This chapter explores the connections between ethics, the phenomenological (and hermeneutical) traditions, and education. It focuses on the idea of the subject, showing phenomenology’s contrast with the modernist picture of the autonomous subject. The chapter first briefly traces the idea of the subject in phenomenology through four representative figures – Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Levinas – and then sketches their approaches to ethics. Then it pivots to four ethical concepts in philosophy of education in this tradition – understanding, risk, subjectification, and responsibility – by connecting them to phenomenological tradition’s broad conception of the subject. The chapter brings into relief the contribution phenomenology makes to envisioning living well together and human flourishing, and education’s role in fostering ethical subjects that would enact such societies.

In many policies for and practices of education for democratic citizenship it is assumed that the democratic community is a community of shared democratic values. On such an account, education has the task of including “newcomers” into this community by ensuring that they adopt and internalize the common democratic values. In this chapter, I discuss the work of two authors, Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, who both have challenged this understanding of democracy and the democratic community. Both authors highlight the contested (Mouffe) and sporadic (Rancière) nature of the democratic community, thus bringing into view the work done to constitute the political community. They also highlight that this constitution does not happen before democratic politics can take place, but actually is an essential part of it. I provide a reconstruction of Mouffe’s and Rancière’s ideas and explore the implications for education.

Chapter 23 reviews the role of grammaticalization at different levels of grammar: phonological, morpho-syntactic, paradigmatic, and semantic-pragmatic. It first discusses the dischronic principles and mechanisms that have been proposed in previous grammaticalization studies. The chapter then examines the prominent patterns by source category, dividing these into nouns and verbs. In the nominal category, four source construction types are illustrated with the reanalyses that led to their emergence as grammatical forms such as postpositions, conjunctions, and auxiliaries. In the verbal category, four source construction types are illustrated, with special focus on the grammaticalization of de-verbal postpositions and auxiliary verbs. The chapter further addresses select aspects of Korean grammaticalization from a typological perspective. It discusses the productive use of affixes, converbs, and predicatives known as “mermaid constructions”, which are among the characteristics shared by many languages in the eastern Eurasian region. It also discusses the presence of large inventories of de-verbal postpositions and numeral classifiers.

Traditionally, Romance diachronic lexicology has focused on the formal and content-level semantic history of nominal, verbal, adjectival, and lexical adverbial bases. Lately, specialists in general historical linguistics have explored the interface between what appears to be syntactic change and certain semantic phenomena affecting the lexical items involved in these shifts. They have examined facets of language change usually associated with syntax but with consequences for the semantic status of the items involved, such as recurrent paths of grammaticalization and the less common phenomenon of degrammaticalization, as well as lexicalization, subjectification, the genesis of pragmatic and discourse markers, and the creation of lexical items with evidential functions. Romanists working on issues of diachronic lexicology are beginning to focus their attention on the genesis and subsequent evolution of prepositions, grammatical particles, pragmatic and discourse markers, as well as the acquisition by some independent lexical items of evidential and subjectification functions. Consequently, they are forging a new link between diachronic syntax and lexicology. Such an approach to lexical studies constitutes a fruitful meeting place for Romanists and for specialists in general historical linguists.

This introductory chapter focuses on theoretical issues related to the imagining subject, discussing its subjectification processes and varied uses of mediating technologies to constitute new social imaginaries.

This chapter focuses on individuals and the ways in which they have undergone transformations in the online world. It examines the popular online writings of Leimengdi, and discusses how online writing became for him a process of subjectification—allowing him to transcend two types of self to become a new imagining subject brimming with morals, emotions, and hopes for the future.

This chapter assesses the neoliberalization of copyright law.It begins with the historical emergence of copyright as a form of public biopolitics.It then looks at three areas where copyright has become neoliberal.The first is incentives theory, which treats all creation as an economic calculation geared toward market rewards.I outline the theory, and show how it works not just to model, but to produce a certain kind of creator, to the exclusion of other forms of creativity.The second is litigation around hip-hop sampling.Here the demand for licensing works to nudge music into commercial channels, where all cultural borrowing is mediated through market transactions.The third is the recent expansion of copyright into what scholars have termed “paracopyright”: a prohibition on circumventing copyright protection technologies, which generally function as forms of “digital rights management” (DRM). Through a detailed examination of how DRM technologies (such as the regional restrictions on DVDs) function, I show how this addition to the law clearly marks a move in the direction of copyright into training individuals that they are consumers of the products of culture.

This chapter introduces and outlines the structure of the book and its argument.It begins with an extended look at litigation between two rival religious sects – the Worldwide Church of God and the splinter group Philadelphia Church of God – over access to doctrinal texts that the WGC owned the rights to, but that it had renounced.It thus provides a good example of how intellectual property can matter even in the most basic and intimate aspects of our lives.I then situate the book in the context of current literature on the expansion of intellectual property (IP) rights.Rather than note their expansion, I argue that the kind of power expressed in IP is subtly shifting.The chapter then offers a brief synopsis of the core Foucauldian theory behind the book – that power can operate according to different logics. It concludes with an outline of the remainder of the text.

This chapter treats developments in trademark in the context of the development of brand capitalism.Traditional trademark analysis displayed the features of a public biopolitics; developments around branding push it in a neoliberal direction.I focus on three developments.The first is trademark dilution, which protects brands as valuable in themselves. An extended analysis of Victoria’s Secret’s successful attempt to shut down a sex-toy shop that called itself “Victor’s Little Secret” shows how dilution also functions as a kind of subjectification.The second is a recent Supreme Court case ruling that, PTO rules against registration of disparaging trademarks violated the First Amendment.The result transfers power to brand owners.The third is the use of Geographic Indicators to protect “traditional” cultural indicia.This resistance strategy is a difficult one, as it risks entrenching conservative and stereotypical views of cultural groups, often at the expense of dissident forms. It thus illustrates an unexpected way that branding can function as a form of subjectification, and the potential limits of using trademarks and branding as strategies of resistance.

This chapter both provides a condensed case for why the analysis of intellectual property (IP) through differing regimes of power is a fruitful one, and details a couple of its implications. One is that we need to be attentive to the way IP law creates certain kinds of subjects, and to be willing to critique it on those lines.The other takes the form of a brief discussion of alternatives proposed to IP, in such areas as “low IP” zones and in creative commons-style proposals.I conclude that the degree to which these alternatives fundamentally challenge the neoliberalization of IP and its move away from public biopower, is essential in assessing the extent to which they actually are alternatives.The goal is not to be strongly prescriptive, but, in the manner of Foucault, to help figure out what are the right questions to ask.

This chapter develops the theoretical framework for the book.Using Foucault, the chapter introduces three models of power: juridical (sovereignty and rights-based), public biopower (promoting the productivity and health of the population in a general way), and neoliberal biopower (same objective as biopower, but working on individuals and treating everything as part of the economy).With neoliberal biopower, the emphasis is on subjectification and the development of homo economicus as a type.I then trace intellectual property (IP) from its emergence at the intersection of classical liberalism and juridical power to the current neoliberal form.My focus is on the contrast between the early, public biopower version of IP with the current, neoliberal one.The earlier version relies on the notion of benefits to an amorphous public and worries about the effects of monopolies; the newer version drops the aversion to monopoly and attempts to use property rights to capture and internalize public benefits, while putting pressure on individuals in the public to view their interaction with culture economically.I then analyze the current, Demsetzian theorization of IP as neoliberal.