This paper investigates what “free-range” eggs are available for sale in supermarkets in Australia, what “free-range” means on product labelling, and what alternative “free-range” offers to cage production. The paper concludes that most of the “free-range” eggs currently available in supermarkets do not address animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and public health concerns but, rather, seek to drive down consumer expectations of what these issues mean by balancing them against commercial interests. This suits both supermarkets and egg producers because it (...) does not challenge dominant industrial-scale egg production and the profits associated with it. A serious approach to free-range would confront these arrangements, and this means it may be impossible to truthfully label many of the “free-range” eggs currently available in the dominant supermarkets as free-range. (shrink)

Can Aristotle’s ontology account for the centrality of relations in the nature of political animals? This article responds to scholars who claim that it cannot, and argues that Aristotle’s conceptual framework in the practical writings is consistent, and continuous, with his first philosophy. Aristotle’s ontology of living beings already assigns a central and constitutive role to relations, both with respect to the exercise of their essential activities and with respect to their connections to other members of their group. Moreover, his (...) thought is hospitable to relational thinking because of the role that it assigns to active receptivity. The fact that our lives are more interconnected than those of any other species does not call into question his ontology; rather, it illustrates how his metaphysics works in the case of the distinctive substances that we are, namely, animals with logos. (shrink)

Criminal Woman [La Donna delinquente], Cesare Lombroso’s book on women criminals, published with Guglielmo Ferrero in 1893, marks the moment when the Italian criminologist first systematically integrated the animal world into his explanations of deviancy. At this time, he put forward a general theory of evolution based on femininity. This article queries the way this structure functions on the theoretical level, via a precise example: female brigands. It proposes that the textual and visual strategies of representing these women, notably (...) their virilization, was closely linked to the theory of “the primitive superiority of the female” and the lack of distinction between the sexes in certain “lower” animal species. Paradoxically, the atavism of criminal women thus brought them closer to masculine features, making them throwbacks on the evolutionary path that the “normal woman”– “a man in a state of arrested development” – had interrupted. (shrink)

Veterinary oaths are public declarations sworn by veterinarians, usually when they enter the profession. As such, they may reflect professional and social concerns. Analysis of contemporary veterinary oaths may therefore reveal their ethical foundations. The objective of this article is to contextualize the ethical content of contemporary oaths, in terms of the origin and development of veterinary medicine and wider societal changes such as the intensification of farming and the rise of animal welfare. This informs a comparison of oaths (...) from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. This analysis suggests some ways in which the oaths might be developed to better reflect contemporary societal values. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 230—233. A word about the quotation marks. People ask about them, in the beginning; in the process of giving themselves up to reading the poem, they become comfortable with them, without necessarily thinking precisely about why they’re there. But they’re there, mostly to measure the poem. The phrases they enclose are poetic feet. If I had simply left white spaces between the phrases, the phrases would be read too fast for my musical intention. The quotation marks make (...) the reader slow down and silently articulate—not slur over mentally—the phrases at the pace, and with the stresses, I intend. They also distance the narrative form myself. I am not Alette. Finally they may remind the reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice: this is not a thought, or a record of thought process, this is a story, told.(1) We read (reread) the poems that keep the discourse with ourselves going. —Wallace Stevens We have to break open words or sentences, too, and find what’s uttered in them. —Gilles Deleuze “The Descent of Alette” “is an allegorical poem” “in four books” “first published” “in 1992” “by Alice Notley.” “In the Descent of Alette,” “the double quotation mark” “is wrapped around” “words, phrases, sometimes whole sentences, and utilized as bones for structure and tonality.” “The winged” “dbl quotation” “like angels or devils” “descending from elsewhere” “function as” “poetic feet.” “Distance” “in the text through the use of dbl quotes,” “according to Notley,” “was a way to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” I know someone who tattooed double quotes on her shoulder blades. In other words, the body is quotable. To be able to say that one is quotable. A body filled with other’s sayings. I never asked her what for, what is the double quote tattoo for and why on the shoulder blades? I prefer my own interpretation that keeps shifting every time I see her. First words of every poem in every book: Book One One ... On ... A ... There ... I ... We ... An ... A ... A ... I ... At ... A ... When ... When ... There ... I ... In ... At ... I ... Once ... A ... A ... In ... A ... A ... Two ... I ... I ... Eyeball ... In ... I... A ... I ... I ... On ... I ... There ... What ... As ... As Book Two I ... When ... I ... I ... As ... I ... I ... There ... I ... There ... I ... A ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I Book Three The ... Presently ... I ... I’m ... I ... We ... What ... My ... I ... Who ... But ... Lay ... My ... I ... The ... Your ... The ... I ... It’s ... As ... The ... Talon’s ... When ... We ... I ... Slowly ... I ... I ... The ... How ... The Book Four I ... I ... You ... The ... Now ... She ... The ... There ... As ... Then ... The ... All ... Let’s I ... You ... The ... Thus ... The ... I ... The ... I ... There ... Have ... The ... As ... The Defamiliar Object “Poetry is a defamiliarized language, whose formations, so far from being simply formations of meaning, are aesthetic structures...”(2) “The same can be” “irresponsibly associated” “with the use of punctuation.” “The dbl quotation as a measure” “of poetic feet” “is treated as such” “because the author” “injects artfulness into it.” “The dbl quote is an object—” “a joystick” “to control breadth” “(of breath.)” “To de-familiarize” “said sign” “is also to” “impart the sensation of [it] as [it is] perceived and not as they are known.”(3) “The dbl quote” “nests previous words, phrasings and sayings.” “How many have come and gone” “through the doorway of this punctuation sign.” “There are also air quotes and virtual quotes.” “There is emphasis and there’s irony.” “It would be aggravating” “or interesting” “to watch a reading of” “The Descent of Alette” “with someone” “raising and curling” “fingers” “bent out of shape” “in what could be used as” “peace signs.” “I am trying to avoid” “scare quotes.” “I looked up” “what they are” “and supposedly they arose” “in the early 20th century.” “The scare quote” “is a mark around a word or phrase to indicate that it doesn’t signify conventional or literal meaning.” “This isn’t how Notley” “intended to use them” “in The Descent of Alette.” “The characters, places, and things” “signify nothing” “beyond” “their literal meaning” “ within the allegory .” “I’d like to stress” “within the allegory;” “that’s why its” “italicized.” “It is told through” “the main character/voice of” “Alette.” “The author reminds us she is not Alette.” “The author marvelously found a way” “to distance” “her self” “from the narrative.” “This was attempted” “by tonal and intimate” “affect of the dbl quote” “used as poetic feet.” “Its as though” “punctuation in this regard” “becomes a magical toy.” “Arguably, punctuation” “(as perceived)” “undergoes a kind of” “ defamiliar ” “make-over.” “The text” gently forces the reader” “to slow down,” “read slowly.” “At some point” “one begins to sense” “lines of text” “moving on its own.” “Broken words, phrases, and sentences” “shuttling left to right” “like a subway” “that stops” “from station to station;” “open quote to end quote.” Double Quote Occupied “There are two worlds; one above ground” “and one underground.” “The world above ground is where,” “the tyrant” “with a capital t” “lives.” “(The “T” gets tangled in the claws of the dbl quote.)” “Alette becomes an owl and kills him.” “In the last book the tyrant dies.” “ “...the tyrant” “a man in charge of” “the fact” “that we were” “below the ground” “endlessly riding” “our trains, never surfacing” “A man who” “would make you pay” “so much” “to leave the subway” “that you don’t” “ever ask” “how much it is” “It is, in effect,” “all of you & more” “Most of which you already” “pay to live below” “But he would literally” “take your soul” “Which is what you are” “below the ground” “Your soul” “your soul rides” “this subway” “I saw” “on the subway a” “world of souls” ”(4) “New York;” “the city of cities” “and its subways—” “worlds underground,” “above ground,” “& above the above ground.” “Skyscrapers,” “Wall Street,” “old money,” “new money,” “and falling further down a cleavage;” “the middle class” “slipping away.” “Contemporary artist ” “Ligorano Reece” “recently made” “a sculpture of ice ” “a block of ice” “carved to read” “middle class” “(in all upper case letters)” “and let it melt” “naturally” “for however long—” “hours,” “days.” “It didn’t take very long to melt.” A global uprise of mass demonstrations; a cacophony of bodies on the street, in parks and universities, on City Hall lawns, coastal ports, neighborhoods, etc., and for what? The reasons are endless and finite. Not a single body is unaffected by the movement even when not “occupying.” “Occupiers” “stormed into a Sotheby’s auction” “protesting” “via human microphone” “that the CEO takes home” “about” “six thousand dollars” “a day.” “(The a/Art market” “is not a reflection” “of a desire” “for a/Art” “but a reflection” “of a desire” “for money” “confused with a/Art.)” What could it mean to occupy that which has been written or said? Someone with double quotes tattooed on both shoulders attempts to reclaim the sign; re-invent it privately-publicly since the body is always split between both spheres. A genre of hide-and-seek; the speaking and silent body which can never mean what it says even while it so desires to mean something. To nest (and hold hostage) someone in double quotes is an act of violence; a gesture of displacement where one is arrested, dislocated, and scrutinized under a distant gaze. “The air quote” “also known as” “finger quote or ersatz quote” “supposedly” “harks back to” “1927.” “The brevity of this gesture” “ as something invisible” “like virtual money or credit” “doesn’t really exist” “though it take up space;” “its the ghostliest of all punctuation signs” “and one that requires the presence and appearance of a body.” “ “she made a form” “in her mind” “an imaginary” “form” “to settle” “in her arms where” “the baby” “had been” “We saw her fiery arms” “cradle air” “She cradled air...” ”(5) “The air” “gets occupied” “by one or two hands” “with thumb, forefinger, and middle finger” “which alternately could be used” “to shoot rubber bullets,” “pepper spray,” “tear gas.” “How three fingers” “could be responsible for so much:” “satire, sarcasm, irony” “and ultimately” “bruises, blood, death.” (“The violence of the dbl quote is to eagerly to place oneself inside a tornado.)” “The violence of this” “embodied punctuation mark” “stems from a discordance with others.” “Is the name, word, or phrase” “placed in dbl quotes” “heroic” “ or brave?” “An act of displacement;” “must there always be” “bright or negative lights—” “a leaderless act” “to inhabit, to occupy” “space removed” “from normative use.” “Of course” “I’m also wondering” “what it means to re-occupy” “public/private space—the street, neighborhood or page” “policed” “by laws, limits, and” “to some extent” “punctuation.” Echo, Mirror “There are first, second, and third voices interwoven.” “ “Braid of voices,”(6) ” “Some lines read as internal thoughts,” “dialogues,” “and scene descriptions,” “all of which make up the allegory.” “It seems appropriate” “for the word” “allegory” “to nest in dbl quotes” “for perhaps it might be” “a gesture to echo on and on” “eternally referencing” “whatever came before.” I notice the first tooth of the double quote, when paying too close attention, gets caught in the hook of the “f”. I space bar to untangle them; the f does not resist the closed bite of “deaf” and I resist to know what it could mean, because it could doubly mean nothing. “ “He looked” “so familiar” “to me...”(7) ” “The second-person” “echoes in one of two directions:” “further into” “or farther from” “me.” “Its as though” “the second-person amplifies” “or else the opposite” “in which he,” “who looks so familiar,” “retreats further” “like stars in a telescope.” “The dbl quote” “has this kind of affect” “concerning distance and dimension” “as also illusory” “as something twice removed” “and unreal” “in a similar way” “movie stars are unreal and far away.” “ “I entered” “a car” “in which I seemed” “to see double” “Each person I” “looked at seemed” “spread out” “as if doubled” “Gradually” “I perceived that” “each person” “was surrounded by a ghostly” “second image” “was encased in it” “& each” / “of those images,” “those encasings,” “was exactly the same” “each was in fact” “the tyrant...” ”(8) A daydream of a mirror-less world while staring through window blinds; a palm tree behind. It was dark with nothing there. A world with no mirrors “in my mind,” though my mind could only reflect what it knew: a palm tree. Naturally then, palm trees multiplied; a world of palm trees reflected the daydream with no mirror in sight. “The mirror” “(prior to obsidian manufacturing ca. 6000 B.C)” “was wherever water” “could be found.” “Its interesting” “mirrors have been around” “before humans—its funny” “animals and humans” “get born into” “a world of mirrors,” “therefore, simulation” “is always already” “a given—” “a sparkly consequence to be born with a dbl.” NOTES 1. Notley, Alice. “Author’s Note” in The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996) 2. Bruns, Gerald L. “ From Intransitive Speech to the Universe of Discourse” in Modern Poetry And The Idea of Language (New Haven & London, 1974), p.75 3. Ibid. p.77 4. Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette (New York, 1996). p.3 5. Ibid. p.10 6. Ibid i. p.9 7. Ibid ii. p.16 8. Ibid iii. p.12. (shrink)

