Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

From commodity fetishes to symbols: Danny Boyle’s simulations of British culture in the London Olympic Games Opening Ceremony

Hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 was a wonderful opportunity for Britain to advertise for its position as a hub in the global leisure economy. The Games Opening Ceremony, which was watched by millions of viewers nationwide and billions worldwide, whether on television or via digital applications, presented a great opportunity for the mediatisation of British culture in ways appealing to domestic and global consumers. A film director, producer, screenwriter and theatre director with international recognition, Danny Boyle was well-positioned to create a show that both conformed to Olympic ethos and presented evolving images of British cultural and technological contributions down to the digital age. Moreover Danny Boyle’s simulations in the show can be interpreted as investigations into consumerism, especially in the leisure industry. While Danny Boyle featured the network of signs surrounding consumers – from emblematic tourist hotspots to British musical and cinematographic hits –, he also suggested personal and collective re-appropriations of products to counter the commodification of goods. Thus he chose to present products crafted by human labour as symbols – rather than fetishes – for human values such as solidarity, social rights and the promotion of ethnic diversity. The use of digital technology in the show was effective to spread those values, presented as part of British nation-building, across cultural borders. Though sometimes viewed as an implied criticism of the Conservative government’s policies, the Opening Ceremony was generally praised by the British press, which was responsive to the collective symbols Danny Boyle chose to present of British culture

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Can the Undead Speak?: Language Death as a Matter of (Not) Knowing

This text studies how language death and metaphor algorithmically collude to propagate our intellectual culture. In describing how language builds upon and ultimately necessitates its own ruins to our frustration and subjugation, I define dead language in general and then, following a reading of Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” explore the instance of indexical translation. Inventing the language in pain, a de-signified or designated language located between the frank and the esoteric language theories in the mediaeval of examples of Dante Alighieri and Hildegaard von Bingen, the text acquires the prime modernist example of dead language appropriation in ἀλήθεια and φύσις from the earlier fascistic works of Martin Heidegger. It synthesizes the mood of language death underpinning intellection generally and the linguistic functions of nomination, necessitation, and equation, in particular. These functions are drawn from the tension located between significance and designificance and expounded in the mapping of Daseinlichkeit

Rhythmical Figures in Dante’s Commedia: A Study of Memory and Composition after Gianfranco Contini

This thesis takes Contini’s 1965 study ‘Un’interpretazione di Dante’, and its discussion of repeated lines and part-lines, as its point of departure in order to pursue new understanding of the compositional processes of Dante’s Commedia. It shows how the repetition of similar items, or ‘figures’, relates to orality both in a transmissional, or textual-critical sense, as well as in a compositional, or oral-formulaic, sense. Recollected language in the poem is discovered to be more pervasive than hitherto thought, and this data is then interrogated, revealing a conception of heterogenous units of rhythm and syntax susceptible of re-use. This challenges the frameworks for prosodic description that have been used to date to describe the poem, while setting up a new historical understanding of rhythm as ‘shape’. These intertwined rhythmical-syntactical units, revealed through line-by-line comparison of the entire poem, are then shown to be historically emplaced – a product of the language-learning practices of the medieval grammatica. Figurae uerborum, a medieval conception of syntax and rhythm belonging to the grammatica, and Contini’s ‘figure ritmiche’ together raise an interpretive challenge: they ask for an autonomous way of speaking about achievements of syntax and rhythm, with reference to new critical categories – particularly memorability and authority. A final section proposes a rhythmical-critical experiment: a practical-critical analysis of a specific rhythmical shape, exploring how the new compositional dynamics discovered in the course of the thesis change how the critic relates to the newly conceived poetic object. From medieval grammarians to twentieth-century philologists, this thesis uncovers a tradition of thought that sees rhythm not as an accident of poetic language, but as a grammatical phenomenon, best exemplified in the poets

