Emergencia, causalidad y realismo

L'origen del concepte modern d'emergència es remunta a la meitat del segle xix, quan els filòsofs realistes es van començar a plantejar per primera vegada les profundes similituds que hi havia en els camps de la física i la química entorn de la qüestió de la causalitat. L'exemple clàssic de causalitat que ofereix la física és el d'una col·lisió entre dues molècules o altres objectes rígids en la qual l'efecte global és una simple suma. Però quan dues molècules interactuen químicament, emergeix un ens completament nou, com quan l'hidrogen i l'oxigen interactuen i formen l'aigua. Hi havia la creença que el fet que emergissin propietats i capacitats noves a partir d'una interacció causal tenia importants implicacions filosòfiques per a la naturalesa de l'explicació científica. Concretament, l'absència de la novetat en les interaccions físiques significava que l'explicació dels seus efectes es podia reduir a una deducció a partir de lleis o principis generals. Tanmateix, la síntesi de l'aigua sí que produeix una cosa nova, una cosa que emergeix a partir d'ens que interactuen com a causes. Això va portar alguns filòsofs a l'errònia conclusió que els efectes emergents no es poden explicar, o, cosa que és el mateix, que un efecte només serà emergent mentre no s'hagi trobat la llei de la qual es dedueix. Aquesta línia de pensament va passar a convertir-se, a començaments del segle xx, en una filosofia completament desenvolupada, una filosofia basada en la idea que l'emergència era intrínsecament inexplicable. Aquest article afirma que, encara que la primera onada de filòsofs emergentistes va aconseguir veure que el concepte d'emergència era una poderosa manera de bloquejar el reduccionisme i , per tant, d'atorgar a altres camps diferents de la física el respecte que es mereixien, es van equivocar pel que fa a la seva inexplicabilitat inherent: les propietats emergents d'un tot sorgeixen a partir de les interaccions causals entre les seves parts, interaccions que constitueixen un mecanisme explicatiu d'aquestes propietats.The origin of the modern concept of emergence can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century, when realist philosophers first began to ponder the deep dissimilarities between causality in the fields of physics and chemistry. The classic example of causality in physics is a collision between two molecules or other rigid objects in which the overall effect is a simple addition. However, when two molecules interact chemically, an entirely new entity may emerge, as when hydrogen and oxygen interact to form water. The fact that novel properties and capacities emerge from a causal interaction was believed to have important philosophical implications for the nature of scientific explanation. In particular, the absence of novelty in physical interactions meant that explaining their effects could be reduced to deduction from general principles or laws. However, the synthesis of water does produce something new, something that emerges from the interacting entities acting as causes. This led some philosophers to the erroneous conclusion that emergent effects could not be explained, or, what amounts to the same thing, that an effect is emergent only so long as a law from which it can be deduced has not been found. This line of thought went on to become a full-fledged philosophy in the early twentieth century, based on the idea that emergence was intrinsically inexplicable. This essay argues that while the first wave of emergentist philosophers correctly saw that the concept of emergence was a powerful way to block reductionism and, therefore, to give fields other than physics their due respect, they were wrong about its inherent inexplicability: the emergent properties of a whole arise from the causal interactions between its parts, and these interactions constitute an explanatory mechanism for those properties.El origen del concepto moderno de emergencia se remonta a mitad del siglo xix, cuando los filósofos realistas empezaron por primera vez a plantearse las profundas similitudes que existían en los campos de la física y la química en torno a la cuestión de la causalidad. El ejemplo clásico de causalidad que ofrece la física es el de una colisión entre dos moléculas u otros objetos rígidos en la que el efecto global es una simple suma. Pero cuando dos moléculas interactúan químicamente, emerge un ente completamente nuevo, como cuando el hidrógeno y el oxígeno interactúan y forman el agua. Se creía que el hecho de que emergieran propiedades y capacidades nuevas a partir de una interacción causal tenía importantes implicaciones filosóficas para la naturaleza de la explicación científica. En concreto, la ausencia de la novedad en las interacciones físicas significaba que la explicación de sus efectos podía reducirse a una deducción a partir de leyes o principios generales. Sin embargo, la síntesis del agua sí produce algo nuevo, algo que emerge a partir de entes que interactúan como causas. Esto condujo a algunos filósofos a la errónea conclusión de que los efectos emergentes no pueden explicarse, o, lo que es lo mismo, que un efecto sólo será emergente mientras no se haya encontrado la ley de la cual se deduce. Esta línea de pensamiento pasó a convertirse, a principios del siglo xx, en una filosofía completamente desarrollada, una filosofía basada en la idea de que la emergencia era intrínsecamente inexplicable. Este artículo sostiene que, aunque la primera ola de filósofos emergentistas acertó a ver que el concepto de emergencia era una poderosa manera de bloquear el reduccionismo y, por lo tanto, de otorgar a otros campos diferentes de la física el respeto que estos se merecían, se equivocaron acerca de su inherente inexplicabilidad: las propiedades emergentes de un todo surgen a partir de las interacciones causales entre sus partes, interacciones que constituyen un mecanismo explicativo de esas propiedades

