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Zygmund Bauman - Postmodern Ethics
We publish the final chapter of Zygmund Bauman's Postmodern
Ethics. Zygmund Bauman (b. 1925) is one of the most distinguished
representatives of the British sociology and works as a professor at
Leeds University, England. One of the most prominent theoreticians
of postmodernity, Bauman is interested in numerous phenomena and
processes of the present, such as culture, politics, ethics,
morality, freedom and many others. In this book Bauman reasons that
postmodernity was formed as a response or a reaction to the
experience of modernity, as the criticism of its ambitions and
aspirations. Postmodernity presented a new evaluation of modernity
heritage. Bauman sees postmodernity as an enlightenment projection
of modernity. It emerged in the second half of the 20th century and
presented a new space for social and cultural change.
According to Bauman, the indefinite conditions of postmodernity
exclude the trust in inexhaustible human intelligence and energy.
Together with the collapse of the modernity perception of man, the
construction of society as a stable and structured formation is
challenged too. Society is perceived as an unstructured and dynamic
social bond. Bauman believes that the fragmented, fractured and
coincidental postmodern world offers different forms and spaces of
human coexistence. The social/cognitive space, together with its
hard-to-bear responsibilities and rational, dutiful existence with
the other are modified into an aesthetised social space and an
unbinding existence with the other. Postmodernity also creates
favourable conditions for the moral space and moral existence of the
other. The disappointment in social intercourse, its fragmentary and
transitory nature is compensated by the intimacy of individual
relations and morality without ethics. Out of that, Bauman
formulates a precondition, that postmodernity allows other social
constructions, i.e. unstructured aesthetic space, created by
spontaneous and aesthetised coexistence, and a moral space, governed
by morality without ethics. Bauman presents us with a unique
possibility to experience the ways morality changes and gains place
in the modern and postmodern social bond. Today, it is not seldom
that morality is seen as excluded from the every-day human
experience and individual relations. Bauman points out the faults in
such a view, and claims that morality does not fade, but just gains
different manifestations.
Hakim Bey - The Temporary Autonomous Zone
We publish extracts from the Hakim Bey's The Temporary
Autonomous Zone translated into Macedonian by the alterglobalist
publishing house "Freedom Square". Our idea is to promote the work
of these young men despite the extraordinary book of Bey.
As Bob Black has once put for Bey's T.A.Z.: …Hakim Bey, the goofy
Sufi, is the Marco Polo of the marginals milieu. An American, he
journeyed to the East for the 70s while we homebodies bumbled along
entropically. In Iran he went native. When that was not enough he
went native again, this time in a country of the imagination, a
Terra Incognita whose sea monsters hold no terror for him. Bey wants
to put his homeland on the map - on a tropical island, an asteroid,
somewhere. Bey has a potpourri of penchants - anarchy, speculative
physics, fanzines, dope, heretical Islam and comely boys - which are
somehowall of a piece in his hands. Bey put the sin back into
syncretism...." Not that he has no respect for the West - for his
Maryland forebears Poe and Mencken, for the Luddites and Ranters and
Haymarket bombers. The modern city is plainly the scene for the
crimes and japes he proposes. But Bey has harsh words for the
Occidental mandarins, the pedant provocateurs: "The Surrealists
disgraced themselves by selling amour fou to the ghost-machine of
Abstraction - they sought in their unconscious only power over
others, & in this they followed de Sade (who wanted 'freedom' only
for grownup whitemen to eviscerate women & children)."...
Venka Simovska& Emilija Georgievska
The paper "Could Psychology be critically transformed from
within? An outline of a radically different approach in Psychology"
is an attempt to introduce a new way of thinking and speaking about
psychology research and practice - known as critical psychology and
qualitative research methodology. Since it is rear examples of young
Macedonian researchers (who exiled abroad, USA and Denmark) to write
in such a critical manner we estimated it would be important to
publish it in Margina. Throughout the text, Simovska&Georgievska
argue that the subject matter of their text is absent in the context
of Macedonian Psychology. They delineate the key differences between
the two main paradigms of Psychology today - traditional and
critical psychology - by discussing the basic ontological,
epistemological and methodological assumptions that define each of
the two paradigms. They contrast the two fundamentally different
sets of assumptions regarding the conceptions of good life and good
society, the understanding of the notion of power and legitimacy in
the realm of psychological knowledge, and the question of
professional ethics in research and practice. Two major critical
arenas - feminist and cultural psychology - are described, including
few illustrative examples of the critical work in these specific
arenas. The complexity of qualitative research methodology is
introduced through contextualization within the four existing
research paradigms today: positivism, post-positivism, critical
theory and social constructionism, reiterating the basic premises of
the qualitative stance as they correspond to the fundamental
assumptions within the more general field of critical psychology.
