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Aesthetics of the Virtual (SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy)
by Roberto DiodatoArguing that the virtual body is something new—namely, an entity that from an ontological perspective has only recently entered the world—Roberto Diodato considers the implications of this kind of body for aesthetics. Virtual bodies insert themselves into the space opened up by the famous distinction in Aristotle's Physics between natural and artificial beings—they are both. They are beings that are simultaneously events; they are images that are at once internal and external; they are ontological hybrids that exist only in the interaction between logical-computational text and human bodies endowed with technological prostheses. Pursuing this line of thought, Diodato reconfigures classic aesthetic concepts such as mimesis, representation, the relation between illusion and reality, the nature of images and imagination, and the theory of sensory knowledge.
The Aesthetics Of Uncertainty (Columbia Themes In Philosophy, Social Criticism, And The Arts Ser.)
by Janet Wolff
Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge
by Simon Schaffer John Tresch Pasquale GagliardiThis volume presents innovative and provocative arguments about the claims of universal knowledge schemes and the different aesthetic and material forms in which such claims have been made and executed. Contributors take a close look at everything from religious pilgrimages, museums, and maps of the world, to search engines and automated GPS. This collection of essays and debates is the result of a major international dialogue held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, Italy. Current obsessions in information technology, communications theory, and digital culture often concern the value and possibility of a grand accumulation of universally accessible forms of knowledge: total libraries, open data bases, ubiquitous computing, and 'smart' technologies. These obsessions have important social and philosophical origins, and they raise profound questions about the very nature of knowledge and its organization. This volume's contributors draw on the histories of maps and of encyclopedias, worldviews and visionary collections, to make sense of the crucial relation between the way the world is known and how it might be displayed and transformed.
The Aesthetics of Videogames (Routledge Research in Aesthetics)
by Jon Robson Grant TavinorThis collection of essays is devoted to the philosophical examination of the aesthetics of videogames. Videogames represent one of the most significant developments in the modern popular arts, and it is a topic that is attracting much attention among philosophers of art and aestheticians. As a burgeoning medium of artistic expression, videogames raise entirely new aesthetic concerns, particularly concerning their ontology, interactivity, and aesthetic value. The essays in this volume address a number of pressing theoretical issues related to these areas, including but not limited to: the nature of performance and identity in videogames; their status as an interactive form of art; the ethical problems raised by violence in videogames; and the representation of women in videogames and the gaming community. The Aesthetics of Videogames is an important contribution to analytic aesthetics that deals with an important and growing art form.
The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality (Routledge Research in Aesthetics)
by Grant TavinorThis is the first book to present an aesthetics of virtual reality media. It situates virtual reality media in terms of the philosophy of the arts, comparing them to more familiar media such as painting, film and photography. When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of the "real" world. Grant Tavinor finds that approach to be fundamentally mistaken, and that to really account for virtual reality, we must focus on the medium and its uses, and not the hypothetical and speculative instances that are typically the focus of earlier works. He also argues that much of the cultural and metaphysical hype around virtual reality is undeserved. But this does not mean that virtual reality is illusory or uninteresting; on the contrary, it is significant for the altogether different reason that it overturns much of our understanding of how representational media can function and what we can use them to achieve. The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, metaphysics, and game studies.
The Aesthetics of Wine
by Ole M. Skilleas Douglas BurnhamThe Aesthetics of Wine shows that discussing wine within the framework of aesthetics both benefits our understanding of wine as a phenomenon, while also challenging some of the basic assumptions of the tradition of aesthetics.Analyzes the appreciation of wine as an aesthetic practice. Tackles prejudices against bodily senses, showing how they distort traditional aesthetic theory Represents the beginnings of a reformulation of general aesthetics
Aesthetics, Poetics and Phenomenology in Samuel Taylor Coleridge
by Tom MarshallThis book re-evaluates the philosophical status of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by providing an extended comparison between his work and the phenomenological theory of Edmund Husserl. Examining Coleridge’s accounts of the imagination, perception, poetic creativity and literary criticism, it draws a systematic and coherent structure out of a range of Coleridge’s philosophical writing. In addition, it also applies the principles of Coleridge’s philosophy to an interpretation of his own poetic output.
