This paper is an application of the principles of individuality found in Guay and Pradeu to illuminate biological individuality in mushrooms. I begin with the distinction between logico-cognitive individuals and ontological individuals, and then I argue for genidentity plus material continuity, as a minimum conception of ontological individuality in biology. Of the many materially-continuous genidenticals found in fungi, only those with functional roles in biological theory, either evolutionary or physiological, warrant consideration. Given numerous ways that theory picks out materially-continuous (...) genidenticals in fungi, I argue for a pluralistic account of mushroom individuality. (shrink)

Prologue: autumn aroma -- What's left? -- Arts of noticing -- Contamination as collaboration -- Some problems with scale -- Interlude: smelling -- After progress : salvage accumulation -- Working the edge "freedom" -- Open ticket, Oregon -- War stories -- What happened to the state? : two kinds of Asian Americans in translation -- Between the dollar and the yen -- From gifts to commodities and back -- Salvage rhythms : business in disturbance -- Interlude: tracking -- Disturbed beginnings (...) : unintentional design -- The life of the forest : coming up among pines -- History -- Resurgence -- Serendipity -- Ruin in gaps and patches -- In science as translation -- Flying spores -- Interlude: dancing -- In the middle of things -- Matsutake crusaders -- Ordinary assets -- Anti-ending : some people I met along the way -- Spore trail: the further adventures of a mushroom -- Notes -- Index. (shrink)

(2013). MUSHROOMING: resistance and creativity in sigmund freud and emily dickinson. Angelaki: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 29-44.

Contrary to the rarity of totipotent cells in animals, almost every cell formed by a fungus can function as a “stem cell”. The multicellular fruiting bodies of basidiomycete fungi consist of the same kind of filamentous hyphae that form the feeding phase, or mycelium, of the organism, and visible cellular differentiation is almost nonexistent. Mushroom primordia develop from masses of converging hyphae, and the stipe (or stem), cap, and gills are clearly demarcated within the embryonic fruiting body long before the (...) organ expands and unfolds through water uptake and cell wall loosening.aThough frequent references are made to gilled mushrooms in this article, the totipotent nature of fruiting body cells and lack of meristems is also applicable to basidiomycetes that spread their spore‐producing tissues inside tubes (e.g., boletes), over spines and rippled surfaces, or form spores in cavities within the fruiting body. Even in the mature mushroom, every hypha retains its totipotency. Among animals, only sponges exhibit a similar degree of developmental flexibility, which is interesting, because these simple metazoans may be relatively close relatives of fungi. BioEssays 24:949–952, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what happens to consciousness under the influence of psychedelic drugs—specifically of psilocybin, or “magic” mushrooms— and performs a Foucauldian discourse analysis upon the answers that have been variously proposed. Predominant societally legitimated answers (the pathological, psychological, and prohibition discourses) are those that, in Foucault's sense, are imposed from the outside as “scientific classifications,” that is, they are based upon observations of the effects of mushrooms on others. By contrast, a series of resistive (...) discourses (the recreational, psychedelic, entheogenic, and animistic discourses) have been constructed in opposition, as a means of making sense of the subjective experience of taking mushrooms. When critiqued, only the animistic discourse— the belief that mushrooms occasion encounters with discarnate spirit entities, or animaphany—transgresses a fundamental societal boundary. In the West, to believe in the existence of spirits is to risk being labeled “mad,” and as such the phenomenon of mushroom‐induced animaphany goes largely ignored. It nevertheless remains a phenomenon in need of further scholarly research. (shrink)

We present the set and setting of the velada, the Mazatec ritual of divination and healing. We highlight the subjective experiences of individuals who consumed sacred mushrooms and interpret them from their cultural and community contexts, but also from findings derived from experimental and neuroscientific research. We understand that the experiences connected to sacred mushrooms can be explained by the effects of psilocybin on the neurobiology of emotions, decision making, and visual, auditory, and bodily imagery. But we also (...) understand that experimentation does not consider the individual and collective history of the person, and that the velada can provide guidance for integrating a person’s history and beliefs into experimental designs. The resurgence of psychedelic medicine prompts us into a transdisciplinary dialogue that encompasses both the anthropological perspective and the set and setting of the entheogenic experience during the sacred mushroom ritual. (shrink)

