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This paper is the first article in English of Rosenstock-Huessy'sFull Count of the Times, the second volume of hisSociology. The vastness and diversity of Rosenstock-Huessy's corpus, plus the associative manner of his writing, makes any systematic analysis of his work very difficult. Yet he explicitly stated in his Sociology that he did have a system. In this paper I clarify why his work is devoted to theFull Count of the Times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is not yet, and perhaps never could be, a clear canonical history that makes sense of Charles Sanders Peirce. In this sense, despite the best efforts of Peirce scholarship, Peirce is not 'an author'. A highly technical philosopher who worked on several fronts, he appears to espouse positions that the standard traditions of philosophical debate find difficult to hold together. Partly because of the fragmentary nature of his oeuvre, and partly because of the diversity of his interests, he is often appropriated into projects, these appropriations contributing further to the difficulty of telling a single sense-making story. In this paper, I sketch five stories: 1. Peirce as sui generis, the founder of pragmatism; 2. Peirce as not sui generis - the influences in his work and the conversations of the philosophers in which he participated; 3. Peirce as a philosopher of science, and hence, not compatible with projects in the human sciences and the humanities; 4. Peirce as he was appropriated into the human sciences and the humanities, in the form of semiology and following that, into Derrida's critique of semiology; 5. Peirce retrieved by neo-pragmatism as a weapon against 'French theory'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguing towards a theory of dromology, Paul Virilio engages at every turn with the consequences of acceleration on society - primarily the ever-increasing speed of information transmission - on society. This paper uses Virilio's theories, specifically his arguments surrounding the impact of acceleration on our experiences of space, to question the workings of agency between humans and technology. Looking specifically at video games and the practice of modding to make user-generated machinima, this paper suggests that a simple binary positioning of humans and techno-agents is an insufficient way to approach the relationships, patterns, effects and outcomes that emerge at the juncture of humans and 'their' technology. Instead, this paper suggests a model of agency that does not privilege a techno-agent, as in the case of Virilio, over a human agent and suggests that it is potentially more useful to consider agency as distributed between, among and across, an assemblage of both human and non-human actors. The aim of this paper is also to consider what anthropological enquiry, and by extension its methodologies, can contribute to a discussion of Virilio's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two starting points from which this paper is constructed: first, Virilio's observation that the wealth of societies is founded on their dromocratic condition, that the faster societies accelerate their citizens, commercial goods and communication the more political and economic power they have and, second, the links that he traces between technologies of speed and acceleration and the accident. We suggest that Virilio's ideas on this invite and deserve a closer ethnographic scrutiny than they have so far received, scrutiny that highlights the varied ways in which speed, acceleration and the accident are articulated in different cultural contexts. To this end we offer an investigation into the dromocratic condition, the violence of speed and the uses of accidents in Iceland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do we not find that the repetitive deployment of certain phrases and words in academic language entails a conceptualisation of meaning into objects that are thereafter encountered daily not as thoughts or ideas but merely as a socio-cultural force? Is it not necessary to identify and illuminate them, and to contrive some sort of resistance to their potent, though unrecognised, illocutionary effects? This article concerns the everyday cultural practices of academic life. It is an attempted intervention into the mundane language use of academics in order to impact critically upon the ongoing and constant articulation of certain culturally latent assumptions into political effects. I argue that within the social and human sciences ‘sump concepts’ are those extremely common concepts that recur in analysis and explanation due to their easy accessibility and to the function that they serve in reproducing certain discourses of social power. In particular, they constitute territorialisations of language, linguistic creations that close off polyvocity, contingency and possibility through identity-thinking into sutured and reactionary conceptualisations. I present a selection of three sump concepts that have become thoroughly imbricated into the discursive culture of academic life – Bottom-Up, Evolution, and Concrete – and that are complacently resorted to on a daily basis in social science research and in social discourse. By exploring their potencies, purposes and pitfalls, I demand a more cautious and considered deployment of these concepts in our academic discourses, and advocate for a critical practice of negative dialectics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the two major publicistic enterprises of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy at the time of the Weimar Republic, the Patmos Publishing House and the journalDie Kreatur. Introducing and discussing both projects and Rosenstock-Huessy's collaborators, it intends to scrutinise the personal and intellectual significance of the two prevailing circles of contributors for Rosenstock-Huessy as a practical example of his sociological key concept of ‘Symblysma’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]