This study sets out to examine the ways Nigerian cyber-fraudsters (Yahoo-Boys) are represented in hip-hop music. The empirical basis of this article is lyrics from 18 hip-hop artists, which were subjected to a directed approach to qualitative content analysis and coded based on the moral disengagement mechanisms proposed by Bandura (1999). While results revealed that the ethics of Yahoo-Boys, as expressed by musicians, embody a range of moral disengagement mechanisms, they also shed light on the motives for the (...) Nigerian cybercriminals' actions. Further analysis revealed additional findings: “glamorization/de-glamorization of cyber-fraud” and “sex-roles-and-cultures”. Having operated within the constraint of what is currently available (a small sample size), this article has drawn attention to the notion that Yahoo-Boys and some musicians may be “birds of a feather.” Secondly, it has exposed a “hunter-and-antelope-relationship” between Yahoo-Boys and their victims. Thirdly, it has also highlighted that some ethos of law-abiding citizens is central to Yahoo-Boys’ moral enterprise. Yahoo-Boys, therefore, represent reflections of society. Arguably, given that Yahoo-Boys and singers are connected, and the oratory messages of singers may attract more followers than questioners, this study illuminates the cultural dimensions of cyber-fraud that emanate from Nigeria. In particular, insights from this study suggest that cyber-fraud researchers might look beyond traditional data sources (e.g., cyber-fraud statistics) for the empirical traces of “culture in action” that render fraudulently practices acceptable career paths for some Nigerian youths. (shrink)

This thesis, which is based on six peer-reviewed publications, is a theoretical and qualitative treatment of the ways in which social and contextual factors serve as a resource for understanding the particularities of ‘cybercrime’ that emanates from Nigeria. The thesis illuminates how closer attention to Nigerian society aids the understanding of Nigerian cybercriminals (known as Yahoo Boys), their actions and what constitutes ‘cybercrime’ in a Nigerian context. ‘Cybercrime’ is used in everyday parlance as a simple acronym for all forms of (...) crimes on the internet, whereas ‘cybercrime’ in a Nigerian context is rooted in socioeconomics and determined by it. In particular, the defrauding of victims for monetary benefit is the most significant theme that emerged from the analysis of Yahoo Boys. While all six publications are situated at the intersections of multiple fields of study, they all share a common endorsement of the constructionist/interpretivist position. The six published works comprise: [a] three conceptual publications; and [b] three empirical publications. The conceptual publications deconstruct the meanings of multiple taken-for-granted concepts in cybercrime scholarship and develop more robust conceptual lenses, namely: (1) ‘Digital Spiritualization’; (2) ‘The Tripartite Cybercrime Framework – TCF’; and (3) ‘The Synergy between Feminist Criminology and the TCF’. These new conceptual lenses represent the candidate’s contribution to developing theory in the field. Alongside this, the empirical section includes three sets of qualitative data, which include: (1) interviews with seventeen Nigerian parents; (2) lyrics from eighteen Nigerian musicians; and (3) interviews with forty Nigerian law enforcement officers. These diverse sources of qualitative data provide a more fully-developed understanding of ‘cybercrime’ in the Nigerian context (and elsewhere). All six-published works, while individually contributing to knowledge, collectively shed clearer light on the centrality of cultural context in the explanation of ‘cybercrime’. (shrink)

This chapter aims at pointing out the consistency of Islam as a source for empowerment strategies of the Black population in the United States and the religion’s effective reinterpretation as a sort of contemporary gnostic self-realization in Hip Hop culture. Moreover, the link between hybrid identity constructions of Hip Hop artists that borrow from religious and cultural sources of Islam and corresponding traditions of spiritual realization in mystical Islam and Sufism is demonstrated in the course of the discussion.

This essay undertakes a phenomenological inquiry into the ‘experiential structure of hip-hop’ – a structure that hip-hop artist Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) gestures towards in his text Decoded. In this book, Jay-Z argues that hip-hop has a particular power to act as the vehicle for the communication of a specific type of experience, i.e. contradictory experiences, or those which do not seem possible under the principle of non-contradiction. For instance, Tupac Shakur says of his mom that “…even as a crack fiend, (...) mama / You always was a Black Queen, mama.” The way in which hip-hop is a powerful vehicle for this communication lies, according to Jay-Z, in its very structure, which he describes using two sets of terms: rhythm/flow and music/rhyme. Using Jay-Z’s general outline, this essay attempts to complete a phenomenological analysis of hip-hop, in the effort to (1) isolate the experiential structure of hip-hop and (2) isolate, within this structure, the way in which hip-hop is able to communicate contradictory experiences. In the final analysis, the author isolates the experiential structure of hip-hop and shows how its multiple layers work to draw listeners in and induce them to experience-with the artist. (shrink)

The article is based on lyrics from 2007 to 2017 involving 18 hip-hop artists. All the songs I studied were by male singers apart from one entitled, “Maga no need pay,” which involved seven multiple artists. In all the songs, the glamorization of cybercrime and cybercriminals was one of the most significant themes. The implications are discussed.

