Download or read book Perception and Experience in Modernity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume of Benjamin Studies publishes the keynote lectures of the first Congress of the International Walter Benjamin Association, which took place in Amsterdam, July 1997. Its title bears witness to the most central concepts of Benjamin’s philosophy of culture. Strongly influenced as he was by Kant, Benjamin never lost his inclination to analyse the components of reality as fashioned by ourselves. Because he was also a materialist, for him the modes of fashioning were shaped in turn by the times and places we occupy in history. As a consequence, Benjamin’s theory assigns a pivotal role in the interaction between the world and its inhabitants to the media: language with its plethora of discourses, the arts, and the whole technology of reproduction. The historical and social development of the media is, translated, according to him, into our instruments of perception, and this perception constructs the elements of the world, the knowledge of this construction and the knowledge of the constructor. The self-knowledge of the constructor is what we call ‘experience’. Within this broad epistemological framework, the diversity and complexity of Benjamin’s project acquires a fundamental coherence and is therefore able to accommodate the temporal volatility of the phenomena of our world. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Perception & Experience offers the most stimulating variety of topics, and that the keynote lectures reflect merely an intensification of interest in certain areas within a much larger field of investigation. The texts presented here pinpoint the central preoccupations of today’s debates amongst Benjamin scholars, preoccupations which are themselves responses to our own historical imperatives.
Download or read book Perception and Experience in Modernity written by Helga Geyer-Ryan and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Senses Still written by C. Nadia Seremetakis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can culture and experience be conceptualized when theorists drag social meaning back and forth between institutions, objects, or acts, as if the dense communication between persons and things were only a quick exchange between surfaces? This volume challenges mentalist approaches to material culture through the historical and ethnographic analyses of sensory memory. The sensory landscape and its meaning-endowed objects bear within them emotional and historical sedimentation that pose crucial questions: What cultural practices enable the sensory-affective experience of history? How does the history of perception speak to the perception of history? The editor, in her four essays, discusses sensory memory as a cultural form not limited to the psychic apparatus of a monadic, pre-cultural, and ahistorical subject but embedded and embodied in a dispersed surround of created things, surfaces, depths, and densities that are stratigraphic sites of sensory biography and history. The volume demonstrates that any ethnographic discussion of the senses involves a priori claims about modernity. Thus the senses are explored in contemporary political and racial violence, exchange practices, the emotions, national identity, food-ways, spatial organization, leisure activity, and the electronic media. Well-known authors examine personal and social investments in objects and substances as the tip of a submerged collective language of materiality that firmly grasps the mutable structure of contemporary experience. Social memory is treated as a meta-sensory organ and shown to be a culturally mediated performance that is activated by material acts and emotionally tangible artifacts.
Download or read book Suspensions of Perception written by Jonathan Crary and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-08-24 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. Suspensions of Perception is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle. Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters—Manet, Seurat, and Cezanne—who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices. Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.
Download or read book Perceptions of Modernity written by Ken A. Jackson and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Value in Modernity written by Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Peter Poellner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Value in Modernity examines a historical paradigm in ethics that has hitherto not been identified as such: existential modernism. Peter Poellner discusses the central claims of this paradigm through detailed examination of the thought of four of its main exponents: Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Robert Musil. In the case of Nietzsche and Sartre, Poellner offers novel interpretations, reconstructing lines of thought in their work that have usually been neglected. He also offers a new assessment of Scheler's subtle phenomenological version of affective value intuitionism, which is a crucial influence on Sartre's existentialism but has so far enjoyed virtually no reception in an anglophone context. Musil's philosophical novel The Man without Qualities is interpreted as contributing a highly original version of ethical perfectionism to the existential modernist paradigm. While Musil's thought on emotions and moods has begun to receive philosophical recognition in recent years, the significance of the philosophical core of his seminal work has so far not been fully appreciated. In Poellner's interpretation, what we find in the existential modernists is an approach in ethical philosophy that combines a qualified form of affective value intuitionism and a kind of ethical perfectionism. This book reconstructs and defends a version of this approach that integrates elements drawn from each of these thinkers, supplemented by an original elaboration of ideas only implicit in some of them.
Download or read book Techniques of the Observer written by Jonathan Crary and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1992-02-25 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle. In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision. Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.
Download or read book Tsimtsum and Modernity written by Agata Bielik-Robson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).