Abstract The artwork of Joseph Beuys was provocative in his time. Although he was very successful on the international art scene and on the art market, the larger The public is still bewildered by his Fat Chair or his installations and his performances. The article shows the evolution of his artwork from classical materials (stone, steel) to soft materials (animals, products of animals) and further to his concept of “social sculpture” and to programmatic diagrams (with words and graphics). A (...) special point of interest is the transition towards language (phonic and conceptual), the philosophy of art exposed in his drawings, and diagrams and the relation between art and science in his artwork. (shrink)

A well‐known typological observation is the dominance of subject‐initial word orders, SOV and SVO, across the world's languages. Recent findings from gestural language creation paradigms offer possible explanations for the prevalence of SOV. When asked to gesture transitive events with an animate agent and inanimate patient, gesturers tend to produce SOV order, regardless of their native language biases. Interestingly, when the patient is animate, gesturers shift away from SOV to use of other orders, like SVO and OSV. Two competing hypotheses (...) have been proposed for this switch: the noisy channel account (Gibson et al., 2013) and the role conflict account (Hall, Mayberry, & Ferreira, 2013). We set out to distinguish between these two hypotheses, disentangling event reversibility and patient animacy, by looking at gestural sequences for events with two inanimate participants (inanimate‐inanimate, reversible). We replicated the previous findings of a preference for SOV order when describing animate‐inanimate, irreversible events as well as a decrease in the use of SOV when presented with animate‐animate, reversible events. Accompanying the drop in SOV, in a novel condition we observed an increase in the use of SVO and OSV orders when describing events involving two animate entities. In sum, we find that the observed avoidance of SOV order in gestural language creation paradigms when the event includes an animate agent and patient is driven by the animacy of the participants rather than the reversibility of the event. We suggest that findings from gestural creation paradigms are not automatically linkable to spoken language typology. (shrink)

Veterinarians serve on the front lines working to prevent animal suffering and abuse. For centuries, their compassion and expertise have improved the quality of life and death for animals in their care. However, modern interest in animal rights has led more and more people to ask questions about the ethical considerations that lie behind common veterinary practices. This Common Threads volume, drawn from articles originally published in the Journal of Animal Ethics (JAE), offers veterinarians and other interested (...) readers a primer on key issues in the field. Essays in the first section discuss aspects of veterinary oaths, how advances in animal cognition science factor into current ethical debates, and the rise of complementary and alternative veterinary medicine and its relationship to traditional veterinary medicine. The second section continues with an essay that addresses why veterinarians have an obligation to educate animal caregivers to look past "cuteness" in order to treat all animals with dignity. The collection closes with three short sections focusing on animals in farming, trade, and research ”areas where veterinarians encounter conflicts between their job and their duty to advocate and care for animals. Contributors: Judith Benz-Schwarzburg, Vanessa Carli Bones, Grace Clement, Simon Coghlan, Priscilla N. Cohn, Mark J. Estren, Elisa Galgut, Eleonora Gullone, Matthew C. Halteman, Andrew Knight, Drew Leder, Andrew Linzey, Clair Linzey, Kay Peggs, Megan Schommer, Clifford Warwick, and James W. Yeates. (shrink)

This edited work collates novel contributions on contemporary topics that are related to human rights. The essays address analytic-descriptive questions, such as what legal personality actually means, and normative questions, such as who or what should be recognised as a legal person. As is well-known among jurists, the law has a special conception of personhood: corporations are persons, whereas slaves have traditionally been considered property rather than persons. This odd state of affairs has not garnered the interest of legal theorists (...) for a while and the theory of legal personhood has been a relatively peripheral topic in jurisprudence for at least 50 years. As readers will see, there have recently been many developments and debates that justify a theoretical investigation of this topic. Animal rights activists have been demanding that some animals be recognized as legal persons. The field of robotics has prompted questions about driverless cars: should they be granted a limited legal personality, so that the car itself would be responsible for damages? This book explores such concepts and touches on matters of bioethics, animal law and medical law. It includes matters of legal history and appeals to both legal scholars and philosophers, especially those with an interest in theories of law and the philosophy of law. (shrink)

This article analyzes the sculptural depiction of two nonhuman animals, Greyfriars Bobby in Edinburgh, Scotland and the Brown Dog in Battersea, South London, England. It explores the ways in which both these cultural depictions transgress the norm of nineteenth century dog sculpture. It also raises questions about the nature of these constructions and the way in which the memorials became incorporated within particular human political spaces. The article concludes by analyzing the modern "replacement" of the destroyed early twentieth century (...) statue of the Brown Dog and suggests that the original meaning of the statue has been significantly altered. (shrink)