While US-Hip Hop has been attested considerable influence of the controversial Black supremacy movement Five Percent Nation, a similar pattern can be observed with the rigid Rastafarian doctrine of the Bobo Shanti Order and Jamaican Dancehall-Reggae. Considering the commercial relevance and global popularity of both musical styles, this study attempted to shed light on the question if either artists are using controversy for promotional agendas or it is them being used for missionary purposes in turn. A multi-layerd cross-case study based (...) on Critical Discourse Analysis as well as ethnographic research has been conducted to determine the degree and direction of Bobo Shanti-representations in Jamaican Dancehall-Reggae as compared to Five Percenter Rap in the US, focusing on visual representations, declared affiliations as well as claims of moral superiority and gender roles in reference to doctrinal sources. -/- . (shrink)

This book is discussing patterns of radical religious thought in popular forms of Black music. The consistent influence of the Five Percent Nation on Rap music as one of the most esoteric groups among the manifold Black Muslim movements has already gained scholarly attention. However, it shares more than a strong pattern of reversed racism with the Bobo Shanti Order, the most rigid branch of the Rastafarian faith, globally popularized by Dancehall-Reggae artists like Sizzla or Capleton. Authentic devotion (...) or calculated marketing?Apart from providing a possible answer to this question, the historical shift of Bobo adherents from shunned extremists to firmly anchored personifications of authenticity in mainstream Rastafarian culture is being emphasized. A multi-layered comparative case study attempts to shed light on the re-contextualization of language as well as expressed dogmatic perceptions and symbolism, attitude towards other religious groups and aspects of ethnic discrimination. Further analysis includes the visibility of artists and their references to practical and moral issues directly derived from two obscure ideologies that managed to conquer airwaves and concert halls. (shrink)

In the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre’s notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, (...) I argue for an alternative model of authenticity in which we take claims about the relative authenticity of country music to be evidence of ‘country’ being a dual character concept in the same way that it has been suggested of punk rock and hip-hop. Authentic country music is country music that embodies the core value commitments of the genre. These values form the basis of country artists’ and audiences’ practical identities. Part of country music’s aesthetic practice is that audiences reconnect with, reify, and revise this common practical identity through identification with artists and works that manifest these values. We should then think of authenticity discourse within country music as a kind of game within the genre’s practice of shaping and maintaining this practical identity. (shrink)

It has been over two decades since Miranda Fricker labeled epistemic injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their capacity as a knower. The philosophical literature has proliferated with variants and related concepts. By considering cases in popular music, we argue that it is worth distinguishing a parallel phenomenon of art-interpretive injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their creative capacity as a possible artist. In section 1, we consider the prosecutorial use of rap lyrics in court (...) as a central case of this injustice. In section 2, we distinguish art-interpretive injustice from other categories already discussed in recent literature. In section 3, we discuss the relationship between genre discourse and identity prejudice. The case for recognizing the category of art-interpretive injustice is that it allows one to recognize a class of harms as being importantly related in ways that one would otherwise overlook. (shrink)

Feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories have established that social identities such as race and gender are mutually constitutive—i.e., that they “intersect.” I argue that “cultural appropriation” is never merely the appropriation of culture, but also of gender, sexuality, class, etc. For example, “white hipness” is the appropriation of stereotypical black masculinity by white males. Looking at recent videos from black male hip-hop artists, I develop an account of “postmillennial black hipness.” The inverse of white hipness, this practice involves the (...) appropriation, by black men, of stereotypical white gay masculinity and/or non-American, non-white femininity. I also argue that Shephard Fairey’s recent images of (mainly militant) non-Western women of color can be read as a new form of white hipness that revises the traditional logic in two ways: (1) by appropriating non-white femininity rather than masculinity, and (2) by adopting the practice of postmillennial black hipness itself. (shrink)

This special issue of Journal of Poetry Therapy focuses on the use of poetry and other forms of expressive writing to explore the transformative experiences of military veterans, and so in this article I discuss how the use of poetry, hip-hop, and philosophy positively influenced my life while I was serving in the United States Air Force (USAF) from 2000 through 2004. This article briefly reviews my reasons for enlisting and discusses the importance that poetry, hip-hop, and philosophy had for (...) me during four different phases of my military history: (i) Basic Military Training, (ii) Aircraft Qualification, Combat Survival, and Water Survival Training, (iii) serving in the post 9/11 operations Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and (iv) the period after fulfilling my time of service for the USAF. In discussing each phase, I explain the unique challenges that I encountered, how I used poetry, hip-hop, and philosophy to successfully overcome these challenges, point out relevant examples of poetry, hip-hop, and philosophy that were particularly influential, and include pictures of my experiences throughout. (shrink)

Politics, and in particular the question of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, is currently dealt with rather through fiction and art, and much less through genuine political actions, is a strong sign of the failure of politics as a positive, voluntaristic political project. Rap /hip hop music, the most naturally political art, does not have the political agenda anymore. The particular history or Israeli rap illustrates this process in a striking way, embodying the recent evolution of the Israeli society. The country (...) was established on a political project and previously unknown social generosity. Yet, the economical and geopolitical context of Israel, as well as increasingly difficult relationship with Palestinians, made its citizens surprisingly uninterested in rethinking the political project of the country. Individual preoccupations, also economical, family and friends’ problems, started to occupy the central place in art and in daily life in Israel, and politics has been definitively associated to corruption and self-interest of an elite. Rap reflects this evolution, is its condensed version. (shrink)

Genre discourse is widespread in appreciative practice, whether that is about hip-hop music, romance novels, or film noir. It should be no surprise then, that philosophers of art have also been interested in genres. Whether they are giving accounts of genres as such or of particular genres, genre talk abounds in philosophy as much as it does the popular discourse. As a result, theories of genre proliferate as well. However, in their accounts, philosophers have so far focused on capturing (...) all of the categories of art that we think of as genres and have focused less on ensuring that only the categories we think are genres are captured by those theories. Each of these theories populates the world with far too many genres because they call a wide class of mere categories of art genres. I call this the problem of genre explosion. In this paper, I survey the existing accounts of genre and describe the kinds of considerations they employ in determining whether a work is a work of a given genre. After this, I demonstrate the ways in which the problem of genre explosion arises for all of these theories and discuss some solutions those theories could adopt that will ultimately not work. Finally, I argue that the problem of genre explosion is best solved by adopting a social view of genres, which can capture the difference between genres and mere categories of art. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to explore Hip Hop as an expression of marronage. I identify marronage as an existential mode of being which restitutes human temporality. Slavery and flight from slavery constituted two inextricable historical processes, therefore logics of marronage must also constitute contemporary human experience. I argue that Hip Hop offers a distinct way of affirming and expressing one’s existence through what has been called a “maroon consciousness.” In the same way that maroons created new worlds free from (...) the tyranny of slavery, Hip Hop offers the Hip Hoppa a space free from colonial logics. (shrink)