Hobbes’s account of the commonwealth is standardly interpreted to be primarily a theory of contract, whereby the archetypal manner of forming a political community is via an act of mutual agreement between suspicious individuals of equal power. By examining Hobbes’s theories of the pre-political family, and what he says about the role of real history in the development of political societies, I conclude that this standard interpretation is untenable. Rather, Hobbes’s conception of commonwealth ‘by institution’ is a hypothetical model used (...) to illustrate the mechanics of sovereignty, and to reconcile men to the conditions of subjection to absolute political power. In practice, all sovereignty is originally by ‘acquisition’. Realizing this casts serious doubt on the possibility that Hobbes is a fundamentally democratic thinker. In turn, we are invited to reconsider the history of political thought after Hobbes, in particular by seeing his theory of the family and of history as a genealogical ancestor of Scottish Enlightenment political theory. (shrink)

The role played by scientists in opposing nuclear weapons policy in Britain has been underestimated or discounted in much of the historical literature on the 1940s and 1950s. In fact an active and vocal section of scientific opinion attempted to organize public opposition to nuclear weapons. This article describes their activities. It also assesses their significance in the wider anti-nuclear weapons movement in the years leading to the foundation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

From Pliny the Elder, who was his contemporary, to the present, the unhappy ending of the fourth Julio-Claudian emperor's life is often and uncritically retold. Thus Agrippina's poisoned mushrooms have become proverbial through the writings of Pliny, Juvenal and others. Historical evidence surrounding the circumstances of his death is, however, vague, contradictory, and open to alternative explanations. In the present note I shall argue for the simplest of these: that the emperor Claudius died after having ingested – either through (...) criminal intent, or by sheer accident – the most W poisonous of mushrooms, Amanita phalloides or Death Cap. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics Is a Mushroom: Worldly Sources of Rule and Exception in Carl Schmitt and Walter BenjaminKam Shapiro (bio)Life is not a mushroom growing out of death.—Carl Schmitt, The Visibility of the ChurchTo isolate death from life, not leaving the one intimately woven in the other, and each one entering into the other’s midst—this is what one must never do.—Jean-Luc Nancy, L’intrus1Carl Schmitt’s theory of the exception was bound up (...) with a thoroughgoing critique of philosophies of immanence, materialism, and “atheism,” which he treated as interchangeable. In his early writings, he adopted the Christian perspective according to which postlapsarian nature cannot by itself yield a juridical order, or in his poetic phrase, “life is not a mushroom growing out of death.” Yet—in accord with Catholic doctrine—he also found sources of life, or law, in this world. While he repudiated theories of collective self-legislation, he embraced a popular sovereign empowered to impose form on a chaotic society. In Political Theology (1922), he compared the form-giving power of the sovereign to an act of divine intervention. Law, he argued, can only function in a lawful or “normal” situation that precedes formalization, and the sovereign “produces and guarantees the situation in its totality” [13]. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923) Schmitt retained his theological terms: “A scientific study of democracy must begin with a particular aspect that I have called political theology” [32]. In the modern age, democratic constituent power (pouvoir constituant) replaces the will of God as the transcendent source of a substantial order, namely democratic homogeneity. Democratic will-formation thereby becomes an act prior to its subject, or as Schmitt wrote, “[...] only political power, which should come from the people’s will, can form the people’s will in the first place” [Crisis 28]. A variety of democratic theorists dwell on the paradoxical character of democratic sovereignty, sometimes tracing it back to Rousseau’s well-known formulations [see esp. Connolly and Honig]. They highlight the gap between a transcendent (ideal or fictive) will in whose name political power acts, and the bounded, material consensus it forms, ostensibly rendering the latter vulnerable to challenge. As I argue, however, a closer look at Rousseau’s discussion of democratic founding in On the Social Contract reveals instead a dynamic relay between dispersed substantial or immanent sources of affiliation, on the one hand, and various agents and techniques of political power that draw on and combine them in a collective will, on the other, or what I call the virtual and the virtuosic.2 After briefly exploring this dynamic in Rousseau’s [End Page 121] On the Social Contract, I will highlight similar dynamics at work in Schmitt’s Weimar writings, examining three instances: the complexio oppositorum (1923), national myth (1923), and the polemical opposition of friend and enemy (1927), focusing especially on the first. Contrary to familiar readings of Schmitt’s metaphysical “exceptionalism,” I argue that for Schmitt, as for Rousseau, political power does not create a normative order from a vacuum, and the apparent transcendence of sovereign authority has a variety of worldly sources.3 Finally, I consider what I call “democratic virtuosity,” or virtuosity from below, focusing on Walter Benjamin’s repudiation of sovereign acts of lawmaking or law preserving in favor of ongoing collective habit-formation. As I argue, Benjamin returns spiritual force to the material world not only to shatter human authorities, but also to democratize creation.Rousseau—Anticipating the PeopleIn the Social Contract, Rousseau formulated the paradox of democratic founding to which so many, including Schmitt, would return. “In order for an emerging people to appreciate the healthy maxims of politics, and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be the result of the institution, would have to preside over the founding of the institution itself; and men would have to be prior to laws what they ought to become by means of laws” [Rousseau 69]. As Rousseau argues, a constitution can form a general will only if it commands the loyalty of the people, that is, if there is... (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes is famed for his adherence to the scientific method of his day. One of the central aspects of his science of politics is the thought-experiment of the state of nature. Like a perfect vacuum, it is an analytic concept. Some of its ramifications occupy these pages.

