This paper deals with the autonomy of art and more specifically with the autonomy of socially engaged art once it is institutionalized. The originality of the article is its use of Goodman's terminology to theorize socially engaged art. By comparing two works of art from the same collective, the main issue is to defend the hypothesis that artistic consecration prevents an emancipatory action from functioning as art or prevents an action from functioning as socially engaged art. Thus, in the context (...) of engaged art, the question is no longer "when is art?" but "where is art?". (shrink)

One cannot ignore the institutions that surround art if one wants to deliver a theory of art acknowledging that art lives through a community of social relationships and assumes meaning as such. I make the claim that the evolution of sports from mere play, survival, and diversion toward the global phenomenon of modern sports can likewise be understood as a function of social connectivity. In this article, I first outline the theory of art, then link that to sport as an (...) institution to then develop the thesis that art and sport institutionalize the body in a particular way and deduce that this creates culture. I conclude that both art and sport, a notion somewhat derived from Wittgenstein, are kinds of... (shrink)

Who has the power to institutionalize culture? How is it that cultural forms become legitimated and appropriated by certain groups? And what are the organizational forms that guarantee the continuity of the interlocks among classifications, etiquette, and resources in the long run? This article explores these questions by observing the struggle over the institutionalization of opera as high culture during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Buenos Aires, a region of the world understudied by cultural sociologists. (...) It contends that to answer these questions we need to observe the contested dynamics though which the process of institutionalization happens. It also shows how this contestation affects, in the long-term, the processes of evaluation and legitimation of the classification upheld, and the consequences it has in terms of audience stratification. In the Discussion section, I present a novel framework for the study of pathways to high culture institutionalization that highlights how the role of the state and competing stakeholders can introduce variable relationships among the elites, the arts, and social closure. (shrink)

The article considers how the use of duplicates and the practice of photography interacted in museums of ethnography, contributing to the ambivalent framing of ethnographic objects as items that can be both scientific specimens and works of art. It focuses on the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris and on the key period of its reorganization between 1928 and 1935, which was central to the institutionalization of French ethnology. By examining the place of duplicates in this museum, as well (...) as the major role attributed to photographs of objects and their materiality, the paper shows that these others of the ethnographic artefacts, often considered separately from their originals, still participated in the same project: the development of the museum and its growing cultural influence. While the duplicates positioned the museum in the various networks of the scientific community, the photographs appealed to the avant-garde, amateurs, African and Oceanian art dealers and the general public. (shrink)

Until fairly recently, most of the attention of art historians and others in these debates has been paid to differences among the partisans of various disciplinary methodologies, or to the differential benefits of one or another school of thought or theoretical perspective in other areas of the humanities and social sciences as these might arguably apply to questions of art historical practice.1 Yet there has also come about among art historians a renewed interest in the historical origins of the academic (...) discipline itself, and in the relationships of its institutionalization in various countries to the professionalizing of other historical and critical disciplines in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These interests have led increasingly to wider discussion by art historians of the particular nature of disciplinary knowledge, the circumstances and protocols of academic practice, and the relations between the various branches of modern discourse on the visual arts: academic art history, art criticism, aesthetic philosophy, the art market, exhibitions, and musicology.2 What follows does not aim to summarize or characterize these developments but is more simply an attempt to delineate some of the principal characteristics of the discipline as an evidentiary institution in the light of the material conditions of academic practice that arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century in relation to the history of mueological display. In brief, this essay is concerned with the circumstances of art history’s foundations as a systematic and “scientific” practice, and its focus is limited to a single, albeit paradigmatic, American example. 1. An extended discussion of these issues may be found in Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science , pp. 80-121. See also The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello .2. One important sign off these discussions has been a series of “Views and Overviews” of the discipline appearing in The Art Bulletin in recent years, of which the most recent has been perhaps the most extensive and comprehensive: Mieke Bal and Norman Byrson, ”Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 73 : 174-208. Donald Preziosi is professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and, beginning in 1992, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science and is currently completing a book on the history of museums entitled Framing Modernity. (shrink)

The idea of modern art presupposes the rise of historicism and the sense of progress since the Enlightenment. Once art, however, conceives itself as progressive and hence modern, it is confronted by the paradoxes of progress: progress renders the modern obsolete at the same time as it seeks to give itself meaning by positing a goal, a destination that would be the end purpose and hence the end of progress. As a consequence, modern art is impelled to constantly transcend its (...) own achievements and limits in a utopian quest for the artwork of the future, the ultimate work of art. But what happens to art when the grand art-historical narrative of modernism collapses? I argue that the ‘modern’ mutates into the ‘contemporary’ and that art now defines itself not in relation to the future but to the present. Contemporary art understands itself as operating in the present, that is, as an art for the present. It finds its destination now in the latest institutionalization of the paradoxes of progress: the museum of contemporary art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to ExpressionismDavid MorganA familiar tradition since the eighteenth century has invested art with the power to heal a decadent human condition. Inheriting this ability from religion—the romantic enthusiast Wilhelm Wackenroder considered artistic inspiration to originate in “divine inspiration” in the case of his hero, Raphael 1 —art eventually replaced institutionalized belief in an evolutionary schedule of cultural development determined (...) by German idealism. Hegel, for instance, theorized the evolution of spirit from religion to art as a qualitative advancement over time. Rejecting the metaphysics of German idealism, Friedrich Nietzsche nevertheless contended that “Art raises its head where religions decline.” By assuming the “feelings and moods” of religion which had been dismantled by enlightenment, Nietzsche claimed that art gave new form to the life of feeling and imbued human endeavors with a “loftier, darker coloration.” 2 In the early twentieth century Wassily Kandinsky believed that the “spiritual in art” was the historical manifestation of an “inner necessity” that was in itself timeless and universal. Kandinsky portrayed the “life of the spirit” as “a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts.” In a kind of “trickle down” aesthetic, the compartments of the triangle move slowly upward toward the apex, which is inhabited by the solitary genius of an age whose vision gradually elevates all those who occupy the lower stages. 3 [End Page 317]The point for proponents of the spiritual in art from romanticism to expressionism (and beyond) was to find in works of art what can best be described as an enchantment. 4 As the negotiation of the gaps or disjunctures separating human beings from complete power over their lives, enchantment conjoins the plane of immediate human experience to a desirable state of affairs through the mediation of such symbolic devices as rituals, incantations, or charms. Thus, evil can be warded off by the use of an apotropaic amulet, and fertility can be enhanced by the recitation of a suitable prayer or the performance of a certain ritual. In a modern analogy a sense of impotence is often alleviated by a trip to the mall where the bored therapeutically lose themselves in symbolic acts of self-renewing consumption. In the traditions of philosophy and science, systems of representation such as astrology, the microcosm, the harmony of the spheres, the great chain of being, the celestial hierarchies, or the mechanisms of theurgy and divination situate humanity within a cosmos that follows a particular order accessible to and in some degree manipulable by human beings. Enchantment consists of an apparatus of belief whose form of representation or enactment is thought to exert influence over the realities it configures.But enchantment is not limited to the spells and magic of premodern metaphysics (or modern consumerism). By means of religion, morality, and aesthetics, Nietzsche once averred, “man likes to believe that... he is touching the heart of the world.” 5 This study will focus on the manner in which art as constructed within the idealist tradition of German art theory functioned as an enchantment. Specifically, it will explore what the history of ideas about abstraction and empathy has to tell us about the spiritualization or enchantment of art. After identifying the philosophical and aesthetic wherewithal of enchantment in nineteenth-century Germany, attention focusses on Franz Marc’s early twentieth-century theorization of abstraction. It is certainly more customary to study Kandinsky, whose writings and early efforts at abstraction are much better known, but Marc’s ideas offer more immediate connections to German intellectual history and clarify the aims of his abstract art as a strategy of enchantment. Moreover, Marc was unusually articulate and wrote often, exploring ideas and artistic efforts with great insight. Focusing on Marc therefore offers a corrective to the historiography that has favored Kandinsky’s writings. Finally, Marc differed from his Russian friend over the cause of the war. Manifesting a difference that is portentous for this study, Kandinsky left Germany for Russia in 1914, while Marc enthusiastically took up arms for the fatherland. Given these circumstances and the unfortunate tendency of art historians to valorize expressionist art rather than situate it in the ideological context of... (shrink)