While this article sets out to advance our knowledge about the characteristics of Nigerian cybercriminals (Yahoo-Boys), it is also the first study to explore the narratives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) officers concerning them. It appraises symbolic interactionist insights to consider the ways in which contextual factors and worldview may help to illuminate officers’ narratives of cybercriminals and the interpretations and implications of such accounts. Semi-structured interviews of forty frontline EFCC officers formed the empirical basis of this (...) study and were subjected to a directed approach of qualitative content analysis. While prior studies, for example, indicated that only a group of cybercriminals deploy spiritual and magical powers to defraud victims (i.e. modus operandi), our data analysis extended this classification into more refined levels involving multiple features. In particular, analysis bifurcates cybercriminals and their operations based on three factors: [a] educational-attainment, [b] modus-operandi, and [c] networks-collaborators. Results also suggest that these cybercriminals and their operations are embedded in “masculinity-and-material-wealth”. These contributions thus have implications for a range of generally accepted viewpoints about these cybercriminals previously taken-for-granted. Since these criminals have victims all over the world, insights from our study may help various local and international agencies [a] to understand the actions/features of these two groups of cybercriminals better and develop more effective response strategies. [b] to appreciate the vulnerabilities of their victims better and develop more adequate support schemes. We also consider the limitations of social control agents’ narratives on criminals. (shrink)

This contribution aims to explore the historical predecessors of the Five Percenter model of self-realization, as popularized by Hip Hop artists such as Supreme Team, Rakim Allah, Brand Nubian, Wu-Tang Clan, or Sunz of Man. As compared to frequent considerations of the phenomenon as a creative mythological background for a socio-political struggle, Five Percenter teachings shall be discussed as contemporary interpretations of historical models of self-realization in various philosophical, religious, and esoteric systems. By putting the coded system of the tenfold (...) Supreme Mathematics as one of its core teachings in context with the Pythagorean Tetractys, an arrangement of ten points in four lines, the commonalities between the sequence and concepts attributed to the respective numbers will be demonstrated. (shrink)

We aimed to identify the critical insights from empirical peer-reviewed studies on online romance fraud published between 2000 and 2021 through a systematic literature review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol. The corpus of studies that met our inclusion criteria comprised twenty-six studies employing qualitative (n = 13), quantitative (n = 11), and mixed (n = 2) methods. Most studies focused on victims, with eight focusing on offenders and fewer investigating public perspectives. All (...) the victim-focused studies relied on data from the Global North, except for Malaysia. Five offender-focused studies used online data available in the public domain, and three derived their data from West Africa. Our review highlights offenders' techniques to deceive and manipulate victims, as revealed in these studies, and highlights some limitations of offender- and victim-focused studies. The dominant framework used across the studies was found to be the “Scammers Persuasive Techniques Model.” While this framework provides a helpful way of considering the stages of victim involvement, it also faces some limitations, which we highlight. Our study reviews the current state of empirical knowledge on romance fraud and identifies certain gaps and biases in the literature. We argue there is a need for further research into online romance fraud to enhance our understanding of it both from the perspective of the offender as well as the experience of the victim. We also highlight the need for a more inclusive and greater range of regional and global diverse range of data sources and perspectives. Given the scale and impact of online romance fraud, we conclude that its study would benefit from a richer empirical engagement that recognizes it as both a regional and global phenomenon. (shrink)

The internet has made the world more linked than ever before. While taking advantage of this online transition, cybercriminals target flaws in online systems, networks, and infrastructure. Businesses, government organizations, people, and communities all across the world, particularly in African countries, are all severely impacted on an economic and social level. Many African countries focused more on developing secure electricity and internet networks; yet, cybersecurity usually receives less attention than it should. One of Africa's major issues is the lack of (...) adequate digital security infrastructure, which has harmed businesses, governmental institutions, and individual communities more than it has helped. The majority of African countries operate without cybersecurity measures in place to combat cyberattacks. Only a few examples of today's cyber risks include digital extortion, business email intrusion, data breaches, online fraud, ransomware, and phishing, and new types of cybercrime are always developing. Due to the advent of new technology, cybercriminals have become more organized and quicker in their attacks and alliance creation. To maintain a secure digital environment for all internet users, this study focused on the challenges, solutions, and need for African countries to improve their online safety by tackling cybercrime, online fraud, and cybersecurity concerns. The objective of this study is to offer practical and long-term answers to the problems posed by cybercrime, with a continuing emphasis on enhancing online safety. It will assess the effectiveness of cutting-edge cybersecurity measures, legislative frameworks, and cross-border cooperative efforts, as well as potential areas for improvement. Additionally, the study will examine cutting-edge methods like blockchain technology, machine learning, and other cutting-edge methods that could improve our using digital defences to stop cybercrime. (shrink)

