Specular suffering: (staging) the body in pain

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Risk And Ecstasy In Erotic Practices

The present article reflects upon the different experiences involved in contemporary eroticisms. Principally, we concentrate on how these practices permit us to decipher links between sexual practices, gender norms, and the limits of sexuality (that is, the frontier zone between norms and transgression, consent and abuse, pain and pleasure). Our main question is with regards to a more general trend (which is quite strong in Brazil): the shift from erotic forms and experiences that were understood in the 1980s to be pro-sex or sexually liberating (the alternatives and rhetoric of the debates surrounding the collection Pleasure and Pain edited by Carol Vance in 1984) towards new semantics and practices of bodily eroticization and of the risks of the frontier zone where terms such as consent and vulnerability exist in dispute and tension. © 2016, Universidade Estadual de Campinas UNICAMP. All rights reserved.20164

Five decades in the study of natural products

This paper describes the five-decade long fascinating journey taken by Prof. T R Govindachari towards the study of the natural products of India. A variety of Indian plants were investigated by him for the study of their constituent alkaloids and terpenoids. The concluding part of the paper summarizes the isolation and identification of the constituents of the neem kernel, which eventually led to the first X-ray structure determination of azadirachtin A

Serotonin-mediated tuning of human helper T cell responsiveness to the chemokine CXCL12

In addition to its role as neurotransmitter, serotonin (5-HT) is an important modulator of inflammation and immunity. Here, we report novel findings suggesting a 5-HT involvement in T cell migration. In particular, we show that 5-HT tunes the responsiveness of human T lymphocytes to the broadly expressed chemokine CXCL12 in transwell migration assays. By real-time PCR, western blot analysis and electrophysiological patch clamp experiments, we demonstrate that the type 3 5-HT receptor (5-HT 3) is functionally expressed in human primary T cells. In addition, specific 5-HT 3 receptor agonists selectively decrease T cell migration towards gradients of CXCL12 but not of inflammatory chemokines, such as CCL2 and CCL5. In transmigration experiments, 5-HT 3 receptor stimulation reverts the inhibitory effect of endothelial-bound CXCL12 on T cell migration. Our data suggest that the reduced T cell responsiveness to CXCL12 induced by 5-HT may occur to facilitate T cell extravasation and migration into inflamed tissues

The semantics of psychospace

Traditionally, in the landscape profession, landscape analysis has been concerned with the physical aspects of place. Properties like shape, amount, use, colour and content have been surveyed, identified and classed in their various combinations to describe ' place character '. With few exceptions, ( Appleton 1998 ), the psychological aspects of place as criteria for classification have been largely ignored. One of the reasons for this, has been the argument that such data are' subjective' and personal, when what is required is, ' objective', verifiable and subject to 'constancy'. Another equally valid objection has been the difficulty in defining and identifying the psychological properties of place.The proposed method of analysing places by their psychological properties depends on people being able to verbally describe their feelings and states of mind. To define the survey parameters, these personal , emotional and mental properties have been identified and arranged in spectrums. By selecting the appropriate terms to describe their feelings in place, psychological profiles can be prepared, describing person -place relationships. With many such profiles, linked to personal details, like age, activity, sex and culture, factor analysis allows statistical examinations to be made of these person -place relationships. These reveal consistent patterns, relating particular combinations of feelings to particular combinations of perceivable place properties.Language is the medium of analysis and a linguistic examination of the data allows its classification into different types of place property. Those which are tangible, nominals and nouns, like apples, beds and chairs, and those which are intangible and descriptors, like abnormality, banality and chaos. Linguistics also offers, through concepts like antonymy, the ability to express opposites or contrasts in design terms, like, alien -friendly, bold -weak, chaotic- ordered.Certain combinations of emotions and perceivable, intangible place properties indicate places of particular significance. These are defined as archetypes. Thus, Arcadia is emotionally peaceful, restful and tranquil, and perceivably fertile, productive and beautiful. Battlefield is tense, shocking, stressful and perceivably brutal, chaotic and dramatic.CG Jung, (1968) asserted that anthropomorphic archetypes exist in the 'collective unconscious' of society and that this innate knowledge prepares the mind for future encounters. His archetypes included concepts like Mother and Father, Superman and Hero. By extension, it is postulated that places are also archetypal.To relate people to places objectively, the concept of 'objective relativity' is evoked ( G H Mead. 1932), allowing personal properties like awe, beauty and calmness to be logically attributed to place, relative to particular people.The main concept on which the thesis is based, is 'Psychospace', a linguistic model of the total psychological experience of place. New concepts are created to describe further people - place relationships. Pratties are property feelings of people attributed to place and Percies are properties of place perceived by some people and not others, and therefore 'subjective', like order, chaos and formality.Also included in 'subjective' judgements are those of assessment. Procons are personal properties, like quality and value, good, bad and satisfactory, but also objectively relative.Methods are proposed for the analysis of places and people and the identification of concepts which are employed in the processes of design. Examples are shown and discussed of how the formulated principles work in practice

