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How is the desk, or the room in which one works and day-dreams, a concern for critical political economy? How does this theme open onto thinking about 'the new normal'? Marx's concept of the consumption fund and Bachelard's poetics of space will help us plot the basic terms of a poetical/political economy adequate to law's involvement in the intimate topographies of post-pandemic capitalism. This paper proposes a phenomenology of intimate lived space that can provide the intellectual tools to understand the topographies of bedroom offices, kitchen table desks and car/taxis where capital takes possession of daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will argue for the relevance of certain distinctive features of messaging systems, namely those in which data (a) can be sent and received asynchronously, (b) can be sent to multiple simultaneous recipients and (c) is received as a "potentially infinite" flow of unpredictable events. I will describe the social technology of the stock ticker, a telegraphic device introduced at the New York Stock Exchange in the 1860s, with reference to early twentieth century philosophers of synchronous experience (Bergson), simultaneous sign interpretations (Mead and Peirce), and flows of discrete events (Bachelard). Then, I will show how the ticker's data flows developed into the 1990s-era technologies of message queues and message brokers, which distinguished themselves through their asynchronous implementation of ticker-like message feeds sent between otherwise incompatible computers and terminals. These latter systems' characteristic "publish/subscribe" communication pattern was one in which conceptually centralized (if logically distributed) flows of messages would be "published," and for which "subscribers" would be spontaneously notified when events of interest occurred. This paradigm—common to the so-called "message-oriented middleware" systems of the late 1990s—would re-emerge in different asynchronous distributed system contexts over the following decades, from "push media" to Twitter to the Internet of Things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I show how the French philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard, reacted to the idea of phenomenology at different stages of his philosophical development. During the early years, Kantianism (through a Schopenhauerian reading of Kant) had the greatest influence on his understanding of phenomenology. Even if he always considered phenomenology a valuable method, Bachelard believed that the term noumenon is necessary, not for a full description of reality, but for probing possible sources of reality. For him, phenomena are not only static objects or things observed in nature, but dynamic objects that can be produced or even created (hence phenomenotechnique). The noumenal realm lies beyond the structure of the phenomenal world. In his later 'poetical' years, Bachelard did not make a strict distinction between noumena and phenomena, but instead situated the poetical (literary) image, a phenomenon of literary consciousness, in specific zones between subjectivity and objectivity; the term phenomenotechnique no longer plays any role in his study of imagination or daydreams. For the later Bachelard, phenomenology became the method or attitude that can best lead us into the unexplored regions of our consciousness (reverie) which remain largely forgotten by Western philosophy, or drowned out by its exclusive concern with other aspects of consciousness, such as rational thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Home' is well known from everyday experience, plays a crucial role in all kinds of narratives about human life, but is hardly ever systematically dealt with in the philosophy of medicine and health care. The notion of home is ambiguous, is often used in a metaphorical way, and is closely related to concepts such as house and dwelling. In this paper the phenomenon of home is explored by means of some phenomenological writings of Heidegger, Bollnow, Bachelard and Levinas. Common in their views is that being at home and dwelling mean something more fundamental than an activity we do along with other activities, such as working and travelling. Dwelling, building a house and being at home are fundamental aspects of human existence. Being human is dwelling. While exploring the relevance of this phenomenological perspective for medical theory and practice, the focus is on the care of people suffering from dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nanotechnologies produce many different types of images but are characterized by the ones that allow us to 'see the atoms' despite the fact that objects at the nanoscale are smaller than the wavelength of light and hence are 'invisible'. Images from scanning probe microscopy (SPM), like 'The Beginning', have played an emblematic role in the constitution of the field and are also more likely to be used in communication outside the scientific field. These images are made, selected, modified and evaluated with respect to the information that they communicate. The 'life cycle' of these images implies the transduction of this information. Outside of the scientific field, however, they are no longer defined by this information, nor according to technical and scientific criteria, but by their aesthetic power, and they become associated with other images from other fields (art, advertisement, entertainment). This process creates a psycho-social 'halo' about 'nano' in the public perception, and raises ethical issues about nanotechnological communication via images. We will analyze the halo of the nano in this respect and propose a strategy for a reflexive 'accommodation' to the images at the nanoscale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, Perraudin sets out to contrast the competing philosophies of time and imagination of two major French thinkers of the twentieth century: Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962). Despite Bachelard’s polemical approach vis-à-vis philosophical tradition in his works on epistemology and poetics, his accounts of time and imagination have been shown by several critics to be significantly influenced and inspired by his predecessor. Perraudin nonetheless argues that Bachelard’s critique of Bergson’s theory of continuous temporality opens the way—through the subtle dialectics of his “philosophy of no”—to more prolific, and as yet untapped, therapeutic possibilities in our understanding of time and imagination than Bergson’s accounts of continuum of the élan vital had managed to reveal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]