The article examines the ethics of musical interpretation, focusing on the performer’s responsibility in faithfully recreating a work from the score. Drawing inspiration from conductor Daniel Barenboim’s reflections (2016), it analyzes the delicate balance between personal expression and fidelity to the work, highlighting how interpretation involves not only technical skill but also moral responsibility. This notion develops through the importance attributed to history, authenticity, and the present in interpretation. These concepts are explored in the relationship between the score and the (...) performer, addressing the ethical challenges involved in balancing fidelity and creativity. The study of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) demonstrates how it serves as the foundation of the ethics of musical interpretation, due to its attempt to recreate the original conditions of performances. However, it is also noted that HIP embodies an overly rigid fidelity, thus requiring a more balanced approach that views musical practice as an ongoing dialogue between past and present. Finally, since the rules of musical practice are not enough for performers to interpret ethically, as they need to be internalized, the role of Aristotelian phronesis is explored as an internal guide for performers in interpretative practice. Phronesis aids the performer in mediating between past and present and in making interpretative decisions that are both ethically and musically appropriate. (shrink)

This book can be seen as both, a celebration of past and present achievements of creative expression, artistic articulation, cultural contributions, and mediated movements for the sake of liberalization and democracy, and a warning against a “cultural revolution” defined by censorship, suppression of pluralist opinions, unnatural conformity in science and journalism, and the distinction between “fake news” and “fact” handled by artificial intelligence or part-time fact checkers.

This article is a theoretical treatment of feminist epistemology of crime, which advocates the centrality of gender as a theoretical starting point for the investigating of digital crimes. It does so by exploring the synergy between the feminist perspectives and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF) (which argues that three possible factors motivate cybercrimes – socioeconomic, psychosocial, and geopolitical) to critique mainstream criminology and the meaning of the term “cybercrime”. Additionally, the article examines gender gaps in online harassment, cyber‐bullying, (...) class='Hi'>cyber‐fraud, revenge porn, and cyber‐stalking to demonstrate that who is victimised, why, and to what effect are the critical starting points for the analysis of the connections between gender and crimes. In turn, it uses the lens of intersectionality to acknowledge that, while conceptions of gender and crime interact, they intersect with other categories (e.g., sexuality) to provide additional layers of explanation. To nuance the utilitarian value of the synergy between the TCF and the feminist perspectives, the focus shifts to a recent case study (which compared socioeconomic and psychosocial cybercrimes). The article concludes that, while online and offline lives are inextricably intertwined, the victimisations in psychosocial cybercrimes may be more gendered than in socioeconomic cybercrimes. These contributions align the TCF to the feminist epistemology of crime in their attempt to move gender analysis of digital crimes “from margin to centre”. (shrink)

Ausgehend von der immer wieder bemühten Metapher des Black CNN wird versucht, das Potenzial der musikalischen Ausdrucksform des HipHop als Kommunikationsstruktur der Schwarzen Minderheit in den USA zu analysieren. Nach einer historisch-kulturellen Erläuterung, die sich mit der Tradition der Reflektion sozialer und politischer Aspekte in den unterschiedlichen musikalischen Äußerungen der Schwarzen Volksgruppe in den USA beschäftigt und schon ansatzweise die Bedeutung dieser Ausdrucksmöglichkeit im Kontext eines internal colonialsm vor Augen führt, werden jene soziodemographischen Entwicklungen nachvollziehbar gemacht, die sich als zentraler (...) Kritikpunkt in den verbalen Artikulationen des HipHop widerspiegeln. Vor dem theoretischem Hintergrund von cultural citizenship - ein Konzept zur Bestimmung kultureller Teilhabe in der Mediengesellschaft -, werden 25 Textbeispiele, die sich auf HipHop- Veröffentlichungen von 1982 bis 2004 finden, auf ihre Übereinstimmung mit Indikatoren untersucht, die sich aus, den Medien zugeschriebenen, politischen und sozialen Funktionen ableiten lassen. Overseen by Scott La Rock... (shrink)

I distinguish between the nineteenth- to twentieth-century (modernist) tendency to rehabilitate (white) femininity from the abject popular, and the twentieth- to twenty-first-century (postmodernist) tendency to rehabilitate the popular from abject white femininity. Careful attention to the role of nineteenth-century racial politics in Nietzsche's Gay Science shows that his work uses racial nonwhiteness to counter the supposedly deleterious effects of (white) femininity (passivity, conformity, and so on). This move—using racial nonwhiteness to rescue pop culture from white femininity—is a common twentieth- and (...) twenty-first-century practice. I use Nietzsche to track shifts from classical to neo-liberal methods of appropriating “difference.” Hipness is one form of this neoliberal approach to difference, and it is exemplified by the approach to race, gender, and pop culture in Vincente Minnelli's film The Band Wagon. I expand upon Robert Gooding-Williams's reading of this film, and argue that mid-century white hipness dissociates the popular from femininity and whiteness, and values the popular when performed by white men “acting black.” Hipness instrumentalizes femininity and racial nonwhiteness so that any benefits that might come from them accrue only to white men, and not to the female and male artists of color whose works are appropriated. (shrink)

Academics have increasingly used video and other electronic methods to collect data and capture reflections from participants. But, until recently, it’s been less common to use film as way of disseminating the results of research. That’s beginning to change. Film can be a powerful way to share research findings with a broad audience. This is particularly true when academics are combining) the traditions of ethnography, documentary filmmaking, and storytelling. -/- Film and cinema are increasingly being used in environmental humanities to (...) complement – or challenge – text-based research. The filmmakers in the arts, sciences and humanities see potential in using the moving images within political philosophy, environmental politics, postcolonial studies, human geography, urban ecology, postcolonial studies, design and literature. An example of this is the film One Table Two Elephants. It is a cinematic ethnography created by two Swedish researchers and filmmakers Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson. Based on years of research in Cape Town, it was filmed in 2015 as part of a longer-term research and film-project . The documentary deals with race, nature and knowledge politics in Cape Town as part of the ways of knowing urban ecologies research project. -/- . (shrink)

