scholarly journals Art imitates the Digital

Lumina ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Nash
Keyword(s):  
Formal System ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Boundary Problems ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Internet Art ◽  
A Site

Where is art in the digital era? This essay identifies the digital as an abstract, formal system. Since art has always relied on formal, abstract systems to carry and deliver itself, what are the implications for art in the digital era? Is the digital a site for art, or is it the other way around? Can there be digital art? Identifying limit and boundary problems as the crucial existential problems for the digital, the essay shows that art has always concerned itself with such problems. This prompts the question as to whether it is possible that human existence and art become the same thing in the digital. Because the digital is currently primarily manipulated in the service of globalist economics, this is clearly not (yet) the case, so what does this mean for art? The essay then briefly examines the self-declared movements of dada, post-digital and post-internet art, concluding that these movements are not capable of questioning the digital as digital, before going on to examine some artists whose practice may be providing guiding lights toward a genuinely digital art.

“The Continuity of Married Companionship”

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-530
Author(s):  
Cara Weber
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Conception ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ethical Action ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
A Site ◽  
Focus Questions

Victorian writers often focus questions of ethics through scenes of sympathetic encounters that have been conceptualized, both by Victorian thinkers and by their recent critics, as a theater of identification in which an onlooking spectator identifies with a sufferer. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) critiques this paradigm, revealing its negation of otherness and its corresponding fixation of the self as an identity, and offers an alternative conception of relationship that foregrounds the presence and distinctness of the other and the open-endedness of relationship. The novel develops its critique through an analysis of women's experience of courtship and marriage, insisting upon the appropriateness ofmarriage as a site for the investigation of contemporary ethical questions. In her depiction of Rosamond, Eliot explores the identity-based paradigm of the spectacle of others, and shows how its conception of selfhood leaves the other isolated, precluding relationship. Rosamond's trajectory in the novel enacts the identity paradigm's relation to skeptical anxieties about self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and reveals such anxieties to occur with particular insistence around images of femininity. By contrast, Dorothea's development in ethical self-awareness presents an alternative to Rosamond's participation in the identity paradigm. In Dorothea's experience the self emerges as a process, an ongoing practice of expression. The focus on expression in the sympathetic or conflictual encounter, rather than on identity, enables the overcoming of the identity paradigm's denial of otherness, and grounds a productive sympathy capable of informing ethical action.

scholarly journals The Vulnerable (Post) Modern Self and the “Greening” of Spiritual Personhood through Life in the Spirit

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 194
Author(s):  
Mary Frohlich
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Social Esteem ◽  
Life On Earth

In the period now being called the Anthropocene, the fatal vulnerabilities of the modern way of constructing selfhood are becoming ever more evident. Joanna Macy, who writes from a Buddhist perspective, has argued for the need to “green” the self by rediscovering its participation in ecological and cosmic networks. From a Christian perspective, I would articulate this in terms of an imperative to rediscover our spiritual personhood as radical communion in both God and cosmos. In this paper, “self” refers to an ever-restless process of construction of identity based in self-awareness and aimed at maintaining one’s integrity, coherence, and social esteem. I use the term “person,” on the other hand, to refer to a relational center that exists to be in communion with other persons. How—within the conditions of the dawning Anthropocene—can the tension between these two essential aspects of human existence be opened up in a way that can more effectively protect human and other life on Earth? This would require, it seems, harnessing both the self-protective and the self-giving potentials of human beings. The proposed path is to give ourselves over into the rhythms of the Spirit, being breathed in to selfless personal communion and out to co-creation of our refreshed selfhood.

