Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov’s Morphine (2008)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Self Organisation ◽  
The Continuum

Balabanov’s Morphine is concerned with cultural memory conceived as a continuum; not as identity but rather subjectivity in construction. The concepts relates to Badiou’s study of subjectivity. It determines existence in a world where the horizon of knowledge is always disappearing and is never available to us in its integrity whereby the subject is barred from the infinite. Different directions and speeds of movement generate the transcendental subject in that the subject is in relation to the variations of the lived. One of such states implies a continuum, or becoming without determination, whilst the other, refers to the imperative to construct knowledge out of the elements of the continuum. Such assemblages, rituals and rites allow the subject to access the ‘beyond’, a different realm, where the elements of the past are positioned towards the future. The transcendence of the subject is coded as an unstoppable flow of imagery—a hallucination—divided into sequences by reiterations and references to the cultural discourse: an introspective vision produces not self-organisation but self-destruction as the subject becomes aware of its own infiniteness. I showcase how Balabanov’s Morphine captures the brutality of such openings and the self-annihilating impact of nothingness.

scholarly journals The Sea in the Poetry of Judita Vaičiūnaitė and Vizma Belševica

Lituanistica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Inga Stepukonienė
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Complex World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lyrical Poetry ◽  
The Subject

The lyrical poetry of Judita Vaičiūnaitė (Lithuania) and Vizma Belševica (Latvia), modern poetesses of the second half of the twentieth century, vividly reflects the realities of urban culture. However, the centre of their lyricism, the woman, is projected not only in the urban environment, but also in nature. The four mythological elements (water, air, earth, and fire) are given special powers and are highly important in both Belševica’s and Vaičiūnaitė’s work. Water in their lyrical poetry becomes an inexhaustible source of spiritual and stylistic variations. In the poetry of Vaičiūnaitė and Belševica, the sea is not a metaphor for harmony, but for anxiety, which contrasts with the representation of earth, sky, and clouds. These elements are often opposed to water paradigms like lakes, rivers, rain, snow or frost, which hide mysterious worlds. The representation of the sea is rather controversial: the overall image is shaped from a multitude of different impulses and impressions that arise from different situations of life. One of the most typical lyrical themes in Vaičiūnaitė’s and Belševica’s work is the past and remembrance of things, people, events, and phenomena. They reflect on the existence of prominent past personalities by representing their vivid images; the reader can feel the spiritual motion and projection of dynamic actions into the future. Meanwhile, memories related to the realm of water often project passiveness. The poetry of Vaičiūnaitė and Belševica reflects a strong symbolic link between the sea and the woman. The lyrical “I”, like the sea, is silent, deep, mysterious and, at the same time, turbulent. The sea also embodies the feeling of global insecurity. The seabed metaphorically represents the threshold between the safe and the dangerous states of a woman, separating the complex world of earth from the inscrutable water world, which may instantly transform the woman’s status. The sea also implies the seme of purity and purgation, the axis of morality and value as discussed by Bachelard. Purity is one of the main value-determining categories, inseparable from the self-awareness of the lyrical “I”, which stands in opposition to the other. In their experience of nature, they share the same motif of “motherly water”. It is not by chance that the poetry of Vaičiūnaitė and Belševica merges the elements of the sea world and reality – images of love appearing in the subconscious of the subject are directed to “the shelter creature, the nourishment creature symbolic of the mother”. This semantics of the sea brings together the poetry of the two Baltic poets.

scholarly journals Well-Being, the Self, and Radical Change

2019 ◽  
pp. 251-270
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Change ◽  
Future Time ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject

Chapter 12 explores radical personal change and its relationship to well-being, welfare, or prudential value. Many theorists of welfare are committed to what is here called the future-based reasons view (FBR), which holds (1) that the best prudential choice in a situation is determined by which possible future has the greatest net welfare value for the subject and (2) what determines facts about future welfare are facts about the subject and the world at that future time. Although some cases of radical change are intuitively prudentially good, many cases of really radical change are not. Yet FBR has trouble explaining this. Many people instinctively reach for the notion of identity to solve this problem—arguing that really radical change cannot be good because it alters who someone is. Yet, as the chapter argues, there are reasons to doubt that appeals to identity are appropriate. The chapter ends with the suggestion that prudential facts may explain why and when retaining identity matters, rather than the other way around, and points to a possible way forward for a theorist of welfare committed to FBR.

‘Newness which never perishes’? Schoenberg’s ambivalent reception of Haydn

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 215-224
Author(s):  
Alexander Carpenter
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The Past ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Future ◽  
Music Tradition

This paper explores Arnold Schoenberg’s curious ambivalence towards Haydn. Schoenberg recognized Haydn as an important figure in the German serious music tradition, but never closely examined or clearly articulated Haydn’s influence and import on his own musical style and ethos, as he did with many other major composers. This paper argues that Schoenberg failed to explicitly recognize Haydn as a major influence because he saw Haydn as he saw himself, namely as a somewhat ungainly, paradoxical figure, with one foot in the past and one in the future. In his voluminous writings on music, Haydn is mentioned by Schoenberg far less frequently than Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, and his music appears rarely as examples in Schoenberg’s theoretical texts. When Schoenberg does talk about Haydn’s music, he invokes — with tacit negativity — its accessibility, counterpoising it with more recondite music, such as Beethoven’s, or his own. On the other hand, Schoenberg also praises Haydn for his complex, irregular phrasing and harmonic exploration. Haydn thus appears in Schoenberg’s writings as a figure invested with ambivalence: a key member of the First Viennese triumvirate, but at the same time he is curiously phantasmal, and is accorded a peripheral place in Schoenberg’s version of the canon and his own musical genealogy.

