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This article investigates fashion theoretical perspectives on European and US litigation over Louboutin’s red sole mark. It argues that fashion has logics that make it a special case with respect to intellectual property law.In recent disputes over Louboutin’s red sole mark including cases heard by the Court of Justice of the European Union and the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals a number of assumptions as to how fashions emerge and are disseminated are made. We test these assumptions against current fashion theory. In a fashion theoretical perspective the red sole is a polysemic gesture involving both branding and aesthetic communication through specific design features, which endows the shoe with aesthetic, social and economic value on the high fashion market. Accordingly, Louboutin’s red sole may be said to serve an aesthetic purpose and to work as an indicator of source at the same time.In our view, fashion is a special case in relation to intellectual property law for two reasons in particular: (i) the temporal logic of fashion is different from that of most other products because fashion is change and (ii) fashion has logics where design features are utterly self-referential: for example, one purpose of the red sole is to announce that ‘this is fashion’. Strong protection of fashion stifles both of these logics and is, therefore, not good for the fashion market as a whole.

This article discusses the nexus of religion and nature by means of an investigation of the mountain wilderness space in ancient Mesopotamia. Drawing inspiration from theories of social space and the field of religion and nature, it pays special attention to the mediality of the sources embedding the wilderness space by analyzing the literary-narrative form of a set of Old Babylonian, Sumerian religious narratives related to the deities Inana and Ninurta and the heroes Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh. Contrary to previous research, which has seen the mountain wilderness as a dangerous and inimical chaos region, this article argues that the mountain wilderness is also ascribed benign connotations and functions. It is a wild and dangerous region, but it is also naturally abundant, primeval, and harbors forms of agency and force. It is an arena for magical transformation, heroic acts, and for direct communication with the deities. It is thus a more ambiguous space than has previously been recognized, and it should be understood in the context of the social space of the scribal milieu. Finally, the article suggests that cosmology studies and the relationships between natural domains and deities, in the general history of religions, are reconsidered in light of theories of social space and in light of the mediality of the sources.

This article investigates how Danish industrialists responded to the rise of the modern state in the decades up until the Second World War, a period in which many of the basic principles of liberal capitalism were called into question, and in which the relationship between the state and the economy underwent major changes in all Western societies. It argues that the industrialists remained firm believers in classical liberalism and, on that ground, opposed growing state intervention as a slide towards socialism. The article has an emphasis on their reactions to calls for social policy initiatives, and it shows that the industrialists typically opposed such initiatives, either on pure ideological grounds or as conflicting with the economic competitiveness of Danish firms. When accommodation to selected demands for a stronger state did take place, it was typically in periods of crisis, the most important being the years just after the First World War. The interwar years did, however, see some approbation to increasing state intervention in the economy, and in the 1930s the idea of cooperation with the state entered their rhetoric. Thus, the article argues that the rhetoric and narratives gradually changed, while the ideological core did not.Capitalism, Industry, The State, Denmark, Interwar Period

This article explores why Herbert of Bosham (d. ca. 1194) claimed that writing history and expressing emotion were inherently incompatible activities. Focusing on the Historia that Bosham wrote (ca. 1184–ca. 1189) about the life and death of his close friend, Thomas Becket, I begin by situating Bosham’s claim within the wider framework of history-writing’s disavowal of the emotions. I then go on to unpack Bosham’s definition of historia as a literary genre and to explain his understanding of emotional expression, using the frameworks of medieval grammar, rhetoric, and biblical exegesis to do so. While Bosham understood history-writing as a genre policed by strict “laws,” I argue, he understood the emotions as inherently lawless—and thus unable to be contained by the normal rules of discourse. This means that when Bosham periodically abandoned the chronological progression that normative historical writing demanded, he was not just being the poor historian that modern scholarship has often made him out to be. Rather, he was being daringly experimental, quite deliberately using rhetoric’s most emotional techniques (especially amplificatio, apostrophe, and enargaeia) in order to give his Historia a lyrical complexion. I argue here that the Historia’s alternation between lyrical stasis and historiographical progression was both personal and political. On the one hand, it mirrored Bosham’s own alternation between mourning and consolation. On the other, by refusing the demands of narrative progress, the Historia refuses to close the Becket conflict down and to bring it safely to a conclusion.

In the twenty-first century, warfare has increasingly become pervaded by fictions. Using carefully crafted virtual worlds to train, prepare, and process military engagements, the US military has co-opted and militarized a field that one does not usually associate with war—the field of aesthetics. This essay considers Harun Farocki's installation Serious Games as an index into the emergence of a newfangled military aesthetic regime. Charting the institutional collaborations between the military and the creative industries in the twenty-first century, the essay examines what happens to the notion of “experience” with the emergence of immersive virtual reality technologies. Revisiting central thinkers in philosophical aesthetics as well as a key moment in the history of war and technology, namely, the invention of the modern war game around 1800, the essay outlines the recent merger of war and aesthetics and draws out some of the consequences for our understanding of contemporary warfare.

A vast amount of text data is available today on the Internet due to the extensive use of social media. Valuable information can be extracted from this data through natural language processing. However, the process of information extraction can be difficult due to the informal forms of these texts. This paper aims to address this challenge by focusing on the conversion of Persian informal words to formal words by using the spell-checking approach. For this purpose, two datasets for formal and informal words were extracted from the four most visited news websites in Persian. Then Persian informal words were divided into multiple categories based on the level of changes required to build the formal equivalents. These were then converted to the formal forms according to their features. Statistical analyses combined with correction rules were used to produce a "candidate list"to find the best formal candidate equivalents. The performance of our conversion system was evaluated through people's comments extracted from the four most visited Persian (Farsi) news agencies. Results show that our proposed system can detect approximately 94% of the Persian informal words, with the ability to detect 85% of the best equivalent formal words. In addition, the comparison between the proposed system and two well-known Persian spell-checkers, Virastyar and Vafa, shows that in terms of detection and correction, the proposed system outperforms significantly. Further analysis shows that the time complexity of the proposed system is linear.

AbstractThe Muslim Brotherhood represents an exemplary case for the discussion of Islam and modernity. Founded in 1928 in Egypt by Hasan al-Banna, it developed from a religious movement into a well-organized institution and a cadre party with mass appeal. The Muslim Brotherhood assumed the role of a major social vehicle for the promotion of a specifically Islamic imagination of modernity and related forms of modern Muslim subjectivity. This article explores the ideas of Hasan al-Banna and their historical context from a distinct theoretical perspective. It poses questions with regard to ways in which he constructed an Islamic modern social order and meaningful Muslim selfhoods. Thereby, it understands the Muslim Brotherhood as an inherent part of the emergence of global modernity as “world history.”

Unless they are luxurious, one rarely stares at cars. Unless they are broken, one rarely reflects about them. Cars pass by. They are driven. They take us from A to B and back. The car, because it is such a habitual vehicle, surrounding us with its unremarkable ubiquity, seems like an obvious metaphor for ordinary life.