Modernist Objects is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of modernist objects. Contributors explore the many tensions surrounding the modernist relationship to objects, things, products and artIfacts through the prism of poetry, prose, visual arts, culture and crafts.

"Rien de plus connu que l'opposition entre Platon et Aristote à propos du rôle de l'expérience, en grec, empeiria. Alors que Platon inviterait à détourner notre regard du sensible au profit d'une contemplation exclusive des réalités intelligibles, Aristote opèrerait essentiellement un retour à l'expérience sensible, comme en témoignent, de fait, ses investigations naturalistes et son intérêt marqué pour la pratique. Mais de quelle expérience parle-t-on? En examinant les figures de l'empeiria chez Aristote, Platon et Isocrate, ce livre restitue la véritable (...) querelle de l'expérience. Celle-ci n'oppose pas simplement un maître, Platon, à un disciple rebelle, Aristote, mais différents acteurs d'un vaste débat, dont Isocrate, au sujet de la nature du savoir utile aux hommes en matière de connaissance, de production et d'action."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

What is behind the upsurge of virulent nationalism and intransigent politics across the globe today? In Fear of Breakdown, Noëlle McAfee contends that politics needs something that only psychoanalysis has been able to offer: an understanding of how to work through anxieties, ambiguity, fragility, and loss.

Political philosopher Noelle McAfee proposes a powerful new political theory for our post-9/11 world, in which an old pathology-the repetition compulsion-has manifested itself in a seemingly endless war on terror. McAfee argues that the quintessentially human desire to participate in a world with others is the key to understanding the public sphere and to creating a more democratic society, a world that all members can have a hand in shaping. But when some are effectively denied this participation, whether (...) through trauma or terror, instead of democratic politics, there arises a political unconscious, an effect of desires unarticulated, failures to sublimate, voices kept silent, and repression reenacted. Not only is this condition undemocratic and unjust, it may lead to further trauma. Unless its troubles are worked through, a political community risks continual repetition and even self-destruction. McAfee deftly weaves together her experience as an observer of democratic life with an array of intellectual schemas, from poststructural psychoanalysis to Rawlsian and Habermasian democratic theories, as well as semiotics, civic republicanism, and American pragmatism. She begins with an analysis of the traumatic effects of silencing members of a political community. Then she explores the potential of deliberative dialogue and other "talking cures" and public testimonies, such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to help societies work through, rather than continually act out, their conflicts. _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ is rich in theoretical insights, but it is also grounded in the practical problems of those who are trying to process the traumas of oppression, terror, and brutality and create more decent and democratic societies. Drawing on a breathtaking range of theoretical frameworks and empirical observations, _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ charts a course for democratic transformation in a world sorely lacking in democratic practice. (shrink)

One of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, Julia Kristeva has been driving forward the fields of literary and cultural studies since the 1960s. This volume is an accessible, introductory guide to the main themes of Kristeva's work, including her ideas on: *semiotics and symbolism *abjection *melancholia *feminism *revolt. McAfee provides clear explanations of the more difficult aspects of Kristeva's theories, helpfully placing her ideas in the relevant theoretical context, be it literary theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, gender studies (...) or philosophy, and demonstrates the impact of her critical interventions in these areas. Julia Kristeva is the essential guide for readers who are approaching the work of this challenging thinker for the first time, and provides the ideal opportunity for those with more knowledge to re-familiarise themselves with Kristeva's key terms. (shrink)

Do poststructuralist accounts of the self undermine the prospects for effective democratic politics? In addressing this question, Nolle McAfee brings together the theories of Jrgen Habermas and Julia Kristeva, two major figures whose work is seldom juxtaposed. She examines their respective notions of subjectivity and politics and their implicit definitions of citizenship: the extent to which someone is able to deliberate and act in community with others.. Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship begins by tracing the rise of modern and poststructural (...) views of subjectivity, and then critiques these views as they are represented in the writings of Habermas and Kristeva. McAfee argues that Habermas's theory of subjectivity is overly optimistic about the possibility for individuals to know their own interests and act autonomously. Kristeva's poststructuralism has its own problems: it seems to limit political agency, since it considers the subject to be split and at odds with itself. Nevertheless, this book shows how Kristevan conceptions of the self can contribute to Habermas's hope for a more democratic, deliberative politics. Combining an insight from poststructural theory--that identity is constituted by a web of relationships--with the theory of deliberative democracy, McAfee argues that we need not be the kinds of individuals supposed by the modern liberal tradition to be effective political agents. The more we recognize our indebtedness to and relationship with others in our midst, the more likely we are to be capable members of political communities. (shrink)

Opposing Viewpoints is the leading source for libraries and classrooms in need of current-issue materials. The viewpoints are selected from a wide range of highly respected sources and publications.

Introduction: free presence -- Conscious reference -- Fragile styles -- Real presence -- Experience of the world in time -- Presence in pictures -- On over-intellectualizing the intellect -- Ideology and the third realm.

