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Abstract: This study explores the pivotal concept of “objective possibility” within Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, a concept that has received less attention compared to more prominent ideas such as reification or totality. Lukács frequently refers to “objective possibility” and related terms in essays like “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” and “Class Consciousness,” emphasizing its importance in understanding class consciousness theoretically. The term’s roots for Lukács derive from Max Weber’s methodological writings, which drew from John Stuart Mill and Johannes von Kries and applied to historical and social causation. However, Lukács diverges from Weber’s use, focusing not on counterfactual historical events but on latent historical tensions in the present that can be actualized through collective action. The study argues that Lukács integrates Weberian objective possibility with Marxist and Hegelian language, utilizing it within a modal social ontology. This approach allows Lukács to theorize key questions of class consciousness, historical action, and revolution. By drawing on Hegel’s dialectics of possibility, actuality, and necessity, as well as Marxian contradictions in material conditions, Lukács reconfigures objective possibility from a heuristic tool for the writing of history to an ontologically significant element in the field of historical action.

One amongst many of the defining characteristics of so-called 'late stage' capitalism are human-animal relationships that have become acrimonious, hostile, or even monstrous in nature. A foundational premise of monster theory, and one that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's seminal 1996 edited collection of the same name suggests, is that the construction of the monster in popular culture is fraught with the boundaries that constitute the society that has spawned them; the monstrous body "exists only to be read" (p. 4). Bringing together the theoretical insights of the Marxist theory of reification, critical animal studies, and monster theory, this article examines the ways in which cinematic depictions of gigantic monstrosity can inform our theorizing of multispecies relationships under capitalism. Specifically, I explore how the tensions between capital and human-animal relationships serve to construct and constitute the multiform monster, Jean Jacket, in Jordan Peele's 2022 film Nope. Through an examination of the multispecies relationalities that the film portrays, I argue that the figure of Jean Jacket is a monstrous culmination of the reified and therefore, necessarily deferred nature of human-animal relationships under capital. However, Nope's conclusion alerts us to the radical dereifying potential of multispecies bonds of care and embodied knowledge; systems of resistance that can be forged even within our current capitalist ruins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Glenn Diaz's The Quiet Ones explores people's lives in the labor force created by a global market system. Work, public services, geography, identities, production, and consumption are generally shaped and directed by the flow of boundary-less foreign capital investments from developed countries. The novel presents characters as workers in the business process outsourcing industry in the Philippines, expatriates as highly skilled workers who migrated to the country to look for better economic and social capital opportunities, and the various relationships with people surrounding these workers. This paper charts the terrain, nature, and the systemic movements of capital through (1) capital-as-presence in the text, framing or creating work patterns, human relationships, consumption behavior, and (2) space-as-absence that mediates relationships between states, citizens, and the State (represented by the law and state authorities), between citizens as workers, between citizens as workers and their cities. The paper concludes that the neoliberal economic agenda in/of globalization created a language where capital is deeply embedded in a textual negotiation of/in meanings that legitimizes the power structure that perpetuates, supports, enables, and reinforces an oppressive elite, imperialist, and capitalist economic market system as the only alternative in rendering a concrete livable world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the emergent phenomena of AI-generated and NFT art through the lens of Georg Lukács’ theory of reification and its existential implications. Lukács argued that under capitalism, social relations and human experiences are transformed into objective, quantifiable commodities, leading to a fragmented and alienated consciousness. Applying this framework to AI and NFT art, these technologies can be said to represent extreme examples of the reification of art and creativity in the digital age. AI art generators reduce artistic production to abstract, computable properties divorced from lived experience, while NFTs transform digital art into speculative commodities, imposing the logic of private property and exchange value onto the previously open domain of online culture. The existential dimension of this reification is explored, raising questions about the nature of creativity, originality, and the value of art in an increasingly financialized and automated world. The article suggests that a Lukácsian critique must not only diagnose the reified character of these cultural forms but also identify their potential for resistance and transformation, pointing toward a re-humanized and emancipatory vision of art in the digital age. Contemporary theorists such as Tiziana Terranova, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Benjamin Noys are invoked to further elucidate these issues.

