ALBERT

Description: The Getty Fiend, a contemporary medieval melodrama set in Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, takes the reader on a tour filled with rock stars and warrior-kings, werewolves and archivists, sartorial Huns and libertine saints, all seen through the keenly dramatic flair of a collector’s eye. A cinematic and labyrinthine take on pulp horror, Ken White’s screenplay-in-verse is a monster mash-up of forms and languages, facades and carnal catastrophes, archaic languages and misplaced rhetorics—a campy, fantastical gender-bending transformation into the inadvertently divine.

Description: Alone in the Dark is an experimental memoir – or perhaps, more accurately, an anti-memoir or fabulist memoir, some unruly combination of essay, prose poem, and floating reverie that examines the relationship between one’s cultural heritage and one’s aesthetic devotions. Unlike a traditional autobiography that details the chronological events of a person’s life, the book begins with the obsessive moviegoing of Dibbern’s early years in New York and then unfurls as a fevered rumination on the role that an excessive love of art plays in shaping ideas about one’s identity. The book opens with the American premiere of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s harrowing, eight-hour-long magnum opus Sátántangó in 1998 as an emblematic cinephile experience. Dibbern then frames the book by asking, why would anyone devote the bulk of their waking hours to such a compulsive pursuit of a seemingly passive experience of art? Sitting alone in a darkened movie theater, he suggests, is not a passive, but a creative act: developing an aesthetic taste, after all, is central to defining our identities. And taste is the product of two contradictory impulses: the will to simultaneously embrace and escape the values of our cultural backgrounds that made us who we are. With these conjectures as the jumping-off point, the book commences its discursive explorations, wending and weaving between topics as diverse as Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, old family photo albums, nineteenth-century immigration to North Dakota, the actress Gena Rowlands’s histrionic mental breakdowns, the self-portraits that the Mandan chief Mato-Tope made in the 1830s, and the dizzyingly joyful suicidal games in Howard Hawks’s film about aviation, Only Angels Have Wings.

Description: The Funambulist Pamphlets is a series of small books archiving articles published on The Funambulist, collected according to specific themes. These volumes propose a different articulation of texts than the usual chronological one. The eleven volumes are respectively dedicated to Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Legal Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, Cruel Designs, Arakawa + Madeline Gins, Science Fiction, Literature, and Cinema. Volume 10 is devoted to the topic of Literature, with entries by Lambert and other authors. The idea that architecture can be created through narrative is popular in some academic circles. It seems a fruitful approach to the discipline as it unfolds an important imaginative field. It also envisions a resistance to forms of architectural teleology, since fiction is usually based on the disfunction of the environment in which it is set. For this reason, we could go as far as to affirm that fiction operates in contradiction to the traditional design method. The word “literature," however, is not often pronounced by the people who seem to promote this creative method. The following texts intend to think of literature as a powerful field of ideas that translates to other creative disciplines. This translation should never be literal, and for this reason, some fictions that evoke architecture — Franz Kafka’s and Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinths, for example — might be paradoxically more difficult to properly translate than less immediately spatial novels. The following texts do not propose any translation of their own but rather offer a humble toolbox in order to do so. This volume also constitutes an opportunity to archive the four texts written for the first event of Archipelagos (Brooklyn, November 2011), an non-institutionalized gathering of people conversing around a given topic. The first event was dedicated to literature and four architects were invited to talk about four authors they chose (Kerouac, Artaud, Dostoevsky and Pessoa) in the first half of the event, while the second half consisted of an open conversation generated by the presentations.

Description: Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and the critical and theoretical approaches of postcolonial and African studies. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet the internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of older kingdoms. Bringing together a collection of articles that were first presented as papers at the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in 2016 and additional articles, the sixth volume of Dotawo showcases a diverse richness of topics concerning Nubia. The articles within this volume attest to the cultural, linguistic, geographic, and demographic diversity witnessed throughout Nubian history nationally and internationally amongst its neighbours, both near and far.

Description: Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and the critical and theoretical approaches of postcolonial and African studies. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet the internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of older kingdoms. Volume 5 of Dotawo focuses on Nubian women, both ancient and contemporary. Nubian women, whether they were queens or commoners, Christians or Muslims, have always been held in high esteem by their communities. The contributors to this volume present articles which address Nubian literature, tomb and temple wall paintings, the challenges of migration and resettlement, cultural tourism, gender roles, women’s health, labor cooperatives, and more. They all focus on the ways in which Nubian women have survived and thrived throughout the centuries.