This article discusses the intricacies of species identification, using a real-life case of mushroom poisoning as a focal point. Two individuals had fallen seriously ill after having consumed mushrooms presumed to belong to the Leccinum group and the Boletus edulis complex. An interdisciplinary team of experts including the author attempted to diagnose the cause and to develop effective treatment. Leveraging expertise in psychology and mycology, the article highlights cognitive factors, such as the suggestibility of eyewitness memory, alongside biological factors, (...) such as complexities of fungal taxonomy, that jointly hamper species identification. The case also sparked discussions among mycologists on the potential toxicity of ostensibly safe mushrooms. The article stresses the imperative for continual updates in mycological knowledge and emphasizes broader implications of cultural conceptions and the dynamic nature of species boundaries in the context of mushroom identification, with the tragic outcome of the incident underscoring the urgency of addressing these issues across both cognitive science and mycology. (shrink)

Honey bees are eusocial insects and the workers inform their nestmates of information regarding the location of food source using symbolic communication, called ‘dance communication’, that are based on their highly advanced learning abilities. Mushroom bodies (MBs), a higher-order center in the honey bee brain, comprise some subtypes/populations of interneurons termed Kenyon cells (KCs) that are distinguished by their cell body size and location in the MBs, as well as their gene expression profiles. Although the role of MBs in learning (...) ability has been studied extensively in the honey bee, the roles of each KC subtype and their evolution in hymenopteran insects remain mostly unknown. This mini-review describes recent progress in the analysis of gene/protein expression profiles and possible functions of KC subtypes/populations in the honey bee. Especially, the discovery of novel KC subtype/population, ‘middle-type KCs’ and ‘KC population expressing FoxP’, necessitated a redefinition of the KC subtype/population. Analysis of the effects of inhibiting gene function in a KC subtype-preferential manner revealed the function of the gene product as well as of the subtype where it is expressed. Genes expressed in a KC subtype/population-preferential manner can be used to trace the differentiation of KC subtypes during the honey bee ontogeny and the possible evolution of KC subtypes in hymenopteran insects. Current findings suggest that the three KC subtypes are unique characteristics to the aculeate hymenopteran insects. Finally, recent application of genome editing for the study of KC subtype functions in the honey bee is described. Genes expressed in a KC subtype-preferential manner can be good candidate target genes for genome editing, because they are likely related to highly advanced brain functions and some of them are dispensable for normal development and sexual maturation in honey bees. (shrink)

. This book is informative, provocative, and encourages one to consider carefully how s/he chooses to live."—Erin McKenna, Utopian Studies "These four lives, researched and skillfully presented by historian Michael Bess, make fascinating ...

This article deals with the construction and performance of antisemitism in Nazi children’s books. It provides an explorative discourse analysis of _Trust No Fox_ as reported (Bauer, Trau keinem Fuchs auf grüner Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid! Ein Bilderbuch für Gross und Klein, Stürmer-Verlag, Nuremberg, 1936) and _The Poisonous Mushroom_ as reported (Hiemer, Der Giftpilz—ein Stürmerbuch für Jung u. Alt, Stürmer-Verlag, Nuremberg, 1938) through the lens of Critical applied legal linguistics (CrALL). It seeks to elucidate how ‘Jewishness’ is (...) constructed in the two books, with a view to enhancing our understanding of the intertextual and interdiscursive embeddedness of anti-Semitic rhetoric generally and nomination and predication strategies specifically. To this end, a specialised corpus of 10,002 tokens, 2,345 types and 43 illustrations was compiled. Subsequently XML annotation was applied with the data being parsed into headings, sentences and/or lines. It was found that the books follow a Jewish/non-Jewish dichotomy, consistently referring to breaches of custom, morality, religion and law. Both works purport to provide descriptive accounts of ‘Jews as they are,’ when, in fact, they generate the normative illusion of ‘Jews as they ought to be’ according to Nazi ideology. It is suggested to use the insights gained into the anti-Semitic rhetoric of children’s books to detect, describe and critique patterns of anti-Semitic rhetoric today. (shrink)