TARP DVIEJŲ KOLONŲ: XVIII A. PABAIGOS – XIX A. PRADŽIOS VILNIAUS MASONŲ KASDIENYBĖ SIMBOLIKOJE

2018 ◽  
pp. 144-163
Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Daily Routine ◽  
The Past ◽  
Secular World ◽  
National Characteristics ◽  
Conservative Christian ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Craft Guilds

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.

A corpus-based investigation of techno-optimism and propositional certainty in the National Intelligence Council’s ‘Future Global Trends Reports’ (2010–2035)

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-57
Author(s):  
Jamie McKeown
Keyword(s):  
Global Trends ◽  
Future Role ◽  
Ideological Bias ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Discursive Representations

This article reports the findings from a study of discursive representations of the future role of technology in the work of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC). Specifically, it investigates the interplay of ‘techno-optimism’ (a form of ideological bias) and propositional certainty in the NIC’s ‘Future Global Trends Reports’. In doing so, it answers the following questions: To what extent was techno-optimism present in the discourse? What level of propositional certainty was expressed in the discourse? How did the discourse deal with the inherent uncertainty of the future? Overall, the discourse was pronouncedly techno-optimist in its stance towards the future role of technology: high-technological solutions were portrayed as solving a host of problems, despite the readily available presence of low-technology or no-technology solutions. In all, 75.1% of the representations were presented as future categorical certainties, meaning the future was predominantly presented as a known and closed inevitability. The discourse dealt with the inherent uncertainty of the subject matter, that is, the future, by projecting the past and present into the future. This was particularly the case in relation to the idea of technological military dominance as a guarantee of global peace, and the role of technology as an inevitable force free from societal censorship.

Discussion of “Methodology Used to Calculate Naval Compensated Gross Tonnage Factors” by John Craggs, Damien Bloor, Brian Tanner, and Hamish Bullen

2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (01) ◽  
pp. 29-30
Author(s):  
Thomas Lamb
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Royal Institution ◽  
Naval Ship ◽  
The Subject

I have been working in this area for the past 9 years. As the Craggs et al paper states, I have presented a number of papers on the subject (Lamb 1998, Lamb 2002, Lamb & Hellesoy 2001, Lamb & Knowles 1999, Storch et al 1995). The Craggs et al paper is the second publication I have seen by others about naval ship compensation coefficients. The other was Brian Tanner's paper presented at the Royal Institution of Naval Architects meeting last year describing how the British Ministry of Defence with First Marine International has been working on this matter for the past 2 years.

scholarly journals Anti-Memorials and the Art of Forgetting: Critical Reflections on a Memorial Design Practice

2008 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
SueAnne Ware
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Complex Spectrum ◽  
Design Practice ◽  
Design Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
Heroin Overdose ◽  
The Future ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

Andreas Huyssen writes, ‘Remembrance as a vital human activity shapes our links to the past, and the ways we remember define us in the present. As individuals and societies, we need the past to construct and to anchor our identities and to nurture a vision of the future.’ Memory is continually affected by a complex spectrum of states such as forgetting, denial, repression, trauma, recounting and reconsidering, stimulated by equally complex changes in context and changes over time. The apprehension and reflective comprehension of landscape is similarly beset by such complexities. Just as the nature and qualities of memory comprise inherently fading, shifting and fleeting impressions of things which are themselves ever-changing, an understanding of a landscape, as well as the landscape itself, is a constantly evolving, emerging response to both immense and intimate influences. There is an incongruity between the inherent changeability of both landscapes and memories, and the conventional, formal strategies of commemoration that typify the constructed landscape memorial. The design work presented in this paper brings together such explorations of memory and landscape by examining the ‘memorial’. This article examines two projects. One concerns the fate of illegal refugees travelling to Australia: The SIEVX Memorial Project. The other, An Anti-Memorial to Heroin Overdose Victims, was designed by the author as part of the 2001 Melbourne Festival.

scholarly journals The fiction of History: recalling the past and imagining the future with Caesar at Troy.

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 143-160
Author(s):  
Richard Alston
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
A Site

This essay considers the nature of historical discourse through a consideration of the historical narrative of Lucan’s Pharsalia. The focus is on the manner in which Lucan depicts history as capable of being fictionalised, especially through the operation of political power. The discourses of history make a historical account, but those discourses are not, in Lucan's view, true, but are fictionalised. The key study comes from Caesar at Troy, when Lucan explores the idea of a site (and history) which cannot be understood, but which nevertheless can be employed in a representation of the past. yet, Lucan also alludes to a ‘true history’, which is unrepresentable in his account of Pharsalus, and beyond the scope of the human mind. Lucan’s true history can be read against Benjamin and Tacitus. Lucan offers a framework of history that has the potential to be post-Roman (in that it envisages a world in which there is no Rome), and one in which escapes the frames of cultural memory, both in its fictionalisation and in the dependence of Roman imperial memory on cultural trauma.

I. The Augustan Historian

1974 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 5-7
Keyword(s):  
Nazi Germany ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Order ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ab Urbe Condita ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship

During the past forty years the dominant preoccupation of scholars writing on Livy has been the relationship between the historian and the emperor Augustus, and its effects on the Ab Urbe Condita. Tacitus’ testimony that the two were on friendly terms, and Suetonius’ revelation that Livy found time to encourage the historical studies of the future emperor Claudius, appeared to have ominous overtones to scholars writing against the political backcloth of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Though the subject had not been wholly ignored previously, the success of the German cultural propaganda-machine stimulated a spate of approving or critical treatments. While some were hailing Livy as the historian whose work signalled and glorified the new order, others following a similar interpretation were markedly scathing.

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