The article explores the way in which new objects of study, such as dance performance and art–practice, emerge in algorithmic aesthetics. The advent of digital communicative practices shapes new means of formalization of dance performance scripts, which nowadays have various technological solutions, including algorithmic ones. Classical aesthetics is unable to describe the technological modernization of artistic expression. The author offers a general framework of algorithmic aesthetics to study of dance performance and art practice.

Until recently, dance was not considered to warrant copyright protection because it existed only as a live performance that was not fixed in a ‘tangible medium of expression’. Not being an object, it could not be property. But the more we try to fold dance into existing modes of copyright and conventional notions of property, the more it resists, upsetting the core assumptions of Locke's social contract theory. Legal scholars argue that the expansion of copyright protection shrinks the public domain. (...) While copyright has become more important for dancers and choreographers who wish to control the appropriation of their work that is now made available to millions of end-users online, it also potentially restricts them from engaging in a dialog with other dancers or building on inspiring dance moves across communities. This paper investigates notions of property that rely on both the commons and individual personhood in the context of dance. (shrink)

Art perception offers action affordances for the self-generated movement of the eyes, the mind, and the emotions; thus some scenes are ’easy to look at', and evoke different kinds of moods depending on what kind of affordances they present for the eyes, the brain, and the action schemas that further the dynamical self-organizing patterns of activity toward which the organism tends, as reflected in its ongoing emotional life. Art can do this only because perception is active rather than passive, and (...) begins with efferent activity in emotional brain areas (e.g. hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus and anterior cingulate) which then motivates afferent processing (parietal imaging activity which finally, after a 1/3-second motivational/selective process is complete, resonates with occipital patterns, resulting in perceptual consciousness). The limbic system ’categories’ that motivate the ’looking-for’ of selective attention are categories of utility, to be understood in terms of emotional affordances and whole-organism affective meanings. Art plays with this looking-for, using it to make us engage in different afforded actions that relate to different limbic (emotional) categories. The drawings of children and of the artistically untutored reveal this structure when we fail to ’draw what we see’, drawing instead what we conceptualize that we ought to be seeing. Art teaches us to get beyond this almost complete dominance of habitual categories, and to see things more freshly -- both in the perceptual and in the emotive sphere. Rather than reinforcing our preconceptions, it forces us to see how they affect our view of reality. -/- Because neither perceptions nor emotional responses are really passive ’responses’ at all, art does not cause us to feel a certain way. Instead, we ’use’ art for the purpose of symbolizing our emotions. Our most important feelings are not directly ’about’ the perceptual objects that trigger them. The object in conscious attention during the feeling of an emotion is normally not the intentional object of the emotion, i.e., it is not the object in relation to which our actions could serve the purpose of the emotion. Emotions are not even triggered by simple ’stimuli’, but rather by the meaning for us of a stimulus in a total context determined by ongoing and dynamical organismic purposes. Emotions arise from the total life process, which is a dynamical system -- not as an isolated chemical event or a causal result of a simple stimulus. For this reason, emotions call not just for satiation or pleasure, but for explication; this is why art is different from entertainment or pretty decoration. Visual art affords not only a meaningful, self-directed dance of the eyes, but also a meaningful dance of this emotional explicating process. (shrink)

Dance is regarded as visual art form by common arts and science perspectives. Definitions of dance as means of communication agree that its message is conveyed by the dancer/choreographer via the human body for the observer, leaving no doubt that dance is performed to be watched. Brain activation elicited by the visual perception of dance has also become a topic of interest in cognitive neuroscience, with regards to action observation in the context of learning, expertise and aesthetics. The view that (...) the aesthetic experience of dance is primarily a visual one is still shared by many artists and cultural institutions, yet there is growing interest in making dance performances accessible for individuals with visual impairment / blindness. Means of supporting the non-visual experience of dance include verbal (audio description), auditive (choreographed body sounds, movement sonification), and haptic (touch tour) techniques, applied for different purposes by artists and researchers, with three main objectives: to strengthen the cultural participation of a non-sighted audience in the cultural and aesthetic experience of dance; to expand the scope of dance as an artistic research laboratory toward novel ways of perceiving what dance can convey; and to inspire new lines of (neuro-cognitive) research beyond watching dance. Reviewing literature from different disciplines and drawing on the personal experience of an inclusive performance of Simon Mayer's “Sons of Sissy,” we argue that a non-exclusively visual approach can be enriching and promising for all three perspectives and conclude by proposing hypotheses for multidisciplinary lines of research. (shrink)

Dance – as a ritual, therapy, and leisure activity – has been known for thousands of years. Today, dance is increasingly used as therapy for cognitive and neurological disorders such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Surprisingly, the effects of dance training on the healthy young brain are not well understood despite the necessity of such information for planning successful clinical interventions. Therefore, this study examined actively performing, expert-level trained college students as a model of long-term exposure to dance training. To (...) study the long-term effects of dance training on the human brain, we compared 20 young expert female Dancers with normal body mass index with 20 age- and education-matched Non-Dancers with respect to brain structure and function. We used diffusion tensor, morphometric, resting state and task-related functional MRI, a broad cognitive assessment, and objective measures of selected dance skill (Dance Central video game and a balance task). Dancers showed superior performance in the Dance Central video game and balance task, but showed no differences in cognitive abilities. We found little evidence for training-related differences in brain volume in Dancers. Dancers had lower anisotropy in the corticospinal tract. They also activated the action observation network (AON) to greater extent than Non-Dancers when viewing dance sequences. Dancers showed altered functional connectivity of the AON, and of the general motor learning network. These functional connectivity differences were related to dance skill and balance and training-induced structural characteristics. Our findings have the potential to inform future study designs aiming to monitor dance training-induced plasticity in clinical populations. (shrink)

Human action has generally appeared to the sociologist as instrumental action, movement conceptualized and valued in terms of its utility, with the actor defined in terms of agency within rationalized social systems . Dance provides a way of seeing that conditions for human existence cannot be reduced to socio-economic relations and forms. Drawing on my ethnographic study of a dance improvisation group, I explore some of the ways in which innovative action resists the productive and textual relations that turn bodies (...) into objects of social control in the capitalist world-order, and creates relations that enable ‘free’ action and liberated subjectivities. Innovations disrupt the pre-existing frames of reference, physical and linguistic, that position the subject in the world of work, and establish an unlimited and undetermined time-space for experiencing ‘something new’. In this case the something new is an opportunity to create oneself anew through choices that are made moving ‘free’ from the constraints of practical activity. Within the intersubjective life-world established through innovative action a space is created for individuation and empowerment. Although these conditions for existence are episodically produced and contingent, they begin and end with the dancing, the relations are self-affirming rather than self-alienating. Dance improvisation experience provides a sociological context for presenting human activity as a contested category in sociological theory, and it raises some important questions about what it means to be human in the world. (shrink)