A near exclusive focus on Hannah Arendt’s concept of forgiveness from her major work The Human Condition has obscured the equally important model of reconciliation in her writings on aesthetics and in her Thought Notebook. By engaging Arendt in a dialogue with her contemporaries and friends Ingeborg Bachmann and Hermann Broch, on the one hand, and with the classic thinkers of tragedy, Aristotle and Goethe, on the other hand, I show how reconciliation responds to the situation of fatherlessness after 1945 (...) and, as a “reconciliation with reality,” offers a new basis for intersubjectivity. Having, as Arendt writes, “enough of origin within” ourselves to do without pre-established categories cannot mean that we must begin to “father” ourselves but that, on the contrary, our inception as beings born to begin anew leaves us radically forlorn and yet equipped with everything we need to “make world” with one another. The essay contends that imagination, judgment, and understanding build a network of thought figures in Arendt that are tied to reality through the work of reconciliation. (shrink)

The "people of knowledge" of traditional Mazatec medicine have preserved until today the ritual use of psilocybin mushrooms as part of their health care systems. The renewed interest in the effect of psilocybin on human consciousness for both therapeutic and recreational purposes usually obviates the historical and cultural background of indigenous peoples, as well as the legitimation of their practices and knowledge. In this article, through the case study of a foreign person who attended a Mazatec ritual specialist to (...) participate in a ritual night ceremony known as velada, we show the importance of approaching research on psychoactive plants and mushrooms from a transdisciplinary and intercultural perspective, so that we can appreciate the profound complexity of the healing processes that take place in traditional indigenous contexts, as well as the limits of recreational uses or exclusively neopositivist and clinical approaches. (shrink)

This essay explores the faultlines, poetic pressures and social structures of feeling determining poetry “after” Hiroshima. Nuclear bombs, accidents and waste pose theoretical and poetic challenges. The argument outlines a model of nuclear implicature that reworks Gricean conversational implicature. Nuclear implicature helps to describe ways in which poems “represent” nuclear problems implicitly rather than explicitly. Metonymic, metaphorical, and grammatical modes of implication are juxtaposed with recognition of social attitudes complicit with nuclear problems. Mushroom and lichen metaphors are analysed and distinguished. (...) There are brief accounts of The Chernobyl Herbarium, The Nuclear Culture Source Book and poems by Aidan Semmens, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg and Gerry Loose. The argument attempts to keep open the fragile agency of writing in poems that confront nuclear power. Poetry after Hiroshima is also contrasted with Adorno’s provocative questions about poetry after Auschwitz, amid Cold War arguments that have distorted recognition of the reality of nuclear production. The essay concludes by considering the emergence of poetry within E.P. Thompson’s theoretical account of “Exterminism,” sketching ways in which poetics and theory might inform both the nuclear imagination and the difficulties of nuclear song. (shrink)

Mhealth technology is mushrooming world-wide and, in a variety of forms, reaches increasing numbers of users in ever-widening contexts and virtually independent from standard medical evidence assessment. Yet, debate on the broader societal impact including in particular mapping and classification of ethical issues raised has been limited. This article, as part of an ongoing empirically informed ethical research project, provides an overview of ethical issues of mhealth applications with a specific focus on implications on autonomy as a key notion in (...) the debate. A multi-stage model of references to the potential of mhealth use for strengthening some or other form of self-determination will be proposed as a descriptive tool. It illustrates an assumed continuum of enhanced autonomy via mhealth broadly conceived: from patient to user autonomy, to improved health literacy, and finally to the vision of supra-individual empowerment and democratised, participatory health and medicine as a whole. On closer examination, however, these references are frequently ambivalent or vague, perpetuating the at times uncritical use of established autonomy concepts in medical ethics. The article suggests zooming in on the range of autonomy-related aspects against the backdrop of digital innovation and datafied health more generally, and on this basis add to existing frameworks for the ethical evaluation of mhealth more specifically. (shrink)