Description: Complementary Modernisms in China and the United States: Art as Life/Art as Idea is the result of a conference where Chinese and Americanist art historians addressed the development of modernism in their respective cultural traditions. The chapters juxtapose historical developments without attempting to map connections or influences. Instead, both national modernisms are presented as part of the larger terrain of global modernism, but generated within specific, localized circumstances. This juxtaposition reveals significant differences as much as any particular moments of connection or similarities, disrupting any standard narrative of the primacy of French (or European) avant-garde art and its influence on more belated and peripheral communities. The differences that are revealed are not merely the result of the very different historical trajectories of each country’s moves into modernity. Rather, differences in attention and methodology are just as important, in particular the focus on the post-1980 development of Chinese art as part of the modernization of Chinese culture and economy, rather than the American perspective on post-1980s postmodern qualities. At the same time, significant convergent concerns emerge, such as the importance of urban centers and urbanization, the profound effect of political and technological disruption, and the question of identity.The volume represent a cross-section of Chinese and Americanist art historians, both early career and senior scholars, working on a wide variety of subjects, such as the Ashcan School, Impressionism, Cai Liang, Liang Sicheng, Huang Binhong, Cézanne, Bauhaus, Joseph Cornell, Andrew Wyeth, Louise Nevelson, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and contemporary art more broadly, with (as is usual in any survey of the 20th century these days) a concentration on the 1960s. 《交互视野下的中国和美国的现代艺术: 艺术/生活或观念》这一会议论文集收录了中美艺术史家对现代主义在各自传统下的发展进行研究所得的成果。这些文章并置历史发展，而非试图详述其中的关联或影响。相反，两个国家的现代主义都被展现为全球现代主义大背景中的一部分，并被认为是在特定环境中产生的。这种并置显示了重要的差异性以及任何特殊情况下的联系或相似之处，打破了一般强调法国（或欧洲）先锋派首要地位及其对周围团体产生影响的标准论述。中国与美国现代主义发展上的差异，并不仅仅是由于两国进入不同历史轨道发展现代化而导致的。相反，关注点和方法论的差异也同样重要，尤其是关注八十年代后中国艺术的发展，将其作为中国文化与经济现代化的一部分，而不是从美国视角来看待八十年代后的后现代价值。同时，也出现了重要的趋同关注点：城市中心与城市化的重要性，政治或科技解体所造成的深远影响，以及自我认同的问题。本论文集所收录的文章，彰显了当今重要的中美艺术史家研究的多样性，从资深到青年一代，从阿什坎学派至当代艺术，（并与任何当下对二十世纪作出的概括论述相一致，）将重点放在二十世纪六十年代。

Description: The Funambulist Pamphlets is a series of small books archiving articles published on The Funambulist, collected according to specific themes. These volumes propose a different articulation of texts than the usual chronological one. The eleven volumes are respectively dedicated to Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Legal Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, Cruel Designs, Arakawa + Madeline Gins, Science Fiction, Literature, and Cinema.

Description: Lamma aims to provide a forum for critically understanding the complex ideas, values, social configurations, histories, and material realities in Libya. Recognizing, and insisting on, the urgent need for such a forum, we give attention to a wide a range of disciplines, sources, and approaches, foregrounding especially those which have previously received less scholarly attention. This includes, but is not limited to: anthropology, art, gender, history, linguistics, literature, music, performance studies, politics, religion, and urban studies, in addition to their intersections, their subfields, the places in between, and critical, theoretical, and postcolonial approaches thereto. Lamma is a space where these fields can interact and draw from one another, and where scholars and students from inside and outside of Libya gather to redefine and reshape “Libyan Studies." We believe that access to research is not the privilege of a few but the right of all and that knowledge production should be inclusive. For these reasons the journal takes its name from the Arabic word lamma, "a gathering." This first issue of Lamma brings together academic research, cultural commentary, literature, and translation. It aims to show some of the possible varieties of research on Libya, from history and literature to sociolinguistics, gender studies, and more. But, perhaps more importantly, it aims to show that the efforts of academic researchers, cultural actors, writers, translators, and even artists are not separate endeavors but rather intertwined. By bringing these efforts together in one forum, we hope to set them in fruitful dialog with each other—and thus begin to complexify the notion of "Libyan Studies."

Description: Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a multi-disciplinary, diachronic view of all aspects of Nubian civilization. It brings to Nubian studies a new approach to scholarly knowledge: an open-access collaboration with DigitalCommons@Fairfield, an institutional repository of Fairfield University in Connecticut, USA, and open-access publishing house punctum books. The first two volumes of Dotawo have their origins in a Nubian language panel organized by Angelika Jakobi within the Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium held at the University of Cologne, May 22 to 24, 2013. Since many invited participants from Sudan were unable to get visas due to the shutdown of the German Embassy in Khartoum at that time, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation funded the organization of a second venue of specialists on modern Nubian languages. This so-called “Nubian Panel 2" was hosted by the Institute of African & Asian Studies at the University of Khartoum on September 18 and 19, 2013. This volume publishes the proceedings of that panel. Future volumes will address three more themes: 1) Nubian women; 2) Nubian place names; 3) and know-how and techniques in ancient Sudan. The calls for papers for the first two volumes may be found on the back of this volume. The third volume is already in preparation with the assistance of Marc Maillot of the Section française de la direction des Antiquités du Soudan, Department of Archeology. We welcome proposals for additional themed volumes, and invite individual submissions on any topic relevant to Nubian studies.

Description: The fifth volume of the Journal of Badiou Studies, “Architheater," energized by the publication of Badiou’s Rhapsodie pour le théâtre (2014), knits together distinguished approaches to artistic production engaging with the work of Alain Badiou: ‘Engaging’ here means articulated positions that include, imply, or criticize the Badiouiesque corpus. The issue does not therefore seek to implement Badiou’s philosophical insights in interpretations of art or of aesthetics, but rather to take Badiou’s philosophy as a center of convergence-nexus of a plethora of philosophical positions that include artistic production as a central element of their structure. Thematically, the volume limits its discussion to “a two" of architecture and theater, thinking their overlapping, juxtaposition, and respective generative capacities. JBS 5 suggests superimposing these two “media" and posing them at the center of the volume for several reasons: Politically, both theater and architecture actively engage in the life of the polis, they effectually and factually demand the participation of collective and material actors. Poietically, both media manifest a comprehensive form of artistic production, that is to say they both include elements and organs (actors, designers, lighting-specialists, engineers, planners, executives, actors, dancers, etc.) that are required as collaborators in the realization of the piece. The Architect, on the one hand, and the Theater maker, on the other, both produce what could be defined as a world, or, in Badiou’s terms, a formation of a subject

