Essays, written between 1920 and 1953, by an influential, modern painter on the purpose of art in modern life.

This paper examines the apparent contradictions between the use of the fragmented close-up in Fernand Léger's film Ballet mécanique and his depiction of the cohesive face in his painting in the early 1920s. I argue that this paradox stems from Léger's seeing, in certain pre-war movements whose aesthetics were premised on fragmentation, an endorsement of the supreme value of technology and modernity to the human subject, and of the suborning of that subject to industrial modernity, with all the catastrophic (...) human consequences that were then witnessed in the First World War. These “aesthetics of fragmentation” are then compared and contrasted with Purism's post-war reconciliation of “man” as a cohesive being, achieved through its conservative revision of modernist aesthetics. This critique is effected through the “portmanteau” of Ballet mécanique, which is effectively an assemblage of different pre-war modernist aesthetics contrasted with Purist depictions of cohesive form. (shrink)

Resumo Houve, durante o século XX, uma persistente recorrência do tema da síntese ou integração das artes, em especial no campo da arquitetura: desde as vanguardas dos anos de 1920 até a ressurgência do tema, no imediato Pós-II Guerra, com Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion e Fernand Léger. No Brasil, nos anos de 1950, o entusiasmo de Mário Pedrosa com a construção da nova capital seguiu o lema Brasília, a cidade nova, síntese das artes. A literatura correspondente menciona com frequência (...) os nomes do arquiteto Gottfried Semper, um teórico oitocentista do estilo, e sua cooperação com o compositor Richard Wagner. O interesse contemporâneo pelo tema da síntese ou integração das artes e suas relações com arte e arquitetura aponta para os trabalhos desses dois autores como a proposição inicial, no âmbito da Gesamtkunstwerk ou a obra de arte total. Neste estudo, examina-se a feição especulativa com que Wagner sustentou a Gesamtkunstwerk, como passo estratégico para os estudos sobre o tema.There had been througout the 20th century a persistent recurrence of the theme of the synthesis or integration of arts, in the field of architecture at least. It was present amongst the early twentieth century vanguards but had a bounce back in the early postwar period with Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion and Fernand Léger. In Brazil in the 1950s, art critic Mário Pedrosa under the mote Brasilia enthusiastically hailed the construction of Brasília the New City, Synthesis of Arts. The corresponding literature points out to architect and historian Gottfried Semper, a nineteenth century theorist of style, who cooperated closely with composer and operist Richard Wagner as the authors who put forth the original conceptions of the Gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork. In this study, we examine the speculative guise with which Wagner held up the Gesamtkunstwerk, as a strategic step for the studies on the theme. (shrink)

Sixteen of the 20th century's leading artistic innovators talk forcefully about their work — from Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger's 1912 presentation of cubist theory to Henry Moore's comments, three decades later, on sculpture and primitive art. Four newly added essays by Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, El Lissitzky, and Fernand Léger.

The Einstellung effect occurs when the first idea that comes to mind, triggered by familiar features of a problem, prevents a better solution being found. It has been shown to affect both people facing novel problems and experts within their field of expertise. We show that it works by influencing mechanisms that determine what information is attended to. Having found one solution, expert chess players reported that they were looking for a better one. But their eye movements showed that they (...) continued to look at features of the problem related to the solution they had already thought of. The mechanism which allows the first schema activated by familiar aspects of a problem to control the subsequent direction of attention may contribute to a wide range of biases both in everyday and expert thought - from confirmation bias in hypothesis testing to the tendency of scientists to ignore results that do not fit their favoured theories. (shrink)

