Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

This study places Nāgārjuna and Plato in dialogue regarding how both seek to orient philosophy in the face of indeterminacy observed at the elemental level of existence, specifically, the indeterminacy of fire’s light. Looking to the elemental within Chōra and Śūnyatā, a directive becomes discernible for calibrating philosophy to this indeterminacy, and crucial limitations are disclosed, which expand philosophy by enabling a productive relation to the non-philosophical. What emerges are directives for language, which serve to modify philosophy’s violence towards the (...) world by striking a middle way between the binaries of reification and nihilism, speech and silence. (shrink)

This essay examines women's spectacularly visible status in feminised mass cultural domains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Feminine spectacles are commonly understood to invite viewers to access women's bodies, yet early twentieth-century spectacles paradoxically called renewed attention to women's illegibility. Women's visual prominence made apparent their ‘unknowability’, recasting an ancient ideational heritage in modern terms. Representations of women as opaque in the early twentieth century constituted a challenge to ocularcentrism and reveal the centrality of femininity in mass (...) mediations of epistemology and ontology. Drawing on written accounts of women's opacity in the fashion and beauty press, I argue that attention to spectacles of unknowability can be productive for feminist modernist studies. The texturing of histories of feminine spectacle challenges some tenacious dichotomies that continue to inform accounts of women's place in the modern, including those of subject and object, and visibility and invisibility. Focusing on opacity leads us to a productive account of the variable visibility of women in the modern, which foregrounds the multiple historical relations of different groups of women to regimes of visibility and keeps in view the diverse ways that differently classed and raced women were positioned vis-à-vis spectacle. The essay draws on feminist and postcolonial theory to suggest that an attunement to the unknowable not only nuances our understanding of a discrete historical period, but can lead the feminist researcher to confront and expand her own gaze in the era of capitalist modernity. (shrink)

Images of brains circulate today as rationales for decision-making and selectivity in policies, curriculum, preservice teacher education and inservice professional development. The excitement over brain-based research, its visual reach and authorizing role accompanies longstanding debates in which the status attributed to biology, physiology and allied psychological approaches has been considered prejudicial. This article traces a series of dislocations in the linkages forged between discourses of vision and epistemic authorization, and how they still inhere in contemporary debates over brain imaging. The (...) critical history that the article offers within the general framework of Visual science and technology studies requires questioning some of the core tenets of visual culture, including what gets to count as the visual, ‘its’ role in legitimation, and the primacy assigned to looking and observation as strategies of truth-production. (shrink)

This paper attempts to draw out the political import of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, by engaging the critique levelled against it by his student and literary executor Claude Lefort. In suggesting a tension in Merleau-Ponty’s work that obscures alterity, Lefort seems to miss the rich political import of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. Founded in his development of the concepts of écart and reversibility, Merleau-Ponty’s ontological position breaks with many of the standard tenets of political thinking, and offers a (...) multifaceted conception of alterity. I will suggest that Lefort’s own claim to alterity buckles under the immanent weight of his critique of Merleau-Ponty, offering at best a conception of otherness limited to a self-relational non-identity. This conception ultimately fails to adequately consider the relations existing between different beings-in-the-world. In thinking being as flesh, Merleau-Ponty offers us an ethico-political optic that attempts to think alterity and ontology in a manner that unhinges us from our closed and autonomous being, opening us to the world, others and to the non-identical becoming that characterizes being as such. (shrink)

We begin with a puzzle about how to intelligibly combine the active and passive elements of perception. For counsel, we turn to Augustine’s account of perception in De Trinitate. Augustine’s trinitarian account of perception offers an attractive resolution of our puzzle. Augustine’s resolution of our puzzle, however, cannot be straightforwardly adopted. It must be adapted. We end with speculation about how this might be done.

Self-presentation is a term that indicates conscious and unconscious strategies for controlling or managing how one is perceived by others in terms of both appearance and comportment. In this article, I will discuss the phenomenology of self-presentation with respect to the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty regarding the visibility of the body within intercorporeal relations through ‘behaviour’ and ‘expression.’ In doing so, I will turn to the work of the Canadian sociologist and social theorist Erving Goffman. Goffman’s account (...) of self-presentation suggests why embodied subjects adopt certain styles of ordered bodily behaviour as determined by the broader social order, giving existential and social significance to the ontological structures of intercorporeal bodily communication. Following Goffman, I will suggest that the embodied subject is continuously—and constitutionally—engaged in implicit and explicit strategies to manage how the body is presented to others. In articulating self-presentation as a feature of intercorporeality, my aim in this article is to use Goffman’s insights to extend Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of bodily communication by demonstrating that bodily communication that is instantiated at the level of intercorporeality is always expressed through social life with its various historical, cultural and linguistic dimensions. (shrink)