"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noe. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noe argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought — that ...

A noted philosopher and member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Science examines flaws in current understandings about consciousness while proposing a radical solution that argues that consciousness must not be limited to the confines of the brain.

The chief problem for the theory of mind is that of presence. In this paper I offer an explanation of this claim, and I indicate how my own “enactive” approach to mind has tried to address this problem. I also argue that other approaches, such as that undertaken by Hutto and Myin, have side-stepped the problem, instead of addressing it; their position opts for reductionism and eliminativism. This essay has two parts. The first is an exposition of the enactive approach, (...) as I understand it, and the second is a critical evaluation of Hutto and Myin. (shrink)

"Works of art sometimes leave us speechless. But they almost never shut us up. They can't. There's just too much to say. Talking about art doesn't leave things as they are; it changes everything. To look, to think, to say what you see, or why you respond as you do, this changes what you see and it changes your response. The effort and the caring remake us. They remake us, in real time, as we listen to the song, or examine (...) the painting, or watch the movie. This is not unique to art, of course. What I have just outlined goes for all experience and is really life's first principle: life is a process of growth and reorganization, a process that commences right then when we first act, for we reorganize ourselves and develop in response to the ways what we do changes what we undergo, as Dewey might have said. But art aims at this; there is art so that we may remake ourselves, and also, so that we may catch ourselves in the act of this remaking. Art requires creation, even from its beholder. Yogi Berra was right: you can see a lot by observing. But observation - the effort and the caring - this requires thought, attention, focus. It can be play, but it is also work-like. Art always proposes a task, and the task is neither easy nor quite well-enough defined. The task, though, is only this: try to perceive, try to bring what is there into focus. If you do this, you will find yourself unveiled and, to whatever little extent, put together anew. The crucial thing to accept is that we don't get all this - the wow, the pleasure, the unveiling, and the reorganization - just for the price of admission. We have to join in, turn on, throw thoughts and reactions at the works themselves, position ourselves to catch them on the rebound, and allow room for emotions, not always positive. This is something we typically do with other people, and in the field cast by their responses and their words and argument. Works of art are always strange provocations; sometimes they offend us; more often they leave us untouched, unaffected, even bored. And this is where their value lies. Each of the short writings collected here is an exercise in giving art and myself the time to let something happen; I try to do this work so that art may do its work. Some of them were written while I was working on my 2015 book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, and they flow from the same well of curiosity that nourished that project. The title is borrowed from Joshua C Taylor's famous Learning To Look, which was the first book about art that I ever read"--. (shrink)

Some cognitive states — e.g. states of thinking, calculating, navigating — may be partially external because, at least sometimes, these states depend on the use of symbols and artifacts that are outside the body. Maps, signs, writing implements may sometimes be as inextricably bound up with the workings of cognition as neural structures or internally realized symbols (if there are any). According to what Clark and Chalmers [1998] call active externalism, the environment can drive and so partially constitute cognitive processes. (...) Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? If active externalism is right, then the boundary cannot be drawn at the skull. The mind reaches – or at least can reach --- beyond the limits of the body out into the world. (shrink)

In this short paper I propose that the sensorimotor approach to perception is a tree yielding two distinct theoretical fruits. One fruit is sensorimotor reductionism. The other is sensorimotor integrationism. In this paper I try to explain what makes these fruits different.

What is at stake when political revolt depends upon radical inner experience? Is the only route to cultural and political change, as Kristeva seems to argue, through personal introspection and revolt? If we want more from life than the freedom to channel surf, as she says, need the direction of inquiry be primarily inward? Need there be an either/or of psychical versus public life? Is the only answer to social and political dead ends really found by turning inward? Is the (...) micropolitics of the couch the path to freedom? “Today,” Kristeva writes, “psychical life knows that it will only be saved if it gives itself the time and space of revolt: to break off, remember, re-form. From prayer to dialogue, through art and analysis, the crucial event is always the great infinitesimal emancipation: to be endlessly recommenced.” In this essay I ask whether we might move Kristeva’s “New Forms of Revolt” from the couch to the polis with the help of one of her major interlocutors, Hannah Arendt, who reminds us that thinking is always a plural affair. I develop a link between Arendt’s thinking and Kristeva’s revolt to show how thinking-as-revolt puts subjects in relation to each other and to the political. Such a political culture of revolt can engage in the work needed to move beyond adolescent fixations in melancholic times. And with it we might in fact create more meaning for our lives. (shrink)

This article looks at how various political cultures and imaginaries occlude the public’s deeply democratic political role, especially the currently reigning anti-political culture of neo-liberalism. Even in an era when millions of people the world over take to the streets in protest, dominant political imaginaries position most of the world’s people as largely powerless. What is needed is a radical political imaginary along the lines that Cornelius Castoriadis suggests. This imaginary foregrounds the ways in which all social and political formations (...) are already constituted by human beings’ ability to create new formations in the absence of foundations. But ignorant of this power, people are trapped in imaginaries where it seems that power resides elsewhere, only in halls of state or corporate boardrooms. This article offers an account that identifies where power originates and how it can be reclaimed through a more radical democratic political imaginary. The article proceeds as follows: the first two sec... (shrink)