In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing explains how bare land is formed. Capitalism produces ‘ruins’ by stripping living beings of the capacity to form their own ecological relations, a necessary condition for the reproduction of life. Contemporary capitalism alienates living beings from ecological relations, i.e. capitalism generates “the ability to stand alone, as if the entanglements of living did not matter. Through alienation, people and things become (...) mobile assets; they can be removed from their lifeworlds in distance-defying transport to be exchanged with other assets from other life worlds, elsewhere” (Tsing 2021, 5). Cutting the threads of the web of life through capitalist alienation, however, produces bare land as a side effect, infertile waste deprived of the means to reproduce itself without capitalist support. Alienation is the deracination of living beings from their lifeworld, transforming them into passive cogs for capitalist accumulation. However, Tsing upholds matsutake mushrooms, rare fungi popular among Japa- nese foodies, as exemplars of the resilience of ecological relations. Even amidst ruins, matsutakes successfully form beneficial relations with other living beings, like pine trees, other fungi and human beings. The insistent capacity to regenerate ecological relations is the ineluctable means of reproduction for the matsutake mushroom. Even at the end of the world, the matsutake persists by perpetually co-producing new lifeworlds for itself and fellow living beings (see also Haraway 2016). I claim that Tsing’s approach to capitalist alienation is descriptively convinc- ing but lacks the affective force for ecological class consciousness. Tsing surveys the web of life from the perspective of living beings quite distant from humankind, articulating a theoretical diagnosis rather than a political exhortation. On an affective level, it is challenging to generate ecological class consciousness among the (presumably) human readers of my chapter if they are presented with only the biographies of mushrooms growing far beyond my home. As Chantal Mouffe (2018, 72) argues, the construction of an emphatically political identity requires an appeal to the affects, like hope, indignation or compassion. Latour and Schultz also stress that ecological politics currently suffers from an affective misalignment, with people failing to identify with the fate of their increasingly inhospitable environments (2022, 47). Why would European humans care about these unknown fungi? The reproduction of our CO2-intensive livelihoods largely depends on the emission of bare land elsewhere, so in the short run, we stand to benefit more from putting our heads in the sand. I employ Chakrabarty’s (2021) suggestion of grounding post-humanist politics first in strategic anthropocentrism to subsequently push for a post-humanist expansion of our human understanding. One must first feel personally interpellated by the crisis of the global means of reproduction before one can grasp the need for an ecological class politics beyond human confines. I turn to John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath as a kindred spirit with more mobilising potential. Steinbeck tells the story of a family of impoverished farmers from Oklahoma, the Joads, travelling to California in pursuit of a better life, yet only encountering more poverty, exploitation and anti-immigrant racism. Steinbeck describes in detail the environmental and social devastation, but he focuses on the commodified labour power of migrant farmers rather than commodified mushrooms. Steinbeck’s main characters are also uprooted from their entangled histories in the land and community of rural Oklahoma, but they present a more familiar face of the ecological class deprived of the means of reproduction. Steinbeck’s outcry against alienation-as-deracination is clear, but the shift in perspective facilitates the empathetic outrage required for building ecological class consciousness. Steinbeck’s strategic anthropocentrism helps human readers understand why alienation-as-deracination is a concern. (shrink)

In recent years the mushrooming power, functionality and ubiquity of computers and the Internet have outstripped early forecasts about technology's rate of advancement and usefulness in everyday life. Alert pundits now foresee a world saturated with powerful computer chips, which will increasingly insinuate themselves into our gadgets, dwellings, apparel and even our bodies.

Codes of governance have mushroomed in contexts operating under a single, dominant institutional logic, such as publicly listed corporations. These codes act as institutional prescriptions that help spread best practices throughout industries. More recently, in some countries, specific codes have been developed for hybrid organizations that integrate multiple, conflicting institutional logics simultaneously, such as cooperative enterprises. Drawing on an extensive set of qualitative data, we ask how such institutional prescriptions may (fail to) address governance challenges in organizations with multiple, conflicting (...) institutional demands. In doing so, we extend current literature on governance of hybrid organizations, which has so far focused on individual and organizational levels, to include institutional-level strategies. While governance codes are often inspired by deontological ethics to solve issues in a single institutional logic, we find that governance codes for hybrid organizations should not prioritize a single institutional logic, nor follow a deontological approach to improving governance, but should, on a more pragmatist take, remain open to continuous learning. (shrink)