How are we to understand Solon's departure from Athens "for the sake of theôria" immediately after the introduction of his laws ? Previous accounts have taken theôria to mean "sightseeing," but the goal of Solon's departure-to avoid explaining or changing the laws-is guaranteed by certain religious features of theôria: the theôros plays the role of civic guardian and must not add to or subtract from an oracle he conveys to the city, and during the theôria the city itself must remain (...) pure and avoid disturbances. Solon adapts these features of theôria to establish his laws as a pseudo-oracular discourse, as a purification of the city, and as a permanent civic medium. The beginning of Solon's open-ended journey thus gives ideological finality to the laws at the middle of the city. This reading of Solon's theôria coheres with other instances of the creative adaptation of ritual in archaic Greek politics. It also develops our understanding of the discourse on theôria as regulating the laws that constitute the political sphere. (shrink)

For nearly a quarter of Darwin's Descent of Man , it is the singing bird whose voice presages the development of human aesthetics. But since the 1950s, aesthetics has had a perilous and contested role in the study of birdsong. Modern ornithology's disillusionment with aesthetic knowledge after World War II brought about the removal of musical studies of birdsong, studies which were replaced by work with the sound spectrograph, a tool that changes the elusive sounds of birdsong into a readable (...) graphic image called a spectrogram. This article narrates the terms under which the image, rather than the sound, of birdsong has become a sign of humanity's ability to reason objectively. Drawing examples from the strange evolutionary tales that exist at the juncture of ornithology, music history, illustration, and linguistics, this story suggests how it was that the human ear disappeared in the unbridgeable gap between the sciences and the study of aesthetics so tellingly termed "the humanities.". (shrink)

My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) electronic systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the histories of philosophy and the visual arts. The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are relevant (...) to a better understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture. The primary subject of this discourse is immersion then: an experience which will be identified within the dissertation as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The understanding of immersion arrived at here will be used to fashion a synchronous theory of art particularly informed by encounters and concepts of immersion into virtuality. To sufficiently address this subject in a scholarly fashion, I have researched, found and accumulated aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards the articulation of what I have come to call immersive consciousness. As a result of formulating such an immersive consciousness, a good deal of the basis for the questioning of the Western ontological tradition has been found in the Western tradition itself when we look with new eyes and ask new uncertain questions. Moreover, this immersive consciousness will be used to propose some abstract questions encircling today's electronic-based culture. Through the structuring of the argument within the thesis - and overtly within the conclusion - I have articulated a non-teleological creative strategy which provides the basis for an unconstraining integration of noologies (ways of semblancing the thinking process). This strategy provides a means of exemplifying - and for honoring - various methods of thinking. This structuring strategy is consistent with the 'hacker ethic' as defined by Steven Levy, as a demand that access to computers - and anything which might teach us something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. To follow this strategy, this dissertation has set out to understand how topical conceptions of virtual immersion connect to pre-existing systems of thought as revealed in art as they have extended out of antecedent ontological self-understandings, historical human self-understandings which have evidenced themselves in the elaboration of technological objectives. To do this I have forged a certain rhizomatic paternity/maternity for Virtual Reality within this dissertation by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with the relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy. (shrink)

A theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination that attempts to do justice to traditional intuitions about its psychological centrality is developed, largely through a detailed critique of the theory propounded by Colin McGinn. Like McGinn, I eschew the highly deflationary views of imagination, common amongst analytical philosophers, that treat it either as a conceptually incoherent notion, or as psychologically trivial. However, McGinn fails to develop his alternative account satisfactorily because (following Reid, Wittgenstein and Sartre) he (...) draws an excessively sharp, qualitative distinction between imagination and perception, and because of his flawed, empirically ungrounded conception of hallucination. His arguments in defense of these views are rebutted in detail, and the traditional, passive, Cartesian view of visual perception, upon which several of them implicitly rely, is criticized in the light of findings from recent cognitive science and neuroscience. It is also argued that the apparent intuitiveness of the passive view of visual perception is a result of mere historical contingency. An understanding of perception (informed by modern visual science) as an inherently active process enables us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework. (shrink)

