of Bangkok, occupying a prominent space both in the urban fabric of the city and in the collective psyche of Thai people. Apart from serving the monarchy and existing power holders, this polysemic landscape has functioned as a site where major contestants to power and authority in modern Thailand had collided in making their marks, claims, demands, and representations. Via the concept of urban palimpsest, this chapter first examines the Royal Field in terms of a symbolic device for ruling authority to manifest, legitimize, and maintain power. The scholarly focus then shifts to the topic of a contested space, where different groups of contenders had re-appropriated Sanam Luang to perform their social and political activities as well as to create their modern identities. The analytical and critical inquiries on the Royal Field essentially argue that it is in fact a dynamic urban palimpsest, whose meanings have: 1) coexisted, converged, contradicted, and contested with one another; 2) been subjected to further appropriations and contentions; and 3) resulted in slippage of public memories, thus generating even more complex and vibrant interpretations.

This chapter examines how ethnicity and multiculturalism are constructed through definitions of tradition by focusing on the “fieldwork phase” of the festival-making process that sought to determine which tradition bearers and what traditions would be selected to represent Hawaiʻi as a multicultural paradigm in the national arena of the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife. The chapter highlights some of the disjunctions between local and national definitions and uses of multiculturalism, showing in particular how the question of “who can speak” for a community by way of a cultural practice was inflected by predetermined notions of authenticity and traditionality. It also considers the Hawaiʻi State Foundation for Culture and the Arts's classification of ethnic groups into Polynesian, Asian, and Other categories. While the final selection of nine ethnic groups were intended to challenge simplistic notions of Hawaiʻi, the chapter argues that they unwittingly reinforced some of the very tropes they sought to undercut.

Of course, there’s no shortage of people who will step in to do your job if you default on it. The corporate world looks to the university for its workforce. Parents want the university to pick up the baton they may have dropped. Students demand that the university support the political cause of the moment. Conservatives believe that the university should refurbish and preserve the traditions of the past. Liberals and progressives would like to see those same traditions dismantled and replaced by what they take to be better ones. Alumni wonder why the athletics teams aren’t winning more. Politicians and trustees wonder why the professors aren’t teaching more. Whether it is state legislators who want a say in hiring and course content, or donors who want to tell colleges how to spend the funds they provide, or parents who are disturbed when Dick and Jane bring home books about cross-dressing and gender change, or corporations that want new departments opened and others closed, or activist faculty who urge the administration to declare a position on the war in Iraq, there is no end of interests intent on deflecting the university from its search for truth and setting it on another path. Each of these lobbies has its point, but it is not the university’s point, which is, as I have said over and over again, to produce and disseminate (through teaching and publication) academic knowledge and to train those who will take up that task in the future. But can the university defend the autonomy it claims (or should claim) from public pressures? Is that claim even coherent? Mark Taylor would say no. In a key sentence in the final chapter of his book The Moment of Complexity (2001), Taylor declares that “the university is not autonomous but is a thoroughly parasitic institution, which continually depends on the generosity of the host so many academics claim to reject.” He continues: “The critical activities of the humanities, arts, and sciences are only possible if they are supported by the very economic interests their criticism so often calls into question.”

This chapter juxtaposes the film criticism of Béla Balázs with the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner in order to carve out their approaches to gesture. It gives particular attention to Plessner’s “Grenzen der Gemeinschaft: Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus” (“The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism”) and Balázs’s “Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films” (“Visible Man or the Culture of Film”). Both authors have a pronounced interest in the potential of social gesture to inform public life, yet they articulate it in different ways: where Balázs bemoans too little gestural embodiment, Plessner sees too much of it. Balázs emphatically conjures up the promise of a gestural cure that he detects in the heightened corporeal expressivity of silent film; Plessner considers such expressivity as symptom not only of gestural, but also aesthetic, social and political ills.