Somatechnics 4.1, Special Issue on the Somatechnics of Movement

The folks at BiM are brimming over with excitement as we announce the launch of Somatechnics 4.1, a special issue on the Somatechnics of Movement. A long time coming, we're finally able to bring into print a selection of authors who may be familiar to some as participants at our Bodies in Movement conference in 2011. The line-up includes: an evocative extension by Michael O'Rourke of his original keynote with response; ghostly musings by Line Henriksen; Peta Hinton on cyberfeminist politics; Rebecca Coleman discussing 5:2 urge; Karin Sellberg's meditations on "the gap"; Gavin MacDonald charting affectively; Johanna Hällsten's situated sound-spaces, and interval and creativity by Anne Douglas and Kathleen Coessens.

 

We would like to thank all the contributors for making this possible, right from the very beginning in a few conference rooms in Edinburgh almost three years ago right through to now. Thanks for the wonderful support and patience - and we hope that everyone enjoys reading the journal as much as we enjoyed working on it.

Article: Tyler Coburn, "Charter Citizen"

A new edition of e-flux, hot off the digital presses, hits us with some juicy morsels this month, including this text by Tyler Coburn, "Charter Citizen". Coburn tests the temperature of a recently ended radical libertarian venture - the establishment of autonomous cities within host country Honduras' borders - in order to reconceive capitalism anew.

"Charter Cities", Coburn explains, build off economist Paul Romer's theory that sets of carefully considered rules encourages economic growth, investment and innovation; and that introducing such "good rules" into a zone with weaker ones would encourage further economic and financial advancement within the host state, in investment, labour force and civil and political structures. But Coburn notes that the dominant and fundamental mode of political engagement at the grassroots level becomes movement - voluntary migration (both in and out) becomes political, democracy conditional and citizenship privatised; at an international level it becomes dependent on tenuously balanced comity and contract.

"Whether floating in international waters or sprouting on foreign territory, these proposed cities are the proving grounds for the technolibertarians’ foray into governance. In fact, they already demonstrate a concrete link between technology and geopolitics: venture capitalist Peter Thiel donated the same amount of startup funds to [charter city venture] the Seasteading Institute as to Facebook."

Also in this month's edition of e-flux online, available to non-subscribers, is a recent instalment by Reza Negarestani, whose work "Differential Cruelty" we spotlighted on BiM. Find these articles on the e-flux journal online.

Article: Steve Redhead, "This Statism We're In"

Sports media, subculture and accelerated culture theorist Steve Redhead takes a bite at British politics as a microcosm of current Western political tendencies in his digestible mini-report, "This Statism We're In".

Launching from claims of neoliberalism's death after the global financial crisis, Redhead argues that the state is now positioned as a crucial, albeit somewhat silent, actor in British policy frameworks:

"the reframing of the state’s role pervades all efforts to move beyond the contemporary laissez-faire philosophy and the dominance of the free market. ... [I]t is more than market versus state, more than market individualism versus state collectivism: it turns, radically, on perspectives on statism, anti-statism and all positions in between, 'Statism', and all of the conflict over the state and its extent, form and role, is a central battleground in this debate. 'Left' equated with statism and 'right' associated with libertarianism is a false dichotomy."

Upon entering such a stage of scrutiny, the question of role of the state unbalances those previously-assumed dichotomised positions we had once taken for granted; no longer left/right, liberal/authoritarian, minimal/big, positions now proliferate British government which challenge the political chequer board, encapsulating multiple seemingly antithetical ideologies. What is the state? Redhead comes to no conclusions, but posits that in the wake of current 'revisioning', what it means to theorise, critique and evaluate is also due for some serious reconsideration.

"This Statism We're In" can be found on Steve Redhead's website, at which can be found other small reports by this single-person think-tank. Topics include musings on Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard, politics and sports fanaticism.

Article: Liz Kinnamon, "London Riots, Living Walls: Questions of Resistance in Late Capitalism"

Street Art vs. Capitalism by Escif in Grottaglie, Italy, 2011

Deleuzian-inspired e-journal Rhizomes dedicates the virtual pages of its most recent 2013 issue (no. 25) to the cultural and political potential of graffiti, where amongst its offerings (varying a little in quality and glowing exaltation of street art's potential) nestles Liz Kinnamon's incisive commentary, "London Riots, Living Walls: Questions of Resistance in Late Capitalism". Critically investigating the revolutionary potential of graffiti and rioting practices as political speech acts, Kinnamon takes two temporally proximate events in 2011 - the street art conference in Atlanta, Living Walls: The City Speaks and the riots across the ocean in the United Kingdom - to explore the loaded question: "In a neoliberal capitalist climate ... where capital is continuously, cannibalistically folding in, what becomes of attempts to find a way out?"