The body of philosophical knowledge concerning the relations among language, the senses, and deafness, interpreted as a canon of key ideas which have found their way into folk metaphysics, constitutes one of the historically sustained conditions of the oppression of deaf people. Jonathan Rée, with his book I see a voice, makes the point that a philosophical history, grounded in a phenomenological and causal concern with philosophical thought and social life, can offer an archaeology of philosophy's contribution to the social (...) oppression of deaf people.This article offers support for such a project while being critical of Rée's philosophical phenomenology, since it presumes, àpriori, two ideas about deafness and sign language: firstly, that deaf experience is like hearing experience but without hearing; and secondly, that the iconic qualities of sign languages are strictly superficial phenomena. Both presumptions, it is argued here, derive from the same philosophical knowledge which has linked deafness to the sense of hearing and the voice, and in doing so secured an intellectual basis for the oppression of deaf people in social life. (shrink)

This response article addresses the conception of “film as philosophy” developed by Shawn Loht in his book Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017), with specific attention to the relevance and implications of Loht's approach for the broader debate beyond a strictly Heideggerian film-philosophy. The article proceeds in three distinct takes. The first take examines Loht's later-Heideggerian inspirations, arguing that although these more fundamental notions of philosophy open significant possibilities for film as philosophy, they nevertheless run (...) the risk of being too embracive, as well as too elusive, to make a distinctive contribution to the debate. For its second take, the article resets its initial point of departure by considering how the earlier Heidegger of Being and Time cues in Loht's approach a special – albeit, ultimately, untenable – investment in cinematic reflexivity, with the stylistic hallmarks of Terrence Malick serving as a test case. In its final take, the article concludes by venturing a possible solution to the questions raised in the first two takes. Here it is proposed that, in contrast to Loht's general interest in cinematographic devices, the voiceover holds a far more sustainable promise of reflexivity, while at the same time giving more prominence to the viewer's acts of listening – which is what a quintessentially Heideggerian film phenomenology surely asks for. (shrink)

Considering formative twentieth-century theories in relation to contemporary technosocial developments, this article examines ideas of spectacle and surveillance as ways of approaching visual politics. I argue that the historically important relationship between the visual and political fields is now intensifying and mutating. First discussing Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, I show how his influential approach proves inadequate to the politics of image-saturated societies. I next show how critics of imperial and racial spectacles, from Michael Rogin to Claudia Rankine (...) and Tina Campt, provide better ways of engaging power and political contestation in the visual field. Third, I examine how Michel Foucault deployed notions of spectacle in his own work but argued for leaving the term behind, presenting surveillance as not just a different modality of power but also spectacle’s temporal successor. This account remains essential for both historical understanding and reckoning with contemporary surveillance. Fourth, however, as Simone Browne argues, Foucault’s separation between spectacle and surveillance is too stark, his history too prone to occlude race. Furthermore, recent surveillance technologies and practices have changed in ways that confound his terms, while extending and also altering the racial dynamics explored earlier in the essay. Today, even surveillance based on optical media contributes to a “postvisual” image world in which algorithmic, machine-machine communication abets forms of power neither tied to human perception nor graspable as subject formation. With surprising assistance from Debord, I end by discussing the significant theoretical and political challenges posed by the ironies of postvisual visuality. (shrink)

Essays explore the significance of Julia Kristeva’s concept of intimate revolt for social and political philosophy. Over the last twenty years, French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and novelist Julia Kristeva has explored how global crises threaten people’s ability to revolt. In a context of widespread war, deepening poverty, environmental catastrophes, and rising fundamentalisms, she argues that a revival of inner psychic experience is necessary and empowering. “Intimate revolt” has become a central concept in Kristeva’s critical repertoire, framing and permeating her understanding of (...) power, meaning, and identity. New Forms of Revolt brings together ten essays on this aspect of Kristeva’s work, addressing contemporary social and political issues like immigration and cross-cultural encounters, colonial and postcolonial imaginations, racism and artistic representation, healthcare and social justice, the spectacle of global capitalism, and new media. Sarah K. Hansen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. Rebecca Tuvel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rhodes College. (shrink)

This essay excavates the pre-capitalist influences of the thought of Guy Debord, French postwar critical theorist and founding member of the Situationist International. Tracing a lineage of what can be described as Debord’s aristocratic sensibility, we discover not simply an aesthetic approach to navigating social life, or guidelines for outmanoeuvring an adversary, but also contempt for honest labour, monetary transactions in cultural affairs, and conventional political gestures. Together these themes remain part of a legacy of an aristocratic past, one that, (...) as will be examined here, informed Debord’s acrimony towards his own mid-20th-century moment. The following discussion will advance a genealogy of Debord’s thinking with these themes from late antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, and finally with an extended examination of the baroque, a concept that helps advance Debord’s diagnostic concept of the society of the spectacle. (shrink)

In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.– Don DeLillo, (2016) Mao II, p.27, Pan Macmillan.Some three years ago we envisioned a project concerning the shift from text...