Accounting for expression presents a central problem for aesthetic theories; It is the problem of how a nonsentient physical object—a painting, a concerto, a dance—can “carry” or convey human emotion. How, for example, does a perceived shape or “form” become a “felt” form? In dance, to speak of “form” is to refer to both the changing shape of the dancer’s body and the dynamic shape the dancer’s movements describe in space. Dance is distinguished from some other visual arts in that (...) the seen object, the dancer, unlike, say, a work of sculpture, presumably has experienced emotions even if she does not experience them while dancing. The audience spectator, however, does not see the dancer’s emotions, only her bodily... (shrink)

This project was provoked by the almost nonexistent pushback from the Democratic liberal establishment to the (2020) exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse, despite his acknowledged killing of two Black Lives Matters protesters against the police murder of George Floyd. It builds on three prior articles arguing for the revival of ancient Dionysian practice, Haitian Vodou, and Indigenous South American shamanism to empower leftist revolution. In essence, I propose an assemblage of spiritual practices that are accessible today for the neo-colonized 99% of (...) the global population, by synthesizing and reconstructing three democratic, lower-SES, Indigenous religions, all of which share a militant defiance of their respective tyrannical plutocracies. To avoid cultural appropriation, I center these reconstructed spiritual practices on the figure of the “mage,” a psychosocial healer loosely analogous to a shaman. And the mage’s signature activity, “magic,” I redefine naturalistically as free interpersonal performative action, practiced using two theoretical disciplines (philosophy and psychology) and two practical disciplines chosen by each mage. More precisely, Spirit/Dance channels the “spirits” of dead ancestors, historical figures, legendary heroes, mythical beings, and fictional characters, into the three ultimate objectives of “mindfulness” for psyches/souls, “liberation” for mindful bodies, and “social justice” for liberated communities, indirectly empowering long-term revolution. (shrink)

This paper discusses possible correspondences between neuroscientific findings and phenomenologically informed methodologies in the investigation of kinesthetic empathy in watching dance. Interest in phenomenology has recently increased in cognitive science (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008 ) and dance scholars have recently contributed important new insights into the use of phenomenology in dance studies (e.g. Legrand and Ravn (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8(3):389–408, 2009 ); Parviainen (Dance Research Journal 34(1):11–26, 2002 ); Rothfield (Topoi 24:43–53, 2005 )). In vision research, coherent neural (...) mechanisms for perceptual phenomena were uncovered, thus supporting correlation of phenomenology and neurophysiology Spillmann (Vision Research 49(12):1507–1521, 2009 ). Correspondingly, correlating subjects’ neurophysiological data with qualitative responses has been proposed as a means to research the human brain in the study of consciousness (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008 ), with similar issues in clinical psychology Mishara (Current Opinion in Psychiatry 20(6):559–569, 2007 ) and biology Kosslyn et al. (American Psychologist 57:341–351, 2002 ). Yet the relationship between neuroscience and qualitative research informed by phenomenology remains problematic. How qualitative research normally handles subjective experiences is difficult to reconcile with standard statistical analysis of objective data. Recent technological developments in cognitive neuroscience have inspired a number of researchers to use more naturalistic stimuli, outside the laboratory environment, such as dance, thereby perhaps helping to open up the cognitive sciences to more phenomenologically informed approaches. A question central to our research, addressed here, is how the phenomenal experiences of a dance audience member, as accessed by qualitative research methods, can be related to underlying neurophysiological events. We outline below some methodological challenges encountered in relating audiences’ first-person accounts of watching live dance performance to neurophysiological evidence of their experiences. (shrink)

Digital cameras and motion capture technologies that document and share creative practices have transformed the way we think about dance as an embodied knowledge as well as the way we experience it bodily. Computational media, which not only records and archives but also calculates, analyses and models dance, further complicates its ontological status. This move to document and inscribe dance in a tangible medium marks a shift from understanding dance as an ungraspable event towards conceiving of dance as a tangible (...) process that can be collected, transmitted, repeated and packaged or archived as an object. I look at two dance works – Matthias Sperling’s Loop Atlas and Siobhan Davies and Anri Sala’s Solo in the Doldrums – that trouble conventional notions of embodiment and its relationship to both presence and absence, at the same time they challenge how computational media fixates on figures and gestures that can be traced, mapped and calibrated. (shrink)

Philosophers sometimes wonder whether academic work can ever be truly interdisciplinary. Whether true interdisciplinarity is possible is an open question, but given current trends in higher education, it seems that at least gesturing toward such work is increasingly important. This volume serves as a testament to the fact that such work can be done. Of course, while it is the case that high-level theoretical work can flourish at the intersection of dance and philosophy, it remains to be seen how we (...) might share this with undergraduate students. For many of us in philosophy and dance, a large number of the students we teach are neither philosophy nor dance majors. As such, we are familiar with the challenge of convincing our students to care about our fields. Both philosophy and dance, qua disciplines on a college campus, face similar challenges. These disciplines are often deeply misunderstood, frequently presumed to be “impractical” (a powerful, but confused objection), intimidating, and frivolous. In this chapter, we offer an account of the course we co-taught at Southern Utah University in the Spring of 2016 titled “Movement and Space” as a rough framework for how to introduce the intersection between philosophy and dance to students. We simultaneously attempted to break students of their misconceptions about philosophy and dance, and worked to engage students and professors alike in a truly interdisciplinary educational experience. Treating philosophy as an embodied endeavor, and employing philosophical concepts through the act of dance encouraged students and faculty alike to rethink the fundamental nature of aesthetics. (shrink)

Impossible objects are those about which the philosopher, narrowly conceived, can hardly speak: poetry, film, music, humor. Such "objects" do not rely on philosophy for interpretation and understanding; they are already independent practices and sites of sensuous meaning production. As Elvis Costello has said, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." We don't need literary theory in order to be riveted by the poem, nor a critic's analysis to enjoy a film. How then can philosophy speak about (...) anything outside of itself, namely all of those things which actually matter to us in this world? In Impossible Objects, Simon Critchley - one of the most influential and insightful philosophers writing today - extends his philosophical investigation into non-philosophical territories, including discussions on tragedy, poetry, humor, and music. In a series of engaging and enlightening conversations, Critchley reflects on his early work on the ethics of deconstruction; the recurring themes of mortality and nihilism; his defense of neo-anarchism; and his recent investigation into secular faith, or "a faith of the faithless". Essential reading for artists, academics, and general readers alike, this book explores the relationship between the philosophical world and those complex and fascinating "impossible objects" which give life meaning. (shrink)

