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The relationship of man and God, in which they love one another, is the way of human existence in which his totality is included. Repentance and purification are maintained through the will or enduring remembrance of God. This is how the original connection between phenomena and their names is maintained: man knows them in his response to God's commandments. But reaching that is always also dependence on the Independent. Loss is the constant potential that confirms the accepted offer of belief that man will repay his debt for what he has received. That debt has two essential contents—verticality, as the connection with God through the totality of existence, and humility, as being on one level of the multiplicity of revelation of oneness. The rupture of the alliance or nonfulfilment of the debt turns man toward the love of phenomena that have ceased to be signs of perfection. Every duality in the totality of existence bears witness to the division that is the proclamation of the Creator and the created.

This chapter continues the discussion of the Del McCoury Band while re-introducing Deleuze's concepts of virtuality/verticality and actualization/horizontality to illuminate the manner in which bluegrass can remain a 'live' tradition thanks to the multiplicity/difference of the 'idea' of bluegrass. This, the differentiation of the idea, is enacted through improvisation.

Maya Deren's writings on film provide the basis for considering her dancefilm works such as A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945–1946). A pivotal figure in the history of dancefilm, Deren's films marked the re‐emergence of the form within the avantgarde for the first time since the experiments of the Futurists, Surrealists, and Dadaists earlier in the twentieth century. Operating outside the major American film studios, which were releasing their highest output of dance musicals, Deren was working with modern and untrained dancers to create choreographies for the screen. Deren realized seminal strategies for dancefilm in the mid‐twentieth century that can be found in the most recent examples of the form. Vertical film form is a concept developed by Deren to account for the different film structure in non‐narrative films—what she calls “poetic film.” Rather than progressing “horizontally” with the logic of the narrative, vertical films or sequences explore the quality of moments, images, ideas, and movements outside of such imperatives. Depersonalization refers to a type of screen performance that subsumes the individual into the choreography of the film as a whole. Actors become figures across whom movement transfers as an “event.” The manipulation of gestural action through stylization occurs through individual performances as well as cinematic effects, the two levels of filmic performance combining to create screen choreographies.

The chapter examines debates about the fragility of Himalayan ecology, and the theories that have been advanced to explain and remedy environmental degradation. It reviews accounts of the introduction of environmental protection in Nepal and the impact of regulations on local patterns of resource use, which have tended to make local people hostile to the institutions designed for nature protection. Phenomenological, discursive, and political–ecological developments in approaches to human–environmental relations are described that will be drawn upon in interpreting the ethnography of Tamang environmental relations.

Chapter 4 investigates the fundamentally mobile relationship of Tamang villagers to their landscape, the historically shifting geographical ranges of their transhumance cycles, the effects mobility has on their patterns of everyday life, and the kinds of productive affordances and animate presences they talk about in their engagements with the diversity of places in the Himalayan environment. The Tamang standpoint of self-placement is intermediary to the cultural and ecological poles of the Tibetans and the Nepalis. Their realm is the ‘middle ground’ from which they ascend and descend to extremes, and in the range of which the diversity of life forms is a creationary process of fertility, giving sustenance to human domestic ecology. While a distinctively local and practice-oriented knowledge of verticality operates within the village terrain, the occasion of pilgrimage to Gosainkund provides a more expanded and extra-local symbolic frame to the ontology of living in the middle ground.

Although the category ‘Abrahamic religions’ is contentious, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do form a group of traditions related historically, conceptually, and practically. The theme of life itself has been central for them all, especially the sacrificial model of transforming death into life and an eschatology that awaits the end of days. The history of these three religions has been more conflictual than harmonious, almost inseparable from the history of power and the emergence of the idea of the nation and state. A conception of life begins to emerge in these religions from common roots in Jewish and Greek thinking. Three trajectories of interest in life itself can be traced: first, a sacrificial imaginary at work across the Greek, Semitic, and Christian histories; second, life understood in terms of verticality; and third, a horizontal, scientific drive to understand life.

The Earth’s fast-expanding array of active satellites are central to the organization, experience – and destruction – of contemporary life on the earth’s surface. Yet it remains difficult to visualize and understand their enigmatic presence. Mysterious and cordoned-off ground stations dot the earth’s terrain, their futuristic radomes and relay facilities directed upwards to unknowable satellites above. Small antennae lift upwards from a myriad of apartment blocks to silently receive invisible broadcasts from transnational television stations. Crowds might even occasionally witness the spectacle of a satellite launch atop a rocket. In such a context, this chapter introduces the ways in which the regimes of power organized through satellites and other space systems are interwoven with production of violence, inequality and injustice on the terrestrial surface. Necessarily, the chapter also attends to the importance of how space is imagined and represented as a national frontier; a birthright of states; a sphere of heroic exploration; a fictional realm; or as a vulnerable domain above through which malign others might stealthily threaten societies below at any moment. The essay addresses the contested geopolitics and ‘astrogeopolitics’ of satellites. It explores satellite regimes as means for national security states to intensely scrutinise the Earth’s surface. It analyses the increasingly weaponised means of directly launching lethal violence. Moreover, it addresses satellites systems as domains contested by all sorts of countergeographic artistic, social and political movements who appropriate the increasingly civilianized architectures of vertical military scrutiny to both contest their hegemony and to add power to ground level political and social struggles.

