Dominant Positions: John Coltrane, Michel Foucault, and the Politics of Representation

Author(s):  
Tracey Nicholls

In a 1979 essay on the principles of a contemporary movement in literature, écriture, Michel Foucault quotes approvingly a rhetorical question posed by minimalist author Samuel Beckett: “what does it matter who is speaking?” (“What Is an Author?” 205). My purpose in this paper is to argue that endorsing such critical-theoretical inattention to speakers’ identities actually promotes some of the abuses of power that Foucault and the theorists he has inspired most object to. Notably, inattention to identity forecloses analysis of the speaker’s position within the discourse and, in so doing, permits both the continued dominance of socially-legitimated points of view and continued marginalization of social commentaries and critiques that oppose themselves to these dominant threads of discourse. My critique of this curious blind-spot in Foucault’s theorizing is worked out through an analysis of critical attention to John Coltrane’s ‘free jazz’ experimentations of the 1960s. One of the central points I am concerned to make in discussing Coltrane is that how artistic projects are represented depends at least in part upon the willingness of critics to take notice of issues of identity and social positioning (both their own, and that of the artists they evaluate). I choose to engage with evaluations of Coltrane, specifically, because there are certain features of his relation to his audience and his critics that demand of us an especially nuanced and complex analysis of the power jazz journalism can exert.

Author(s):  
Hilary Radner ◽  
Alistair Fox

In this section of the interview, Bellour describes how he began to engage in film analysis in the 1960s, beginning with a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, with the aim of establishing the way it worked as a “text.” He proceeds to describe his personal encounters with major figures like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and his friendship with Christian Metz, suggesting how his interchanges with them helped to shape his own thinking, and how it diverged from theirs.


Author(s):  
Francine Fragoso de Miranda Silva ◽  
Cláudia Regina Flores ◽  
Rosilene Beatriz Machado

ResumoEste artigo tem por objetivo identificar e analisar práticas matemáticas inscritas em cadernos escolares de uma escola mista estadual do município de Antônio Carlos (SC), nas décadas de 1930 e 1940, com enfoque dado para as frações. São utilizadas as teorizações de Michel Foucault para nortear os preceitos teórico-metodológicos. Os resultados da pesquisa indicam práticas matemáticas desenvolvidas nessa escola obedecendo aos programas oficiais catarinenses da época, com soluções rápidas e sucintas e voltadas às tarefas de seu cotidiano. Também se observam que elas estão inseridas num contexto histórico, compreendido entre a Reforma Francisco Campos, de 1931, e o início do Movimento da Matemática Moderna, nos anos de 1960, no qual a fração recebe uma nova abordagem, distanciando-se da relação entre número e medida e aproximando-se da noção de parte-todo.Palavras-chave: Práticas matemáticas, Cadernos escolares, Frações, História da educação matemática.AbstractThis article aims to identify and analyze mathematical practices registered in school notebooks of a mixed state school in the city of Antônio Carlos (SC), in the 1930s and 1940s, focused on fractions. Michel Foucault's theorizations are used to guide theoretical and methodological precepts. The results of the research show mathematical practices developed in these schools obeying the Santa Catarina official programs of the time, with quick and succinct solutions and focused on their daily tasks. It is also observed that they are inserted in a historical context, between the Francisco Campos Reform, of 1931, and the beginning of the Modern Mathematics Movement, in the 1960s, in which the fraction receives a new approach, moving away from the relationship between number and measure and approaching the notion of part-whole.Keywords: Mathematical practices, School notebooks, Fractions, History of mathematics education.ResumenEste artículo tiene como objetivo identificar y analizar las prácticas matemáticas registradas en los cuadernos escolares de una escuela estatal mixta en la ciudad de Antônio Carlos (SC), en la década de 1930 y 1940, con un enfoque en las fracciones. Las teorizaciones de Michel Foucault se utilizan para guiar los preceptos teóricos y metodológicos. Los resultados de la investigación muestran prácticas matemáticas desarrolladas en estas escuelas que obedecen los programas oficiales de Santa Catarina de la época, con soluciones rápidas y sucintas y centradas en sus tareas diarias. También se observa que se insertan en un contexto histórico, entre la Reforma Francisco Campos, de 1931, y el comienzo del Movimiento de Matemáticas Modernas, en la década de 1960, en el que la fracción recibe un nuevo enfoque, alejándose de la relación entre numerar y medir y acercándose a la noción de parte-todo.Palabras clave: Prácticas matemáticas, Cuadernos escolares, Fracciones, Historia de la educación matemática