A lucid break-down of the consumerist atmosphere of the UK riots follows, and a surprisingly complementary reading with the officially-sanctioned graffiti happenings staged during the Living Walls conference. Kinnamon paints a sad picture of the blunted and sanitised evolution of these anti-authoritarian practices since the 1970s:

"We are fully planted in a time when resistance is co-opted, folded into capital, and rendered harmless. ... But even before someone trademarks and stamps a slogan from the latest peoples movement onto a t-shirt, many so-called rebellions bear an already-resemblance to the systems they allegedly oppose. The actors in the UK riots and Living Walls utilize and exhibit the same characteristics capitalist governmentality has conditioned in them."

Yet hope is not completely lost: Kinnamon leaves us with some space to salvage these modes of political speech (rioting, graffiti) from their integration into capital through the work of Rei Terada via Michel Foucault's concept of parrhesia. However, the forms which these speech acts adopt, it would seem, will always be precarious and ambivalent at best.

Rhizomes is an open-access journal. All the essays in the current issue are all freely downloadable from their website. Its archive is also worth a lengthy browse; it can be found here.

Article: Kathleen Stewart, "Atmospheric Attunements"

The beautifully evocative (and, indeed, atmospheric) writing offered by Kathleen Stewart's in her article "Atmospheric Attunements", like some half-remembered dream, stays with a reader well beyond the closing of the piece. Stewart describes her article as "a writing and thinking experiment aligned with forms of nonrepresentational theory" and, true to her word, this brief article floats above the academic rigors of heavy theory and citation. Instead, in six snippets of situational reflections, the author submerges into divergent, descriptive topologies which attend to a random, quite personal selection of spaces and times (fictional, anecdotal, poetic, quotidian) becoming intimate and lived.

"I am asking how questions of form, event, viscerality, and circulation open and problematize attention to the ways that forces take form as worlds or dissipate (or get stuck, fester, shelter something ...). How do rhythms and labors of living become encrusted and generative? How do we now describe the activity of sensual world-making, and what kind of theory is being built in this way?"

Buzzing, West Virginia, migraines, homelessness and much more: these fragments of description and rumination bubble to the surface of the text and conglomerate. Carried along by such cases, Stewart probes the possibilities for harnessing practices of writing and critique towards attuning to a proliferation of inhabited worlds in the making, all incommensurable yet equally laden with material and sensory rhythms and atmospherics.

Stewart's open-access article can be found nestled in the extensive online archive of Environment and Planning D, in volume 29(3) of 2011.

Article: Bernard J. Hibbitts, "Coming to Our Senses: Communication and Legal Expression in Performance Cultures"

Bernard J. Hibbitts was arguably well ahead of the legal scholaship curve when he published "Coming to Our Senses: Communication and Legal Expression in Performance Cultures" in the Emory Law Journal (41 (1992): 873-960), and he settled into this theme for the next few years until the currency of cyberspace pulled him into more intense study of the implications of technology upon the law. "Coming to Our Senses", the first of a series of publications devoted to the human senses and the law threw an ambitiously wide net into legal, anthropological and historical fields in order to contrast an American-style written legal culture with semi- or largely non-literate "performance cultures".

 

Perhaps a little outmoded today and a little unwieldy in the separation between performance and non-performance cultures, Hibbitts' article is nonetheless a fascinating tour of the unappreciated interventions of the five human senses upon legal discourse and tradition, as well as their cultural significance outside of contemporary Western legal modes. Framed as a survey loosely following anthropological research methods, Hibbitts looks to Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong for theoretical purchase alongside a horde of historical scholars.

"In their highest forms of cultural and intellectual exression, speech routinely gives voice to gesture and gesture gives shape to speech: music gives sound to sculpture, while sculptue gives sustance to music. Law is simultaneously heard, seen, and sometimes even felt and savored. Ultimately, the meaning of significant cultural and legal messages resides less in the individual components of communication (although these must be recognized) than in their synthesis, performance."

Hibbitt's article is available online at a dedicated site via the University of Pittsburgh, or as a pdf article as published in the Emory Law Journal from the Social Science Research Network. The BiM blog is indebted to the Sensory Studies website for providing the link to this text.



