Rewatching on the Point of the Cinematic Index offers a reassessment of the cinematic index as it sits at the intersection of film studies, trauma studies, and adaptation studies. Author Allen H. Redmon argues that far too often scholars imagine the cinematic index to be nothing more than an acknowledgment that the lens-based camera captures and brings to the screen a reality that existed before the camera. When cinema's indexicality is so narrowly defined, the entire nature of film is (...) called into question the moment film no longer relies on a lens-based camera. The presence of digital technologies seemingly strips cinema of its indexical standing. This volume pushes for a broader understanding of the cinematic index by returning to the early discussions of the index in film studies and the more recent discussions of the index in other digital arts. Bolstered by the insights these discussions can offer, the volume looks to replace what might be best deemed a diminished concept of the cinematic index with a series of more complex cinematic indices, the impoverished index, the indefinite index, the intertextual index, and the imaginative index. The central argument of this book is that these more complex indices encourage spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation of the reality they see on the screen, and that it is on the point of these indices that the most significant instances of rewatching movies occur. Examining such films as John Lee Hancock's Saving Mr. Banks (2013); Richard Linklater's oeuvre; Paul Greengrass's United 93 (2006); Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006); Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011); and Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), Inception (2010), and Memento (2000), Redmon demonstrates that the cinematic index invites spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation. (shrink)

Description from a book review by J. G. Beebe-Center: "Mr. Allen's book develops in detail the view that pleasure and unpleasure are essentially manifestations of the progression and thwarting of impulses. Part one is a brief summary of the principal theories of feeling. Part two is devoted to "sensory" or "bodily" pleasure and unpleasure. These forms of feeling, it is argued, 'depend on an analogue of conation existing in the organism, a nisus to maintain, or to carry out (...) to the full extent, the functioning proper to the bodily system.' Part three -- the piece de resistance (about half the book) -- deals with the relation of pleasure and unpleasure to the main instincts. Parts four, five and six take up a number of classical problems: the relation of pleasure and unpleasure to sensation, their relation to desire, the relativity of feelings, the qualitative variety of feelings, and the psychology of values. The author shows throughout a rare combination of historicophilosophical sophistication and of first-hand familiarity with the modern experimental literature.". (shrink)

Research has shown that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable than concepts that are simply bizarre. However, this disparity may exist only in studies using cross-cultural samples. To test the impact of bizarreness on culturally homogeneous populations, we read a fictional narrative to 33 college-age students at a Midwestern university. This narrative featured 18 sets of target items – six which were intuitive, six which were counterintuitive, and six which were bizarre. After hearing the story, experimenters administered a written recall (...) task. As hypothesized, students did not differ in their recall of counterintuitive or bizarre target items. Therefore, we propose a minimally distinctive model of memorability, encompassing both counterintuitiveness and bizarreness. This model may help us better understand the memorability of expectation violations, especially those within religious stories. (shrink)

The act of judging how matters stand was a subject of investigation for Husserl throughout his career. The recurrence of this theme in his work indicates the great importance which Husserlian phenomenology attributed to the task of uncovering the nature of judgment. Scholarly commentary on Husserl has, until now, lacked one of the essential elements for a complete account of Husserl on judgment, because there was no full-length investigation into the important theme of "vague judgment" in his writings. ;This dissertation (...) is a critical interpretation of Husserl's principle texts on vague judgment. In addition to using the general norms of scholarly analysis, it takes great care to understand Husserl from within the transcendental reduction, lest his statements be misinterpreted as paradoxes dissolving into incoherence. The dissertation also seeks to identify the relation of the elements of the description of vague judgment to the more fundamental principles of phenomenology: parts/whole, identity/difference, empty/filled, presence/absence. This investigation starts with Husserl's fullest treatment of categorical vagueness, from Formal and Transcendental Logic , and then considers the theme in Ideas I and Logical Investigations , with a consideration of the use which Husserl makes of this description to analyze cultural sediments in The Origin of Geometry . ;The study concludes that vague judging is an empty act in which from the whole which possesses an attribute there does not emerge that attribute as a distinct part to be then identified with its whole. Because of this failure to think articulatedly, the fact, even in its perceptual presence, is absent as it itself. This description also brings to light essential notes of vague judgment and its foundation, viz., time. Finally this dissertation shows that Husserl's description of vague judgment unfolded organically, without basic reversal, over the course of his life's work. (shrink)

