Ghost/Machine: cinema in a digital age

Cinema, with its passive cinematic apparatus and linear narrative is often characterised as a contrast to new media narrative strategies, yet from Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera to Mike Figgis’ TimeCode and Wong Kar Wei’s 2046 cinema provides narrative strategies and spatial conceptualisations which prefigure or are contiguous with new media environments. Both our perception of what cyberspace constitutes and the technology that actualises those perceptions arise out of and are driven by fantasy and desire. This paper will explore the metaphors used to represent and understand new media aesthetics through cinematic representations of new media environments. Two key themes relevant to new media aesthetics emerge. Irigaray, Haraway, and Grosz are used to explore the de-essentialising haptic and penetrative potential of new technologies and their ability to collapse the boundary between the body and the machine. The second fantasy, of new media as a liminal space that expresses the memorialising function of technology and its relation to mourning, is analysed using Benjamin, Burgin and Rutsky. These altered spaces and perceptions of the body and memory of the post-cinematic subject are illustrated through an analysis of Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. [From the Author]

Ghost and self: Jung's paradigm shift and a response to Zinkin

Zinkin's lucid challenge to Jung makes perfect sense. Indeed, it is the implications of this `making sense' that this paper addresses. For Zinkin's characterization of the `self' takes it as a `concept' requiring coherence; a variety of abstract non-contextual knowledge that itself has a mythical heritage. Moreover, Zinkin's refinement of Jung seeks to make his work fit for the scientific paradigm of modernity. In turn, modernity's paradigm owes much to Newton's notion of knowledge via reductionism. Here knowledge or investigation is divided up into the smallest possible units with the aim of eventually putting it all together into `one' picture of scientific truth. Unfortunately, `reductionism' does not do justice to the resonant possibilities of Jung's writing. These look forward to a new scientific paradigm of the twenty-first century, of the interactive `field', emergence and complexity theory. The paper works paradoxically by discovering Zinkin's `intersubjective self' after all, in two undervalued narratives by Jung, his doctoral thesis and a short late ghost story. However, in the ambivalences and radical fictional experimentation of these fascinating texts can be discerned an-Other self, one both created and found. [From the Publisher]

Journal citation among heterodox economists 1995-2007: Dynamics of community emergence

Purpose – This study aims to investigate the pattern among 17 heterodox economic journals over a prolonged period to provide evidence about the social dynamics among the group of researchers who publish in them and the extent to which they hold or develop a collective identity as heterodox economists. Design/methodology/approach – Traditional approaches to citation analysis are extended by the use of techniques from social network analysis. In addition to citation counts, measures of network position and clique membership are used to identify key journals and turning points in a longitudinal analysis. Findings – Important shifts in the nature of citation within the network of journals are identified in the 1998-2001 period and evidence is found of the emergence of a collective identity. Research limitations/implications – The methods prove a valuable extension of citation analysis and also focus greater consideration on the social relationships that citations represent. They are well suited to addressing the principal limitation of the study, its restriction to journals within the defined community rather than journals in general. Originality/value – This extends traditional approaches to citation analysis, provides an important new technique in identifying emergent collective identities and provides insight into the history and nature of the heterodox economic community.