Music can infect us. In the dominant approach, music contaminates listeners through emotional mimicry and independently of value appraisal, just like when we catch other people’s feelings. Musical contagion is thus considered fatal to the mainstream view of emotions as cognitive evaluations. This paper criticizes this line of argument and proposes a new cognitivist account: the value metaphor view. Non-cognitivism relies on a contentious model of emotion transmission. In the competing model (social appraisal), we catch people’s emotions by (...) appraising value through their emotional expressions. Social appraisal debunks the main motivation for non-cognitivism and offers fruitful insights into musical contagion. Combining it with metaphor theory, I claim that musical contagion involves experiencing the music as a metaphor for emotions and values. Just like people infect us as we appraise value through their emotional expressions, music contaminates listeners because they hear it metaphorically-as some emotional expression and hereby appraise it metaphorically-as some value. As infectious music “sounds like” emotions and values, cognitivism is safe. (shrink)

E-Government refers to the administration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to the procedures and functions of the government with the objective of enhancing the transparency, efficiency and participation of the citizens. E-Government is tough systems that require distribution, protection of privacy and security and collapse of these could result in social and economic costs on a large scale. Many of the available e-government systems like electronic identity system of management (eIDs), websites are established at duplicated databases and servers. An (...) established validation and management system could face a single failure point and the system is prone to Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS), denial of service attacks (DoS), malware and other cyber attacks. The execution of a privacy preserving and a secure decentralized system is enabled by the block chain technology. Here any third-party organizations do not have any control over the transactions of the Government. With the help of block chain technology, new and existing data are encapsulated within ledger or blocks, which are evenly distributed through the network in an enduring and sustainable way. The privacy and security of information are improved with the help of block chain technology, where distribution and encryption of data are performed through the total network. This analytical paper maps out the analysis of the security in the e-government system, utilizing the block chain technology that provides privacy and security of information and thereby enhancing the trust among the public sector. Qualitative and theoretical analysis is made for the proposed topic and implications of privacy and security of the proposed system is made. (shrink)

Socialism is a political ideology that proposes that the state should control the means of production to manage a planned economy. The possibility of realizing this thesis has been debated throughout the 20th century. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) includes technologies such as artificial intelligence or big data that could reopen the debate through the formulation of new digital models of planned economy. This qualitative research presents some theoretical models proposed in academia to update socialism in the 4IR. It describes (...) six new theoretical forms of digital socialism: Platform Economy, Socialist Feedback Infrastructure, Algorithmic Central Planning, Cyber-Communism, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC), and Open Loop In Natura Economic Planning. The study concludes that the study of political ideologies and the debate about the future of society would benefit from further analysis of these models. (shrink)

In his article untitled Messages in Art Jerrold Levinson discusses the idea of a message behind a work of art. He argues that despite certain disclaimers put forward by artists it is „hard to deny that artworks (...) very often do have messages, and far from inexpressible ones”. From given examples it would seem that Levinson assumes that musical work just as other artworks sometimes generate messages and that in order for a work of music to be successful in (...) expression this message should be comprehensible and certainly not incoherent. The author of this paper draws on Levinson's “Messages in Art” as well as his “Music as Narrative and Music as Drama” to explore further the issues mentioned above. In particular the author argues that seeing musical works through the message it may generate is somewhat reductive and that musical work as well as other artworks are prone to abiding by an aesthetic code and therefore even when they allow for interpretation in terms of messages or morals these messages are incoherent or vague at best. (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt to discuss issues and challenges of Cyber Crime in India from an ethical perspective. Ethics is a branch of philosophy which deals with what is considered to be right or wrong. The ethics centers and program devoted to busin age for several re crime’. The advancement ess ethics, legal ethics, bioethics, medical ethics, engineering ethics, and computer ethics have sprung up. Cyber crime is emerging as a serious threat. Computer Technology is one (...) of the important general purpose Technologies in today’s asons. Today it is used in almost all the organizations, institutions, and people. Computer technology makes the life so speedy and fast, but hurled under the eclipse of threat from the deadliest type of criminality termed as 'Cyber of IT brings so many facilities to us; but also brings so many problems and challenges too and out of which Cyber Crime is a kind of offence which deals with the cyber world which includes computer security, information security, and mobile security too. The increasing number of crimes in the field of Information Technology brings a big attraction to Cyber Crime to everyone. (shrink)

This study aimed to identify the digital transformation and its impact on the application of Cyber Security in the Palestinian Ministry of Interior and National Security. The study used the analytical descriptive approach. The study tool (questionnaire), and the comprehensive survey method was used, where (61) questionnaires were retrieved (87.1%), and they were unloaded and analyzed using the SPSS statistical package. The study found several results, including that there is a statistically significant correlation between all dimensions of Digital transformation (...) and the application of Cyber Security in the Ministry of Interior and National Security. And that there is an impact of Digital transformation on the application of security in the Ministry of Interior and National Security in the governorates of Gaza, and the impact coefficient was (0.897). It was found that the dimensions affecting the dependent variable of Cyber Security are dimensions (organizational structure, job description, data privacy and security, technical infrastructure required for digital transformation), as these dimensions affect (89.7%) of the variation in the application of Cyber Security. The study presented a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: The need for the Ministry's administration to provide a special budget to develop the quality of its electronic services as a lever for digital transformation. And the need for the number of workers in computer and information technology departments and units to be commensurate with the volume and quality of work to bridge the gap between the required performance and the actual performance. The ministry should set a clear methodology for exchanging data and information between the components of the ministry. And the need for the Ministry of Interior and National Security to use a protection network capable of detecting all threats. (shrink)