The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer (Routledge Research in Sport, Culture and Society)
by Ridvan Askin Catherine Diederich Aline BieriSoccer has long been known as 'the beautiful game'. This multi-disciplinary volume explores soccer, soccer culture, and the representation of soccer in art, film, and literature, using the critical tools of aesthetics, poetics, and rhetoric. Including international contributions from scholars of philosophy, literary and cultural studies, linguistics, art history, and the creative arts, this book begins by investigating the relationship between beauty and soccer and asks what criteria should be used to judge the sport’s aesthetic value. Covering topics as diverse as humor, national identity, style, celebrity, and social media, its chapters examine the nature of fandom, the role of language, and the significance of soccer in contemporary popular culture. It also discusses what one might call the ‘stylistics’ of soccer, analyzing how players, fans, and commentators communicate on and off the pitch, in the press, on social media, and in wider public discourse. The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer makes for fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport, culture, literature, philosophy, linguistics, and society.
Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy and Tagore: A Transcultural Philosophy of Education (Palgrave Studies in Education and Transculturalism)
by Ranjan GhoshThis book provides a radical rethinking of the prominent Indian thinker Rabindranath Tagore, exploring how his philosophy of education relates to the ideas of Western theorists such as Kant, Plato and Aristotle. Tagore's thoughts on pedagogy, university and formal education are subjected to a fascinating critique within Ghosh's transcultural framework, referencing a wide range of thinkers across varying time periods, places, and cultures, and developing a greater sensitivity to other traditions, languages, and forms of thinking and writing. The book changes the way we have so far thought about the educationist Tagore, and will be of interest to scholars and specialists of literature, Indian history, and philosophy of education. It is political, deeply philosophical and has a transcultural take on our understanding of a variety of issues relating to Tagore and to philosophy of education in general.
Aesthetics, Well-being and Health: Essays within Architecture and Environmental Aesthetics (Routledge Library Editions: Ethnoscapes)
by Birgit ColdIn everyday life, most people do not reflect seriously on the impacts of architecture and environmental aesthetics on their well-being and health. Originally published in 2001 as part of the Ethnoscapes: Current Challenges in the Environmental Social Sciences series, reissued now with a new series introduction, Aesthetics, Well-being and Health: Essays within Architecture and Environmental Aesthetics, is an intriguing volume bringing together professionals working in architecture, planning, urban design and social policy with academics from both humanities and social sciences to provide a broad-based and insightful discussion on how aesthetics affect us emotionally and physically. The essays help us understand our cultural and individual preferences related to the quality of the environment and challenge the common belief that environmental beauty is a matter of personal taste. A wide range of concepts are discussed such as place identity, multi-sensuous and emotional processes, geometrical order and controlled space, architectural plasticity, aesthetically real and virtual values, participative design processes, ethics in architecture, and beauty and happiness. The book highlights the importance for today's society to engage more in aesthetic ethics and to understand the significance of creating aesthetically pleasing environments.
Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel (Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis Book Series)
by Jussi SaarinenWhy do painters paint? Obviously, there are numerous possible reasons. They paint to create images for others’ enjoyment, to solve visual problems, to convey ideas, and to contribute to a rich artistic tradition. This book argues that there is yet another, crucially important but often overlooked reason. Painters paint to feel. They paint because it enables them to experience special feelings, such as being absorbed in creative play and connected to something vitally significant. Painting may even transform the painter’s whole sense of being. Thus, painting is not only about producing art, communicating content, and so on, but also about setting up and inhabiting an experiential space wherein highly valued feelings are interactively enabled and supported. This book investigates how and why this happens by combining psychoanalytical theorization on creativity with philosophical thinking on affectivity. It focuses on creative experience itself, and illuminates the psychological mechanisms and dynamics that underlie the affects at stake. Painters’ own descriptions of how they feel at work are used throughout to give an accurate, true-to-life portrayal of the experience of painting. The strength of the book lies in its open-minded yet critical integration of contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, and in its truthfulness to painters’ experiential descriptions of the painterly process. On the whole, it enriches our understanding of artistic creativity and sheds more light on how and why we come to feel the things we do. As such, the book will appeal to philosophers, psychoanalysts, and art researchers alike.