Antarcticness: Inspirations and imaginaries

Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understandings explain how the Antarctic is viewed and managed while identifying aspects which should be more prominent in policy and practice. The authors and artists place Antarctica, and the perceptions and knowledge through Antarcticness, within inspirations and imaginations, without losing sight of the multiple interests pushing the continent’s governance as it goes through rapid political and environmental changes. Given the diversity and disparity of the influences and changes, the book’s contributions connect to provide a more coherent and encompassing perspective of how society views Antarctica, scientifically and artistically, and what the continent provides and could provide politically, culturally and environmentally. Offering original research, art and interpretations of different experiences and explorations of Antarctica, explanations meld with narratives while academic analyses overlap with first-hand experiences of what Antarctica does and does not – could and could not – bring to the world

Physical theatre as an approach to contemporary stagings of classical Greek tragedy

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This PhD focuses on physical theatre techniques and practices in order to provide acting keys for directing ancient drama. More specifically, the work for stage put effort in the acting method, with which the chorus and the main characters can be approached. For that reason, the basic method adopted was that of J. Lecoq, and especially the ‘transference’ practice. Moreover, specific elements were selected from the methods of: the Laboratory theatre of J. Grotowski, the Odin Teatret of E. Barba, and from K. Stanislavski’s practice of physical actions. Elements were also incorporated from modern dance techniques (M.Graham, P. Bausch and R. Laban), as well as from Dramatic play. The first part of the PhD summarizes theoretical aspects on the tragedy’s structure through the written material that has survived from antiquity. The ancient drama history, the history of acting and directing tragedy, as well as other interpreting matters are analyzed. Moreover emphasis has been placed on Euripides’ whole work, on the historical and cultural frame of writing the Bacchae, as well as on ideological aspects and comments on the roles. Finally, material for the most important performances, which took place in Greece, is given. In the second part of the thesis an experiment has been performed between the classic speech of tragedy and contemporary methods of movement and speech. The aim was to investigate how these function together, by applying them on the text of Bacchae. Although the stress on the body pre-existed in acting methods of several directors, the specific method of Physical theatre was applied around 1955 from J. Lecoq. Since in Physical theatre the physical expression is symbolic, non-realistic, with a heightened sense of theatricality, this method can provide to tragedy the suitable acting tools for the big statures of the roles-symbols and for the meaningful movement of the chorus. Physical theatre does not emphasize on the character and his behavioural gestures but on the situations themselves and how the actor undertakes them. Therefore it can complement word-based theatre, which focuses on the acts emerged from the myth and on the creation of mimetic archetypes. In that way, the demonstrated actions and the messages conveyed through them, become essential and represent the collective unconscious. Consequently, if tragedy expresses symbols, emphasizes on the myths’ acts and detaches from realism then it is proved that the method of Physical theatre can be an appropriate method

