Parables for the Virtual

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Massumi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Body Art ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Twentieth Anniversary ◽  
Theoretical Issues

Since its publication twenty years ago, Brian Massumi's pioneering Parables for the Virtual has become an essential text for interdisciplinary scholars across the humanities. Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the internet as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation. Renewing and assessing William James's radical empiricism and Henri Bergson's philosophy of perception through the filter of the postwar French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Massumi tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan's acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multifaceted argument. This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new preface in which Massumi situates the book in relation to developments since its publication and outlines the evolution of its main concepts. It also includes two short texts, “Keywords for Affect” and “Missed Conceptions about Affect,” in which Massumi explicates his approach to affect in ways that emphasize the book's political and philosophical stakes.

“Is an Archive Enough?”: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-165
Author(s):  
Bradley J. Fest
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
First Century ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Rachel Blau Duplessis ◽  
Film And Video

In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have made it possible for writers and artists to create massively unreadable works through computational and collaborative composition, what the author has elsewhere called megatexts. The ubiquity of texts appearing across media that are quite literally too big to read—from experimental novels to television, film, and video games—signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the era of neoliberalism. But what happens to other long forms, such as the twentieth-century long poem, when written in an era of megatextuality? Rachel Blau DuPlessis's work, including Drafts (1987–2013) and Traces, with Days (2017–), readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking through a megatextual impulse in the twenty-first-century long poem. Though her work is plainly indebted to its modernist precursors (H.D., Pound, Williams, etc.) while disavowing at every level of its composition a patriarchal will toward totality, DuPlessis's various experiments in the long poem are also thoroughly contemporary and respond to the economic, military, political, and environmental transformations of the neoliberal era by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris. This essay positions DuPlessis's work amidst a larger twenty-first-century media ecology, which includes both the megatext and the big, ambitious novel, and argues that rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumulation without end, DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext's phallogocentric form against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means—socially, culturally, economically—to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accumulation.

“Naked flesh”—A somatic calling of the “mind”?

Human Affairs ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-239
Author(s):  
Robert Švarc
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Art ◽  
System Research ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Ritual Practices

Abstract Actionism, Performance and Body Art have produced forms that still provoke in their radicalism and brutality and raise many questions. Regardless of the theme—love, violence, gender, death, sexuality, killing of animals, ritual practices and myths, ecology, criticism of the ideology and so on—they are almost always characterized by an explicit and demonstrative exposure of flesh. The topic of my research is the body as a medium of the human act. Does the body elicit different “corporations of the mind” or does it draw attention to its own complex naked presence and extensionality in every elementary social interaction? Is the body unquantifiable—imponderabilia, unpredictable, and is it spinning out of the generated statistics of the system research?

Finding out about filling-in: A guide to perceptual completion for visual science and the philosophy of perception

1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 723-748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luiz Pessoa ◽  
Evan Thompson ◽  
Alva Noë
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Neural Signals ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
Visual Science ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Perceptual Completion ◽  
Theoretical Category ◽  
Internal Processing ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
Boundary Completion

In visual science the term filling-in is used in different ways, which often leads to confusion. This target article presents a taxonomy of perceptual completion phenomena to organize and clarify theoretical and empirical discussion. Examples of boundary completion (illusory contours) and featural completion (color, brightness, motion, texture, and depth) are examined, and single-cell studies relevant to filling-in are reviewed and assessed. Filling-in issues must be understood in relation to theoretical issues about neural–perceptual isomorphism and linking propositions. Six main conclusions are drawn: (1) visual filling-in comprises a multitude of different perceptual completion phenomena; (2) certain forms of visual completion seem to involve spatially propagating neural activity (neural filling-in) and so, contrary to Dennett's (1991; 1992) recent discussion of filling-in, cannot be described as results of the brain's “ignoring an absence” or “jumping to a conclusion”; (3) in certain cases perceptual completion seems to have measurable effects that depend on neural signals representing a presence rather than ignoring an absence; (4) neural filling-in does not imply either “analytic isomorphism” or “Cartesian materialism,” and thus the notion of the bridge locus – a particular neural stage that forms the immediate substrate of perceptual experience – is problematic and should be abandoned; (5) to reject the representational conception of vision in favor of an “enactive” or “animate” conception reduces the importance of filling-in as a theoretical category in the explanation of vision; and (6) the evaluation of perceptual content should not be determined by “subpersonal” considerations about internal processing, but rather by considerations about the task of vision at the level of the animal or person interacting with the world.

