scholarly journals Ethical Mimesis and Emergence Aesthetics

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Green Energy ◽  
Natural Phenomenon ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Richard Powers ◽  
Living Matter ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Emergence Theory ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Nature Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic

In nature the transformation of dead matter (objects) into living matter endowed with green energy or subjectivity is called emergence. Art itself, I argue, is an emergence phenomenon, enacting and replicating in theme and form emergence in nature. Literature thus conceived is about the emergence of spirit. It depicts forces that suppress spirit and enables the spiritual in nature to find expression. It gives voice to spirit rising. Mimesis is thus reconceived as a replication of the natural phenomenon of emergence, which brings to life what has hitherto been seen as object, dead matter. This article outlines the concept of emergence in current philosophical and scientific theories; examines the aesthetic precursors of emergence theory in certain Frankfurt School theorists, notably Theodor Adorno; and applies emergence aesthetic theory to a contemporary novel, Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018).

The Aesthetic Taboo: Aura, Magic, and the Primitive

2018 ◽  
pp. 124-160
Author(s):  
David Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Ideal State ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The Aesthetic

“The Aesthetic Taboo” concerns the place of primitive anthropology in the aesthetic theory of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. It traces the influence of Freud’s Totem and Taboo through their work, in the concepts myth, magic, and aura. Neither thinker ever manages to escape the historical narrative of aesthetics: the transition from a state of necessity that defines the Savage as pathological subject, through a state of domination to an ideal state of freedom. Adorno and Benjamin continue to think within the traditions of Kant and Schiller. Yet in Aesthetic Theory magic images the sensuous remnant in the artwork that withstands rationalization. This “pathological” moment restores to the aesthetic its foundations in pleasure and pain and demands the destruction of the racial regime of representation. Its analogy with the Subaltern suggests another conception of life in common, predicated on the pains and pleasures of the pathological subject.

scholarly journals Making Art from Uncertainty: Magic and Its Politics in South African Rugby

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 699-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua D. Rubin
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Rugby Players

This essay examines the intersection of the politics of post-apartheid South Africa and the politics of playing rugby. It traces the sport’s history through its manifestations in the apartheid state and the anti-apartheid struggle, but it also shows that South African rugby counts for more than the sum of these histories. Drawing inspiration from the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Franz Boas, as well as from the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, the article argues that rugby contains an inherent dimension of unpredictability that allows it to recombine and challenge the symbols and sentiments assigned to it. Considered in this way, rugby acquires a measure of autonomy as a social production, shaping possibilities and entering into existing political conversations with its own voice. Acknowledging this small space of unpredictability, then, carries important implications for how we theorize sporting performances in relation to other forms of creative expression. Rugby players, coaches, and teams, for their part, are well aware of the sport’s autonomous dimension, and they know that they must negotiate the uncertainty of the sport if they wish to participate at all. These social actors regard uncertainty as a problem to be solved, and they conceptualize and work through rugby’s layering of unpredictable instant atop unpredictable instant in socially and historically specific ways. As a result, the negotiations between South Africans and their rugby become a powerful heuristic for post-apartheid social life, and they produce not only violence and injuries but also moments of magic thick with political significance.

scholarly journals Benjamin's conception of language and Adorno's aesthetic theory

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (112) ◽  
pp. 321-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Duarte
Keyword(s):  
Primary Task ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Original Language ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Original Strength

According to the theory of language of the young Benjamin, the primary task of language isn't the communication of contents, but to express itself as a "spiritual essence" in which also men take part. That conception according to which language would be a medium to signification of something outside it leads to a necessary decrease of its original strength and is thus denominated by Benjamin bürgerlich. The names of human language are remainders of an archaic state, in which things weren't yet mute and had their own language. Benjamin suggests also that all the arts remind the original language of things, as they make objects "speak" in form of sounds, colors, shapes etc. That relationship between arts as reminders of the "language of things" and the possible reconciliation of mankind with itself and with nature has been developed by Theodor Adorno in several of his writings, specially in the Aesthetic Theory, where the artwork is ultimately conceived as a construct pervaded by "language" in the widest meaning - not in the "bourgeois" sense.

STUDY OF DECORATIVE VARIETY IN GORONTALO KARAWO FABRIC IN AESTHETIC AND SYMBOLIC ELEMENTS

ARTic ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 121-134
Author(s):  
Apsari Dj Hasan
Keyword(s):  
Manufacturing Process ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Decorative Motifs ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
The Aesthetic

This study aims to examine the decorative types of Gorontalo karawo fabrics in aesthetic and symbolic elements. Researchers want to know as made in the research design, aspects that are present in the decoration of fabrics in aesthetic and symbolic elements. This study uses a number of related theories to get results, and as a determinant, the authors use aesthetic theory, as well as historical approaches. With this theoretical basis, the author seeks to describe the aesthetic aspects and symbolic meanings that exist in Gorontalo karawo fabric. Through the data collection of the chosen motif and provide a classification of motives, the part is used as a reference for research material. The results showed that Gorontalo filigree had an aesthetic value consisting of unity formed from the overall decorative motifs displayed, complexity formed by complexity in the manufacturing process, and intensity of seriousness in the manufacturing process or the impression displayed on the filigree motif. The aesthetic form also reflects the diversity of meanings for communication, such as the symbol of a leader with his noble instincts, a symbol of cultural cooperation, which is worth maintaining, and ideas about nature conservation. This research proves that the decoration in Gorontalo filigree cloth (karawo) does not only act as a visual value, but also as a communication of cultural meanings and social status. Of all these distinctive motifs show a relationship between humans and humans and humans with nature. The influence of culture from the Philippines is also known to have a strong influence on the emergence of the Gorontalo filigree namely manila filigree.