This essay argues that the supermarket partakes in the reification of the nuclear family form. The supermarket is a ubiquitous food space, shaping subjectivity through the ordinary aspects of everyday life. The ubiquity of this space obscures the historical nature of the nuclear family, presenting it instead as the natural and necessary structure of kin relations. I begin with a discussion of Georg Lukács’ account of reification, examining the ways reification thus theorized reveals the reifying force of the supermarket. I then make an intervention into Lukács’ notion of reification, attending to the ways domestic labor, procreation, the production of labor power, and the home as the center of consumption support the reification of the nuclear family both in and outside of the supermarket. In conclusion, this analysis points to the connections between the supermarket, the nuclear family form, and the production of climate chaos to argue that reconfigurations of family and food relations are necessary in the face of ongoing and proliferating climate-related crises.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we are living in a transition from the “era of things to the era of non-things”. According to his perspective, things do not determine the world we live in: information does. Consequently, the profession of translation has become increasingly mechanized to meet the high demand for “information”, turning readers into compulsive consumers of words. Thus, there is a significant risk of confusing the symbolic representation of words with essential reality, neglecting the importance of context and paratext in the construction of meaning. This phenomenon can lead to a loss of meaning in the act of translation, diminishing its role as a bridge between cultures and languages. Borrowing from the axiom of Portuguese intellectual Rui Pereira in a society of “non-thought”, it is crucial to reflect on how “translating in times of non-translation” operates. In this regard, the objective of this essay is to analyze how paratranslation, from the Vigo School, can be understood as a space of resistance against a process of reification of the other’s existence in the act of translating. In the “AI era”, where translation has become an increasingly mechanized act, the examination of the paratexts surrounding this process serves as a way to return to the fundamental condition of translation: the human condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Often we unconsciously take for granted that there is not really an alternative to how we currently organize society – we tend to reify existing social order, misperceiving the way things are now as the way things must be. Such reification constrains our agency by discouraging the thought that we could do better. Alternative organizations undermine this reification by manifesting the real possibility of organizing differently. Such dereification is valuable in itself insofar as it lifts constraints on agency, facilitating intentional choice regarding the social systems we (re)produce. A case study of this dereification is offered by the Réseau Alimentaire Local (RAL), a network of French 'solidarity groceries' unified by the pursuit of more just and sustainable alternatives to the dominant model. Groups within the RAL develop their own software to manage these novel alternatives. We were struck, however, by some groups' efforts to reify their own solutions, disparaging other approaches as mere attempts to 'reinvent the wheel'. The case thus raised a tricky question: can alternative organizations dereify existing social order without at the same time reifying their proposal, thereby reimposing constraints on agency? Our exploration through the RAL case grounds two contributions. First, conceptualizing reification in terms of materializing abstract ideas, we demonstrate how any given organizational configuration contributes to the materialization of multiple ideas simultaneously. We identify two forms of such multiplicity: vertical multiplicity, where nested relational networks materialize coherent ideas that differ only in their degree of specificity; and horizontal multiplicity, where intersecting relational networks materialize divergent ideas of the same degree of specificity. We argue that failure to recognize this multiplicity accounts for a great deal of materiality's reifying capacity, while its recognition can facilitate new ways of approaching the dereification challenge. Our second contribution is therefore a strategy for resisting reification: materializing multiplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neuroscience of creativity is built on a tacit and near universal assumption that is false. Paradoxically, this is not contentious; once made explicit, the assumption is readily conceded as false. Psychology regards creativity as made up of many complex, multifaceted, and varied cognitive and emotional processes deployed across many different domains. But we instead think of, and treat, creativity as if it were a single, separate, cohesive, and discrete thing--as in, Einstein had it. In a straightforward extension of this fallacy, cognitive neuroscientists have looked for uniquely creative cognition that (1) is distinct from all other kinds of cognition and (2) has a proprietary neural substrate. In other words, a standalone and monolithic creativity faculty in the brain that manages only creativity and all creativity. First, this paper brings into sharp