In this study, we apply MOSAIC (model of syntax acquisition in children) to the simulation of the developmental patterning of children's optional infinitive (OI) errors in 4 languages: English, Dutch, German, and Spanish. MOSAIC, which has already simulated this phenomenon in Dutch and English, now implements a learning mechanism that better reflects the theoretical assumptions underlying it, as well as a chunking mechanism that results in frequent phrases being treated as 1 unit. Using 1, identical model that learns from child‐directed (...) speech, we obtain a close quantitative fit to the data from all 4 languages despite there being considerable cross‐linguistic and developmental variation in the OI phenomenon. MOSAIC successfully simulates the difference between Spanish (a pro‐drop language in which OI errors are virtually absent) and obligatory subject languages that do display the OI phenomenon. It also highlights differences in the OI phenomenon across German and Dutch, 2 closely related languages whose grammar is virtually identical with respect to the relation between finiteness and verb placement. Taken together, these results suggest that (a) cross‐linguistic differences in the rates at which children produce OIs are graded, quantitative differences that closely reflect the statistical properties of the input they are exposed to and (b) theories of syntax acquisition need to consider more closely the role of input characteristics as determinants of quantitative differences in the cross‐linguistic patterning of phenomena in language acquisition. (shrink)

Expert chess players, specialized in different openings, recalled positions and solved problems within and outside their area of specialization. While their general expertise was at a similar level, players performed better with stimuli from their area of specialization. The effect of specialization on both recall and problem solving was strong enough to override general expertise—players remembering positions and solving problems from their area of specialization performed at around the level of players 1 standard deviation (SD) above them in general skill. (...) Their problem‐solving strategy also changed depending on whether the problem was within their area of specialization. When it was, they searched more in depth and less in breadth; with problems outside their area of specialization, the reverse. The knowledge that comes from familiarity with a problem area is more important than general purpose strategies in determining how an expert will tackle it. These results demonstrate the link in experts between problem solving and memory of specific experiences and indicate that the search for context‐independent general purpose problem‐solving strategies to teach to future experts is unlikely to be successful. (shrink)

In this study we use a computational model of language learning called model of syntax acquisition in children (MOSAIC) to investigate the extent to which the optional infinitive (OI) phenomenon in Dutch and English can be explained in terms of a resource-limited distributional analysis of Dutch and English child-directed speech. The results show that the same version of MOSAIC is able to simulate changes in the pattern of finiteness marking in 2 children learning Dutch and 2 children learning English as (...) the average length of their utterances increases. These results suggest that it is possible to explain the key features of the OI phenomenon in both Dutch and English in terms of the interaction between an utterance-final bias in learning and the distributional characteristics of child-directed speech in the 2 languages. They also show how computational modeling techniques can be used to investigate the extent to which cross-linguistic similarities in the developmental data can be explained in terms of common processing constraints as opposed to innate knowledge of universal grammar. (shrink)

The original book chapter does not have an abstract. However, I have written an abstract for this repository: Religious life encompasses a wide diversity of situations for which the emotional tone is on a continuum from extreme euphoria to extreme dysphoria. In this book chapter, we propose the novel hypothesis that euphoria and dysphoria have distinctly separate functional consequences for religious evolution and survivability. This is due to the differential cognitive states that are created in euphoric and dysphoric situations. Based (...) on readings from religious studies and cognitive psychology, we propose that euphoria in religion is conducive to social bonding and situations needing lateral thinking and creativity; whereas dysphoria in religion is conducive to situations where precision and analogical reasoning are necessary. (shrink)