Within the past couple of decades, art-historical scholarship has developed a more acute awareness of the need to reassess and re-evaluate its dominant narratives. It has become apparent that the value judgements that have guided modernist historiography can no longer be taken for granted, and there has been an ever-increasing demand for more diverse perspectives. One central issue which has gradually surfaced into broader consciousness, is the impact of occult and esoteric ideas on artistic theories and practices since the late (...) nineteenth century. This article looks into the background of this phenomenon, locating a point of culmination in the new Symbolist direction of art that emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century. The aim is to demonstrate that central Symbolist principles, such as inwardness, intuition, and dematerialisation are linked with popular esoteric beliefs, and that the late nineteenth-century aesthetic theorisations of these issues have had significant effects on later artistic developments. The artists of this new movement were no longer satisfied with the old ‘window on the world’ paradigm. Instead of copying a tangible reality as it appeared to their eyes, they turned inward, towards the world of dreams, fantasies and nightmares, visions and hallucinations, ancient myths and fairy tales. But they were not merely looking for new kinds of subject matter in order to ‘shock the bourgeoisie’. The innovative aesthetic attitude that they developed in both theory and practice rested on a philosophical foundation that was deeply rooted in occult and esoteric ideologies and their quest for new directions and forms of expression in art was paralleled by an intensive religious searching. (shrink)

Though far from new, the rhetoric of transparency is on the ascent in public and political life. It is cited as the answer to a vast array of social, political, financial and corporate problems. With the backing of a ‘movement’, transparency has assumed the position of an unassailable ‘good’. This article asks whether the value ascribed to transparency limits political thinking, particularly for the radical and socialist Left. What forms of politics, ethics, of being-in-common, might it be possible to think (...) if we pay attention to secrecy rather than transparency? (shrink)

Approximately at the turn of the nineteenth century, the visual encounter between humans and birds, which has been going on since both forms of life have existed, began to solidify into a hobby, into something that a middle-class citizen of American might spend a morning doing. Certain technologies—optics , field guides, and later, automobiles—helped to enable this pursuit. In the twentieth century, bird watching became an immense industry. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, one report claims that in America (...) "an estimated 70.4 million people now go out-of-doors to watch birds one or more times per year" . Much has been written on how and why bird watching has grown in popularity during the last 150 years or so. 2 This essay will look instead at the effects produced by the nearly infinite acts of looking inherent to a hobby that has been described as one of "Americans' most-favored [outdoor] activities". (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard's first simulation stage re-interpreted in the light of architectural theory and psychoanalysis.

Reading with Gilles Deleuze, this thesis explores art as a production that abandons representation as a formation of identity in favour of an ontology of becoming. I argue that the move to abstraction in painting resonates with the aim of "thought without image" because it counters representation with a radical materiality that returns painting to the movement of matter. In order to situate Deleuze's thinking on art within a trajectory of a philosophy of becoming I open the thesis with a (...) chapter on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. Here I introduce the notion of 'thinking in painting' and argue that, while in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of art painting is a pedagogical investigation of the pre-human, chaotic and invisible 'depth' of a lived visible world, Deleuze takes Bergson's commitment to the possibility of moving beyond the human seriously and reverses the order of perception in order to seize the non-human virtual that eludes actualization. For Deleuze, the task of painting is therefore not to reveal the ontogenesis of the actual and the lived, but to extract the virtual and to embody it as a monument to that event. In abstraction the interest moves from the mechanism of perception to the work of paint, and in the subsequent chapters on Mondrian, Pollock, Klee and Bacon I explore specific practices and their peculiar logic of sensation. In Mondrian we see the strange space of virtuality unleashed when the line is not constrained by the closure of the punctual system, and in Pollock's explosive "all-over" paintings identify that space not as a chaos but as a chaosmosis or machinic heterogeneity. I argue that by understanding these modulating and rhythmic compositions as haptic spaces, we break through the distancing of visibility and can begin to think at the level of expressive matter. I then turn to Klee, and using the famous image of "taking a walk with a line" explore the notion of the emergent figure in the context of Klee's aim to "render visible". What we find is an art where space and the form of expression works on the plane of composition and refers only to the unfolding rhythms of the abstract line. In the final chapter I discuss Bacon's portraits and look at how the multiplicity of the event that is maintained in the diagrammatic composition is drawn into the recognizable face. I conclude that the embodiment of the non-human event forces thought to confront the possibility of the emergent identity that is realized in the abstraction of "thinking in painting". (shrink)