focus the nature and ubiquity of this fallacy. It then outlines the alternative theoretical position that is (1) based on fundamental neural principles and (2) predicated on taking seriously the concept of creativity as complex and diverse. Like morality or secretiveness, it holds that creativity does not exist as its own, specialized entity in the brain. Instead, its neurocognitive mechanisms are distributed, embedded, and varied; that is, creativity is everywhere and multiply realizable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Objectives: The purpose of this systematic review was to examine how the scientific community in Europe that is involved with research with animals perceives and experiences the implementation of 3R (Replace, Reduce, Refine). Methods: A systematic search of the literature published in the past ten years was performed in PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus. Publications were screened for eligibility using a priori inclusion criteria, and only empirical evidence (quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methodologies) was retained. Quantitative survey items were investigated by conducting a meta-analysis, and the qualitative data was summarized using an inductive meta-synthetic approach. Included publications were assessed using the Quality Assessment for Diverse Studies tool. Results: 17 publications were included (eight quantitative, seven qualitative, two mixed-methods). The meta-analysis revealed that scientists are skeptical about achieving replacement, even if they believe that 3R improve the quality of experimental results. They are optimistic concerning the impact of 3R on research costs and innovation, and see education as highly valuable for the implementation of 3R. The meta-synthesis revealed four barriers (systemic dynamics, reification process, practical issues, insufficient knowledge) and four facilitators (efficient use of animals, caring for animals, regulatory uptake, supportive workplace environment). Conclusion: These findings show actionable levers at the local and systemic levels, and may inform regulators and institutions in their 3R policies. Trial registration: The protocol was registered into the PROSPERO database under the number CRD42023395769. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It seems a truism that while our grasp of the world is at best inconclusive, it is attended by a pressing desire to articulate the ultimate context in which our lives are set. Here, my remarks focus on the limits of our ability to explicate that context or landscape, suggesting that any attempt to de-confuse our world will be inherently inconclusive, indeterminate, and undefined. In other words, I want to encourage a little cognitive dissonance regarding our ability to make sense of the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central axis of the article is the argument that History and Class Consciousness adopts from the Hegelian dialectics not only the category of totality but also the master–slave dialectic, although it never refers explicitly to the latter. Hence, in this article, we aim to detect the subtle influence that the Hegelian master–slave dialectic exerts on History and Class Consciousness and, more specifically, on the constitution of the Lukacsian concepts of reification, praxis, working class-bourgeoisie interaction, working-class self-consciousness, autonomous subject. Our approach to the Hegelian master–slave dialectic is mostly – but not only – based on its philosophical–anthropological interpretation by A. Kojeve. Kojeve’s interpretation, by attributing a crucial role to labour in the mastery–slavery dialectic, focuses on that aspect of the Hegelian dialectic which, in our estimation, was determining for HCC. In addition, our approach to the Hegelian master–slave dialectic is based on some occasional references Lukacs has to it in Young Hegel as well as on his interpretation latent in History and Class Consciousness.

One amongst many of the defining characteristics of so-called ‘late stage’ capitalism are human-animal relationships that have become acrimonious, hostile, or even monstrous in nature. A foundational premise of monster theory, and one that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s seminal 1996 edited collection of the same name suggests, is that the construction of the monster in popular culture is fraught with the boundaries that constitute the society that has spawned them; the monstrous body “exists only to be read” (p. 4). Bringing together the theoretical insights of the Marxist theory of reification, critical animal studies, and monster theory, this article examines the ways in which cinematic depictions of gigantic monstrosity can inform our theorizing of multispecies relationships under capitalism. Specifically, I explore how the tensions between capital and human-animal relationships serve to construct and constitute the multiform monster, Jean Jacket, in Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope. Through an examination of the multispecies relationalities that the film portrays, I argue that the figure of Jean Jacket is a monstrous culmination of the reified and therefore, necessarily deferred nature of human-animal relationships under capital. However, Nope’s conclusion alerts us to the radical dereifying potential of multispecies bonds of care and embodied knowledge; systems of resistance that can be forged even within our current capitalist ruins.

