The Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetics of Islamic Visual Cultures: Sight, Insight, and Desire

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gülru Neci̇poğlu
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cognitive Capacity ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Visual Cultures

The subjectivity of the gaze and its engagement with human experience had the capacity to incorporate the body, affect, sensation, and memory, thereby raising the status of the visual arts and architecture into potential sites of knowledge. This essay engages with the subject of the gaze and aesthetic experience by exploring the wonderment of the eye, the embodiment of vision through emotional states and desire, the disembodiment of the eye in introspective vision, and the cognitive capacity of sight to produce insight. Addressing these diverse yet interrelated themes, it considers the modalities of the gaze in new genres of Safavid and Ottoman texts on the arts and architecture, starting with their origin in medieval paradigms of visual perception and artistic creation. These more specialized sixteenth–seventeenth-century Persian and Turkish sources include treatises on the visual arts, album prefaces, biographies of architects, and biographical anthologies of calligraphers and painter-decorators. 


Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

Biocultural theory and the problem of human editing

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (6) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Roman Belyaletdinov
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Future ◽  
Philosophical Ethics ◽  
The Status ◽  
Biomedical Technologies ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Biological Foundation

The transition from an irregular understanding of nature as a given to the regulatory concepts of human development is one of the central philosophical and socio-humanitarian issues in the development of not only biotechnologies, but also society as a whole. In the theory of philosophy of biomedicine, the discussion is structured as the positioning of various problematic approaches, modeled using the principles of bioethics and philosophical ethics, taking into account the actual experience of the application and social perception of biomedical technologies. The status of problematic approaches is determined not only by philosophical ethics, but also by the willingness of society to accept something new as its own future. At the same time, accepting the future is impossible without rooting the future in the past - the beliefs and expectations that legitimize the future. The correlation of such concepts as the authentic autonomy of J. Habermas and the expansion of utilitarianism into the problems of editing the human genome, the conflict associated with challenges requiring collective moral action, and the rigidity of traditional moral mechanisms lead to the search for such a sociobiological language that would be formed from competitively coexisting old, traditional, and new, bioengineering, concepts of human development. The idea of biocultural theory as a form of connection between culture and biological foundation is associated with the work of A. Buchanan and R. Powell, who propose a systemic definition of biocultural theory as a mutual biological and cultural transformation of a person. Biocultural theory is aimed at shaping such a philosophical horizon, where the body, not only carnal, such as organs, but also personal - the awareness of its own bioidentity, becomes open and understandable due to the expansion of the connection between biology and culture, but at the same time acquires problems that becomes the subject of philosophy and ethics, since now a person, comprehended as a body, receives a variability that is no longer associated exclusively with culture. The goal of the article is to show that editing a person is not so much a traditionally understood risk as a transformation of the understanding of the cultural and biological conditions for the formation of his bioidentity.

Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin's Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity

Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilya Kliger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The Status ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
Modernist Discourse

Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls “a crisis of authorship.” The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within the longue durée context of debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originating at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called “transcendental” and “realist“—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.

Figures of/for Voice

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nowell Smith
Keyword(s):  
Inner Ear ◽  
Sound Production ◽  
Silent Reading ◽  
The Body ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Presence And Absence

The concept of “voice” has long been highly ambiguous, with the physiological-phonetic process of sound production entangled in a far more extensive cultural and metaphysical imaginary of voice. Neither purely sound nor purely signification, voice can name either a sonorous excess over signification or the point at which sounds start to signify. Neither purely of the body nor ever extricated from its body, it can figure multiple kinds of meaningful embodiment, the breakdown of meaning in brute materiality, or even a strangely disembodied emanation. Voice can be both intentional and involuntary, both singular and plural, both presence and absence, both the possession of a subject and something that possesses subjects or is uncontainable by the subject. Voices may signify immediacy and be experienced as immediate, and yet they are continually mediated—by text, by technology, by art. In literature, the status of voice is particularly fraught. Not only do literary works deploy this imaginary of voice, but voice is crucial to literature’s medium. If this is most evident in the case of works composed or transmitted orally, it also holds for written works that, while destined for silent reading, nevertheless construct a virtual soundworld destined for its reader’s inner ear, to be subvocalized rather than read aloud. Literary works have been crucial in the development and deployment of the cultural-metaphysical imaginary of voice, precisely because “voice” poses such a diverse set of questions and problems for literature. These problems change focus and force with the development of technologies of inscription and prosthesis, from printing to sound recording to automated speech.

