Liquid Life
Liquid Life

Author: Rachel Armstrong

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 600

ISBN-13: 9781950192182

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If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a "machine" would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we recognize as part of "being alive."Liquid Life references a third-millennial understanding of matter that seeks to restore the agency of the liquid soul for an ecological era, which has been banished by reductionist, "brute" materialist discourses and mechanical models of life. Offering an alternative worldview of the living realm through a "new materialist" and "liquid" study of matter, Armstrong conjures forth examples of creatures that do not obey mechanistic concepts like predictability, efficiency, and rationality. With the advent of molecular science, an increasingly persuasive ontology of liquid technologies can be identified. Through the lens of lifelike dynamic droplets, the agency for these systems exists at the interfaces between different fields of matter/energy that respond to highly local effects, with no need for a central organizing system.Liquid Life seeks an alternative partnership between humanity and the natural world. It provokes a re-invention of the languages of the living realm to open up alternative spaces for exploration, including contributor Rolf Hughes' "angelology" of language, which explores the transformative invocations of prose poetry, and Simone Ferracina's graphical notations that help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling, and designing with fluids. A conceptual and practical toolset for thinking and designing, liquid life reunites us with the irreducible "soul substance" of living things, which will neither be simply "solved," nor go away.

Ecological Literature and the Critique of Anthropocentrism
Ecological Literature and the Critique of Anthropocentrism

Author: Bryan L. Moore

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-14

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 3319607383

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This book is an analysis of literary texts that question, critique, or subvert anthropocentrism, the notion that the universe and everything in it exists for humans. Bryan Moore examines ancient Greek and Roman texts; medieval to twentieth-century European texts; eighteenth-century French philosophy; early to contemporary American texts and poetry; and science fiction to demonstrate a historical basis for the questioning of anthropocentrism and contemplation of responsible environmental stewardship in the twenty-first century and beyond. Ecological Literature and the Critique of Anthropocentrism is essential reading for ecocritics and ecofeminists. It will also be useful for researchers interested in the relationship between science and literature, environmental philosophy, and literature in general.

Everyday Aesthetics
Everyday Aesthetics

Author: Katya Mandoki

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-22

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 131713849X

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Katya Mandoki advances in this book the thesis that it is not only possible but crucial to open up the field of aesthetics (traditionally confined to the study of art and beauty) toward the richness and complexity of everyday life. She argues that in every process of communication, whether face to face or through the media, fashion, and political propaganda, there is always an excess beyond the informative and functional value of a message. This excess is the aesthetic. Following Huizinga's view of play as an ingredient of any social environment, Mandoki explores how various cultural practices are in fact forms of playing since, for the author, aesthetics and play are Siamese twins. One of the unique contributions of this book is the elaboration and application of a semiotic model for the simultaneous analysis of social interactions in the four registers, namely visual, auditory, verbal and body language, to detect the aesthetic strategies deployed in specific situations. She argues that since the presentation of the self is targeted towards participants' sensibilities, aesthetics plays a key role in these modes of exchange. Consequently, the author updates important debates in this field to clear the way for a socio-aesthetic inquiry through contexts such as the family, school, medical, artistic or religious traditions from which social identities emerge.

East West Street
East West Street

Author: Philippe Sands

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2017-07-11

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 0525433724

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A profound, important book, a moving personal detective story and an uncovering of secret pasts, set in Europe’s center, the city of bright colors—Lviv, Ukraine, dividing east from west, north from south, in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A book that explores the development of the world-changing legal concepts of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich. It is also a spellbinding family memoir, as the author traces the mysterious story of his grandfather as he maneuvered through Europe in the face of Nazi atrocities. This is “a monumental achievement ... told with love, anger and precision” (John le Carré, acclaimed internationally bestselling author). East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in “the Paris of Ukraine,” a major cultural center of Europe, a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. Phillipe Sands changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder

New Ideas from Dead Economists
New Ideas from Dead Economists

Author: Todd G. Buchholz

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-01-26

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 059318355X

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An entertaining and widely-praised introduction to great economic thinkers throughout history, now in its fourth edition, with updates and commentary on the 2020 “great cessation,” Trump and Obama economic policies, the dominance of Amazon, and many other timely topics. Through the teachings of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and more, renowned economist Todd Buchholz shows how age-old ideas still apply to our modern world. In this revised edition, Buchholz offers fascinating insights on the most relevant issues of 2021: climate change, free trade debates, the refugee crisis, growth and conflict in Russia and China, game theory, and behavioral economics. New Ideas from Dead Economists—found on the desks of university students, prime ministers, and Wall Street titans—is a riveting guide to understanding both the evolution of economic theory and our complex contemporary economy.