Codes of governance have mushroomed in contexts operating under a single, dominant institutional logic, such as publicly listed corporations. These codes act as institutional prescriptions that help spread best practices throughout industries. More recently, in some countries, specific codes have been developed for hybrid organizations that integrate multiple, conflicting institutional logics simultaneously, such as cooperative enterprises. Drawing on an extensive set of qualitative data, we ask how such institutional prescriptions may (fail to) address governance challenges in organizations with multiple, conflicting (...) institutional demands. In doing so, we extend current literature on governance of hybrid organizations, which has so far focused on individual and organizational levels, to include institutional-level strategies. While governance codes are often inspired by deontological ethics to solve issues in a single institutional logic, we find that governance codes for hybrid organizations should not prioritize a single institutional logic, nor follow a deontological approach to improving governance, but should, on a more pragmatist take, remain open to continuous learning. (shrink)

In the bracket mushroom, Schizophyllum commune, a recessive genetic alteration, mnd, causes abnormally hyperplastic three‐dimensional mounds of hyphae to rise from the surface of both haploid and dikaryotic mycelia. mnd, although not a genetic block in the fruiting body developmental pathway, is at least partially epistatic to fruiting. Within dikaryons containing both mutant and wild‐type nuclei, [mnd + mnd+], a nonreciprocal somatic recombination event can lead to stable conversion of the mnd+ region of the wild‐type nucleus to mnd. This transformation (...) to the homoallelic [mnd + mnd] condition involves no genomic areas other than the mnd region and permanently prevents any further fruiting. Studies relating to the recombination mechanism have ruled out a diploid intermediate state and other concomitants of orthodox somatic recombination, as well as whole chromosome transfer. Instead, a novel form of internuclear genetic transfer is postulated whereby a nearby locus, mob+, controls the mobilization of the mnd chromosomal region alone from one nucleus to the other within the binucleate cells of dikaryotic mycelia. (shrink)

We argue that current discussions of criteria for actual causation are ill-posed in several respects. (1) The methodology of current discussions is by induction from intuitions about an infinitesimal fraction of the possible examples and counterexamples; (2) cases with larger numbers of causes generate novel puzzles; (3) “neuron” and causal Bayes net diagrams are, as deployed in discussions of actual causation, almost always ambiguous; (4) actual causation is (intuitively) relative to an initial system state since state changes are relevant, but (...) most current accounts ignore state changes through time; (5) more generally, there is no reason to think that philosophical judgements about these sorts of cases are normative; but (6) there is a dearth of relevant psychological research that bears on whether various philosophical accounts are descriptive. Our skepticism is not directed towards the possibility of a correct account of actual causation; rather, we argue that standard methods will not lead to such an account. A different approach is required. Once upon a time a hungry wanderer came into a village. He filled an iron cauldron with water, built a fire under it, and dropped a stone into the water. “I do like a tasty stone soup” he announced. Soon a villager added a cabbage to the pot, another added some salt and others added potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on, until there was a meal for all. (shrink)

Over the past decade, investments in agricultural and food technology startups have grown to previously unknown dimensions. Mushrooming agri-food tech startups that promise to solve critical issues in the agri-food system through technological innovation are increasingly perceived as an attractive new investment opportunity for venture capitalists and investors. This paper investigates how digital agri-food technologies are narrated, constructed, and promoted for financial investment. Through qualitative content analysis of agri-food tech industry reports, articles, and commentaries we trace the logic, rationales, and (...) narratives of this most recent investment rush, and reveal its immanent techno-finance fixes. We conceptualize the agri-food imaginaries produced within the agri-food tech discourse as financialized imaginaries, and argue that they are specifically tailored to construct, incentivize, and legitimize this new agri-food tech space for financial investment. In their attempt to raise money from investors, venture capital firms further fuel this development by discursively creating an ‘agri-food tech investment rush’—similar to the land and gold rushes of the past. Investments in agri-food tech startups, however, are presented to investors as both a profitable investment opportunity as well as a moral obligation, allowing for food production to cope with neo-malthusian and environmental threats. This paper contributes to our understanding of digitization as a socio-technical project, which includes the active envisioning and promotion of desirable agri-food futures. (shrink)