In The Entanglement, philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, and argues that we have radically underestimated the significance of this long recognized but underappreciated reality, what he refers to as the "entanglement." The core of The Entanglement is the idea that human existence is inextricably aesthetic and philosophical. In the first half of the book, Noë offers a detailed examination of pictures and seeing, writing and speech, and choreography and dancing, which serve as case studies (...) and the base in which the phenomenon of entanglement is set. In later chapters, Noë deepens this analysis by exploring the nature of the aesthetic itself, and its place in our lives, examining what the entanglement can teach us about science, and, in particular, the project of applying science in the domain of the human. In these later chapters he covers a range of topics, including sex, gender, and the body, psychology and AI, the problem of style, and the nature of 'nature.' Drawing on his work in perception, consciousness, and the philosophy of art, Noë offers a new model for thinking about the nature of the human, the limits to what a natural science of the human can do on its own, and the irreplaceable importance of art and philosophy for the larger project of studying and understanding ourselves. (shrink)

A selection of essays written by one of the leading critics of film over the last two decades, this volume examines theoretical aspects of film and television through penetrating analyses of such genres as soap opera, documentary, comedy, and such topics as 'sight gags', film metaphor, point-of-view editing, and movie music. Throughout, individual films are considered in depth. Carroll's essays, moreover, represent the cognitivist turn in film studies, containing in-depth criticism of existing approaches to film theory, and heralding a new (...) approach. (shrink)

Perhaps the most influential compatibilist response to this question is Fodor's strategy of levels. Fodor argues that although psychological laws range over world-involving propositional attitudes and their contents, these laws are implemented in computational mechanisms that supervene on the individual's intrinsic states.

There is a traditional scepticism about whether the world "out there" really is as we perceive it. A new breed of hyper-sceptics now challenges whether we even have the perceptual experience we think we have. According to these writers, perceptual consciousness is a kind of false consciousness. This view grows out of the discovery of such phenomena as change blindness and inattentional blindness, which show that we can all be quite blind to changes taking place before our very eyes. Such (...) radical scepticism has acute and widespread implications for the study of perception and consciousness. The writings collected in this volume explore these implications. The contributors are scientists and philosophers at the forefront of this research, and include well-known authors such as psychologists Susan Blackmore and Arien Mack, and philosophers Andy Clark and Daniel Dennett. They have an gift for bringing these paradoxical issues to life and sharing their excitement with the non-specialist. (shrink)

In this paper I explore a brand of scepticism about perceptual experience that takes its start from recent work in psychology and philosophy of mind on change blindness and related phenomena. I argue that the new scepticism rests on a problematic phenomenology of perceptual experience. I then consider a strengthened version of the sceptical challenge that seems to be immune to this criticism. This strengthened sceptical challenge formulates what I call the problem of perceptual presence. I show how this problem (...) can be addressed by drawing on an enactive or sensorimotor approach to perceptual consciousness. Our experience of environmental detail consists in our access to that detail thanks to our possession of practical knowledge of the way in which what we do and sensory stimulation depend on each other. (shrink)

Experiments on scene perception and change blindness suggest that the visual system does not construct detailed internal models of a scene. These experiments therefore call into doubt the traditional view that vision is a process in which detailed representations of the environment must be constructed. The non-existence of such detailed representations, however, does not entail that we do not perceive the detailed environment. The “grand illusion hypothesis” that our visual world is an illusion rests on (1) a problematic “reconstructionist” conception (...) of vision, and (2) a misconception about the character of perceptual experience. (shrink)

This paper argues that the public can do more than legitimate government; it can provide public knowledge for sound public policy. Critics of democracy worry that the public has too little objectivity and impartiality to know what is best. These critics have a point: taken one by one, people have little knowledge of the whole. For this reason, citizens need to escape the cloisters of kith and kin and enter a world of unlike others. They need to be open to (...) other perspectives and concerns. They need to deliberate with others in public. In other words, an inchoate plurality of people needs to become public in order to develop a more comprehensive picture of the whole and to define ‘where the shoe pinches’. Democracy requires that the multitude deliberate publicly in order to create public knowledge by which sound public policy can be formed. Key Words: deliberation • democracy • John Dewey • Jürgen Habermas • legitimacy • particularity • perspectives • rational deliberative • proceduralism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Dance and music serve in this essay to exemplify both the looping entanglement of art and life as well as the account of art and philosophy developed in Strange Tools. This essay replies to criticisms of Carrie Noland, Nancy S. Struever, and Thomas Rickert and also offers a briefer restatement of the general approach.