Learning To Be Affected: Social suffering and total pain at life’s borders.

The practice of Live Sociology in situations of pain and suffering is the author’s focus. An outline of the challenges of understanding pain is followed by a discussion of Bourdieu’s ‘social suffering’ (1999) and the palliative care philosophy of ‘total pain’. Using examples from qualitative research on disadvantaged dying migrants in the UK, attention is given to the methods that are improvised by dying people and care practitioners in attempts to bridge intersubjective divides, where the causes and routes of pain can be ontologically and temporally indeterminate and/or withdrawn. The paper contends that these latter phenomena are the incitement for the inventive bridging and performative work of care and Live Sociological methods, both of which are concerned with opposing suffering. Drawing from the ontology of total pain, I highlight the importance of (i) an engagement with a range of materials out of which attempts at intersubjective bridging can be produced, and which exceed the social, the material, and the temporally linear; and (ii) an empirical sensibility that is hospitable to the inaccessible and non-relational

Recombination in the Open-Ended Value Landscape of Digital Innovation

Digital innovation introduces a new open-ended value landscape to anyone seeking to generate or capture new value. To understand this landscape, we distinguish between design recombination and use recombination, explore how they play out together, and redirect the attention from products and services toward digital resources. Digital resources serve as building-blocks in digital innovation, and they hold the potential to simultaneously be part of multiple value paths, offered through design recombination and assembled through use recombination. Building on this perspective, we offer the value spaces framework as a tool for better understanding value creation and capture in digital innovation. We illustrate the framework and offer the early contours of a research agenda for information systems researchers

Personal health technologies, micropolitics and resistance: A new materialist analysis

Personal health technologies (PHTs) are near-body devices or applications designed for use by a single individual, principally outside healthcare facilities. They enable users to monitor physiological processes or body activity, are frequently communication-enabled, and sometimes also intervene therapeutically. This paper explores a range of PHTs, from blood pressure or blood glucose monitors purchased in pharmacies, fitness monitors such as FitBit and Nike+ Fuelband, through to drug pumps and implantable medical devices. It applies a new materialist analysis, first reverse engineering a range of PHTs to explore their micropolitics, and then forward-engineering PHTs to meet, variously, public health, corporate, patient and resisting-citizen agendas. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of PHTs, and the possibilities of designing devices and apps that might foster a subversive micropolitics and encourage collective and resisting ‘citizen-health’

Assembling and (Re)assembling critical infrastructure resilience in Khulna City, Bangladesh

