Camera, mind and eye

Author(s):  
David MacDougall

This chapter argues that written and spoken language do not accurately convey how we actually think, or even how language presents itself in our minds. The ways images are organised in films also fail to represent accurately how we see and how we process mental images. The conventions of language and film are partly responsible for this, but the author argues that it is sometimes possible for individual artists to break the rules, bringing films closer to portraying the realities of conscious experience. For example, filmmakers such as Flaherty, Godard, and Hitchcock are able to construct new and distinctive ways of looking at the world. Referring to the work of the anthropologist and filmmaker Ivo Strecker and art critic Norman Bryson, the chapter closes with a discussion of the uses of the short and long take in nonfiction cinema, comparing these with the glance and the gaze in human perception.

Author(s):  
Nina Bosak

The demonolexis in Yu. Andrukhovych’s long short story “Recreatsii” (“Recreations”) has been analyzed in the article. In the course of the research there have been outlined the following lexical-semantic groups of demonomens: toponymic and onomastic names, modified lexemes, names of the rituals, genuine Ukrainian demonomens, obscene words and expressions, demonomens of Biblical origin, names from the world mythology and general demonolexis. The special lexical-semantic group has been formed by non personificated demonomens, which serve to convey the peculiarities of the contemporary Ukrainian writers’ mentality, their habits through speech. Such nomens help to reveal the protagonist’s soul, show the positive and negative sides of his personal ego, demonstrate the duality of the human perception of the world, indicate the causes of phobias, emotions, sensations. Key words: demonolexis, demonomen, lexical-semantic group, non personificated demonomen.


Multilingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenanne Ferguson

Abstract This article investigates contemporary uses of the Sakha language algys (blessing poems) and reveals the “old” and “new” types of language materiality present in this genre of ritual poetry. Focusing primarily on one example of algys shared online in 2018, I discuss how performing algys has always involved close interconnection between language and the material world and present the changing contexts and forms of algys transmission that highlight both fixity and fluidity in the way speakers conceive of language and materiality. Despite the new mobilities and technologies that build upon the previously established written textual forms of this poetry—and contribute to its continued circulation and transmission—certain elements of traditional algys remains salient for speakers, reinforced by ideologies or ontologies of language that foreground the power of the (spoken) word. This is connected to the production of qualia and the invocation of chronotopes. Thus, while textual forms further enable processes of citationality as they are circulated online; the written words alone do not constitute an algys. Rather, here the importance of embodied, spoken language materiality is at the fore.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32
Author(s):  
Işık Sarıhan

Pure representationalism or intentionalism for phenomenal experience is the theory that all introspectible qualitative aspects of a conscious experience can be analyzed as qualities that the experience non-conceptually represents the world to have. Some philosophers have argued that experiences such as afterimages, phosphenes and double vision are counterexamples to the representationalist theory, claiming that they are non- representational states or have non-representational aspects, and they are better explained in a qualia-theoretical framework. I argue that these states are fully representational states of a certain kind, which I call “automatically non-endorsed representations”, experiential states the veridicality of which we are almost never committed to, and which do not trigger explicit belief or disbelief in the mind of the subject. By investigating descriptive accounts of afterimages by two qualia theorists, I speculate that the mistaken claims of some anti-representationalists might be rooted in confusing two senses of the term “seeming”.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernanda Coutinho

In this essay, I examine the status of Baleia, the family dog in Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas secas (1938). My principal interest is to analyse the attenuation of distances and the differentiation of sensibility between humans and animals in the novel. I argue that Baleia allows Ramos to leave aside an absolute belief in human reasoning and think of the nonhuman animal as a being endowed with complexity. In this, Ramos deviates from a speciesist appreciation of history and sharpens the gaze of his readers with respect to the limitations of our understanding of the world and its beings.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (76) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Stein Larsen

Peter Stein Larsen: “Danish Identity in Modern Poetry”The article examines how Danish identity has been expressed in poetry. Since the 1960s, Danish poetry has had a tradition of a critical focus on national identity. This tradition of ‘interaction poetry’ has a polyphonic enunciation, a style influenced by spoken language and an ironic perspective on Danish identity. The tradition is distinct from the dominant symbolist and modernist tradition, where one can observe a monological enunciation, a high poetic style and an international perspective. Aspecial feature of the tradition of a critical focus on national identity is its ability to express an implied utopia of openness, empathy, equality and solidarity, despite the fact that the poems are ironic about Danish xenophobia, narrowness, pettiness, bureaucracy and lack of engagement in the world. The article investigates a number of poetry collections by Klaus Rifbjerg, Benny Andersen, Marianne Larsen, Henrik Nordbrandt, Maja Lee Langvad and Eva Tind Kristensen.