Italo Calvino
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an
experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of
narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem
to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in
which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader,
ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's
Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the
difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading.
Using shifting structures, a succession of tales, and different
points of view, the book probes the nature of change and chance and
the interdependence of fiction and reality. The real Calvino
intersperses 10 different pastiches--stories of menace, spies,
mystery, premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make
meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and
Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night
is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes
lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both
of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and
space."
Dan Rhodes
An ingenious project in prose construction, Rhodes's book of
short stories is composed of 101 tales, each containing exactly 101
words. The short-shorts boast an economy of language common to prose
poems, or even sonnets, and the subject matter is love.
Anthropology's macabre humor builds imperceptibly, story by story
and girlfriend by girlfriend, until it reflects with surreal
accuracy how we try to complete ourselves through--or at the expense
of--another.
Like the French poetry movement OulipoAan experimental group whose
projects included the writing of an entire novel without using the
letter "e"ARhodes seems to have created a new, ostensibly senseless
form that yields some true delights.
Dan Rhodes was born in 1972, and grew up in Devon and Kent. He went
to the University of Glamorgan, where he studied humanities, and
later took a part-time MA in writing. He has written two collections
of short romantic fiction-Don't Tell Me The Truth About Love and
Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories. His first novel, Timoleon
Vieta Come Home.
Rumena Buzarovska
As part of our aim to promote the young prose writers from our
cultural context, we publish short stories by Rumena Buzarovska,
postgraduate student on English Literature at Skopje University.
Rumena Buzarovska writes prose which main accent is on the
development of the story. In this context she is representative of
the line in Macedonian young literature that put the formal
experiments and capacities of the postmodernist prose in second
plan.
Lazar Dimov
By presenting the art work from Lazar Dimov "The mounting landscape,
review on objects and objectivity" Margina is again involving into
the less popularized areas of Macedonian art scene. It is the
industrial design. Dimov researches the different aspects of the
objects and objectivity in the modern consumer society, giving
special meaning to one of its aspects - the mounting. Through this
theoretical framework Dimov is introducing a stance of practicality
in it's project that could be best seen by Philip Stark thought
(cited by Dimov himself) that "The designer should and must take
part in the quest for meaning in creation of the civilized world".
Gjorge Jovanovic
Gjorgje Jovanovic (1980) graduated in 2003 at the Faculty of Visual
Art, Skopje presents his photo-collages from "The walk of mister
Chenk through the divided continent" - his first solo exhibition in
Tochka. Using the creative features of the collage, such as the
process of selecting the material, the separation of fragments from
a whole and their implementation in a completely new concept that
gives the new meaning to the art work, the artist is occupied by one
procedure process where time is an essential element in the
completion of the art work. Opposite to this, when working on the
photographs belonging to the genre "artist's photograph" or "the
photography as art", the author uses the photograph as a media for
visual research in order to register the instant view, in this case
the characters spotted by his camera. This edition of photographs is
achieved thanks to the many features of the digital camera that
enables the artist to preserve all the interesting moments that
inspired him. The photographs were processed with a computer design
program, and they are not aiming to achieve an aesthetical effect
and better visual appeal, but to search for the structure of his
language of expression closest to his painting. That is why these
photographs do not have a status of a document, nor pretend to be in
the rank of artistic photography, rather they have an individual
artistic character in which the artist is expressing his personal
view of the world that surrounds him.
Lexicon of Yu mythology
We publish the second part of the thematic part from the Lexicon of
Yu mythology. This time we include longer essays from the book. As
we already said on this project: It is all about memory. In fact,
not only about memory, since the time is multiple, maybe even
circle, as a Mebius tape, overwhelming even the space...
So, many things are connected with the memories of SFRY. Our youth,
of course, our constitutional experiences with the getting familiar
with the world, our formation, in emotional, moral, educational,
political sense...
What is beautiful is that the forming, the constituting, actually,
never stops. The dissolution of Yugoslavia, and our caught in a
completely new social concept, independent Macedonia, meant exactly
further (and it became endless) personal and social constitution
through the vertigos of the recent Balkans history...
Many people lost everything in these vertigos: their own lives,
families, homes, properties, and living places... Their tragedy is
incomparable and irreplaceable...
The surviving majority had to face different loses. One of it is the
loss of the collective memory, which seemed confiscated by the new
nation states.
As Dubravka Ugresic put it, with the dissolution of the
multinational Yugoslavia the process of confiscation of the Yugoslav
collective memory and its substitution with the construction of the
national memory began. The war only speed up the things.
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