An exploration of the castrato as a critical provocation to explore the relationships between sound, music, voice instrument, and machine. Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body, and personhood. Connecting sometimes bizarre snippets of history, this multi-disciplinary book moves backward and forward in time, deliberately troubling the meaning of concepts like “technology” and “human.” Voice Machines attends to the ways that early modern encounters and inventions—including settler colonialism, emergent racialized worldviews, the printing press, gunpowder, and the telescope—participated in making castrati. In Bonnie Gordon’s revealing study, castrati serve as a critical provocation to ask questions about the voice, the limits of the body, and the stories historians tell.
The 1898 suppression of white phosphorous in the French match industry was a victory of organized labour. At a time when most French workers did not have the power to effect changes in the health and safety conditions of their work, the match workers succeeded. At a time when most French women were not unionised and did not pursue effective action on occupational health problems, French women in the match industry succeeded. This book, first published in 1989, examines their actions and provides the definitive account of their success.
Eric Santner offers a radically new interpretation of Marx's labor theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. What Marx characterized as the dual character of the labor embodied in the commodity, he argues, is the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies transferred from the political theology of sovereignty to the realm of political economy. This genealogy, leading from the fetishism of the royal body to the fetishism of the commodity, also suggests a new understanding of the irrational core at the center of economic busyness today, its 24/7 pace. The frenetic negotiations of our busy-bodies continue and translate into the doxology of everyday life the liturgical labor that once sustained the sovereign's glory. Maintaining that an effective critique of capitalist political economy must engage this liturgical dimension, Santner proposes a counter-activity, which he calls "paradoxological." With commentaries by Bonnie Honig, Peter Gordon, and Hent de Vries, an introduction by Kevis Goodman, and a response from Santner, this important new book by a leading cultural theorist and scholar of German literature, cinema, and history will interest readers of political theory, literature and literary theory, and religious studies.
In two weeks, Leah and Jacob will be slaves to Pharaoh. Only a miracle can save them now. One night an old man with an odd name, Moshe, comes to Goshen. Strange things start happening, and they wonder if God remembered His people at last or if Moshe will be a failure as a redeemer just like all the others.
The current study investigated how clients' perceptual processing changes over the course of therapy and how clients' perceptual processing at the late stage of therapy relates to outcome by comparing two types of therapy for depression, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and process-experiential therapy (PET). Data was drawn from the Watson, Gordon, Stermac, Kalogerakos & Steckley (2003) archival database, wherein sixty six clients were diagnosed with major depression and received 16 weeks of treatment; 33 clients received CBT and 33 clients received PET. Three sessions for each client were selected, one from the early, middle, and late stages of therapy. Selection was based on clients' highest rating on the Client Task Specific Change Measure - Revised. The middle twenty minutes of each selected session were rated on the Levels of Client Perceptual Processing measure (LCPP; Toukmanian, 1986, 1992; Toukmanian & Gordon, 2004). Clients' perceptual processing levels were examined over the course of therapy (three stages) and in relation to depressive symptoms, self-esteem, dysfunctional attitudes, interpersonal problems, general symptom distress, and problem-focused coping at posttreatment and follow-up. Results indicated that clients in both therapies became more reevaluative and integrated new perspectives over the course of therapy. Clients in CBT engaged in more differentiation with analytic focus to make meaning of their experiences than clients in PET while clients in PET engaged in more differentiation with internal focus to make meaning of their experiences than clients in CBT. Clients' use of reevaluative statements at the late stage of therapy was related to a decrease of depressive symptoms, dysfunctional attitudes, interpersonal problems, general distress, suppressive coping, and reactive coping, and to an increase in self-esteem, at posttreatment and at follow-up for clients in CBT and for clients in PET. Clients' use of integrative statements at the late stage of therapy was related to a decrease in dysfunctional attitudes, suppressive and reactive coping, and to an increase in reflective coping at posttreatment and at follow-up for clients in CBT and for clients in PET. Implications for clinical work and future research are discussed.
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