Gesture, Interruption, Vibration: Rethinking Early Twentieth-Century Gestural Theory and Practice in Walter Benjamin, Rudolf von Laban, and Mary Wigman

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Ruprecht
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Actual Mode ◽  
Rudolf Von Laban ◽  
Mary Wigman

This article compares Rudolf von Laban's and Mary Wigman's practices and theories of gestural flow with Walter Benjamin's theory of gesture as interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the rediscovery of transhistorical continuities between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin's Brechtian gestures address inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique the essentializing aspects of historical and vitalist flow. Addressing in particular forms of vibration as both enriching and destabilizing the gestural from its margins, my article explores how vibratory energy indicates a self-reflexive theory of media, but also a revolutionary charge, in Benjamin; how it engenders a politically ambivalent process of transmission between dancers and audience in Laban; and how it becomes an actual mode of movement in Wigman. The historical inquiry contributes to a genealogy of vibration in contemporary dance.

Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Post-Kantian Philosophy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Franks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Kantian Philosophy

This article examines three moments of the post-Kantian philosophical tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Kantianism, Post-Kantian Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism. It elucidates the distinctive methods of a tradition that has never entirely disappeared and is now acknowledged once again as the source of contemporary insights. It outlines two problematics—naturalist scepticism and historicist nihilism—threatening the possibility of metaphysics. The first concerns sceptical worries about reason, emerging from attempts to extend the methods of natural science to the study of human beings. Kant’s project of a critical and transcendental analysis of reason, with its distinctive methods, should be considered a response. The second arises from the development of new methods of historical inquiry, seeming to undermine the very possibility of individual agency. Also considered are Kant’s successors’ revisions of the critical and transcendental analysis of reason, undertaken to overcome challenges confronting the original versions of Kant’s methods.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Charlotte Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Realist Theory ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The Introduction sets synthetic realism in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture and aesthetics to show why literary realism needs to be grasped in metaphysical terms. Ranging across contemporary periodical culture and works of literature, philosophy, and science, it examines the ways in which realist theory and practice grapples with the recalcitrance of ‘reality’ as a shifting referential cipher. The Introduction also considers previous critical approaches and suggests that the effects of these encounters between realist aesthetics and philosophical discourse were more various, ambiguous, and complex than we might have thought. It concludes with brief overviews of the book’s five main chapters and elucidates the overarching arguments that are developed within them.

Hashishdom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Partridge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Theophile Gautier ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Alexandre Dumas ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

By the 1840s cannabis was beginning to be used in Western societies, particularly in France and America; as the century progressed, it enjoyed some popularity among physicians and psychiatrists. By the early twentieth century, philosophers such as Ernst Bloch and particularly Walter Benjamin were experimenting with the drug. This chapter is a discussion of the reception and use of hashish, primarily in the nineteenth century. As well as exploring its relationship with the Orient in the minds of users, it discusses its emergence as a technology of transcendence. Of particular significance in this respect was the work of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, particularly The Hasheesh Eater. However, other figures are discussed, including Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, and Charles Baudelaire.

Introduction

On Hospitals ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Sethina Watson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
General Lack ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Legal Model ◽  
Medieval Christianity

This chapter redefines the problem of hospitals in the medieval church. It surveys the spread of welfare foundations to the West and, especially, the intensive foundation of welfare houses, in many forms, during the ‘charitable revolution’ of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This messy picture of hospitals on the ground, ‘between church and world’, has never conformed to the legal model that historians have long held for hospitals, as ecclesiastical houses under the bishop (a model that rests fundamentally on the sixth-century laws of Justinian, the East Roman/Byzantine Emperor). This gap between the ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ of hospitals, so familiar in scholarship, has long been attributed to lax enforcement—and a general lack of concern—by bishops, popes, and canonists. This chapter redefines the problem as the model itself, which was established by early twentieth-century historians. It unpicks this model, identifying the national agendas that produced it and the frameworks that have continued to shape the field. It argues for canon law as a European question and for the place of welfare at the heart of medieval Christianity. The overall approach and structure of the book is then introduced.

Searching for a Storyteller, Remediating the Archive: Philip Scheffner’s Halfmoon Files

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Olivia Landry
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
New Media ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
German History ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Abstract Spurred by the search for the identity of a colonial soldier captured in Germany during World War I, who left his trace in the form of a story in the sound archive in Berlin, Philip Scheffner’s documentary film The Halfmoon Files (2007) is an excavation of an obscured moment in early twentieth-century German history. By way of the figure of the storyteller, read intertextually with Walter Benjamin, this article explores Scheffner’s film as the site of the collision of history and media, where materials of the past come alive in the present through remediation, through which new media revisit the old. The article asserts that the ghost of the storyteller, which haunts this film, returns not in the form of a person but as a hypermedial experience.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-50
Author(s):  
Lucia Ruprecht
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cornelius Castoriadis

The Introduction gives an outline of the book’s main concepts and themes: it discusses choreographic gesture within the context of early twentieth-century dance, defines it with reference to Walter Benjamin as a force of intermittency that marks movement so that it becomes available for expression and reflection, and explains the book’s notion of the gestural imaginary with reference to Cornelius Castoriadis. It offers a critique of Giorgio Agamben’s and Jacques Rancière’s theories of gesture, shifting emphasis from Agamben’s preoccupation with gestural mediality to Rancière’s multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures. The Introduction also discusses the book’s both archive-based and theoretically informed methodology, and provides an overview of its thematic organization.

‘Sons of the Empire’: Dance and the New Zealand Male

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-42
Author(s):  
Marianne Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Body Building ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Professional Dancers ◽  
First Contact ◽  
Male Dancers

This article traces the journeys of dancing men from the stages of New Zealand to the stages of London during the twentieth century. The oft-repeated history of ‘the hard man’ of New Zealand who belonged to the ‘culture of imperial manliness’ is challenged by the stories of these men who, beginning in the 1920s with Jan Caryll, became professional dancers. I argue that within early twentieth-century New Zealand culture the opportunity existed for men and male bodies to be on display. The Maori haka, which featured men dancing in public exhibitions and ceremonies, had been seen by non-Maori (Pakeha) since first contact, while the emergence of body-building, beginning with the visit in 1902 of Eugen Sandow and a culture of sport, allowed men to be on show. Not least of all, tours to the antipodes of European dancers inspired young men to study ballet and contemporary dance. As a consequence, throughout the twentieth century New Zealand male dancers continued to arrive in London and contributed to both New Zealand and British dance histories.

‘Propaganda by the Deed’ in Theory and Practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 86-98
Author(s):  
Phil Chilton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Propaganda By The Deed

Abstract Many analysts of the ‘terrorism’ phenomena locate the desire to cause terror as a key definitional concept: terrorists seek to cause terror. Such a conception risks obscuring the motivations for the act of terrorism, it is committed purely to terrorise. The idea that this type of political violence is an act of ‘propaganda by the deed’, however, is one commonly applied by the perpetrators themselves. The anarchist ‘terrorists’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and contemporary ‘jihadists’ both understood their acts, at least in part, as propaganda by the deed. Beyond just the creation of terror propaganda by the deed can be used as an alternative conceptual vantage point to examine and understand the motivations that lie behind acts of terrorism and the material conditions that give rise to these acts.

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