Description: Not to be confused with metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that count as Black Metal events — and indeed, to see how Black Metal might count as thinking. Theory of Black Metal, and Black Metal of theory. Mutual blackening. Therefore, we eschew any approach that treats theory and Metal discretely, preferring to take the left-hand path by insisting on “some kind of connaturality between the two, a shared capacity for nigredo." Black Metal Theory is noise. Lacking one clear manifesto or position, it fails to become an elite circle. It is amplified and transmitted electronically: through instruments, lo-fi recordings, internets, and print-on-demand publishers…yet rather than a clear direction of progress we glean only its subversive raw dissonance, disruptions, animalistic screams, resonating disturbances, high-pitched feedback, primitive growls, and its atmospheric statics, hisses, and drones. Black Metal Theory refuses to be hi-fi. It quenches its sonic thirsts from primordial-ditch stews that resemble the dark sludge of recently melted snowfall — pristine white flakes transmuted into a tumultuously sexy and delicious mixture of trash and dirt and ash and poison that swirls and splashes in ditches before seeping into the underground. Our ears drink this disharmonious black bile and our bodies suspend in its intoxicating formless complexities. The third issue of Helvete, “Bleeding Black Noise," features artwork and essays that focus on the sonic aspects of Black Metal, specifically its interactions with Noise — the interruptions, creations, and destructions of signals. “Bleeding Black Noise" is a revision of Steven Parrino’s statement, “My relation between Rock and visual art: I will bleed for you." In this issue, Rock is replaced with Noise, and Bleeding is celebrated as a release of the Black Noise — raw energy and formless potential. The essays and art portfolios included here experiment with sonic and conceptual feedback, as well as the way that black noise works through feedback as a process, resonating as background hums or drones, and cascading in foregrounded screams.

Description: Nubian studies needs a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and critical and theoretical approaches present in post-colonial and African studies. The journal Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies brings these disparate fields together within the same fold, opening a cross-cultural and diachronic field where divergent approaches meet on common soil. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of old kingdoms. This first volume of Dotawo is the outcome of a Nubian panel within the Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium held at the University of Cologne, May 22-4, 2013. Organized by Angelika Jakobi, the Nubian panel was attended both by specialists of the modern Nubian languages and scholars working on medieval Nubia and its languages, particularly Old Nubian. We are indebted to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation at Cologne for generously sponsoring the organization of the Nubian panel and the invitation of the participants.

Description: Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet is the first book of essays to consider the poetry of one of the twentieth- and early twenty-first-century’s most important literary, affect, and queer theorists. Acclaimed as one of the “truly innovative" poets of her generation by Maud Ellmann, Sedgwick’s work as a poet is, perhaps, less well known, but is no less compelling than her ground-breaking trilogy of queer theoretical texts: Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Epistemology of the Closet, and Tendencies.

Description: What’s left to say about the anarchist canon? One answer might be that reflecting on the canon’s construction can help reveal something about the ways in which anarchism has been misunderstood. Another possibility is that it locates anarchism — in all its diversity and complexity — in particular geographical and historical locations. The canon not only establishes the parameters of anarchist theory, it sets them in a particular (European) context, serving as a springboard for subsequent revisions, developments and critiques. The canon describes a classic form, to use George Woodcock’s term – it benchmarks anarchism. Who constructed it, where did it come from — what are the implications of its reification in contemporary anarchist studies? How successful have recent critiques been in overcoming the limitations that canonical study has encouraged? What are the risks of leaving the canon intact, even if as a target for critique? Should anarchists worry about the explosion of the canon if the result is to include as ‘anarchist’ philosophers or movements who do identify with anarchist traditions? What does self-identification mean in the absence of a canon? Does the rejection of the canon imply the rejection of an anarchist history of ideas, and if such a history remains important in anarchism, how should it be approached and understood? In this special issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies (Issue 2013.1) edited by Ruth Kinna and Süreyyya Evren, noted anarchist scholars explore these questions.

Description: Not to be confused with metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that count as Black Metal events — and indeed, to see how Black Metal might count as thinking. Theory of Black Metal, and Black Metal of theory. Mutual blackening. Therefore, we eschew any approach that treats theory and Metal discretely, preferring to take the left-hand path by insisting on “some kind of connaturality between the two, a shared capacity for nigredo." Issue 2 focuses on the theme of Inversions in Black Metal. Nailed at the heart of many a logo, suspended from the neck, held out in Satanic blessing: the inverted cross is one of black metal’s anti-icons. The antithesis of a revelation of light, it signifies an originary blasphemy. Forsaking ascension and mining a path towards the centre of the earth, black metal finds a satanic stain lodged at the core of being. However, the significance of this movement is not bound by a simple reversal. The inverted cross hangs above a swarming logic of inversion: the overturning of Christianity, but also a mimesis of Christian self-desecration; the rejection of certain forms of religion, but also of modernity’s pallid enlightenment; the invocation of strange gods of the earth, even as the earth is cursed. When thought becomes poison, it is no longer so easy to determine which way is up and which way is down. To throw down one’s head, to push oneself into the cursed earth, to occupy the place of the inverted crucified: is this to think-by-not-thinking an unconditioned rapture beyond negation and affirmation?