The article begins with a sociologically triumphalist critique of philosophical aesthetics, grounded in the work of Ernest Gellner and Emile Durkheim. It proceeds to note the practical failure of this kind of sociology to become institutionalized within the wider discipline. It explores a number of possible explanations for this failure, but finally suggests that a normalized sociology of art requires a normalized conception of art itself, such as that tentatively advanced by Pierre Bourdieu and Franco Moretti. The article also has (...) an autobiographical subtext. (shrink)

Gustavo Costa reviewing the Italian edition of Vico's _Institutiones Oratoriae_ in _New Vico Studies_ 9 (1991), has written that Rhetoric is the mainspring of an important trend of Vichian studies which initiated at the beginning of the twentieth century and had its manifestation in John D. Schaeffer's _Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), where Schaeffer aptly noted, summing up a long exegetic tradition, Vico was imbued with rhetoric and convinced of its centrality (...) to Western civilization. Unfortunately, the editions of Vico's works published in English have not yet included the _Institutiones Oratoriae_, which more or less reflects the lectures on rhetoric given by Vico at the University of Naples, starting with the academic year 1699-1700 and going through 1739-1741. The manual on rhetoric was used in Italy up to the end of the nineteenth century and established the common curriculum in rhetoric to be followed in all Universities. This English edition offers a text of the _Institutiones_ complete on the base of the four known extant manuscripts. It offers the marginal glosses made by Vico's students, a collection of Vico's phrases and explanations of terms collected by some of the students, a glossary of Latin words and rhetorical terms from the Latin text, and a wealth of information in the commentary. _The Art of Rhetoric_ is the manual for everyone who wants to know what rhetoric is, how it was employed in the forum or the courts, how it could be learned from the classic orators, and how it can be used whenever we speak for convincing, praising or motivating. (shrink)

The publication takes the example of one of the native faith religious movements of modern Ukraine. It highlights the peculiarities of its spontaneous emergence, development, self-identification, and guidelines for religious activity. The article also briefly examines the origins of this community, the sources of its doctrine and name, the peculiarities of searching for its own religious identity, the main points of reflection on the sphere of the sacred, understanding the “idea of God”, the representation of religious symbols and art, the (...) organization of ritual and cult practice, and the directions of religious activity. At the same time, the peculiarities of forming such a religious community are considered not in isolation, but in the context of interaction and mutual influence with other native faith confessions of Ukraine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as Symptom:Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic CriticismTim Dean (bio)This paper tackles a problem that is exemplified by, but not restricted to, Slavoj Žižek's work: the tendency to treat aesthetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced. Whether or not one employs the vocabulary and methods of psychoanalysis to do so, this approach to aesthetics has become so widespread in the humanities that it (...) qualifies as a contemporary critical norm. As a norm, it may be subject to debate and even contestation. Today it is normative to read literature, film, and other cultural texts primarily as evidence about the societies that made them—evidence that necessarily requires our hermeneutic labor in order to yield its significance. This methodological protocol remains in place whether one inhabits critical perspectives as ostensibly disparate as historicist, materialist, or psychoanalytic modes of thinking; it is also a grounding assumption of cultural studies, irrespective of how one defines that critical practice. Indeed, the issue I want to address is quite as much a Marxist problem as it is a psychoanalytic one, and therefore the way in which Žižek articulates Lacan with Marx makes his work especially fertile terrain on which to engage this matter. As Žižek reminds us in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Lacan claimed that Marx invented the symptom [SO 11]—an observation that Žižek has been keen to exploit from the very beginning of his work.Žižek's combining psychoanalysis with Marxism in novel ways has helped make Lacan more palatable to contemporary critical sensibilities by politicizing psychoanalysis, demonstrating how it offers less an account of the individual than of society and culture. In Žižek's hands psychoanalytic theory appears less vulnerable to the standard criticisms that it is ahistorical and apolitical. While a number of critiques of Žižek have reiterated these common objections, nevertheless his politicizing of psychoanalysis has been particularly important during a period that witnessed the rise of new historicism, the institutionalization of cultural studies, and the escalating importance of "the political" as a sign—perhaps the sign—of humanities professors' seriousness.1 Žižek's work has gone a long way toward making Lacan seem indispensable to cultural studies, just as Juliet Mitchell's and Jacqueline Rose's work a decade earlier made Lacan seem indispensable to theoretically rigorous feminism. At a moment when the poststructuralist variant of Lacanian theory was being displaced by historicist modes of thought, Žižek emerged on the scene to revivify psychoanalysis and make it exciting again. Thus his work's appeal has an historical basis quite apart from Žižek's own personal charisma and his remarkable productivity. It is his politicizing of psychoanalysis, as much as his [End Page 21] rendering Lacan newly accessible, that has made Žižek popular. I want to argue, however, that his style of politicizing psychoanalysis carries a significant ethical cost, one that follows partly as a consequence of Žižek's failure to work through his theoretical relation to Althusser, from whom he derives the practice of symptomatic reading while claiming to displace the latter's version of psychoanalytic Marxism. Thus I shall be arguing for a significant distinction between a political and an ethical psychoanalysis, suggesting that we have been cultivating the former at the expense of the latter.Spaghetti PsychoanalysisThe notion of the symptom is central to Žižek's thinking about politics and culture. Although in his work and in psychoanalytic theory more generally the term symptom carries a range of conceptual meanings, symptomatology remains the governing trope of Žižek's oeuvre. Following Lacan, who continued to modify the concept of the symptom throughout his career, Žižek argues that just about anything can be understood as symptomatic:[I]n the final years of Lacan's teaching we find a kind of universalization of the symptom: almost everything that is becomes in a way symptom, so that finally even woman is determined as the symptom of man. We can even say that "symptom" is Lacan's final answer to the eternal philosophical question "Why is there something instead of nothing?"—this "something" which "is... (shrink)

