Between Technological Flesh and the Technological Field: A phenomenology of the domestic interior

Swift and radical technological change necessitates a re-appraisal of the phenomenology of the house. Canonical phenomenology often has been technologically averse and the phenomenological appraisal of the house, as offered by philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1958) and architect Juhani Pallasmaa (1994), has notably omitted its technological components. This thesis asserts that neither the technologization of the flesh nor the field can be ignored. Upon asserting the importance of both technology and the house to our Being, the thesis proposes some basic principles for understanding technological change. A re-appraisal of the phenomenology of the house is then initiated, starting with a selected series of behavioural and symbolic foci: the hearth, the toilet, the table, the bed and the window. These are discussed with regard to their historical importance in the house and speculated upon as they become increasingly changed by advanced technology. This thesis takes the form of a book. It is a synthetic and removed work, navigating the overlapping zones of a number of disparate discourses. Its perspective is situated in the midst of many complex and interconnected metaphors. It is part historical description, poetical observation, philosophical conjecture, curation, and design

(Un)real (un)realities : exploring the confusion of reality and unreality through cinema

This thesis examines the confusion of reality and unreality in contemporary media discourses, and focuses specifically upon the medium of cinema. The art of our time, cinema reflects the postmodern fusion between machine and culture. As such, a crucial concern of this work, which addresses the impact of digital and visual technological developments in western societies and examines how such advances have come to supersede the historical and cultural imperatives, is precisely this resultant confusion/fragmentation. The thesis analyzes how audiences interpret the current cinematic evolution, based on computer generated imagery, and how their subjectivity influences and impacts upon knowledge, ideology, culture and society as a whole. The creation of (un)realities in fictional spaces is most apparent in such concurrent places as the Internet, videogames and Virtual Reality, spaces which are certainly of interest to this thesis. However, it is also crucial to note that recent years have seen a proliferation of films based on the confusion between reality and unreality; and, further, that these have enforced a fear of being deceived by technology. Indeed, such post-classical films as Total Recall (Verhoeven, 1990), The Lawnmower Man (Leonard, 1992), The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski, 1999) and eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999) materialize this fear cinematographically; a fear which is arguably then assimilated by the spectators because this fear is projected onto their lives. In this respect, it is essential to be aware of the creation of new spaces, identify related boundaries and understand our own creations in order to have control over our destiny. Concepts such as (un)reality, a hybrid of reality and fiction, are essential to refer to the inventions, contexts and information that appears in a world where atoms and a binary of 0s and 1s constitute a dual code to which our lives conform. The production of an original film, Luna (Diaz Gandasegui, 2007), works in synergy with the written text to illuminate the complexities of (un)reality and the vital influence of technology on its confusion

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

Errans:Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing

Today’s critical discourses and theorizing vanguards agree on the importance of getting lost, of failure, of erring — as do life coaches and business gurus. The taste for a departure from progress and other teleologies, the fascination with disorder, unfocused modes of attention, or improvisational performances cut across wide swaths of scholarly and activist discourses, practices in the arts, but also in business, warfare, and politics. Yet often the laudible failures are only those that are redeemed by subsequent successes. What could it mean to think errancy beyond such restrictions? And what would a radical critique of productivity, success, and fixed determination look like that doesn’t collapse into the infamous ‘I would prefer not to’? This volume looks for an answer in the complicated word field branching and stretching from the Latin errāre. Its contributions explore the implications of embracing error, randomness, failure, non-teleological temporalities across different disciplines, discourses, and practices, with critical attention to the ambivalences such an impossible embrace generates.‘Submit Your References’: Introduction | ARND WEDEMEYER | 1–18The Punakawans Make an Untimely Appearance: In Praise of Caves, Shadows, and Fire (or A Response to Plato’s Doctrine of Truth) | PRECIOSA DE JOYA | 19–47The Animal That Laughs at Itself: False False Alarms about the End of ‘Man’ | JAMES BURTON | 49–74Not Yet: Duration as Detour in Emmanuelle Demoris’s Mafrouza Cycle | ROSA BAROTSI | 75–92Incomplete and Self-Dismantling Structures: The Built Space, the Text, the Body | ANTONIO CASTORE | 93–112Camera Fog; or, The Pendulum of Austerity in Contemporary Portugal | MARIA JOSÉ DE ABREU | 113–40Rinko Kawauchi: Imperfect Photographs | CLARA MASNATTA | 141–58Inbuilt Errans: What Is and Is Not ‘Radical Indifference’ | ZAIRONG XIANG | 159–75Errant Counterpublics: ‘Solidarność’ and the Politics of the Weak | EWA MAJEWSKA | 177–99‘The Exile from the Law’: Keeping and Transgressing the Limits in Jewish Law | FEDERICO DAL BO | 201–31Errans: Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 24 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-24