The article discusses the revision of the Marxian theory of value proposed by Francisco de Oliveira in 1988, which introduced the concept of the public fund as a constitutive part of the value of labor force and the volume of private capital. The revision had impacts on the Marxian theory of exploitation and the conception of surplus value. The text also mentions José Arthur Giannotti's critique of the Marxian theory of value, arguing that contemporary capitalist accumulation rendered this law inoperative. The author argues that Marx's labor theory of value is still relevant for understanding the reification of forms of sociability in the market. [Extracted from the article]

This article addresses theater as an alternative communication tool to promote understanding and empathy between individuals in a world where communication is limited by interpretive filters and subjectivity. Theater, through acting, challenges the construction of closed identities and promotes openness towards otherness, allowing participants to live and represent life from the perspective of the other. The notion of the "other" as one who differs in beliefs, values, customs and experiences is highlighted. In this sense, theater offers an opportunity to overcome the reification of the other by representing him/her/them in his/her/they diversity and complexity. The exercise of interpretation requires working on the inner configuration of the character, recognizing that both the character and the person who interprets it are being reconfigured in the process. Although it is recognized that theater has limitations, such as the impossibility of living from the interpretative framework of others and the risk that some actors or actresses focus on themselves instead of representing the other, its value as a tool that contributes to the construction of a more open and plural world is emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Lengua para Fines Específicos is the property of Revista de Lengua para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Muiraquitã: Revista de Letras e Humanidades is the property of Muiraquita and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

I present the contours of an explanatory model of legitimacy that directs the focus away from normative questions and onto specific mechanisms of reality construction at play in constituting social orders. The key assumption informing the model is that stable orders rely fundamentally on their capacities to construct separate spheres of social reality, by which they exempt critical parts of reality from the burden of legitimation. I argue that an order's legitimacy ultimately depends on its ability to confine the question of legitimacy by relegating authorship of reality to opaque sources that are separated epistemically from the institutional order. The effective reification of critical zones of reality is shown to be a functional precondition for institutional stability. I show that capitalist democracy, in particular, depends on this mode of constructing 'passive legitimacy', which constitutes a key obstacle for any attempt to transform it towards an ecologically and socially sustainable formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text approaches how two teenagers, Mungo (protagonist of Young Mungo) and the anonymous Character (protagonist of O peso do pássaro morto – The weight of the dead bird, in English) perceive the trauma of the rape they suffer. She languishes throughout her life and dies; he seeks strength to withstand the pain of rape and kills the two rapists. “Rape culture” as a practice of virile sexism requires constant questioning so that the societies that inherit these practices coexist without gender violence and do not cause pain and trauma in historically vulnerable people. This paper adopts the concept of violence, based on Freud (2011), Gomes (2013) and Misse (2016), in addition to hegemonic masculinity via Connel & Messerchmidt (2013).Literature seeks to initiate this discussion as another way of disseminating the encounter of plural genders.

This article considers how poetry features in Pasolini’s cinema. It argues that the manner in which Pasolini films poetry provides insight into his theory of an affinity between poetry and film, and into more general judgements concerning social reality. The article begins with an analysis of the final sequence of Salò (1975) where I argue that Ezra Pound’s poetry provides a soundtrack for the spectacle of torture in which the film’s libertines engage. Following this, I consider Pasolini’s 1965 text “The Cinema of Poetry” and use this text as a way of reading the role played by a copy of Rimbaud’s collected poems in Teorema (Theorem, 1968). I then move to consider the relationship between oral recitation and text in Il decameron (The Decameron, 1971) and Il fiore della mille e una notte (The Arabian Nights, 1974). In doing this, I argue that one can observe a shift across these films whereby poetry and orality move from being a foundational moment for reciprocal community to being a vehicle for an ambiguous and violent fate. The article then considers the conspicuous presence of reading and writing within Salò before ending with a consideration of one scene towards the end of the film in which Pasolini appears to invest a recitation of the Gospel with a disruptive force that is otherwise lacking in his final film.