Description: Echoes of No Thing seeks to understand the space between thinking which Martin Heidegger and the 13th-century Zen patriarch Eihei Dōgen explore in their writing and teachings. Heidegger most clearly attempts this in Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and Dōgen in his Shōbōgenzō, a collection of fascicles which he compiled in his lifetime. Both thinkers draw us towards thinking, instead of merely defining systems of thought. Both Heidegger and Dōgen imagine possibilities not apparent in the world we currently inhabit, but notably, find possible, through a refashioning of thinking as a soteriological reimagining that clears space for the presencing of an authentic experience in the space which emerges between certainties. Jenkins elucidates this soteriological reimagining through a close reading of both authors’ conceptions of time and space, and by developing a practice of listening that is attuned to the echoes that resonate between the two thinkers. While Heidegger often wrote about new beginnings (as well as about gathering oneself, preparing the site, clearings, and practicing) in preparation for the evental un-concealing of truth, nowhere is this as present as in the enigmatic, difficult, and in fact beautiful, Contributions. To call a text beautiful, especially a work of philosophy, risks committing an act of disingenuity, and yet Contributions, like Jacques Derrida’s Glas or Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, rises to this acclaim through its very resistance to a system, its refusal to be easily digested, or even understood. Contributions is unfinished, partial, even at times muttered; it is the beginning of a thinking which takes place on a path and as such cannot imagine—or refuse—its final destination. It invites us to take up towards, but not to insist on, its thinking; it is a “turn" away from the reason and logic of a technologized world and returns philosophy—as a thinking—to a place of wonder and awe. Dōgen’s Shōbogenzō, from another culture and time entirely, is also a beautiful text, for similar reasons. The Shōbogenzō, gathered first as a series of talks given by Eihei Dōgen (and later composed as written texts) details the process of understanding which leads, for Dōgen, to a position of pure seeing, or satori, and yet these talks are not simply rules for monks, nor merely imprecations and demands for a laity; rather, they open a being’s thinking to the possibility of something purely other and work as a transition across worlds that also opens us to an other world. What both thinkers illustrate, as do the other thinkers drawn on in this project—most notably, those philosophers associated with the Kyoto School, who were both intimately aware of Dōgen’s work, and studied, or studied with, Heidegger—is that world is not a fixed, stable entity; rather it is a fugal composition of possibility, of as yet untraversed—and at times un-traversable—spaces. Echoes of No Thing seeks to examine, within the lacunal eddies of be-coming’s arrival, that space between which both thinkers point towards as possible sites of new beginnings.

Description: Not to be confused with metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that count as Black Metal events — and indeed, to see how Black Metal might count as thinking. Theory of Black Metal, and Black Metal of theory. Mutual blackening. Therefore, we eschew any approach that treats theory and Metal discretely, preferring to take the left-hand path by insisting on “some kind of connaturality between the two, a shared capacity for nigredo."

Description: Radical theory has always been beset by the question of ontology, albeit to varying degrees and under differing conditions. In recent years, in particular, political metaphysics has returned with force: the rise of Deleuze-influenced “new materialisms," along with post-/non-Deleuzian Speculative Realism (SR) and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), all bear testament to this. In this same period, anarchism has returned as a major influence on social movements and critical scholarship alike. What, then, are some of the potential resonances between these currents, particularly given that anarchism has so often been understood/misunderstood as a fundamentally idealist philosophy? This special issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies (Issue 2013.2) considers these questions in dialogue with the new materialisms, Speculative Realism, and Object-Oriented Ontology, in order to seek new points of departure. It is in this sense that ADCS also strives to play a critical role recent discussions in the wider political, cultural, and philosophical milieu.

Description: "Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the superhero world and beyond, much is made of the genre’s utopian and dystopian landscapes, queer identity-play, and transforming bodies, but might it not be the case that the genre’s overblown normative framing, or representation, serves to muzzle, rather than express, its protagonists’ radical promise? Why, when set against otherwise unbounded, and often extreme, transformation—human to machine, human to animal, human to god—are certain categories seemingly untouchable? Why does this speculative genre routinely fail to fully speculate about other worlds and ways of being in those worlds? For all their nonconformity, superhero stories do not live up to the idea of a radical genre, in look, feel, or tone. The mainstream American superhero genre, and its surrounding discourses, tells and facilitates an astonishingly seamless tale of opposing ideologies. But how? Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds serves a speculative response, detailing not so much a hunt for genre meaning as a trip through a genre’s meaningscape. Looking anew at superhero meaning-making practices allows a distinct way of thinking about and describing the creative, formal, and ideological conditions of the genre and its protagonists, one removed from corralling binaries, one foregrounding the idea of a synergy—often unseen, uneasy, and even hostile—between official and unofficial agents of superhero meaning and one reframing familiar questions: What kinds of meaning do superhero texts engender? How is this meaning made? By whom and under what conditions? What processes and practices inform, regulate, and extend superhero meaning? And finally, superhero narratives present a new question: How might we reimagine its agents, surfaces, and spaces? Centering the experiences and practices of excluded and marginalized superhero fans, Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes reveals that genre meaning is not lodged in one place or another, neither in its official creators or fans, nor in “black and white” conservatism or in a “rainbow” of progressive possibilities. Nor is it even located somewhere in the in-between; it is instead better conceived of as an antagonistic, in-process nexus of meaning undergirded by systems of power."

Description: Beta Exercise: The Theory and Practice of Osamu Kanemura is the first bilingual (Japanese-English) book to provide an overview of the theoretical work of Japanese photographer and video artist Osamu Kanemura, a unique talent and voice in the world of avant-garde contemporary photography. The opening essay “Life Is a Gift" meditates on the transformation of human life into an exchangeable commodity and the abstraction that entails. “Essay 01" develops Kanemura’s idea of photographic “technique" in an era when such techniques have become accessible to all, radically undermining the importance of human subjectivity in the process of capturing the photographic image: “We can say that modern technology constitutes photographic technique." Instead, Kanemura argues, extra-technical elements such as concept and vision will have to compensate for the expression of individuality that technique is no longer able to convey. Taking cues from Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the essay “Dead-Stick Landing" develops Kanemura’s theory of the moving image as mechanical system, solely governed by an “on-off switch," while “Essay 02" develops these ideas into a consideration of cinematic time and the experience of boredom in cinema as the result of a truthful “loyalty" expressed to machines, and not to stories. The essays are accompanied by an extensive two-part interview with Italian photographer Marco Mazzi, touching upon topics ranging from the technical aspects of Kanemura’s equipment, the concept of non-editing, and the destruction of the frame to the similarity between Mao’s dialectics and the camera, the presence of the human figure as trace, and the politics of photographing Tokyo.