To travel to suffer: towards a reverse anthropology of the early modern colonial body

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karel Vanhaesebrouck
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intercultural Dialogue ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Colonial Body ◽  
A Site

By focusing on the way early modern plays staged these colonial encounters, this contribution will address the question of the enslaved body which functioned as a site of both cultural exoticism and compassionate identification, directly dealing with complex issues such as pain, cruelty and martyrdom. This chapter will take two specific texts as its starting point: the fascinating play Les Portugais infortunés (1608) by Nicolas Chrétien des Croix, which stages an encounter of a shipwrecked Portuguese crew with an indigenous African tribe, and La Peinture spirituelle (1611) by Louis Richome, the account of the massacre of 39 Catholic martyrs from the ‘Compagnie de Jésus’, murdered by Protestants, on their way to Brazil on the 15th of July in 1570. In both cases the human body functions as a spectacular locus of intercultural dialogue (or warfare). This chapter proposes an analysis of both texts, not as literature in the first place, but as artefacts of cultural imagination which question the idea of alterity and the all too easy dichotomy between the self and the other, while at the same time showing that Europe, Africa and Brazil (or by extension South America) share a history and a culture of the (hurt) body.

scholarly journals Working the aporia: ethnography, embodiment and the ethnographic self

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 819-836
Author(s):  
Andrew Hickey ◽  
Carly Smith
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
A Site

A more considered sense of the embodied nature of encounter is called for in the scholarship of ethnography. This paper argues for an ethnographic practice that accordingly moves beyond simplistic recounts of ‘highly personalised styles and their self-absorbed mandates’ (Van Maanen, 2011: 73), to more fully position an understanding of the ethnographer’s Self as an also encountered ‘site’. Taking cues from Heideggar’s (2008/1927) formulation of Dasein and the realisation of the Self through the encountered Other, this paper argues that attempts to make sense of the Other in ethnography – ultimately the raison d’etre of ethnographic practice – concomitantly require an accounting-for of the Self. This paper takes aim at the nature of embodiment as central to the experience of encounter, but will argue that this encounter of the Self functions as an aporia: a site of unknowing, but equally, of generative possibility. It is with the effects that embodiment has and the inflections it provides for the ethnography that particular attention is given.

scholarly journals "The Self" and "The Other" in Disciplinary Anthropology

1970 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul-François Tremlett
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Knowing How ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Pastoral Power ◽  
A Site

In this paper I argue that fieldwork constitutes a ‘limit-experience’ where self and other encounter and confront one another. I suggest this confrontation provides an opening for what Foucault described as knowing “how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known” (1992). It begins by outlining Foucault’s notion of ‘pastoral power’, and argues that anthropology is an explicitly pastoral discipline, whose pastoral function emerges by interrogating the opposition of ‘Self’ to ‘Other’. Drawing on early and contemporary anthropological writings, I show how the discipline constructs a knowing Self which is opposed to an Other that is actively denied selfhood whilst being simultaneously constructed as a site of instruction. I conclude by exploring how anthropology might forge a radical break with pastoral power by recasting our understanding of fieldwork and recognising that it is primarily a site for a de-centering encounter between self and other selves.

The oughtness of existence: Living and suffering by what we ought

2021 ◽  
pp. 095935432110369
Author(s):  
Joachim Meier
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings

Rooted in the fact–value dichotomy of the modern scientific outlook, psychology tends to render “ought” as distinguishable from and additional to “is.” The purpose of this article, however, is to disclose an “oughtness” at the center of human existence by which human beings inevitably live and suffer. In the first part, psychology’s neglect of oughtness is tracked down through significant albeit different theoretical strands. Second, through a threefold argument entailing (a) the other, (b) language, and (c) the self, it is revealed how people’s concrete lived lives as well as the very formation of a subject are incomprehensible without the oughtness of existence. Finally, the relation between suffering and oughtness is spelled out. Due to the oughtness of existence, guilt and inadequacy enter into the human life.

scholarly journals Anility and time. Beyond the self-realisation

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-278
Author(s):  
Sergei A. Lishaev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Goal Setting ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Time Production ◽  
Temporal Parameters ◽  
The Past ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Will