Author(s):  
Daniel W. Johnston

This text and accompanying audio-visual files document a theatre workshop aimed at investigating how philosophical phenomenology might be useful in the creative process. Phenomenology is understood here as the study of the way the world shows itself to conscious experience through practical engagement with the world. The workshop involved five professional actors and four undergraduates working on Act II of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard over two days. Basic concepts of phenomenology were introduced including Worldhood, Being-with-others, Moods, and Temporality. Each participant used a digital voice recorder to reflect on a series of exercises and tasks aimed at focusing attention on the experience of objects, places, and rehearsal itself. The workshop had three phases: developing an awareness of one’s own experience of the world, applying the same aspects of worldhood to a character, and reflection on the creative process of the actor in the part. Given the limited timeframe of the rehearsal, this was merely a preliminary examination of how phenomenology might inform and contribute to the artistic process of theatre-making. Rather than constituting an entirely new approach to rehearsal, theatre phenomenology might enable performers to develop an awareness of their own engagement with the world and creative practice.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 403-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Tacchetti ◽  
Leyla Isik ◽  
Tomaso A. Poggio

Recognizing the people, objects, and actions in the world around us is a crucial aspect of human perception that allows us to plan and act in our environment. Remarkably, our proficiency in recognizing semantic categories from visual input is unhindered by transformations that substantially alter their appearance (e.g., changes in lighting or position). The ability to generalize across these complex transformations is a hallmark of human visual intelligence, which has been the focus of wide-ranging investigation in systems and computational neuroscience. However, while the neural machinery of human visual perception has been thoroughly described, the computational principles dictating its functioning remain unknown. Here, we review recent results in brain imaging, neurophysiology, and computational neuroscience in support of the hypothesis that the ability to support the invariant recognition of semantic entities in the visual world shapes which neural representations of sensory input are computed by human visual cortex.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-88
Author(s):  
Robert Farrugia

Michel Henry radicalises phenomenology by putting forward the idea of a double manifestation: the “Truth of Life” and “truth of the world.” For Henry, the world turns out to be empty of Life. To find its essence, the self must dive completely inward, away from the exterior movements of intentionality. Hence, Life, or God, for Henry, lies in non‑intentional, immanent self-experience, which is felt and yet remains invisible, in an absolutist sense, as an a priori condition of all conscious experience. In Christian theology, the doctrine of the Trinity illuminates the distinction between the immanent Trinity (God’s self‑relation) and the economic workings of the Trinity (God‑world relation). However, the mystery of God’s inmost being and the economy of salvation are here understood as inseparable. In light of this, the paper aims to: 1) elucidate the significance of Henry’s engagement with the phenomenological tradition and his proposal of a phenomenology of Life which advocates an immanent auto‑affection, radically separate from the ek‑static nature of intentionality, and 2) confront the division between Life and world in Henry’s Christian phenomenology and its discordancy with the doctrine of the Trinity, as the latter attests to the harmonious unity that subsists between inner life and the world.


Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Batcho

Abstract Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility (hearing/listening), affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship (the frame) and instead enter the reality of the film’s immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach (1) the microphone from its adherence to space, (2) the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form.


Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov

The Miracle documents the introduction of the symbolic into the real by means of sensing the lack, or in Lacan’s terms, the lack-of-being. The lost object—whether voice, memory or senses—is the ultimate horror because it reveals the uncanny voids in the discourse. Being is conceived simultaneously in the ontological sense of openness within which ideas emerge, and being in the noumenal sense of the world, or of entities separated in the world from the temporal perspective—the vibrations of time and culture. The symbolic is the ontological horizon of Being whereas its anterior is the lack-of-being, that is, the there-of-Being (Dasein) lacks its place in the order of reality. The symbolic mode is characterised by the minimal gap between its elements and places they occupy: as Lacan noted, in order for the gap between elements to occur, something has to be fundamentally excluded. What happens in psychosis—and in The Miracle—is precisely the inclusion of this lacking object into the frame of ‘reality’. It appears within the constructed world as the hallucinated, or imagined, or mystified object: the voice, which in this case equals the gaze, haunts the cultural discourse as paranoiac.


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