Two essential components make up the semantic information that was used to pinpoint the video events. They consist of: (a) A spatial component of a video frame, such as the scenery, visible people, and visible objects. (b) A temporal component that is represented by a series of video frames across time, such as the actions of a character or the movements of an object. The video's audio, video, and text components are examined in order to provide the higher-level semantic (...) data. The semantic structure of the movie is discovered using a variety of cues from many modalities, such as auditory and visual elements, bridging the gap between high level semantic notions and low level qualities. A video contains three distinct modalities. The three are as follows: (1) Visual modality, which refers to the scene seen in the video; (2) Auditory modality, which refers to spoken words, background music, and other noises; and (3) Textual modality, which refers to written materials that describe the subject matter of the movie. There are numerous video databases and a sizable amount of video data in general. Even while there are tools for maintaining and exploring these collections, many decision-making applications increasingly require tools to extract the critical information hidden in the video data. (shrink)

The present work aims to efficiently carry out life-death education for college students, improve their psychological problems, and reduce suicide accidents by combining LDE with Dance Movement Therapy. DMT is a psychosomatic cross therapy that treats mental or physical diseases through dance or improvisation. Firstly, this paper introduces LDE and DMT and designs the activities of DMT intervention. Secondly, the relationship between DMT and LDE is analyzed. Finally, a questionnaire survey is conducted on the research objects. The research (...) class='Hi'>objects are divided into the experimental group receiving DMT intervention, the control group participating in sports dance courses, and the benchmark group. The research data show no significant difference in interpersonal skills and emotional psychology among the three groups. The DMT intervention group has substantial changes in other factors except for the conflict control ability before and after the intervention. In addition, the questionnaire survey results after the intervention demonstrate that the DMT intervention group gets a significantly higher score in the interpersonal relationship, interpersonal relationship building ability, moderate rejection ability, self-disclosure ability, and emotional support ability. Therefore, DMT intervention positively impacts college students’ interpersonal relationships. After the sports dance course, there are differences in the total score of interpersonal ties and scores of interpersonal relationships building ability, self-disclosure ability, and emotional support ability in the control group, but with no significant difference in moderate rejection ability and conflict control ability. Therefore, compared with traditional psychotherapy methods, the DMT method reported here is conducive to releasing pressure and alleviating physical and mental anxiety. The research content provides new ideas for psychological education in colleges and universities and contributes to improving college students’ suicidal tendencies and helping college students grow up healthily. (shrink)

Several philosophical problems concerning the object of criticism in dance are identified and analyzed as preliminary to an eventual theory of evaluation of dance. Basic to philosophical adequacy is understanding the artform as it is actually practiced and appreciated, recognizing its complexity as a performing artform using unique human bodies as instruments. ;Definitions of "dance" proposed by philosophers, dance historians, and others are inadequate to specify necessary and sufficient conditions of dance, to distinguish dance from other human non-art phenomena, and (...) to distinguish dance from other artforms. Definitions can be adequate for a specific purpose, using descriptive characteristics and standards for evaluation and appreciation by an audience. ;The ontological status of dance is best understood as consisting of the primary media of movement by human bodies and music and secondary media of the visual dimensions of costumes, scenery, and lighting. Improved understanding of the artform is possible with this more comprehenive recognition of its complex multi-media status, as shown in an analysis of "appropriateness" of the various media, a typical criterion for evaluation. ;The identity of a work of art in dance can be established using a notational system in conjunction with a standard for acceptable compliance with that notation. "Substantial similarity," as determined by lay observers, the test for copyright infringement, provides a useful standard for dance. Other theories have required too much of an identity standard; its purpose is to identify a particular performance as one of a certain work, not to teach dancers to perform the work, nor to enable directors to produce it, nor to provide standards for a good performance of the work. ;A necessary condition of the proper object of criticism is perceivability. The considerable interest in the dance world in production and other factors not perceivable on stage during performance is best understood as a interest in the on-going skills of artists, as opposed to the evaluation of an aesthetic object. (shrink)

Impossible objects are those about which the philosopher, narrowly conceived, can hardly speak: poetry, film, music, humor. Such "objects" do not rely on philosophy for interpretation and understanding; they are already independent practices and sites of sensuous meaning production. As Elvis Costello has said, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." We don't need literary theory in order to be riveted by the poem, nor a critic's analysis to enjoy a film. How then can philosophy speak about (...) anything outside of itself, namely all of those things which actually matter to us in this world? In Impossible Objects, Simon Critchley - one of the most influential and insightful philosophers writing today - extends his philosophical investigation into non-philosophical territories, including discussions on tragedy, poetry, humor, and music. In a series of engaging and enlightening conversations, Critchley reflects on his early work on the ethics of deconstruction; the recurring themes of mortality and nihilism; his defense of neo-anarchism; and his recent investigation into secular faith, or "a faith of the faithless". Essential reading for artists, academics, and general readers alike, this book explores the relationship between the philosophical world and those complex and fascinating "impossible objects" which give life meaning. (shrink)

Besides the pure pleasure of watching a dance performance, dance as a whole-body movement is becoming increasingly popular for health-related interventions. However, the science-based evidence for improvements in health or well-being through dance is still ambiguous and little is known about the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. This may be partly related to the fact that previous studies mostly examined the neurophysiological effects of imagination and observation of dance rather than the physical execution itself. The objective of this pilot study was to (...) investigate acute effects of a physically executed dance with its different components (recalling the choreography and physical activity to music) on the electrical brain activity and its functional connectivity using electroencephalographic (EEG) analysis. Eleven dance-inexperienced female participants first learned a Modern Jazz Dance (MJD) choreography over three weeks (1 h sessions per week). Afterwards, the acute effects on the EEG brain activity were compared between four different test conditions: physically executing the MJD choreography with music, physically executing the choreography without music, imaging the choreography with music, and imaging the choreography without music. Every participant passed each test condition in a randomized order within a single day. EEG rest-measurements were conducted before and after each test condition. Considering time effects thephysically executed dance without musicrevealed in brain activity analysis most increases in alpha frequency and in functional connectivity analysis in all frequency bands. In comparison,physically executed dance with musicas well asimagined dance with musicled to fewer increases andimagined dance without musicprovoked noteworthy brain activity and connectivity decreases at all frequency bands. Differences between the test conditions were found in alpha and beta frequency betweenthe physically executed danceandthe imagined dance without musicas well as between thephysically executed dance withandwithout musicin the alpha frequency. The study highlights different effects of a physically executed dance compared to an imagined dance on many brain areas for all measured frequency bands. These findings provide first insights into the still widely unexplored field of neurological effects of dance and encourages further research in this direction. (shrink)