What can postmodernism do for, or to, educational research? The article discusses its potential for resisting closure and simplification. Developing a ‘preposterous’, anachronistic postmodern method that is caught up with surrealism and the baroque, the article plays with trompel'oeil paintings and outmoded popular entertainments such as magic lanterns, peep shows and clockwork automata as figures for critique and analysis. It argues for defamiliarisation, fascination, recalcitrance and frivolity as methodic practices for research in the compromised conditions of postmodernity, and as forms (...) of ethical resistance to the risk-averse literalism that pervades contemporary education policy. (shrink)

A growing interest in Claude Lefort is bringing to light his radical insights on modern democracy, totalitarianism, and human rights. While the notion perhaps most closely associated with Lefort is that of ‘the empty place of power,’ this article offers a reading of Lefort from a unique angle: his concept of the myth of the One. I demonstrate that to Lefort, the phantasmagorical appeal of the One – the desire for harmony, unity and stability – is the force that continually (...) endangers the democratic project, while the distinctive and unavoidable characteristic of democratic society is its ‘inability’ to name itself as One – a coherent and established social self. Thus, the main challenge of society is its symbolic self-institution. The discussion illuminates Lefort’s singular stance in the study of totalitarianism (Arendt), his rejection of the imaginary (next to Castoriadis), his debt to the structuralism scheme (Lévi-Strauss), as well as his conversation with anarchist voices (La Boétie, Clastres) and with psychoanalysis (Lacan). Ultimately, what Lefort coins ‘symbolic division’ condenses the pledge of democracy to embrace a neurotic self, a bodiless body, a nameless identity in an empty space of power. As such, Lefort’s anti-myth of the One promises to be a vexing objective. (shrink)

The article discusses Paweł Polit’s book on the philosophy and painterly oeuvre of S. I. Witkiewicz that relates both areas of Witkiewicz’s work based on his idea of “unity of personality.” Exploring Witkacy’s theory, also contained in his literary works, Polit confronts it with the philosophical sources of his thought, as well as with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Deleuze’s and Derrida’s reflections on painting that bring to the fore its corporeal, haptic dimension. The idea of the “unity of personality” is, according (...) to Polit, a keystone of Witkacy’s thought, giving coherence to his aesthetic reflection, despite of its changes. Subjected to an appropriate interpretation, i.e. connected with the theory of the unconscious background of experiences, inseparable from the psychophysical identity of an individual, the idea of “unity of personality” becomes also the interpretative key to Witkacy’s painting. The author draws attention to the originality of Polit’s approach to Witkiewicz which situates itself within a broader contemporary discussion on the relationships between art and philosophy, painting and writing. She juxtaposes Witkacy’s case discussed by Polit with other examples of artists in whose oeuvre writing and visual work illuminate each other and intertwine. (shrink)

For the better part of the past decade, global social movements have drawn popular attention to the power of image production and acts of representation, particularly the ways ubiquitous cameras challenge the exercise of power This essay lays out a theoretical schema for interrogating a broader “politics of visibility” at work in the early twenty-first century, most readily apparent through the activities of smartphone-enabled and visually-savvy activists. As new media technologies have opened up new strategies of representation, these modes of (...) representation have been incorporated into existing media practices that delimit the ways in which the consequentiality of various movements and political projects can be understood. Theoretically revisiting the concept of visibility, this essay critiques the relationship between technology and the production of knowledge in media studies before arguing that the visibility of an event presages a consequentiality partially determined by the ways in which it is rendered perceptible and thus, intelligible. (shrink)

Recent social theory that stresses the ‘nonrepresentational’, the ‘more-than visual’, and the relationship between affect and sensation have tended to assume some kind of break or rupture from historical antecedents. Especially since the contributions of Crary and Jay in the 1990s, when it comes to perceiving the built environment the complexities of sensation have been partially obscured by the dominance of a static model of vision as the principal organizing modality. This article returns to some prior historical articulations of the (...) significance of motility in perception, retracing pathways across art history, architectural theory and the history of neuroscience to argue for an alternative model based on the movement of the eye. Along with subsystems that deal with balance and orientation, I offer parallels between spatial motifs of the interior spaces of the body – labyrinths, vestibules, chambers – and those in artefacts and the built environment that contribute to the heightened physicality of the oculomotor subject. (shrink)

One aspect of Foucault's thought brings him much closer to Freud than many commentators believe. This Freudian “moment” in Foucault is formulated in the following dictum: the soul is the prison of the body. For Foucault, the modern soul is formed when the norms that govern disciplinary training and exercise are internalized. Once internalized, these norms affect our self-understanding and conduct. This paper focuses on Foucault's account of internalization. It shows that this Freudian moment in Foucault mitigates his criticisms of (...) the repressive hypothesis, but it also suggests a conception of interiority that can be interpreted as the modern instantiation of the rapport à soi. (shrink)

I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop lrigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.