Description: Departing from the conventional readings of Karl Marx’s Capital and other of his works, by way of François Laruelle’s “radicalization of concepts," Katerina Kolozova identifies a theoretical kernel in Marx’s thought whose critical and interpretative force can be employed without reference to its subsequent interpretations in the philosophical mainstream. The latter entails a process of abstracting a philosophical legacy — or rather, of putting it in brackets — and then codifying a history of a learned interpretation established in supposed fidelity to the theoretical project of a “master." Interpreting the master implies a mastery of doctrinal tools, which results in establishing a catechism of the Logos of the Master. And this catechism interferes, Kolozova argues, with more direct encounters with Marx’s writings. As we know, Marx’s rigorously descriptive language unravels the radical core of capitalist economic processes and, through that unraveling, also reveals capitalism’s necessary exploitation and subjugation of human labor. Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism attempts to recuperate and emancipate the notion of metaphysics in this scenario by virtue of radicalizing thought’s encounter with the Real. Kolozova argues that this metaphysical drama is at the origin of the social and economic injustices of contemporary global economic-political realities, and she illustrates this state of affairs in discussions of the problem of wage labor, automated speculation as the core of late capitalism, the post-2008 financial crisis, the status of technology in late capitalism, sexual difference and gender, and the human and non-human body’s subjugation capitalist automation

Description: Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and the critical and theoretical approaches of postcolonial and African studies. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet the internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of older kingdoms. The seventh issue of Dotawo is dedicated to Comparative Northern East Sudanic linguistics, offering new insights in the historical connections between the Nubian languages and other members of the NES family such as Nyima, Nara, and Meroitic. A special focus is placed on comparative morphology.

Description: Journal of Badiou Studies (General Editors: Michael J. Kelly and Arthur James Rose) is a multilingual, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the philosophy and thought of, and surrounding, the philosopher, playwright, novelist, and poet Alain Badiou. Badiou Studies is dedicated to original, critical and challenging arguments that directly engage with the conditions and circumstances of Badiou’s thought. We aim to identify pertinent intellectual discourses, ideas, historiographies, and concepts, and seek articles that situate these theories within emerging events in politics, science, art and love. Badiou Studies is especially concerned with maintaining a fidelity to Badiou’s thinking without collapsing into hagiography or celebrity fetishism. This is why we encourage works that actively critique Badiou’s philosophy and his currency as an established philosophical figure. Badiou himself embraces this approach and serves on the journal’s Advisory Board. Alain Badiou’s small book on ethics (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil) remains one of the most important points of entry into Badiou’s thought, since it is not only widely read across disciplines but is also one of the most widely translated of all of his works. This issue of Badiou Studies (Vol. 3) draws together scholarly responses and criticisms to Badiou’s ethics. Sometimes in agreement, sometimes in violent opposition, always faithful to the imperative to keep thought going.

Description: Pen in the Park is a unique revolutionary children’s book written by Raşel Meseri and illustrated by Sanne Karssenberg. Meseri narrates the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul through the figure of a penguin named Pen, whogoes on a trip from Antarctica to Gezi Park to save his fellow penguins, and gets involved in various adventures with his friends Chapulletta, the cat Trafo, and the dog Loukanikos. The Gezi movement of 2013–14 started with the threat of the destruction of the Gezi Park, a public space, which became quickly occupied by protestors from all generations and political backgrounds to build a movement that addressed not only the destruction of green areas and gentrification of public space, but also the democratic deficit of the country as such. At the height of the protests, dozens of protesters were killed and thousands injured. As the result of the protests, the park remained a public space and the struggle continues in different forms up to this day. During the protests, penguins were reclaimed as one of the symbols, as the main television channels preferred to show documentaries about the lives of penguins, instead of the uprising in Turkey. In Meseri’s story, Pen the brave penguin, Pen, is both a symbol and an active agent in the course of events, guiding us through the process of political emancipation, democratic experiment, friendship, and solidarity that characterizes the Gezi movement.

Description: Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang’s work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that had been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity. At the heart of Xiang’s argument is an account of the way the unfounded feminization of figures such as the Babylonian (co)creatrix Tiamat, and the Nahua creator-figures Tlaltecuhtli and Coatlicue, is complicit with their monstrification. This complicity tells us less about the mythologies themselves than about the dualistic system of gender and sexuality within which they have been studied, underpinned by a consistent tendency in modern/colonial thought to insist on unbridgeable categorical differences. By contextualizing these deities in their respective mythological, linguistic, and cultural environments, through a unique combination of methodologies and critical traditions in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl, Xiang departs from the over-reliance of much contemporary queer theory on European (post)modern thought. Much more than a queering of the non-Western and non-modern, Queer Ancient Ways thus constitutes a decolonial and transdisciplinary engagement with ancient cosmologies and ways of thought which are in the process themselves revealed as theoretical sources of and for the queer imagination.

Description: Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and critical and theoretical approaches present in post-colonial and African studies. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of old kingdoms. The third volume of Dotawo, guest-edited by Marc Maillot, is dedicated to Know-Hows and Techniques in Ancient Sudan. This collection of articles is the result of a workshop held at Lille University on September 5 and 6, 2013, which brought together several Sudanese archaeology scholars, from architecture to iron production through pottery and textile industry. Organized by Faïza Drici, Marie Evina, and Romain David, with the support of Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3 University and the laboratoire de recherche Halma-Ipel UMR 8164 (Centre national de recherche scientifique – CNRS), this workshop was presided over by Vincent Rondot (present Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Department of the Louvre Museum and former Director of Section française de la direction des antiquités du Soudan – SFDAS). The idea of an academic publication of this workshop in Dotawo was presented by Marc Maillot (SFDAS) in September 2014, during the 13th International Conference for Nubian Studies. The project was warmly welcomed by the editorial committee, and gave birth to a fruitful SFDAS/Dotawo cooperation that started a year ago.