1- The first period of human life in prehistoric times was known as the period of food gathering economy, as it depended on gathering wild plants and hunting animals, and made simple tools and machines from stones and animal bones that were used in hunting, and used tree leaves and animal skins to make clothes. As for the second period, the Neolithic era, it was known as the period of food production economy when he learned agriculture and domesticated (...) animals. Agriculture was initially described as meeting the need and was cultivated in small areas and in one season. 2- When he learned the life of stability and lived in permanent villages, the oldest of which is the village of Jarmo, many tools were found made of flint, stone vessels, spoons and pottery. In addition, the village contained permanent houses and clay ovens for making bread, fireplaces, basins, stoves and clay dolls. 3- Domesticating animals, especially goats, sheep and pigs, benefiting from their meat, cheese, skins and fat to make oils, and domesticating dogs. 4- The most important crops that he cultivated were wheat and barley, and later in other areas he cultivated lentils, flax and legumes. 5- In the Stone Age, he learned fertilization and artificial irrigation. He cultivated large areas and had a surplus in production, which prompted him to make large-sized stores to store the surplus, noting that the stores had existed since the era of Hassouna, but they were small. He also learned trade and the barter system and the discovery of metals. Specialization in work and division of labor appeared, and other crafts and professions appeared. The pottery wheel, spinning and weaving discs, and seals were invented. 6- Wool and hair of sheep and goats and some plants such as flax were used to make clothes using spinning discs. 7- Many pottery vessels of different sizes and shapes were found, and they contained drawings, decorations, engravings, and colors of great precision, some of which were made by hand and others with a pottery wheel. Tools and machines were made of copper. 8- Moving to the south and the emergence of large cities, carrying out irrigation projects, and the emergence of the first systems of government. 9- A change and development occurred in the human mind, benefiting from the natural environment and the wealth it contains that could serve him as a result of the development of social, cultural and economic life. 10- Plant cultivation and domestication were coupled with animal husbandry and domestication, as both complement each other in terms of benefit. Because of them, other crafts and professions emerged, including the manufacture of tools and machines, pottery and weaving. Trade also flourished as a result of an increase in the surplus and the increase in labor. 11- Learning how to extract oils and methods of obtaining them from plants and animals which was of great importance because it had multiple uses, especially in cooking, and the demand for it increased in trade. 12- Plant and animal wealth played an important role in its prosperity and economic recovery, as it represented the backbone of the economy of Mesopotamia. 13- Our information about animals and plants came from cuneiform texts and seals that show scenes of hunting animals, scenes of grazing sheep, scenes of ears of wheat and plants, and from murals on the walls of palaces, scenes of barns designated for raising animals, scenes of relief and three-dimensional sculptures that show domesticated domesticated animals, and scenes of hunting predatory animals. (shrink)

This chapter examines the sculptural aesthetics of Johann Herder and Chinese Daoism. Herder’s thesis that sculpture presents “forms in which the living soul animates the entire body” might have changed the way Europeans viewed the plastic arts, but Daoism had already discovered this “truth” two millennia earlier. What is common to both Herder and Daoism is the argument that sight inherently falls short when it comes to knowing the possibility of human experience. As sight lacks the tactile sensation of (...) touch, and sculpture is an artform created by the hands, it falls to spirit to convey what our eyes cannot feel and our hands cannot see. What the sculptor shapes is thus not the human imagination but the spirit of Nature, a shaping that in reality never departs from the hidden ground of the soul. (shrink)

The article examines work by contemporary American artist Kiki Smith, who proposes a future in which human and nonhuman bodily borders merge. The artist’s contribution to the more-than-human artistic entanglements is juxtaposed with Joseph Beuys’s artistic manifesto from 1974 which proposes, among other things, an attempt to get outside of the represented human towards the asignified ahuman. In Kiki’s sculpture, both human and nonhuman animals undergo constant morphogenesis, becoming hybrid forms far beyond the human-social paradigm, implying that the human (...) and nonhuman binary, due to the exchange of affective entanglements, is no longer valid in the heyday of techno-scientific development. The analyzed work shows that both human and nonhuman bodies are raw materials not separated from one another but always interconnected with the world and its ongoing material processes. Thus, the article emphasizes that it is only through the transgression of the human and nonhuman border that one can acknowledge the more ethical and political ways of cooperation needed for the appreciation of the multispecies dimension of our world and its survival. (shrink)

L'un a les flancs bleutes, l'autre la poitrine gluante; une nageoire pousse ici sur un dos, surgit la une queue; tantot la tete manque, tantot le reste; la main de celui-ci ondule, et celui-la reclame en hurlant ses pieds qui s'evanouissent. Introduisant a la polymorphie de l'animal, le frontispice, ainsi commente par Philostrate, est deploye a travers ce receuil qui explore la difference entre homme, animal et plante. De la medecine a la religion, en passant par les modeles (...) et contre-modeles politiques, les metaphores et les fables, l'imagerie et la logique, textes et images y sont analyses. Car l'animal (dit-on meme animal en grec?) est l'un des lieux de polemique majeurs pour determiner les ruptures au sein de l'Antiquite greco-latine et mieux fixer les coupures entre Antiquite et Modernite. (shrink)

One of the issues with introducing animal rights law is whether the problem is quantitative or qualitative, whether it can be achieved by working within existing legal paradigms or whether it requires a new set of paradigms. The answer is fundamental: a quantitative problem can be solved by applying more of the same solutions, while a qualitative problem requires completely different solutions. The qualitative camp can be represented by, say, Professor Gary Francione, demanding not only rights for animals but (...) that they have personhood and are no longer considered “property.” The quantitative approach can be finely represented by Professor David Favre, who has argued for many years that we can make progress by developing existing legal principles to give some rights to some animals, and he does so eloquently in his new book. He is clear in his view that progress is, and can continue to be, made with a series of steps, as he puts it, “climbing the slippery slope toward personhood” (p. viii).His case is supported by looking backward—progress made in establishing the rules governing humans in their relationships with animals—as well as forward to developments that will support continuing improvement in the lives of animals, not least the potential for technology (for example, through cell- and plant-based meat). At the same time, he also rightly rejects the concepts of animal welfare and animal rights being at odds, let alone either of them being a panacea for better lives for animals.One aspect of animal law that Favre believes does need to change is that of property status. As he says, the status of animals as personal property is “critical to the future of animal law” (p. 25). In general, the solutions have been largely binary—that animals simply cannot be property for them to have meaningful rights or that animals can be property and still have rights. The former makes intuitive good sense (and is consistent with the objectives of the human abolitionist movements) but would have enormous effects on economic activity throughout the world. The latter is appealing because it does not change the current paradigm, so can be developed more easily.Favre's premise is that we are moving toward rights for animals, so we need to find a way of integrating animals into the current legal system rather than having to destroy and reconstruct the legal system. His ingenious solution is to propose a fourth category of property, alongside real, personal, and intellectual property: “living property.”Within this category, he envisages using the common law concept of the trust to provide equitable “self-ownership,” where an animal has equitable “ownership” while a human retains legal “ownership.” He then connects this concept to adaptations in other aspects of law that start to recognize the selfhood of animals, creating a platform onto which broader and deeper rights for animals can develop, such as the status of “animalhood” (p. 72) and the corresponding legal right of consideration before decisions are made by the state affecting an animal's fundamental interests (such as continuing to be alive). By putting animals in a separate class—rather than uncomfortably leaving them in personal property—he creates a possible route for animal rights that seems less paradigm-busting than removing them from being property altogether.Drawing on evidence from criminal law, tort law, equity (trusts), property law, and family law, he shows how in many places—with a focus on states in the United States—existing laws are being adapted (“green shoots” p. 81) to recognize that animals are more than personal property, in ways that cannot be explained simply through the growth of regulations. For example, family law is starting to recognize that in the division of matrimonial assets, companion animals cannot be treated simply like any other personal property such as a table or a car based on who paid for them. Because animals are “living property,” the courts should take account of other aspects, such as who cared for the animals and who looked after them. Similarly, the concept of extending trust law so that an animal can be the beneficiary of a trust—in the same way as a human can be but inanimate personal property cannot—shows that the law can understand that companion animals can play a large emotional role in our lives (as well as we in theirs), such that we want to ensure proper care for them after we die.The book raises important issues. First, it is intentionally about domestic animals, with their close links with humans, so the potential for laws to engage is much easier than with, say, farmed animals. The danger with solutions that focus on domestic or charismatic animals (e.g., dogs, chimpanzees, elephants) is that the arguments may be pertinent essentially only to those species and therefore hard to apply to animals of less charismatic species, say in a factory farm (but who are present in much greater numbers and generally badly treated in comparison). He “leaves for another day” (p. 32) the discussion about other animals. Hopefully that day will come, as it would be interesting to see how Favre could extend his concept to animals for whom the public has less affection and less appreciation of their capacities (and for whom the prospect of death is much more real and imminent).Secondly, public support for these ideas about living property may simply not be present. If there is not a sufficient groundswell of support for changing the status of animals, then whether one proposes changing it to not-property or “self-owned” property doesn't matter (if someone doesn't like needles, it doesn't matter whether the needle you propose to use is big or small). This may be too pessimistic, of course (people can be helped to overcome a fear of needles, and one way to start is with small needles). Perhaps the law should start with small changes to recognize at least a few animals—their sentience, their capacities for pleasure and pain, their emotions and preferences, their potential for autonomy—and build public support from there.There is also the underlying and more radical point about whether these ideas—the trust for a beloved companion set up by the human, the divorce settlement that doesn't just give the companion to the party who paid for them—are actually bringing about changes for animals as such or are simply adapting laws to help humans, recognizing human needs, and do not actually change the status of animals. The ends are still humans, and the means are still animals.This is not intended to paint a bleak picture: The more bluntand uncompromising part of the animal rights movement that has been focused on the qualitative problem has hardly been successful at getting animal rights laws passed anywhere in the world, so everything that moves us closer to a better, richer, more thoughtful view of animals will help. Favre's approach has ingenuity, shows good sense, and has the potential to bring about real animal rights. The themes and cases in this book that show how courts and legislatures are becoming more aware of the sentience of at least some animals, as well as proposing a middle path in the debate about animals as property, are important in the journey toward recognition of animal rights. Even more important, they may actually work. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage, centré sur la question interdisciplinaire de la rencontre entre les animaux humains et non humains, cherche à créer des passerelles entre les différents courants des études animales. Des chercheurs issus des sciences de l'homme et des sciences de la nature questionnent les grandes étapes historiques, politiques et philosophiques qui ont marqué les relations que nous entretenons avec les animaux non humains depuis le Moyen Âge. Ce volume s'attache à mettre au jour les moments de rupture ainsi que le (...) rôle de certains précurseurs de la révolution animale. Il interroge également la notion d'anthropomorphisme, centrale pour repenser la relation homme-animal. Il se termine par une ouverture sur le domaine artistique, à travers la bande-dessinée, la poésie et la sculpture. (shrink)