Affect in Literacy Learning and Teaching: Pedagogies, Politics and Coming to Know (Expanding Literacies in Education)
by Kevin M. Leander Christian EhretIn this cutting-edge volume, scholars from around the world connect affect theory to the field of literacy studies and unpack the role and influence of this emerging area of scholarship on literacy education. Offering an introduction to affect theory and scholarship as it relates to literacy studies, contributors discuss the role of humanizing and dehumanizing influences on schooling and examine the emotional and affective dimensions at individual and communal levels. Arguing that an affective turn requires a radical rethinking of the nature of literacy, these chapters address the impact and import of emotion and affect on reading, writing and calling to action. Grounded in trailblazing research, the contributors push the boundaries of academic writing and model how theoretically-driven writing about affect must itself be moving and expressive.
Affect, Learning, and Teacher Education: Getting Stuck in Social Justice (Routledge Cultural Studies in Knowledge, Curriculum, and Education)
by Erica E. Colmenares Scott JarvieThis volume inquires into student teachers’ “stuck moments”—moments of felt crisis—as they occur within the context of a university-based social justice teacher education (SJTE) program. The book complicates the notion that these stuck moments are primarily effects of a gap between theory and practice. Instead, Colmenares and Jarvie argue for a more robust conceptualization, drawing on affect theory, posthumanism, and Deleuzian scholarship. By considering what stuck moments do, and do to, student teachers, the book reimagines SJTE in ways that are both responsive to stuckness and disruptive of discourses of learning that dominate the field. Through a critique of the affective workings of learning, the authors consider how these discourses can prove counterproductive for the work of teaching for social justice. This insightful and stimulating volume will be of use to scholars, researchers, and students with interests in curriculum studies, affective approaches to education and SJTE.
The Affected Teacher: Psychosocial Perspectives on Professional Experience and Policy Resistance
by Alex MooreAt a time when teaching and learning policy too often presents itself in a simplistic input-output language of measurable targets and objectives, The Affected Teacher explores the role played by emotionality in how professional life is experienced by school teachers. The book argues that, in the very highly organised and structured social spaces of public institutions, emotionality - or, more precisely, all that is included in the concept of ‘affect’ - needs to be recognised and validated, rather than ignored or pathologised. It explores how neoliberal education policy seeks to mould professional subjectivities, relationships and practices; how teachers experience and ‘manage’ their feelings; and the role that affect plays in guiding either compliance with or resistance to often unpopular policy directives. Drawing on a rich body of original data comprising formal and informal discussions with a range of teachers, the case is argued for psychoanalytically and politically informed individual and group reflexivity, both as a form of professional and personal development and as a way of keeping alive alternative beliefs and understandings regarding the purposes of education. The Affected Teacher is relevant to practising schoolteachers and to undergraduate and graduate students and academics involved in education related courses such as policy studies, education management and the sociology of education, as well as disciplines related to psychosocial studies and psychoanalysis.
Affective Betrayal: Mind, Music, and Embodied Action in Late Qing China (SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture)
by Jean TsuiAffective Betrayal uses "affect" as an analytical category to explicate the fragility and fragmentation of Chinese political modernity. In so doing, the book uncovers some of the unresolved moral and philosophical obstacles China encountered in the past, as well as the cultural predicament the country faces at present.At the turn of the twentieth century, China's leading reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) presented modern political knowledge in musical and visual representational formats that were designed to stimulate readers' bodily senses. By expanding the reception of textual knowledge from "reading" to "listening" and "visualizing experiences," Liang generated an epistemic shift, and perhaps an all-inclusive internal intellectual, philosophical, and moral transition, alongside China's modern political reform. By tracing the marginalized academic and philosophical positions Liang sought to restore in China's incipient democratic movement, Affective Betrayal examines how his attempts to conjoin Confucian morality and liberal democracy expose hidden anxieties as well as inherent contradictions between these two systems of thought. These conflicts, besides disrupting the stability of China's burgeoning modern political order, explain why the import of modern concepts led to China's continued political impasse, rather than rationality and progress, after the 1911 revolution.