Description: Covert Plants contributes to newly emerging discourses on the implications of vegetal life for the arts and culture. This stretches to changes in our perception of ‘nature’ and to the adapting roles of botany, evolutionary ecology, and environmental aesthetics in the humanities. Its editors and contributors seek various expressions of vegetal life rather than the mere representation of such, and they proceed from the conviction that a rigorous approach to thinking with and through vegetal life must be interdisciplinary. At a time when urgent calls for restorative care and reparative action have been sounded for the environment, this essay volume presents a range of academic and creative perspectives, from evolutionary biology to literary theory, philosophy to poetry, which respond to the perplexing problems and paradoxes of vegetal thinking. Representations of vegetal life often include plant analogies and plant imagery. These representations have at times obscured the diversity of plant behavior and experience. Covert Plants probes the implications of vegetal life for thought and how new plant science is changing our perception of the vegetal — around us and in us. How can we think, speak, and write about plant life without falling into human-nature dyads, or without tumbling into reductive theoretical notions about the always complex relations between cognition and action, identity and value, subject and object? A full view of this shifting perspective requires a ‘stereoscopic’ lens through which to view plants, but also simultaneously to alter our human-centered viewpoint. Plants are no longer the passive object of contemplation, but are increasingly resembling ‘subjects,’ ‘stakeholders,’ or ‘actors.’ As such, the plant now makes unprecedented demands upon the nature of contemplation itself. Moreover, the aesthetic, political, and legal implications of new knowledge regarding plants’ ability to communicate, sense, and learn require intensive, cross-disciplinary investigation. By doing this, we can intervene into current attitudes to climate change and sustainability, and hopefully revise, for the better, human philosophies, ethics, and aesthetics that touch upon plant life.

Description: Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and critical and theoretical approaches present in post-colonial and African studies. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of old kingdoms. Place names in Nubia have only received limited attention so far. The need for such a study guided the decision to dedicate the fourth volume of Dotawo to this very issue. Place names are by nature dynamic and may shift over the course of the centuries. Therefore, toponymy is particularly apt to diachronical studies and offer fertile ground for multi-disciplinary analysis. The contents of the volume embrace a wide time frame (from the beginning of recorded history until today) and consist of contributions from scholars active in all fields of Nubian Studies (philology, linguistics, history, archaeology, etc.). The goal has been to gather into one publication the fruits of the collaboration of specialists working with all sorts of theoretical and methodological tools on the successive periods of Nubian history with a focus on the names that identified the micro- and macro-localities where this history was taking place.

Description: mythomaniaS is a catalog of case studies in the form of film stills, architectural fragments, stage props, texts, and images culled from the experiments of MindMachineMakingMyths (Lab M4, part of the New Territories architecture studio, Bankgok, Thailand), a collaboration begun in 2012 between Camille Lacadee and François Roche to construct environmental-architectural psycho-scapes (in the partly fabricated wilds of various countries) as laboratory-shelters for exploring and deconstructing the supposed rifts between realism and speculative fiction (myth), psyche and environment, body and mind. Bringing together architecture, Deleuze and Guatarri’s schizoanalysis and deterritorialization, and Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics (the “science of imaginary solutions which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”), Lacadee and Roche (and their tribe, Ezio Blasetti, Stephan Henrich, Danielle Willems, Gwyll Jahn, and many others) enacted and filmed mise-en-abymes in which certain scripted para-psychic narratives and architectural structures merge in the pursuit of reclaiming resilience — described by Roche as a tactic for merging refusal and vitality into a schizophrenic logic able to navigate the antagonism between the bottom-up and top-down conditions of the globalized world. In these fabricated schizoid psycho-nature-machine-scapes, the human being is no longer a bio-ecological consumer but a psycho-computing animal that emerges co-dependently with its environment in a hyper-local haecceity (“this-ness”).

Description: Over the past ten years, Organs Everywhere (Œ) has promoted conversations that approach architectural design from the edges of the discipline — testing its boundaries, technologies, methods and (e)valuation systems, and keeping them unstable. It has valued transdisciplinary, speculative and irreverent explorations over strict publishing formats and academic purity, promoting a profanatory and open-ended ethos. Each issue has strung together disparate organs and limbs, activating precarious couplings and associations, and testing new metabolisms and assemblages. And so does the first volume of Œ Case Files continue its commitment to the making and unmaking of monsters, both by anthologising past contributions into fresh configurations and designs, and by combining them with entirely new articles and voices. Here, philosophers, designers, experimental architects, artists, science fiction writers, activists, and poets shift, expand and re-imagine notions of space, time, inhabitation, technology, knowledge, use, value and experience. A patchwork of essays, stories, design experiments, buildings, art installations, drawings, prose poems, photographs and speculative projects collide in the book, infecting simple disciplinary orthodoxies with doubt and potentials, uncertainty and hope — indecisive photons and softness; metatactility and haunted houses; neurodiversity and protocells; prosthetics, grease and darkness; post-human scenographies, software and GPS anklets; anthropocenic devices, paprika and synthetic biology.

