Chaos Imagined

Chaos Imagined PDF Author: Martin Meisel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540469
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
The stories we tell in our attempt to make sense of the world—our myths and religion, literature and philosophy, science and art—are the comforting vehicles we use to transmit ideas of order. But beneath the quest for order lies the uneasy dread of fundamental disorder. True chaos is hard to imagine and even harder to represent. In this book, Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passion, excitement, and compromises the act provokes. Meisel builds a rough history from major social, psychological, and cosmological turning points in the imagining of chaos. He uses examples from literature, philosophy, painting, graphic art, science, linguistics, music, and film, particularly exploring the remarkable shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from conceiving of chaos as disruptive to celebrating its liberating and energizing potential. Discussions of Sophocles, Plato, Lucretius, Calderon, Milton, Haydn, Blake, Faraday, Chekhov, Faulkner, Wells, and Beckett, among others, are matched with incisive readings of art by Brueghel, Rubens, Goya, Turner, Dix, Dada, and the futurists. Meisel addresses the revolution in mapping energy and entropy and the manifold effect of thermodynamics. He then uses this chaotic frame to elaborate on purpose, mortality, meaning, and mind.

Chaos Imagined

Chaos Imagined PDF Author: Martin Meisel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540469
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 604

Get Book Here

Book Description
The stories we tell in our attempt to make sense of the world—our myths and religion, literature and philosophy, science and art—are the comforting vehicles we use to transmit ideas of order. But beneath the quest for order lies the uneasy dread of fundamental disorder. True chaos is hard to imagine and even harder to represent. In this book, Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passion, excitement, and compromises the act provokes. Meisel builds a rough history from major social, psychological, and cosmological turning points in the imagining of chaos. He uses examples from literature, philosophy, painting, graphic art, science, linguistics, music, and film, particularly exploring the remarkable shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from conceiving of chaos as disruptive to celebrating its liberating and energizing potential. Discussions of Sophocles, Plato, Lucretius, Calderon, Milton, Haydn, Blake, Faraday, Chekhov, Faulkner, Wells, and Beckett, among others, are matched with incisive readings of art by Brueghel, Rubens, Goya, Turner, Dix, Dada, and the futurists. Meisel addresses the revolution in mapping energy and entropy and the manifold effect of thermodynamics. He then uses this chaotic frame to elaborate on purpose, mortality, meaning, and mind.

Introducing Chaos

Introducing Chaos PDF Author: Iwona Abrams
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 1848317662
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, does it cause a tornado in Texas? Chaos theory attempts to answer such baffling questions. The discovery of randomness in apparently predictable physical systems has evolved into a science that declares the universe to be far more unpredictable than we have ever imagined. Introducing Chaos explains how chaos makes its presence felt in events from the fluctuation of animal populations to the ups and downs of the stock market. It also examines the roots of chaos in modern maths and physics, and explores the relationship between chaos and complexity, the unifying theory which suggests that all complex systems evolve from a few simple rules. This is an accessible introduction to an astonishing and controversial theory.

Explaining Chaos

Explaining Chaos PDF Author: Peter Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521477475
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
A clear and accessible discussion of the ideas and issues behind chaotic dynamics.

Chasing Chaos

Chasing Chaos PDF Author: Jessica Alexander
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0770436919
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Jessica Alexander arrived in Rwanda in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide as an idealistic intern, eager to contribute to the work of the international humanitarian aid community. But the world that she encountered in the field was dramatically different than anything she could have imagined. It was messy, chaotic, and difficult—but she was hooked. In this honest and irreverent memoir, she introduces readers to the realities of life as an aid worker. We watch as she manages a 24,000-person camp in Darfur, collects evidence for the Charles Taylor trial in Sierra Leone, and contributes to the massive aid effort to clean up a shattered Haiti. But we also see the alcohol-fueled parties and fleeting romances, the burnouts and self-doubt, and the struggle to do good in places that have long endured suffering. Tracing her personal journey from wide-eyed and naïve newcomer to hardened cynic and, ultimately, to hopeful but critical realist, Alexander transports readers to some of the most troubled locations around the world and shows us not only the seemingly impossible challenges, but also the moments of resilience and recovery.