In recent years, the notion of the body schema has been widely discussed, in particular in fields connecting philosophy, cognitive science, and dance studies, as it seems to have bearing across disciplines in a fruitful way. A main source in this literature is Shaun Gallagher’s distinction between the body schema – the “pre-noetic” conditions of bodily performance – and the body image – the body as intentional object –, another is Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the living body, that Gallagher often draws (...) upon. In this paper, I will first discuss Gallagher’s presumed clarification of body schema–body image, and discuss a recent critique by Saint Aubert (2013), who evaluates it against the backdrop of Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on this issue. While I believe that Saint Aubert’s criticism overshoots the mark, it is useful for a clarification of Gallagher’s analysis and points to a problematic feature, namely the alleged inscrutability of the body schema to phenomenological reflection. This is particularly interesting in relation to contemporary dance and performance practice, where working with – and against – habitual structures is a core element. Certain contemporary training techniques are explicitly aimed at raising awareness of those bodily aspects that condition movement and expression – that Gallagher sees as pertaining to the body schema – and that in ordinary activities often remain hidden. In order to clarify the role that reflection on our own body and its habitual patterns plays in contemporary dance practice, I will examine the movement language and improvisation practice “Gaga”, where this aspect is arguably fundamental. (shrink)

Through the ages, ritual dances have been part of human culture. Although artistic, the _umxhentso_ dance is a ritual dance performed by the Xhosa _amagqirha _(traditional healers) to establish connections with supernatural beings. During the dance performance, the amagqirha enter a state of trance and connect with the spiritual realm. During this state of trance, they seek guidance and vision from their ancestors. The _amagqirha_, in all the Xhosa communities, perform these dance rituals at initiation and healing ceremonies. The (...) objectives of this study were to examine the religious and social purposes of _umxhentso_ dance in amagqirha rituals and determine how it assists amagqirha in establishing connections with their ancestors during ceremonies. This study adopted the naturalistic research approach in studying the _umxhentso_ dance during the amagqirha ceremonies. The researchers examined, evaluated and assessed the research participants’ actions and behaviours in a natural setting within a societal and cultural framework. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Disturbances and Dislocations: Understanding Teaching and Learning Experiences in Indigenous Australian Women’s Music and DanceSarah H. WattsElizabeth Mackinlay. Disturbances and Dislocations: Understanding Teaching and Learning Experiences in Indigenous Australian Women’s Music and Dance (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).Elizabeth Mackinlay, a lecturer in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland, documents her unique pedagogical approaches and ways of thinking about the teaching and learning (...) of music and dance in her book, Disturbances and Dislocations: Understanding Teaching and Learning Experiences in Indigenous Australian Women’s Music and Dance. A university-level anthropology course dealing with the music and dance traditions of Australia’s Yanyuwa women was the setting for this “ethnographic case study” (p. 17). Through this course, Mackinlay sought to help students connect Indigenous Australian performance practices to social and political issues while fostering awareness of gender issues and learning processes within Indigenous Australian music and dance performance contexts. These objectives were met through a distinctive approach—by disposing of the strict lecture class format and bringing the field into the classroom. Disturbances and Dislocations documents the experiences of Mackinlay, her students, and several Yanyuwa women who come together as part of the course to engage in hands-on, authentic music and dance exchanges that bring the Yanyuwa women’s voices to the fore. [End Page 90]From the very beginning of the book, Mackinlay highlights her unique point of view as author of this work. She is a “white, middle class, educated woman” (p. 15) researching the experiences of and teaching university-level courses relating to Indigenous Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, a cultural background that is not her own. She is a political, educational, and ethnic outsider to the groups of peoples she studies. The wife of an Aboriginal man and mother to Aboriginal children, she is afforded links to the Yanyuwa people that provide her with a measure of status as a family member within the community. The dichotomy of being at once an insider and an outsider in the Yanyuwa community lends a fascinating level of complexity to Mackinlay’s exploration and analysis of the presence and impact of Yanyuwa culture-bearers in her classroom. The warmth, honesty, and openness with which she addresses her unique role in this learning exchange is engaging to the reader, and allows her personal situation to add humanity and life to the words on the page.The eight-chapter book commences with an introductory section that reflects upon her personal experiences in engaging in scholarship relating to Indigenous Australian issues. Additionally, the reader is introduced to the site of the ethnography, her classroom, in which her personal and professional lives intertwine. The next chapter further establishes the context of the ethnography by discussing a pilot project that laid foundations for the main study presented in the book. In this 1999 pilot project, a group of Mackinlay’s students, largely white women, participated in hands-on music and dance workshops under the guidance of Mackinlay and several Yanyuwa women. Student responses from this pilot project indicated that they felt awkward at times, but valued the time spent with the Yanyuwa guests and wished for more of these types of class sessions. Mackinlay determined that this cultural exchange could be even richer if more class time could be dedicated to it, an important observation for her own work, and also for others who seek to furnish cultural encounters for students.The fourth chapter delves into a theoretical discussion of the meanings of the inclusion of the study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in contemporary classroom settings. Issues of political positioning, representation of Indigenous voices, identity, and “speaking from and of in-between spaces” (p. 64) as one with a foothold in both white and Indigenous worlds are all addressed, engaging the reader in Mackinaly’s own complex journey of coming to terms with her own teaching and scholarly pursuits. It is refreshing to the reader that Mackinlay acknowledges her unique viewpoint as facilitator of this course and this research study. While she is an authority in this realm, she highlights her own backgrounds and biases, her individual lens... (shrink)

The elevation of ordinary, functional, and task‐based movements were cast as a central aesthetic strategy in the dance concerts at the Judson Memorial Church. A dance ontology focused on an art product could emerge from dance's choreographic structure. A twist to Danto's indiscernibility demands that the performative aspect of the dance medium requires more to capture the aliveness that stilled objects of art do not have.Yvonne Rainer's innovation gives credence to the aliveness in an art capable of always reinventing (...) the ordinary. Aliveness becomes the aboutness of dance. Danto's embodiment amounts to “symbolic expression.” One way Rainer achieved an embodied everydayness was by including artists with no dance training such as Rauschenberg or Morris, or the composer Philip Corner. Dance historian Sally Banes has shown the way Rainer's development of the everyday could be seen as part of a larger investigation. (shrink)