This article argues that the figure of Oedipus lies at the heart of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Oedipus is the prototypical Aufklärer as no one can rival him in his courageous attempt to employ his own autonomous reason `without direction from another'; yet self-knowledge remains beyond his grasp. Indeed, Oedipus' obsessive drive to bring the truth to light ultimately leads him to put out his own eyes because he is unable to bear the sight of the catastrophe that (...) this drive engenders. Oedipus' demise represents in allegorical form the self-destruction of enlightenment itself. Enlightenment is similarly driven to illuminate the world in its totality by reducing it to philosophical concepts. In the process, however, it becomes blind to the question of its dependence upon that which it purports to possess. In its attempt at total illumination, therefore, enlightenment does not effectuate an exit or Ausgang from the opacity of myth, as Kant had held, but rather is blinded, paradoxically, by the radiance of its own projections. Reading the dialectic of enlightenment through the tragedy of Oedipus leads back to the enigmatic question of art as the means by which the rationalization and disenchantment of the world can be reflected upon critically. (shrink)

How does a sense of touch, figuratively and practically, get deployed within equality governance, and to what questions and ways of thinking about the state does this direct us? Taking 2009–2010 as a snap-shot moment in the development of British equality reform—the year leading up to passage of the Equality Act 2010—this article explores the relationship between touch (the haptic) and equality governance from three angles. First, how have governmental bodies used touch language and imagery, including in geometrical representations of (...) disadvantage? Second, what other, more challenging encounters and actions are imaginable; specifically, can touch mobilise the feeling state as a critical form of active citizenship? Third, what re-conceptualisations of the state does the touching, feeling state invoke, and with what effects? Specifically, does conceiving of the state as a multi-identity formation reframe the risks associated with a haptic state, thereby opening up new strategies for political action? (shrink)

In the aftermath of a normalized Foucaultian world with an all encompassing web of biopower, one remaining hope is to cultivate nimbleness. Nimbleness is an embodied aesthetic sensitivity to the material presence. Cultivating nimbleness is a particular style of cultivation; it is to willfully gather together one’s self in the wake of a formative force far richer than the derivative web of living power relationships of human embeddness within a horizon of social, economical, political and historical subjectivating power relations; which (...) are chronicled and labeled by Michel Foucault as the normalizing practices of biopower. In other words to have freedom, one must start by rejecting the categories and labels normally internalized in order to relearn to learn from the material presence. Such a style of cultivation is a means of resisting normalizing power relations which co-opt cultivating practices to engross their own dominance which has had the by-product of an impotence to negate the gross material injustices present. This normalizing style of cultivation is a prevalent, corrupted, semblance which denies the importance of beauty for that of efficiency, rejects non-human purposiveness, and limits its measure of ethics to short term economical pragmatism. The thesis acknowledges that something is awry with the world and that giving care to beauty might help. The aim is to examine the event of Beauty as depicted by the philosopher Immanuel Kant and to apply this characterization to elective architectural spaces such that it may motivate individuals to cultivate their own nimbleness in relation to a formative force of nature. However given the revealed need for sensitivity to the particular material presence, the thesis can not be a rule book or catalog for beautiful design. Rather it is a rehabilitation for architects who are already heterospatially curious, with the desired outcome of architects cultivating their own nimbleness to reflectively judge as a ground up, multi-node, rhizomatic means of resistance to normalizing power practices as manifest in bad architecture. (shrink)

Scientific images represent types or particulars. According to a standard history and epistemology of scientific images, drawings are fit to represent types and machine-made images are fit to represent particulars. The fact that archaeologists use drawings of particulars challenges this standard history and epistemology. It also suggests an account of the epistemic quality of archaeological drawings. This account stresses how images integrate non-conceptual and interepretive content.

This paper critiques enlightenment notions of representation and rehearses an alternative model of mapping that is grounded in performance. Working from her own practice as a landscape painter, Bolt argues that the particular experience of the “glare” of Australian light fractures the nexus between light, form, knowledge, and subjectivity. This rupture prompts a move from shedding light ON the matter to shedding light FOR the matter and suggests an emergent rather than a representational practice.