It is about analyzing the connection between just memory, narration and art, using an approach that mixes philosophy and visual arts. We will start from the perspective of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur on fair memory, presented in his work Memory, History, Oblivion (2000), according to which there is an institutionalized ideologization of memory in which narrations are silenced or distorted by the so-called official history. In the process of recovering fair memory, these narratives need to be heard, recognized and (...) valued, deconstructing abusive mechanisms that silence them with the aim of producing oblivion or that manipulate them involve distorting the facts to benefit hegemonic discourses. Next, we will discuss how the myth of Brazilian racial democracy is an example of institutionalized ideologization of memory, considering mainly the reflections of Brazilian philosophy Sueli Carneiro in Device of raciality (2023). Finally, we will show how Elian Almeida's pictorial counter-narratives, especially the Vogue series (2020), work to strengthen and disseminate unofficial narratives about Brazil that have been suffocated by official history. (shrink)

This book examines the complexities of the hipster through the lens of art history and cultural theory, from Charles Baudelaire's flan̂eur to the contemporary 'creative' borne from creative industries policies. It claims that the recent ubiquity of hipster culture has led many artists to confront their own significance, responding to the mass artification of contemporary life by de-emphasising the formal and textual deconstructions so central to the legacies of modern and postmodern art. In the era of creative digital technologies, long (...) held characteristics of art such as individual expression, innovation, and alternative lifestyle are now features of a flooded and fast-paced global marketplace. Against the idea that artists, like hipsters, are the 'foot soldiers of capitalism', the institutionalized networks that make up the contemporary art world are working to portray a view of art that is less a discerning exercise in innovative form-making than a social platform--a forum for populist aesthetic pleasures or socio-political causes. It is in this sense that the concept of the hipster is caught up in age-old debates about the relation between ethics and aesthetics, examined here in terms of the dynamics of global contemporary art."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

The subject of this study is the process of entering the art world of a new object – the art of the street wave. Based on the method of discursive analysis proposed by M. Foucault, an attempt is made to determine through which discursive utterances the subjects of the art world form the discourse of street wave art, as well as how the field of utterances is organized. The subject whose activity is being investigated is the St. Petersburg Inloco Foundation, (...) which focuses in its work on artists whose creative career has a street background. The article describes the characteristics of what can be conceptualized as a statement in the activities of the Foundation, and also describes how the field of these statements is organized. In the course of the study, the forms of sequences, forms of coexistence and intervention procedures were considered. It was revealed that the experience of street creativity of representatives of the art of the street wave is being modified under the influence of discursive practices of the field of contemporary art. It is noted that the art of the street wave exists at the junction of two fields – the field of graffiti and the field of institutionalized art. It is concluded that the borderline position of street wave art allows it to expand the field of contemporary art due to the fact that it was once in the field of "non-art", was extracted by the subjects of the art world from the sphere of everyday life and endowed with the status of a candidate for evaluation. (shrink)

Over the last three decades, the art market has undergone a remarkable transformation. Before the 1990s, artworks were sold with hardly any concern about whether they had been stolen or looted, whereas now any reputable gallery or auction house checks the “provenance” of any substantial work before sale. This transformation reflects interlocking changes in law, norms, and institutions. New York’s and more broadly the United States’ assertion of jurisdiction and application of U.S. substantive law has destabilized title to stolen and (...) looted goods worldwide because American statutes of limitations generally provide weaker protection for those who possess stolen or looted goods even in good faith. Application of American law has had a profound effect, especially for the high end of the market, because European or Asian investors who purchase art outside of the U.S. may eventually want to sell or display their works in the U.S. Defective title under American law thus affects prices worldwide. The tightening and broader application of American law reflects both longstanding legal principles and changes in social norms towards the redress of historical wrongs, most notably prominent campaigns relating to art confiscated or sold under duress in Nazi Germany. New institutions, most importantly searchable databases recording stolen and looted art such as the Art Loss Register, are also changing perceptions about minimum standards for good faith purchase, which in turn affects both social norms and court cases. These new norms, induced by both legal changes and better information, have influenced the market even for less valuable art, for which sale or display in the U.S. is not a relevant consideration and for which the threat of costly legal action is not credible. The fact that social and institutionalized norms play an important role in protecting original owners is probably good, because norms and institutions can be effective even where law is not and often do so at lower cost. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to critique health policy discourses that are taken for granted. This perspective will allow for the identification of ‘exclusionary’ health policies, which we define as policies that are thought to offer universal benefit, despite yielding adverse effects for significant groups of people in society. As such, policies that are said to be designed ‘for all’ frequently benefit only a subset of the population. Our intent is to highlight the distributional consequences of certain health policies (...) that are largely institutionalized in contemporary society. We believe that these distributional effects are explicit representations of power in society and that institutions may provide individual ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’ that, in turn, yields separation as an outcome, a separating equilibrium. Specifically, if those who benefit from policies of partition are numerous and are to obtain significant advantage or incur limited costs, or if those who are adversely affected are scarce (or hidden), or the size of these adverse effects are small (or perceived to be minor), then partition becomes more likely as a ‘legitimate’, but exclusionary, instrument of public policy. (shrink)

The task of finding art in the world is presented as a tale of three dynamic forces that have shaped art in recent times. The first is expansion of the domain of art. This is reflected in linguistic change. The term "art" has grown enormously in sense and extension. The second force is the public's subjective response to art writ large. Our commercial culture compels reaction. The third force is the art world's active promotion of the expansion of art's domain (...) and the contextualization of the public's subjective response to it. The aspiration of the paper is to bring some clarity to how we presently identify art, respond to it, understand it, and institutionalize it. The tale concludes with discussion of the future of art in the world today. (shrink)