The aims and approaches of the emergent field of information history are explored in a Socratic dialogue. The philosopher Aspasia and her student Socrates are on their return to Athens from the harbor town of Piraeus when they begin discussing the proper subject of information history. After some deliberation, they come to realize that information history is not about information per se. Instead, information history seeks to provide a historical understanding of the nature of information practices—activities that include collecting, organizing, (...) and preserving, among others. In the end, they conclude that information history is the study of information becoming information. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"And They Sang A New Song":Reading John's Revelation From The Position Of The LambJ.A. Jackson (bio) and Allen H. Redmon (bio)Then one of the elders said to me, "Do not weep. See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and the seven seals." Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and (...) among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered.—Revelation 5:5–6In an interview with Markus Müller, René Girard asserts the importance of taking into account the apocalypticism of Christianity. Apocalypse, Girard reminds us, "means revelation: apocalypto means to open up and to show the truth. But it also means absolute violence, so the apocalypse is a violent revelation and a revelation of violence" (Girard 1996). That the Revelation is a violent revelation has been well established. Despite textual evidence that would beg those who approach the text to do just the opposite, readers have fixated on the violence of the Revelation since its inception, finding in it God's final retribution against those who persecute the Church.1 Commentators such as Dennis E. Johnson, William Hendricksen, and George Elden Ladd have produced recent, full-length commentaries that champion the appearance of a Christ in Revelation ready to establish himself as a military champion and exact his revenge on those who persecute him (see, for example, Johnson 2001; Hendricksen 1998; and Ladd 1993). These accounts, and those that follow suit, are blinded by the violent revelation of John's apocalyptic narrative and fail to see the poem's revelation of violence—the other, prophetic half of what Girard rightly contends exists in Christian apocalypse.This error is understandable to some extent. Read in its own light and apart from the Gospel revelation as understood by those familiar with mimetic [End Page 99] theory, one has no hermeneutical principle for recognizing the end to which John is writing. The victims of the text can be ignored in the precise way that all victims are disregarded when the scapegoat mechanism functions properly. Such should not be the case in the Revelation, though, a text in which the scapegoat mechanism is exposed and pushed to its logical conclusions. John offers his reader a glimpse into the way this mechanism will function when all that is left is wall-to-wall violence, when one is left with only two alternatives: succumb to the mechanism and reciprocate its violence, or extricate oneself through nonreciprocation (and potentially die).In the margins of the violent revelation in John's apocalyptic vision, a revelation of violence emerges that can expose humankind's potential to annihilate itself and the mechanism with which it will do so. When read through the lens of mimetic theory, one discovers that John's narrative delivers a revelation of violence, an explicit naming and unmasking of the sacrificial mechanism that can capture for the reader not only the machinations of the sacrificial apparatus but one's own potential participation in it as well. As such, the poem can posit itself as a commandment (a Thou-shall-not-murder) that ultimately refuses the temptation to respond to violence in violence.The fact that John uses the apocalyptic to present this directive should not be surprising. Girard writes: "Only through the mediation of the scapegoat mechanism can violence become its own remedy, and the victimage mechanism can only be triggered by the frenetic paroxysm of the 'crisis.' This means that the violence, having lost its vitality and bite, will paradoxically be more terrible than before its decline. As the whole of humanity makes the vain effort to reinstate its reconciliatory and sacrificial virtues, this violence will without doubt tend to multiply its victims, just as happened in the time of the prophets" (Girard 1978, 195–96). While Girard's commentary on biblical eschatology and apocalypse refers mainly to the scapegoat mechanism as it applies to and is revealed in the Gospel texts, we see the immediacy and the frenzy of the apocalyptic and the ubiquitous violent mimetic appropriations also performed in John's Revelation.2 John captures... (shrink)

This book contains two previously unpublished phenomenological studies by Gurwitsch: "Marginal Consciousness" and "The Phenomenology of Signals and Significations". Each is preceded by an editor's introduction which recounts the history of the text, outlines its content, and sets the findings of these investigations within the context of the development of Gurwitsch's phenomenology.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

