scholarly journals Jan Švankmajer’s Kunstkammer: Every thing means everything

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-352
Author(s):  
Anna Maria Brzezińska
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Value ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Subjective Context

Thesis. Jan Švankmajer’s Kunstkammer is a project with a complex constellation of meaning that defies clear-cut categorization in the context of Pomian’s theory of semiophores.  Discussed concepts. The paper describes the kunstkammer art project created by Jan Švankmajer, a Czech surrealist, in the context of Pomian’s theory of semiophores and compares it to traditional and historical equivalents, using the concepts of micro- and macrocosm, the world as a stage (Theatrum Mundi), hermeticism, and alchemy.  Results and conclusion. Jana Švankmajer’s Kunstkammer should be analyzed primarily in the individual and subjective context, rather than in the social one.   Originality/cognitive value of the approach. Pomian has described many examples of traditional kunstkammers, but there are also several modern collections that have not yet been described in the literature.  

Commentary

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy J. Miller ◽  
Grace E. Cho
Keyword(s):  
Self Esteem ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Active Engagement ◽  
Socioeconomic Conditions ◽  
Personal Meanings ◽  
Self Evaluation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Past Experiences

Chapter 12, “Commentary: Personalization,” discusses the process of personalization, based on the portraits presented in Chapters 8–11. Personalization is not just a matter of individual variation; it is a form of active engagement through which individuals endow imaginaries with personal meanings and refract the imaginary through their own experiences. The portraits illustrate how the social imaginary of childrearing and self-esteem entered into dialogue with the complex realities of people’s lives. Parents’ ability to implement their childrearing goals was constrained and enabled by their past experiences and by socioeconomic conditions. The individual children were developing different strategies of self-evaluation, different expectations about how affirming the world would be, and different self-defining interests, and their self-making varied, depending on the situation. Some children received diagnoses of low self-esteem as early as preschool.

scholarly journals Politics and the Craft of War in Sam Shepard’s States of Shock

لارك ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (20) ◽  
pp. 30-40
Author(s):  
Sanaa Lazim Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Controversial Subject ◽  
Sam Shepard ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

Sam Shepard is one of the controversial modern American playwrights who wrote about issues that are concerned with the individual in America rather than the institution In his theatre, the audience expects to see everything that concerns itself with the western culture and ignores that which is global. He is very much interested in the inner landscape of America rather than its position as the leader of the world. Thus, in his drama he preaches such ideology urging the US Administration to focus the attention on the American welfare. The research attempts an analysis on his play The States of Shock using the New Historicism approach through studying the writer’s point of view concerning the craft of war. Modern politics has been very influential on both the social as well as the literary scene. Wars, whether launched or were only loomed at, has been considered the most controversial subject about which plays, poems, and books were written. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, writers

Augmented Reality: Breaking into What World?

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4-2) ◽  
pp. 351-371
Author(s):  
Vladimir Ignatyev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Complex Structure ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Relational Theory ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Biological Substrate ◽  
The Individual

The article considers the phenomenon of augmented reality as a special hybrid reality and a part of social space. The author compares the differences in approaches to the interpretation of reality in philosophy, social theory and natural science. The provisions of phenomenological sociology are used as a methodological basis for the study. The author substantiates the necessity of conjugation of ontological and epistemological perspectives of interpretation of the “multilayer” social reality. The lack of concentration of attention in most studies on distinguishing these angles leaves the category of social reality on the periphery of the construction of social ontologies. And this is not a paradox, but a desire to avoid difficulties in choosing a research position when solving a problem of a certain class each time that arises: either to build ontological models of each layer of the social, or to re-enter into polemics about the permissible limits of avoiding solipsism. The article shows one of the possible ways out of the vicious circle of polemics about the demarcation of ontology and epistemology by presenting the concepts of ‘social reality’ and ‘social actuality’ as a means of separating research angles. Their application makes it possible to establish that the environment formed by augmented reality is much more complex than it seems to the individual in his direct perception. It includes four spaces: 1) the objective world; 2) the mental world; 3) a hybrid world as a symbiosis of real and imaginary worlds; 4) symbiosis of fragments of the real world - torn apart in space and time and combined with the help of technologies in devices, which make it possible for an individual to be present while observing their combined existence and to operate with them. The author comes to the conclusion that this feature of the organization of space with the help of augmented reality implies the specificity of the changed social space in which individuals have to interact. There is a transformation of the basic ‘cell’ of society - the system of social interaction. It has been established that augmented reality technologies provide additional, qualitatively new opportunities for influencing individual pictures of the world. Augmented reality also complicates virtual reality, introducing, in addition to fictional characteristics, the content of practical actions. Augmented reality not only ‘comprehends’ the world, but is in direct practical contact with it, turning into a special side of constant reality. It was found that the interaction of augmented reality with social reality is reversible. Thanks to this process, social reality from ‘augmented’ reality is transformed into a ‘complex’ one, the qualitative determination of which can be designated as ‘hybrid social reality’. Its mode of existence is more complex than that of the human community, and is inaccessible to them as long as they retain the biological substrate of their corporeity. But no less significant consequence for social and anthropogenic transformation is the emergence in society of its new structural unit - a techno-subject, as an actor of a new species and a new agent that forms a hybrid society. It has been established that the user of augmented reality transforms the provided visual effects in his imagination into really (beyond imagination) existing things and phenomena (ontologization). A reverse movement also takes place - from illusions fixed in the imagination as objects (created by augmented reality), back to pure illusions (reverse hypostatization). The distinction between the observed and the hidden through the introduction of the concepts of social reality and social actuality makes it possible to discover a more complex structure of the social - its multi-layered nature, supplementing the ontology of social reality and, in particular, P. Donati’s relational theory of society, with ideas about such layers as actual and potential, virtual and valid. The article considers the possibility of extending the idea of the heterarchical principle of the structure of society (developed in the works of I.V. Krasavin on the basis of the model of W. McCulloch) to the further development of the augmented reality ontology. The formation of space connections using AR technology is a continuation of the embodiment of the heterarchy principle, which brings the social structure beyond the structures of a constant society.