Umayyad Islamic art has a very rich understanding of art. It will not be possible to create architectural, handicrafts and other custom decorations of these dates, including animal decorations and animal decorations. Therefore, it has become a very important owner in figure art. The figures of the early Islamic period have a common style and style while under the influence of different cultures. In this high Islamic art, it is preserved and maintained before it is transformed into a (...) form that can be applied from sculpture and painting. It is one of the figures that can be said to what extent the people who have survived until today. Because human and animal figures will not be a part of the most important elements of Islamic art. With the absence of Islam and the negative view of the statue, the life necessary for an early period aimed to be completed. In the design of the plan, private 'civil decorations' can be included in Islamic art with a political planning. Do not avoid this art because they are not cautious about verses and events. In this work, it is aimed to place the subject in question, to bring it to the exhibition and to imagine a wider window expression. Therefore, it will be a pleasure to reach and present the goals achieved. (shrink)

Images of encounters between animals and drones or Google Street View cars are quite viral on the web. This article focuses on the different regimes of animacy and conflicts of affects in these images using an anthropo- semiotic approach. It investigates how other- ness reveals something that exceeds us, from the materiality of the machine to systems of values. It suggests that the disturbance of ani- mal presence in contemporary digital images helps us to read media technologies.

The results of artistic experimentation with data sets from the natural sciences differ considerably with respect to quality and consistency. The British artist duo Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) counts among those setting the standard. In its animations and videos, it explores, in an equally multifaceted and concise manner, how scientists affect our world-view with their respective pictorial languages and visualization strategies. Especially in domains that elude our natural sense of space and time, the researchers’ representations are inevitably creative. (...) Semiconductor combines everyday experiences and complex imaging techniques in manifold ways. Thus, they offer unseen and sometimes unorthodox interpretations of a world in constant flux while retaining a high degree of complexity in their subtly crafted works. Semiconductor’s works provide opportunities for reflection on the extensive procedures in the sciences on various levels and in doing so they create poetic pieces that shift and recombine in various ways. With these means, sensualized data – like sounds and images – take on a strong role in their time-based works. As operative entities they not only represent but they seem to act. (shrink)

Si la référence des cyniques anciens à l’animal comme modèle est bien connue, il est plus difficile d’en comprendre le sens, car ils ne sont pas les seuls dans l’Antiquité à évoquer l’animal dans un contexte éthique. En partant de la définition aristotélicienne du paradigme, il est dans un premier temps montré que l’animal intervient parfois chez les cyniques dans le cadre d’une induction qui présuppose qu’homme et animal appartiennent à un même genre moral. Mais l’ (...) class='Hi'>animal apparaît également, dans d’autres contextes, à titre d’exemplum épidictique : il montre de façon immédiate et évidente à l’homme la vertu et le genre de vie qu’il doit imiter. Ces deux types d’exemplarité reposent sur une conception analogique des rapports entre animalité et humanité, typique de la pensée antique, mais l’originalité du cynisme, par rapport, par exemple, au platonisme, réside dans le fait que la vertu attribuée à l’animal n’est pas conçue comme intrinsèquement inférieure à celle de l’homme. Cependant, comme toute imitation, l’imitation de l’animal repose sur une interprétation préalable de ce qui en lui est à imiter. Ce cercle herméneutique explique que, parfois, l’animal dans le cynisme ait un statut de paradigme négatif. (shrink)

Un navire humain fait naufrage sur l'ile du roi des djinns ou l'entente regne entre toutes les especes. Les naufrages pretendent qu'ils sont les seigneurs, que les animaux sont leurs serviteurs. S'engage alors un proces dans lequel les representants des nations humaines se succedent pour prouver leur superiorite. Les familles animales se relaient pour les refuter. Telle est l'epitre sur les animaux des Freres en Purete. Une fable-fleuve, un joyau inespere de la litterature arabe intercale entre un traite de botanique (...) et un traite d'anatomie. Tout a la fois divertissement et oeuvre de mobilisation politique, miroir tendu au prince aussi bien qu'aux peuples, hymne de louange au Createur, dispute theologique autour du privilege de l'homme dans la Creation, allegorie du systeme philosophique des Freres en Purete, le Proces animal de la domination humaine, qui connut un grand retentissement depuis les Mille et une nuits jusqu'a la Ferme des animaux d'Orwell, n'a pas fini de nous donner a penser et a debattre. Pour restituer l'oeuvre dans sa forme authentique et en offrir les clefs de lecture, il aura fallu se confronter a des manuscrits aux versions contradictoires, realiser l'enquete historique replacant le texte dans son contexte, et operer l'interpretation philosophique de la fable. Car cette epopee judiciaire est aux Freres en Purete ce qu'est la Caverne pour Platon, a savoir l'allegorie du systeme. (shrink)

Human beings are strange animals. Although evolutionary theory has brilliantly accounted for the features we share with other creatures—from the genetic code that directs the construction of our bodies to the details of how our muscles and neurons work—we still stand out in countless ways. Our brains are exceptionally large, we alone have truly grammatical language, and we alone compose symphonies, drive cars, eat spaghetti with a fork and wonder about the origins of the universe.

Tout animal, chaque fois qu'il surmonte une difficulté, éprouve en retour une satisfaction, que son organisme lui procure sous forme de récompense. Rien de plus universel. Mais l'homme est cet animal singulier qui a appris à jouir pour lui-même de son plaisir cognitif. Ce qui n'était qu'un instrument est devenu un but en soi, qui a libéré l'homme de son environnement tout en l'enchaînant à sa propre quête de jouissance. Il en découle une thèse historique aux conséquences capitales. (...) Depuis que, à l'aube de sa préhistoire, l'homme a découvert son aptitude au plaisir, le devenir des civilisations n'a obéi qu'à une seule logique, profondément addictive : l'intensification de ce plaisir. Le processus de très longue durée qui est alors enclenché s'appelle l'anthropocène. Car les sociétés humaines ont toujours avancé dans une même direction, mais elles le faisaient à leur insu : non pas en visant ce progrès de la civilisation qu'idéalisaient les philosophes des Lumières, mais entraînées par la poussée invisible de leur libido cogitandi. Si Ben que, de la révolution néolithique jusqu'à notre mondialisation effrénée, leur course a toujours été une course folle, ignorante de la force qui l'impulsait."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Quelque chose a changé dans notre rapport aux animaux. La " cause animale " est à l'ordre du jour, et le vivant humain est désormais plus essentiellement animal qu'humain. Cela s'appelle un zoocentrisme : au centre de notre humanité, l'animalité. En apparence, nous avons tout à gagner à cette nouvelle image de l'homme. Elle nous vient de la biologie de l'évolution, qui nous a situés, quelque part dans l'ordre des primates, en bonne compagnie avec nos cousins les grands singes. (...) Elle est aussi un appel à réformer et à moraliser nos relations avec les animaux que nous exploitons : on respecte d'autant mieux qui nous ressemble. Enfin l'animalité humaine fait de nous des esprits forts, qui ont su en finir avec les dualismes et les grands partages métaphysiques d'antan. Bref : c'est à tous égards une pensée progressiste, car ouverte à la science, généreuse envers les animaux, et philosophiquement éclairée. Il se pourrait pourtant que ces raisons d'en finir avec la différence homme-animal ne soient qu'un ensemble de pensées bancales qui, entre oubli des sciences humaines, réduction de la vie humaine à sa seule vulnérabilité et déni de ce que nous vivons en première personne, composent finalement le portrait idéologique d'un progressisme stérile. Pouvons-nous échapper au " complexe des trois singes ", ces trois façons de méconnaître ce que nous vivons et faisons comme vivants humains? Et pouvons-nous imaginer un progressisme de vérité conscient de tout ce que nous devons aux animaux sans pour autant renier ce que nous sommes? Etienne Bimbenet est professeur de philosophie contemporaine à l'université Bordeaux Montaigne. Il est notamment l'auteur de L'Animal que je ne suis plus (Gallimard, 2011), et de L'Invention du réalisme (Cerf, 2015). (shrink)