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

Psychotropes: Models of Authorship, Psychopathology, and Molecular Politics in Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick

Among the so-called “anti-psychiatrists” of the 1960s and ‘70s, it was Félix Guattari who first identified that psychiatry had undergone a “molecular revolution.” It was in fact in a book titled Molecular Revolutions, published in 1984, that Guattari proposed that psychotherapy had become, in the de¬cades following the Second World War, far less personal and increasingly alienating. The newly “molecular” practices of psychiatry, Guattari mourned, had served only to fundamentally distance both patients and practitioners from their own minds; they had largely restricted our access, he suggested, to human subjectivity and consciousness. This thesis resumes Guattari’s work on the “molecular” model of the subject. Extending on Guattari’s various “schizoanalytic metamodels” of hu¬man consciousness and ontology, it rigorously meditates on a simple ques¬tion: Should we now accept the likely finding that there is no neat, singular, reductive, utilitarian, or unifying “model” for thinking about the human subject, and more specifically the human “author”? Part 1 of this thesis carefully examines a range of psychoanalytic, psychi¬atric, philosophical, and biomedical models of the human. It studies and re¬formulates each of them in turn and, all the while, returns to a fundamental position: that no single model, nor combination of them, will suffice. What part 1 seeks to demonstrate, then, is that envisioning these models as differ¬ent attempts to “know” the human is fruitless—a futile game. Instead, these models should be understood in much the same way as literary critics treat literary commonplaces or topoi; they are akin, I argue, to what Deleuze and Guattari called “images of thought.” In my terminology, they are “psycho¬tropes”: images with their own particular symbolic and mythical functions. Having thus developed a range of theoretical footholds in part 1, part 2 of the thesis—beginning in chapter 4—will put into practice the work of this first part. It will do so by examining various representations of authorship by two authors in particular: Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick. This part will thus demonstrate how these author figures function as “psychoactive scriv¬eners”: they are fictionalising philosophers who both produce and quarrel with an array of paradigmatic psychotropes, disputing those of others and inventing their own to substitute for them. More than this, however, the second part offers a range of detailed and original readings of these authors’s psychobiographies; it argues that even individual authors such as Huxley and Dick can be seen as “psychotropic.” It offers, that is, a series of broad-ranging and speculative explanations for the ideas and themes that appear in their works—explanations rooted in the theoretical work of the first part. Finally, this thesis concludes by reaffirming the importance of these authors’s narcoliteratures—both for present-day and future literary studies, and beyond. For while Huxley and Dick allow us to countenance afresh the range of failures in the history and philosophy of science, they also prom¬ise to instruct us—and instruct science—about the ways in which we might move beyond our received mimetic models of the human

Muscling Through: Athletic Women in Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915