Dance and Subtraction: Notes on Alain Badiou's Inaesthetics

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Owen Clark
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Philosophical Writing ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Aesthetic Thinking ◽  
Widespread View ◽  
Special Case

In an essay entirely devoted to the subject of dance in Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics [Petit manuel d'inesthétique (Badiou 2005b)], we find the following contentious statement: “Dance is not an art, because it is the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body” (69). At first glance, this statement seems strangely familiar to the reader versed in writing about dance, particularly philosophical writing. “Dance is not an art”: Badiou critiques Mallarmé as not realizing this as the true import of his ideas. It is familiar because it attests to a certain problem in aesthetic thinking, one that relates to the placement and position of dance and the works that comprise its history into what can be seen as certain evaluative hierarchies, particularly vis à vis the relation of dance to other art forms, and in particular, those involving speech and writing. Dance seems to suffer from a certain marginalization, subtraction, or exclusion, and its practice seems to occupy a place of the perennial exception, problem, or special case. The strangeness of the statement, on the other hand, relates to the widespread view outside of academic writing that the status of dance “as art” is actually completely unproblematic. What follows therefore is a critical commentary on this assertion of Badiou, placed both in the context of Badiou's writing, and in the wider one pertaining to the problem of exclusion just outlined.

scholarly journals This time without ‘feeling’: Children’s intuitive theories of art as a logical basis for learning progression in visual arts

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Maras
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Epistemological Beliefs ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Australian Curriculum ◽  
Logical Basis ◽  
Empirically Supported ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Experiential Process ◽  
The Subject ◽  
K 12

Learning in Visual Arts has traditionally been framed as an experiential process in which feeling and intuition complement the development of aesthetic knowledge. However, while art can be about feelings and processes that develop students’ expressive capacities, the complexity of art understanding and thinking extends beyond this narrow common-sense assumption. I argue that this assumption, which is represented in the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (ACARA, 2015), and even more firmly resonates in recent proposals for the revision of this curriculum (ACARA, 2021), obfuscates the conceptual and theoretical bases on which students make progress in art understanding. This paper examines the proposition that art understanding emerges progressively and can be described in conceptual terms, the basis of which can be identified in empirical research on the emergence of children’s intuitive theories of art. This paper examines how selected studies articulate the cognitive grounds on which students’ ontologies of art and epistemological beliefs are represented in their reasoning about art over time. It is argued that an empirically supported conception of learning anchored in students’ cognitive development in art that recognises the theoretical commitments underscoring their conceptual and practical reasoning in visual arts practices K–12 provides a logical basis for articulating progression in the subject.

The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii’s Alive (2006)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Spectral Effect ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Spectator

The dis/appearances of the characters in Veledinskii’s Alive denotes ruptures in continuity (including the continuity of the gaze). The role of the phantom is to overcome the complete break between the living and the dead as well as to overcome the ruptures in discourse. The persistent revenant is an epitome of the return: they become by coming back and in doing so they create a repetitive experience—teleological aporia, a certain inheritance. The phantom is a trace and also a differance (in Derridean terms) in that their spectral effect is in the ideological tendency and the promise of emancipation. In Alive, the phantom resists the totality of representation and so emerges as a method of paralogy: legitimacy of the subject is determined by a denial of the possibility of legitimation. The spectre as a mediation of discourse which lies in between, and in Alive—not between life and death but between death and death. In Alive political agency is the phantom’s expediency whereby the gaze onto the spectator—the pervasiveness of the ghostly experience problematizes the status of the spectator who—in the presence of the posthumous narrator—emerges as a posthumous spectator.

