http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance Project MUSE®: Latest articles in SubStance. daily 1 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Vol. 28, no. 2 (1999); Vol. 29 (2000) through current issue Latest Articles: SubStance Literature TWO Project MUSE® SubStance 1527-2095 0049-2426 Latest articles in SubStance. Feed provided by Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.neyrat.html <p>By Frédéric Neyrat, Roxanne Lapidus</p> “What characterizes the comical is the infinite satisfaction, the sense of security one experiences in feeling oneself to be above one’s own contradiction, rather than seeing in it a cruel and unhappy situation.” In his approach to the comic, Hegel identifies the sense of security one experiences in feeling oneself “above.” Thanks to this position of looking down from above, all the contradictions of the world are revealed as inconsistencies, as ridiculous pretensions; everything that is patently false collapses. But all the value of the world as it is—of the world as it is thought and produced—nevertheless remains, preserved in its broad strokes, its order and its organization. Here’s the comic ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.neyrat.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 Intact 2011-11-05 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Intact 2011-11-05 2011 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00 2011-11-05 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.bennington.html <p>By Geoffrey Bennington</p> So: Being is always being-in-contact. Contact presupposes a prior separation, and neither precedes nor overcomes it. Contact is never established or given as presence, it is (only) the rhythm or vibration of its own touching and separating, its own touching (even poignant) separation. Separation has a certain priority in this story. Not: Being first, then relation. Nor: Subject first, then contact. The subject is “subject to the outside,” as you say, always already. Which means that the touch (without which the alterity of the other would not impinge at all) is already withdrawing in its very touch, vibrating away again and becoming, intrinsically, a trace of itself, a trace of touch. Once ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.bennington.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 In Rhythm: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy 2011-11-05 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press In Rhythm: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy 2011-11-05 2011 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00 2011-11-05 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.conley.html <p>By Verena Andermatt Conley</p> In the 1960s French theorists criticized the privileging of sight in Western culture, connecting it to all evils, from phallocentrism to colonialism and bourgeois capitalism. They quoted Martin Heidegger who discussed the West’s ineluctable march toward abstraction in “The World as Picture,” in which he showed how the now-quaint-looking wind charts of the Renaissance with their figural décor were increasingly replaced with signs.1 Michel de Certeau criticized this obsessive flattening of the world as an attempt on the part of strategists of state reason to render it legible. He noted the progressive loss of the figural and the poetic, or what he called the charm of the old maps and atlases. However, Certeau ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.conley.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 Making Sense from Singular and Collective Touches 2011-11-05 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Making Sense from Singular and Collective Touches 2011-11-05 2011 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00 2011-11-05 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.crandall.html <p>By Jordan Crandall</p> Beginning with the mid-century rise of computing, the practice of tracking has relied on observational experts installed in the control rooms of military and intelligence operations—specialists skilled in the detection and interpretation of the movements of the world, arrayed before them on images or maps. Propelled by the efficiency demands of the new cultures of security, these observation-based procedures have now ceded, at least in part, to algorithmic ones, in ways that challenge the centrality of human agency. In the science of video analytics, the detection and analysis of movement is automated, but still represented visually for human observers. The software takes input from existing security ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.crandall.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 An Actor of the Street: Events, Agencies, and Gatherings 2011-11-05 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press An Actor of the Street: Events, Agencies, and Gatherings 2011-11-05 2011 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00 2011-11-05 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.evens.html <p>By Aden Evens</p> One expresses oneself at the computer almost exclusively through the mouse and keyboard. Vision is nearly indispensable, and hearing plays a supporting role, but these senses are unusually constrained at the computer, as active input falls to the fingertips. At the computer, you express yourself, communicate your desires, by executing a gesture chosen from among a very few possibilities: you can click a key on the keyboard, move the mouse, or click the mouse. That’s it. Specialized speech-based interface augmentations are available; there are eye motion detectors and other alternative mouse-control techniques; touchscreens are proliferating in certain categories of device. But the great bulk of us continue to use ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.evens.