How do we care well for a human being: ourselves or another? Non-Kantian scholars rarely identify the philosophy of Kant as a particularly useful resource with which to understand the full complexity of human care. Kant’s philosophy is often taken to presuppose that a philosophical analysis of good human life needs to attend only to how autonomous, rational agents—sprung up like mushrooms out of nowhere, without a childhood, never sick, always independent—ought to act respectfully, and how they can be (...) forced to interact rightfully. Questions involving aspects of human life captured by what Eva Kittay aptly phrased “the fact of dependency” (1999) —such as our vulnerable, fragile, and embodied social natures, asymmetrical care relations, and deep systemic injustices—are therefore commonly thought to be beyond the grasp of Kant and of Kantian philosophy. Against this historically prominent understanding of Kant’s practical philosophy, below I engage and draw upon recent Kant scholarship which shows both the inadequacy of such rationalist readings and the fruitfulness of using Kant’s practical philosophy to enhance our understanding of human care relations. After situating my approach in the existing, relevant secondary literature on Kant’s human agent, I explore key features of Kant’s accounts of human nature and the highest good. I pay special attention to his proposal that our human nature comprises reflective and unreflective aspects and patterns that we (ought to) strive to develop, transform, and integrate in wise ways through our faculty of desire. In addition, I emphasize the dangers that our ineradicable propensity to do bad things (evil) poses for our projects of self- and other- care. I proceed by outlining how Kant’s account of moral (ethical and legal) responsibility for self and others is developed through his theories of freedom, that is, through his theory of virtue (virtuous internal freedom with its account of perfect and imperfect duties) and his theory of right (rightful external freedom with its account of innate, private, and public right). On the conception I am advancing, we are pretty messy, fragile, and vulnerable beings whose projects of caring are difficult, ongoing, and complex. On the one hand, we (should) strive to care for ourselves (by striving to manage and heal badly functioning parts and by developing, transforming, and integrating immature or distinct parts of ourselves into good wholes) and for others (assisting them in their projects of management and healing and of developing, transforming, and integrating themselves into good wholes) in ways that are both respectful and attentive to the particular people we are—people with lives of our own to live—and the kinds of relationships we share. On the other hand, we should, and can, be forced to interact rightfully, meaning interaction consistent with one another’s basic (innate, private, and public) rights and, hence, contribute to reform projects that improve our inherited, imperfect legal-political systems with regard to care relations. Bringing Kant’s philosophy into dialogue with care theorists, I conclude, advances the insights of both traditions by showing one way to arrive at a multifaceted, yet unified account of human care relations where our embodied, social as well as our rational natures are given due consideration. (shrink)

In light of new historical evidence regarding ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson’s correspondence with art historian Erwin Panofsky, this article provides an in-depth analysis of the presence of entheogenic mushroom images in Christian art within the context of the controversy between Wasson and philologist John Marco Allegro over the identification of a Garden of Eden fresco in the 12th century Chapel of Plaincourault in France. It reveals a compelling financial motive for Wasson’s refusal to acknowledge that this fresco represents Amanita muscaria, (...) as well as for Wasson’s reluctance to pursue his hypothesis regarding the entheogenic origins of religion into Christian art and artifacts. While Wasson’s view – that the presence of psychoactive mushrooms in the Near and Middle East ended around 1000 BCE – prevailed and stymied research on entheogens in Christianity for decades, a new generation of 21st century researchers has documented growing evidence of A. muscaria and psilocybin-containing mushrooms in Christian art, consistent with ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini’s typology of mushroom trees. This article presents original photographs, taken during fieldwork at churches and cathedrals throughout Europe and the Middle East, that confirm the presence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art: in frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, and stained glass windows. Based on this iconic evidence, the article proposes a psychedelic gospels theory and addresses critiques of this theory by art historians, ardent advocates, medieval historians, and conservative Catholics. It calls for the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Committee on the Psychedelic Gospels to independently evaluate the growing body of evidence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art in order to resolve a controversial question regarding the possible role of entheogens in the history and origins of Christianity. (shrink)

Grice's arguments that ordinary language indicative conditionals are logically equivalent to material conditionals are criticized. It is agreed that 'indirectness conditions' going beyond the material conditional can "sometimes" be detached' from ordinary language conditionals, but it is argued that this is not always possible. An example in which a speaker who knows that some mushrooms are non-poisonous tells a hearer "if you eat those mushrooms you will be poisoned", causing the hearer not to eat the mushrooms, is (...) discussed, and it is argued that this utterance should be regarded as factually unsatisfactory', and therefore, by Grice's own standards, false. (shrink)

Organizations routinely make choices when addressing conflicting stakes of their stakeholders. As stakeholder theory continues to mature, scholars continue to seek ways to make it more usable, yet proponents continue to debate its legitimacy. Various scholarly attempts to ground stakeholder theory have not narrowed down this debate. We draw from the work of Juergen Habermas to theoretically advance stakeholder theory, and to provide practical examples to illustrate our approach. Specifically, we apply Habermas’ language-pragmatic approach to extend stakeholder theory by advancing (...) seven sets of normative axioms. We conclude that a deliberative approach, with its focus on the conditions of legitimation and deliberative democracy, has the potential to become a cornerstone of stakeholder theory. The need for global stakeholder discourse and its internalization in corporate structures and institutions is exemplified by a multitude of CSR and stakeholder initiatives that have mushroomed in response to global risk scenarios such as climate change, nuclear warfare, or terrorism. Further research may help to build a functioning global governance system in order to provide guidance for management in the 21st century. (shrink)