Extreme Weather Events continue to cause shocking losses of life and long-term damage at scales, depths and complexities that elude robust and accountable calculation, expression and reparation. Cyclones and storm surges can wipe out entire towns, and overwhelm vulnerable built and lived environments. It was storm surges that was integral to the destructive power of Hurricane Katrina in the USA (2005), Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (2013), as well as Cyclone Nargis (2008) and the 1970 Bhola Cyclone in the Bay of Bengal. This paper report on work which concerns itself with the question of, given what we know already about such extreme weather events, and their associated critical infrastructure impacts and recovery trajectories, what scenarios, insights and tools might we develop to enable critical infrastructures which are resilient? With several of the world’s most climate vulnerable cities situated in well-peopled and rapidly growing urban areas near coasts, our case study of Khulna City speaks globally into a resilience discourse, through critical infrastructure, disaster risk reduction, through spatial data science and high visualisation. With a current population of 1.4 million estimated to rise to 2.9 million by 2030, dense historical Khulna City may well continue to perform a critical role in regional economic development and as well as a destination for environmental refugees. Working as part of the EU—CIRCLE consortium, we conduct a case study into cyclones and storm surges affecting the critical infrastructure then discuss salient developments of loss modelling. The research aims to contribute towards a practical framework that stimulates adaptive learning across multiple stakeholders and organisational genres

Pengembangan Media Video Pembelajaran Rias Fantasi di Jurusan Tata Kecantikan SMK Negeri 6 Padang

Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengembangkan media video pembelajaran dan mengetahui tingkat kevalidan, kepraktisan dan keefektifitasan media video pembelajaran pada mata pelajaran rias fantasi dengan berbagai tema di SMK Negeri 6 Padang. Jenis penelitian ini adalah penelitian dan pengembangan dengan menggunakan langkah 4-D. Populasi penelitian adalah peserta didik kelas X KCII tata kecantikan SMK Negeri 6 Padang tahun ajaran 2022/2023 yang berjumlah 36 orang. Teknik pengumpulan data menggunakan angket. Teknik analisis data dengan menghitung skor penilaian video dari angket yang diberikan dan dikategorikan sesuai dengan analisis data menggunakan uji t. Perolehan hasil penelitian ini adalah video telah dikembangkan dengan model pengembangan 4-D, hasil validitas video oleh ahli media 0.90  dan validitas materi diperoleh nilai 0.92 dengan valid, hasil uji praktikalitas video dari respon guru memperoleh nilai 97% dengan kategori sangat praktis dan dari respon peserta didik mendapatkan nilai 80.91% dengan kategori sangat praktis, hasil uji efektivitas diperoleh hasil pre-test 38,88% dan post-test diperoleh hasil 91,66% dengan kategori efektif video di gunakan di SMK Negeri 6 Kota Padang. Dari perolehan hasil tersebut, maka video telah layak, praktis dan efektif untuk digunakan sebagai bahan ajar dikelas

Travelling and sticky affects: : Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian- Guattarian lens

In this paper we combine the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1987) with Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993, 2004, 2009) work to follow the rhizomatic becomings of young people’s affective relations in a range of on- and off-line school spaces. In particular we explore how events that may be designated as sexual cyberbullying are constituted and how they are mediated by technology (such as texting or in/through social networking sites). Drawing on findings from two different studies looking at teens’ uses of and experiences with social networking sites, Arto in Denmark, and Bebo in the UK, we use this approach to think about how affects flow, are distributed, and become fixed in assemblages. We map how affects are manoeuvred and potentially disrupted by young people, suggesting that in the incidences discussed affects travel as well as stick in points of fixation. We argue that we need to grasp both affective flow and fixity in order to gain knowledge of how subjectification of the gendered/classed/racialised/sexualised body emerges. A Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian frame helps us to map some of these affective complexities that shape sexualized cyberbully events; and to recognize technologically mediated lines of flight when subjectifications are at least temporarily disrupted and new terms of recognition and intelligibility staked out. Keywords

‘Awkward Antarctic nationalism’:bodies, ice cores and gateways in and beyond Australian Antarctic Territory/East Antarctica