Author(s):  
Declan Fahy

Objectivity and advocacy have been contentious topics within environmental journalism since the specialism was formed in the 1960s. Objectivity is a broad term, but has been commonly interpreted to mean the reporting of news in an impartial and unbiased way by finding and verifying facts, reporting facts accurately, separating facts from values, and giving two sides of an issue equal attention to make news reports balanced. Advocacy journalism, by contrast, presents news from a distinct point of view, a perspective that often aligns with a specific political ideology. It does not separate facts from values and is less concerned with presenting reports that are conventionally balanced. Environmental reporters have found it difficult to categorize their work as either objective or advocacy journalism, because studies show that many of them are sympathetic to environmental values even as they strive to be rigorously professional in their reporting. Journalists have struggled historically to apply the notion of balance to the reporting of climate change science, because even though the overwhelming majority of the world’s experts agree that human-driven climate change is real and will have major future impacts, a minority of scientists dispute this consensus. Reporters aimed to be fair by giving both viewpoints equal attention, a practice scholars have labeled false balance. The reporting of climate change has changed over time, especially as the topic moved from the scientific domain to encompass also the political, social, legal, and economic realms. Objectivity and advocacy remain important guiding concepts for environmental journalism today, but they have been reconfigured in the digital era that has transformed climate change news. Objectivity in climate reporting can be viewed as going beyond the need to present both sides of an issue to the application in reports of a journalist’s trained judgment, where reporters use their training and knowledge to interpret evidence on a climate-related topic. Objectivity can also be viewed as a transparent method for finding, verifying, and communicating facts. Objectivity can also be seen as the synthesis and curation of multiple points of view. In a pluralistic media ecosystem, there are now multiple forms of advocacy journalism that present climate coverage from various points of view—various forms of climate coverage with a worldview. False balance had declined dramatically over time in mainstream reportorial sources, but it remains a pitfall for reporters to avoid in coverage of two climate change topics: the presentation of the many potential future impacts or risks and the coverage of different policy responses in a climate-challenged society.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 212-232
Author(s):  
Mykola Ruban ◽  
Vadym Ponomarenko

In the article on the basis of the complex analysis of sources and scientific literature the attempt to investigate historical circumstances of development and construction of shunting electric locomotives at the Dnipropetrovsk electric locomotive plant has been made. It was found that during the 1960s and 1970s, the team of designers of the Dnipropetrovsk plant, having strong research and production potential, at the request of the Ministry of Railways of the USSR developed and built unique samples of shunting electric locomotives of the VL41 and VL26 series to meet the needs of Soviet main-line railways with modern high-tech electric vehicles. It is proved that in the absence of thorough experience and, accordingly, the possibility of a rapid technological breakthrough in the development of main-line locomotives, during the experimental operation of shunting electric locomotives VL41 and VL26, several design shortcomings were identified, which led to their further use exclusively on the house tracks of enterprises, and designers of Dnipropetrovsk plant later focused on the development and construction of traction units for industrial application commissioned by the Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy of the USSR. At the same time, the construction of the main-line railway equipment to the order of the Ministry of Railways allowed the staff of the enterprise to gain valuable experience, which was later used in the implementation of the renewal program of rolling stock of Ukrzaliznytsia. Although today the Dnipropetrovsk plant is in decline, the analysis of historical circumstances of formation and design and technological heritage of electric locomotive construction in Ukraine is of fundamental importance both in the general perspective of the development of domestic transport engineering, and the railway industry in particular. Further study of the history of Dnipropetrovsk electric locomotive plant requires clarification of the historical circumstances of institutionalization of the Special Design and Technology Bureau of the enterprise from the creation of industrial electric locomotives and traction units to the development and re-equipment of main traction rolling stock and specialized repair equipment within the state enterprise “Ukrainian Research Design Institute of Electric Locomotive Engineering”.


Author(s):  
Н. Сидоренко ◽  
N. Sidorenko

The architecture of Soviet modernism occupies an important place in the history of world architecture. Due to the relatively recent recognition of Soviet modernism as a separate architectural trend, in most regions of our country (including the South of Russia), the objects, which were implemented in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1980s, have not been studied. This can lead to irreparable loss of structures with compositional and artistic value. The building of the former Museum of International Friendship, located in the park named after Pleven in Rostov-on-Don, is one of such objects. The building is designed using the basic planning, artistic and urban planning techniques of Soviet modernism. The article discusses the features of the Museum from different points of view. The retrospective analysis of transformations of the town-planning situation, which has influenced formation of the volume and compositional decision of the building, is carried out. The architectural and artistic features of the Museum are determined on the basis of field research and the study of preserved historical graphic materials. The article reveals the value of the object as a structure reflecting the main trends of Soviet architecture of the 1960s-1980s. The modern state of the building of the former Museum is investigated, the lost features of architectural and town-planning decisions are fixed. The necessity of restoration and preservation of its original appearance is confirmed


2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret E. Thomas

This paper explores the possibility that Conlon Nancarrow’s connection to jazz runs more deeply and widely throughout the Studies for Player Piano than is typically recognized through the clear stylistic allusions to jazz found in a few of the Studies. I propose that an awareness of this deeper connection—as suggested by Nancarrow’s profound appreciation for early jazz, especially that of Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines—might prompt a new and rewarding mode of listening to the Studies, an improvisational mode. The principle of collective improvisation, important in both early jazz of the 1920s and in “free jazz” of the 1960s, was valued by Nancarrow, and his discussion of it intimates an aesthetic stance that runs through his music.