scholarly journals Dietary supplements in fitness centers: body management and health risks

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Camargo Silva ◽  
Maria Isabel Brandão de Souza Mendes ◽  
Sílvia Maria Agatti Lüdorf
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Health Risks ◽  
Physical Training ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internal Organs ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Fitness Centers ◽  
Supplement Use

The purpose of this study was to explore the meanings of supplement use among those who engage in physical activity in fitness centers. A qualitative study was carried out based on 67 questionnaires answered on the internet by practitioners of physical training. There was also an observation of the groups in the Facebook, the dynamic and other aspects such as discussions, messages, profiles and images. It was detected that physical activity practitioners care more about the quantity of substances ingested than any other factor that may lead them to suffer certain health risks. They believe that so-called "excesses" may cause diseases to the internal organs. Although the participants believe that their own consumption of supplements does not compromise their health, a biomedical authority is crucial for them to recognize whether or not they are at risk. The consumption of supplements can vary depending on what is understood to be excessive and which risks may compromise the body. There are many motivations for managing these substances. Health risks should not be analyzed solely from a biomedical perspective, but also addressed by the socio-cultural logic of the perceptions and meanings attributed by the subjects to the body and the management thereof.

Disability Studies and the Destruction of Jerusalem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Watts Belser
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Gender Discourse ◽  
The Way

This chapter uses disability studies theory to analyze the political and cultural significations of the body amidst Roman conquest. Extending the insights of scholars who have examined way Roman colonial dominance reshapes Jewish gender discourse, it argues that imperial violence similarly restructures the way rabbinic narrative portrays the body. Bavli Gittin and Lamentations Rabbah both recount stories of Rabbi Tsadok, a celebrated priest who fasted for forty years in an attempt to avert the destruction of Jerusalem. In contrast to the beauty tales examined in the previous chapter, Rabbi Tsadok’s body is used to mark the visceral impact of Roman conquest—and to chronicle the enduring scar that catastrophe leaves upon the flesh. Yet even as these stories use disability to make visible the tremendous loss that destruction brings, they also resignify the cultural logic of imperial victory, emphasizing the subversive power of disabled Jewish flesh.

Postmodern Body Techniques: Some Anthropological Considerations on Natural and Postnatural Bodies

1996 ◽  
Vol 18 (s1) ◽  
pp. S95-S106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Steroid Use ◽  
Body Building ◽  
The Past ◽  
Body Techniques ◽  
A Site

Debates concerning “the body,” embodiment, and corporeality have become increasingly central to cultural theory in the past decade. This article addresses the question of the “natural body” from the point of view of both traditional social theory (Marcel Mauss) and more recent arguments about the body as a site of enculturation. Why is the natural body preserved as a moral value within the realm of sport, while its limits are also pushed to “unnatural” extremes? By contrasting body building as sport (where anabolic steroid use is condemned) with reproductive body building (pregnancy, where steroid use is increasingly central), the paradoxical dimensions of the “(post)natural” body in sport are examined.

scholarly journals Bodily relations and reciprocity in the art of Sonia Khurana

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 255-274
Author(s):  
Leon Wainwright
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Discursive Field ◽  
Affective Relations

This article explores the significance of the ‘somatic’ and ‘ontological turn’ in locating the radical politics articulated in the contemporary performance, installation, video and digital art practices of New Delhi-based artist, Sonia Khurana (b. 1968). Since the late 1990s, Khurana has fashioned a range of artworks that require new sorts of reciprocal and embodied relations with their viewers. While this line of art practice suggests the need for a primarily philosophical mode of inquiry into an art of the body, such affective relations need to be historicised also in relation to a discursive field of ‘difference’ and public expectations about the artist’s ethnic, gendered and national identity. Thus, this intimate, visceral and emotional field of inter- and intra-action is a novel contribution to recent transdisciplinary perspectives on the gendered, social and sentient body that in turn prompts a wider debate on the ethics of cultural commentary and art historiography.

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