In response to the many changes currently going on in health care, this book offers the combined insight and wisdom of a stellar group of scholars and professionals with extensive experience in the health care field. The book opens with a look at people's actual experience of health care today, from four different perspectives. It then addresses foundational questions, including the nature of medicine, nursing, and justice. Surveyed next are the changing economics of health care as well as the impact (...) of these changes on such areas as mental health care, long-term care, health care for minorities, and legal malpractice. The closing section of the book assesses from a Christian perspective available constructive alternatives, including creative funding strategies with special attention to the needs of poor persons, physician unions, and the use of "alternative medicine" therapies. (shrink)

Textual entailment is a relationship that obtains between fragments of text when one fragment in some sense implies the other fragment. The automation of textual entailment recognition supports a wide variety of text-based tasks, including information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Much ingenuity has been devoted to developing algorithms for identifying textual entailments, but relatively little to saying what textual entailment actually is. This article is a review of the logical and philosophical issues involved in (...) providing an adequate definition of textual entailment. We show that many natural definitions of textual entailment are refuted by counterexamples, including the most widely cited definition of Dagan et al. We then articulate and defend the following revised definition: T textually entails H = df typically, a human reading T would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by H from the proposition expressed by T. We also show that textual entailment is context-sensitive, nontransitive, and nonmonotonic. (shrink)

The Magician's Apparatus is an essay for the exhibition catalogue of The Collector's Room Exhibition at JGM Gallery in London, curated by Karen David. The Collector’s Room sees JGM Gallery transformed into a parlour room of a collector with a leaning towards illusion, stage magic and the escapologist Harry Houdini. In this room we encounter artworks such as spirit levels, levitations, gospel magic props, tarot cards, portraits of magicians, antique keys, handcuffs, sword boxes, escape trunks, magic wands, smoke, and mirrors. (...) The essay focuses on an encounter I had with a waxwork double of Paul Daniels at Wookey Hole Caves. It considers the central operation of the magicians’ craft: employing a decoy to misdirect, opening up the space between fact and fiction, the real and the made up. When watching a magic trick, the audience is knowingly placed at the centre of a conceit, an illusion that they are both complicit in but also kept separated from. A magician's audience always knows that the trick is not showing us what is actually happening - showing the spectator the mechanism of the illusion - but it is pretending to do that thing. Like the waxwork double, the magic trick is a simulation of reality that is always slightly distorted, always off-centre, always a theatrical manifestation of the real. (shrink)

The article opens with a brief discussion of the cultural economy of cities. A framework for investigating this phenomenon is then proposed, paying special attention to the interconnections between the system of production, its geographic milieu and the logistics of distribution. An overview of the structure and logic of the French film industry is laid out in which the fragmentation of production activities and labor markets is stressed. The policy system governing the French film industry is described in detail, and (...) the special role of the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie) is highlighted. The industry is then shown to be deeply interwined with the urban milieu of Paris, both in terms of its locational structure and its cultural dynamics. The final major section of the article deals with issues of industrial survival and competitiveness in the new global economy. It is suggested that French film policy needs to shift from a posture of defensive support of the industry to a more clearly articulated and aggressive concern with rebuilding market share in both the domestic and international arenas. (shrink)

Occasional Papers in Cassirer and Cultural-Theory Studies presented at the University of Glasgow's Centre for Intercultural Studies. Given the growing disenchantment, on all sides, with the 'high theory' of the 1970s and 1980s, and with the dominant master-trope of literary and cultural reflexion of the 1980s and 1990s, the extended metaphor or 'allegory', this volume offers a timely re-examination of what, according to Goethe, is a deeper mode of understanding the symbol. Via the life-long preoccupation of Ernst Cassirer with the (...) problems of 'symbolic form', as he christened it, the papers collected here try to come to terms with the thinking of Goethe and Schiller on the symbol, and on related issues. Taken together, they attempt to elucidate the filiation of German classicism down through the nineteenth century to the present, in the belief that some of Cassirer's ideas have fed, often unacknowledged, into the mainstream of contemporary cultural theory, and that the rigour of his thought can help clear up much of the confusion in that 'theory'. (shrink)

The famous story of the choice of Hercules became one frequently depicted in Western art and, as Ernst Panofsky showed, the various treatments of this theme demonstrate the significance of cultural continuity through the centuries. At the same time, the motif of Hercules and his choice presents us with a challenge to current theoretical approaches to culture. We can either take the easy path and accept the current hermeneutic orthodoxies of popular cultural studies, or we can choose a harder but, (...) ultimately, more rewarding path: the philosophy of culture articulated by Ernst Cassirer. This volume brings together a collection of papers which reflects the broad sweep, both historical and theoretical, of Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms. They range from language-theory to myth and religion; and all are set, with varying degrees of emphasis, in a comparative context. (shrink)