Download or read book Walter Benjamin Modernity written by Peter Osborne and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2005 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other single author has so commanding a critical presence across so many disciplines within the arts and humanities, in so many national contexts, as Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). The belated reception of his work as a literary critic (dating from the late 1950s) has been followed by a rapid series of critical receptions in different contexts: Frankfurt Critical Theory and Marxism, Judaism, Film Theory, Post-structuralism, Philosophical Romanticism, and Cultural Studies.This collection brings together a selection of the most critically important items in the literature, across the full range of Benjamin's cultural-theoretical interests, from all periods of the reception of his writings, but focusing upon the most recent, to produce a comprehensive overview of the best critical literature.
Download or read book Cinema and Experience written by Miriam Hansen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kracauer. Film, medium of a disintegrating world. -- Curious Americanism. -- Benjamin. Actuality, antinomies. -- Aura: the appropriation of a concept. -- Mistaking the moon for a ball. -- Micky-maus. -- Room-for-play. -- Adorno. The question of film aesthetics. -- Kracauer in exile. Theory of film.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity written by Andrew Benjamin and published by re.press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Benjamin is universally recognised as one of the key thinkers of modernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theology and law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet the problem of architecture in and for Benjamin's work remains relatively underexamined. Does Benjamin's project have an architecture and, if so, how does this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us? In what ways are Benjamin's writings centrally caught up with architectural concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How can Benjamin's theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of our own present.
Download or read book Emotions in Late Modernity written by Roger Patulny and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has changed the way we experience and act on our emotions. Divided into four sections that include studies ranging across multiple continents and centuries, Emotions in Late Modernity does the following: Demonstrates an increased awareness and experience of emotional complexity in late modernity by challenging the legal emotional/rational divide; positive/negative concepts of emotional valence; sociological/ philosophical/psychological divisions around emotion, morality and gender; and traditional understandings of love and loneliness. Reveals tension between collectivised and individualised-privatised emotions in investigating ‘emotional sharing’ and individualised responsibility for anger crimes in courtrooms; and the generation of emotional energy and achievement emotions in classrooms. Debates the increasing mediation of emotions by contrasting their historical mediation (through texts and bodies) with contemporary digital mediation of emotions in classroom teaching, collective mobilisations (e.g. riots) and film and documentary representations. Demonstrates reflexive micro and macro management of emotions, with examinations of the ‘politics of fear’ around asylum seeking and religious subjects, and collective commitment to climate change mitigation. The first collection to investigate the changing nature of emotional experience in contemporary times, Emotions in Late Modernity will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as sociology of emotions, cultural studies, political science and psychology. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Whitehead s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy written by David Ray Griffin and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2008-01-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the postmodern implications of Whitehead’s metaphysical system.
Download or read book Performance and Modernity written by Julia A. Walker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-06 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body, often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity, Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of economic, industrial, political, social, and psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took shape on stage. In new styles of performance-acting, dance, music, pageantry, avant-garde provocations, film, video and networked media-this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modelling new habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world.
Download or read book After Modernity written by James R. Mensch and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1996-07-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an important new answer to the much-discussed question of the nature and possibility of philosophy following the collapse of the modern foundationalist paradigm. Mensch offers an alternative based in phenomenology. Using Husserl's analysis of temporality to reinvigorate Aristotle's account of time, he shows how the passing of modernity is actually an opening for doing metaphysics in a new nonfoundationalist manner. Positioning Husserl within a wider context, Mensch views him both as a culmination of the modern foundationalist paradigm and as providing a way to overcome it through his descriptive analyses.
Download or read book The Ecstatic Quotidian written by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.
Download or read book Film 1900 written by Annemone Ligensa and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays examining the relationships between culture, film, and the audience around the turn of the twentieth century. The current digital revolution has sparked a renewed interest in the origins and trajectory of modern media, particularly in the years around 1900 when the technology was rapidly developing. This collection aims to broaden our understanding of early cinema as a significant innovation in media history. Joining traditional scholarship with fresh insights from a variety of disciplines, this book explains the aesthetic and institutional characteristics in early cinema within the context of the contemporary media landscape. It also addresses transcultural developments such as scientific revolutions, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, as well as differing attitudes toward modernization. Film 1900 is an important reassessment of early cinema’s position in cultural history. “The capable Ligensa and Kreimeier invited a coterie of renowned Continental scholars and thinkers to reflect on issues of modernity and cinema by harking back to the fin de siècle. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.” —T. Lindval, Choice