Figuring Collectivity in the Age of Climate Crisis

This dissertation confronts a contradiction that has come to define human life over (at least) the past quarter millennium: though we have, collectively, become the first species to inscribe ourselves into the geological record, we have, individually, diminishing power over the shape of the world toward which we blindly work. While imperial expansion and unfettered fossil fuel extraction threaten to undermine the material conditions of all human life, there is, I argue, a more fundamental problem manifest in anthropogenic climate change, one that poses a representational challenge. Because of its own globality, the threat posed by something as diffuse and total as the climate seems to demand the articulation of an equally global subject: the human as a species. What does it mean, however, to represent the everyday experiences of individuals as unified by such an abstraction? While some scholars have argued that this abstracted collectivity poses a challenge to the traditional tools of humanistic representation, this dissertation begins with the claim that experiencing ourselves as a species is a problem of representation. Climate change, I argue, exposes the inadequacy of a social totality emptied of its determinacy and demands that we represent our universality through the materiality of our everyday phenomenology. If we are to take a humanistic approach to the ecological crises we face, we must begin by developing new figures for the unity of our social world.I confront this representational problem through three pivotal moments over the past century in which thinkers have turned to the figurative power of language to articulate and address the frailty of their social worlds. These moments, I argue, articulate a poetics of emancipatory collectivity adequate to our current crisis. The first chapter turns to the moment when philosophy transformed its static conceptual environment (Umwelt) into the lived world (Welt). By following Martin Heidegger’s development of “worldliness” during the 1920s, I show that his central figure, ekstasis, dissolves the totalizing threat, not of a specific historical form of political life, but of the very methodological approach of all metaphysics. More than the individuated unification of selfhood, I argue, ecstasy articulates the spatio-temporal universalization (“worlding” as he called it) of any given moment of experience. This figure of phenomenological worldliness, then, not only placed philosophy back on the firm ground of everyday experience, but uncovers, contra Heidegger’s own conservative derailments, the coherence of “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) in the collective rearrangement of our embodied worldliness (Weltlichkeit). The second chapter explores the political possibilities of this ecstasy through Hannah Arendt’s inversion of Heidegger’s enclosed individualism into a theory of porous collectivity. Arendt subverted the Heideggerian antagonism between selfhood and the social world, I suggest, by insisting that our entanglement in an endless “web” of the actions of others grounds our own capacity to act. In order to explore the inherently poetic character of this narrative web, I turn to a close reading of Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel of life in Nazi Berlin, Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone). I read the novel as an attempt to poetically weave together the threads of responsibility and complicity that National Socialism had so successfully torn apart. It offers, then, a world in which the reified and totalizing disfiguration of collectivity under Nazism becomes legible in its everyday fabrication and, therefore, its potential transformation into a world that could once again figure the possibility of freedom. The third chapter seeks to more directly understand how the material threat of climate change challenges our modes of political and poetic representation. I suggest that 10:04, a recent autofictional novel by Ben Lerner, offers a helpful starting point by navigating the alienation characteristic of urban bourgeois consumers. Against the allure of various pseudo-political salves to this alienation, Ben, the protagonist, diagnoses his consumptive passivity as a function of the “bad forms of collectivity” that the global economy imposes upon him. To illuminate the stakes of this gesture, I return to the key Marxian dialectical figure of our “social metabolism” between labor and the world as a whole to argue that Lerner’s project exhibits a kind of metabolic poetics. Lerner’s novel, I argue, reactivates consumption simply by reconfiguring the universalizing mechanism in which it latently participates, revealing the dialectical relation between the individual and the arrangement of its world. Through close readings of these figurative re-animations, this dissertation insists that humanistic methods are necessary to any approach to our contemporary global crises that hopes to remake our world with an eye toward justice, joy, and collective freedom

The Pathos of the Real

This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real—their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering—and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means.The works at the center of this study—by Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Müller—zero in on scenes of agony, destruction, and death with an astonishing degree of precision and detail. The strange and troubling nature of the appeal engendered by these sights is the subject of The Pathos of the Real. Robert Buch shows that the spectacles of suffering conjured up in these texts are deeply ambivalent, available neither to cathartic relief nor to the sentiment of compassion. What prevails instead is a peculiar coincidence of opposites: exaltation and resignation; disfiguration and transfiguration; agitation and paralysis.Featuring the experiences of violent excess in strongly visual and often in expressly pictorial terms, the works expose the nexus between violence and the image in twentieth-century aesthetics. Buch explores this tension between visual and verbal representation by drawing on the rhetorical notion of pathos as both insurmountable suffering and codified affect and the psychoanalytic notion of the real, that is, the disruption of the symbolic order.In dialogue with a diverse group of thinkers, from Erich Auerbach and Aby Warburg to Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan, The Pathos of the Real advances an innovative new framework for rethinking the aesthetics of violence in the twentieth century

The Christian image and contemporary British painting: (the communication of meaning and experience in religious paintings)

My research uses my painting practice as an experimental and investigative tool to test the capacity of practical aesthetics to generate similar or analogous experiences to the non-dualist reception aesthetics of certain key examples of post-Tridentine (1563) Catholic Counter-Reformation devotional imagery, particularly, The Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1647-1652) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the Incarnation (1596-1600) by El Greco. I apply an interpretative method to the development of Christian imagery within painting in the post-Reformation period and its relationship to the economic system of modern capitalism and the Enlightenment aesthetic of the sublime. My research aims to see what, if any, meanings and experiences, which, I believe, were present in the affective aesthetics of certain Counter-Reformation imagery can, through the contemporary aesthetics of my painting practice, be reconstructed or re-generated again as similar experience to those original pre-Enlightenment non-dualist meanings and experiences. The experience I aim to generate in my paintings is an affective and experiential narrative of presence, - Eliot’s ‘unity of thought, feeling and action’, which I argue is found in the meaning and experience of those key Christian devotional images