In 1882, the South Australian Baptist Missionary Society sent off its first missionaries to Faridpur in East Bengal. Miss Marie Gilbert and Miss Ellen Arnold were the first of a stream of missionary women who left the young South Australian colony to work in India. Scores of women from other Christian denominations and from other Australian colonies also went to India and indeed to other mission fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As with other western women missionaries, these women (...) intended to save souls and to bring India's daughters to Christ, often by means of medical work. But unlike their British sisters, these women came from the edge of empire to intervene in another, but different, colonial site. These missionary ventures coincided with efforts of the Australian settlers to elaborate for themselves an identity separate from and against that of the metropolitan centre. Within these debates, contestations over the meaning of ‘the colonial girl’ and ‘the Australian girl’ played a key role. The article explores why the women were drawn to India rather than to working with Aboriginal people in Australia. It begins to investigate how in seeking to reconstruct Indian womanhood they elaborated for themselves a separate colonial, Australian identity and how much in their missionary endeavours they affirmed an identity as white, Christian and ultimately British. (shrink)

The conceptual framework and core courses of the certificate program in Preventive Engineering and Social Development of the Centre for Technology and Social Development at the University of Toronto are briefly described. Preventive approaches for the engi neering, management, and regulation of technology examine how technology fits into, interacts with, and depends on human life, society, and the biosphere in order to apply this understanding in a negative feed back mode to avoid or reduce harmful effects to these contexts. These (...) approaches represent a new paradigm for engineering education and practice enriched through STS. (shrink)