This paper reports on an analysis of the work of Leni Riefenstahl, and German expressionism, through the use of trans-disciplinary semantic associative search in specialized databased dictionaries1. Within this database space (Kitagawa and Kiyokim 1993), the quantitative data of objects as representation can be visualized by number. While the method of image analysis is qualitative, it is based on a quantitative analysis of visual representation. Through this analysis, Riefenstahl's film Olympia Fest der Vlker is compared with the Nazi ideology of (...) the body image. The film is often categorized as romantic; however, this paper proposes a new interpretation based on theories of Jonathan Crary, and Martin Jay, which are combined using the mechanism of connotation in searching database systems. We proposs that, in the context of Visual Culture Studies, the use of digital technologies may provide new possibilities for research in the humanities. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between reflecting and making in the context of the new institutional connection between research and art/design. The article argues that while this new dispensation offers exciting possibilities for fruitful cross- and interdisciplinary development, caution is necessary to ensure that the artistic domain retains a level of autonomy within the broader university. For elucidation, the article initially looks to the early history of education in our fields and to Pierre Bourdieu's account of the "early moments of (...) the autonomization of the artistic field," in his critique of the "scholastic disposition." Bourdieu recognises "a repression of the material determinations of symbolic practices" within those early developments: in effect, a repression of those embodied, situated, and practical aspects of art and design production. He regards such repression as a trait of the broader academy, both then and in subsequent and recent periods. The article argues that this attitude still provides the impetus for what James Elkins refers to as "the incommensurability of studio art production and university life." The article further argues that a parity of esteem between reflecting and making is vital not only for the sake of the stability of the fields of art and design but for the ongoing development of the broader university. In this argument the article looks to the work of John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. (shrink)

Axel Honneth distinguishes between recognitive practices according to the social domain in which they occur and this allows him to theorise the relationship between power and recognition. 'Love-based recognition', which suggests the centrality of recognition to the relationships that nurture us in the first instance, is located in the family. Honneth argues that relationships encompassed by this category are pre-political, thereby repeating the distinction between the public and the private common to much political theory. This article explores the structure of (...) this delineation in his thinking. I argue that Honneth's analysis marginalises feminist concerns with how power functions through recognition in the private sphere. Honneth also robs himself of a rejoinder to recognition sceptics, who suggest that the desire for recognition is a condition of subordination. The article argues for an alternative approach to the analysis of 'love' within recognitive theory. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A City of Brick":Visual Rhetoric in Roman Rhetorical Theory and PracticeKathleen S. LampPerhaps none of the words Augustus, the first sole ruler of Rome who reigned from 27 BCE to 14 CE, actually said are quite as memorable as the ones Cassius Dio has attributed to him: "I found Rome built of clay and I leave it to you in marble" (1987, 56.30).1 Suetonius too discusses Augustus's building program, (...) offering an alleged quote along with an explanation of his motivation: "Since the city was not adorned as the dignity of the empire demanded, and was exposed to flood and fire, he so beautified it that he could justly boast that he had found it built of brick and left it in marble" (1998, Aug.28.3). Though Suetonius's explanation is practical, Dio argues Augustus's "city of brick" had a more metaphoric or symbolic meaning: "In saying this he was not referring literally to the state of the buildings, but rather to the strength of the empire" (1987, 56.30).Both historians, then, perceive a connection between the physical appearance of the city and Rome's place at the head of the (Roman) world. Maecenas, Augustus's right-hand man who was essentially the minister of culture, explicitly draws attention to this strategy in a speech fabricated by Dio. Maecenas advises Augustus, "Make this capital beautiful, spare no expense in doing so, and enhance its magnificence with festivals of every kind. It is right for us who rule over so many peoples to excel all others in every field of endeavor, and even display of this kind tends to implant [End Page 171] respect for us in our allies and to strike terror into our enemies" (1987, 52.30). Here Dio suggests, albeit in hindsight, that Augustus's building program was a conscious "display" of Rome's supremacy meant to elicit a reaction, particularly from those who dwelled outside the city.Though from this passage of Dio's it is possible to argue that the physical appearance of the city of Rome was meant to persuade, or at least elicit some response, the passage does not provide support for the claim that architecture, monuments, and city planning functioned rhetorically in ancient Rome. After all, Quintilian reminds us that "many other things have the power of persuasion" (1970, 2.15.6-9). Nonetheless, this passage does generate questions about the relationship between the Augustan building program, or more broadly the Augustan cultural campaigns, and rhetoric in the principate—specifically about the way in which the cultural campaigns functioned rhetorically to help Augustus gain and maintain power.Recently, I have argued that the Ara pacis Augustae, an Augustan monument commissioned in 13 BCE, functioned as a visual example of a rhetorical text, meant not only to celebrate Augustus's successful campaigns is Spain and Gaul but also to garner public support for Augustus's heir and the process of dynastic succession. Because specific rhetorical techniques often associated with the epideictic genre clearly function on the altar, the Ara pacis demonstrates that Augustus and/or his ministers were thinking rhetorically when constructing at least some Augustan monuments (Lamp 2009). Similarly, architectural historian Diana Favro has argued that certain aspects of Augustan architecture made use of rhetorical techniques related to the canon of memory (1996). These findings are perhaps not surprising given that George Kennedy, writing nearly forty years ago, acknowledged that Augustus, a figure he called "the greatest rhetorician of antiquity, " "developed new techniques of verbal and visual persuasion which took over some of the functions and adapted some of the methods of traditional oratory" (1972, 378, 382).Still, very little attention has been paid to Augustus as a rhetorical figure, which is not to say that scholars of rhetoric have paid no attention to Roman rhetoric. While the classicist Theodore Mommsen, writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, went as far as to refer to the principate as the "end to the entire discipline of rhetoric" (1992, 125), the decline narrative in regards to Roman rhetoric is shifting. Traditionally, this decline narrative suggested that following the assassination of Cicero, traditional oratory retreated into... (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard's 3rd simulation stage reinterpreted through the theory of architecture, Marxism and Jaques Lacan.