Alain Lévêque, né en 1942 à Paris, est l'auteur notamment de Bonnard, la main légère (Deyrolle Editeur/L'Arbre voyageur, 1994 ; Verdier, 2006), et le préfacier des Observations sur la peinture de Pierre Bonnard, parues aux éditions L'Atelier contemporain en 2015. Il faut miser pour voir. Savoir jouer, ruser, cacher, mais aussi dévoiler son jeu, s'attendre à perdre, à gagner, réfléchir, avoir des coups de tête, de la chance, se recueillir, tout dépenser. Ne pas retenir quelques mots bien au chaud pour (...) l'hiver, dans son bas de laine pour les temps de disette. Tout dépenser. Il faut à chaque fois écrire toutes voiles dehors, au risque de se trouver fort dépourvu quand la bise n'est pas venue. Je ne connais rien de plus difficile que ces commandes d'un " petit texte " pour une exposition de peinture, le travail d'un sculpteur. Car jamais de moi-même je n'irais me fourrer dans pareil pétrin (encore qu'il est tentant de mettre ses mains dans la pâte qui finira par s'échauffer et lever, mais c'est une autre histoire). Il s'agit qu'on m'invite à jouer, et si le jeu est engageant, je ne peux m'empêcher de dire chiche et de jouer à perdre haleine, me fiant à l'excitation, à l'emportement, et croisant les doigts pour qu'à la fin je puisse enlever le bandeau que j'ai sur les yeux et reconnaître ce que j'ai cru toucher. Ecrire pour voir. Est-ce écrire en regard du tableau? On peut bien écrire quelques mots dans un carnet devant le tableau, il ne s'agit jamais d'un tête-à-tête. Le tableau a une et même plusieurs longueurs d'avance. Qu'il soit peint comme de toute éternité et ne demande rien à personne crève les yeux. Le tableau est immobile, cela crève aussi les yeux, on ne peut pourtant pas le fixer. Ecrire dans son carnet oblige à baisser les yeux. Lorsqu'on les relève, le tableau a détalé. On envoie des mots en éclaireur. L'ensemble des textes écrits par Maryline Desbiolles (parus pour la plupart dans des catalogues ou revues, ou inédits) sur l'art, autour de l'art, à partir de l'art est ici réuni : une première partie rassemble les approches les plus réflexives sur la création ; dans le second chapitre les textes s'articulent autour de deux thématiques chères à l'auteur : l'Italie, la cuisine ; le troisième chapitre réunit les essais et poèmes consacrés aux sculptures de Bernard Pagès ; sont ensuite regroupés les essais consacrés à des artistes ou des oeuvres ; le volume se clôt enfin sur des oeuvres de fiction dont l'élément déclencheur de l'écriture fut la fréquentation d'oeuvres plastiques. L'ensemble des textes a été revu en prévision de cet ouvrage, tout autant essai sur l'art qu'oeuvre littéraire. (shrink)

The demanding frontier life of My Ántonia or Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. Yet sprawl and urban density, rather than small towns and farms, are the predominant features of our modern society, agribusiness and other commercial forces have rapidly taken over family farms and ranches, and even the open spaces we think of as natural retreats only retain the barest façade of (...) their former frontier austerity. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, he took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. The simple, stolid pieces of architecture carved out against the Dakota skies—whether the local schoolhouse, car wash, prison, homes, hunting lodge, or churches—evoke in their spare lines and weather-battered frames the stoic and toughened spirit of the people within their walls. Folk art is also an integral part of the landscape in Dow’s visual study, and he examines the subtle evolution of local craftsmanship from homemade sculptures, murals, and carvings to carefully crafted pieces aimed at tourists. Anchoring all of these explorations is the raw and striking landscape of the North Dakota plains. Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. (shrink)

Les canevas de conférences sont à l'œuvre de Gustave Thibon ce que les esquisses sont aux toiles ou aux sculptures des artistes : souvent conçues comme simples outils de travail, elles survivent, par leur valeur intrinsèque, à leur emploi. Ainsi des textes que nous proposons ici aux lecteurs : Gustave Thibon ne les a écrits que pour lui-même, à seule fin d'affermir son discours lorsqu'il parlait en public. Précaution utile, car il improvisait beaucoup... Mais de même que la nudité du (...) trait, s'il est juste, fait ressortir le pouvoir miraculeux de la main, le dépouillement de la phrase accusera ici celui de l'intelligence. Et Gustave Thibon a l'intelligence contagieuse! Il nous donne de comprendre tout ce qu'il nous donne à comprendre. On remarquera qu'ici, où il n'est guère question que de sujets "terre à terre", sociaux ou politiques, Gustave Thibon emploie, certes, son légendaire bon sens à la juste exposition des problèmes, à la claire formulation des questions (ce qui relève d'une sorte de bon sens inspiré qui n'a vraiment rien de commun avec le gros bon sens ordinaire) mais qu'en revanche, il n'entrevoit jamais l'ombre d'une solution qui n'exige de la part des hommes un minimum d'ouverture à une autre dimension - une dimension spirituelle, religieuse, hors de laquelle tout se complique à l'infini, rien ne peut être dénoué."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

"L'abstention, le désintérêt, le désespoir et la haine que suscite "la politique" appellent à changer désormais la stratégie. Le terme de stratégie, interrogé sous le prisme des implications que peuvent avoir ses connotations militaires en termes d'affects et de désaffection, le type d'action politique qu'il paraît induire, ouvre un commentaire précis de Jacques Rancière, de ses positions et intentions. En passant par la littérature, car "l'homme est un animal politique parce que c'est un animal littéraire", Vincent Jarry dessine (...) alors autre chose en résonance : une démocratie des murmures loin des donneurs de leçon, piste pratique cherchant à conjurer le manque de sensibilité dont souffre trop souvent le militantisme."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay examines the exhibition of dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Dinosaurs provide an especially illuminating lens through which to view the history of museum display practices for two reasons: they made for remarkably spectacular exhibits; and they rested on contested theories about the anatomy, life history, and behavior of long-extinct animals to which curators had no direct observational access. The American Museum sought to capitalize on the (...) popularity of dinosaurs while mitigating the risks of mounting an overtly speculative display by fashioning them into a kind of mixed-media installation made of several elements, including fossilized bone, shellac, iron, and plaster. The resulting sculptures provided visitors with a vivid and lifelike imaginative experience. At the same time, curators, who were anxious to downplay the speculative nature of mounted dinosaurs, drew systematic attention to the material connection that tied individual pieces of fossilized bone to the actual past. Freestanding dinosaurs can therefore be read to have functioned as iconic sculptures that self-consciously advertised their indexical content. (shrink)

Peu connu du grand public, le philosophe Henri Van Lier a rédigé à la fin de sa vie une œuvre monumentale, l'Anthropogénie, qui apporte un éclairage nouveau et pour tout dire fascinant sur ce drôle d'animal qu'est l'homme, depuis ses performance les plus basiques, jusqu'à ses réalisations les plus élaborées. Extraordinaire par son ampleur et sa fécondité, cet ouvrage de plus de 1000 pages est d'une lecture difficile car pour mener à bien son entreprise, Van Lier a - Philosophie (...) – Nouvel article. (shrink)

On ne comprend pas vraiment le thomisme tant qu'on n'y sent pas la presence de saint Thomas lui-meme, ou plutot de frere Thomas avant qu'il ne fut devenu un saint fete au calendrier, bref de l'homme avec son temperament, son caractere, ses sentiments, ses gouts et jusqu'a ses passions. Car il en eut au moins une. Au niveau de la nature humaine pure et simple, Thomas eut la passion de l'intelligence. Comprendre ensemble le philosophe et le croyant en Thomas, c'est (...) en ces termes qu'Etienne Gilson invite le lecteur a entrer dans la pensee complexe, mais incontournable, du Docteur angelique. Tel est aussi l'esprit qui anime cette etude systematique, visant au coeur meme du thomisme et guidee par le souci constant de manifester l'unite de la doctrine a travers le deploiement de cette passion de l'intelligence - cette puissance contemplative, qui embrasse dans un meme elan rationnel les grandes questions theologiques, ontologiques et anthropologiques: l'existence de Dieu, l'etre et l'essence, la nature et la causalite physique, la connaissance, la vie humaine. Dans l'oeuvre immense d'Etienne Gilson, cet ouvrage occupe une place centrale: non seulement parce que Le Thomisme aura accompagne son auteur durant toute sa carriere, a travers les remaniements et amplifications de six editions successives; mais encore, parce que cette magistrale introduction a la philosophie de saint Thomas aura contribue de maniere decisive a definir une methode historiographique: celle d'une histoire doctrinale unitaire et coherente, par dela tous les clivages philosophiques et theologiques. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

Les falsifications idéologiques qui voient dans la puissance le seul déchaînement de la nature, des pulsions et des forces de domination, mobilisent la volonté et les instincts les plus agressifs pour les mettre au service de leur idéal de maîtrise. Vouloir la domination, telle est bien l'interprétation de la puissance que se font les impuissants. Cette interprétation a pour elle la force de l'évidence car c'est toujours la maîtrise, comme fonctionnement institué de la puissance, que nous percevons d'un œil grossier. (...) Les lectures réactives de Nietzsche se trouvent ainsi piégées lorsqu'elles mettent en avant certaines " valeurs nietzschéennes ". Elles ne font que révéler l'idéal de maîtrise qui anime leurs interprétations de la volonté de puissance. Elles oublient de se voir fonctionner en Nietzsche. Inutile pour cette raison de chercher la Grande Politique de Nietzsche dans un programme ou une institution. L'institution des valeurs se fait toujours au détriment de la puissance active d'évaluation individuelle. Alors que les lectures réactives de Nietzsche réduisent l'expression de cette puissance d'évaluation à un non-lieu, les lectures actives de Nietzsche en font une force de libération. De cette force, recouverte ou occultée par les plus grands interprètes de Nietzsche, dépend l'actualité critique d'une pensée pour tous, une pensée dont personne ne peut se prévaloir d'en être le seul maître. (shrink)

