BiblioVault - Books about Experience

Refrains for Moving Bodies

Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces

Derek P. McCormack

Duke University Press, 2013

In Refrains for Moving Bodies, Derek P. McCormack explores the kinds of experiments with experience that can take place in the affective spaces generated when bodies move. Drawing out new connections between thinkers including Henri Lefebvre, William James, John Dewey, Gregory Bateson, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, McCormack argues for a critically affirmative experimentalism responsive to the opportunities such spaces provide for rethinking and remaking maps of experience. Foregrounding the rhythmic and atmospheric qualities of these spaces, he demonstrates the particular value of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "refrain" for thinking and diagramming affect, bodies, and space-times together in creative ways, putting this concept to work to animate empirical encounters with practices and technologies as varied as dance therapy, choreography, radio sports commentary, and music video. What emerges are geographies of experimental participation that perform and disclose inventive ways of thinking within the myriad spaces where the affective capacities of bodies are modulated through moving.

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Remembrances

The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature

Stephen Owen

Harvard University Press, 1986

Stephen Owen's book, inspired by Chinese literature, is for all who value literature in any language. Remembrances takes up the strongest claims we can make for literature: that it can sustain life in the present and the life of the past. The past has always played a particularly powerful role in Chinese civilization. Both private memories and cultural artifacts were an inescapable part of the present, offering models for present behavior and recalling what had been lost.

Owen shows how the fascination with the past came into being in Chinese literature, some of the forms it took, and the ways readers have responded to such literature. He reflects on a series of moments in Chinese writing from the seventh century B.C. to the early nineteenth century. Through poems, anecdotes, exegeses, and one long story of an ardent collector and his wife, Owen treats a theme basic to Chinese civilization not as something exotic but as a motif fundamental to our civilization, even though its expression differs from our own.

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Rhetorical Homologies

Form, Culture, Experience

Barry Brummett

University of Alabama Press, 2009

A highly developed study of the relationships between rhetoric and public culture.

One of the most widely used ideas in scholarship of the humanities and social sciences is that of homology: a formal pattern structuring different kinds of texts, ideas, and experiences. Rhetorical Homologies explores the central meaning of this form in a variety of discourses and also examines the kind of homologies that shape audience responses to personal, public, and political issues. Barry Brummett is most interested in homologies among very different orders of experience and texts: experiences on the battlefield that are homologous to those at a dining room table, for instance. What the common patterns that underlie such cases mean, why they are interesting, and why homology is rhetorical are the subjects of this study.

Brummett focuses on a wide range of topics, from the homologies between rhetoric and weapons throughout history to the homology of ritual injuries as manifested in representations of Christian martyrs, Laurel and Hardy films, the African-American practice of playing the dozens, and televised professional wrestling. Brummett also explores the homology of the Wise Woman, using rhetorical representations of Sojourner Truth and Oprah Winfrey. In a concluding chapter, Brummett argues that the idea of homology is important in understanding how social life is organized in general and that the centrality of discourse in organizing experience makes rhetorical homologies an important perspective for general knowledge beyond the boundaries of this study.

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The Role of the Judge in International Trade Regulation

Experience and Lessons for the WTO

Thomas Cottier and Petros C. Mavroidis, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2003

The WTO is generally seen as a key actor of globalization and, as such, has been the point of convergence of popular irritation worldwide. Many of the reproaches addressed to the WTO show civil societys concern with what is perceived as a democratic deficit in the way the organization operates. The main fear is to see trade rise as the ultimate value, prevailing over concerns such as health and environment. The Role of the Judge offers insight into how disputes are solved at the WTO level, into how the judicial branch interacts with the rest of the organization, and into the degree of sensitivity of the system to external input. The book sheds light on the judicial system governing the WTO and shows it to be the only truly multilateral system where disputes are solved by third-party adjudication.
The book develops along three lines: the first a search for cases submitted to the WTO where the judge exceeded its authority; the second a comparison of the WTO with the operations of national judicial systems having different levels of integration, specifically the United States (federal level) and the EC (quasi-federal level); and the third an exploration of directions for the future of dispute settlement in the WTO.
Reflecting the diversity of its contributors, this book addresses questions of economics, political science, and law, bringing an unusual level of multidisciplinarity to this topic and context. It is designed for both academic readers and practitioners, who will find it full of practical insights as well as rich and detailed analysis.
Thomas Cottier is Professor of European and International Economic Law, University of Bern, and Managing Director, World Trade Institute, University of Bern.
Petros C. Mavroidis is Professor of Law, University of Neuchâtel. He formerly worked in the Legal Affairs Division of the World Trade Organization.
Patrick Blatter is Mavroidiss scientific collaborator.

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