ABSTRACT -/- One increasingly reads about different aspects of the death of philosophy. One reason or cause being its institutionalization, as just another academic discipline, while research universities demand their tenured professionals to produve endless streams of really irrelevant publications, resulting in dealing with more detailed, microscopic issues and fabricated ‘problems’. The professionalization of philosophers created other problems of this socio-cultural practice. The dying out of philosophy is not only cased by external social and cultural factors, but also by (...) internal factors such as its methods and those concerning its subject-matter. I have explored the above in the context of meta-philosophy. In the process I also investigated the nature, the subject-matter and theories of philosophy of art, aesthetics and theory of art. It is mostly about these explorations of art that the contents of this piece is concerned with. All this is an exercise with words as the verbal means are the traditional instruments of doing philosophy. These tools not only enable the doing of philosophy but also creates limitations and limits to philosophizing. This will remain the case until the discourse develops other (for example visual, auditory, computational, etc) means to develop its many levelled and multi-dimensional practice - and in the process questions and overcomes its anthropo-centered bias. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 168-172 [Access article in PDF] Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language. Paolo Rossi. Trans. Stephen Clucas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xxviii + 333. $32.00 cloth. Of the traditional five canons of rhetoric—inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and actio—the most circuitous and fascinating history belongs to memoria. From its propulsion of Homeric lore to its grounding of (...) rhetorical invention to its exile under print culture to its recent revival in public memory studies, the promiscuous and perplexing history of memory in the West may be one of the least appreciated, and perhaps least understood, elements of rhetorical and intellectual history. The publication in 1966 of Frances Yates's highly praised The Art of Memory drew the attention of contemporary scholars to the importance of mnemotechnics to the culture of late medieval and early modern Europe. 1 Yates persuasively argued that the art of memory is an integral element of European intellectual history, one that can enrich our understanding of everything from Dominican theology to Shakespearian theater. However, six years earlier, in 1960, the Italian intellectual historian Paolo Rossi published in Italian an important precursor to Yates's work entitled Clavis Universalis: Arti Della Memoria e Logica Combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz. The book traces the encyclopaedic and mnemotechnical traditions from Aristotle through Cicero and Raymond Lull and into the early-modern period, arguing that the art of memory provides an important antecedent to the advent of method in seventeenth-century philosophy, especially in the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz. Yates, in her preface to The Art of Memory, acknowledges her debt to Rossi's work, and now this work has been made available in English translation. Stephen Clucas's translation, under the title Logic and the Art of Memory, will no doubt stimulate and supplement research into the mnemotechnical tradition in the English-speaking world, and perhaps lead us to reconsider the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric.Rossi argues that the neglect of the mnemotechnical tradition in its Ciceronian and Lullian strands has distorted our understanding of the "new" science and philosophy of the seventeenth-century, which is often interpreted as constituting, in a Kuhnian sense, a drastic paradigm shift from a [End Page 168] Renaissance worldview that still retained occult elements. Rossi places the work of Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz within the historical strand of the logico-encyclopaedic and mnemotechnical traditions, suggesting that these figures culminate late medieval and early modern intellectual and cultural ambitions as much as they give rise to new ones. Rossi makes his argument by providing a history of mnemotechnics from Aristotle into the fifteenth century in chapter one; by examining the fascination with encyclopaedism, combinatoria, and memory in the sixteenth century in chapters two and three; by investigating the role of artificial memory in the works of key intellectual figures in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in chapters four through six; and by tracing the impulse toward universal knowledge and its connection to mnemotechnics among seventeenth-century Cartesians, Baconians, and in the work of Leibniz, in chapters seven and eight.Chapter one, after showing the pervasiveness of Renaissance mnemotechnical literature, surveys its classical and medieval antecedents in philosophy and rhetoric. Rossi argues that Aristotle's De memoria et reminiscentia, Cicero's De oratore, Quintilian's De institutione oratoria, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the works of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were each important to the mnemotechnical tradition into the seventeenth century. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century treatises on the ars memorativa and the ars predicandi, drawing on these classical and medieval theories, emphasize the importance of memory places (loci), images (imagines), and order or arrangement (dispositio) in mnemotechnics. Additionally, they intimately link the memory to the imagination, stressing the importance of exciting and stimulating the imagination in memorization. The Italian Pietro da Ravenna, for example, attributed the might of his memory to, in his own words, turning "the images of the most beautiful virgins into memory places" (22). Such imaginative mnemonic techniques were considered to... (shrink)

Pencak Silat is a martial art, performance practice and system of body cultivation prevalent throughout much of Indonesia and the Malay-speaking world. This article compares different modalities of the practice and pedagogy of Sundanese Pencak Silat in West Java with more recent attempts to standardize practice at a national level under the auspices of the Indonesian Pencak Silat Association. Drawing on David Sudnow’s seminal account of learning how to play jazz piano, it is suggested that learning how to improvise is (...) a highly structured process that proceeds from the mastery of certain generic principles from which are generated potentially unbounded repertoires of habitual response. In the institutionalized instruction that is propagated by IPSI generative potential is subjugated to the desire to achieve homogeneity in practice. Aspects of Pencak Silat as it is taught nationally under the auspices of IPSI are examined in relation to the notion of spectacle. In conclusion, it is argued that the limits of the Nationalist project become self-evident as the dynamic potential of the body in Sundanese Pencak Silat is subsumed in an attempt to achieve fixity of the symbolic order. (shrink)

The article presents three models of radical cultural practice: Adorno’s dissonant modernism, Brecht’s “functional transformation” or “re-functioning” of institutions through estrangement and dialectical realism, and Debord’s Situationist détournement of art, aiming to rupture and decolonize naturalized everyday life. The three models all begin with a critical appropriation of the traditions of art and aims at resisting the social power that passes through art, as an institutionalized field of production and activity. Each of the three modes establishes a set of productive (...) strategies. (shrink)

Arnold Gehlen is one of the most controversial figures of German intellectual history. Gehlen’s commitment to National Socialism (a commitment he never disavowed) is mostly seen in close connection with his theoretical focus on institutions. According to Gehlen, what mankind requires above all is order and thus the protection of institutions. And yet, by reducing Gehlen’s sociology to the necessity of order one misses the analytical scope of his writings. As this article aims to show, the strength of Gehlen’s sociology (...) lies less in its theory of institutionalization than in its attempt to comprehend change, i.e. the conceptual clarification of the interplay between radical innovation and institutionalization. In order to apprehend Gehlen’s understanding of change we have to look at his sociology of art as it is art which works as ‘a small symbol of society’. To approach Gehlen from this perspective is not to rehabilitate the controversial thinker. Instead, I am trying to show that Gehlen’s theoretical framework is as complex as modern culture itself and should therefore not prematurely be declared a reactionary testimony of the past. (shrink)