Article: Bojana Cvejić, Marta Popivoda, Ana Vujanović and Bruno Latour, "A Conversation with Bruno Latour"

Making Things Public exhibition. Photo by Franz Wamhof.

Interviewers Bojana Cvejić, Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović delve into performance theory, politics and the public in this short interview with Bruno Latour, conducted at the end of 2011 and published in the most recent number of open-access TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory (No. 20, 2012), devoted to the theme of Art and the Public Good.

Springboarding off the theoretical conceptions of the public posited by Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, Latour, Cvejić, Popivoda and Vujanović explore the difficulties of performing (in) a political moment, the disappearance of politics and fumbling in the dark, with a fleeting touch upon Latour's co-curated exhibition Making Things Public from 2005 (in the catalogue for which he produced the call-to-arms for an object-oriented democracy, "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik"). Departing from a public/private divide in favour of recognising politics as located at that place of exception "where experts fail, where ... there is no procedure in place", Latour examines the sensitivities implicit in public and political actions.

"I can name the exact moment when it happened, when I started doing this ephemeral work of building a strange circle whereby you obtain something that is absolutely imposible: to speak in the name of several different people who say different things. And no habit can accomplish that. That's exceptional and if the principle of exception has an ephemeral quality to it, that's also what makes political activities hard."

No. 20 of ThK also includes a piece by Nina Power, which explores the London riots, the "public" and the legal status of art (this works through themes brought up in her public lecture of May 2012 blogged here) and a biting inquisition by Mario Kikaš into the failures of the critical theory sanctioned by the university, along with other short pieces exploring the various intricacies of performance theory, politics and the public. The next issue should be published soon this year.

Article: Valérie November, Eduardo Camacho-Hübner and Bruno Latour, "Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation"

Valérie November, Eduardo Camacho-Hübner and Bruno Latour argue for mapping reefs and risks in this call for a redefinition of cartographical interactions, "Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation", published in volume 28 of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2010) and now available online for free download.

Written almost as both rationale and prelude to work by the three authors on the mapping of risk, November, Camacho-Hübner and Latour here contend that the advent of accessible, interactive and user-defined digital mapping practices has the capacity to free us from a modernist, "mimetic" mapping impulse towards a more contingent, navigational interpretation. They argue that mimetic mapping, which relies on a spurious resemblance between representational map signs and a "real", outside territory, entrenches space and territory as part of a fixed and objective reality. Navigational practices, on the other hand, casts maps as "the dashboards of a calculation interface" for a succession of signposts via which movement can be negotiated. A shift towards navigational interpretation deeply implicates not only a freedom from "the tyranny of space" but also the inclusion of a whole set of "subjective" factors recognised in risk geography within practices of mapping.

"As soon as we shift to the navigational interpretation of geographical techniques, we realize that there is nothing especially spatial about geography. Any map is simply one set of inscriptions leading to and coming from another series of dissimilar signposts to help navigators find their way through their trajectories."

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space has recently included this work by November, Camacho-Hübner and Latour within a group of various "highlight" articles for open access availability. The articles, including, inter alia, a translated section of Michel Serres' Les origines de la géométrie, Graham Harman's "I am also of the opinion that materialism must be destroyed" and Michael Brown and Claire Rasmussen's "Bestiality and the Queering of the Human Animal", are accessible to nonsubscribers in order to provide an idea of the kinds of papers published in the journal.

Article: Eugenie Brinkema, "Vomit, or, Kant and Derrida in Oz"

Eugenie Brinkema's contribution to the most recent volume of Film-Philosophy (volume 15, issue 2 of 2011) has very little to do with The Wizard of Oz but, rather, has a quite a lot to do with David Lynch and vomit – and, chiefly, its visual representation and where this might intersect with a theory of unrepresentable and non-aesthetic disgust.

"Vomit tempts; it solicits," Brinkema asserts. It compels the construction of metaphor, narrative, materiality. Analysing one of Lynch's early works entitled Six Figures Getting Sick (or sometimes Six Men Getting Sick) (1967) – an animation loop featuring six smudged and distorted figures connected to increasingly glutted stomachs which finally disgorge in white streams of paint – she neatly expurgates earlier scholarship on the role of vomit and regurgitation in Lynch's piece. Denuding the figures in Six Figures Getting Sick of the narrative and fleshy metaphors pushed upon them in previous readings of the vomiting depiction, Brickema turns the assumption of form around: "in Lynch's work, the Figures do not vomit; the vomit Figures".