Abstract Right: Natural Immediacy within the Matrices of Personhood

2018 ◽  
pp. 168-188
Author(s):  
Wes Furlotte
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social World ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Opening Section

Chapter ten, therefore, examines the opening section of Hegel’s Rechtphilosophie, “Abstract Right,” in order develop a ‘preliminary sketch’ of the concepts of right and juridical personhood. The chapter historically contextualizes Hegel in relation to the mechanical deterministic conception of the individual (Hobbes) and abstract, though free, conceptions (Rousseau, Kant, Fichte). The chapter then moves to point out Hegel’s uniqueness in this context. Synthesizing Hobbesian and Fichtean standpoints, Hegel argues that the natural dimension of the individual (impulse, drive, and whim) is crucial to the genesis of actual freedom in the social world. Reconstructing Hegel’s analysis, the chapter shows that freedom is not undermined by acting out on one’s desires, impulses etc. but is brought into the world by these very drives. Although these drives are historically and socially conditioned they are, nevertheless, immediate and therefore constitutive of the basal level of juridical personhood. Thereby the chapter argues that a new sense of nature arises within Hegel’s political philosophy. The task, then, is to pursue what nature must mean within the fields constituting the socio-political.

New Outlines of Structural Sociology, 1945–70

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-85
Author(s):  
J.P.S. Uberoi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Theory ◽  
World View ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Indian Point

This chapter presents a discussion of international intellectual trends in the social sciences, theoretical and empirical studies in India, the question of independence of mind or home rule in intellectual institutions. Following the swarajist project outlined earlier of viewing Europe and its systems of knowledge and practices from an independent Indian point of view, this chapter is in effect a research outline for a new structural sociology in India. We are introduced to structuralism as it exists in the world, its scope and definition and as a methodology for the social sciences. This is followed by the approach to structuralism as scientific theory, method and as philosophical world view. Finally discusses are the principles of structural analysis, structuralism in language, literature and culture, in social structure, with regard to society and the individual, religion, philosophy, politics, sociology and social-anthropology.

Habitus and Field

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Leander
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
International Studies ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Heuristic Devices

The terms habitus and field are useful heuristic devices for thinking about power relations in international studies. Habitus refers to a person’s taken-for-granted, unreflected—hence largely habitual—way of thinking and acting. The habitus is a “structuring structure” shaping understandings, attitudes, behavior, and the body. It is formed through the accumulated experience of people in different fields. Using fields to study the social world is to acknowledge that social life is highly differentiated. A field can be exceedingly varied in scope and scale. A family, a village, a market, an organization, or a profession may be conceptualized as a field provided it develops its own organizing logic around a stake at stake. Each field is marked by its own taken-for-granted understanding of the world, implicit and explicit rules of behavior, and valuation of what confers power onto someone: that is, what counts as “capital.” The analysis of power through the habitus/field makes it possible to transcend the distinctions between the material and the “ideational” as well as between the individual and the structural. Moreover, working with habitus/field in international studies problematizes the role played by central organizing divides, such as the inside/outside and the public/private; and can uncover politics not primarily structured by these divides. Developing research drawing on habitus/field in international studies will be worthwhile for international studies scholars wishing to raise and answer questions about symbolic power/violence.