“But Such a Mind, Mak’st God Thy Guest”

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 565-589
Author(s):  
Steven Hrdlicka
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Subject

Abstract Ben Jonson’s Eupheme poems and Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of Venetia Digby as Prudence have often been seen as art works fiercely at odds, and that particularly Jonson’s overall brash dismissal of the visual arts is epitomized in his poems in praise of Venetia’s life. Yet ample evidence within Eupheme supports the idea that not only are Jonson’s poems in peculiar ekphrastic conversations with Van Dyck’s painting but that Jonson conceives of the ekphrasis as a device for guiding viewers and readers into rare contemplative poetic spaces. The nature of the interplay between Van Dyck’s painting and Jonson’s poems shares similarities to how Jonson conceived of the courtly masque as a cooperative, unitive experience of visual and verbal elements. In addition, the influence of emblems of Alciato on Jonson’s poetry is instructive in this regard, as these emblems exhibit a cooperative interplay between discrete visual and verbal (body and soul) elements. Issues arising from the artistic cooperative interplay between the body and the soul are linked to the Catholic theology of prudence through the subject of both Jonson and Van Dyck’s works. Specific Catholic contexts hitherto not considered are suggested for both the painting and poems, and especially Jonson’s poem “To My Muse” (the last poem in Eupheme), but these theological contexts are also established in relation to the two titles of Jonson’s poems, which take for their subject Venetia’s body and mind. Furthermore, various loose ends such as the dating of Van Dyck’s painting and the idea that Sir Kenlem had commissioned it to reconstruct Venetia Digby’s reputation are brought up and considered throughout the essay with an eye to these contexts.

scholarly journals Conceptualising and researching the body in digital contexts: towards new methodological conversations across the arts and social sciences

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carey Jewitt ◽  
Sara Price ◽  
Anna Xambo Sedo
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
The Body ◽  
Research Groups ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social

The turn to the body in social sciences has intensified the gaze of qualitative research on bodily matters and embodied relations and made the body a significant object of reflection, bringing new focus on and debates around the direction of methodological advances. This article contributes to these debates in three ways: 1) we explore the potential synergies across the social sciences and arts to inform the conceptualization of the body in digital contexts; 2) we point to ways qualitative research can engage with ideas from the arts towards more inclusive methods; and 3) we offer three themes with which to interrogate and re-imagine the body: its fragmenting and zoning, its sensory and material qualities, and its boundaries. We draw on the findings of an ethnographic study of the research ecologies of six research groups in the arts and social sciences concerned with the body in digital contexts to discuss the synergetic potential of these themes and how they could be mobilized for qualitative research on the body in digital contexts. We conclude that engaging with the arts brings potential to reinvigorate and extend the methodological repertoire of qualitative social science in ways that are pertinent to the current re-thinking of the body, its materiality and boundaries.

Articulating the Power of Dance

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Ridley
Keyword(s):  
Social Activity ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Advanced Level ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Dance Notation

Making some minor changes to the syllabus of a peripheral GCE subject – Advanced Level (A-level) Dance – would hardly seem to be of much importance to anyone except dance students and their teachers. But the loss of dance notation is not as unimportant as it might appear: there are implications for the status of dance in the curriculum, for its ability to attract a range of students and for the development of the subject itself. Whilst being a popular social activity, in UK schools dance is constructed as a physical subject with an aesthetic gloss, languishing at the bottom of the academic hierarchy. Dance as a discipline is marginalised in academic discourse as an ephemeral, performance-focused subject, its power articulated through the body. Yet dance is more than just performance: to dismiss it as purely bodies in action is to ignore not only the language of its own structural conventions but also the language in which it might be recorded. Using the notion of docile bodies, the author considers the centrality of the body as instrument in defining the power of dance and how Foucault's mechanisms of power and knowledge are exemplified in current conceptions of dance in education.

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