All this seems to – and does – prepare the article for an intelligent update on Lynch and vomit; however, the author's larger ambitions extend towards laying the groundwork for a different kind of ethics: "an ethics of the worse than worse". Hinging on a critical engagement with Jacques Derrida's reading of Emmanuel Kant in his essay "Economimesis", Brinkema turns to a much-ignored part of Lynch's oeuvre, Wild at Heart (1990), in order to position vomit as the gesture towards an unspeakable, undigestible, certainly unviewable and always deferred disgust of that which can only be described in tautological terms as "something more disgusting than the disgusting".

"My argument follows from the way in which disgust is figured by Derrida, reading Kant, not as a compendium of its possible provocations (dirt, the corpse, feces) – each of which might suggest that a relation to its object and cause would be possible – but as the form of the possibility for something more disgusting than the literally disgusting."

The articles in Film-Philosophy are available for free download from their website. The most recent issue which includes Brinkema's piece is a fascinating special issue edited by Tina Kendall dedicated to exploring the exigencies of disgust. It includes a tasty piece by Steven Shaviro entitled "Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: Györgi Pálfi's Taxidermia". Previous volumes can be found here.

Article: Julia Reinhard Lupton, "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt"

Just for this month, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies is offering the the whole content of their newest issue of Spring 2012 - entitled "Becoming Media", edited by Jen Boyle and Martin Foys" - for free download. Contributions include Eugene Thacker's "Wayless Abyss: Mysticism, Mediation and Divine Nothingness" and a fascinating cross-media experiment by Whitney Anne Trettien, "Plant Animal Book: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits", which is accompanied by an additional digital essay-cum-gloss to be read relationally with the postmedieval text.

Julia Reinhard Lupton's quirky and reflective article "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt" is another postmedieval offering in this issue available online throughout March. Lupton spices up seventeenth-century Hannah Woolley's cookbook The Queen-like Closet (first published in 1670) through a peculiar comparative proximity with Hannah Arendt's concept of "judgment", carefully filtered through the register of actor-network theory and object oriented ontology. Through such a perview, Lupton encourages not only a wider reading of Arendt's philosophy but also (and perhaps more primarily) a subtle re-evaluation of the generally quotidian task of cooking and the tactile engagements which form the basis for judgment in the course of preparing food for a table. 

"Bringing the two Hannahs to the same table helps me unfold the preparation of meals as engaging at once a worldly environment and social scripts, setting the scenes in which action, work and labor enter into the most intimate proximity, without, however, losing their distinctions altogether."

 

Article/Interview: Amelia Groom and Nick Currie, "Past Futures", Frieze Magazine

The newest issue (145) of Frieze Magazine includes a discrete review/interview by Amelia Groom and Nick Currie entitled "Past Futures", exploring the fascinating legacy of 1960s Japanese architecture group "Metabolism" and containing an interview wtih Rem Koolhaas, co-author of Project Japan: Metabolism Talks together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, published by Taschen last year.

Following just after the close of the first major exhibition of the Metabolism's work at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2011-2012), Groom reviews the offerings found at the retrospective Metabolism, the City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan and provides a snapshot of the collective's history from their post-war manifesto days to the current crumbling and derelict fate of the techno-futuristic structures which were built to their plans. Contextualised by the undeniable intertwining of the recent Fukashima nuclear disaster (as well as the recent revelation of the government's deliberation over mass Tokyo evacuation) and Japan's World War II history from which this manifesto-defined architectural movement took shape, the Metabolism movement and its revisitation taps into the intricate relation between complete destruction and pure creation.

"Devastatingly aware of the impermanence of built spaces and the destructibility of cities, they responded to the widespread housing crisis of postwar Japan by calling for more flexible and dynamic urban models. Promising to design spaces for living bodies that would be more in line with the metabolic processes of those bodies, they conceived of cities as living, moving and evolving creatures. Buildings would be adaptable organisms perpetually rejuvenating themselves; the metropolis would be a verb rather than a noun."

Currie's interview with a slightly laconic but engaging Koolhaas follows Groom's report, tracing the currents of power, government and Asian industry in and through the Metabolism movement.