This study aims to explain the commodification practices of media workers in the digital era, more precisely on iNews TV Semarang, Indonesia. This research uses a qualitative approach with a case study method. Data collection techniques were carried out in the form of observations and interviews with people who work as journalists at iNews TV Semarang. This study shows that journalists experience commodification in the form of absolute exploitation and relative exploitation. Absolute exploitation is seen in the irregular working hours of journalists, resulting in chaos during their worship hours. At the same time, relative exploitation is in the form of intensification of the labor process for journalists, which is carried out by giving multiple assignments. Journalists also get another task: looking for clients for the company's benefit. The commodification that has occurred has also involved processes of alienation, mystification, naturalization, and reification.

Clustering is indispensable in the quest for robust vegetation classification schemes that aim to partition, summarise and communicate patterns. However, clustering solutions are sensitive to methods and data and are therefore unstable, a feature that is usually attributed to noise. Viewed through a central‐tendency lens, noise is defined as the degree of departure from type, which is problematic since vegetation types are abstractions of continua, and so noise can only be quantified relative to the particular solution at hand. Graph theory models the structure of vegetation data based on the interconnectivity of samples. Through a graph‐theoretic lens, the causes of instability can be quantified in absolute terms via the degree of connectivity among objects. We simulated incremental increases in sampling intensity in a dataset over five iterations and assessed classification stability across successive solutions derived using algorithms implementing, respectively, models of central‐tendency and interconnectivity. We used logistic regression to model the likelihood of a sample changing groups between iterations as a function of distance to the centroid and degree of interconnectivity. Our results show that the degree to which samples are interconnected is a more powerful predictor of instability than the degree to which they deviate from their nearest centroid. The removal of weakly interconnected samples resulted in more stable classifications, although solutions with many clusters were apparently inherently less stable than those with few clusters, and improvements in stability flowing from the removal of outliers declined as the number of clusters increased. Our results reinforce the fact that clusters abstracted from continuous data are inherently unstable and that the quest for stable, fine‐scale classifications from large regional datasets is illusory. Nevertheless, our results show that using models better suited to the analysis of continuous data may yield more stable classifications of the available data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how poetry features in Pasolini's cinema. It argues that the manner in which Pasolini films poetry provides insight into his theory of an affinity between poetry and film, and into more general judgements concerning social reality. The article begins with an analysis of the final sequence of Salò (1975) where I argue that Ezra Pound's poetry provides a soundtrack for the spectacle of torture in which the film's libertines engage. Following this, I consider Pasolini's 1965 text "The Cinema of Poetry" and use this text as a way of reading the role played by a copy of Rimbaud's collected poems in Teorema (Theorem, 1968). I then move to consider the relationship between oral recitation and text in Il decameron (The Decameron, 1971) and Il fiore della mille e una notte (The Arabian Nights, 1974). In doing this, I argue that one can observe a shift across these films whereby poetry and orality move from being a foundational moment for reciprocal community to being a vehicle for an ambiguous and violent fate. The article then considers the conspicuous presence of reading and writing within Salò before ending with a consideration of one scene towards the end of the film in which Pasolini appears to invest a recitation of the Gospel with a disruptive force that is otherwise lacking in his final film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most classical pragmatist scholars who work on William James appreciate radical empiricism, little has been said up to now about the ontological status of relations in James's radical empiricism. As is the case here, I wish to rectify this neglected trend and briefly sketch the onto-relational concepts as they appear in James's "Does Consciousness Exist" and "A World of Pure Experience." For the reasons contained in this essay, James's Essays on Radical Empiricism stands out as one of the first times in Western philosophy, though certainly not in all philosophy, that a processive conception of experience is privileged over rationalist conceptions of experience. This posits both privileged access to some previously inaccessible domain of knowledge and erroneously characterizes experience as ontologically dualistic. The reification of philosophical nouns like "consciousness" and "body" can be explained when we consider the metaphysical status