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This article explores the continuities and discontinuities of pre-Revolutionary intellectual traditions in 1920s Soviet culture and the Stalin-era cultural revolution. Through examination of the pre-revolutionary philosophical legacy underpinning Soviet musicological theory, I demonstrate that there are decisive features, such as Soviet Prometheanism, that characterize the musicology of the 1920s that both underline and differ from the pre-revolutionary philosophy of music and the musicology of the 1930s. I offer the basic outlines of a Soviet cultural theory of music formulated by Russian music critic, historian, composer and musicologist Boris Asafiev (1884–1949) in the 1920s. Explaining and describing what I mean by a particular cultural theory of music in the Soviet context forms the core issue of my article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Byron's interest in the hybris/nemesis dichotomy of the Promethean poetic trope in his oeuvre, based on his reading of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. Drawing on theories of writing by Nietzsche and Derrida, the article addresses the ways in which the Promethean acts as a supplement of Byron's poetic selfhood, constructing a discourse of scepticism about poetic truth, and the tragedy of Byron the poet conflicted between creation and destruction. The reading of the past/present dichotomy in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I–II highlights an early Byronic awareness of the tragic force inhabiting poetry, defacing the illusion of lyrical symbolism. The analysis of 'Prometheus' invites a further discussion of Byronic scepticism in light of his meditations on mourning, death and posterity, as well as addressing the ways in which the dramatic pattern of the poem resembles the fragmentation of poetic thought between composition and mental performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Prometheism' was an interwar movement of borderland nationalists from the former Russian Empire who envisioned the division of the Soviet Union into independent nation-states. This article argues that ideological affinities and diasporic connections made the Promethean cause an attractive 'alternative internationalism' to the Soviet system for exiled thinkers hailing from the so-called 'southern borderlands' of Crimea, the Caucasus, the Volga region and Central Asia. In the 1930s, Prometheism drew intellectuals from these regions to Poland, where the movement's thinkers formulated ambitious visions of Eurasian liberation from Soviet power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the discourse of difference in Dxiokze xha... bene walhall/Gente del mismo corazón (2014), a novel by Javier Castellanos, Zapotec writer, poet, musician and author of three other bilingual (Zapotec/Spanish) novels: Wila che be ze lhao/Cantares de los vientos primerizos (1994), Da kebe nho Seke gon ben xhi'ne Guzio/Relación de hazañas del hijo del Relámpago (2005), Laxdao yelazeralle/El corazón de los deseos (2007). In Dxiokze xha... bene walhall/Gente del mismo corazón difference is a trope echoing the language of twentieth century indigenous movements and allowing the author to revisit historical events in an effort to demythify national narratives. The article argues that in revisiting historical episodes, Castellanos proposes polycentrism as an alternative to the liberal notion of a harmonious pluricultural nation. To do so, Castellanos employs the dilla guka-dillaxiwi, a Zapotec narrative genre that subdues the individualistic, Promethean and hegemonic position of narrative authority. Moreover, his use of the dilla guka-dillaxiwi responds to a cultural turn in which anthropology and literature were seeking to break away from the policies of indigenismo and set out to form indigenous intellectuals, cultural workers, as agents for a pluricultural nation. Considering the importance of this cultural turn, the article contributes to Latin American and indigenous literature by analyzing the interaction between anthropology and literature. And, as a way of inviting further research on the connections between Mexican indigenous literature and anthropology, the article highlights Castellanos' encounters with national figures, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla and Carlos Montemayor, driving forces for Mexico's turn to pluriculturality at a moment when difference became a disputed topic for indigenous and national intellectuals in multiple fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Prometheanism” meant the political cooperation of interwar Poland with non-Russian peoples and nations in Russia directed against the tsarist, and later the Soviet empire. The Promethean movement included representatives of Ukraine (Ukrainian People’s Republic – UNR), Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Mountaineers of the Northern Caucasus), Crimean and Volga Tatars, Turkestan and nations inhabiting Finland (Ingria, Komi, Karelia), as well as a part of the Don, Kuban and Terek Cossacks. This article focuses on the relations between the Polish side and individual nations and structures of the Promethean front, on those turning moments in its development, as well as on the political and organisational evolution of the Promethean movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any reflections on an eventual transition towards a degrowth society have to take into account the current crisis in the dominant system and question whether the latter will be able to grow again or not. In order for the latter to happen, the role played by technological innovation is crucial. This paper starts by reconsidering Georgescu-Roegen’s definition of Promethean Techniques and Tainter’s principle of Declining Marginal Returns, with the aim of providing – within the common framework of