How does pregnancy transform our embodiment? This question will be explored with the help of phenomenology and Butoh dance. Although Butoh has not yet been able to fulfil its true potential for disclosing female embodiment and particularly pregnant embodiment, it will provide us with helpful clues. In pregnancy, objects are less ready-to-hand, more out of reach - world as we know it becomes removed. The habit body vanishes away. But pregnancy is not just a loss of the ordinary: it (...) also opens up new dimensions. One such dimension is that of being touched from within. A phenomenology of the pregnant body thus leads to a removal of world, but also reveals new dimensions of world, and it even comes to disclose the other as a new world within. It means to carry something alien, like the stone in Butoh play Child’s Breath, which can only be carried slowly, awkwardly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Finding a Pedagogical Framework for Dialogue about Nudity and Dance ArtSuzanne Jaeger (bio)"Nudity is like calling something 'Free Beer.' I always threaten to make people do stuff naked, and I'm all for it, but to me, it's usually more trouble than it's worth. If something is swinging around, that's all anybody looks at."—Mark Morris, choreographerIntroductionIn his article on nudity in theatre dance, philosopher Francis Sparshott observes that because we (...) live in a culture in which, for the most part, we remain clothed when in public, we wonder why the dancers in a particular performance of theatre dance are undressed.1 It can be at least a little shocking and often distracting. There are, of course, times when people are naked in public, for example, when seeing a physician, on a nude beach, when using a public change room, or when engaged in a sexual encounter. For the most part, however, we wear clothes in most social contexts. Even if we allow that performances are extraordinary public situations dissimilar from everyday social interactions, because nudity is not the usual condition even for theater dance, we may well wonder why a choreographer has chosen to have the dancers undressed. In other words, the question is fair enough.Certainly, creating some sense of shock or surprise in the audience is often what artists are seeking. Furthermore, they may also be playing on their own, the audience's, or their dancers' exhibitionism. These are all possible aspects of the experience of seeing theater dancers naked on stage. Exhibitionism is itself an interesting aesthetic value, about which much could be said. Exhibitionism is also, at times, tedious, such as when it comes as a [End Page 32] demand for attention that outweighs the interest that can be generated by what the exhibitionist is actually doing. We often expect artists to show us something that goes beyond them—something that focuses our attention and interests away from the artist and onto the work of art.In the following discussion I assume that choreographers sometimes choose to present their dancers undressed because they believe it contributes to the meanings of the dance as a work of art. It is this idea that nudity can be artistically meaningful that I wish to explore. If nudity is not used solely for commercial appeal, shock value, or exhibitionism but rather to contribute to meanings evoked by the dance as an artwork, what more can be said about how the audience has access to these meanings?I begin by defining "art dance" in relation to other kinds of dance practices and then consider a distinction between nudity and nakedness raised first by Kenneth Clark and John Berger in their analyses of meaning in oil paintings and other visual representations of the human form.2 I then introduce two ideas commonly discussed in some canonical literature in the philosophy of art: first, the claim that works of art express feelings; and second, the concept of form as it is used when talking about works of art. Although the discourses of philosophical aesthetics have since moved in new directions, and the notions of expression and aesthetic form are no longer central to the problems of the day, I return to these seminal ideas because they add to our understanding of how nudity can contribute meaning to a work of art dance.I also assume in the discussion that the success of using nudity in a dance work can only be judged on a case-by-case basis. The analyses of feeling and form are meant to provide a pedagogical framework for dialogue with students about the role of nudity in the aesthetics of art dance. The examples serve as illustrations of how one might interpret meanings in particular dance works that use nudity. The educational objective of my interpretations is to promote by example the capacity of art dance observers for experiencing, understanding, and becoming meaningfully involved with works of art dance that use nudity.Part One: Definition of Art DanceWhat I have to say about nudity is said with art or theater dance in mind rather than other forms of dance. This... (shrink)

This article introduces and explores the concept of emotional consumption through an analysis of an exotic dance club in the New England area. Through understanding how regular customers consume the services offered in an exotic dance club, I show how consuming service labor differs dramatically from consuming objects of exchange. Emotional consumption involves psychosocial dynamics, which emerge from the intersubjective relationships between the consumer and the dancer who is providing a service. In this exchange, the consumer engages in an (...) interaction where the boundary between pure economic exchange begins to merge with a sense of relationality. (shrink)

The idea that choreographic movements communicate to audiences by kinetic transfer is a commonplace among choreographers, dancers, and dance educators.1 Moreover, most dance lovers can cite their own favorite examples—the bounciness of the Royal Danish Ballet, the stomping of Bharata Natyam performers, the stag leaps in the thundering Greek chorus in Martha Graham’s Night Journey, or the contagious rhythmic transfer that takes over our feet when we watch classic tap dancers like Buster Brown. The perceptual capacity for kinetic transfer was (...) succinctly identified and theorized by John Martin. He called this capacity metakinesis. Martin was influenced by Theodor Lipps’s earlier theory of empathy. Lipps introduced his notion of empathy as a way to characterize our muscular responses to the perceived internal dynamics of inanimate objects under stress and tension, for example, weight-bearing columns and cantilevered boulders. Martin argued analogously about dance. -/- In what follows, we explore and evaluate three general challenges to the existence and significance of kinetic transfer in dance: challenges to the very possibility of kinesthetic understanding in dance, questions about the relevance of kinetic transfer to explanations of artistic communication in dance, and concerns about the relevance of kinetic transfer to evaluative questions germane to dance appreciation. We do not subscribe to every aspect of Martin’s story. Nevertheless, we think that Martin was exceedingly prescient. His speculations appear to be supported by recent research in neuroscience and psychology.We feel as a result that Martin’s comments are highly suggestive of what might be going on in ordinary dance consumers (or at least moderately informed ones). Critically, however, we do not model these contributions in terms of a discrete, stand-alone kinesthetic sense as Martin did. Rather, we argue that metakinesis and kinetic transfer refer to a general crossmodal sensorimotor perceptual capacity that contributes to our understanding and experience of actions in everyday contexts. Nor do we claim that audiences recognize and understand dance solely on the basis of kinetic transfer. Rather, we argue that this sensorimotor capacity is a contributing factor in our perceptual engagement with dance works, one of a range of tools ready to hand to choreographers and dancers for conveying information critical to the content of their works. (shrink)