The philosophy of age is mostly an inquiry into the temporal parameters of human existence. The aim of this article is to review the senile temporality as qualitatively different in time production (chronopoesy) from the temporality of youth and maturity. To achieve this I have considered different types of senile chronopoesy, especially its most radical version (eschatologic time), which correlates with chronoaesthetics of the decrepit and Christian Messianic time. As a result, I managed to identify the main conditions of transformation of time production while aging. I considered the problem, using comparative analysis, in the perspective of the methodological horizon of hermeneutics phenomenology (analytics of Dasein). The results of the study can be reduced to several points. The reduction of ‘age’ and ‘inner age’ future that requires an answer from Dasein determines a shift in the human temporality and configures the particular senile temporality. Changes are the most significant if man accepts his life as meaningfully completed, and the will to Other (that is good on its own) replaces the will for particular achievements (i. e., self-realisation). Goal-setting and the production of over situational temporality persist in eschatologic senility, while ‘heroic’, ‘finishing’ and petty senilities have no big goals and only situational temporality, uncompensated by the verticalization of temporality (by the orientation to the Other). The period between the substantial and physical eschatons is kindred to the time or the aesthesis of the decrepit and the Messianic time of Christian historiosophy as they all are forms of the present (end time). End time is an intransitive present, free from the past and future, correlated with the Other (that is timeless). Once started, it never ends and never become past until the end of the life.

Levinas and ethics: The death of Pope John Paul II

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-179
Author(s):  
Anjum Alvi
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Dimension ◽  
Pope John Paul Ii ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
John Paul Ii

The essay aims to identify the ethical dimension of the relation of the self with the Other/Beyond as an indispensable aspect of human existence that underlies and forms a premise for any cultural phenomenon, and thus constitutes an unavoidable perspective in anthropology. By juxtaposing modern and non-modern perspectives on value, self, and freedom, this essay reclaims the ethical dimension for the cultural dominant of modernity from which, through the imposition of the self, it has been lost from sight. The argument for the ethical dimension is centrally embedded in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and anchored in different philosophical and theological concepts. It is exemplified by the event of Pope John Paul II's death, which is taken as a synecdoche for his life and work that allows us to redefine the interrelated topics of religion and ritual as statements of ethics.

scholarly journals The weather as a storyteller in Lalami’s The Other Americans

Ars Aeterna ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-56
Author(s):  
Amal Al-Khayyat ◽  
Yousef Awad
Keyword(s):  
Career Development ◽  
Weather Conditions ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arab American ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
A Site

Abstract This study explores the self-nature relationship through tracing the key role that the weather conditions in Arab American Laila Lalami’s novel The Other Americans (2019) play in narrating the protagonist’s story. It highlights how the weather conditions echo Nora’s deep emotions and reflect her inner thoughts and feelings in the light of her relationships with other characters. The study focuses on Nora’s journey of becomingness and reveals that through depicting the changes in the weather, the story of Nora’s self-actualization and settlement can be narrated. It considers presenting how reading the weather conditions informs the reader about Nora’s self-perception, love affairs, career development and aspirations. It also explores how Lalami employs weather description to show the ways in which Nora ends up achieving self-reconciliation. As the events unfold, Nora is transformed from a person who comments on the clouds and winds and describes the fogs and rains to a fully-fledged character who, figuratively, is able to conjure up thunderstorms and hurricanes. Hence, by paying closer attention to the weather conditions, one can arguably witness Nora’s metamorphosis. In other words, Lalami’s novel is a site in which discourses on identity, ethnicity, multiculturalism and environment converge.

‘A pedagogy of the image’: Chantal Akerman’s ethics across film and art

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-53
Author(s):  
Kate Rennebohm
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
A Site

This article elucidates the complex ethical paradigm at the heart of Chantal Akerman’s work and thought, arguing first that her ethics are as concerned with the figure of the self as they are with the figure of the other and that, second, these ethics exist as much in the spatial and durational structures of her work as in the content of her images. In this way, this article contends that approaching Akerman’s work through the question of ethics allows one to see consistencies across her film and installation work, even as her aesthetic strategies shift across the different dispositifs of the cinema and the gallery or museum. Addressing these shifts, I offer the concept of Akerman’s ‘ethical pedagogy of the image’ – a term that implies both a method and a site of instruction. Drawing on these two meanings, this article ultimately reveals that Akerman’s pedagogical aim involves turning viewers’ ethical attention back on to themselves – to offer a prompt and a space for reconsideration of their own ethos.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document