scholarly journals Nothingness in motion: Theorizing Bruce Lee’s action aesthetics

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-380
Author(s):  
Wayne Wong
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Kung Fu ◽  
Bruce Lee ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Chinese Aesthetics ◽  
Global Action ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Action Cinema ◽  
Shed Light

This article argues that Bruce Lee revolutionized kung fu cinema not only by increasing its authenticity and combativity but also by revealing its inherent connection to wuyi (武意), or martial ideation. Martial ideation refers to a specific negotiation of action and stasis in martial arts performance which contains a powerful overflow of emotion in tranquility. Since the early 1970s, Bruce Lee’s kung fu films have been labeled “chop-socky,” offering only fleeting visual and visceral pleasures. Subsequently, several studies explored the cultural significance and political implications of Lee’s films. However, not much attention has been paid to their aesthetic composition—in particular, how cinematic kung fu manifests Chinese aesthetics and philosophy on choreographic, cinematographic, and narrative levels. In Lee’s films, the concept of martial ideation is embodied in the Daoist notion of wu (nothingness), a metaphysical void that is invisible, nameless, and formless. Through a close reading of Laozi’s Daodejing (道德經), it is possible to discover two traits of nothingness—namely, reversal and return—which are characteristics of Lee’s representation of martial ideation. The former refers to a paradigmatic shift from concreteness to emptiness, while the latter makes such a shift reversible and perennial via the motif of circularity. The discussion focuses on films in which Lee’s creative influence is clearly discernible, such as Fist of Fury (1972), The Way of the Dragon (1972), and the surviving footage intended for The Game of Death featured in Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey (2000). These films shed light on the complicated relationship between the cinematic (action and stasis), the martial (Jeet Kune Do), the aesthetic (ideation), and the philosophical (Daoism). The goal is to stimulate a more balanced discussion of Lee’s films both from the perspective of global action cinema and Chinese culture.

Review: Peter Sloterdijk, Der Ästhetische Imperativ – Schriften zur Kunst

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 367-374
Author(s):  
Sascha Rashof
Keyword(s):  
Product Design ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
Modern Design ◽  
Light Product ◽  
Environmentally Responsible ◽  
Artificial Condition ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Action Cinema

Peter Sloterdijk’s Der Ästhetische Imperativ – Schriften zur Kunst is a collection of essays addressing a range of topics in the aesthetic realm, including sound, light, product design, cities and architecture, the human (artificial) condition, museums, action cinema and the art system. Via a ‘media’-anthropological, historico-philosophical approach, he critiques the ‘aesthetic imperative’ of (post-)modern design civilizations by re-evaluating the analogy between universal ethics and aesthetics after Kant. In this way, Sloterdijk argues for a more singular, intensive, socially and environmentally responsible aesthetic experience.

The reflection of negative social phenomena in contemporary opera practice

Human Affairs ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Mojžišová
Keyword(s):  
Belief System ◽  
Moral Belief ◽  
Visual Interpretation ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Aesthetic Aspect ◽  
Contemporary Opera ◽  
European Theatre ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractThere are two approaches that dominate contemporary opera performances. The first may be characterised as producing a subtle, aesthetic and stylistic means of expression. The second runs up visual, interpretation and content means to their maximum expressivity and the audience is exposed to violence, sex and experience disgust. This paper analyses specific productions by renowned European theatre and opera directors, in order to shed light on the way in which opera directors cope with the threat of terrorism, sexual violence, and the impact of the mass media upon the moral belief system of modern man. Within the context of the bold productions of European theatre-makers Slovak opera theatre seems conservative, gravitating towards the aesthetic aspect of opera.

Untimely Love: The Aesthetics and Politics of Anachronism in The Age of Innocence

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-273
Author(s):  
John Sampson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Free Love ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Metropolitan Museum Of Art ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Age Of Innocence ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Emma Goldman

Abstract “Untimely Love” reassesses the aesthetic choices and political implications of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), first by highlighting a surprising overlap between Wharton and the anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman. Wharton's novelistic critique of New York society's marriage rituals, spurred by an unconsummated affair between Newland Archer and his wife's cousin Ellen Olenska, follows Goldman in positing an antagonism between the hierarchies of marriage and the equalizing nature of love. For Wharton, however, this antagonism will not be resolved with free love one day triumphing. To explain her position, the article turns to Jacques Rancière's unresolvable antagonism between “politics” and “the police,” which has an aesthetic analogue in the clash between the formally anarchic modern novel and premodern hierarchies of genre. Wharton unearths 1870s New York like an archeologist to expose how its patriarchal logic polices women's sexuality within and outside marriage, making expressions of love quite rare. Wharton unleashes the disruptive power of love through formal experimentation, temporarily subverting her own historical realism, when she has Ellen and Archer visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, which did not yet exist in the novel's timeframe. The Met's impossible location and its uncataloged holdings open to public viewing upset New York's social and aesthetic hierarchies. It is in this anachronistic and democratic context that Archer first sees “love visible” in the world, rearranging his entire worldview. Wharton, in a related political gesture of aesthetic dissensus, aligns her untimely lovers with the museum's suddenly visible ghosts of history.

scholarly journals Translation of Classics by JX Native Literati of Song Dynasty from the Perspective of Translation Aesthetics

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 860
Author(s):  
Yuying Li ◽  
Yuming Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
The Song Dynasty ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Tang And Song Dynasties ◽  
National Power ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Aesthetic