Two case studies of students from California School for the Blind studying artworks in museums and on the Web are discussed. The analysis focuses on the traditional understanding that unreachable artworks in the museum are deciphered by non-intellectual elites primarily from the perspective of visual perception and museums are simple vessels of art, as contended by Ernst Gombrich and Pierre Bourdieu, and that exclusion is either passive or active. It is also argued that there is a bridge between sensing an (...) object and understanding it that is beyond perceptions. The article concludes that the two students featured in the case studies were more likely to be passively rather than actively excluded from unreachable and two-dimensional artworks, and that they could still develop a symbolic intellectual and emotional connection with these artworks and the museum through verbal descriptions and being in their presence. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 112-142, Spring 2022.

This article examines the limits and potential of hospitality through struggles over auditory space in care at the end of life. Drawing upon empirical research and a nurse’s account of noisy mourning in a multicultural hospice ward, I argue that the insurgent force of noise as corporeal generosity can produce impossible dilemmas for care, while also provoking surprising ethical relations and potentialities. Derrida’s ideas about the aporias of the gift and absolute responsibility are used to make sense of the pushy (...) generosity of alterity as it is made to matter through sound. (shrink)

While the groundbreaking insights that contemporary theorists have formulated with regards to space---as a multiplicity without essence, as an active event, and as inseparable from subjectivity, power, Otherness and time---have ostensibly purged it of its traditional understanding as absolute, a specific visuality characteristic of Cartesian perspectivalism remains privileged in its theorization which force it to remain so. While the complexity of space cannot be recovered from an abstract contemplation of its visual geometry in a way that reflects these contemporary concerns, (...) there have unfortunately been relatively few attempts to imagine space away from the visual in a way that challenges its traditional absoluteness. To this end, it is argued that because sound and music contain implicit and explicit spatialities, the sonic represents a rich and unexplored area from which to imagine a radical non-visual space that discursively organizes space according to a different economy through which to challenge its assumed visuality. And yet, even when space has been approached through sound, there is a tendency to exteriorize sound into an object or a set of practices that robs it of its defining quality---its own "soundfulness". By breaking down those factors that are considered salient to how space is conceived today along sonic rather than visual lines, the argument is made that the "soundfulness" of sound's physical properties gives it a complex texture of excess that is corporealized within the body and forwards the philosophical possibility of unfolding the spatiality of sound according to vectors beyond the visible in a way that, while reflecting contemporary concerns, prevents its return to absoluteness. To take seriously this "soundfulness" thus allows us to recuperate the sonic as a philosophical and political way of experiencing and knowing the world, including that of space. The arguments, as well as being drawn from the insights of contemporary spatial theory, the physics of sound, the phenomenology of listening, rhizomatic and feminist theory, quantum mechanics and musicology, will be explained through an understanding of space as sound and exemplified in The Disintegration Loops, a post-minimalist musical piece by sonic artist William Basinski. (shrink)

Boredom, in cinema as well as in our everyday experience, is usually associated with a generalised loss of meaning or interest. Accordingly, boredom is often perceived as that which ought to be avo...