L’exposition d’art dans des paysages est devenu populaire au Japon, avec la multiplication récente de festivals d’art locaux. Dans ces festivals, qui attirent chacun des centaines de milliers de visiteurs, coexistent des œuvres hétérogènes. Certaines sont des sculptures autonomes, d’autres des installations qui se fondent dans le paysage, et d’autres encore sont des œuvres de type « art relationnel ». Bien que ces œuvres in situ affirment leur lien essentiel avec le site naturel rural et avec le corps du spectateur (...) — constituant un événement, une expérience, une rencontre éphémère —, les relations avec le site comme avec le visiteur sont complexes et ambigües. Il y a des œuvres in situ, mais parfois aussi in aliquo situ : des œuvres qui peuvent être installées n’importe où. Qu’est-ce qui attire les visiteurs dans ces expositions? Quels sont donc la nature et le mérite de leur localisation? Si les visiteurs apprécient de voir des œuvres dans ces paysages cela peut être en partie lié au principe japonais traditionnel d’expérience des lieux dit meisho-meguri, ou « pèlerinage vers des sites célèbres ». Cette pratique issue du Moyen Âge est associée historiquement au sacré. Aujourd’hui ce pèlerinage prend la forme du tourisme moderne mais conserve un sens traditionnel invisible car les visiteurs se déplacent à travers une série de lieux géographiques selon un jeu culturellement codé. Selon nous, dans le cas des visites d’œuvres d’art en zones rurales, l’appréciation des œuvres d’art participe à ce même jeu traditionnel de se déplacer physiquement dans une série de lieux. Cette dimension spirituelle implicite modifie à son tour la perception des œuvres. Ainsi on dira que la pratique japonaise de visiter ces expositions d’art in situ témoigne de la survivance d’une tradition, et constitue ainsi un système alternatif d’expérience esthétique. The installations of artwork in natural landscapes have become popular in Japan with the recent increase in local art festivals. In these art festivals where hundreds of thousands of visitors gather, heterogeneous installations coexist; some are autonomous sculptures, some are fused into the natural landscape, and some belong to “relational art”. Although most works assert the essential quality of their location, and the experience as “an event”, their relationships to the rural areas and to the body of the visitor are complex and ambiguous. Some works are really in situ, but some are in aliquo situ—that is, works that could be installed anywhere. What attracts visitors to these exhibitions? Hence what is the nature and merit of the location? What is the relation to the visitor’s bodily presence? If visitors enjoy the site-specificity of the artwork this may be linked to the traditional Japanese system of experiencing places as meisho-meguri—i.e. “a pilgrimage to a series of famous sites”. This practice comes from the Middle Ages and was by then spiritual. While today these pilgrimages appear as a form of modern tourism, they retain a culturally coded character because visitors’s journey is like “a game of visiting a series of geographical places”. According to me, in the case of the visit of artistic sites, the appreciation of the artwork participates in this same game of bodily displacement to a series of places. This implicit spiritual underpinning conversely modifies the visitor’s perception of the works. Thus I propose that visiting artistic sites in natural settings in Japan appears as informed by this Japanese particular tradition, and thus constitutes an alternative system of contemporary aesthetic experience. (shrink)

           “I’ve written a story!†My eighty year old father’s rich, booming voice fired up the phone line, briefly burning through the fuzzy enunciation that stemmed from a minor stroke of three years back. It hadn’t been the stroke but rather his growing blindness that had slowed his production. Through dictation he’d still kept up his short monthly magazine column (in one of the last and most gravely scatological of these (...) he’d inadvertently shamed my Enlightenment scholarship by writing “I thought everyone knew that Frederick the Great and Voltaire corresponded about their bowel movementsâ€). He sounded happier and more alive than I’d heard him in years, though the sketch he’d written, from a cat’s viewpoint, is spectrally peopled under aliases by his Shakespearian actor parents, and a spunky Lesbian witch who lightheartedly inducts my mother into her coven through ritualized sexual intercourse, which scandalizes my grandmother and titillates my father, who confesses along the way to alcoholism, habitual premature ejaculation, voyeurism, and unassuageable jealousy of his illustrious father, whose death in 1949 aroused only “a cold pride†(unlike the wrench I know he felt when his wife and his mother died in the late 1960s). The sketch resolves with his dead father’s body intoning Hamlet’s lines about what a piece of work is man, ending with “A paragon of animals,†which the feline observer coolly concludes must surely refer to cats.            That phone call was my last conversation with my father. A month before he had, quixotically, married a woman he’d known for two decades, on his part decidedly nonexclusively, a few days after she got a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer. Now, in deference to her fear of flying, they took off on a tiring train and car trip from San Francisco to a convention in London, Ontario, where my exhausted father began his slide into incontinence, depression, and dementia.. (shrink)

Dans notre monde radicalement artificialisé, seuls les animaux, en nous rappelant ce qu'a été la nature, nous permettront peut-être de nous souvenir de notre propre humanité. Mais saurons-nous vivre avec eux? Le voulons-nous encore? Car l'abattage de masse des animaux, considérés comme simples éléments des " productions animales ", leur inflige une terreur et une souffrance insoutenables, tout en désespérant les éleveurs. Et l'élevage, après 10 000 ans d'existence, est aujourd'hui souvent décrit comme une nuisance, pour l'environnement comme pour notre (...) santé. Une condamnation reposant sur une confusion entre " élevage " et " production animale ", dont il nous faut comprendre les enjeux. Qu'est-ce que l'élevage? Quelles différences entre " élevage " et " productions animales "? Quelle est la place de la mort clans le travail avec les animaux? Peut-on améliorer leur sort dans les systèmes industriels? Faut-il " libérer les animaux " comme le proposent certains philosophes? En répondant ici a ces questions, Jocelyne Porcher explique en quoi la capacité des hommes à coexister pacifiquement dépend de leur capacité à vivre en paix et dignement avec les animaux. Et pourquoi, dès lors, sauver l'élevage en évitant son assujettissement au système d'exploitation et de mise à mort industrielle pourrait être une des plus belles utopies du XXIe siècle. (shrink)

I propose a distinction between design intentions, activities and products, as opposed to artistic intentions, activities and artworks. Examples of design products would include a specific type of car (or any other invention or device) as well as closer relatives of art such as decorative wall designs. In order to distinguish artistic from design intentions, I present an example in which two sculptors independently work on a single object to produce two sculptures, which are distinct just because the artistic intentions (...) of the sculptors are distinct. This case is then contrasted with an attempted parallel example for design intentions, which fails to produce two correspondingly distinct design products in spite of the different design intentions of its designers. I argue that this failure occurs because designs are types, for which any single token of a given type could not simultaneously be a token of some other type of the same general kind; whereas the possibility of my sculptural 'double artwork' example shows that such artworks cannot be types. I then further investigate the concept of a design, and conclude by arguing that an extension of my sculptural example shows that literary artworks also cannot be types. (shrink)