“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward the unruly forms of embodiment that were newly public in England during this period. The richness of athleticism as a representational site is reflected in the broad scope of the project: its claims extend from the past to the present; its critical reach encompasses depictions in popular literary works as well as imagery from mainstream visual culture, analyzed in analog and digital ways, using formal as well as experimental methods. “Muscling Through” enacts a practice for somatic reading that is akin to “surface reading” in seeing descriptions of the muscular body and its power as a meaningfully evident feature of the text. Reading somatically in Sportswoman narratives reveals a constellation of affects, sensations, desires, ambitions, and responses to conspicuous physicality that don’t track back to sex, conform to binary logic, or center a masculinist standpoint. Although she has been overlooked previously, many well-studied nineteenth-century genres contain a version of the Sportswoman; chapters on sensation and realist novels, New Woman literature, and finally Decadent and modernist fiction bring her back into view. Tracing athleticism’s representational arc across the period sheds new light on conventional themes of marriage, reproduction, and femininity, and turns our attention to other themes that have been under-discussed in relation to women, such as self-oriented development, marital competition, and vocational desire. Visual Vixens, the dissertation’s companion website, adds an essential element of experiential exploration to the project. This digital component translates the Sportswoman themes of embodiment, fitness, and activity into a playful, interactive tool that trains people to build visual literacy by decoding the representational conventions in images of female bodies. A brief epilogue on contemporary culture shows that the issues that the Sportswoman raises are confoundingly and harmfully still with us. In the end, “Muscling Through” is both a historicist account of the muscular body’s power in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination and a presentist interrogation of how the representation and policing of current athletes is informed by an earlier Victorian model of the Sportswoman

Trance as Artefact: De-Othering transformative states with reference to examples from contemporary dance in Canada

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Dance Studies, University of Surrey, United Kingdom.Reflecting on his fieldwork among the Malagasy speakers of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, Canadian anthropologist Michael Lambek questions why the West has a “blind spot” when it comes to the human activity of trance. Immersed in his subject’s trance practices, he questions why such a fundamental aspect of the Malagasy culture, and many other cultures he has studied around the world, is absent from his own. This research addresses the West’s preoccupation with trance in ethnographic research and simultaneous disinclination to attribute or situate trance within its own indigenous dance practices. From a Western perspective, the practice and application of research suggests a paradigm that locates trance according to an imperialist West/non-West agenda. If the accumulated knowledge and data about trance is a by-product of the colonialist project, then trance may be perceived as an attribute or characteristic of the Other. As a means of investigating this imbalance, I propose that trance could be reconceived as an attribute or characteristic of the Self, as exemplified by dancers engaged in Western dance practices within traditional anthropology’s “own backyard.” In doing so, I examine the degree to which trance can be a meaningful construct within the cultural analysis of contemporary dance creation and performance. Through case studies with four dancer/choreographers active in Canada, Margie Gillis, Zab Maboungou, Brian Webb and Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe, this research explores the cultural parameters and framing of transformative states in contemporary dance. I argue that trance functions discursively and is rooted in a cultural and rhetorical context which is collaboratively constructed as both an embodied state or process, and as an artefact. As a discourse, trance problematizes issues of multiculturalism, decolonization, migration, embodiment, authenticity, neo-expressionism and the commodification of trance practice in a post-modern, transnational, economically globalized world. The West’s bias exists due to its investment in maintaining philosophical authority over the non-West and its attachment to notions of “high” culture. By expanding the range of possible sites for trance experience and by investing in previously unapplied theories such as flow, the potential exists to situate and to regard trance as other than Other to the West

21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media, Book of Abstracts

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline

Masculinities: Konzeptionen von Männlichkeit im Werk von Thomas Hardy und D.H. Lawrence

Psychiater: 'Amerikas Jungen in der Krise', titelt Die Welt am 2. Juni 1998 und ruft unter Bezug auf den Psychiater William Pollock von der Harvard University 'eine nationale Krise des Knabenalters' aus. Nachdem '[j]ahrelang (...) in den USA die Förderung von Mädchen Priorität' hatte, offenbaren die Statistiken nun eine erschütternde Bilanz: 'Im Pubertätsalter begehen in den USA fünfmal so viele Jungen wie Mädchen Selbstmord. Jungen machen 90 Prozent der Disziplinarfälle aus und brechen viermal häufiger die Schule ab.' Während es unter männlichen Jugendlichen zu immer mehr Gewalttaten, wie beispielsweise der weltweit durch die Medien gegangenen Serie von Bluttaten an amerikanischen Schulen kommt, die 2002 in einem Film wie Bowling for Columbine sogar noch einen künstlerisch-kritischen Ausdruck findet, und sich Deutschland noch von den Schockwellen des Erfurter Massakers erholt, leiden nach einer in L'Actualité médicale publizierten kanadischen Studie im Kindes- und Jugendalter deutlich mehr Männer als Frauen an Beeinträchtigungen beziehungsweise Erkrankungen