Debates in radical cultural praxis reflect conflicting viewpoints on the left. While one might assume that the enormity of the challenges facing the left would lead to a common front this is rarely the case as communist and horizontalist viewpoints clash. This essay addresses new possibilities for thinking about avant-garde art and vanguard politics by considering the recent debates between Slavoj Žižek and McKenzie Wark and further, by looking at the limits of the cultural revolution as we have known it (...) since the late 1960s. The impasse of Occupy Wall Street, Strike Debt, and similar protest movements has led Žižek to shift from a view of the party in terms of the Lacanain Discourse of the Analysis to more general reflections on the Discourse of the Master. The consequent critiques of Žižek that are examined are shown to have evaded his ideas, failing to advance radical cultural praxis beyond postmodernism. On the other hand, one finds that Žižek’s renewal of radical thought is challenging others on the progressive left to do the same. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage se veut une lecture rhétorique de quelques problèmes-clés ayant marqué la période qui s'étend des débuts de la révolution scientifique du XVIIe siècle jusqu'au moment où, au XIXe, une autre se prépare. Une telle sorte d'analyse se fonde sur le fait qu'avant d'intervenir dans les efforts de persuasion, certains schèmes " poétiques " sont déjà présents et actifs dans la formation et l'acceptation de toute représentation nouvelle. C'est pourquoi la " rhétorique profonde " que nous propose ici (...) class='Hi'>Fernand Hallyn ne se contente nullement d'éclairer les procédés de la science qui interviennent dans la communication de positions, de démarches ou de résultats, mais vise d'abord à étudier ses formes d'invention et de découverte. Saisir la démarche scientifique en train de se faire comme un cas particulier de la problématique générale de la créativité - bref explorer plus avant la voie ouverte dans La Structure poétique du mande - tel est donc l'enjeu de ce volume. (shrink)

Author Marc James Léger responds to Elias Khoury’s review of his book _Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism_, which was published in volume 17 of the _International Journal of __Žižek Studies_. While Léger accepts the one mistake in the book that Khoury correctly identifies, he takes issue with nearly everything else in Khoury’s review, which involves fallacies, misquotations, reductive arguments, misdirection and failure to mention anything that would contradict Khoury’s generally false claims. Léger describes the possibility of academic foul (...) play in the context of a public secret directed against him and that he has been struggling against since the late 1990s. (shrink)

Professeure de lettres, l'auteure retrace le cheminement historique (l'âge d'or) et géographique (l'Espagne surtout) du concept de Dieu au regard de la foi et de la raison. L'époque contemporaine (depuis 1800) est abordée dans le dernier chapitre.

Recent scholarship on the idea of communism leads to questions of organization and what Michael Hardt refers to as “the problem of leadership.” Beyond the critical assessment of the crises of contemporary capitalism, and beyond the existing social democratic solutions, a psychoanalytically-informed Žižekian notion of the party offers solutions to ultra-left theories of networked horizontalism as well as versions of the party that repeat the problems of communist modernism. If the context of climate change, economic inequality and political authoritarianism require (...) that we reconsider “what is to be done” about global neoliberal capitalism, then the idea of the political party, understood in terms of Jacques Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst, can provisionally occupy the place of a neutral knowledge of the objective demands of history that is premised on the experiences of the emancipatory left. Like the Analyst, the party does not stand in for or represent the people. However, through the fetishistic aspect of representation, as opposed to materially or ontologically-grounded guarantees for political power, the party registers a minimal difference from a technocratic University Discourse and an ultra-left Discourse of the Hysteric. (shrink)

Debating on Second Language Acquisition is not merely in terms of concept but also the real phenomena which postulate each research result. It needs more investigation on SLA due to the various realities on how children and adults acquire and learn any language. This research aims to describe how children and adults acquire and learn their first and second language. Participants consisted of children and adults whose ages determined by the researcher based on the purposive sampling technique. They were all (...) six persons and chosen based on certain characteristics. Content analysis technique was applied in order to analyze all data gained. The result showed that since human alive inside mother’s womb especially at up to the age of three months, a fetus has tried to acquire sounds subconsciously. Language proficiency is really determined by three factors of Phased Process Approach namely Subconscious Acquisition, Conscious Acquisition, and Learning. The ideal time for learning something is begun from the age of 2 or 3 years old, by the fact that children have had the ability to bear a meaning on any input that they catch. The learning process has been begun within the process of acquisition. Based on the findings, it is clear that the children acquire the language step by step based on the development of the brain. Children acquire language is just the same as adult in acquiring the language although there will be some constraints faced by adult concern with the first language because adult has had the strong basis of the first language just than children. (shrink)

Taking Kant’s suspicion of the morality as a simple phantom of the mind as a departing point, we are intending to investigate the central role of the moral consciousness, taken here both as the possible source of this illusion so much as the premise through which one can infer the normativity of reason and assure the reality of duty and of our moral experience. Despite the fact this suspicion be somehow inevitable and remains in the philosopher’s mind as a kind (...) of threat, it has been contrasted with a factual perspective of morality – according to which the experience of morality as an unconditional obligation is by itself an evidence of its intrinsic origin in reason. (shrink)