Loin de pouvoir être réduit à son acception contemporaine, notamment heideggérienne, le concept de finitude est un concept traditionnel. Tel est le constat qui anime cette recherche dont l'objectif est de mettre au jour certaines de ses figures dans l'histoire de la pensée. Il s'agit, en évitant toute interprétation préconçue, d'étudier, sans prétendre à l'exhaustivité, comment ce concept, d'abord présent de façon explicite dans la pensée chrétienne des premiers siècles, se renouvelle ensuite tout au long de l'histoire de la pensée. (...) Le concept de finitude apparaît inauguralement chez Grégoire de Nysse, le théologien fondamental de l'infinité divine, pour qui " le fini " - to peratoumenon - est marqué par l'imperfection radicale de ne pas être Dieu. L'essence du fini est alors pensée grâce à la liaison platonicienne entre être et non-être. Appartenant au domaine général du fini, l'homme est en effet séparé de l'être véritable, mais il possède aussi un être propre : cette double caractéristique est une constante de l'approche chrétienne du fini, que Thomas d'Aquin exprime dans le concept d'ens finitum " participant " de l'être sans restriction dans sa restriction même. Refusant la discontinuité médiévale entre l'étant fini et son créateur, encore à leurs yeux présente chez Descartes, Leibniz et Spinoza renouvellent le concept de fini par leur ambition commune d'une rationalité infinie du fini, le premier au travers de la notion de " substance finie " dérivée de l'infini, le second par celle de " mode fini ", affection de la substance infinie. C'est contre de telles approches de la finitude que la philosophie critique réagit : " l'être raisonnable fini " de Kant est un sujet originaire et ne peut donc trouver aucun appui dans une rationalité infinie. L'idéalisme allemand entreprend de dépasser cette finitude kantienne à partir de Kant lui-même, en repensant la subjectivité transcendantale. La question du statut à accorder à la finitude - Endlichkeit - est au cœur des controverses qui l'animent. Heidegger reprendra d'abord, non sans hésitation, ce concept d'Endlichkeit, ancré dans la tradition occidentale, en parlant d'une " finitude du Dasein ", puis d'une " finitude de l'Être ", mais le poids historique d'un tel concept lui apparaîtra rapidement incompatible avec la nouveauté de sa pensée. Il ressort de cette étude que la question de la finitude consiste moins à se demander si l'homme est ou non un être fini que de déterminer de quelle finitude il est fini. Cette détermination est historiquement et philosophiquement décisive car elle concerne l'essence de l'homme, qui peut et doit " se connaître lui-même ". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Music, Mind, and Morality:Arousing the Body PoliticPhilip Alperson (bio) and Noël Carroll (bio)I. IntroductionIf like Aristotle one agrees that the responsibility of philosophy is to offer as comprehensive a picture of phenomena as possible, then one must admit that sometimes the methods and goals of analytic philosophy stand in the way of getting the job done properly; they may even distort one's findings. This is not said in order (...) to eschew analytic philosophy. It is simply a reminder that sometimes we need to stand back and check to reassure ourselves that the tail is not wagging the dog.One example of where this danger looms is in the philosophy of art. In the eighteenth century the Modern System of the Arts was born.1 It included the practices that we think nowadays are the appropriate inhabitants of art schools and art centers and the legitimate beneficiaries of programs like the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States. These arts included poetry, painting, sculpture, music, dance, and sometimes gardening. These are what we might call the arts with a "capital A."This is a different way of understanding the notion of the arts and the nomenclature from which they derive in Latin and Greek. For Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, arts were simply any skilled practice. Poetry, for Aristotle at least, was an art, but so were navigation, medicine, and statecraft. And there were, of course, the martial arts. What happens with the emergence of the Modern System of the Arts—otherwise known as the Fine Arts, or the Beaux Arts, or, for us, the Arts with a capital A—is that a subset of the arts in the Greco-Roman sense were selected out and christened as a class unto itself, [End Page 1] different from the other "small a" arts. Whereas once upon a time chemists and painters might have been grouped together in the same guild in virtue of the fact that both types of workers ground substances, such as pigment; with the advent of the Modern System of the Arts, chemists and painters became first and foremost categorically different.However, the consolidation of the class of Arts with a capital A demanded a theoretical answer to the question of what criterion an art form had to meet in order to gain membership in the Modern System of the Arts. The first suggestion was that a candidate practice had to possess the capacity to imitate the beautiful in nature. This was not a definition that had legs. For when absolute or pure instrumental music—or, as Peter Kivy calls it, music alone2 —took center stage as the most important form of music as well as the Art with a capital A to which all the other arts putatively aspired, the criteria for entry into the Modern System of the Arts had to be reconceived. Since music alone could not creditably be described as the imitation of the beautiful in nature (or, for that matter, the imitation of anything else), a new license for practicing Art with a capital A had to be found. And this has become one of the animating tasks of the analytic philosophy of art.But the analytic philosophy of art comes with a certain bias toward discharging this task. It is committed to finding an essentialist answer to resolving the question of what warrants citizenship in the republic of Art (with a capital A). That is, what makes something an Artistic practice or, for that matter, a work of Art such that it is different from other things? What separates the Arts and the artworks from everything else?Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the most popular and recurring proposals here is that the Arts are what are primarily intended to promote aesthetic experience where that has formerly been characterized as disinterested pleasure but, more recently, as experience valued for its own sake. Experience valued for its own sake, of course, is virtually by definition conceptually independent from any other end, whereas the practices that do not belong to the Modern System of the Arts are primarily devoted to securing other ends—useful or utilitarian ends, knowledge... (shrink)

This article examines the little-known sculptures of pathology created by Doctor Paul Richer (1849–1933) in the 1890s for the so-called Musée Charcot at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in Paris. Under the direction of Doctor Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), one of the founders of modern neurology, Richer was the head of the hospital's museum of pathological anatomy, as well as the Salpêtrière's resident artist. His ‘series of figural representations of the principal types of nervous pathology’ included busts of patients suffering from (...) labio-glosso-laryngeal paralysis and myopathy, as well as sculptures depicting patients with Parkinson's disease and juvenile hypothyroidism. These patient portraits were seen as objective, while also paradoxically providing an alternative to mechanical media, such as the photograph and the cast, by permitting the doctor's intervention in not only controlling and animating the sitter, but also emphasising the patient's symptoms. This was a new kind of medical specimen: the ‘scientific artwork’, as they were called by a contemporary. This phrase, far from being an oxymoron, indicates the purposive collapse of the objective (‘scientific’) and subjective (‘artistic’) binary in Richer's sculptures of pathology. Through a detailed examination of three of Richer's works, this article problematises the categories traditionally used to describe, analyse and understand medical imagery and complicates our understanding of the relationship between science and art at the end of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Since time immemorial, Lord Jagannātha has been regarded as the principal deity of Odisha. The land of Odisha (former Kaliṅga) was a meeting place of the Hindus, Buddhists and Jainas. The Buddhists, Jainas, Vaiṣṇavas, the worshippers of Gaṇpati and others came to Purī and found the presence of their own lord in Jagannātha. However, of all religious creeds, Buddhism played an important role in the socio-cultural history of Odisha. During the period of emperor Aśoka, the Śabaras (a tribal people) of (...) Odisha were converted to Buddhism. Buddhist pillars were built in Purī, and Buddhist symbols were carved into it. Later on, the Śabaras started worshipping the Triratna as the three principal deities of the Jagannātha temple. In course of time, the three deities of the temple, viz. Jagannātha, Baḷabhadra and Subhadrā, have been accepted by the people of Odisha as the symbols of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, respectively. As stated by Donaldson (Iconography of the Buddhist sculpture of Orissa, Abhinav Publications, Buldana, 2001), the eighteenth century Buddhist works such as “Jñānasidhi” and “Prajñodaya-Viniścaya-Siddhi,” the Buddha was named as Lord Jagannātha. By the twelfth century A.D., there had already developed a new culture in Odisha with Jagannātha as the center and the Lord came to be conceived as Ādi Buddha and Buddha as the ninth incarnation of Viṣṇu-Jagannātha. The place of Purī has been regarded as a place of Tāntric worship and Jagannātha as the Lord of the Tāntric cult. The Gundichā temple (where the Lord resided for 10 days during the Car festival) has been regarded as a Buddha Vihāra. The Buddhist principle of nonviolence and universal brotherhood found its best expression in the Jagannātha cult. (shrink)

Over evolutionary time, humans have developed a selective sensitivity to features in the human face that convey information on sex, age, emotions, and intentions. This ability might not only be applied to our conspecifics nowadays, but also to other living objects (i.e., animals) and even to artificial structures, such as cars. To investigate this possibility, we asked people to report the characteristics, emotions, personality traits, and attitudes they attribute to car fronts, and we used geometric morphometrics (GM) and multivariate statistical (...) methods to determine and visualize the corresponding shape information. Automotive features and proportions are found to covary with trait perception in a manner similar to that found with human faces. Emerging analogies are discussed. This study should have implications for both our understanding of our prehistoric psyche and its interrelation with the modern world. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore digitally fabricated aesthetic enhancements and modifications of the body as well as digitally fabricated fauna habitats. We will address how we utilize speculative works through our bio inspired digitally fabricated designs via two of our most recent projects: {skin} D.E.E.P. and in silico et in situ. Through these two projects we explore cultural implications of the intersection of technology and biologically inspired art/design. Technology has provided an ever increasing amount of data which has facilitated the (...) way data can be used in aesthetic explorations. Technology can redefine the human experience by enhancing our senses, experiences, and forms of expression. In our work {skin} D.E.E.P., we explore these ideas via augmentation through wearables and biomimetic expressions on the skin through digitally fabricated prosthetics. {skin} D.E.E.P. employs temporary biomimetic skin patterns via wearable 3D printed exoskeletons. The first series of this work mimics the patterns and textures of animal skin via ephemeral impressions onto human skin. Taking inspiration from shedding snakeskin, we shed the outer layer by removing the 3D printed prosthesis. The epidermis retains the negative imprint of the prosthetic mimicking the look of serpent skin. The dermis reestablishes the smooth form of the human skin as it heals itself within the hour, erasing the ephemeral imprint, symbolically representing rebirth and renewal. Investigating the ephemeral aesthetic of textured patterns on human skin will not by any means provide a solution to an engineering problem, yet acts as a larger philosophical basis to conduct a discussion about the possibilities of blending bio inspired designs. The manifestation of data into physical form occurs via digital fabrication in our most recent series in silico et in situ: fauna habitats in the age of voxels, where we aim to create a new ecosystem for animals and to potentially augment their habitat. The habitats include pollinator waterers, spider habitats and turtle basking platforms. This project pushes forward with a new piece—the development of a 20-foot avian sculpture that will solely exist to support the habitat of the Chimney Swift species. The Chimney Swift is a near-threatened bird species in the US. in silico et in situ investigates the interplay of art, nature and technology by contextualizing sculptural works and placing these sculptures into nature. The project serves as a breeding ground for a larger dialogue about nature, culture, human intervention, design art and technology. Providing the artwork in the public sphere, barrier free in nature, fosters this discourse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Artforum, Andy Warhol, and the Art of Living:What Art Educators Can Learn from the Recent History of American Art WritingDavid Carrier (bio)When around 1980 I began writing art criticism, Artforum was much concerned with historical analysis.1 When presenting the work of younger painters and sculptors, it seemed natural to explain artists' accomplishments by identifying precedents for their work. Much of my criticism published in the 1980s presented post-formalist accounts (...) of abstract painting. Seeking precedents for the painting I admired, I looked to the history of art. But such pleas for the value of tradition were doomed. Commentators preaching the values of tradition lost out to the writers emphasizing a break with the past. Much of interest for art education can be learned by studying the history of this very influential, small circulation journal.Only in retrospect did the urgency of this felt need for a break with the past become apparent. The history of responses to Abstract Expressionism suggested a different way of thinking about moments of change. HaroldRosenberg's conception of "action painting" implied that Pollock broke dramatically with the past. Clement Greenberg, by contrast, in a famous phrase said: "I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollock's 1946-1950 manner really took up Analytic Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braquehad left it...in their collages of 1912 and 1913."2 Greenberg's counter-intuitive analysis, asking us to see very different looking paintings as essentially similar, had prevailed. So it was not unreasonable to expect that after Greenberg, concern with tradition would remain important. But that was not what happened.Demand for a break with the past often carries political overtones. Historians debate whether the French Revolution broke with the past, or merely developed trends of the old regime. The idea of a complete break with tradition can seem attractive, but of course such dramatic ways of thinking underestimate real continuities. Struggle among post-Greenbergian artwriters to define a new critical paradigm mimics conflicts among artists to define the [End Page 1] leading post-Abstract Expressionist tradition. Once a critical paradigm has been established, debate may proceed peacefully. But when defining a period style is at issue, the stakes are high, and so conflicts are ferocious. Of course, struggle is always accompanied also by co-operation, but failing to grasp the real role of conflict leads to all-too-pious visions of what is possible.Greenberg developedthe most influential critical approach, and so when his way of thinking was rejected, a radically different approach was of most interest. Here we are dealing with what Harold Bloom famously called the anxiety of influence. Just as the most interesting painting after Abstract Expressionism deconstructed that tradition, so in criticism no ways of thinking too similar to Greenberg's stood a chance of being important. I think it interesting to reconstruct the process rationally in which an individual obtains such power. A totem, Freud explains, is "an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan."3 The communion bread and wine are just bread and wine, but for the believer they become Christ's body and blood. Rationally speaking, a representational painting is just pigment on canvas; and a minimalist sculpture, just shaped metal. But in what Arthur Danto calls the "transfiguration of the commonplace," "a work of art...has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks...We are dealing with an altogether different order of things."4 Greenberg became a totem. He was not just an important writer whose arguments entitled him to reasonable respect. The mere mention of his name invoked irrational fears.Greenberg was obsessed with tradition. Abstract Expressionism was rooted in early modernism, so that the era from Manet through Pollock defined a period style. Greenberg's historiography may seem inescapable. How can a young painter be understood except by seeking precedents for her achievement? Cannot the now famous artists who emerged in the 1980s be understood in these terms? Barbara Kruger comes out of John Heartfield and dada... (shrink)

