Fluent Essays

Philosophy final paper, broken down into three partsFinal Project (25 pts) Prompt: Throughout the quarter, Sara Ahmed will guide us through the uses of use, and the goal of the final project is to take a selection of text from the course and “make use of it.” This will take different shapes for everyone but hopefully by the end of the quarter you will have found something that you find useful in Philosophy. Ahmed suggests that use is in the plural—that things have different uses and use has different uses. She says: In some instances, then, by “uses of use,” I am referring to how scholars have made use of use in developing their arguments. In reading for use, we are making connections that might not otherwise have been made across domains that might otherwise remain distinct, such as biology, psychology, architecture, and design, which all make use of use to explain the acquisition of form.[footnoteRef:0] [0: Ahmed, What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use, Durham: Duke UP, 2019, 8.] Following her, you might choose to write a paper that makes certain connections, you might want to change the form of a text to give it another use, you might want to create an object of use. I am giving you the opportunity to be creative with this task. However, I do have to approve of the project, which is why you must first submit a proposal where I’ll give you notes or suggest that you change some things. The final project must be submitted in two parts: 1. By March 2rd at 21:00am CST you must submit a proposal (5 pts): A description (of about one page) of the use you intend to make of the text detailing: i. The section or text that you will make use of (it may be a subsection of a text, a chapter or a full text) ii. Material you will create, detailing the medium you will use iii. A justification of why the original material can be used in the way you intend to use it (remember that Ahmed in pp 25-26 claims that material/materiality is important to determine which uses can be given to a thing, even if they are outside of the intended use). 2. By March 15 at 8:00am CST you must submit (20pts): a. An introduction of 2 pages in length (double space, 12pt). If you decide to write a paper, the introduction should be part of your paper, if you decide to do something else, your introduction should be in a separate document. Your introduction should do the following: i. Explain very briefly the main issue that you think the section of the text/the text you chose treats (in other words, what is the main thesis of the section of text/text.) ii. Why you think the text is useful in the way you to use it. Explain why you find this to be useful. iii. Explain the way you use the text, describe the process you follow. b. Your final paper (the paper should be at list 6 pages exclude the introduction pages and work cited page) Assessment Grading of the project will be determined by the following criteria: · Timely submission of each of the elements · Capacity to understand what the stake of the chosen text is and ability to tJohn Wilkins Analytical Language I see that the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has omitted the article on John Wilkins. The omission is justifiable if we recall its trivi­ ality (twenty lines of mere biographical data: Wilkins was born in 1614; Wilkins died in 1672; Wilkins was the chaplain of the Prince Palatine, Charles Louis; Wilkins was appointed rector of one of the colleges of Ox­ ford; Wilkins was the first secretary of the Royal Society of London; etc . ) b u t inexcusable if w e consider Wilkins speculative work. He was full of happy curiosity: interested in theology, cryptography, music, the manufac­ ture of transparent beehives, the course of an invisible planet, the possi­ bility of a trip to the moon, the possibility and the principles of a world language. He devoted a book to this last problem: An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (6oo pages in quarto, 1668 ) . Our National Library does not have a copy; to write this note I have consulted The Life and Times of john Wilkins by P. A. Wright Henderson (1910 ) ; the Worterbuch der Philosophie by Fritz Mauthner ( 1924); Delphos by E. Sylvia Pankhurst ( 193 5 ) ; and Dangerous Thoughts by Lancelot Hogben (1939 ) . All o f us, a t one time o r another, have suffered through those unappeal­ able debates in which a lady, with copious interjections and anacolutha, as­ serts that the word luna is more (or less) expressive than the word moon. Apart from the obvious comment that the monosyllable moon may be more appropriate as a representation of a simple object than the disyllabic luna, nothing can be contributed to such discussions; except for compound words and derivatives, all the languages in the world ( not excluding Johann Martin Schleyers Volapiik and Peanos romantic Interlingua) are equally inexpressive. There is no edition of the Royal Spanish Academy Grammar that does not ponder the envied treasure of picturesque, felicitous, and ex­ pressive words in the riches of the Spanish language, but that is mere boasting, with no corroboration. Meanwhile, that same Royal Academy 230 J O R G E L U I S B O R G E S produces a dictionary every few years in order to define those words . . . . In the universal language conceived by Wilkins in the middle of the seventeenth century, each word defines itself. Descartes, in a letter dated November 1619, had already noted that, by using the decimal system of nu­ meration, we could learn in a single day to name all quantities to infinity, and to write them in a new language, the language of numbers; he also pro­ posed the creation of a similar, general language that would organize and contain all human thought. Around 1664, John Wilkins undertook that task. He divided the universe into forty categories or classes, which were then subdivided into differences, and subdivided in turn into species. To each class he assigned a m1 03 2008 Politics of the archive Translations in film Hito Steyerl   VHS to .flv A closeup of a woman at a blackboard. She turns around to speak. But her mouth is not visible on screen. Clearly, this picture has been cropped on both sides. But why? And by whom?   Translating images into words. This text deals with some aspects of the afterlife of two films. Both were shot in Yugoslavia. Both are famous partisan movies, called Valter brani Sarajevo (1972) and Bitka na Neretvi (1969). The film studio where Valter brani Sarajevo was shot was destroyed in the recent Bosnian War. But this film and the even more legendary Bitka na Neretvi live on. Their existence in cinemas belongs to the past, just like the country they were produced in. But they travel around the world as home videos, as DVDs or online. The afterlife, as Walter Benjamin once famously mentioned, is the realm of translation. This also applies to the afterlife of films. In this sense, this text deals with translation: with the transformations of two films, whose original prints were caught up in warfare, transformations which include transfer, editing, translation, digital compression, recombination and appropriation.   Memory 2 I came across the incomplete picture of the woman teacher, when doing research for a film of mine. I saw it on a cinema screen in the Sarajevo film museum, where the print is screened once a year – in order to be ventilated and thus preserved, as the projectionist explained. Because I wanted to use this picture in my film, I tried to find a more complete version of it. But during the research, it turned out that the image as such was no longer the point. It started to give answers to questions nobody had ever asked in the first place. Questions like: what is an archive? What is an original version of a film? What is the impact of digital technologies on translation? And what constituencies are created within the digital limbo of globalized media networks? The further I got with my research, the clearer it became that the cropping of this image wasn’t just a simple mistake or misfortune. It had been cropped because specific forces had been tearing at it and had pushed part of it into an hors-champ, which is defined by political and economic factors. Within the contradictory dynamics of globalization and postcommunism/postcolonialism, archives fragment and multiply, some become porous and leak, some bend and twist their contents. While some images are being destroyed for good, others can never be deleted again.   35mm, color positive. The image in question is from a take in the film The Battle of Neretva, a famous Yugoslav partisan movie made in 1969, starring Orson Welles, Yul Brynner, Franco Nero as well as many famous Yugoslav actors. It tells the story of a legendary battle on the river Neretva in Bosnia during WWII. Partisans fought against a combination of German, Italian and Croatian fascists as well as against Serbian nationalWhat should the introduction/justification have · A paragraph explaining the main issue from the text that you’ll explore/discuss in your project. You must also state your thesis in this paregraph (remember, the thesis is a claim, a position you are taking, with respect to the main issue you will explore) · A paragraph where you explain the way you intend to use the text, in other words, how do you plan to explain your thesis · A paragraph where you explain why you think the text is useful in the way you intend to use it. Explain why you find this to be useful. · A paragraph where you describe the process you intend to follow (first I will …, then I will…, …, finally I will …)