This paper investigates how the credit incentive to engage in questionable research practices interacts with cumulative advantage, the process whereby high-status academics more easily increase their status than low-status academics. I use a mathematical model to highlight two dynamics that have not yet received much attention. First, due to cumulative advantage, questionable research practices may pay off over the course of an academic career even if they are not attractive at the level of individual publications. Second, because of the role (...) of bottleneck moments in academic careers, questionable research practices may be selected for even if they do not provide a benefit in expectation. I also observe that, within the model, the most successful academics are the most likely to have benefited from fraud. (shrink)

Looking into the future is always a risky endeavour, but one way to anticipate the possible future shape of AI-driven societies is to examine the visionary works of some sci-fi writers. Not all sci-fi works have such visionary quality, of course, but some of Stanisław Lem’s works certainly do. We refer here to Lem’s works that explore the frontiers of science and technology and those that describe imaginary societies of robots. We therefore examine Lem’s prose, with a focus on the (...) Cyberiad stories, to see what challenges our future technological societies may face when they entrust their lives to AI technology. For example, what questions should we ask, and what questions do we forget to ask, when developing AI systems and allowing these systems to control our lives. The technologically honed minds of our current technocrats are perhaps too limited to guide us into this future, because AI-based technology is relatively unchartered territory, as any new, complex technology is by nature. Lem’s visions of future societies oriented around AI and robotics portray AI technology in a deeper and more nuanced way than the current technological visions offered by our leading technological prophets. Based on Lem’s visions, what is to come may not turn out to be an AI-driven nirvana. (shrink)

When beginning to think about the relation between experimental music and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, this quotation seems to be a natural starting point. In Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation of this phrase from John Cage they suggest a resonance between music and philosophy: in both fields the experimental approach entails a dismantling of predetermining codes and hierarchies, and with this arises the opportunity for an open-endedness that accommodates singular events and encounters. This understanding of experimentation, however, is (...) not as transparent as it seems. In the context of the uptake and critique of Deleuzian ideas in the theorisation of music and sound, as well as recent re-evaluations of the milieu of “experimental music,” critics have argued that a range of normative demands, ideological assumptions, and metaphysical reductions undermine the purported freedoms of both Cagean and Deleuzian experimentalism. -/- Here I can only deal with a small aspect of the wide historical and theoretical problem this involves; but in short my aim is to begin to construct a means through which Deleuze and Guattari’s thought can be used to help us examine some strategies that composers and performers in post-Cagean musical experimentalism developed to navigate around the demands, assumptions, and reductions of Cage’s thought. (shrink)

Any properly designed network coding technique can result in increased throughput and reliability of multi-hop wireless networks by taking advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless medium. In many inter-flow network coding schemes nodes are encouraged to overhear neighbour’s traffic in order to improve coding opportunities at the transmitter nodes. A study of these schemes reveal that some of the overheard packets are not useful for coding operation and thus this forced overhearing increases energy consumption dramatically. In this paper, we (...) formulate network coding aware sleep/wakeup scheduling as a semi Markov decision process (SMDP) that leads to an optimal node operation. In the proposed solution for SMDP, the network nodes learn when to switch off their transceiver in order to conserve energy and when to stay awake to overhear some useful packets. One of the main challenges... (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Issues about the nature and ontology of works of art play a central part in contemporary aesthetics. But such issues are complicated by the fact that there seem to be two fundamentally different kinds of artworks. First, a visual artwork such as a picture or drawing seems to be closely identified with a particular physical object, in that even an exact copy of it does not count as being genuinely the same work of art. Nelson Goodman describes such works as (...) being “autographic.” Second, other artworks such as musical or literary works seem to be copyable without any such limitations: for example, two identical copies of a novel could each equally be a genuine instance of that novel; such works are “allographic,” in Goodman’s terminology. Nevertheless, it seems clear enough that a deeper understanding of both kinds of artworks requires the pursuit of analogies or similarities between them, in spite of their differences. Any such analogies that may be found will provide critical tests for more general theories about the nature of artworks. I show how to resolve such analogies for the orientational concept of inversion. (shrink)

Although contemporary Western culture and criticism has usually valued composition over improvisation and placed the authority of a musical work with the written text rather than the performer, this essay posits these divisions as too facile to articulate the complex dynamics of making music in any genre or form. Rather it insists that music should be understood as pieces that are created with specific intentions by composers but which possess possibilities of interpretation that can only be brought out (...) through performance. (shrink)

In what follows I offer some reflections on an ethics of listening, or perhaps more generally a philosophy of listening, that can be discerned in different forms in the experimental music that, since the 1950s, has challenged and radicalised how music is understood. I situate these reflections around three of my own concert experiences as an audience member.

