This lecture takes a closer look at the nature of international scholarly publication. Publishing is a prerequisite for success in the modern university, but there is very little discussion among humanities scholars about the characteristics of publishable scholarship. In this talk, Professor Leonard Neidorf attempts to identify the implicit criteria that editors of international journals use when they evaluate the merit of submissions. He then identifies some respects in which the journals’ criteria are at odds with current humanities pedagogy, and he recommends some ways to bring publishing and pedagogy into greater harmony. Beyond this philosophical discussion, the talk offers a wide range of practical advice for increasing one’s success in journal publishing based on Professor Neidorf’s experience with over sixteen different international humanities journals.

William S. Burroughs worked with sound and word as discrete, digital units of information, creating recombinant effects on a reader’s consciousness through the operation of chance operations that momentarily empty the semantic register and allow pure sound to occur, as in mantra. In novels such as Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, Burroughs sought, through a sequence of recombined information, to reprogram consciousness into a cacophonous, silent register beyond the verbal.
Cutting texts into slices and rearranging them towards a reprogramming on the scale of consciousness anticipates the recombinant DNA technologies, if not the concepts, that would transform the evolutionary scale of life all the way up to today’s CRISPR. Assured by molecular biology that DNA is a kind of “word”, Burroughs seeks, like CRISPR, to rewrite it by cutting it up.  As a “virus from outer space”, Burroughs’ imaginative meta-description of language is itself shaped by the discourse of both Francis Crick’s discourse of panspermia - where nucleic acids are ubiquitous galactic hitch hikers hosted by appropriate planetary petri dishes such as our own - and alien abduction, where abductee accounts have continual recourse to the language and practices of DNA manipulation - the informatic vision of nascent genomics. This talk will ponder the parallel fashion in which both discourse of the alien and of biotechnology itself can be seen through this digital lens to have been “abducted” by the idea of recombinant information, itself at play in Burroughs work. Modeling alien phenomena as themselves artificial life forms caught up in the sexual selective frameworks of human consciousness hosting them will be further explored.

William Seward Burroughs wrote some of the most brutal and hilarious texts of the 20th century, novels, stories, essays and paintings that sought to shatter what he perceived to be the monotonous "control" of the egoic mind through what he called a “blast of silence.” This talk will seek to explore Burroughs’ literary technique of the “blast of silence” as a direct operation of the artist on the conscious mind of a willing reader, whose “narrative mind” is usually consumed by the malware of the internal monologue - what Burroughs called the “word virus” that is hosted by the subject/ object mind. Through his collaboration with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, Burroughs worked with sound and word as information, creating recombinant art through the operation of chance operations that momentarily empty the semantic register and allow pure sound to occur, as in mantra. As in the epigraph above, Burroughs conceived his own writing as a kind of anti-viral program for humans captured by the allure of control through continuous surveillance and biotechnology and technoscientific control. Through this alarm and blast of silence, Burroughs's texts can momentarily empty a reader or a listener’s mind of its incessant verbal content. Here Burroughs achieves a kind of “naked lunch” with the reader, the space of consciousness beyond word Burroughs called the Third Mind.

全球文明与传播博士系列讲座（四）

人与人之间存在着差异，这是自然事实。这种差异包括自然的差异（不同的外貌体征、智力体力等）与社会的差异（财富、教养、道德等）两方面。自然差异往往成为社会差异的基础，当这种个人差异转化为集团差异，即一部分人凭借其优势建立了对另一部分人的统治时，就出现了政治。因此，政治作为人的自然与社会差异的产物，以等级或特权的方式使差异凝固下来，起到了维护甚至强化差异的作用。当这种人与人之间差异政治化发展到极端时，就出现了各种形式的国家，国家放大了个人的自然和社会差异，不同国家的人不可能达到利益共享。但个人同时又葆有对平等权利的追求，尤其是在政治秩序中被统治的、急需为自己争取更多的政治机会和权利的人们，要求实质性的平等。因此，任何稳定的政治秩序都力求在人的平等和差异中寻找某种平衡。
随着社会的发展，要维持这种平衡并非易事。虽然差异的边界依然清晰，公民与非公民、统治者与被统治者的的区分依然显著，但平等权利已经逐渐扩展到政治领域之外。一些具有相同处境或持有相同主张的人们结成群体，要求在既有的政治框架内为自己谋求权利，例如少数民族为自己争取更多的政治权利、不同性取向的支持者为自己争取社会的平等对待等。与此同时，公民与非公民的政治身份差异也受到了冲击。基于普遍人权，任何国家都有对个人权利的保护的义务，不仅限于本国公民。这在一定程度上造成了本国国内社会资源分配不足、不均等社会矛盾。

因此，如何维护政治秩序，在平等和差异中维持平衡，在当前的政治过程中是一个值得思考的问题。

4月26日下午两点半，思索讲坛邀您与唐士其教授共同探讨：政治中的差异与平等。

弗雷德里克·詹姆逊（Fredric Jameson,1934- ）是当代著名的西方马克思主义思想家和批评家，其作品已经被翻译成十多种文字，产生了广泛的影响。讲座先谈谈我和他的际遇，然后概括地介绍一下他的思想和观点，结合他的新作《辩证法的效价》，重点谈谈他的后现代概念以及他的批评方法——历史化和辩证法：历史可以成为一种能动力量，它在我们面前呈现为一种迥然不同的生活方式，从而对我们自己的生活方式进行质疑，进行判断，并通过我们对我们所处的社会构成进行判断。
本次讲座为《英美文学研究论丛》高端学术讲堂第二讲，由文学研究院副院长周敏研究员主持。

上外法学院“法意讲坛”第三十六讲