This thesis is about meaning, expression and language in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and their role in the phenomenological project as a whole. For Merleau-Ponty, expression is the taking up of a meaning given either in perception or in already acquired forms of expression, thereby repeating, transforming or congealing meaning into gestures, utterances, artworks, ideas or theories. Contrary to the predominant view in the literature, the relation of expression to meaning, and in particular the problem of expressing new meanings, was of fundamental (...) importance to Merleau-Ponty from the very beginning, in that it was intrinsically related to the overcoming of what he termed “objective thought”. Admittedly, there is an evolution of his philosophy in this respect: from the early stance where the recasting of certain basic categories is taken as pivotal for the development of a new form of thinking, with arguments drawn also from various empirical and social sciences, to what appears to be an effort at an all-pervading reformulation of philosophical language during his last years. But the remoulding of categories was never for Merleau-Ponty a matter simply of finding a few, better adapted concepts, but from the outset an endeavour to think philosophical arguments through to a point where they reveal their inherent inconsistencies. Recasting philosophical expression is thus a risky enterprise, and this is a point I explore further in Essay 1, that focuses especially upon creative expression in painting and to some extent in literature. In Essay 2 I discuss the notion of Gestalt and how it serves this general project, whereas Essay 3 deals with verbal language, on the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure’s linguistics. Essay 4 examines bodily expression from the point of view of feminist phenomenology and in particular Judith Butler’s early reading of Merleau-Ponty, and finally Essay 5 discusses expression in the art of dance. (shrink)

In _Always More Than One_, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects this (...) to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation? (shrink)

This paper addresses the ontological status of the body in the context of bodily practices in body-oriented disciplines, such as sport training, dance, and physiotherapy. Following Descartes’, Huss...

The object of this investigation is the connection between dance and modern philosophy. The body has been disciplined in modern era in a very peculiar way which is conveyed into governmental processes of optimization of the bodily potentiality. Dance has not only an aesthetic value but a political one. In this contribution I analyse the government of the body through disciplined movement and the research for the intensive variations in the contemporary sperimental 'contact improvisation'.

Many objects in the world have functions. Typewriters are for typing. Can-openers are for opening cans. Lawnmowers are for cutting grass. That is what these things are for. Every day around the world people attribute functions to objects. Some of the objects with functions are organs or parts of living organisms. Hearts are for pumping blood. Eyes are for seeing. Countless works in biology explain the “Form, Function, and Evolution of... ” everything from bee dances to (...) elephant tusks to pandas’ ‘thumbs’. Many scientific explanations, in areas as diverse as psychology, sociology, economics, medical research, and neuroscience, rest on appeals to the function and/or malfunction of things or systems. They talk of how humans and other organisms or their parts work, what their functions are, why they are present, and how different situations will affect them and how they will react. Philosophers, going back to Aristotle, used to make generous use of functions in describing objects, organisms, their interactions, and even as the basis of ethics and metaphysics. And yet, since the Enlightenment, talk of the function of natural objects, teleological function, began to be viewed with suspicion, as the mechanical model of the world replaced the old Aristotelian model. From a religious standpoint, it used to be easy to see how objects in the natural world could have natural functions, for God was said to instill functions by design throughout Creation. But philosophers became increasingly reluctant to invoke God to solve every difficult philosophical problem, and became unwilling to indulge in such religious explanations of teleology. (shrink)

The objective of the research presented in this paper was to investigate whether an association existed between the activation of the body schema and reaching adulthood among people in late adolescence. Three activities that are known to enjoy popularity among young people were analysed, namely: dancing, playing computer games that require motor involvement, and playing computer games of an educational and entertaining character. It was assumed that the chosen forms of activity correspond to three levels of activation of the body (...) schema. The following research methods have been applied to this study: the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the Defence Style Questionnaire, and the Bodily Self Representation Questionnaire. The study has proven that the activation of body schema through dance is significantly related to high self-esteem and the use of mainly mature and neurotic defence mechanisms in threat situations. (shrink)

The theory and culture of the arts has largely focused on the arts of objects, and neglected the arts of action – the “process arts”. In the process arts, artists create artifacts to engender activity in their audience, for the sake of the audience’s aesthetic appreciation of their own activity. This includes appreciating their own deliberations, choices, reactions, and movements. The process arts include games, urban planning, improvised social dance, cooking, and social food rituals. In the traditional object arts, (...) the central aesthetic properties occur in the artistic artifact itself. It is the painting that is beautiful; the novel that is dramatic. In the process arts, the aesthetic properties occur in the activity of the appreciator. It is the game player’s own decisions that are elegant, the rock climber’s own movement that is graceful, and the tango dancers’ rapport that is beautiful. The artifact’s role is to call forth and shape that activity, guiding it along aesthetic lines. I offer a theory of the process arts. Crucially, we must distinguish between the designed artifact and the prescribed focus of aesthetic appreciation. In the object arts, these are one and the same. The designed artifact is the painting, which is also the prescribed focus of appreciation. In the process arts, they are different. The designed artifact is the game, but the appreciator is prescribed to appreciate their own activity in playing the game. Next, I address the complex question of who the artist really is in a piece of process art — the designer or the active appreciator? Finally, I diagnose the lowly status of the process arts. (shrink)

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to assess the reliability and validity of the new judging system in DanceSport. METHODS: Eighteen judges rated the 12 best placed adult dancing couples competing at an international competition. They marked each couple on all judging criteria on a 10 level scale. Absolute agreement and consistency of judging were calculated for all main judging criteria and sub-criteria. RESULTS: A mean correlation of overall judging marks was 0.48. Kendall’s coefficient of concordance for overall marks (...) (W = 0.58) suggesting relatively low agreement among judges. Slightly lower coefficients were found for the artistic part (Partnering skills (W = 0.45) and Choreography and performance (W = 0.49)) compared to the technical part (Technical qualities (W = 0.56) and Movement to music (W = 0.54)). ICC for overall criteria was low for absolute agreement (ICC(2,3) = 0.62) but higher for consistency (ICC(3,3) = 0.80). CONCLUSION: The relatively large differences between judges’ marks suggest that judges either disagreed to some extent on the quality of the dancing or used the judging scale in different ways. The biggest concern was standard error of measurement (SEM) which was often larger than the difference between dancers scores suggesting that this judging system lacks validity. This was the first research to assess judging in DanceSport and offers suggestions to potentially improve both its objectivity and validity in the future. (shrink)