Even today, a century after the publication of the “Origin of Species”, current zoological literature often reveals an insufficient grasp of the implications of the now generally accepted view that it is natural selection that confers direction on the evolutionary process.This is, in part, due to a reaction against oversimplified teleology and against Lamarckism. In rejecting Lamarck's thesis that the activities of an animal directly affect its hereditary characters it is frequently assumed that this implies that such activities are (...) irrelevant to the study of evolution. This is a non-sequitur, for activities may affect evolution not directly, through heredity, but indirectly, by influencing the direction of the selective forces impinging on the organism. Reasons are given for concluding that changes in habits and behaviour frequently precede structural change and, in fact, determine the direction of the latter.As an example of a concept which deserves a more evolutionary treatment than it commonly receives, the subject of neoteny is considered. It appears that failure to think in terms of the selective forces involved has frequently led to error. An analysis in functional terms is made of the theory that the chordates represent secondarily glorified sea-squirts and it is concluded that this idea is unlikely to be correct. The characteristics of man that are commonly considered to be neotenous are also discussed. It is concluded that a facile and unanalytical application of the label “neoteny” to many of the evolutionary changes involved has tended to obscure rather than to clarify their significance: the neotenous features of man are not those that have been of primary importance in human evolution, but are secondary to the acquisition of new characters which are not to be found in either the adult or the young stages of any other primate.Aujourd'hui, un siècle après l'apparition de l'Originedes Espèces, la conviction est presque générale que la sélection naturelle dirige le procès de l'évolution. Néanmoins, les publications zoologiques actuelles révèlent souvent une compréhension insuffisante de ce qui en résulte.Ceci doit en partie être considéré comme réaction contre une téléologie simpliste et contre le Lamarckisme. En rejetant la thèse de Lamarck, que les activités d'un animal ont une influence directe sur ses caractéristiques héréditaires, on admet fréquemment que de pareilles activités n'ont rien à voir avec l'étude le l'évolution. Cependant, une telle conclusion n'est pas justifiée, car les activités peuvent influer sur l'évolution non pas directement, par la voie de l'hérédité, mais indirectement en agissant sur la direction des forces sélectives que l'organisme rencontre. Des raisons ont été données qui mènent à conclure que des changements dans les habitudes et dans le comportement précèdent maintes fois le changement structural et même déterminent la direction de celui-ci.Comme exemple d'un concept qui mérite un traitement plus évolutionniste qu'il ne reçoive en général, la néoténie a été examinée. Il paraît que l'on a fait beaucoup d'erreurs en ne tenant pas compte des forces sélectives engagées. Une analyse au pointde-vue de la fonction a été appliquée à la théorie que les chordées ne sont que des ascidies néoténiques transfigurées par après, et il s'ensuit que cette idée n'est probablement pas correcte. Aussi les caractéristiques de l'homme généralement regardées comme neoténiques ont été discutées. Il en résulte que, en désignant légèrement et sans analyse plusieurs changements évolutionnaires comme néoténie, on a plutôt obsurci qu'éclairci leur signification. Ce ne sont pas les traits néoteniques de l'homme qui ont joué le rôle principal dans l'évolution humaine; au contraire, ils n'apparaissent qu'après l'acquisition de quelques nouvelles caractéristiques qui ne se trouvent ni dans l'adulte ni dans les phases plus jeunes des autres primates.Sogar heutzutage, ein Jahrhundert nach dem Erscheinen der „Origin of Species”, zeigt die jetzige zoologische Literatur oft eine unzulängliche Einsicht in die Folgerungen, zu denen die jetzt allgemein akzeptierte Annahme leitet, dass die natürliche Selektion die Richtung des Evolutionsprozesses bedingt.Dies ist teilweise zu sehen als eine Reaktion gegen eine einseitige Teleologie und gegen das Lamarckismus. Bei der Ablehnung der TheseLamarck's, dass die Aktivitäten eines Tieres einen direkten Einfluss ausüben auf seine erbliche Konstitution, nimmt man oft an, dass dies bedeutet, dass derartige Aktivitäten demnach nichts zur Sache tun bei dem Studium der Evolution. Zu einer derartigen Konklusion ist man jedoch nicht berechtigt, denn, obwohl die Aktivitäten die Evolution nicht direkt beeinflussen können mittels der Erblichkeit, so können sie dies jedoch indirekt, weil sie die Richtung der selektiven Kräfte, welche auf das Organismus einwirken, bestimmen. Es werden Argumente gegeben, welche die Konklusion rechtfertigten, dass Änderungen in Gewohnheit und Verhalten oft Strukturänderungen vorhergehen und tatsächlich die Richtung dieser letztgenannten bestimmen. Die Neotenie wirdt als ein Beispiel eines Begriff betrachtet, welcher eine mehr evolutionäre Behandlung verdient als bisher geschehen ist. Es ergibt sich dass man viele Irrtümer hat gemacht, indem man den betreffenden selektiven Kräften keine Rechnung getragen hat. Eine Analyse der Theorie, welche die Chordaten als neotenische Ascidien betrachtet, wird von einem funktionellen Gesichtspunkt aus durchgeführt. Daraus scheint der Schluss berechtigt, dass diese Theorie falsch ist. Auch werden die menschlichen Kennzeichen, welche gewöhnlich als neotenische betrachtet werden, besprochen. Die Konklusion lautet, dass, wenn man leichtfertig und ohne genügende Analyse den Zettel „Neotenie“ für mancherlei evolutive Änderungen anwendet, man die richtige Bedeutung dieser Erscheinung vielmehr verdunkelt als aufklärt: nicht die neotenische Kennzeichen des Menschen sind am wichtigsten in seiner Evolution; in Gegenteil sie erscheinen nur sekundär, nachdem die neuen Kennzeichen, welche sich weder in den Erwachsenen noch in den jüngeren Stadien von den anderen Primaten finden lassen, erschienen sind. (shrink)

Electronic machinic phenomena yield fascinating links with biological processes. Either in the macro-micro-structure of binary encoded information ‐ bytes on media ‐ to the processual flow programs execute on hardware while operating it. Observing micro-electronic worlds akin to living entities: electronic voltages running throughout electronic architectures pipelining data to memory registers; operating systems executing programs on electronic substrates; data flows taking place in machines and in communications protocols within networks. Static art-sci constructs explore and visualize these observations as 2D drawings (...) (Neon Paleolitikos Drawings, 2017‐present) or 3D sculptures (Binary and Biological Sculpture Series, 2018‐present), creatively exposing their inherent rhythmic organization of information, while dynamic installations (Phoenix.Wolfanddotcom.info, Wolfanddotcom, Half-Plant, 2017, Ant Ennae Labyrinths, 2019‐present) propose immersive interference mechanisms that attempt user entanglement in non-human environments. Seven aesthetic case examples are introduced and explored, observing and seeking resonances between micro-granular electronic, biological and hybrid data as source synthesis. This research proposes a look at bio-electronic aggregates on Neon Paleolitikos strata. After the Anthropocene, Neon Paleolitikos is an imaginary epoch dating since the decline of mankind until the zenith of bio-electronic life forms: operational symbioses combined among ruins of silica, transistors, algorithms, cells, plants, animals and electricity. (shrink)