Language in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

AI language models can now produce text that is indistinguishable from our own, forcing us into a confrontation with the romantic assumptions underlying ‘natural language’ in the West. In this thesis, I will conduct a genealogy of the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ qualities of language through the literary, philosophical, and mathematical texts in which our ideas of authorship are premised. My hope is that this discussion will deepen our understanding of the language produced by AI models, answer why we feel compelled to anthropomorphize these machines, and situate readers in the reality of our present linguistic moment

Representing the human condition: a comparative study of the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino

The thesis aims to explore the issue of representation and its limits in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvin. It focuses on the authors' treatments of the relationships between representational practices and the constraining limits of the human condition in perceiving reality. The introduction aims to discuss the methodology of the thesis and the theoretical positions of contemporary theorists regarding these relationships in order to contextualise and place the thesis in perspective. The conflictual tension between representation and the human condition will then be organised around five major themes, i. e. language, cognition, hermeneutics, spatial forms, and games, each of which will be a focal point of a chapter. While the first two chapters set out to describe how language and cognition prevent humans from attaining the real in its absolute state, the next three chapters will mainly discuss the implications and consequences of the unattainable real and human inadequacies. Each of these five chapters, in its different yet interconnected direction, features an extensive discussion of the issue of representational limits and a comparative analysis of what the authors manage to do in face of the issue. A final conclusion will summarise the similarities and differences in the ways both authors deal with the critical interactions between representation and the limits of the human condition

New Realism and Contemporary Philosophy

This open access book advances the current debate in continental realism. In the field of contemporary continental ontology, Speculative Realist thinkers are now grappling with the genealogy of their ideas in the history of modern philosophy. The Speculative Realism movement prompted a debate, criticizing the predominant postmodernist orientation in philosophy, which located its origins in Kantian “correlationism” which supposedly ended the period of early modern naive realist metaphysics by showing that the mind and the outside world can only ever be understood as correlates. The debate over a new kind of realism has attracted many supporters and critics. In order to refocus its specific interpretation of modern philosophy in general and of the Kantian gesture in particular, this volume brings together major authors working on contemporary ontology and historians of ideas. It underlines and illustrates the fact that contemporary continental philosophy is rediscovering its past in original ways by productively re-interpreting some of the key concepts of modern philosophy. The perspectives and accounts of the key concepts of the history of philosophy are different in the views of individual contributors, and sometimes radically so, yet the discussion between contemporary realists and their critics shows that the real battleground of new ideas lies not in developing the philosophical motifs of the end of the 20th century, but rather in rethinking the milestones of modern philosophy. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com

Paragons of art and nature in eighteenth-century British aesthetic theory.

This dissertation examines the interaction of nature and art as objects of aesthetic appreciation in eighteenth-century Britain, with special emphasis on the aesthetic theories of Anthony Ashley-Cooper-3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and William Gilpin. Despite its openness to explore principles of aesthetics and concepts, such as beauty and sublimity, that were common to both nature and art, modern aesthetic theory framed the relation of art to nature hierarchically, an aspect captured by the term ‘paragon’. In this dissertation I trace a movement away from theories in which the superiority of nature to art was recognized (chapter 2 on Shaftesbury’s aesthetics) to theories where this aspect was complicated (chapter 3 on Addison’s aesthetics), contested, and reversed (chapter 4 on Gilpin’s aesthetics), and I argue that this transformation was deeply interwoven with complex and changing notions of artistic imitation, conceptions of the sublime, and aspects of natural theology that were then an integral part of the aesthetic. By showing that the supersession of nature by art was already contained within Gilpin’s notion of the picturesque, this dissertation offers a historical antecedent to Hegel’s radical exclusion of natural beauty from the scope of philosophical aesthetics

Orthographies in Early Modern Europe

This volume provides, for the first time, a pan-European view of the development of written languages at a key time in their history: that of the 16th century. The major cultural and intellectual upheavals that affected Europe at the time - Humanism, the Reformation and the emergence of modern nation-states - were not isolated phenomena, and the evolution of the orthographical systems of European languages shows a large number of convergences, due to the mobility of scholars, ideas and technological innovations throughout the period