Music and language are universal human abilities with many apparent similarities relating to their acoustics, structure, and frequent use in social situations. We might therefore expect them to be understood and processed similarly, and indeed an emerging body of research suggests that this is the case. But the focus has historically been on the individual, looking at the passive listener or the isolated speaker or performer, even though social interaction is the primary site of use for both domains. Nonetheless, (...) an important goal of emerging research is to compare music and language in terms of acoustics and structure, social interaction, and functional origins to develop parallel accounts across the two domains. Indeed, a central aim of both of evolutionary musicology and language evolution research is to understand the adaptive significance or functional origin of human music and language. An influential proposal to emerge in recent years has been referred to as the social bonding hypothesis. Here, within a comparative approach to animal communication systems, I review empirical studies in support of the social bonding hypothesis in humans, non-human primates, songbirds, and various other mammals. In support of this hypothesis, I review six research fields: (i) the functional origins of music; (ii) the functional origins of language; (iii) mechanisms of social synchrony for human social bonding; (iv) language and social bonding in humans; (v) music and social bonding in humans; and (vi) pitch, tone and emotional expression in human speech and music. I conclude that the comparative study of complex vocalizations and behaviors in various extant species can provide important insights into the adaptive function(s) of these traits in these species, as well as offer evidence-based speculations for the existence of “musilanguage” in our primate ancestors, and thus inform our understanding of the biology and evolution of human music and language. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Other Shoes is a companion to Kendall Walton’s other essay collection, Marvellous Images, published seven years earlier. But careful study reveals considerable coherence; Walton reprises the same motifs throughout, though with different combinations and inflections, the book’s reverse chronology revealing how some of these ideas developed. Moreover, every paper exhibits the same accessible, sometimes (...) homespun, ‘care beans’, ‘gosh’ ) style typical of Walton: unburdened by needless technicality, yet deft. This style’s downside is perhaps that insufficiently careful readers may misread him. A quarter-century of Charles and faithful sidekick The Slime not so much evading critical fire as watching it spray harmlessly across the pages of philosophy journals is testament to this.Some of the papers, especially the... (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the effect of applying detection and prevention tools for career fraud in combating and preventing fraud and reducing its risks through an applied study on Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza Strip, Palestine. To achieve the objectives of the study, the researchers used the questionnaire as a main tool to collect data, and the descriptive and analytical approach to conducting the study. The study population consisted of (501) supervisory employees working at MOH in (...) Gaza Strip, Palestine. The researchers used the stratified random sample method and the multiple regression method to measure the effect. The study concluded a set of results, the most important of which is a positive evaluation among respondents about the levels of application of tools to detect and prevent job fraud within MOH, and the presence of a high interest in tools to prevent job fraud during the implementation of its various work. The study recommended the necessity for the Palestinian National Authority to develop and approve laws regulating health sector, so that those laws guarantee the prevention of conflicts of interest, especially for the category of doctors, by preventing job duplication of doctors working in the government sector. Also study recommended the need for MOH to adopt principles of health sector governance and begin immediately to implement them. This process to ensure transparency, disclosure and accountability in the business framework in a manner that realizes the effective protection of stakeholders and does not compromise or discriminate in the application of these principles, which ensures that all forms of job fraud are organized in an organized manner and within fixed legal frameworks. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIneffability of musical meaning is a frequent theme in music philosophy. However, talk about musical meaning persists and seems to be not only inherently enjoyable and socially acceptable, but also functionally useful. Relying on a phenomenological account of musical meaning combined with a naturalist explanatory attitude, we argue for a novel explanation of how ineffability is a feature of musical meaning and experience and we show why it cannot be remedied by perfecting language or musico-philosophical study.Musical meaning is seen (...) as an experiential phenomenon that consists of layers, some recent, others archaic. As such, musical meaning is strongly characterized by asubjectivity. It is in-between, in a state where the division of subject and object is not yet valid or valid anymore. A naturalistic interplay of experiential layers in music brings about a non-reified dynamics driving for expressions, interpretations, engenderings of subjects and objects or even for political action. Generally speaking, the in-betweenness of musical meaning can never be universally reified or symbolic nor can it ever be “subjective,” “mine” or present “at the origin.”In this view, ineffability has two primary reasons. First, the criteria offered for defining musical meaning are often too strict, resulting in untenable pretensions of universality. Second, the processual and relational nature of the in-between keeps meaning in flux; any snapshot creates a new situation and new meanings. (shrink)

In philosophy of music, formalists argue that pure instrumental music is unable to represent any content without the help of lyrics, titles, or dramatic context. In particular, they deny that music’s use of convention counts as a genuine case of representation because only intrinsic means of representing counts and conventions are extrinsic to the sound structures making up music. In this paper, I argue that convention should count as a way for music to genuinely represent (...) content for two reasons. First, the view that only intrinsic ways of representing counts is too stringent. If use can ground meaning in language, then use might also ground meaning (and representation) in music, too. Second, even if we were to insist on intrinsic features, convention should count as a way for music to genuinely represent because convention is an intrinsic feature of music. Without knowledge of musical systems and encultured listening, music wouldn’t even be recognized as music, so convention is already baked into our listening practices. (shrink)

The United Kingdom's Parliamentary Bill 'Fraud Trials (Without a Jury) 2007', failed. Nevertheless, fraud trials without a jury do take place and there is much evidence to support this. Today the UK still does not support fraud trials without a jury, even though fraud in the UK today is the highest amount of fraud globally. The longer version of this paper is submitted here since it has become urgent that UK fraud trials be examined (...) as a matter of urgency. On page 87 of this complete paper (cut down for The Criminal Lawyer in 2008) a U.S study of 46 corporate fraud trials revealed that the defendants were CEOs, President, Chairman, Senior Vice Presidents, Chief Financial Officers, but only one entity reach trial stage. After the ce Arthur Anderson LLP v. United States, 544 U.S. 696 (2005), and the Lehman Brothers SEC case and the SEC v. Bank of America Corp., 653 F. Supp. 2d 507 (S.D.N.Y. 2009, and the Report by the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry on the 2008 financial crash, a global financial disaster was predicted and George Osborne, UK Chancellor pleaded for leniency for HSBC Bank frauds, threatening a global meltdown. The U.S. judiciary increased its volume of Deferred Prosecution Agreements and the UK followed suit. So, in year 2022, there is global financial meltdown and the UK has the highest rate of fraud in the world with few successful convictions. This paper is very relevant today as we must stop using deferred prosecution agreements and seek more convictions and harsh jail sentences for those financial fraudsters who have created this meltdown. -/- *When this paper was written, UK fraud was estimated at £40 million and some experts suspected twice that amount. Today UK fraud is in the billions of pounds annually. (shrink)