It is well known that the belief that music is inherent in the beating of the pulse was widely held throughout the Middle Ages. Numerous brief but explicit statements of this belief, and of the associated ideas that music is present in other bodily rhythms and or in the virtues and humors can be culled from the writings on music of music theorists and encyclopedists. For such writers, the idea of the musicality of pulse was, of course, one specific expression (...) of the more general notion that musical harmonies inhere in the body and soul of man. The supposed links between music and human physiology and psychology were, however, not only of interest to writers on music: as might be expected, physicians too concerned themselves with the subject. Moreover, certain medical writers who flourished in the north Italian studia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries seem to have been much readier than either musical theorists or natural philosophers to provide their readers with detailed discussion of the nature of the music of pulse. The works of these physicians span nearly two hundred years of the teaching of the Italian schools and represent a fairly continuous tradition. Their views not only throw light on the concept of pulse music itself, and hence on one aspect of late medieval handling of the ancient theme of the harmonies of the universe; they also illustrate, in one small area, something of the nature of the actual application in medical training of the venerable tradition linking medicine with the liberal arts and with philosophy, a tradition institutionalized in the very existence of the faculties “of arts and medicine” of the Italian universities. For academic writers on medicine, indeed, the value of a knowledge of music for the understanding of pulse became one of a set of axiomatic illustrations of the importance of an education in liberal arts for physicians. To what extent this particular prescription was seriously intended or taken the following discussion of the opinions and sources of some of the academic medical writers on the music of pulse may help to show. jQuery.click { event.preventDefault(); }). (shrink)

Science must articulate its sources, as well as its relevance and its context, and it must provide clear argumentation. Furthermore, it is strictly bound to academic and ethical rules. Art is not constrained by these methods, ethics or rules. In the relatively new field of artistic research, science and art are integrated. However, the definition of this institutionalized field, and the methods and evaluation criteria of its output are debated. Can the scientific and artistic approaches be integrated into one coherent (...) working method? The essay inherently embraces both the artistic and the scientific approaches. It drifts between the subjective and the objective, the experiential and the intellectual. The essay expresses a train of thought, and critically reflects on those thoughts: it experiments and speculates. What if artists were to use the essay as an unmethodological research method? The artistic researcher approaches the topic of investigation, as it were, essayistically: essaying art. The expression of this act of essaying can encompass all possible artistic media, and all possible combinations of media. (shrink)

The history of twentieth-century visual arts can no longer be written as a succession of avant-garde movements, contends eminent art historian Bernard Smith in this stimulating book. He argues that a return to the concept of period style is inevitable and that modernism--the dominant "style" of art that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and continued through the 1960s--deserves recognition as a period style. Smith renames this period Formalesque since it is no longer modern and since it emphasizes (...) the formal values of art more than any previous period does. In a wide-ranging reformulation of art history in the twentieth century, the author defines the nature and development of Formalesque--an avant-garde style that arose between 1890 and the First World War, was institutionalized between the world wars, and flourished anew between 1945 and 1960. Identifying the Formalesque period, says Smith, makes it possible also to identify dialectical adversaries, such true oppositional avant-garde styles of the twentieth century as Dada, Surrealism, and the Neue Sachlichkeit. These constitute the formative elements of the modernism--now called postmodernism--that became increasingly dominant after 1960. The author locates twentieth-century artistic movements and developments in a broad cultural context and concludes with a thought-provoking examination of the relation between the Formalesque and European and American cultural imperialism. (shrink)

Education and learning occur in various settings, some of which are more formally institutionalized than others. Even if it seems to have failed as a definition of art, awareness of art-world institutions has increased in the wake of George Dickie’s proposal that art enmeshes an artifact in a set of interlocking yet informally structured art-world systems, that is, “the art-world.”1 However, relatively little of that attention has fallen on the distinctively educative roles played by art-world institutions and those who act (...) on their behalf. This oversight is sometimes addressed when the topic is the art museum,2 but very little has been said about parallel issues concerning music, the concert hall, and what Virgil.. (shrink)

The aestheticization of everyday life is a multidimensional socio-cultural phenomenon. The study of the history of everyday life is today one of the most relevant areas of modern science.This research aims to identify the origins of the process of aestheticization of everyday life in Modern times and the expansion of time boundaries beyond its philosophical understanding in the XVIII century. The purpose of the study is to analyze the historical material of the XVII century, demonstrating that the processes of aestheticization (...) and theatricalization of everyday life took place at this time. In France of the XVII century, there are all conditions for the process of aestheticization and theatricalization of everyday life. The process of socialization of elites is completed by the middle of the XVII century, a new aesthetic taste and aesthetic ideal is being formed, which can be transferred to the subject-spatial environment, art is being institutionalized and the luxury industry is emerging. In the XVII century, we see not only the artistic and aesthetic design of the subject-spatial environment, but also an absolutely obvious expansion of artistic life beyond art, when everyday life is likened to art, bodily needs such as sleep, nutrition, toilet are aestheticized and dramatized. There was also a change in the canons of behavior and appearance under the influence of a new aesthetic ideal. The process of aestheticization in the XVII century was not of a mass nature, remaining elitist and affecting only the social elite. However, the model or mechanism of the aestheticization of everyday life, created in the XVII century, persists for the next centuries, spread across Europe and reach Russia. (shrink)

Em "Teoria da vanguarda", de Peter Bürger, o choque é compreendido como o artifício intencional dos movimentos de vanguarda contra a autonomia do esteticismo modernista, a fim de devolver a arte à práxis vital. Adotando uma perspectiva distinta, o choque, para Adorno, expõe antes a crise da experiência da formalização do tempo decorrente da incongruência entre as forças produtivas e as relações de produção na sociedade industrial, sendo que dois caminhos artísticos distintos derivam da inflexão histórica da crise da experiência. (...) Em Schoenberg, na esteira do que Bürger classificaria como esteticismo, o choque seria amortizado pela expansão da linguagem musical, mediante seu registro. Em Stravinsky, o procedimento mecânico de golpes rítmicos e de montagem, em consonância com a profusão de vivências do choque, surge como elemento regressivo. Os choques não seriam dispositivos críticos, mas sismogramas de reações às mudanças da consciência subjetiva do tempo na modernidade. O artigo procura enfatizar as premissas conflitantes entre Bürger e Adorno quanto à posição do conceito de choque, assim como as críticas de Bürger ao modernismo adorniano. In Peter Bürger's "Theory of the avant-garde", the concept of shock is rendered as an intentional avant-garde procedure against the institutionalization of art, i.e., against the autonomous criteria of modernist aestheticism, with the purpose of bringing art back to everyday life and vital praxis. From a quite different materialistic perspective, the concept of shock, in Adorno's musical writings, exposes the crisis of experience (Erfahrung) of the dissociation of time within two major streams of modern music, namely Schoenberg's school and Stravinsky's. This paper aims to point out the conflicting assumptions and consequences between Adorno and Bürger regarding their respective theoretical grasps on the concept of shock, as well as the critique to Adorno's musical modernism that Bürger addresses in this book. (shrink)