This book is premised on the view that the idea of the avant garde has an increased importance in these times of global political crisis. Much cultural production today is shaped by a biopolitics that construes all creative and knowledge production in terms of capital accumulation. A different kind of culture is possible. This collection of writings, essays, interviews and artworks by many of today's most radical cultural practitioners and astute commentators on matters avant garde mediates the different strategies and (...) temporalities of avant-garde art and politics. Tracing diverse genealogies and trajectories, the book offers an inter-generational forum of ideas that covers different arts fields, from visual art, art activism, photography, film and architecture, to literature, theatre, performance, intermedia and music. This is an extraordinarily rich collection and is sure to be a benchmark for many years. (shrink)

In a recent BioEssays paper [W. F. Martin, BioEssays 2017, 39, 1700115], William Martin sharply criticizes evolutionary interpretations that involve lateral gene transfer into eukaryotic genomes. Most published examples of LGTs in eukaryotes, he suggests, are in fact contaminants, ancestral genes that have been lost from other extant lineages, or the result of artefactual phylogenetic inferences. Martin argues that, except for transfers that occurred from endosymbiotic organelles, eukaryote LGT is insignificant. Here, in reviewing this field, we seek to correct some (...) of the misconceptions presented therein with regard to the evidence for LGT in eukaryotes. A recent paper dismisses claims of lateral gene transfer into eukaryotic genomes. We counter the arguments made in that paper and discuss the extensive evidence for LGT in eukaryotes. (shrink)

Pioneering work in the 1940s and 1950s suggested that the concept of chunking might be important in many processes of perception, learning and cognition in humans and animals. We summarize here the major sources of evidence for chunking mechanisms, and consider how such mechanisms have been implemented in computational models of the learning process. We distinguish two forms of chunking: the first deliberate, under strategic control, and goal-oriented; the second automatic, continuous, and linked to perceptual processes. Recent work with discrimination-network (...) computational models of long- and short-term memory (EPAM/CHREST) has produced a diverse range of applications of perceptual chunking. We focus on recent successes in verbal learning, expert memory, language acquisition and learning multiple representations, to illustrate the implementation and use of chunking mechanisms within contemporary models of human learning. (shrink)

In den Philosophischen Brocken kritisiert Kierkegaard die sokratische Präexistenzlehre wegen ihrer nihilistischen Konsequenzen für die Zeitlichkeit: Das geschichtliche Dasein des Menschen wäre überflüssig, wenn er a priori bereits vollendet wäre. Weil Kierkegaard in seiner christlichen Argumentation dennoch nicht umhin kann, selbst ein Analogon zum vorgeburtlichen Sein der Seele bei Platon vorauszusetzen, wendet er in der religiösen Schrift Die Krankheit zum Tode einen sophistischen Trick an, mit dessen Hilfe er die Präexistenzimplikation aus dem Bewusstsein des Lesers verdrängen will.

In einer philosophischen Inhaltsangabe und Interpretation versuche ich, die Doppeldeutigkeit der Vergeltungsmetapher im Ijob-Buch herauszuarbeiten. Entgegen den geläufigen theologischen oder pessimistischen Deutungsvarianten ist dabei streng zwischen einer vorreflexiv-moralischen und metaphysischen Sinnebene zu unterscheiden. Während Ijobs Freunde über das Referat einer noch nicht vernünftig angeeigneten Tradition nicht hinauskommen, entwickelt sich der ,,Angefeindete" zweifelnd und philosophisch suchend zu einem geistigen Individuum, indem er die Einschränkungen eines endlichen Daseins letztlich als ermöglichende Bedingungen seiner Freiheit erkennt, sich aus dem Seinsgrund der Gerechtigkeit Gottes selbst (...) zu gestalten. (shrink)