The Brain is the Screen

The Brain is the Screen PDF Author: Gregory Flaxman
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816634477
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
The first broad-ranging collection on Deleuze’s essential works on cinema. In the nearly twenty years since their publication, Gilles Deleuze’s books about cinema have proven as daunting as they are enticing—a new aesthetics of film, one equally at home with Henri Bergson and Wim Wenders, Friedrich Nietzsche and Orson Welles, that also takes its place in the philosopher’s immense and difficult oeuvre. With this collection, the first to focus solely and extensively on Deleuze’s cinematic work, the nature and reach of that work finally become clear. Composed of a substantial introduction, twelve original essays produced for this volume, and a new English translation of a personal, intriguing, and little-known interview with Deleuze on his cinema books, The Brain Is the Screen is a sustained engagement with Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy that leads to a new view of the larger confrontation of philosophy with cinematic images.Contributors: Éric Alliez, U of Vienna; Dudley Andrew, U of Iowa; Peter Canning; Tom Conley, Harvard U; András Bálint Kovács, ELTE U, Budapest; Gregg Lambert, Syracuse U; Laura U. Marks, Carleton U; Jean-Clet Martin, Collége International de Philosophie, Paris; Angelo Restivo; Martin Schwab, U of Michigan; François Zourabichvili, Collége International de Philosophie.Gregory Flaxman is a doctoral student in the Program of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Politics of Immunity

The Politics of Immunity PDF Author: Mark Neocleous
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 183976483X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
The violence and destruction hiding behind the obsession with immunity Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance. Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight – Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty – Politics of Immunity moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder. Wide-ranging and polemical, Politics of Immunity lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined.

Thinking Globally

Thinking Globally PDF Author: Mark Juergensmeyer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520278445
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
In this accessible text, Mark Juergensmeyer, a pioneer in global studies, provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of global studies from regional, topical, and theoretical perspectives. Each of the twenty compact chapters in Thinking Globally features Juergensmeyer’s own lucid introduction to the key topics and offers brief excerpts from major writers in those areas. The chapters explore the history of globalization in each region of the world, from Africa and the Middle East to Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and cover key issues in today's global era, such as: • Challenges of the global economy • Fading of the nation-state • Emerging nationalisms and transnational ideologies • Hidden economies of sex trafficking and the illegal drug trade • New communications media • Environmental crises • Human rights abuses Thinking Globally is the perfect introduction to global studies for students, and an exceptional resource for anyone interested in learning more about this new area of study.

Masculinities

Masculinities PDF Author: Eduardo P. Archetti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000181367
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
The complex relationship between nationalism and masculinity has been explored both historically and sociologically with one consistent conclusion: male concepts of courage and virility are at the core of nationalism. In this ground-breaking book, the author questions this assumption and advances the debate through an empirical analysis of masculinity in the revealing contexts of same-sex (football and polo) and cross-sex (tango) relations. Because of its rich history, Argentina provides the ideal setting in which to study the intersection of masculine and national constructs: hybridization, creolization and a culture of performance have all informed both gender and national identities. Further, the author argues that, counter to claims made by globalization theorists, the importance of performance to Argentinian men and women has a long history and has powerfully shaped the national psyche. But this book takes the analysis far beyond national boundaries to address general arguments in anthropology which are not culture-specific, and the discussion poses important comparative questions and addresses central theoretical issues, from the interplay of morality and ritual, to a comparison between the popular and the aristocratic, to the importance of ‘othering' in national constructions - particularly those relating to sport. This book represents a major contribution, not only to anthropology, but to the study of gender, nationalism and culture in its broadest sense.

André Bazin's Film Theory

André Bazin's Film Theory PDF Author: Angela Dalle Vacche
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190067292
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Through metaphors and allusions to art, science, and religion, Andre Bazin's writings on the cinema explore a simple yet profound question: what is a human? For the famous French film critic, a human is simultaneously a rational animal and an irrational being. Bazin's idea of the cinema is amind-machine where the ethical implications have priority over aesthetic issues. And in its ability to function as an art form for the masses, cinema is the only medium that can address an audience at the individual and community levels simultaneously - the audience sees the same film, but eachindividual relates to the narrative in a different way. In principle, cinema can unsettle our routines in productive ways and expand our sense of belonging to a much larger picture.By arguing that this dissident Catholic's worldview is anti-anthropocentric, Angela Dalle Vacche concludes that Andre Bazin's idea of the cinema recapitulates the histories of biological evolution and modern technology inside our consciousness. Through the projection of recorded traces of the worldonto a brain-like screen, the cinema can open viewers up to self-interrogation and empathy towards Otherness. Bazin was neither a spiritualist nor an animist or a pantheist, yet his film theory leads also to ideas of a more cosmological persuasion: through editing and camera movement, cinemaexplores our belonging to a vast universe that extends from the microbes of the microscope to the stars of the telescope. Such ideas of connectedness, coupled with Bazin's well-known emphasis of realism, form the foundation for his film theory's embrace of Italian neorealism. Choosing to avoid aquantitative naturalism based on accumulation of details, Bazin's theory instead promotes the kind of cinema that celebrates perceptual displacement, the objectification of human behavior, and one's own critical self-awareness.

Collected Chaos

Collected Chaos PDF Author: Destiny Victory
Publisher: Destiny Victory
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 31

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Book Description