Kantor's 'Poor Object' as Icon of Truth

In a 1980 address Jacques Derrida characterised the problematic of representation as a ʻsendingʼ or ʻdispatchʼ—as envoi of truth. For Derrida the appearance of the envoi is not separate from that which it represents. Such a revision of the relationship between truth and representation derives from Heideggerʼs reading of Plato, which deconstructs the Allegory of the Cave into a narrative economy. The ʻimageʼ of truth enshrined in Platoʼs cave is seen in terms of a necessarily structured process of disclosure or alētheia. Such an ʻeconomy of truthʼ is also an inherent part of the Orthodox iconʼs uncanny power to act as the envoi of truth from ʻthe other worldʼ. Recent research has identified a relationship between the metaphysics of icons and the early twentieth-century avant-gardes in contemporaneous Russian writing. In categorically located his ʻpoor objectʼ ʻbetween the garbage dump and eternityʼ Tadeusz Kantorʼs aesthetic apparently bears an unlikely affinity with the ʻhammered gold and gold enamellingʼ—ʻthe artifice of eternityʼ of Orthodox icons. However, whilst Kantor can be seen to draw on the metaphysics of Bruno Schulzʼs ʻdegraded realityʼ, his apparently peculiar marriage of symbolism and abstraction indicate a previously unexplored proximity, via the Russian avant- garde, with the mystical legacy of the aesthetic logic of icons. This paper makes links between Pavel Florenskyʼs work on space and representation, in particular his 1919 essay ʻReverse Perspectiveʼ, and Heideggerʼs and Derridaʼs critiques of representation, drawing on recent research to shed new light on Kantorʼs aesthetic of the ʻrealʼ

Tadeusz Kantor as 'Hunger Artist' in the 'Poor Room of the Imagination'

In a story by Franz Kafka, a caged man endures hunger as a public spectacle, an act of self-starvation antithetical to life. The attraction lies in taking life to the precipice of extinction. In witnessing the diminishing of vitality to its vanishing point, the value of life itself is somehow affirmed for the spectator. Echoes of Kafka can be found in the late art of Tadeusz Kantor whose aesthetic of “poor reality” underwent a radical transformation. As the ageing artist approached death he began to use himself as his own “found object”. Where Kafka martyred himself in his writing, Kantor became a version of Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” and put the condition of his encroaching death on display. In his painting he returned to figuration in a series of self-portraits, and his presence in his theatre changed from that of demiurge-creator to participant-victim. This essay uses the metaphysics of Heidegger and Agamben to examine this turn in Kantor’s aesthetic in his series of late paintings and theatrical works between 1985 and his death in 1990. Common to this late work is the motif of the “poor room of the imagination”, a metaphysical space in which the artist rehearses both a yearning for life and his departure from it. In using his art to confront his own condition Kantor can be seen to affirm the value of life even as it approaches the condition of extinction. In this sense Kantor eschews the negative endings of Kafka’s fictional heroes

Psychophysical what?

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.There have been numerous attempts to solve the apparent dualism of ‘body’ and ‘mind’, purportedly uniting mutually incompatible binaries through hyphenation, the creation of compound terms, or the erasure of one of the terms entirely. ‘Psychophysical’, ‘psychosomatic’ (with or without the word ‘unity’), ‘mind-body’, ‘body-mind’, and, following Hanna (1970), ‘somatic’, have all been advanced as a means of articulating an undivided sense of human being. This discussion deconstructs this descriptive matrix in an attempt to expose the naked paradox of human being obscured by tacit assumptions hidden in language. In dance the idea of ‘body’ is often afforded priority. Dancers understanding of themselves in activity, whether performing or observing – in the fields of learning, creating or rehearsing – is critically affected by their conception of themselves as divided or unified beings. To say, ‘there is no “body” … or “mind”’ might facilitate a more productive, poietic sense of practice, a ‘thinking in activity’ that does not imply a dualistic ontology. This requires a practical philosophical perspective. Such ‘philosophical practicality’ in dancers’ practice may afford them greater resilience for their future careers against the fragmentation of dis-unity that thinking of ‘body’ or ‘mind’ engenders

Not Fit for Purpose: Oil Sands Mines and Alberta’s Mine Financial Security Program