In the present paper I want to do two things. First, I want to discuss Ramsey’s own views of Ramsey-sentences. This, it seems to me, is an important issue not just (or mainly) because of its historical interest. It has a deep philosophical significance. Addressing it will enable us to see what Ramsey’s lasting contribution in the philosophy of science was as well as what its relevance to today’s problems is. Since the 1950s, where the interest in Ramsey’s views has (...) mushroomed, there have been a number of different ways to read Ramsey’s views and to reconstruct Ramsey’s project. The second aim of the present paper is to discuss the most significant and controversial of this reconstruction, viz., structuralism. After some discussion of the problems of structuralism in the philosophy of science, as this was exemplified in Bertrand Russell’s and Grover Maxwell’s views and has re-appeared in Elie Zahar’s and John Worrall’s thought, I will argue that, for good reasons, Ramsey did not see his Ramsey-sentences as part of some sort of structuralist programme. I will close with an image of scientific theories that Ramsey might have found congenial. I will call it Ramseyan humility. (shrink)

The received wisdom in statistical mechanics is that isolated systems, when left to themselves, approach equilibrium. But under what circumstances does an equilibrium state exist and an approach to equilibrium take place? In this paper we address these questions from the vantage point of the long-run fraction of time definition of Boltzmannian equilibrium that we developed in two recent papers. After a short summary of Boltzmannian statistical mechanics and our definition of equilibrium, we state an existence theorem which provides general (...) criteria for the existence of an equilibrium state. We first illustrate how the theorem works with a toy example, which allows us to illustrate the various elements of the theorem in a simple setting. After a look at the ergodic programme, we discuss equilibria in a number of different gas systems: the ideal gas, the dilute gas, the Kac gas, the stadium gas, the mushroom gas and the multi-mushroom gas. In the conclusion we briefly summarise the main points and highlight open questions. (shrink)

During the past decades, the culture industries have multiplied media spectacles in novel spaces and sites, and spectacle itself is becoming one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society, and everyday life. An Internet-based economy has been developing hi-tech spectacle as a means of promotion, reproduction, and the circulation and selling of commodities, using multimedia and increasingly sophisticated technology to dazzle consumers. M edia culture proliferates ever more technologically sophisticated spectacles to seize audiences and augment their power and (...) profit. The forms of entertainment permeate news and information, and a tablodized infotainment culture is more and more popular. New multimedia that synthesize forms of radio, film, TV news and entertainment, and the mushrooming domain of cyberspace, become spectacles of technoculture, generating expanding sites of information and entertainment, while intensifying the spectacle-form of media culture. Political and social life is also shaped more and more by media spectacle. Social and political conflicts are increasingly played out on the screens of media culture, which display spectacles like sensational murder cases, terrorist bombings, celebrity and political sex scandals, and the explosive violence of everyday life. M edia culture not only takes up expanding moments of contemporary experience, but also provides ever more material for fantasy, dreaming, modeling thought and behavior, and constructing identities. Of course, there have been spectacles since premodern times. Classical Greece had its Olympics, thespian and poetry festivals, its public rhetorical battles, and bloody and violent wars. Ancient Rome had its public offerings of bread and circuses, its orgies, its titanic political battles, and the spectacle of Empire with parades and monuments for triumphant Caesars and their armies, extravaganzas put on display in the 2000 film Gladiator.. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

Higher education institutions in the Arabian Gulf region today, which have mushroomed and proliferated in the past ten to fifteen years, have been constructing themselves along models of Western universities at the levels of governance, programs, and structure. At the outset of the twenty-first century, universities have globally experienced a drastic shift in their governance from ‘republics of scholars’ to stakeholder organizations. In this paper, we discuss and deconstruct some of the consequences of that drastic shift, paramount among which is (...) the downsizing and neglect of some sciences/fields. We discuss some of the major problems that the Market Model of the University is facing in the West through a literature review. We also explore the academic view on some problems and challenges facing University governance today in the globe at large and specifically in the Arabian Gulf Region. We believe that universities in this region in their present state face the serious challenge of generating indigenous knowledge that fulfills the needs of citizens within this region, knowledge that draws upon the culture, history, and geography of the area and responds to the specific needs of citizens in this area. (shrink)