This is a discussion and translation of the first academic address of Vico’s career. “Delle cene sontuose de’ romani” (“On the sumptuous dinners of the Romans”) was delivered early in 1699 before the Accademia Palatina. This is the same year that Vico assumed his position as professor of Latin eloquence at the University of Naples. Vico’s choice of a topic concerning the details of everyday Roman life derives from his concern to understand Roman culture in terms other than its political (...) history. He approaches the teaching of Latin in a similar way, advocating in his textbook, Institutiones oratoriae, that the place to begin learning Latin is “From the comics!”—meaning that the everyday expressions of Latin speech are those preserved by the comic poets, especially Plautus and Terence. (shrink)

Hilmi Omar Budda (1894-1952) has played a significant role in the process of institutionalization of History of Religions in Turkey. He, who was the first academician in the field of History of Religions in Turkey, lectured for many years in Dâru’l-Funûn (Ottoman University) Faculty of Divinity, which was found in 1924. Then he worked in department of Institute of Islamic Sciences, which was a branch of Istanbul University Faculty of Arts, by pursuing his same position and career. After that, (...) Budda lectured in Ankara University Faculty of Divinity, which was found in 1949, as the first academic person of the department of History of Religions. Budda, who wrote many scientific studies and trained a large number of students during his academic life roughly thirty years, filled a gap in the field of History of Religions in the early years of republic period. Even though there are some scientific problems in his writings and views on issues, this article deals with Budda’s contributions to the History of Religions and his role in the formation of such a discipline in Turkey. This study, besides, mentions about Budda’s academic sides by analyzing his scientific writings composed of books, articles and columns. (shrink)

As the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds played a pivotal role in shaping the course of British art in the 18th century. In these discourses, Reynolds reflects on the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the importance of aesthetic education. With insightful commentary on the works of the Old Masters and a wealth of practical advice for aspiring artists, this volume is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of art or (...) art theory. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Globalization trends of culture, the idea of multiculturalism, bringing and acceptance of foreign elements into the culture, open coquetry of the "West" with culture and arts of the "East", eclecticism, but also paradoxical what happened to be the fate of modern art after postmodern deconstruction of the meaning and the reduction of his function to ability to serve in variable updating roles towards individual and society, is 46 years after the release of books Asphyxiating Culture repeatedly bringing me to read (...) and review it. The topic, therefore, is to examine the validity of Dubuffet appeal, its insertion into the broader context of the forms of "dehumanization" of art, but also review of the reference just in the context of relations culture - art. New search respectively the determination of periphery in arts and culture should besides unfinished theme energizing academic debate of last years, if not decades, thus defining theme of Art, can and should briefly look at the issue of the institutionalization of art; the relationship of artistic production and its cultural context, which is not transferable; "foucaultian" power of discourse established by culture; extremely interesting affinity of art and advertising; aestheticism of culture; enforcement of discontinuity issues and pluralism as in the thought also within the artistic creation, namely for topics that Dubuffet advises and argumentations plays. Nearly half a century after his call and its final words -"therefore, our artistic production, which is not subjected to a thorough critique of culture and effectively not reveals the futility and absurdity, is no refuge for us" - we need to talk about our accountability. Dubuffet today. (shrink)

One of the most memorable lines of Hegel's oeuvre is from the preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood.’ Surprisingly, relatively little philosophical attention has been paid to the notion of ‘the familiar’ in Hegel scholarship. This essay aims to rectify this lack by offering a preliminary inquiry in what the notion means across Hegel's work. It does so by focusing on three underexplored moments in Hegel's work: the (...) exposition of the logic of appearance in the description and diagnosis of seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch painting in the lecture notes from the 1823 Berlin lectures on the philosophy of fine art; the function of institutionalized practice in Hegel's Tübingen essay of 1793; and the conjunctural relation of the familiar with philosophical terminology in an entry from the ‘Aphorisms from the Wastebook.’ Through a careful reading of these three moments, I will show that the familiar is a point that constellates multiple processes, mechanisms and apparatuses that, when grasped in their complex totality, functions as the ‘prius’ of Hegel's speculative philosophy. (shrink)

As the institutionalization of the avant-garde took place, postmodern theory both reacted to and helped create the forces that eroded reason and even taste, labelled them quaint in the name of a postmodern theory, at the same time that mass commodity form was inscribing exchange value on all work of the imagination. In fact, the reality is that the system, the society of domination has enclosed discourse in such a way that, coupled to new social media and electronic platforms, (...) all radical, all working class or under class voices are pre vetted or erased, and only the most craven corporate financialized kitsch is validated. The collusion of galleries, collectors and curators, following the model of studio film and network TV, has equated popularity with quality. The problem then is to recuperate something of the lost radical conscience of art and culture. There is now an amnesia about the prehistory of society, of our own psyches, and of the imagination. The colonizing of consciousness has rendered the imagination of the west atrophied and almost inert. All art is a recreation of our own psychic formation (mimesis) as well as being shaped by its 'otherness', by a purposelessness. All stories are crime stories, all stories are about exile, and all stories are about homesickness. And all art contains a narrative. For only by having no purpose can the artwork posit the direction to which society must look to create an 'other' or elsewhere. To retain something of that utopian promise that is foundational in culture. The world is being dis-enchanted. The Utopian promise is not kept. (shrink)

The roots of ‘ancient sport’, or Zurkhaneh, as its name implies, go back to ancient Iran and the rituals of Mithraism, in which believers pray and learn morality and humanity in cave-shape temples built in connection with running water. After the advent of Islam and the fall of the ancient religions, temples gave way to Zurkhanehs, and athletes who, while learning moral teachings, cultivated physical strength to resist external enemy forces and internal oppression, grown in those Zurkhanehs. With a tendency (...) to Sufism, Shi`ism and following the first Imam of the Shiites, athletes became heroes and knights, many of whom today, after hundreds of years, are still the cultural myths of the people of Iran. The ancient sports such as wrestling are a symbol of human and moral virtues, the promotion of which can lead to the growth and development of the moral beauty and chivalry culture among all athletes in various sports and lead to institutionalize characteristics of heroism and magnanimity in society. Ancient sports exercising tools, art and architecture of Zurkhaneh, poems, rituals and personalities form the nature of Zurkhaneh and ancient sports have a great impact on the formation of heroic identity and the way to perform the sport movements with the special instruments of Zurkhaneh, which is accompanied by epic and religious poems. In fact, Zurkhaneh instruments, the type of poems that are recited and the existence of epic and religious patterns complement each other. This process increases the effect of Zurkhaneh on the formation of athletic and heroic identity among sportsmen. As such, it will be suggested that Zurkhareh offers an ethical ideal from which globalized Western sport can learn. (shrink)

This book discusses the work of four different kinds of artists from four different countries to examine how they create a space for politics in their work.