This chapter brings Borges and Deleuze together to discuss to forms of difference: the same difference and a different sameness. The former is more familiar mapping as it does on to the openness of the creative process as witnessed particularly purely in improvisation. The second however brigs to the surface again the 'secret' form of improvisation considered sporadically throughout the book. Using Borges's short story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,' as one possible example of this un-heard-of form of improvisation, some progress (if that is the right word) is made in bringing this vanishing form of improvisation into view.

This chapter argues that conceptions of spiritual and intellectual transcendence in European thought are predicated on rootedness. Beginning with Plato’s Timaeus, the human has been imagined throughout history as rooted in the divine. The plant’s verticality is conceived as a model for moral rectitude. Paul Claudel, the father of neo-Catholicism in twentieth-century France, uses the image of the crucifix rooted in the Garden of Eden as the starting point for a series of cryptographic tableaux meant to illustrate the necessity of spiritual rootedness. The chapter then shows the ways in which the inverted plant, which thrives even when uprooted and replanted upside down, has been used repeatedly as a figure for intellectually purposeful unorthodoxy (in the case of the Encyclopédistes), for intellectual risk (Paul Valéry), and for the overturning of European values (Michel Tournier).

This chapter presents a detailed description, discussion, and interpretation of the Middle Bronze Age site, the Wilsford Shaft. The discussion moves the debate beyond the existing ritual-versus-economic explanation, and argues that the reader should assess the site, its creation, and use in terms of digging to extreme depths. The chapter positions the Wilsford Shaft in the context of recent and current thinking about southern Britain in the Middle Bronze Age, as presented in a detailed description of excavations of the farmstead at Down Farm, and current thinking about the local prehistoric, social landscape in Britain at this time. The chapter concludes by suggesting that current attempts to understand Wilsford can be supplemented by focusing on the presence of ground-cutting that occurred both at The Shaft and at Down Farm.

This part of the book examines the emergence of the modern skyline and the ways in which it acquired symbolic and cultural significance between 1890 and 1940. The discussion takes the post-9/11 city as a point of departure to bring into focus the cultural and architectural significance of the New York skyline as a site and source of anxiety. It then circles back to the early high-rise architecture of pioneers like Cass Gilbert and Ernest Flagg to focus on the rise of the modern skyscraper, cityscapes, panoramas, verticality, and imaginations of the vertical city. The main argument in Part I is that the modern skyline of New York figures across a diverse body of cultural production as a highly unstable space to read and interpret. In works ranging from the immigrant stories of Abraham Cahan and Willa Cather to the social realist paintings of the Ashcan School, the high-rise photography of Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the vertiginous flickerings of urban actuality films and avant-garde cinema, the skyline hovers between the sublime and the uncanny, ultimately figuring as a site of instability and change that invites yet resists interpretation.

Interlude B reviews The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future by John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, in which they charge “buffered” liberalism and authoritarian interventions with the “atomization” of society. For them, “post-liberalism” replaces “market, state, and technocracy” with the relational fabric of “society, culture, and interpersonal relations.” They also hold that “virtue ethics” is both “more demanding” than utilitarianism and “less moralist” than Kantian deontology. They go on to review politics, economics, culture, and international relations, providing significant insights for a viable post-liberal agenda. Although applauding the general tenor of the book, the Interlude takes exception to a number of accents, such as appeals to (unreflective) “naturalism,” “verticality,” and “neo-medievalism.”

This chapter explores the experiences of the East Germans who moved to Marzahn in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing especially on their sensory worlds, inner lives, memories, and sense of spatial orientation and awareness. In particular, it describes a parallelism between their personal, psychological, and emotional sense of rupture and amnesia on one hand and the amnesia and rupture of the landscape and architectural and urban material reality of Marzahn on the other. It is argued that Marzahn was a highly desirable place for most East Germans, who were often desperate to escape the slums of the old Berlin. Yet everything there—from new weather patterns to new elevations and new kinds of soil—played a role in detaching people from their old lives, and transforming them into a new kind of conscious subject, one shaped more fundamentally by socialism.

Professor Rolando Quadri was a leading scholar of the 20th century. He anticipated the vertical changes to the structure of the modern global community. His vision of the international community was as a “supra partes” entity or authority distinct from its constituent members. What was extraordinary was his theoretical-methodological approach to the “principles” of international law, seen as the supreme source of law, which he contended as the authoritative expression of the will of the international community as a whole. Some of his theoretical insights on “principles” allow to consider him as a precursor of international constitutionalism. This chapter remarks on the modernity of the thought of this outstanding scholar, comparing Quadri’s vision of constitutionalism to modern visions of global constitutionalism and addressing the links thereof.