Article: Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova, "Soft Thought (in Architecture and Choreography)"

The first issue of the new open-access journal Computational Culture publishes, among other fascinating works, Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova's "Soft Thought (in Architecture and Choreography)", which explores the possibilities and potentials of digital code as autonomously aesthetic object.

This aesthetic of "soft thought", Parisi and Portanova argue, relies on neither the generative framework of software failure nor the conceptualisation of algorithm as bodily extension. Herein lies their deviation from glitch aestheticists such as Tony Sampson and Andy Clarke's extended functionalism. Parisi and Portanova consider two algorithm-based projects: "I've heard about it... (a flat, fat, growing urban experiment)" by R&Sie(n), in which urban structure is generated from random and contingent secretions; and the choreographical project "Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced" led by William Forsythe, Maria Palazzi and Norah Zuniga Shaw which seeks to reimagine dance through a variety of organisational structures. By departing from what they perceive as a dependency on matter and material realisations, Parisi and Portanova argue for a concept of soft thought which distinguishes algorithmic code as an aesthetic object by virtue of the abstraction, incompleteness and incomputability that infects and constitutes all algorithms.

"...we want to emphasise that the main limit of computation is not its incapacity to include material contingencies. Quite the opposite, computation, or the formal architecture of algorithms, only remains limited to a closed formalism if one does not take into consideration how algorithms themselves tend towards abstraction, infinity, or the reality of the incomputable."

The journal "special issue", entitled "A billion gadget minds" also includes contributions by Michael Wheeler, Anna Munster and Ingmar Lippert. It can be found online here. Computational Culture is now inviting contributions for their second issue.

Article: Rachel C. Lee, "Haptics, Mobile Handhelds, and other 'Novel' Devices"

Rachel C. Lee delves into the techno-textural and spices it with a literary turn in her new article, "Haptics, Mobile Hendhelds, and other 'Novel' Devices: The Tactile Unconscious of Reading across Old and New Media" for CTheory's Theory Beyond the Codes.

An analytical reading of Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003) is embedded in the heart of Lee's article, but one which is provokingly framed by consideration of new media's haptic concerns - from the "stretch-and-pinch" of the iPhone to the sticky "glaze" of the immersive console gaming experience. By repositioning literary analysis within a web of "multipoint tactilities", Lee seeks to highlight the affective possibilities of literature's ludic interactivity.

"...my point has been not so much to align Truong's novel with the console game's flashing images that the user now putatively physically controls ... as much as to provoke, through the analysis of the novel's tactile devices, recognition of new media's emphasis on interactivity (that narrower meaning of tactility) as thoroughly caught up in a cognitive challenge. Cognitive challenge is at the core of immersion..."

Article: Eugene Thacker, "Cryptobiologies"

Peculiarly tucked away in volume 6 (2006) of the little Spanish e-journal Artnodes lies the article "Cryptobiologies" by Eugene Thacker. Nestled inconspicuously between various Spanish-language commentaries relating to the theme of "Organicities", this teasingly brief rumination dwells on the now-quotidian nature of various biotechnologies, "biodefensive" strategies and the uncertain humanity-animality distinction.

Within six pages, Thacker's text provides a discursive inquiry into the enduring reaction of unease towards the affective dimensions of contagion. It ranges from a linguistic analysis of the US position on infectious disease to medieval practices of biological warfare. And while a small section suggests a re-encoding of Heidegger's notion of Angst towards a notion of "existential biology", it is the Deleuzian and Bataillean engagement underpinning Thacker's obscurely named "Cryptobiologies" (for the word never appears in the body of the text, which perhaps indicates how we are to receive the word) that both enables and enlivens his vivid mapping of these biological politics.

"...to ask what it would be like to be a pack, a swarm, a flock - this is the question of animality ... a question not of species, genus and organism, but of topologies or patterns that effortlessly cut across species. The threshold of our understanding is not between human and animal, but rather between humanity and animality."

Article: Reza Negarestani, "Differential Cruelty"

Reza Negarestani's critical reading of Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition fastens upon the dependent associations of cruelty and determination suggested within the first chapter of Deleuze's text. From here, Negarestani explodes its implications in order to ambitiously exalt in a philosophy of cruelty that remobilises ontology itself within a new reading: that of differential cruelty.