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 Touch in the Abstract 2011-11-05 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Touch in the Abstract 2011-11-05 2011 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00 2011-11-05 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.fenves.html <p>By Peter Fenves</p> While searching for the original meanings of the river names of Germany, the etymologist soon discovers that in many cases the names derive from words meaning “river.” So prevalent is this semantic phenomenon that it can be found even in the case of confluent rivers. Thus, the name Rhein, Anglicized as “Rhine,” derives from the same complex of words that gives rise to such modern German verbs as rennen (“to run,” as in the running of a race) and rinnen (“to run,” as in the running of water), both of which are cognates of rhein, the Greek verb that can be found in the famous Heraclitean or pseudo-Heraclitean apothegm, panta rhei, ouden gar menei (“everything flows, nothing remains”). Apropos the name “Ruhr,” which ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.fenves.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 At the Confluence of Etymology and Thinking: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy 2011-11-05 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press At the Confluence of Etymology and Thinking: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy German language 2011-11-05 2011 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00 2011-11-05 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.goh.html <p>By Irving Goh</p> In Entre orient et occident, Luce Irigaray argues that humans, especially those of occidental heritage, still do not know how to breathe properly. To breathe properly (and Irigaray suggests we can learn this through yoga) would involve the conscious sharing of air around us. What this sharing does is open us to the fact that the air we breathe is always traced by the expiration of the other, and that, vice-versa, our expiration will always affect the other. It also makes us conscious of the fact that one breathes differently from the other, that there is always “a difference of relation to breath” (113, my translations) not just between man and woman, but also between each one of us. By acknowledging the fact that ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.goh.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 Touch Today: From Subject to Reject 2011-11-05 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Touch Today: From Subject to Reject 2011-11-05 2011 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00 2011-11-05 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.bishop.html <p>By Ryan Bishop, Irving Goh</p> The equivocity of the English term “touch” brings together perfectly the idea of an agonistic, loving contact between the flesh of the painter and what Merleau-Ponty called the flesh of the world and the connotation of a singular style. Touch exposes. A mere tap on the shoulder, or a brush of the skin, gives exposition to the one who was previously neither seen nor heard. That same touch may also awaken, in the one whose shoulder is tapped or whose skin is brushed against, an aspect of the self that he or she never knew existed, an aspect that he or she never presents to others. At times, the exposition of that other aspect of the self does not need an accidental touch or a touch that surprises. As ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.bishop.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 Plus d’un toucher: Touching Worlds 2011-11-05 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Plus d’un toucher: Touching Worlds 2011-11-05 2011 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00 2011-11-05 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.irigaray.html <p>By Luce Irigaray</p> Entering into presence with an other is generally submitted to the rules of a world that is presumed to be neutral with respect to each one and to which each one must conform. Communicating with the other would require the neutralization of the singular belonging from each and the adoption of an artificially neutral attitude that cuts us off from our energetic resources. Our natural energy is not yet educated towards a communication with respect for our difference(s). This energy is left both uncultivated and repressed. It remains in a natural state in which only degrees of intensity exist, an intensity that sometimes needs to be released through acts of instinctive domination or submission, unless it is ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.irigaray.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us 2011-11-05 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us 2011-11-05 2011 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00 2011-11-05 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.manning.html <p>By Erin Manning</p> A call for a participatory art event often entails the invitation to touch. This may involve an actual direct touching (“touch this lever, this button and it will cause a change in the environment”), or it may involve a more elusive call to touch that includes being moved by a work in transformation. Either way, the call to touch is a demand: it asks the participant to relate, in this time of interaction, to the unfolding of the work. It asks the participant to be open to a certain unknowability, and to a certain risk. Here I want to suggest that despite calls made toward open-endedness and process (understood as positive effects of a generative event) the call to touch is never straightforward. For it ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v040/40.3.manning.html">Read More</a> Project MUSE® http://muse.jhu.edu/ 2011-11-06T00:05:02-05:00 Fiery, Luminous, Scary 2011-11-05 text/html en-US The Johns Hopkins University Press Fiery, Luminous, Scary 2011-11-05 2011 TWO Project MUSE® 0 2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00 2011-11-05