the theory of complex systems - a sound theoretical basis for the analysis of the rise and fall of complex societies. The main purpose is to verify whether, after the last Promethean revolution, a “Great Wave” emerged or not. The second part of the paper presents an initial investigation into this hypothesis, using Total Factor Productivity growth as an indicator of (marginal) returns on innovation (1750–2015). Despite the limitations implicit in the use of this indicator, data show three cycles of innovation, corresponding to the first, second and third industrial revolutions, but of different magnitude and duration. In particular, the whole cycle that began with the first industrial revolution in England around 1750, reached a peak in the U.S. in the nineteen-thirties and later declined, following a trend that basically confirms the Great Wave hypothesis. Even recent innovations resulting from the ICT revolution, however considerable, do not seem capable of counteracting this long-term trend. Data on returns on innovation seem, therefore, to be coherent with evidence provided by research in other fields (energy, mineral resources, agriculture, health, education and scientific research), showing that advanced capitalist societies have entered a phase of declining marginal returns - or involuntary degrowth - with possible major effects on the system’s capacity to maintain its present institutional framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the contemporary film Ex Machina as a coherent group concerning the boundaries of knowledge and the perils of scientific Prometheanism. The development of AI (Artificial Intelligence) should be delimited and contained, if not curtailed or banned, and scientists ought to proceed in a responsible and cautious manner. An obsessive or excessive pursuit of knowledge, aiming to equal God and create humanoid beings, constitutes the essential feature of scientific Prometheanism, which can end in catastrophic destruction. Both Frankenstein and Ex Machina stringently critique scientific Prometheanism as one aspect of modernity, and expose the real dangers that AIs pose to the very existence of humanity and civilization. In Paradise Lost, Milton provides the epistemological framework for Frankenstein and Ex Machina. The article concludes that the union of science and arts in science fiction (films) can be very productive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focussing on Shevchenko/Aqtau, an urban laboratory of Soviet nuclear modernity on the Caspian Sea in Western Kazakhstan, this study provides a close reading of Soviet technopolitics in a long-term perspective. Encompassing a time span from the late 1950s to the present, the article traces how Shevchenko evolved from a secret uranium mining camp for the Soviet A-bomb project in the Western Kazakh desert into a testing ground for fast breeder and nuclear desalination technologies and a showcase of "atomic-powered Communism" ( Josephson), but is now struggling with its transition into the post-Soviet era. Adopting a multi-dimensional perspective to show the interconnectedness of political, techno-scientific, ecological and social developments, the article highlights how the showcase city lent substance to the imaginary of the Scientific-Technological Revolution both domestically and abroad but also tracks the underlying decision-making processes in the Soviet nuclear establishment to reveal substantial disputes over questions of military versus civilian use and safety versus technological prowess. It analyses traits of the city's social microcosm to reveal the strictly segregated, but closely interconnected spheres of a privileged urban society and a sprawling, post-GULag forced labour camp, and adopts an enviro-technical perspective to study how the Promethean project of nature improvement eventually entailed grave environmental degradation. Finally, it sheds light on transsystemic cooperation across the block divide and highlights how Soviet visions of the future continue to shape visions of the future in Russia and Kazakhstan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical prevalence of Promethean characteristics such as dominion and domination has resulted in a dispensation where exclusive pragmatism and habitual perception have steered human actions in directions that have resulted in an unprecedented ecological crisis. Christianity, reductionist science, pragmatic technology, and capitalism have homogenised discursive arenas, limiting the extent to which one can exercise negative freedom, and making ecological degradation unavoidable as a consequence of Promethean progress. Mechanisms exist that prevent changes toward ecologically-sensitive attitudes from rooting and spreading as remedies to Promethean attitudes. Alternative, Orphic attitudes, theories, and movements do exist, and they offer something of a response to Promethean attitudes underpinning the ecological crisis. Permaculture offers a down to earth, contextbound approach to establishing Orphic systems, while philosophy in two specific formats are tools to further broaden the context of the ecological crisis. These philosophical formats are, first, Badiou and Žižek's outline of the role of philosophy "in the present," and second, Pierre Hadot's work on philosophy as a way of life. From the first, it is clear that philosophy cannot confine itself to humanity as it has been historically constituted, which implies that it cannot confine itself to the realm of the Promethean, which has dominated Western history. From the second, philosophy as a way of life entails a breakaway from Promethean, utilitarian, and habitual perception, and aligns itself with an Orphic form of consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernity and Enlightenment are on a perpetual axis of mutual tension. The paths of modernity are tortuous, and its