She has always existed and is more than a citizen of multiverses,‭ ‬most likely the ground of all.‭ ‬In the West she was introduced around C.570‭ ‬and since then many individuals have searched for her,‭ ‬tried to become familiar with her and created all sorts of,‭ ‬frequently ridiculous,‭ ‬things in her name. Once someone has a passion for her it cannot be extinguished but increases.‭ ‬Objectively this need for her is referred to as‭ ‘‬love of wisdom‭’‬,‭ ‬the need for wisdom,‭ (...) ‬while personally it is a need of some individuals. -/- This passion and need has become institutionalized and it has developed a discourse and became a socio-cultural practice of its own.‭ ‬Fairly recently it has even become a discipline at,‭ ‬mostly higher,‭ ‬institutions of learning.‭ ‬Previously those searching for and attempting to interact with her came from many walks of life and all kinds of professions,‭ ‬while in the last century or so many people began to live off her as they are remunerated for talking about,‭ ‬about the history of searching for and investigating her and saying all sorts of things about her. -/- Many things are done in her name and all sorts of neologisms are fabricated to label them,‭ ‬such as analytic,‭ ‬continental,‭ ‬idealism,‭ ‬rationalism,‭ ‬empiricism,‭ ‬and all these labels are again specified and specified ad infinitum with terms such as materialism,‭ ‬physicalism,‭ ‬weak naturalism,‭ ‬speculative and new realism,‭ ‬etc. -/- Individuals from many other disciplines and areas of life,‭ ‬such as sociology,‭ ‬the arts,‭ ‬humanities,‭ ‬cognitive sciences,‭ ‬sport,‭ ‬etc got on the bandwagon so that we now have a philosophy or love of wisdom,‭ ‬epistemologies,‭ ‬ontologies etc of everything under the sun.‭ ‬Even if you were to write some theses or do some study you will stipulate your epistemology,‭ ‬ontology,‭ ‬methodology,‭ ‬etc.‭ ‬Just as those who live off philosophy become involved in every area of humanity and all its socio-cultural practices produce so-called peer reviewed publications,‭ ‬articles,‭ ‬essays and books on philosophy of art,‭ ‬sport,‭ ‬humanities,‭ ‬cognitive sciences,‭ ‬religion,‭ ‬gods,‭ ‬sex,‭ ‬rock‭ ‘‬n roll,‭ ‬language,‭ ‬words,‭ ‬ideas,‭ ‬how words and ideas and concepts do their thing,‭ ‬etc,‭ ‬etc.‭ -/- The way these subject-matter are treated will usually consists of some form of reasoning,‭ ‬the use of arguments or argumentation and some kind of logic and a process that resembles the features,‭ ‬steps,‭ ‬stages and processes of theorizing,‭ ‬the construction and development of models,‭ ‬short term,‭ ‬medium or large theories.‭ ‬The latter is often presented in the form of entire‭ ‘‬metaphysical‭’ ‬and speculative systems such as those of Plato,‭ ‬Aristotle,‭ ‬Kant,‭ ‬Hegel,‭ ‬Marx,‭ ‬Husserl,‭ ‬Habermas et al.‭ ‬While Socrates and to some extent the later Wittgenstein attempted to be more authentic to the original principles of trying to follow and developed the ideal of identifying,‭ ‬capturing by verbal interaction‭ (‬be it discourse,‭ ‬or dialogue‭) ‬and becoming one‭ (‬like mystics of all religions who are passionate about‭ ‘‬the one‭’‬,‭ ‬the Beloved,‭ ‬the one Real Self,‭ ‬etc and attempt to become one,‭ ‬united with or‭ ‘‬oned‭’ ‬with their object or subject of desire‭) ‬with Sophos‭ – ‬by exploring and investigating or applying and executing practical use of language,‭ ‬and thereby to uncover and capture her. -/- The effects of the institutionalization of the discipline are far-reaching and the professionalization of the role of philosopher as a‭ ‘‬profession‭’‬,‭ ‬an employee of an institution and a representative of the status quo are discussed in a number of articles being cited. -/- The methods of the philosophical discourse vary,‭ ‬first of all between the so-called Continental and Anglophone Analytic philosophies,‭ ‬its movements,‭ ‬schools and institutions,‭ ‬such as research universities,‭ ‬journals,‭ ‬communities and book publishers.‭ ‬It seems as if increasingly philosophizing employs some of the stages and steps of the processes of theorizing.‭ ‬Other aspects of her methods are heuristic devices,‭ ‬the use of metaphors and analogies,‭ ‬philosophical logic,‭ ‬informal and other types of logic,‭ ‬arguments and argumentation.‭ ‬This involves the creation of fallacies in thinking and reasoning and the causing of all sorts of fallacies or crooked thinking. -/- The nature and changes of philosophical subject-matter are discussed as the socio-cultural practice lost most of its traditional‭ ‘‬objects‭’ ‬with the social and cultural differentiation of other,‭ ‬specialized disciplines.‭ ‬In turn the discourse attempts to fabricate other subject-matter,‭ ‬for example the development of so-called Experimental Philosophy,‭ ‬inter-disciplinary studies such as cognitive sciences and philosophies or meta-level explorations of and speculations about other disciplines,‭ ‬professions and domains‭ (‬for example normative,‭ ‬instrumental and subjective aesthetic‭ – ‬this the terminology and distinctions according to the working class obsessive Critical Theory of the so-called Frankfurt Schule.‭ ‬One always wonders what degree of personal experience their educated,‭ ‬middle class academics have of‭ ‘‬the working class‭’‬,‭ ‬whatever that is meant to be‭?)) ‬of human activity.‭ ‬Such as philosophy of medicine,‭ ‬sport,‭ ‬art,‭ ‬religion,‭ ‬just name it and it is bound to exist.‭ -/- Another‭ ‘‬extension‭’ ‬of or interest in‭ ‘‬philosophy‭’ ‬is that of certain individuals,‭ ‬schools or movements in other disciplines,‭ ‬for example social‭ ‘‬sciences‭’ ‬such as sociology and supporters of the above mentioned‭ ‘‬Schule‭’‬.‭ ‬They frequently use philosophical words such as ontology,‭ ‬epistemology,‭ ‬multi-dimensional,‭ ‬many-levels,‭ ‬contexts assumptions,‭ ‬pre-suppositions,‭ ‬immanent,‭ ‬transcendent,‭ ‬etc.‭ ‬Is this intended to be an extension of philosophy and the doing of philosophizing or merely cognitive bias of the form‭ ‘‬authority bias‭’‬.‭ ‬In this case the authority being‭ ‘‬the discipline of philosophy‭’‬,‭ ‬as well as the‭ ’‬use of the word philosophy‭ ‬and terms from the philosophical discourse‭’‬.‭. 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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In DialogueResponse to Roger Mantie, “Bands and/as Music Education: Antinomies and the Struggle for Legitimacy,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 20, no 1 (Spring 2012): 63–81Panagiotis A. KanellopoulosRoger Mantie’s paper “Bands and/as Music Education: Antinomies and the Struggle for Legitimacy,”1 looks at the educational band-world through a perspective informed, in his words, by “three concepts flowing from the work of Michel Foucault: power, truth, and discourse.” This is an (...) ambitious intention, and to my mind, it has to be carried through with courage, and by that I mean addressing the full consequences of the project at hand.Mantie argues that there is a break between the traditional musical practices of “American wind bands” and the contemporary institutionalization of banding that has induced the creation of the “pedagogical band world” within contemporary school and university contexts. Whereas the former aimed to promote music “of the people and for the people,” institutionalized music education band [End Page 191] practices sought to solve “the problem of their educational legitimacy in adopting the presentation of ‘art music’ as their raison d’etre.” Whereas, in the “old band world” what mattered most was “the here and now celebration of immanent time, space, and place,” contemporary approaches to band as a means for music education celebrate “the timeless and unassailable qualities of the music itself.” This break entailed the creation of “a schizophrenic creature that suffers a continual crisis of identity.”On IdealizationOne of the core issues that emerge out of Mantie’s text relates to a not uncommon tendency to regard a non-institutionalized form of musical practice as constituting the “true” instantiation of this very musical practice, as opposed to the subsequent contaminated version that is the inevitable result of institutionalization.2 Such an approach seems to me quite at odds with Foucault’s nominalism, with his emphasis on problematization and eventalization or eventialization [évènementialisation]—“the bringing to light of ‘ruptures of evidence,’”3 which is rooted in methodological individualism.4 For Foucault, eventalization entails a “breach of self evidence.... It means making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all.”5 Edward Said has noted Foucault’s “predilection for the analysis of discontinuous but actual spaces,”6 in other words, his tendency to adopt a spatial instead of temporal perspective, preferring to talk about places, fields, loci, topical institutions, events, their singularity and their discontinuities and fragmentations, instead of unified processes of temporal developments.Mantie’s text tends to take as granted issues that should be regarded as loci of problematization. In his account, “the American wind band” (and despite his cautious comment in a footnote) is regarded as a bounded cultural phenomenon that constitutes an enactment of democracy, based on openness, inclusiveness, informality, and plurality, elements that have, it is suggested, vanished from its contemporary pedagogical incarnations. One of the most important strengths of a Foucauldian approach is that it does not help us to easily take sides. Taking as an unquestionable fact that traditional band practices were an instance of practicing democracy masks active processes of exclusion, operating on the basis of racial and gender oppression and discrimination. A Foucauldian perspective might be important for developing multiple local micro-historical accounts of traditional wind band practices, emphasizing not only what these practices forefront (thus contrasting it with contemporary practices) but, most importantly, what they exclude or silence.7Instead of claiming that “bands were simply appropriated by schools,” an argument [End Page 192] that implies a uniform passage from an original form of the band world to its educational distortion, the aim could be “to fragment what was thought unified, and show the heterogeneity of consistency,”8 directing our attention to the microphysics of power/knowledge relationships as they emerge in different (educational or other) contexts and in the passage from older to more recent practices. A Foucauldian view of the relationships between old and contemporary band practices, as well as the position of the latter within larger music education discourses would not lead to a process of discovering “uncontaminated... (shrink)