Description: In den 10 Must-Knows aus der Biodiversitätsforschung legen 45 Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler fundiert und allgemein verständlich Fakten zur biologischen Vielfalt dar. Sie analysieren die komplexen Systeme der Erde, indem sie zehn Schlüsselbereiche hervorheben, von denen wiederum jeder untrennbar mit allen anderen verbunden ist. Sie zeigen Wege auf, um einen weiteren Verlust an Artenvielfalt und Ökosystemen zu stoppen und die biologische Vielfalt zu fördern. Ihr Ziel ist, für Politik und Gesellschaft wissenschaftlich gesicherte Bewertungen der aktuellen Erkenntnisse für bessere politische Entscheidungen und Maßnahmen auf lokaler, regionaler, nationaler und globaler Ebene zur Verfügung zu stellen, um die Vielfalt des Lebens – die Biodiversität – zu erhalten. Dies sind die 10MustKnows 2022: 1. Klima- und Biodiversitätsschutz zusammen verwirklichen 2. Planetare Gesundheit stärken 3. Unsichtbare Biodiversität beachten 4. Biokulturelle Lebensräume fördern 5. Wald nachhaltig nutzen 6. Landwirtschaft umbauen 7. Land und Ressourcen schützen 8. Transnationale Infrastrukturen und Bildung für Nachhaltigkeit 9. Zugang und offene Nutzung von Forschungsdaten sichern 10. Biodiversitätsfreundliche Anreize setzen

Description: The field of disability studies significantly contributes to contemporary discussions of the marginalization of and social justice for individuals with disabilities. However, what of disability in the past? The Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe explores what medieval texts have to say about disability, both in their own time and for the present.This interdisciplinary volume on medieval Europe combines historical records, medical texts, and religious accounts of saints’ lives and miracles, as well as poetry, prose, drama, and manuscript images to demonstrate the varied and complicated attitudes medieval societies had about disability. Far from recording any monolithic understanding of disability in the Middle Ages, these contributions present a striking range of voices—to, from, and about those with disabilities—and such diversity only confirms how disability permeated (and permeates) every aspect of life.The Medieval Disability Sourcebook is designed for use inside the undergraduate or graduate classroom or by scholars interested in learning more about medieval Europe as it intersects with the field of disability studies. Most texts are presented in modern English, though some are preserved in Middle English and many are given in side-by-side translations for greater study. Each entry is prefaced with an academic introduction to disability within the text as well as a bibliography for further study. This sourcebook is the first in a proposed series focusing on disability in a wide range of premodern cultures, histories, and geographies.

Description: Die USA ächzen unter eisiger Kälte bis hinunter in den Süden von Texas. Mindestens dreißig Menschen kamen ums Leben, Millionen sind ohne Strom. Auch bei uns in Deutschland ist gerade eine Kältewelle vorübergegangen, und im Januar gab es einen historischen Schneesturm in Madrid. Was ist da los?

Description: Im Pariser Abkommen haben so gut wie alle Staaten der Erde sich verpflichtet, Anstrengungen zu unternehmen, um den Anstieg der globalen Temperatur auf 1,5 Grad über dem vorindustriellen Niveau zu begrenzen. Am Samstag haben die führenden Klimadiplomaten der USA und Chinas, John Kerry und Xie Zhenhua, in einem gemeinsamen Statement erneut bekräftigt, dass sie ihre Klimaschutzanstrengungen verstärken wollen, um dieses Ziel in Reichweite zu halten.

Description: Climate change and socioeconomic developments will have a decisive impact on people exposed to hunger. This study analyses climate change impacts on agriculture and potential implications for the occurrence of hunger under different socioeconomic scenarios for 2030, focusing on the world regions most affected by poverty today: the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. We use a spatially explicit, agroeconomic land-use model to assess agricultural vulnerability to climate change. The aims of our study are to provide spatially explicit projections of climate change impacts on Costs of Food, and to combine them with spatially explicit hunger projections for the year 2030, both under a poverty, as well as a prosperity scenario. Our model results indicate that while average yields decrease with climate change in all focus regions, the impact on the Costs of Food is very diverse. Costs of Food increase most in the Middle East and North Africa, where available agricultural land is already fully utilized and options to import food are limited. The increase is least in Sub-Saharan Africa, since production there can be shifted to areas which are only marginally affected by climate change and imports from other regions increase. South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa can partly adapt to climate change, in our model, by modifying trade and expanding agricultural land. In the Middle East and North Africa, almost the entire population is affected by increasing Costs of Food, but the share of people vulnerable to hunger is relatively low, due to relatively strong economic development in these projections. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the Vulnerability to Hunger will persist, but increases in Costs of Food are moderate. While in South Asia a high share of the population suffers from increases in Costs of Food and is exposed to hunger, only a negligible number of people will be exposed at extreme levels. Independent of the region, the impacts of climate change are less severe in a richer and more globalized world. Adverse climate impacts on the Costs of Food could be moderated by promoting technological progress in agriculture. Improving market access would be advantageous for farmers, providing the opportunity to profitably increase production in the Middle East and North Africa as well as in South Asia, but may lead to increasing Costs of Food for consumers. In the long-term perspective until 2080, the consequences of climate change will become even more severe: while in 2030 56% of the global population may face increasing Costs of Food in a poor and fragmented world, in 2080 the proportion will rise to 73%.