Mining jurisdictions around the world are grappling with the significant environmental harms and costs associated with orphaned mines, i.e., mines whose owners are financially unable or otherwise unwilling to remediate and reclaim their mine sites. Numerous Canadian examples, including the notorious Giant Mine in the Northwest Territories, have significantly harmed water, soil, air, and wildlife, as well as human health, safety, and well-being. Such impacts can be particularly devastating for Indigenous peoples, who continue to rely on their traditional territories for cultural and other purposes. Canadian governments have gradually developed remediation and reclamation liability regimesto ensure that mine operators remediate and reclaim in a timely manner, or to at least ensure that governments have access to sufficient funds to carry out this closure work themselves. While they differ in various ways, the basic logic of such regimes is the same: by requiring mine owners toset aside some funds (e.g., in the form of cash or a letter of credit), they act as a kind of insurance that the public will not bear the costs of remediation and reclamation. Unfortunately, Alberta has refused to develop an effective regime to protect Albertans from bearing the costs of oil sands mine remediation and reclamation. The regime in place today will not ensure that there are sufficient funds set aside to complete this closure work in the eventthat operators fail to do so. In some respects, this is not news. It has been over two decadessince Alberta’s Auditor General first identified serious deficiencies in Alberta’s regime. Continued mismanagement has left Albertans with a significant risk that they will be responsible for cleaning up oil sands mines that threaten potentially irreversible environmental harm, including a growing inventory of nearly 1.6 trillion litres of toxic tailings. Alberta’s Mine Financial Security Program (MFSP), which applies to both coal and oil sands mines, is a misnomer. While it allows mine owners to post full security against their closure liabilities, it also allows them to rely on the estimated value of their assets (proved andprobable reserves) as collateral to avoid posting meaningful security. This is essentially themining equivalent of the province’s failed asset-to-liability approach in the conventional oil and gas sector. The results are staggering. While the coal mining sector has chosen to secure nearly the entirety of its estimated closure liabilities (approximately $700 million), oil sands companies have posted less than$1 billion in security against an official estimate of approximately $46 billion in total closure liabilities. This is less than two percent of official estimates, and less than one percent of internal estimates leaked to the media in 2018, which suggested that total closure liabilities could be as high as$130 billion. Finally, following two critical reports from the Auditor General (2015 and 2021), Alberta undertook a year-long review of the MFSP in 2022. The results of this review, however, are currently unknown. Significant reforms are necessary. The MFSP rests on a series of unrealistic assumptions about asset values, future oil markets and prices, and the development of effective but also low-cost remediation and reclamation technologies. The MFSP’s asset-to-liability approach, which allows oil sands companies to avoid posting security where their assets are deemed to be worth at least three times more than their liabilities (3:1), is also counter-intuitive and counter-productive: instead of collecting security when operators can afford it, operators would be required to post security when profitability is declining — precisely when operators are least able to afford it and resulting in further financial distress. Simply put, the MFSP will not provide insurance precisely when it is needed most. Correcting the MFSP asset calculations, requiring annual security deposits, and opening the process for estimating remediation and reclamation costs to independent scrutiny are three reforms that could be instituted in the short term and that would go some way towards ensuring the fulfillment of the polluter-pays principle upon which all such regimes are ultimately based. In the longer term, the MFSP exposes Albertans to far too much risk and uncertainty. Our primary recommendation is for Alberta to convene an independent and transparent expert panel,with opportunities for public participation, to recommend a regime that adequately incentives progressive remediation and reclamation and secures outstanding oil sands liabilities while not exacerbating the near-term risk of default. No matter the specific structure that is adopted for security, the assurance of independent, transparent assessment of the degree to which potential liabilities are fully funded, perhaps in the style of pension fund reporting, is essential

Direct Measurement of a 27-Dimensional Orbital-Angular-Momentum State Vector

The measurement of a quantum state poses a unique challenge for experimentalists. Recently, the technique of "direct measurement" was proposed for characterizing a quantum state in-situ through sequential weak and strong measurements. While this method has been used for measuring polarization states, its real potential lies in the measurement of states with a large dimensionality. Here we show the practical direct measurement of a high-dimensional state vector in the discrete basis of orbital-angular momentum. Through weak measurements of orbital-angular momentum and strong measurements of angular position, we measure the complex probability amplitudes of a pure state with a dimensionality, d=27. Further, we use our method to directly observe the relationship between rotations of a state vector and the relative phase between its orbital-angular-momentum components. Our technique has important applications in high-dimensional classical and quantum information systems, and can be extended to characterize other types of large quantum states.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Letting Tattered Clothing Sing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Anatomy Lesson