Author(s):  
John Gennari

In the post-1945 period, jazz moved rapidly from one major avant-garde revolution (the birth of bebop) to another (the emergence of free jazz) while developing a profusion of subgenres (hard bop, progressive, modal, Third Stream, soul jazz) and a new idiomatic persona (cool or hip) that originated as a form of African American resistance but soon became a signature of transgression and authenticity across the modern arts and culture. Jazz’s long-standing affiliation with African American urban life and culture intensified through its central role in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. By the 1970s, jazz, now fully eclipsed in popular culture by rock n’ roll, turned to electric instruments and fractured into a multitude of hyphenated styles (jazz-funk, jazz-rock, fusion, Latin jazz). The move away from acoustic performance and traditional codes of blues and swing musicianship generated a neoclassical reaction in the 1980s that coincided with a mission to establish an orthodox jazz canon and honor the music’s history in elite cultural institutions. Post-1980s jazz has been characterized by tension between tradition and innovation, earnest preservation and intrepid exploration, Americanism and internationalism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-584
Author(s):  
S. E. Gontarski

American outlier writer William S. Burroughs was a creative force – an homme de lettres in his own right, yes, but as a cultural theorist as well, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call ‘a society of control’ or ‘a surveillance culture’, and, moreover, as a textual embodiment as well. That is, Burroughs was as much a media theorist and performance artist as he was a traditional literary figure, what we generally call a writer, or novelist, although he lauded those latter categories. Through such multimodality he offered critiques of a ‘control society’ and of ‘thought control’ by a media that strips us of volition. In his lectures on Michel Foucault delivered at the Université de Paris VIII in the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze detailed Burroughs's influence on both philosophers with his critique of our ‘control societies’, a term they adopted from him. These critiques of what Burroughs calls ‘thought control’ were and currently remain inseparable from his emergence as a performance artist, such embodiment of his art readily available amid our own image-obsessed electronic revolution. That is, the products of this period are currently being recirculated through commercial media outlets and through multiple open access formats to suggest – to confirm – that the artist whom many another ‘outsider’ has called ‘the Priest’ and who saw himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’ and ‘a technician of consciousness’, this dystopic modernist author, visionary science fiction writer, and aesthetic weapons maker was one of the major media artists, social critics, cultural theorists and literary figures not only of his but of our ‘postpersonal’ time. Michel Foucault closes The Order of Things by imagining a time when ‘man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’. The closing image was crafted some fifteen years before Foucault met Burroughs in New York in 1975, but in the 1960s Burroughs, too, was already imagining and theorising the disappearing author and a post-human, media-dominated world. Such lines of thought suggest parallel (but independent) trajectories that Deleuze will see as bridging philosopher and artist if not philosophy and art.


Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lozanka Peycheva

The avtorski pesni v naroden duh (authored songs in folk spirit) are a modern and multifaceted phenomenon, which has accumulated a rich history in Bulgarian musical culture. This research presents the essential characteristics of these songs and a two-part typology (1. authorized/avtorizirani folk songs; 2. newly composed songs ‘in folk spirit’), which is based on both models of authorship (according to Michel Foucault, authorial function is manifested in two basic forms of authorship—plagiarism and appropriation). This study provides an overview of some of the thematic debates that attempt to resolve the inevitable contradictions and tensions surrounding songwriting in folk spirit. The avtorski pesni v naroden duh have attracted the critical attention of Bulgarian musicians and society and have been the subject of lively discussions, criticisms, and controversy in numerous publications from the first decades of the 20th century to the present. This survey offers different perspectives, opinions and arguments focused on one of the main discussion topics related to the creation and functioning of the avtorski pesni v naroden duh: pro and contra the obrabotvane (transformation, polishing, processing, cultivation) of folklore. This problem has been at the heart of intellectual discussions since the 1930s and during the 1950s–1980s. The critical discussion of the question pro and contra the obrabotvane of folklore, with its whole inconsistency, complexity and impossibility to be reduced to unambiguous answers, leads to sharp confrontations between the holders of different opinions.


Author(s):  
Amy C. Beal

This is the first comprehensive treatment of the remarkable music and influence of Carla Bley, a highly innovative American jazz composer, pianist, organist, band leader, and activist. Giving attention to Bley's diverse compositions over the last fifty years spanning critical moments in jazz and experimental music history, this book provides a long-overdue representation of a major figure in American music. Bley is best known for her jazz opera “Escalator over the Hill,” her role in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, and her collaborations with artists such as Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Robert Wyatt, and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. She has successfully maneuvered the field of jazz creating works that range from the highly accessible and tradition-based to commercially unviable and avant-garde. The book details the staggering variety in Bley's work as well as her use of parody, quotations, and contradictions, examining the vocabulary Bley has developed throughout her career and highlighting the compositional and cultural significance of her experimentalism. The book also points to Bley's professional and managerial work as a pioneer in the development of artist-owned record labels, the cofounder and manager of WATT Records, and the cofounder of New Music Distribution Service. The book shows Bley to be not just an artist but an activist who has maintained musical independence and professional control amid the profit-driven, corporation-dominated world of commercial jazz.


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