Description: A methodology to assess future development in patterns of vulnerability is presented which can support the assessment of global policies with regard to their impacts on specific vulnerabilities on the regional or local scale. Patterns of vulnerability, formalized by vulnerability profiles (e.g. for the livelihoods of dryland smallholder farmers) were investigated under different consistent indicator scenarios reflecting different global policies. After unfolding several principal possibilities to do such an analysis of temporal change in vulnerability patterns we could conclude that the concept of “Clusters of Change” (CoCs) is the most straight forward and promising approach. The main arguments are that each interpretation has necessarily to consider both, the starting situation and it’s change over time (”poor and heavily improving”, ”rich and stagnating” etc.). This implies that we are looking for patterns which represent typical combinations of present states AND expected future changes. An application of the CoC-concept to the drylands vulnerability patterns considering the indicator set for the present situation and the same indicator set for 2050 under a baseline scenario was performed as a test. Comparison of the present vulnerability cluster partition with the spatial distribution of the CoCs revealed that most of these clusters are separated into an improving and a deteriorating part which shows where winners and losers of the baseline scenario are – an interesting result which illustrates the appropriateness of the CoC – method. To explore the potential of CoCs for the dryland vulnerability we applied the method to two different sets of scenarios until 2050: a baseline vs. Climate policy scenario (OECD, 2012) and a ”policy first” scenario vs. ”security first” scenario (UNEP, 2007). The first one serves as an example for a policy assessment while the second compares the vulnerability consequences of two scenarios based on different story-lines of further global development. The main conclusion to be drawn from these calculations is that the CoCs are rather insensitive with regard to the small differences between the scenarios. Regarding the first set of scenarios the relatively short time horizon of relevant influences of climate policies on climate change impacts and several indicators which are not influenced at all generate only a very small difference. The only significant change in the resulting vulnerability profiles was in the values of change in water scarcity: it was lower for all profiles in the climate policy case. The second set of scenarios is not directly related to policy decisions but to different global story-lines which deviate stronger. This resulted in an increasing cluster number from 4 (policy first) to 5 (security first) clusters, about 20% of the pixels changing cluster membership, 3 clusters showing the same spatial extent for both scenarios but the 4th cluster (“policy first”) “losing” India which generates a separate cluster in the “security first” scenario. This allows for the interpretation that a further development according to the “security first”-storyline compared to the “policy first”-storyline would make a difference particularly for India. Closer inspection of the respective profile shows a qualitatively different situation indicating increased vulnerability compared to the “policy first” scenario where India shares one cluster with e.g., Northern Africa.

Description: In coupled human-environment systems where well established and proven general theories are often lacking cluster analysis provides the possibility to discover regularities – a first step in empirically based theory building. The aim of this report is to share the experiences and knowledge on cluster analysis we gained in several applications in this realm helping to avoid typical problems and pitfalls. In our description of issues and methods we will highlight well-known main-stream methods as well as promising new developments, referring to pertinent literature for further information, thus offering also some potential new insights for the more experienced. The following aspects are discussed in detail: data-selection and pre-treatment, selection of a distance measure in the data space, selection of clustering method, performing clustering (parameterizing the algorithm(s), determining the number of clusters etc.) and the interpretation and evaluation of results. We link our description – as far as tools for performing the analysis are concerned - to the R software environment and its associated cluster analysis packages. We have used this public domain software, together with own tailor-made extensions, documented in the appendix.

Description: Historical agreed minimum discharges of river Elbe at the czech-german border profile Hřensko/Schöna Discharges of the river Elbe at the border profile between the Czech Republic and Germany at Hřensko/ Schöna play an essential role for the suitability of the German river section downstream for shipping. A cascade of reservoirs upstream the border profile was mainly built between 1950 and 1964. Since then a significant supplemental low water management at the boarder profile is possible. Although the low wa¬ter control at the German-Czech boarder profile is currently managed by a network of German and Czech institutions the legal basis of this management regime is currently not fully understood. In particular, the question raised weather current management targets for low water supplement can be seen based on still valid German-Czech agreements between the former states German Democratic Republic and Czech Slovakian Socialistic Republic. This report summarizes the chronological follow up of the construction of the Czech reservoir system and the related agreements between the German and Czech site.The authors have assembled the development of the effectively agreed minimum discharges at the border profile ČSSR/GDR at Hřensko/Schöna. The available joint coordination statements between ČSSR and GDR during the period April 1983 and May 1988 were reviewed and compared to the recorded discharges. The capacity for low water supplements at Hřensko/Schöna increased since 1900 from 143,58 Mil. m³ to 2 566,24 Mil. m³ in 2010. The greatest parts of the total storage capacity are located in the Vltava and in the Ohře river basin with storage capacities of 1 894,03 Mil. m³ and 404,35 Mil. m³, respectively. The Vltava cascade is currently managed in a way that a minimum discharge is guaranteed of about 40,0 m³/s at barrage Vrané. This compares to a natural discharge situation with minimum flows between 12,0 to 15,0 m³/s. The barrage system in the Ohře river system can currently ensure minimum discharges of about 8,00 m³/s compared with natural discharges between 1,50 and 2,00 m³/s. The boarder profile at Hřensko/ Schöna is directly affected by the reservoir control in Vltava and Ohře. The GDR made several efforts to agree with the ČSSR on minimum discharge levels for the river Elbe at the border profile at Hřensko/Schöna. After years of negotiations minimum monthly medial discharges (Min MQ month) were defined for a hydrological year starting from November until October. However, these monthly medial values still allowed for shortfalls at the daily scale. Based on the monthly medial values two coordination arrangements were concluded between the ČSSR and the GDR about the supply of minimum discharge at their joint border profile at Hřensko/Schöna. The first started in April, 1983 and was valid till 1990. The agreement was updated and extended in May, 1988 till 2000. The lastly agreed monthly minimum values range between 86,8 m³/s in August and 185,2 m³/s in April. Although an agreement about these values exists, it never had a legally binding character. However, these values are still used as orientation for the control of Czech reservoirs in practise. In the past, the agreed minimum discharges felled only once below the limit. In July 1964, the observed monthly discharge was 89,1 m³/s which is 7.1 m³/s short of the agreed value of 96,2 m³/s. Climate change might lead to a more frequent short fall of the once agreed minimum values. Considering this fact and the informal nature of the current target values for control a new formal framework for the minimum flow regime at the German-Czech boarder might be in the interest of the German water users downstream.