Author(s): Tanaka, Stefan | Abstract: This essay operates from a challenge that is evident in Miyoshi’s life and career, a humility of our knowledge system and the quest to exceed it. I suggest that Asia is trapped within a historical framing (as the Orient) that prevents people and places within Asia from extracting themselves from that condition of being. The problem lies within the conflation of

In his academic lifetime, Masao Miyoshi was virtually a walking area studies program. It would be difficult to think of a better a model for the reconfiguration of area studies than the traces of his intellectual trajectory. As a Japanese educated in Japan’s elite First Higher School, just before it was dismantled by the postwar US military occupation, and Tokyo University, he was an early exile (calling

There are two fundamental features of the information processing behind most efforts to substitute artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics for professionals in health and education: reductionism and functionalism. However, true professional judgment hinges on a way of knowing the world and relating to persons that is at odds with the mindset of substitutive automation. Instead of reductionism

More than sixteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine explored the experience of time through a simple exercise. You can still try it today. Choose a song that you love and learn it by heart. Keep practicing until you remember every part of the song and every shift in the melody. As you sing it, you will know how much of the song has passed since the beginning and how much of it remains until the end

Polyscaler autonomous remote sensing systems are presently constituting new regimes of teleactivity for real-time surveillance and data gathering. This essay continues several ongoing projects that examine the philosophical, technological, and political ramifications of these systems as they pertain to the constitution of the subject, community, and the imaginaries operative within and through them

Although it is well known that Walter Benjamin played a leading role in the antebellum German Youth Movement, withdrawing from the presidency of the Berlin Independent Students Association and from other reformist activities only with the onset of World War I, scholars often do not ask whether this multifaceted student activism had any effect on his later thought and writing. This dossier proposes

Throughout his life, Benjamin returned to questions of pedagogy and the ways in which children and adults come to know and learn. This essay explores his notion of Spielraum, or “playspace,” in relation to pedagogy. A pedagogy based on play is here explored in relation to three objects of Benjamin’s thinking: (1) film and cinema, where, through the actions of technology, time, and space are exploded

T. J. Clark has described Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as containing a politics that is “cryptic,” as if “being actively aired and developed elsewhere.” This article seeks to uncover this uncover the buried foundations of such a politics in Benjamin’s early writings on pedagogy and to identify their cryptic nature with his traumatic break from Gustav Wyneken and the tragic failures of the Youth

If one overlooks Oliver Cromwell, the first republican “solution” to the “Irish problem” was offered in the most famous of English republican utopias, James Harrington’s Oceana (1656). It was a lament for the failure, sixty years before, of the Elizabethan attempt to “depopulate” the country and replace the victims with settlers. Must be something in the air or soil, he suggested, that makes planters

What happened to Marcel Duchamp between 1912—Nude Descending a Staircase—and 1917—Fountain? And why should it matter to us? Between 1912 and 1917, Duchamp was increasingly concerned with the question of reproducibility that, starting with photography and chronophotography, leads to Frederick Taylor—that is to say, to the readymade. The readymade is born from the serialized production for mass markets

Philosophy is, for me, before anything else, to learn to repeat repetitions that are good. To learn ways that the pharmakon, which is always that which repeats, does not destroy me or render me indifferent by its repetitions, but rather takes care of me (me soigne). That is to say, individuates me, distinguishes me, differentiates me, . . . in order to permit me to discern in myself—to distinguish—alterity

Much is made of Charles Darwin's concept of natural selection, but Bernard Stiegler has developed a theory of artificial selection that is arguably every bit as important for an understanding of human life, and the life of the mind and aesthetics, in particular. Building on work by the paleoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler argues that humans evolve biologically insofar as they are animals

If we are living in a period of epigonal theory, as Anthony Adler (2015) has recently written, then we have the task somehow from within this period, with its particular horizon, to map out the possibilities for ourselves and for the future. Adler has done this with regard to Giorgio Agamben, whose major epigonal category is, in Adler’s illumination, “erudition,” an “Italian category.” I intend to

Few theoretical movements have developed as quickly or as publicly as the one known, among other names, as “Speculative Realism” and/or “ObjectOriented Philosophy” (hereafter collectively referred to as SR/OOO). The views of each of the main writers associated with these movements—Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, Iain Hamilton Grant, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton, among others—vary widely, and even the

In recent years, questions regarding music, sound, and nature have intensified. This intensification is visible in various domains of musical practice, such as the increased audibility of composers involved in acoustic ecology as both practitioners within and theorizers of the field; the global presence of sound collectives employing audio recordings and music scholarship for the purpose of denouncing