SummaryThe main question of this paper is — how do representational pictures convey information? I argue: 1) This question is approached from three opposing metaphysical frameworks. a) Monism answers this question by treating representational pictures as a species of cognitive symbolism. b) Polarism answers this question by sharply distinguishing between natural symbolism and languages; and, between symbolism and reality — representational pictures are natural symbols, mimics of reality. c) Pluralism treats pictures as occupying a mid‐point between the scales of reality (...) /illusion, knowledge/deception — representational pictures are quasi‐symbolic simulations. 2) The occurrence of institutionalized deception , the game of creating/having false visual hypotheses without the making of false intellectual hypotheses — undermines monism and polarism. Consequently, 3) the pluralist approach — we gain information on the intellectual plane by the use of perceptual deception — is the most promising for explaining how representational pictures convey information.RésuméLa question principale dont s'occupe cet article est »Comment les images représentatives transmettent de l'information?« Mon argumentation: 1) Cette question est abordée dans trois cadres métaphysiques opposés: a) le monisme répond à cette question en la traitant comme une variété de symbolisme cognitif; b) le polarisme y répond en distinguant strictement entre le symbolisme naturel et les langages et entre le symbolisme et la réalité— les images représentatives sont des symboles naturels, des imitations de la réalité; c) le pluralisme traite les images comme occupant un point médian entre les échelles »realité/illusion«, »connaissance/erreur«. Les images représentatives sont des simulations quasi‐symboliques. 2) L'existence de »tromperies institutionalisées« , le jeu consistant á créer/avoir des hypothèses visuelles fausses sans faire des hypothèses intellectuelles fausses, condamnent le monisme et le polarisme. Par conséquent 3) l'approche pluraliste constitue la voie la plus prometteuse pour expliquer comment les images représentatives apportent de I'information.ZusammenfassungDie Hauptfrage, die in dem vorliegenden Aufsatz behandelt wird, ist die, wie repräsentationale Bilder Information vermitteln. Meine Argumentation lautet: 1.) Die Frage wird von drei entgegengesetzten metaphysischen Standpunkten her angegangen. a) Der Monismus beantwortet die Frage, indem er repräsentationale Bilder als eine Art von kognitiven Symbolen behandelt. b) Der Polarismus beantwortet die Frage, indem er scharf zwischen natürlichen Symbolen und Sprachen einerseits und zwischen Symbolismus und Wirklichkeit anderseits unterscheidet . c) Der Pluralismus behandelt Bilder als ein Zwischending, das in der Mitte von Wirklichkeit Illusion der Wissen/Täuschung lokalisiert wird . 2) Das Vorkommen von institutionalisierter Täuschung , das Spiel, das darin besteht, falsche visuelle Hypothesen zu schaffedhaben ohne falsche intellektuelle Hypothesen zu machen untergraben die Position des Monismus und des Polarismus. Folglich ist 3.) der pluralistische Standpunkt wonach wir auf intellektueller Ebene durch den Gebrauch von Wahrnehmungstäuschung Information gewinnen, der vielversprechenste für die Erklärung, wie repräsentationale Bilder Information vermitteln. (shrink)