In 1968 in Nuremberg Kantor staged An Anatomy Lesson According to Rembrandt. However, this ‘anatomy’ was not of a cadaver but a dissection of the subject’s clothing—an anatomy of the hidden—of the contents of pockets, the lining and stuffing of fabric. Kantor’s artistic investigation in scientific form referred, via Rembrandt’s 1632 painting, to the idea of the seventeenth-century anatomy theatre: a scientific investigation in theatrical form. Each enacts a quest for knowledge: in art-event, painting or lecture-demonstration. The implicit object of each investigation is the living human subject: a ‘you’ or a ‘me’. Each enquiry can be placed in a historical ontological context—post-Heideggerian, post-Cartesian and post-Aristotelian—in which the self is understood as located in a particular world-view informing an individual’s sense of belonging or anxiety. My discussion examines Kantor’s Anatomy Lesson in relation to these conceptions of the self by tracing his aesthetic of ‘the reality of the lowest rank’ and how it arose out of his personal experience of the Nazi occupation. Viewed from this perspective, Kantor’s Anatomy Lesson can be seen as an ironic enactment of the catastrophic reversal of the hopes inherent in the project of enlightenment. The Nazi application of scientific reason led to some of the worst horrors in history. Implicit in the irony of Kantor’s Lesson is a definition of this horror—the reduction of the human subject to non-human object—the awful realisation of the hidden imperative in the scientific rationalism of Cartesian dualism. In staging this reduction Kantor can be seen to be operating within a Heideggerian conception of the self as the place of negativity, ‘held out over the nothing’, a liminal but precious presence. In the anatomy of clothing and marginal objects, this reconfiguration of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson prefigures recent post-Heideggerian discourse around the concept of ‘bare life’

The Problem of 'Feeling' in Dance Practice: Fragmentation and Unity

In the The Man Without Content (1999) Giorgio Agamben problematises the traditional distinction between artist and spectator. Central to this distinction is the idea that art works by inducing a ‘feeling’ in the spectator. Agamben questions this dichotomy through a re-assessment of the relationship that questions the idea of aesthetic affect. This radical re-evaluation invites reconsideration of the place of ‘feeling’ not only in artistic practice but also in its reception and its pedagogy. The idea of ‘feeling’ is pervasive in dance. The nature of the medium—performed movement—has been supposed to communicate a ‘kinaesthetic sense’. But, what exactly is this ‘feeling’ that is, by implication, supposed to underwrite artistic practice and its reception? If the idea of art’s effect on the spectator is fundamentally flawed, where does that leave the role of ‘feeling’? ‘Feelings’ are not merely sensations, but their subjective appreciation. Caught in the web of memory, sensations are implicated in the contextual pattern of experience: interpreted and anticipated. ‘Feeling’ is a fact of lived experience that is less about ‘sensation’ than about the conscious subjective perception of being-in-the-world. But if ‘feeling’ is unreliable, of what use is it as a measure of artistic success and should it be dismissed as irrelevant? This paper will seek to re-articulate the nature of human being as one that is vibrantly suspended between conscious subjectivity and a world illuminated by that consciousness. Viewed in this way, the conventional thinking about ‘feeling’ in dance can be set aside and the practices of creation and spectating can be reunited in a new way through a fresh understanding of ‘feeling’ that takes into account its unreliability and its physiological and subjective reality

Addendum to "Superimposed Oscillations in the WMAP Data?"

We elaborate further on the possibility that the inflationary primordial power spectrum contains superimposed oscillations. We study various effects which could influence the calculation of the multipole moments in this case. We also present the theoretical predictions for two other cosmological observables, the matter power spectrum and the EE polarization channel.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, uses RevTex4, matches published versio

The perspectives of UK personnel towards current killing practices for laboratory rodents

Data supporting manuscript entitled 'The perspectives of UK personnel towards current killing practices for laboratory rodents.

Constraints on the Primordial Power Spectrum from High Resolution Lyman-alpha Forest Spectra and WMAP

The combined analysis of the cosmic microwave background on large scales and Lyman-alpha forest on small scales provides a sufficiently long lever arm to obtain strong constraints on the slope and curvature of the power spectrum of primordial density fluctuations. We present results from the combination of the first year WMAP data and the dark matter power spectrum inferred by Viel et al. (2004) for two different sets of high resolution and high signal-to-noise quasar absorption spectra: the Croft et al. (2002) sample with a median redshift z=2.72 and the LUQAS sample (Kim et al. 2004) with a median redshift z=2.125. The best fit value for the {\it rms} fluctuation amplitude of matter fluctuations is sigma_8 =0.94 +- 0.08 and n=0.99 +- 0.03, if we do not include running of the spectral index. The best fit model with a running spectral index has parameters n=0.959 +- 0.036 and n_run=-0.033 +- 0.025. The data is thus consistent with a scale-free primordial power spectrum with no running of the spectral index. We further include tensor modes and constrain the slow-roll parameters of inflation.Comment: 6 pages, 4 Figures, 1 Table. One figure added and second order extension of the standard slow-roll approximation included. Main results unchanged. MNRAS in pres