This article argues that the modern world is not only produced by, and is promoting, processes of rationalization and disenchantment, but is also the site of `enchanting' influences that are genuinely `charming' or `magical'. Such modes of influencing rely increasingly on the power of images, and on theatre-like performances of words or discourses. The impact takes place under conditions that, following Victor Turner's work, could be called `liminal', and which can be turned through `imagemagic' into a state of `permanent liminality'. (...) A path-breaking analysis of such influences can be found in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, written at a highly liminal moment in European history, the end of the Renaissance and the unfolding of the Reformation. It is argued that the central problem of the play is the source of the power that motivates, from the inside, human beings. Shakespeare attributes this power to images through which human beings can be incited to act, in particular to fall in love, and assigns a decisive role in the manipulation of such images to the Trickster figure of folk-tales and myths. Such image-magic makes its victims believe that they gained enlightenment, maturing to reason, exactly when succumbing to its influence; while its lasting impact is the confusion of the senses, or the power to distinguish and discriminate. (shrink)

Pictures have always played a prominent role in philosophical speculation about the mind, but the concept of a picture has itself been the object of philosophical scrutiny only intermittently. As a matter of fact, it was studied most intensively in the course of a theological controversy in the Eastern Roman Empire, during the eighth century - which is a sufficient indication of its marginal place in the history of philosophy. Perhaps this is because pictures have never produced in us the (...) theoretical paralysis which Augustine famously associated with time, but have on the contrary generally seemed too unproblematic to deserve much time from philosophers. Even today, after several decades of accumulating theory, philosophers with no stake in the matter are often impervious to its charm. I feel some sympathy for this attitude, because the task of explaining the nature of depiction is, I believe, one which calls for the refinement rather than refutation of our first thoughts about it. But a precise understanding of depiction is both a necessary prolegomenon to a significant part of aesthetics, and a useful prophylactic against confusion in the theory of the imagination. Besides, there is also the pleasure of the chase, which J. L. Austin nonchalantly appealed to many years before the Research Assessment Exercise was inaugurated. (shrink)

David Roberts's The Total Work of Art in European Modernism extends and deepens the analysis of the counter-paradigm of redemptively inspired art to modernism's own pre-occupation with secularization. It addresses the imbalance in social and critical theory whereby progressive secular rationalization has been elevated to the sole logic of modernity, and the romantic redemptive tradition has been reduced to a marginal counter-enlightenment. The total work of art paradigm allows Roberts to demonstrate how the programme of modernity has been constituted by (...) internal tensions and antinomies from the very beginning. (shrink)

Many educators persist in opposing art to intellect. This is incompatible with modern understandings of the interdependence of cognition and feeling. It also causes neglect of the value of art as one medium for presenting and exploring ideas. Historical examples add weight to the point by showing the richness of thought that has often informed visual art. The educational waste and cultural damage consequent on neglecting this aspect of art is indicated and remedial approaches are suggested.