With the significant growth of China's comprehensive national power, Chinese culture should not only "bring in" but also "go out". Chinese culture is extensive and profound, and classical literature has reached its peak in the Tang and Song dynasties. Jiangxi has been full of natural resources and outstanding people since ancient times, especially in the Song dynasty, when people of talent came forth in large numbers and created brilliant heritage of classic literary works for their offspring. Therefore, study on the translation of classics by JX native literati of Song Dynasty has very important academic value, application value and popularization meaning. Based on the modern translation aesthetics theory, this paper discusses how English translation of Chinese classics represents the beauty and the aesthetic value of the original from the perspective of rhetorical devices, form, images, and emotion respectively, in the hope to carry forward Chinese classics and Chinese culture.

scholarly journals The co-optation of sensibility and the subversion of beauty

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Arnold Berleant
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Sense Experience ◽  
Political Criticism ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
Mass Marketing ◽  
Ethical Significance

The aesthetic analysis of everyday life has developed an important body of work whose significance extends beyond the academy. Because of its ubiquity in experience, aesthetic sensibility has many manifestations, both overt and concealed. This paper examines some largely hidden ways in which taste and aesthetic judgment, which are manifested in sense experience, have been subtly appropriated and exploited. I identify and describe such procedures as the cooptation (or appropriation) of aesthetic sensibility, a phenomenon that has consequences damaging to health, to society, and to environment. These practices are a form of negative aesthetics that distorts and manipulates sensible experience in the interest of mass marketing and political control. Such practices have great ethical significance and carry social and political implications that suggest another role for aesthetics, a critical one: aesthetics as an instrument of emancipation in social analysis and political criticism.

The Crimean War and (Self-)Sacrifice in Mid-Victorian Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Melissa Schramm
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Insight Into

Charles Dickens was among those writers who responded to the tragic losses of the Crimean War with renewed attention to the cultural significance of sacrifice. He followed the war effort with care, protesting publicly about the bureaucratic bungling that had cost British lives in Sebastopol. His novels written immediately after the cessation of the war provide us with insight into the aesthetic uses of different models of sacrifice. In Little Dorrit (1856), Dickens explores the vocation of self-sacrifice popularized by feminine service in the war; in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens depends upon the dynamics of barbaric sacrifice to achieve closure as the Christlike Sidney Carton lays down his life for his brother man on the scaffold. This chapter draws upon the work of the theologians Nancy Jay and Yvonne Sherwood to probe the contradictions inherent in Victorian imaginings of sacrifice—both Protestant and Catholic, male and female.

scholarly journals The Artification of Football: A Sociological Reconsideration of the ‘Beautiful Game’

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-320
Author(s):  
John Hughson
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Football Players ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Sociological Explanation ◽  
Insight Into

Football is widely referred to as the ‘beautiful game’. This gives the impression that the sport can be aesthetically appreciated by its human observers. However, while many people might acknowledge that some of the physical movements made by top level football players exhibit grace, even beauty, this does not equate to football being accepted as a form of culture comparable to other areas of human activity described collectively as ‘the arts’. While this article takes an interest in philosophical inquiry into the aesthetic possibilities of football, it is primarily concerned with a sociological explanation as to how football has become ‘artified’. In doing so, the article draws upon the concept ‘artification’ as developed by Roberta Shapiro and Nathalie Heinich. The approach is not concerned with definitions of art according to aesthetic criteria or notions of appreciation, but with ‘how and under what circumstances art comes about’. This requires examining football in relation to discernible ‘constituent processes’ of artification. For reasons explained in the article, the contextual focus is on the artification of football in England. Artification is not a closed and finished matter. In that it can be said to have occurred, artification must be balanced against ‘de-artification’ in the form of potentially countervailing tendencies. Such consideration is taken up in the conclusion, via reflection upon the damaging impact of the excesses of commercial organisational control. Overall, artification is advocated as a sociological model that offers insight into the cultural significance of football in contemporary life.

2. Looming Tragedy

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Carrying Capacity ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Planetary Boundaries ◽  
Limits To Growth ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Global Action

Ecologists have applied the concept of “carrying capacity”, the population of a species that an ecosystem can support, to human populations. Ecological limits to growth in population and the economy dominated environmental concern in the 1970s and beyond. More recently they have been supplanted by the idea of planetary boundaries, based on the stresses that the earth system is capable of absorbing, several of which (including biosphere integrity and climate change) have already been transgressed, suggesting the system is in grave peril. This chapter also considers the points of critics of the idea that there can be limits, then analyzes the political implications of limits and boundaries, from the authoritarianism associated with some 1970s thinkers to the need for cooperative global action to the more democratic possibilities that could be associated with degrowth and planetary boundaries.

Kinesthetic Empathy in Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 175-235
Author(s):  
Ana Hedberg Olenina
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Soviet Psychology ◽  
Kinesthetic Empathy ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Brain

Chapter 4 explores Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of the audience’s corporeal empathy, evoked by actors’ movements and graphical, nonhuman “gestures”—that is, “movements” implied by the structure of the shot composition, editing, and other formal devices. In scrutinizing Eisenstein’s theory that spectatorship is, fundamentally, an enactive experience, this chapter traces the roots of his ideas and evaluates the aesthetic and political implications of his position. First, I analyze the filmmaker’s engagement with psychological theories of William James, William Carpenter, Vladimir Bekhterev, Alexander Luria, and Lev Vygotsky, as well as the 19th-century German theorists of empathy (Einfühlung). Special attention is devoted to one of Eisenstein’s major sources: Vladimir Bekhterev’s Collective Reflexology (1921), a seminal work of early Soviet psychology, which discussed nonverbal communication in crowds and argued that the processing of visual sensations by the brain instantaneously impacts motor networks. I argue that although Eisenstein’s model of spectatorship appears manipulative, it is also potentially emancipatory. Embracing the utopian spirit of the avant-garde, he was willing to subject himself and his audience to radical experimentation aimed at testing the sensory properties of cinema and demystifying the mass production of emotions.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document