scholarly journals 'Always think of the objects': Ekphrasis as aesthetics in the contemporary novel

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lucy Eleanor Alston
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Temporal Qualities

<p>It is a commonplace that ekphrasis – the description in literature of a visual work of art – brings to the fore questions of representation and reference. Such questions are particularly associated with the ‘postmodern’; ekphrasis is thus often subsumed under the category of metafiction. There has been little critical attention, however, to how the ekphrastic mode might be understood in aesthetic terms. This thesis considers the nature of ekphrasis’s referential capacity, but expands on this to suggest a number of ways in which the ekphrastic mode evinces the aesthetic and ontological assumptions upon which a text is predicated. Two case studies illustrate how the ekphrastic mode can be figured to different effect. In comparing these two novels, this thesis argues that the ekphrastic mode makes clear the particular subject-object relations expressed by each. If Lukács is correct in asserting that the novel mode expresses a discrepancy between ‘the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one’, ekphrasis provides a fruitful but under-explored avenue for critical inquiry because, as a mode, it is situated at the point at which subject and object must converge. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), a novel that includes both traditional ekphrastic descriptions and embedded photographs and references to critical theory that function ekphrastically. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) provides a contrast: the novel makes continued reference to film – a medium defined by its temporal qualities – but as used in the novel the ekphrastic mode implies a fixed, ahistorical schema. The implications that such differences have on the novel mode and critical discourse are explored in the final section of the thesis.</p>

Natural History and Aesthetic Truth in Aesthetic Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-41
Author(s):  
Max Pensky
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
Social Domination ◽  
Core Idea ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Critique Of Ideology ◽  
Content Reading

Abstract Theodor W. Adorno’s claim in Aesthetic Theory that artworks have a truth content, and that this truth content in turn depends on philosophical interpretation, is among the work’s most challenging and obscure claims. This article argues that “The Idea of Natural History,” Adorno’s lecture dating to 1932, offers important resources for interpreting the claim of art’s truth content. Reading the lecture’s core idea of transience, the article proposes that the form of philosophical interpretation Adorno develops there illuminates one way to clarify what Adorno means, in Aesthetic Theory, by the interpretation of art’s truth content. While far from definitive, this conclusion does support interpretations of art’s truth content that foreground art’s function as a critique of ideology, that is, of having a field of application that moves beyond the sphere of the aesthetic and toward the disclosure of conditions of social domination.

Proletarian Modernism: Film, Literature, Theory

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (5) ◽  
pp. 1056-1075
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Alternative Route ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
Opening Up

This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art's democratic potential.

The Discussion of the Concept of Sustainable Development of Ecological Architectural Aesthetics

2012 ◽  
Vol 598 ◽  
pp. 8-11
Author(s):  
Shen Qi Gan ◽  
Hong Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
The Core ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
Environment Perception ◽  
Basic Concepts ◽  
Ecological Architecture ◽  
The Aesthetic

This paper introduces the basic concepts of ecological aesthetic, pointing out that the ecological aesthetic comes from population, resources, environment and other factors, understanding the natural beauty from the harmonious compatibility between man and nature, the environment, perception, greatly improving the aesthetic value of taste. This paper introduces the core categories、aesthetic standards and the three characteristics of ecological architectural aesthetics in detail, interpret the ecological architecture and its aesthetic theory.

How Does an Aesthetic Object Happen? Emergence, Disappearance, Multiplicity

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 478-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Varvara Kobyshcha
Keyword(s):  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Land Art ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Gestalt Theory ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
The Third ◽  
Plastic Arts ◽  
First Case ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Social Phenomenology

In studying visual and plastic arts, social researchers tend to assume that an aesthetic object is pre-given to a viewer who does not participate in the process of the object’s becoming. They problematise the aesthetic status of an artwork, but not its objectness. This article shows that audience perception, considered as interaction and situated practice, does not merely define the meanings and emotions attached to a certain object, but plays a constitutive role in the object’s physical state and its very existence as an object, i.e. as an integrated unity extracted from its surroundings and affording a direct, intensive encounter. Synthesising the conceptual resources of Hennion’s pragmatics of taste, Simmel’s aesthetic theory, gestalt theory, and social phenomenology, I explain various ways an object in the situation of perception happens and achieves a certain mode of existence or fails to happen and disappears. The article is based on three empirical examples derived from the ethnographic study of the open-air land art/architectural festival ‘Archstoyanie’. The first case illustrates how an object is extracted from the environment and the festival’s infrastructure; the second, how the visitors destroy the incomplete boundaries of an object so that it dissolves into the surroundings; and the third, how an object maintains its integrity despite its inner complexity and multiple centres that attract the visitor’s attention.

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