In this paper I offer critical attention to the notion of atmosphere in relation to music. By exploring the concept through the case study of the Closed Brethren worship services, I argue that atmosphere may provide analytical tools to explore the ineffable in ecclesial practices. Music, just as atmosphere, commonly occupies a realm of ineffability and undermines notions such as inside and outside, subject and object. For this reason I present music as a means of knowing the (...) atmosphere. The first part of this paper points to the limits of an understanding of atmosphere as a constellation of things, as proposed by Gernot Böhme. In contrast to this, Hermann Schmitz conceptualises atmosphere as half-thing which suggests movement. Drawing on this, I propose to methodologically approach atmospheres as movements. Consequently, in the second part of this paper I closely analyse two motions as they cohere in Closed Brethren worship services: first, becoming (Deleuze and Guattari), a movement on the level of the individual worshiper; secondly, territorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari), a movement of the atmosphere towards its solidification. Here music as atmosphere is not a system of moral signification but a generative power affording intimate processes of divine encounter, whilst producing affective denominational difference. (shrink)

This chapter is a substantially expanded version of (and so substantially supersedes) “Words Fail Me. (Stanley Cavell’s Life Out of Music)” that appeared in Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Bloomsbury, 2020). It offers to read Cavell’s claim that “philosophy, of a certain ambition, tends perpetually to intersect the autobiographical.” Its guiding thought is that a life that finds a home in philosophy from out of its devotion to music (as is true of, among others, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and (...) Wittgenstein, all philosophers Cavell wrote about and cared about) will take on a certain character. In Cavell’s case, his distinctive orientation in philosophy—call this his lifelong coming to terms with his abandoning a life in music—is guided in part by (1) an interest in those moments in experience where words seem to run out, or veer toward nonsense, leaving in their wake touchstones of ecstasy; and (2) an interest in the education of the senses, without which interest we risk their starvation. These twin claims are illustrated through an interweaving of remarks and reminiscences of Cavell on music that culminate in a reading of his last published pieces devoted to music, primarily “Impressions of Revolution.”. (shrink)

Arts Entrepreneurship is a comparatively new concept in arts management however, it is inevitable for the arts, especially classical music to adapt the concept for its survival. This article investigates how arts entrepreneurship is executed through strategic collaboration in three different cases of classical music organizations in Seoul, Korea: Yellow Lounge Seoul, Ensemble Ditto and The New Baroque Company. By providing vivid examples of how to apply arts entrepreneurship in classical music products, it will better help to (...) understand the concept. The study conducted a focused group interview (FGI) with concert with classical music marketing specialists and their strategic collaborators. The framework of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) was applied to analyze identify arts entrepreneurship in each organization. The entrepreneurial approaches of these organizations are identified by how their entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is executed in their innovativeness, risk-taking, and proactiveness. The results of this empirical study are demonstrated in three aspects: 1) Strategic collaboration with an unconventional partner resulted in realization of entrepreneurial orientation. 2) Entrepreneurship through strategic collaboration resulted in reducing production costs, sourcing new funds, increasing the audience base and performance opportunities 3) Arts entrepreneurship was designed to maintain the core value that the quality of music would not be compromised or altered. (shrink)

Using research grants administrators and their clients (academic researchers) as the lens, this paper investigated the relevance and implication of a fraud prevention policy at a University of Technology (UoT) in South Africa. The paper adopted a quantitative approach in which closed-ended questions were complemented by open-ended questions in the survey questionnaire in the attempt to capture the perceptions of both research grants administrators and their clients on the relevance and implications of a fraud and irregularity prevention policy. (...) The results indicate that both research grants administrators (71.4 %), and their clients (73%) do not know if UoTx has a fraud and irregularity policy. While only 36% of research grants administrators indicated that they would feel safe reporting deceitful activities, a slight majority (59%) of the clients reported same. With regards to the steps to follow to report fraudulent activity, it was noted that while all (100%) the research grants administrators noted that they were clueless, ironically an overwhelming majority of their clients indicated otherwise. Notwithstanding, both research grants administrators and their clients (93% and 95% respectively) concurred that a fraud prevention policy was necessary for UoTx. The implication is that having phenomenal controls that are not effectively publicized, monitored or worse still overridden by someone are useless. (shrink)

I begin by defending Heinrich Gustav Hotho’s foundational edition of the Lectures on Aesthetics (LA) contra Gethmann-Siebert and others who argue for a non-systematic view of Hegel’s aesthetics generally and music specifically. I defend Hegel against the common conceit that his comprehension of music was somehow deficient and introduce the Hegelian idea of absolute agency as performative in art and music. Reference to Kant’s transcendental aesthetics then allows us to grasp how, in Hegel, meaningful tones arise from (...) the vibratory oscillation between selfhood’s presiding unity and its temporal self-positing. I then trace back further elements of musical architecture, such as rhythm, harmony and melody to the temporal oscillation arising from within selfhood. The fundamental ambiguity within temporal oscillation is the source of meaningfulness in music, the feeling that its experience is meaningful without telling us exactly what that meaning is. Meaningfulness forms the absolute Ur-Ton of beautiful music, which arises as determinate tones within selfhood and resonates into the soul of the listener. The temporal vanishing of musical tones within a compositional framework is a pre-linguistic expression of meaning, performative of the ambiguous oscillation between the human and the divine. (shrink)