Negarestani proposes by way of a radical Deleuzean reading that the science of ontology is the essence of a philosophy of cruelty. "Cruelty" here refers not to an instrumental form acting as a unidirectional vehicle to the positive determination of being; but rather, as plays of multiple, interrelated sets of cruelty to which determination is fundamentally and problematically bound. Explicating this philosophy from Difference and Repetition as transition from Deleuze's early work "Coldness and Cruelty", Negarestani concludes with the tantalising implication of a different ethical register "wherein the problem is not determiend by its solution or conditions but by its capacity to generate fields of the problematic".

"Deleuze's philosophy of difference is, first of all, a universal ethics in so far as it demonstrates that difference or determination as such qua cruelty creates a field of the problematic for which solutions (correlation with the beyond or a meta-level) remobilize the problem rather than terminate it. ... The philosophy of cruelty ... is capable of seeing ontology as a differential or non-unitary field of cruelty pregnant with the problematic and, therefore, capturing ontology through syntheses between sadistic and masochistic reasons, or between being out of the void and being through the void."

Read Negarestani's article in volume 14(3) of Angelaki, journal of the theoretical humanities (2009).

Article: Karin Sellberg and Michael O'Rourke, "John Cameron Mitchell's Relationscapes"

Live as of the last day of January, Sellberg and O'Rourke's post "John Cameron Mitchell's Relationscapes" offers the first of several comment-and-reply style pieces devoted to the films of this popularly embraced champion of queer cinema on the online platform In Media Res this week.

The matter of choice for this particular encounter is the changeable landcapes of human relations upon which his 2006 film Shortbus charts its course. These innumerable heterogeneous connections shape not merely the faces of selves and others, but also the spaces occupied; it encompasses people, envelopes rooms, enfolds structures and expands endlessly in vast networks of urbanity.

"We argue that Shortbus invents with what Erin Manning calls 'relationscapes', a complex of embodied and embodying 'biograms', propulsively becoming bodies. The heterotopic hive – 'the motherboard'– is characterised by the eponymous salon where people of all races, ages, genders and sexes come to talk, fuck, watch and convene to generate new 'ecologies of experience'."

Further posts for this curated theme week include Kristopher Cannon's "Hedwig leaves her stain on the Shortbus", Cynthia Barounis's "Queerness Meets Disability in Shortbus" and Robert Summers's "Reading Hedwig and the Angry Inch Otherwise: A Reparative Reading on the Art of Enacting Middle". They can all be found on In Media Res.

Article: Tony D. Sampson, "Contagion Theory Beyond the Microbe"

CTheory's latest special issue In the Name of Security of its e-journal Theory Beyond the Codes offers up the first instalment of a new rumination by Tony D. Sampson. Sampson revisits nineteenth-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde's contagion theory in the context of communication theory in combination with the work of cognitive scientist George Lakoff and socio-political theorist Teresa Brennan.

At the bridge between the social and the biological, Sampson negotiates a variety of current phenomena (from Obama-love to consumer behaviour and the GFC) to trace the conditioning and organisation of infectious social environments. While this article is introductory in flavour, it works through a tantalising (abstract) diagram of Tardean human relations.

"Tarde's social becomes an assemblage of relationality composed of self-spreading and mesmeric imitative waves or flows. What comes together ...[is] the 'coherent' outcomes of 'desires that have been excited or sharpened by certain [social] inventions,' which have imitatively radiate outward, point-to-point, assembling what appear to be the logical arrangements of social form, like markets, nations and cities. What radiates outwards are neither social facts nor collective representations, but the microrelations of shared passions, thoughts, conversations, beliefs, feelings and affects which pass through porous self/other relations in all manner of contagious enviroments... The social, according to Tarde, is a vital force that self-spreads, radiates and vibrates out from capricious mechanism-independent social encounters with events and accidents."

Article: Snowden Wright, "Young, Male, Straight -- and Anorexic"

If anything, Snowden Wright's autobiographical account of anorexia during his puberty (written in the now classic genre of internet-as-confessional) realises the relentless quality of bodily change and the militant expectation of its incidence.

If we could be said to assume a tendency towards corporeal movement, this story of bodily regulation as 'fun house grotesquerie' - whether successful or not - begs questions concerning the limits of corporeal control, its reception and its patrol.

"The doctor administered a battery of tests that revealed my body was frozen at the cusp of puberty, my voice refusing to deepen into adulthood, my muscles failing to develop into those of a man. Adolescence had become a kind of incarceration -- when all I wanted was to escape. But I learned to understand my anorexia as an immature and almost fatal type of rebellion."

Read his article, published on 27 December 2010, online at Salon.com.