of relations in James's thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the lens of immigration and asylum, this Article develops a new understanding of legal personhood on the basis of equal human dignity, as the interface between legal personhood, equality and human rights, in order to address the dual-faceted and opposing reality of immigrants and asylum claimants in relation to their equality as humans in the order of nature and their inequality within the social/political order of Europe, where they are subjected to a constant process of depersonification and reification. This reformulated approach to legal personhood not only seeks to remove the debasement and dehumanisation that has come to characterise European Union (EU) immigration and asylum law but also intends to address the limitations of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) as a valid platform for translating the EU's own self-proclaimed commitment to human rights into justiciable normative claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty years after its first edition, "Forme estetiche e società di massa" by Alberto Abruzzese remains a book to be read as a precious testimony of the crucial transition from a sociology of social subjects, in their political and economic relationships, to a sociology of the imaginary, in its contemporary communicative and relational declinations. Furthermore, is equally important and fruitful a rereading aimed at identifying further suggestions and orientations regarding the dialectic between hyperrealism and virtuality, in the cultural horizon of the digital revolution and today's mediamorphoses of values. The objective of this contribution lies precisely in the proposal of a philosophically and semiotically oriented rereading of some important chapters of the book in question, dedicated to the code switching involved in the procedures of monumentalisation. These are traditional procedures of decontextualization and spatiotemporal delocalization, which found an innovative and emphatic development especially in the context of the great nineteenth-century Exhibitions, but which still appear capable of highlighting, from an aesthetic and ethical point of view, some crucial phenomena of postmodernity: charismatic powers and political correctness, the fetishism of identity claims and the fickleness of media consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the problem of alienation from nature, considered through the phenomena of reification and de-objectification. I propose understanding alienation as the result of a distorted relation between the subjective and the objective and I suggest a tentative solution via the combination of two ethico-political practices: releasement and reappropriation. In doing so, I put forward a structural-ethical critique and response to our current ecological crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Logos: Anales del Seminario de Metafísica (1575-6866) is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An application of Generative Diffusion Techniques for the reification of human portraits in artistic paintings is presented. By reification we intend the transformation of the painter's figurative abstraction into a real human face. The application exploits a recent embedding technique for Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM), inverting the generative process and mapping the visible image into its latent representation. In this way, we can first embed the portrait into the latent space, and then use the reverse diffusion model, trained to generate real human faces, to produce the most likely real approximation of the portrait. The actual deployment of the application involves several additional techniques, mostly aimed to automatically identify, align, and crop the relevant portion of the face, and to postprocess the generated reification in order to enhance its quality and to allow a smooth reinsertion in the original painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent's motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. The enactive approach has made progress by developing a relaxed naturalism, and by placing normativity at the core of life and mind; all cognitive activity is a kind of motivated activity. It has rejected representational architectures, especially their reification of the role of normativity into localized "value" functions, in favor of accounts that appeal to system-level properties of the organism. However, these accounts push the problem of reification to a higher level of description, given that the efficacy of agent-level normativity is completely identified with the efficacy of non-normative system-level activity, while assuming operational equivalency. To allow normativity to have its own efficacy, a new kind of nonreductive theory is proposed: irruption theory. The concept of irruption is introduced to indirectly operationalize an agent's motivated involvement in its activity, specifically in terms of a corresponding underdetermination of its states by their material basis. This implies that irruptions are associated with increased unpredictability of (neuro)physiological activity, and they should, hence, be quantifiable in terms of information-theoretic entropy. Accordingly, evidence that action, cognition, and consciousness are linked to higher levels of neural