This paper explores ‘awkward Antarctic nationalism’ and builds on the critical scholarship that explores the contours and contradictions of everyday, mundane, banal and even hot polar nationalisms. The emphasis on ‘awkward’ is designed to draw attention to the resonances and affordances that are associated with Australian polar nationalism in and beyond the Australian Antarctic Territory/East Antarctica. Using the 2016 Australian Antarctic strategy: 20 year action plan as a starting point, it considers how bodies, ice cores and gateways are put to work in order to address a fundamental pressure facing all claimant states. That is how to reassure domestic audiences that claims to territory and access are safe, sovereign and secure without alienating others with whom one wishes to do business within a particular area of Antarctica. More broadly, the paper concludes that both claimant states and non claimant states are rubbing up against one another in areas such as custodianship, environmental stewardship and polar science and logistics. This has implications for how we interrogate the ideals and practices of the Antarctic Treaty

Consilient Discrepancy: Porosity and Atmosphere in Cinema and Architecture

Cinema constitutes a way of looking at the world, at a world – its aspect, its appearance; but it also presents how that world looks, its prospect – by the prospective glance it throws back toward us. The “look” of a film – its mood, ambiance or atmosphere – eclipses formal and aesthetics registers. It is fundamentally world-forming, and therefore both cosmogonic and ethical: cosmogonic because it produces a world in the midst of, and as, the temporality that devolves through its passage; and ethical because the world it brings about is an inhabited world, a conjugation of people and place that constructs particular ways of being-there-together. The premise here is that atmosphere, ambiance and mood have never been vague categories for cinema and need not be for architecture: rather, that they are in fact producible through deliberate organizational strategies – kinematic and narrative in film, tectonic and material in architecture – according to what might be called “consilient discrepancy” – the coexistence of disseveral systems in unaligned multiplicity that, while never fusing, resonate to produce emergent conditions. Cinema offers architecture an accessible and instructive instance of such consilient discrepancy, because, in it, atmosphere is more fully captured and the conditions that create it more evidently analyzable. To that extent, cinema provides architecture with comparative grounds for engaging with atmosphere through a properly tectonic practice that can potentially enrich the design and experience of architecture. Consilient discrepancy is evident across multiple registers in film. It can function at the level of narrative, space and time and thus puts into question verisimilitude, causality, situational and durational veracity. An example of this is the constitutive disjunctions of Jean-Luc Godard’s jump cut montage where sampled film sequences, film and photographic stills, texts and citations, ambient sound, spoken word and music, build into complex assemblages of sense (Histoire(s) du Cinema, 1998). It is evident in Nicholas Roeg’s multiple, simultaneous temporalities where past and future events interpenetrate and mutually condition the narrative present (Bad Timing, 1980). Similarly, we can find it in Michelangelo Antonioni’s sequence shots that traverse multiple timeframes across the same space – a technique that enables past and present to communicate and amplify the affective, foundational value of the unseen and off-frame (The Passenger, 1975). Another example would be David Lynch’s labyrinthine existential settings, constituted of interminable slippages between indeterminable and infinitely potentialized spaces of dreams, imagination, memory and reality (Mulholland Drive, 2001). Likewise, we could cite Michael Hanake’s persistent displacement of causality and verisimilitude through ambiguous narrative viewpoints (Caché, 2005), and Roy Andersson’s radically liminal settings and characters whose lives constitute larval pre- and/or posthuman states of existence (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, 2014). This paper will foreground two foundational characteristics of atmosphere in cinema, as evident in the works just cited, and explore their applicability to architecture. The first characteristic is the consilient discrepancy outlined here by way of introduction, and the second, related characteristic, is a spatiality of porosity and occlusion. The provisional aim of comparing cinema and architecture according to this tectonic logic is to go beyond typical ways of understanding cinema’s formal engagement with architecture. For this purpose, a detailed analysis of Béla Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) will serve as a case study for how the medium of cinema generates atmosphere, ambiance and mood through visual language. This will be followed by a similarly detailed consideration of concomitant qualities created in two recent works by the architects Flores Prats, the Mills Museum and Casal Balaguer. Functioning as exemplars of how cinematic qualities can be made manifest in architecture, these precedents will further substantiate the cinematic–architectonic proposition ventured in this paper