We argue that developing a human ethics application is an effective method for refining the intent and design of research studies. Our study aimed to investigate the delivery of end-of-life and palliative care nursing to residents of an aged care unit in a Multi-purpose Service/centre in rural Victoria. We used the ethics application process as a strategy to focus the study, and to refine the data collection and analysis techniques. It is our contention that the process of completing the application (...) and gaining ethics approval is laborious; however, the intellectualising that occurs provides researchers with an opportunity to reflect upon and refine their studies, thus ensuring the ultimate success and timely completion of research investigations. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 56–58 Nechvatal, Joseph, Immersion Into Noise , Open Humanities Press, 2011, 267 pp, $23.99 (pbk), ISBN 1-60785-241-1. As someone who’s knowledge of “art” mostly began with the domestic (Western) and Japanese punk and noise scenes of the late 80’s and early 90’s, practices and theories of noise fall rather close to my heart. It is peeking into the esoteric enclaves of weird music and noise that helped me understand what I think I might like art to be: (...) A way of learning about the world through perturbation—exploration by incitement and speculation of possible conditions. What I have always loved about artistic investigations influenced by noisy aesthetics or sensibilities is that they can be simultaneously transcendent and absurd, amusing and revelatory, singular and pluralistic, mindless and intensely penetrating. The provocative friction that noise brings to bear on aesthetic experience, artistic practice, and “the” Art World acts as a kind of impulse response, proposing new energies while revealing underlying structure; noise signals are a simultaneous synthesis and analysis of spaces, subjects and relations. About two weeks prior to Christmas 2011, Joseph Nechvatal was generous enough to spend some time with me at 39 Quai des Grands Augustins, Paris . We each had one glass of red wine, briefly discussed common acquaintances, shared points of interest, and his published writings. We also, I recall, disagreed lightheartedly about how much contemporary relevance the ideas of telematic-artist Roy Ascott have for today’s art-and-technology practitioner (Joseph > Jamie). After the encounter, I read through a PDF version of Immersion Into Noise Joseph was kind enough to send me ( the HTML version is here ). A number of points of entry into cultures of “noise” are available these days. There are the acoustic-spatial approaches of thinkers like Douglas Kahn, Brandon LaBelle and Salome Voegelin; the techno-cultural musicologies of Jonathan Sterne and David Toop; the political writings of Jacques Attali, former adviser to President François Mitterrand, in his Noise: The Political Economy of Music (spoiler alert: It’s not really about music). Enter the new writings of one Joseph Nechvatal, with his invitation of an Immersion Into Noise . Nechvatal has been active for over 20 years in on- and off-line discussions of art, technology, virtuality, as well as his own set of art-theoretical departures and terminologies. A practicing artist, and instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Immersion Into Noise , is Nechvatal’s third published volume. His writings, broadly, address a concern with the possibilities of a synthesis between the biological and the virtual, and the contemporary artistic resonances that these possibilities suggest. Nechvatal’s project is to try to name contemporary currents of artistic practice within our technologized culture. He comes at this through art history, post-modern philosophy, anthropology and consciousness studies. Portions of Immersion Into Noise have appeared in his PhD dissertation, as well as online art publications like Zing Magazine . An open-access publication, and part of the impressive and heartening activities of the Open Humanities Press, Nechvatal’s book is a somewhat unexpected addition to the Critical Climate Change series edited by Tom Cohen of SUNY University and Claire Colebrook of Penn State. Other titles in the series have address themes of post-globalism and cultures of threat. Joseph Nachvetal’s title is the first to focus entirely on art history, art practice and aesthetics. It is awkward to too easily fit Nechvatal’s writings in with the aforementioned burgeoning canon of cultural and artistic practice in, and writings on, noise (Russolo, Schaeffer, Cage and Yves Klein through to Kahn, LaBelle, Voegelin, et. al). Immersion Into Noise is not primarily an examination of sound-noise or phenomenologies of sound, and the relativist, non-objectivist possibilities arising therefrom in social, public, and exhibition art practices. Although Nechvatal makes mention of sonic practice and experience (his own encounter in 1968 with the technological complex was set in motion at a Jimi Hendrix concert at the Chicago Coliseum), he does so only by way of introducing a broader concept of “art-noise.” The noise-scape can envelope various kinds of involvement in all kinds of art, by artists, audiences, and distributed amalgams of all of these. Midway through the book, we are offered characteristics of an “immersive noise vision theory.” This theory, leading to an even more syncretic thinking about the art experience, is sketched out through further reference to the author’s personal observation, as well as his art-historical research and notes. Personal examples take on the reflex of a kind of art-noise-travel-writing, as Nechvatal visits Ryoji Ikeda’s Datamatics [ver 2.0] installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), hears Cecil Taylor at Alice Tully Hall in New York, spends time with the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, and explores the Wagner-inspired Venus Grotto of Linderhof, Bavaria, to name a few. These site-events, to varying degrees, are renderings of noise-art’s potential to “place us back into a ritual position by dragging art down into the felt 360° noise-perspective of the enthusiastic and participatory.” (p.103) The arc of the ideas proposed here position immersiveness, saturation and “scopic all-over tension” as most productively foundational to noise art, or art-noise. An itinerary from the most ancient of artistic expressions (cave drawings) to the most digital of presentations is charted (Ikeda’s minimal/maximal bitwise works for synchronized audio and visual projection). The harsh sonic onslaught of Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow), is, under this analysis, not so far from colossal denseness of the churches of the High Baroque (Nechvatal visits the Rosario Chapel in Santo Domingo Church, Puebla, Mexico). And there is much more here, eaten up by noise: A rethinking of the work of Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Nicolas Schöffler (whom Nechvatal names the true “the Father of Cybernetic Art”) and the Happenings of Alan Kaprow, all as art-noise in their own right. Each of these artists and moments demonstrate techniques of destabilization, immersiveness, frame-breaking and “all-over fullness and fervor.” Here is writing on art and art history that is as ambitious as it is promising: “wildly visionary,” Nechvatal states as in conclusion. Self-admittedly far-reaching to the point of verging on totalization, we are asked to consider that the moments, spaces, arts and artists Nechvatal appreciates in the book all derive from an increasingly prevalent “noise consciousness.” Along the way we gain an appreciation of noise as a productive and proactive tension in art, rather than an unwanted signal or unwelcome intrusion. Most promising here for me are Nechvatal’s revealing descriptions of the potential for noise to make manifest the material-perceptual framework of individual and collective art experience. How might we allow what we have been repeatedly taught is our contemporary condition of “information overload” to transform itself into a calm, warm, sympathetic kind of inundation. Treatment of experience in this way, dissolves boundaries between the bodily, informational, material and technical complexes that make up our world, and is the promise of a radical, if momentary, Immersion Into Noise. (shrink)