scholarly journals The Power of Technique and the Absence of Man in a Photographic Picture

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4(17)) ◽  
pp. 141-168
Author(s):  
Senadin Musabegović

The text problematizes the connection between art and the power of technology. The question arises: how can photography as an art, created as a technical invention, respond to the challenges of technical power, which manifests itself as an unconditional desire for domination that knows no limits? The esthetician from Sarajevo, Sadudin Musabegović, understood the very power of photographic representation precisely through the figures of division: mimesis - poiesis - techne. Martin Heidegger's opinion on technique is connected with the figure offered by Musabegović. Sadudin Musabegović's aesthetic thought provides possible answers to the question: how is a man present in photography itself when the famous film critic Andre Bazin said that photography is the only art we enjoy because of an absence of a human? And what role does art play in overcoming the crisis established by technology in the modern world? In the 'age of mass reproduction', art itself has lost its aura, as Walter Benjamin states, and Musabegović adds that even the photographed being has lost its aura. The problem of losing the aura can also be understood as a new beginning, as a ‘new source’ for art itself. But for the source itself, Musabegović says that he finds himself in the flow, that he is always outside himself, he is in the intertwining, permeation that manifests itself in a dynamic, reversible, and moving figure: mimetic activity – making techne – productive poiesis. This text aims not only to explain the meaning of this figure, which Musabegović established originally within aesthetics, and especially in the field of photography and film, but also to analyze its meaning in the context of unmasking the logic of modern technical control, which marked a modern way of living, thinking, and perceiving the world.

Author(s):  
Pierre Sorlin

André Bazin, a teacher and a film critic, was intent on making his students and readers realize that the cinema offered them a unique tool to discover the world. After his premature death at the age of 50, his friends collected some of his articles, republishing them in a variety of formats. However, the variable nature of this series of montages sometimes provoked misinterpretations. For example, a sentence on the “irresistible realism” of film was considered a proof that, for him, cinematic images copied reality. However, this chapter will argue that Bazin’s conception of both film and reality was far more elaborate and sophisticated than that. Bazin argued that there are so many things around us that we cannot see them all, we thus only ever know a small portion of the surrounding reality. Human beings have long drawn portraits and landscapes in order to observe at leisure what interests them. Unlike drawings, biased by the artist’s feelings, photography is “objective” since it is merely the effect of a chemical reaction and, beside its target, for instance a person, it registers, unwillingly, aspects of the surroundings such as they are. Film is as unbiased as photography and in addition gives faithful motion reproduction. While watching a long sequence taken in distant shot we may become aware of people, actions, situations appearing in the background and that we wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Thanks to its realism a film can help us to gain a less narrow vision of reality.


2001 ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
Serhii Viktorovych Svystunov

In the 21st century, the world became a sign of globalization: global conflicts, global disasters, global economy, global Internet, etc. The Polish researcher Casimir Zhigulsky defines globalization as a kind of process, that is, the target set of characteristic changes that develop over time and occur in the modern world. These changes in general are reduced to mutual rapprochement, reduction of distances, the rapid appearance of a large number of different connections, contacts, exchanges, and to increase the dependence of society in almost all spheres of his life from what is happening in other, often very remote regions of the world.


2018 ◽  
pp. 5-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. M. Grigoryev ◽  
V. A. Pavlyushina

The phenomenon of economic growth is studied by economists and statisticians in various aspects for a long time. Economic theory is devoted to assessing factors of growth in the tradition of R. Solow, R. Barrow, W. Easterly and others. During the last quarter of the century, however, the institutionalists, namely D. North, D. Wallis, B. Weingast as well as D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, have shown the complexity of the problem of development on the part of socioeconomic and political institutions. As a result, solving the problem of how economic growth affects inequality between countries has proved extremely difficult. The modern world is very diverse in terms of development level, and the article offers a new approach to the formation of the idea of stylized facts using cluster analysis. The existing statistics allows to estimate on a unified basis the level of GDP production by 174 countries of the world for 1992—2016. The article presents a structured picture of the world: the distribution of countries in seven clusters, different in levels of development. During the period under review, there was a strong per capita GDP growth in PPP in the middle of the distribution, poverty in various countries declined markedly. At the same time, in 1992—2016, the difference increased not only between rich and poor groups of countries, but also between clusters.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Elvira Lumi ◽  
Lediona Lumi

"Utterance universalism" as a phrase is unclear, but it is enough to include the term "prophetism". As a metaphysical concept, it refers to a text written with inspiration which confirms visions of a "divine inspiration", "poetic" - "legal", that contains trace, revelation or interpretation of the origin of the creation of the world and life on earth but it warns and prospects their future in the form of a projection, literary paradigm, religious doctrine and law. Prophetic texts reformulate "toll-telling" with messages, ideas, which put forth (lat. "Utters Forth" gr. "Forthteller") hidden facts from fiction and imagination. Prometheus, gr. Prometheus (/ prəmiθprə-mee-mo means "forethought") is a Titan in Greek mythology, best known as the deity in Greek mythology who was the creator of humanity and charity of its largest, who stole fire from the mount Olympus and gave it to the mankind. Prophetic texts derive from a range of artifacts and prophetic elements, as the creative magic or the miracle of literary texts, symbolism, musicality, rhythm, images, poetic rhetoric, valence of meaning of the text, code of poetic diction that refers to either a singer in a trance or a person inspired in delirium, who believes he is sent by his God with a message to tell about events and figures that have existed, or the imaginary ancient and modern world. Text Prophetism is a combination of artifacts and platonic idealism. Key words: text Prophetism, holy text, poetic text, law text, vision, image, figure


2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Petr Kouba

This article examines the limits of Heidegger’s ontological description of emotionality from the period of Sein und Zeit and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik along the lines outlined by Lévinas in his early work De l’existence à l’existant. On the basis of the Lévinassian concept of “il y a”, we attempt to map the sphere of the impersonal existence situated out of the structured context of the world. However the worldless facticity without individuality marks the limits of the phenomenological approach to human existence and its emotionality, it also opens a new view on the beginning and ending of the individual existence. The whole structure of the individual existence in its contingency and finitude appears here in a new light, which applies also to the temporal conditions of existence. Yet, this is not to say that Heidegger should be simply replaced by Lévinas. As shows an examination of the work of art, to which brings us our reading of Moravia’s literary exposition of boredom (the phenomenon closely examined in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik), the view on the work of art that is entirely based on the anonymous and worldless facticity of il y a must be extended and complemented by the moment in which a new world and a new individual structure of experience are being born. To comprehend the dynamism of the work of art in its fullness, it is necessary to see it not only as an ending of the world and the correlative intentional structure of the individual existence, but also as their new beginning.


2020 ◽  
pp. 35-41
Author(s):  
A. Mustafabeyli

In many political researches there if a conclusion that the world system which was founded after the Second world war is destroyed of chaos. But the world system couldn`t work while the two opposite systems — socialist and capitalist were in hard confrontation. After collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist community the nature of intergovernmental relations and behavior of the international community did not change. The power always was and still is the main tool of international communication.


Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last fifty years has begun to ebb, sociolegal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This chapter asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and the older materialisms—both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist—that held sway prior to post-structuralism. What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in contemporary legal studies? To attempt answers, the chapter turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard—once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin—once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements—earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The chapter argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.


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