Islamic Philosophy and the Challenge of Post Modernism: A Sociological Perspective

This paper briefly describes the Post Modernism philosophy, introduces the work of its key proponents, provides a critical appraisal of Post Modernism thought and finally it compares the Post Modernism philosophy with philosophical heritage of Islamic faith and civilization and recommends ways to cope up with the challenge of post modernism.Post Modernism, Sociology, Philosophy, History, Islamic Civilization, Modernism, Enlightenment, Globalization

Penal modernism: an American tragedy

This paper discusses Whitman’s analysis of penal modernism. While I am in agreement with the central claim that penal modernism has been ignored and caricatured, I argue here that Whitman’s account of the penal modernist theory of judging must be understood in the context of a wider reframing of the social functions of the criminal law in penal modernism. This is explored by considering the unusual connection that the novel An American Tragedy (1925) has to the history of American criminal law, and the light that this can shed on the question of the meaning of penal modernism

The movement-image, the time-image and the paradoxes of literary and other modernisms

Which modernism or modernisms circulate in Deleuze’s two-volume work on cinema? Can one meaningfully claim that both or either The Movement-Image (Cinema I) and The Time-Image (Cinema II) maintain connections with literary modernism? What relationship if any may be forged between theoretical debates in the areas of literary and film studies as these have been influenced by engagement with Deleuze’s work on cinema? The first obstacle to any successful negotiation of these questions lies in the absence in the books of any reference to the category of modernism – a fact which is after all hardly surprising in a French author of Deleuze’s generation. A second consideration is summed up well by Joost Raessens when he argues that “For Deleuze the term ‘modernity’ is not a neutral category. In effect modern cinema is a representation of differential thought which is determined [...] as a fundamental critique of the classic thought of Plato and Hegel.” Scholars often assert that Deleuze’s modernity owes much to Nietzsche, in the shape of the latter’s demand for a new approach to questions of truth and knowledge. Once life is no longer judged in the name of a higher authority such as the good or the true, the stage is set for Nietzschean transvaluation. This is a process which subjects “every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the life which they involve” (TI 141) to evaluation. This normative model of a cinema which has the capacity to carry out a Nietzschean total critique by means other than philosophy presides over The Time-Image in particular. In terms of the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought, total critique is opposed, in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, to Kantian critique as well as to Hegelian sublation. The thinking images of modern cinema, more specifically of its preeminent auteurs in Deleuze’s pantheon such as Welles, Resnais, Godard, and others, can effectuate this new image of thought. Thus is rendered tangible Deleuze’s claim that films think, that cinema thinks. Thus are linked a modernism of cinema and a project which dates back to Difference and Repetition, namely the challenge to a certain image of thought. In this challenge the allies include the two philosophers who dominate the film books – Bergson and Nietzsche. This chapter assumes the position that it is impossible to consider Deleuze’s modernism as being in any way other than intrinsically linked to his overall philosophical system and therefore that it is only in this context that connections with literary modernism can be explored

Shaggy Modernism

A short paper situating James Hutchinson's artwork 'Shaggy Modernism' within the history of craft and computing

A Review of Leonardo Caffo and Azzurra Muzzonigro’s “Costruire Futuri: Migrazioni, città, immaginazioni”

Modernism has provided a strong case for technoprogressivism, innovation and speculation on future possibilities. However, drastic and often devastating consequences have followed modernism such as global warming and mass biodiversity loss. In Leonardo Caffo and Azzurra Muzzonigro’s new book, a case for posthumanism as a means for envisioning and rethinking futures studies is argued and practical means by which those futures can be realized are outline

Elective Modernism and the Politics of (Bio) Ethical Expertise

In this essay I consider whether the political perspective of third wave science studies – ‘elective modernism’ – offers a suitable framework for understanding the policy-making contributions that (bio)ethical experts might make. The question arises as a consequence of the fact that I have taken inspiration from the third wave in order to develop an account of (bio)ethical expertise. I offer a précis of this work and a brief summary of elective modernism before considering their relation. The view I set out suggests that elective modernism is a political philosophy and that although its use in relation to the use of scientific expertise in political and policy-making process has implications for the role of (bio)ethical expertise it does not, in the final analysis, provide an account that is appropriate for this latter form of specialist expertise. Nevertheless, it is an informative perspective, and one that can help us make sense of the political uses of (bio)ethical expertise

DYNAMITE: ANARCHISM, MODERNISM, AESTHETICS

This book argues for the intersection of anarchist theory, modernist writers, and aesthetic innovations under the sign of "the bomb." Individual chapters concern such figures as Joseph Conrad, Richard Wagner, Henry Adams, Andrei Bely, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Katherine Ann Porter, as well as collectivities like the Surrealists and the Dadaists. Anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Michael Bakunin are also important to the text. The original version of this text was produced as a dissertation at the University of California Berkeley. Committee members were Carolyn Porter, Ann Banfield, and the late Michael Rogin. Three chapters--those on Conrad, Wagner, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case--were published in refereed academic journals. A synopsis of the argument was published in The Turn of the Century, Walter Pape, editor (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter) 1995. Dynamite had been approved for publication in the Atopia series of Stanford University Press when major changes at the press resulted in the abolition of the series

Erik Bergman, cosmopolitanism and the transformation of musical geography

Modernism is haunted by its disavowal of what Homi Bhabha calls ‘the location of culture’. Making a dogma out of the universalism of the Enlightenment, it has largely denied cultural difference. However, as theorists, such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, have pointed out, modernism can itself be seen as a product of colonialism and imperialism with which it is largely coterminous. This is perceptible notably in the cultural geography of centre and periphery which is one of modernism’s hallmarks. Witness for instance how Theodor W. Adorno, in his Philosophy of New Music, is so troubled by music from ‘the periphery’ – that of Janáček and Bartók – that he posits an essential asynchronicity, whereby this music represents a different stage of development. This transformation of space into time, which is characteristic of the cultural geography of musical modernism, relates closely to the ‘time lag’ between metropolis and colony that Bhabha decries as an essential feature of colonialism. Since it is a largely hidden aspect, the cultural geography of musical modernism and the transformations it underwent from modernism’s inception during the hey-day of imperialism to its late, ‘post-colonialist’ phase is rarely discussed. While it is beyond the scope of this contribution to study the totality of the intricate intersections between musical modernism and cultural geography, I will illustrate some aspects with the work of a composer who was both subject to and continuously sought to evade the dynamics of centre and periphery, the Finland-Swede Erik Bergman (1911-2006). Coming from the periphery of musical modernism, Bergman was unusual in rejecting romantic nationalism, associating himself instead with the international avant-garde. However, he quickly contrasted this form of universalist internationalism with a deep interest in and compositional engagement with non-Western music, long before the American and European avant-gardes discovered ‘the orient’. This form of ‘globalism’ is in turn complemented by Bergman’s rediscovery of the local, the sounds and musical cultures of his native environment. In so doing, Bergman is however not interested in the self-exoticising characteristic of nationalism, but in uncovering the strangeness within the self. In my contribution, I will seek to relate Bergman’s compositional choices both to its various historical contexts and to recent discourses in the social sciences and humanities, notably the critical reconceptualization of cosmopolitanism currently undertaken

Dances on the Edges of Modernism

When modernism started to become the major paradigm in the western world, western theatre also took part in the development. Realism, a child of modernism, soon became the mainstream of the theatrical expression. As soon as realism became established in the first-half of the 20th century, anti-realist movements flourished as reactions to the establishment. These movements were so diverse that it ranged from movements which were purely artistic such as what was done by Edward Gordon Craig until those that were political like what was proposed by Bertolt Brecht (1992)