What forms of consciousness can the subject have of her body in action? This is a recurrent issue in contemporary research on skilled movement and expertise, and according to a widespread view, the body makes itself inconspicuous in performance in favour of the object or goal that the activity is directed to. However, this attitude to consciousness in bodily performance seems unsatisfying for an understanding of skilled action, and the work of several researchers can be seen as responding to this (...) view: Montero, Legrand, Ravn and others in the philosophy of expertise and of dance have developed various notions of consciousness and cognition to account for the mindful processes at play in performance. Two related questions can be distinguished here: 1. Is there an inherent conflict between skilled action and at least more than marginal awareness of that action, or is it possible – and even desirable – to reflect on our own performance without considerably impeding on it? 2. What forms of consciousness pertaining to the body in action must we distinguish in order to answer the first question? This paper gives an overview of this discussion, focusing on the second issue, although the first will come into play in so far as it is linked with the latter question. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of bodily reflection and on dancers’ descriptions, I show that there is, in phenomenological terms, a bodily level of reflection: a fully conscious and exploratory activity that is led by the skilled body, and that is explicitly aimed at by many performers. (shrink)

Edward Said pointed to the problem of Orientalism that develops when the West creates a fictitious imagined version of Eastern religion and culture. Said’s notion of Orientalism focuses on the general distorted representation of Eastern religion and culture by the West. Homi Bhabha extends Said’s notion of Orientalism to reveal the tension of the inevitable hybridity between the East and the West. Here, cultural practices develop in the space of hybridity with the intention to promote a feeling of coherence as (...) opposed to with the objective to deform or distort religion and culture. Thus, the intention in a space of hybridity is often not to engage in Orientalism. Instead, the goal is to develop something new in a hybrid form. An opportunity arises in philosophy of education to adequately confront the problem of Orientalism that may develop in a space of hybridity. The author proposes a philosophical postcolonial framework that engages in a creative process that does not further Orientalism but rather develops something new with an ethic of hybrid responsibility for religion and culture. To illustrate this, the author uses Kuchipudi Indian Classical Hindu dance as an example. (shrink)

What is it about art that can be so captivating? How is it that we find value in the often odd and abstract objects and events we call artworks? William P. Seeley proposes that artworks are attentional engines. They are artifacts that have been intentionally designed to direct attention to critical stylistic features that reveal their point, purpose, or meaning. In developing this view, Seeley argues that there is a lot we can learn about the value of art from (...) interdisciplinary research focused on our perceptual engagement with artworks. Recent breakthroughs in cognitive science and behavioral science can explain how we recognize artworks and how we differentiate them from more quotidian artifacts. Seeley pushes this line of reasoning, showing how cognitive science can help reveal the way artworks function as a unique source of value. Cognitive systems integrate this information into our experience of art, guiding attention and shaping what we perceive. Our understanding and appreciation of artworks is therefore carried in our perceptual experience of them. -/- Attentional Engines explores the pitfalls and potential of this interdisciplinary strategy for understanding art. It articulates a cognitivist theory of art grounded in perceptual psychology and neuroscience and demonstrates its application to a range of puzzles in the philosophy of the arts. This includes questions about the nature of depiction, the role played by metakinesis in dance appreciation, the nature of musical expression, and the power of movies. The provocative interdisciplinary theories Seeley presents will appeal to scholars and students interested in aesthetics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of art, cognitive science, and anyone with a burning curiosity about how artworks work. (shrink)

This book develops an original theory of performative beauty. Philosophical aesthetics has largely neglected one's own actions as a potential experience of the beautiful. Throughout the book, the author uses own experiences of Argentine tango as a case study; one important incentive for social dancing is to have pleasurable and beautiful experiences. This book begins by investigating the methodological causes for why beauty in modernity has been seen to result only from contemplating external objects. It then builds a theory (...) of performative beauty that incorporates findings from new phenomenology, neuroaesthetics, enactivism, and somaesthetics and that reassesses existing inquiries of beauty. The result is an account that identifies kinaesthetic awareness as the point of emergence of both theory and practice, of creation (poiesis) and perception (aisthesis), and of moving (agency) and being moved (reception). Performative beauty is the pleasure of being moved by the dance where the dancer feels both as a creative improvisor and as an integrated part of the activity itself. A Somaesthetics of Performative Beauty - Tangoing Desire and Nostalgia will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, dance studies, performance studies and related fields of artistic research. (shrink)

The object of the study is the continuous preservation of the multi-genre Cossack folk song, which represents a key purpose in the implementation of the preservation of the traditional mentality at the present stage. The subject of this work is the immanent complexes of traditional song culture in the folklore heritage. The purpose of this study is to structure the issue of the cultural interrelation of the ethnic canvas of the Kuban Cossack folk songs, in the originality of the genesis (...) of the vocal and performing specifics of modern creativity. When discovering the fundamental foundations of the vocal performance of the Cossack song, special attention is paid to the study of the folklore primary sources of the Kuban folklorists, V.G.Zakharchenko, A.D.Bigdai, G.M.Kontsevich. Along with this, an expert assessment of the characteristics of the Kuban Cossack folk song according to the genre classification component is an important feature of the performance of vocal samples today. The theoretical basis is in an analytical approach to the peculiarities of the performance of a local source from the point of view of substantiating the scientific nature of the subject under consideration according to the functionally oriented elements of the report: traditions, traditional manner of performance, interpretation of the text, song melody. Methodological basis: components of the study of the local singing tradition, modernization of folklore song documents, the method of consistency-the genre diversity of Cossack performance. The author's approach to the correlation of musical sources as methodological characteristics of the Kuban Cossack singing traditions has been developed. We test the proposed system when working with archival documents, in the diagnosis of song samples recorded from informants. The key aspect is the musicological analysis of the musical collections of Kuban Cossack folk songs from the point of view of the continuously developing, multifaceted changing performing skills of the soloist and choir. The author takes into account the introduced model of performing Cossack songs since the resettlement of the Black Sea Cossacks, who brought the baggage of multi-genre sources and eventually introduced the Kuban folk singing art. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the author's analytical systematization of authentic song compositions recorded by folklorists, in the analysis of multi-genre Kuban Cossack sources (selectively) for further active performance on stage. The specific directions of performance according to characteristic song genres are determined: historical, military, everyday, marching, lyrical, wedding, ceremonial, round dance, comic. The reproduced orientation of the nature of the continuous preservation of folklore sources in the revised performance interpretation of Cossack vocal works gives rise to significant broadcasting opportunities today. (shrink)