roots are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western man to be his own master, to use his insight to make a world different from the one that he found. The passion that enabled modern man to break free from his ancient chains was the same passion that created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes which arose in their wake in the twentieth. The metaphor of chains runs like a thread through the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and reflects the snare of modern freedom. Through the metaphor of chains, Rousseau criticized the identical nature ascribed to modernity and Enlightenment. He perceived the ambivalence of progress, the contradictions inherent in modernity and the paradox of freedom in the modern age. In the following article, I shall trace Rousseau’s attitude regards the ‘Promethean paradox’, from his early essays up until his Emile, or On Education (1762). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The gradual abandoning of the ‘socialism in one country’ doctrine during the post-war period and the intensive transformation of European social democracy in the 1990s pushed social democratic politicians and intellectuals into the front line of advocates of a unified and powerful Europe. They contributed to the inclusion of social democratic and environmentalist values in the EU’s official narrative. The success of European integration and George W. Bush’s presidency created the narrative of the Promethean role of Europe. Scholars with a social democratic or environmentalist background created this narrative and it was also shaped by authors’ national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘You can’t stop progress’, we are endlessly told. But what is meant by “progress”? What is “progress” toward? We are rarely told. Human flourishing? And a culture? That would be a good start – but rarely seems a criterion for ‘progress’. (In fact, survival would be a good start…)Rather, ‘progress’ is simply a process, that we are not allowed, apparently, to stop. Or rather: it would be futile to seek to stop it. So that we are seemingly-deliberately demoralised into giving up even trying.Questioning the myth of ‘progress’, and seeking to substitute for it the idea of real progress – progress which is actually assessed according to some independent not-purely-procedural criteria – is a vital thing to do, at this point in history. Literally: life, or at least civilisation, and thus culture, may depend on it.Once we overcome the myth of ‘progress’, we can clear the ground for a real politics that would jettison the absurd hubris of liberalism and of most ‘Leftism’. And would jettison the extreme Prometheanism and lack of precaution endemic to our current pseudo-democratic technocracy. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not fall into complete pessimism or into an endorsement of the untenable and unsavoury features of conservatism. The challenge, in other words, is to generate an ideology or philosophy for our time, that might yet save us, and ensure that we are worth saving.This paper is then a kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s crucial aphorism on this topic: ‘Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.’ [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contends that states that employ cyber proxies are confronted with twin dilemmas. First, governments risk a Promethean dilemma when they equip cyber proxies with tools that could be turned against them. Second, governments risk a dilemma of inadvertent crisis escalation by empowering proxies with more expansive, or less restrained, political agendas that may exceed their mandates. The essay explores how states can manage the risks associated with these dilemmas and the conditions under which they are likely to backfire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asking whether transhumanist hopes of overcoming ageing and cognitive and other shortcomings are realistic, this paper pitches a Christian anthropology against a transhumanist anthropology. It is shown that on critical examination many of the technologies proposed by transhumanists in order to better or extend human life raise questions about dualism and materialism, about our nature as relational beings, and indeed even about what it means to be alive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay revisits a crucial moment in the modern Chinese history of translation: Lu Xun's “hard translation” of Marxist theories in the late 1920s and the ensuing debate on translation in the early 1930s. It questions the simplistic application of the paradigm of literalism to the case of “hard translation”, and focuses instead on the translator's self-allegorization as a vital rhetorical surplus of Lu Xun's translation practice. In particular, this essay scrutinizes Lu Xun's rewriting of the Prometheus myth in his response to his critic, Liang Shiqiu. Lu Xun's Prometheus is a translator embodying cannibalistic self-torment. I trace the theme of cannibalism in his other works, and compare the allegory of the cannibalistic translator to the Brazilian theory of translation as cannibalism. I argue that it is within this self-referential rhetoric that “hard translation” becomes a figure of the translator's subjectivity and “labor of the negative”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An article is presented on the history of research on Eastern European civilization undertaken by Polonists between 1919 and 1939. The author compares differing attitudes among German academics regarding Polish research on Eastern versus Western Europe, examines the historical debates concerning the shape and location of Poland's eastern borders including the Kresy region, and discusses the anti-Russian philosophy of governance called Prometheism of Józef Piłsudski, head of state of the Second Polish Republic.