The World the Bedouin Lived in: Climate, Migration and Politics in the Early Modern Arab East

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Astrid Meier ◽  
Tariq Tell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Societal Level ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Marginal Zones

Environmental history provides a perspective from which we can deepen our understanding of the past because it examines the relationships of people with their material surroundings and the effects of those relationships on the individual as well as the societal level. It is a perspective that holds particular promise for the social and political history of arid and marginal zones, as it contributes to our understanding of the reason some groups are more successful than others in coping with the same environmental stresses. Historians working on the early modern Arab East have only recently engaged with the lively field of global environmental history. After presenting a brief overview of some strands of this research, this article illustrates the potential of this approach by looking closely at a series of conflicts involving Bedouin and other power groups in the southern parts of Bilād al-Shām around the middle of the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals The Memory of the National and the National as Memory

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 92-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Poblete
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Centered Form ◽  
Derechos Humanos ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

This essay seeks to illuminate a different, more encompassing kind of transition than that from dictatorship to post-dictatorship (and its attendant forms of memory of military brutal force and human rights abuses) often privileged by studies of political violence and social memory. The focus is twofold: first, to describe a transition from the world of the social to that of the post-social, i.e. a transition from a welfare state-centered form of the nation to its neoliberal competitive state counterpart; and secondly, to analyze its attendant memory dynamics. The double articulation of collective memory under neoliberalism, the deep and recurring violence it has involved at both the social and the individual level, and its self-articulation as a social memory apparatus are apparent in two Chilean films exploring the logic (Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero) and the history (Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz) of the implementation of this neoliberal memory apparatus in Chile. Este trabajo intenta iluminar una transición más amplia que aquella entre dictadura y post-dictadura ( y sus correspondientes formas de memoria sobre la violencia militar o los abusos a los derechos humanos) que suele ser el objeto de estudio de los trabajos sobre violencia política y memoria social. Mi interés es doble: primero, describir una transición del mundo social al post-social (es decir, una transición desde una forma de estado-nación centrada en el estado de bienestar a su contraparte neoliberal y competitiva; y en segundo lugar, analizar sus correspondientes formas de memoria. La doble articulación de la memoria colectiva bajo el neoliberalismo, la profunda y recurrente violencia presente, tanto a nivel social como a nivel individual, y su autoarticulación como un aparato de la memoria social son evidentes en las dos películas chilenas Tony Manero de Pablo Larraín y Nostalgia de la luz de Patricio Guzmán que exploran la lógica y la historia de la implementación de este aparato de la memoria neoliberal en Chile.

The Great Illusion: Ignorance, Informational Cascades, and the Persistence of Unpopular Norms

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Bicchieri ◽  
Yoshitaka Fukui
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Informational Cascades ◽  
Mediterranean Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Choices

Norms of discrimination against women and blacks, norms of revenge still alive in some Mediterranean countries, and norms that everybody dislikes and tries to circumvent, such as the invisible norms of reciprocity that hold among the Iks studied by Turnbull, are all examples of unpopular and inefficient norms that often persist in spite of their being disliked as well as being obviously inefficient from a social or economic viewpoint. The world of business is not immune to this problem. In all those countries in which corruption is endemic, bribing public officials to get lucrative contracts is the norm, but it is often true that such a norm is disliked by many, and that it may lead to highly inefficient social outcomes (Bicchieri and Rovelli 1995).From a functionalist viewpoint such norms are anomalous, since they do not seem to fulfill any beneficial role for society at large or even for the social groups involved in sustaining the norm. In many cases it would be possible to gain in efficiency by eliminating, say, norms of racial discrimination, in that it would be possible to increase the well-being of a racial minority without harming the rest of society. To social scientists who equate persistence with efficiency, the permanence of inefficient norms thus presents an anomaly. They rest their case on two claims: when a norm is inefficient, sooner or later this fact will become evident. And evidence of inefficiency will induce quick changes in the individual choices that sustain the norm. That is, no opportunity for social improvement remains unexploited for long. Unfortunately, all too often this is not the case, and this is not because people mistakenly believe inefficient norms to be good or efficient.

Recentering the World: The Quest for ‘Elective’ Centers in a Secularized Universe

1987 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Cohen ◽  
Nachman Ben-Yehuda ◽  
Janet Aviad
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

The various ‘quests for meaning’ of the ‘decentralized’ contemporary Western youths are interpreted as so many attempts to ‘recenter the world’ around new ‘elective centers’. Rather than being centers of the contemporary world into which the individual is born, such centers are located outside it, and freely chosen by the seekers. Four such elective centers are discussed: (1) traditional religious conversion, (2) the occult, (3) science fiction, and (4) tourism. Each of these elective centers is first briefly described and then analysed in a comparative framework, focused on six principal questions: (a) the social and cultural conditions which engender the contemporary ‘quest for a center’, (b) the nature of elective centers, (c) mechanisms of election and rejection of alternative elective centers, (d) extent of involvement with elective centers, (e) elective centers and the wider social framework, (f) the institution-building potential of the elective centers.

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