According to the biomedical model of medicine, the subject of the illness event is the pathology rather than the person diagnosed with the disease. In this view, a body-self becomes a ‘patient’ body-object that can be enrolled in a therapeutic protocol, investigated, assessed, and transformed. How can it be possible for cancer patients to make sense of the opposite dimensions of their body-self and their body-diseased-object? Could a creative embodied approach enable the coping with trauma tied to the experience of (...) illness? By applying a phenomenological approach and auto-ethnographic analysis to the experience of cancer, this visual exploration provides support for rethinking the cancer event through a performative perspective. This work previews images and video material collected over ten years of haematological treatments, video dance performances and physical explorations. This work displays how processes of healing can be set in motion by creative embodied practices, physical explorations and unexpected journeys. By resisting the biomedical model and allowing the emergence of new meanings, it illustrates how dance and performative practices offer ground for transformation. (shrink)

The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the word “consent” originally derives from the “Latin consentīre to feel together, agree, accord harmonize”, further broken down into “con- together + sentīre to feel, think, judge, etc.” Thus, consent is originally a matter of mutual activity and receptivity, specifically a co-creating co-creation based on shared, ongoing feeling. What this seems to imply – and this is certainly always been true in my experiences with social Latin dance – is that consent is not a (...) static thing, not an object or product that has been definitively produced and recorded. Instead, consent is an ongoing process, a reciprocating experiencing that is crucially both beyond one individual dancer, and also simultaneously active and receptive. Altogether, then, consent in social Latin dance emerges as a process of doing and undergoing together. Thus, if the connection of dancing consent is broken, for example if one partner shifts from the acting/receiving balance to a state of exclusive acting (with no receiving), then consent is no longer transpiring, which greatly increases the risk of unwanted touch beginning and continuing. Put simply, wanted touch is consensual touch, and consensual touch is touch that is supported by an ongoing activity and receptivity of consent. Wanted touch in dance is thus analogous to a “closed” electrical circuit. (In fact, at the cellular level of a dancer’s body this truth is literal rather than merely analogous, given the neurochemical dimension of the body’s activities). A closed circuit, in this technical sense, refers to a circuit in which there is no break in the path (for example between a device and an outlet), an unbrokenness that sustains a live current in the circuit. By contrast, unwanted touch in social Latin dance is like an open circuit, involving a break in the path between the partners, which entails the absence of the necessary current of consent. (shrink)

The following paper argues that J.G. Fichte, despite his apparent philosophical neglect of art and aesthetics, does develop a strong, original, and coherent account of art, which not only allows the theorization of modern, non-representative art forms, but indeed anticipates Nietzsche and Heidegger in conceiving of truth in terms of art rather than scientific rationality. While the basis of Fichte’s philosophy of art is presented in the essay “On Spirit and Letter in Philosophy,” it is not developed systematically either in (...) this text or anywhere else in his writings, but must be reconstructed through a broad consideration of all his works, including, above all, his political and economic writings. For Fichte, the art-work does not exist as an object possessing “aesthetic value” and which can, in turn, be possessed, consumed, and enjoyed through the subjective act of aesthetic experience. Rather, it involves a mode of praxis which, grounded in a radical and original power of imagination, creatively discloses possibilities for future forms of existence, experience, and political community that cannot be theoretically anticipated. While Fichte cannot himself theorize specific forms of art, since the art that concerns him belongs to the future, we can, however, retrospectively try to understand non-representational painting and non-mimetic dance as concrete realizations of Fichte’s art-work of the future. In this way, Fichte’s philosophy of art ultimately suggests an alternative to Heidegger’s understanding of the work of art as a projective institution of truth. Fichte suggests that the human body, rather than human language, is the fundamental medium of art. (shrink)

As part of a recent attempt to extend the methods of formal semantics beyond language, it has been claimed that music has an abstract truth-conditional semantics, albeit one that has more in common with iconic semantics than with standard compositional semantics. After summarizing this approach and addressing a common objection, we argue that music semantics should be enriched in three directions by incorporating insights of other areas of Super Semantics. First, it has been claimed by Abusch 2013 that visual narratives (...) make use of discourse referents akin to those we find in language. We argue that a similar conclusion extends to music, and we highlight it by investigating ways in which orchestration and dance may make cross-referential dependencies more explicit. Second, we show that by bringing music semantics closer to the semantics of visual narratives, we can give an account of the semantics of mixed visual and musical sequences. Third, it has been claimed that co-speech gestures trigger characteristic conditionalized presuppositions, called ‘cosuppositions’, and that their semantic status derives from their parasitic character relative to words. We argue that the same conclusion extends to some instances of film and cartoon music: it may trigger cosuppositions that can be revealed by embedding film excerpts or gifs in sentences so as to test presupposition projection. We further argue that under special discourse conditions, pro-speech gestures and pro-speech music alike can trigger cosuppositions as well. These results suggest that new insights can be gained not just by extending the methods of semantics to new objects, but also by drawing new connections among them. (shrink)

RESUMO O objetivo do presente artigo é tratar a dança como discurso visual e verbo-visual e identificar alguns de seus componentes que permitem a construção de sentido para um público sem formação específica e que seja mero amador e frequentador de espetáculos de dança. Na primeira parte, busca-se estabelecer as bases teórico-conceituais do trabalho e, para tanto, percorrem-se trechos da obra de Bakhtin, Medviédev e Volóshinov que convergem com o pensamento de Rudolf Laban, teórico da dança que a concebe como (...) linguagem. Na segunda parte, analisa-se um corpus constituído de quatro fragmentos discursivos, exemplares de diferentes gêneros - balé clássico, balé moderno, hip-hop e streetdance. Mobilizam-se para a análise os conceitos de gênero discursivo, entonação e sistema de valores. ABSTRACT The objective of this article is to examine dance as visual and verbal-visual discourse, and to identify the components that foster the production of meaning for an audience without any specialized training, but who are merely amateurs, and who attend dance shows. The first part of the article establishes the theoretical-conceptual basis for the study, supported by excerpts from the works of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov, which converge with the perspective of dance theorist, Rudolf Laban, who conceives of dance as language. Secondly, a corpus consisting of four discursive fragments from different genres are analyzed: classical ballet, modern ballet, hip-hop and street dance. The analysis focuses on the concepts of discursive genres, intonation, and value systems. (shrink)