entropy can be interpreted as indicating higher levels of motivated agential involvement. Counterintuitively, irruptions do not stand in contrast to adaptive behavior. Rather, as indicated by artificial life models of complex adaptive systems, bursts of arbitrary changes in neural activity can facilitate the self-organization of adaptivity. Irruption theory therefore, makes it intelligible how an agent's motivations, as such, can make effective differences to their behavior, without requiring the agent to be able to directly control their body's neurophysiological processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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If we are to escape reification--a sort of cognitive neutrality of basic, gnosic apprehension of the world plus a fundamental disrespect of the other as free agent--we should recognize our mode of existence as always already one of existential engagement with and within experience, aiming at articulating and expressing this engagement. One way of fully inhabiting this, let's call it the proper human stance, is through recognizing a pendular space between the basic attitudes of acknowledging lived, shared interests and values and avoiding being bound to and dependent on the values of others. Both philosophy as radical critical reflection, and art, or artistic processes of production and reception, can be seen as invitations to inhabit this pendular space of human experience, by way of continually opening up our habits of sensibility to new engagements in thought and life, and successfully articulating and expressing these engagements in public forms. I take Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein's mature philosophy as an attuning to an apt attitude towards this invitation. Is this attitude one possible, non-procedural meaning of "liberalism"? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, interaction forms of people who have experienced crises and users of mental health services are examined against the background of Gramsci's and Spivak´s concept of subalternity. To this end, first Foucault´s History of Madness is analysed in terms of hegemony theory. His concept of alienation is compared with that of Laing and related to Honneth´s theory of reification in order to explain, against this background and Lorenzer´s theory of interaction forms, how Foucault´s concept of disalienation is incorporated in modified form in the practice research network VISION-RA. Findings from this network on reifying interaction forms in the field of (community) psychiatry as well as on attempts of users of mental health services to resist these are presented. Following Spivak, the latter are interpreted as subaltern rebellion.

Based on a corpus composed of normative texts from Chile referring, on the one hand, to international migrations (1975 and 2021) and, on the other, to sexgender diversity (2012 and 2018), this article aims to analyze the way in which prefigurations of the migrant subject and of the subject of gender-sexual dissidence and diversities are constructed, in addition to its implications for lgtbi+ migrants. The approach is made from the critical analysis of feminist discourse. The analysis allows us to observe prefigurations that adopt a position of unidimensional identity reification, conceiving this subject, on the one hand, exclusively as a hetero-cis normed economic migrant, and on the other, as a vulnerable gender-sexual minority, thus implying an erasure of lgtbi+ migrants and the specific inequalities that affect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of time, dystopias have become one of the prevailing modes of approaching a critique of reality. In the 21st century we witness a new boom in the genre, in which the relationship between crisis and dystopia has become closer. The threats that loom over our times (among which military conflicts, economic crisis, ecological emergency and rising right-wing populism are the most noteworthy), are captured in these dystopias in the form of images such as those of ruins or totalitarianisms. Thus, and following the premise of the repetition of history, dystopias turn to the past of the Western world as a way of lecturing about the present, in order to avoid the same mistakes of previous times. However, in this reified repetition of history, dystopian images tend to avoid the connections that link it not only to the present crises but also to the future dystopian debacle. To this end, we understand that the recurrence of history collaborates to its oblivion, thereby reinforcing the «reflexive impotence» which characterizes our times, according to Mark Fisher (2018). In order to confirm such hypotheses, this article aims to inquire into some of the main tropes of the most successful cinematic dystopias of our times, in an attempt to elucidate the discourses behind such reification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Eleuthera is the property of Universidad de Caldas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Estudios Politicos (01215167) is the property of Universidad de Antioquia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Intersecoes: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Money is something apparently known by most everyone living in exchange-dominated economies. When queried exactly what is known about it, the common response is that it is a "thing" of great worth. Implied in the notion of describing it as a "thing" rather than a piece of paper is that it must exhibit some additional abstract feature. What exactly this feature is however remains largely shrouded to many. Despite the more recent and clarifying work of Modern Monetary Theory economists explaining not only what money is but also how it operates, effectively conveying this empirically based theory to the broader public has proven to be more difficult. This paper attempts to identify the problems associated with explaining money to an audience already thoroughly familiar with the topic. Charles S. Peirce's theory of signs will be used to reconstruct money's abstract character and make visible the unknowns of money's supposed "known-ness." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is the second part of the essay on the phenomenon of alienation and its forms in modern societies (the first part was published in 2021, No. 4). In this part, the author focuses on technology as fetishized by the modern thinking and on various manifestations of alienation in labor, which are not only (and not so much) a consequence of private ownership of the means of production (according to Marx), but also a by-product of objective tendencies of social differentiation as aggravated in the course of historical development (division of labor) and the subordination of most spheres of the modern social experience to the logic of instrumental rationality. Excessive specialization, standardization, algorithmization, routinization of activities, technological and functional operationalization of the work process and professional roles, the dominance of means over goals, administrative and bureaucratic regulation and control have become signs of the time and distinctive features of the rhythm of activity not only in industrial enterprises, but also in non-physical labor. An important aspect (and a background circumstance) in the diagnosis of modernity is the fact that in recent centuries, modern societies have developed mainly in the urban social-ecological environment. The format and style of urban life with its role-based fragmentation and specific depersonification (and an increase in anonymity) also provoked a range of consequences that make alienation a challenge for modern societies. The author uses the concepts of classical sociological theory as a key tool for analyzing and describing the universe of modernity, and refers to the ideas of M. Weber, G. Simmel, L. Wirth, H.M. McLuhan, H. Marcuse, G. Friedmann, С. Lefort and others.

The article is an essay on the critical analysis of one of the fundamental issues of social theory of the 19th - 20th centuries - alienation and its manifestations in modern societies. Alienation is interpreted not in one of its special meanings (such as alienation of labor, etc.), but in the broadest way - as the transformation of products of individual and collective activities into an independent force that subjugates a person and transfers him from the position of the subject to the position of the object of social relations. Such a definition makes alienation a universal feature of social life. However, in different societies and in different historical periods, alienation can have variable specific forms. The historically specific manifestations of alienation in modern societies can be explained by referring to the classical theme of their genesis. The originality of their institutional organization is largely associated with the originality of their culture and spiritual life (in particular, with the radical demarcation between human and nature, subject and object in the modern era). The multifaceted phenomenon of scientific and technical rationality, the product of the post-Renaissance Western-European culture, becomes a source of social realities and practices fraught with alienation. The article illustrates it by a number of examples, including the logic and mechanisms of the capitalist money economy. The author refers to the heritage of world philosophy and social thought, which problematized and conceptualized the considered issues in various ways: the Frankfurt School, existentialist philosophers, pillars of theoretical sociology - Karl Marx and Georg Simmel.

The subject of the article is normative dereification, which was enacted in the Polish legal system on the basis of the provisions of the Act of 21 August 1997 on animal protection. These provisions indicate that an animal, as a living being capable of experiencing suffering, is not a thing, and at the same time they stipulate the need for the appropriate application of the provisions on things to animals in matters not regulated by this Act. The aim of the article is to determine the significance of such dereification for the definition of the legal status of an animal in Polish law, and its impact on the form of the model of animal protection in Poland. The basis of the findings in this respect is a formal legal analysis of the Polish legal acts regulating the principles of animal protection, and animals’ status as the object of a legal relationship. The study organises and summarises the views on the legal standing of animals, and the concept of their normative dereification, as expressed in the rulings of Polish courts, and in the Polish legal literature.