The Affective Core Self: The Role of the Unconscious and Retroactivity in Self-Constitution (Contributions to Phenomenology #130)
by Lajos HorváthThis book extends the contemporary concept of the minimal self by introducing the affective core self. The overall aim is to integrate certain psychoanalytical ideas into the phenomenological investigation of passivity and reformulate the idea of the phenomenological unconscious. This volume contributes to the multidimensional analysis of the self by positioning the affective core self between the layers of the more minimal and the less minimal self. It underscores the importance of the unconscious in the constitution of the affective core self by providing the comparative analysis of the phenomenological and the psychoanalytical unconscious.Furthermore, comparisons are drawn between Freud’s conception of the afterwardsness of trauma and the phenomenological notion of retroactive sense-constitution. The book concludes that retroactive sense-making is a double-sided phenomenon and differentiates between implicit-bodily and conscious-narrative retroactive sense-constitution. In order to bolster the idea of implicit-bodily sense-constitution the volume also examines and utilizes contemporary insights on the nature of body memory. The conclusion claims that the affective core self is constituted in time by means of the underlying processes of the two-sided retroactive sense-constitution. This text appeals to students and researchers working in phenomenology and philosophy of mind.
Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography (Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences)
by Thomas Stodulka Samia Dinkelaker Ferdiansyah ThajibThis book illustrates the role of researchers’ affects and emotions in understanding and making sense of the phenomena they study during ethnographic fieldwork. Whatever methods ethnographers apply during field research, however close they get to their informants and no matter how involved or detached they feel, fieldwork pushes them to constantly negotiate and reflect their subjectivities and positionalities in relation to the persons, communities, spaces and phenomena they study. The book highlights the idea that ethnographic fieldwork is based on the attempt of communication, mutual understanding, and perspective-taking on behalf of and together with those studied. With regard to the institutionally silenced, yet informally emphasized necessity of ethnographers’ emotional immersion into the local worlds they research (defined as “emic perspective,” “narrating through the eyes of the Other,” “seeing the world from the informants’ point of view,” etc.), this book pursues the disentanglement of affect-related disciplinary conventions by means of transparent, vivid and systematic case studies and their methodological discussion. The book provides nineteen case studies on the relationship between methodology, intersubjectivity, and emotion in qualitative and ethnographic research, and includes six section introductions to the pivotal issues of role conflict, reciprocity, intimacy and care, illness and dying, failing and attuning, and emotion regimes in fieldwork and ethnography. Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography is a must-have resource for post-graduate students and researchers across the disciplines of social and cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, cultural psychology, critical theory, cultural phenomenology, and cultural sociology.
Affective Economies, Neoliberalism, and Governmentality
by Anne-Marie D’AoustAdvanced capitalism is characterized by a level of symbolic production that not only results in a dematerialization of labor, but also increasingly relies on highly emotional components, ranging from consumption desire to workforce management. Feelings as varied as love, anger, and desire are integral to neoliberal processes, though not in unproblematic and monolithic ways. Whereas some accounts decry capitalism’s hold on the emotional realm, as the commodified search for soul mates through online dating sites or Starbucks’ promotion of fair-trade coffee suggest, others counter that emotions represent a privileged site of resistance to market rationality. Relying on different case studies ranging from drone strikes, the 2008 economic crisis in Ireland, and marriage migration management, this volume builds on this productive tension between subjection and resistance through the lenses of the concept of governmentality. Developed by Michel Foucault, governmentality sheds light on the ways in which economic and political life are now being managed through logics of security and economic calculations. This volume explores how individuals might become emotionally attached to regimes of power that are detrimental to them, how neoliberal processes are concomitant with the valorization of certain emotional dispositions, and how affective economies might provide a site of resistance. This book was published as a special issue of Global Society.
Affective Governmentality: Neoliberal Education Advertisements in Singapore (Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education #9)
by Andrew Joseph PereiraThis book investigates the subjectivities in education arising from the triumphant mobilisation of care as portrayed in educational advertisements, and provides a novel theory of affective governmentality based on empirical research on affect, neoliberalism, and governmentality. It also takes the bold step of encouraging the re-imagination of the central and pressing question of school marketisation in Singapore, and problematises the seemingly innocuous portrayals of care in light of neoliberal governmentality seeking to perform cultural work on preferred identities and subjectivities. Using a judicious selection of media artefacts, the book scrutinises the creation of emotional technologies through an ethic of caring, harnessing vulnerabilities and triumphalism. As such it not only equips readers to understand the role of emotional technologies but also offers a critical and alternative view of hope and aspirations for transforming society.
Affective Heritage and the Politics of Memory after 9/11: Curating Trauma at the Memorial Museum (Interventions)
by Jacque Micieli-VoutsinasThis book critically examines the institutional curation of traumatic memory at the 9/11 Memorial Museum and its evocative power as a cultural storyteller. Memorial Museums are evocative spaces. Drawing on aesthetic practices deeply rooted in representing the ‘unrepresentability’ of cultural trauma, most notably the Holocaust, Memorial Museums are powerful, popular mediums for establishing cultural values, asking the visitor to contemplate "Who am I?" in relation to the difficult histories on display. Using primary data, this book poses important questions about the emotionally-charged site: what ‘moral lessons’ are visitors imparted with at the 9/11 Memorial Museum? Who is the cultural institution’s primary audience—the imagined community it reconstructs this traumatic history and safeguards its memories for? What does the National September 11 Memorial & Museum ultimately teach visitors about history, ourselves, and others? This work will be of interest to students and scholars in the areas of Human Geography, American Studies, Museum Studies and Public History, Cultural and Heritage Studies, and Trauma and Memory Studies.
Affective Intensities in Extreme Music Scenes
by Rosemary OverellAn ethnographic study of gender, place and belonging, Affective Intensities introduces readers to the embodied sensations, flows and experiences of being in extreme music scenes in Australia and Japan.
The Affective Intensities of Masculinity in Shaping Gendered Experience: From Little Boys, Big Boys Grow
by Amanda KeddieThis book tells a story of masculinity through the experiences of one boy, ‘Adam’. From four different studies and time periods, it tracks moments of significance in his life over a period of 20 years. These moments highlight the ways in which Adam is both drawn towards and away from a hegemonic masculinity of physical toughness, domination, competition and an opposition to ‘the feminine’. The book is set against the backdrop of a long history of contentious gender politics in Australia and globally but particularly responds to the renewed attention to the social construction of masculinities in the current #MeToo climate. Against this backdrop, nuanced and longitudinal accounts of boys’ and men’s experiences of masculinity are significant because they can offer insight into the complex bodily, social, economic, and historical forces that configure masculinities. Such understandings are important in our endeavours as those who educate, support and work with boys and men to transform gender inequalities.
Affective States: Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions
by Mateusz Laszczkowski Madeleine ReevesIn recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as 'affect theory'. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts-from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea-the chapters in this volume interrogate this 'affective turn' through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.
Affective Touching: Neurobiology and Technological Applications (Elements in Histories of Emotions and the Senses)
by Mark PatersonAt the end of the twentieth century the discovery of 'slow', affective touch nerves in humans known as C Tactile (CT) afferents, which are entirely separate from the faster pathways for touching objects, had huge social implications. The Swedish neuroscientists responsible formulated an “affective touch hypothesis” or “social touch hypothesis” to consider their purpose. Part I offers a history of the science of social touch, from related discoveries in mammals by physiologists in the 1930s, to the recent rediscoveries of the CT nerves in humans. Part II considers how these findings are being intentionally folded into technologies for interaction. First, as mediated social touch, communicating at a distance through haptics. Second, with the increasing number of social and service robots in health care and domestic settings, the role of affective touch within human-robot interaction design.
Affective World-Making: Routing Planetary Thought
by Simi Malhotra Sakshi Dogra Jubi C. JohnThis volume fosters a re-imagination of the planet where it is seen not only as a resource, but also as an entity that must not be excluded from the political imperative of care and kinship. The authors go beyond the normative understanding of space by recognizing the potency of touch, where they look at somatic experiences that invite the intensity of affect. This book questions the dominance of the capitalocene through the existence of social aesthetic and records the affective encounters that facilitate the creation of planetary identity, affinity, and entanglements. With discussions on architecture, poetry, rap music, romantic literature, performance art, digital fashion, Instagram, Netflix shows, YouTube videos, moving image practices, eco-sexual movements, and graphic narratives, the chapters in this volume initiate a conversation on what it means to inhabit the world today. An important contribution, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of environmental humanities, planetary humanities, affect studies, digital humanities, and media studies, besides also being of interest to those studying interdisciplinary critical/cultural theory, Television and film studies, philosophy, and architectural theory.