Aesthetics of contingency

Aesthetics of contingency PDF Author: Matthew C. Augustine
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526127040
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A study of how literature responds to conditions of political uncertainty, this book rewrites much of what we thought we knew about civil war and Restoration literature. Rather than sparking a decisive break with the past, for many the seventeenth-century’s civil wars opened onto a resolutely indeterminate future.

Aesthetics of contingency

Aesthetics of contingency PDF Author: Matthew C. Augustine
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526127040
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A study of how literature responds to conditions of political uncertainty, this book rewrites much of what we thought we knew about civil war and Restoration literature. Rather than sparking a decisive break with the past, for many the seventeenth-century’s civil wars opened onto a resolutely indeterminate future.

The Aesthetics of Contingency

The Aesthetics of Contingency PDF Author: Sonam Singh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This dissertation explores the aesthetics and ethics of attempts to formalize and coordinate modern-i.e., disenchanted, antagonistic, contingent-understandings of the self and the social, the sexual and the political. In Part One, "Coordinating Private and Public Contingencies," I delineate an intellectual genealogy of attempts by cultural and social theorists to account for a modern recognition of the self and society as both riven by innate internal antagonisms and both subject to anarchic contingencies in development. I focus on Marx's and Baudelaire's resonant reflections on the popular failure of the 1848 revolution in France, and sketch an ensuing aesthetic-theoretical tradition of reading literary forms as cognate with and offering insights into the ideological totalizations of social and political forms. In Part Two, "The Resistance to Contingency," I critique the content and critical reception of Walter Benjamin's highly influential dismissals, on supposedly progressive political grounds, of Baudelaire's aesthetic and ethical insights, grounding my analysis in a comparative reading of Benjamin's transcendental historical schemas in his political work against Baudelaire's decidedly immanent ones in his lyrics. In Part Three, "Contingency and/as Liberty," I explore this congruence of political and literary aesthetics further in an analysis of three George Orwell novels. I develop an argument about how the critical reception of these novels has not consistently considered their narrative structures' insinuation that conceptualizations and formalizations of the domestic decisively condition and constrain those of the political. In the conclusion, "Modernity, not 'Modernism, '" I offer an argument about the need to think of a literary "modernity" more capacious than the conventional confines of literary "modernism" by juxtaposing the "high modernist" Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas with a text of the Weimar-era legal theorist Carl Schmitt. I bring out their shared recognition of innate interpersonal antagonisms and their shared concern for the unprogrammable contingencies of political developments, but note their strikingly contrasting accounts of responsible decision-making given such awareness. Against Schmitt's aporetic distinction of an organic community of friends, I expound Woolf's more trenchant ethical vision of political community, one grounded in her less idealistic vision of domestic politics.

Kant and the Experience of Freedom

Kant and the Experience of Freedom PDF Author: Paul Guyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521568333
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
This collection of essays by one of the preeminent Kant scholars of our time transforms our understanding of both Kant's aesthetics and his ethics. Guyer shows that at the very core of Kant's aesthetic theory, disinterestedness of taste becomes an experience of freedom and thus an essential accompaniment to morality itself. At the same time he reveals how Kant's moral theory includes a distinctive place for the cultivation of both general moral sentiments and particular attachments on the basis of the most rigorous principle of duty. Kant's thought is placed in a rich historical context including such figures as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kames, as well as Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Schiller, and Hegel. Other topics treated are the sublime, natural versus artistic beauty, genius and art history, and duty and inclination. These essays extend and enrich the account of Kant's aesthetics in the author's earlier book, Kant and the Claims of Taste (1979).

Fixing the Limit

Fixing the Limit PDF Author: Dan DiPiero
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
To speak of "the contingent" is to attempt to discuss something that seems to belong to the order of chaos, the unpredictable nature of events and situations we are powerless to control. But as artists, political theorists, philosophers, and other writer-thinkers reinvigorate the explorations of those processes for which it is desirable to not know the outcome in advance, this thesis asks the question: "what can be gained by a renewed insistence on the contingent?" Staring from an analysis of the indeterminate nature of improvised music, this thesis expands to address another type of performance: the political. Heavily informed by Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude, I delineate various indeterminate procedures in art and political life, from chance and indeterminacy to radical contingency. By distinguishing these processes, I posit that contingency is not a broad phenomenon we are powerless to affect, but rather a concept that functions distinctly within various fields. Finally, I argue that by designing the limit, we are capable of creating procedures with unknown ends that nevertheless carry the character of our designs. I will argue that doing so at the state level is imperative, because, as I attempt to show, the non-final character of contingency is always inextricably constitutive of political equality, and that without an insistence on this formation, we claim a powerlessness in relation to contingency that leaves our contemporary democracy vulnerable to those forces which would solidify their aims in determinate and certain end-points.

Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics

Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics PDF Author: Ian Andrews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350148482
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and aligning it with a new trend in interdisciplinary phenomenology, Ian Andrews provides a unique look at the role of chance in art and its philosophical implications. His account of how the composer John Cage and other avant-garde creatives such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Sol LeWitt and Ed Ruscha used chance in their work to question the structures of experience and prompt a new engagement with these phenomena makes a truly important contribution to Continental philosophy. Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the disciplines of phenomenology, deconstruction and hermeneutics, as well as being compelling reading for anyone interested in pursuing sound studies, art theory and art history through an interdisciplinary post-phenomenological lens.

Contingency and Normativity: The Challenges of Richard Rorty

Contingency and Normativity: The Challenges of Richard Rorty PDF Author: Rosa Maria Calcaterra
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004393838
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Contingentism depicts normativity as one of our human effective possibilities rather than as a metaphysical bottleneck which we should necessary fulfill. The book is a critical survey of Richard McKay Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism”, in the light of various theoretical arguments as well as of his own resourceful attempts to renew philosophy from within its practice.

Contingent Computation

Contingent Computation PDF Author: M. Beatrice Fazi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786606097
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In Contingent Computation, M. Beatrice Fazi offers a new theoretical perspective through which we can engage philosophically with computing. The book proves that aesthetics is a viable mode of investigating contemporary computational systems. It does so by advancing an original conception of computational aesthetics that does not just concern art made by or with computers, but rather the modes of being and becoming of computational processes. Contingent Computation mobilises the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead in order to address aesthetics as an ontological study of the generative potential of reality. Through a novel philosophical reading of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and of Turing’s notion of incomputability, Fazi finds this potential at the formal heart of computational systems, and argues that computation is a process of determining indeterminacy. This indeterminacy, which is central to computational systems, does not contradict their functionality. Instead, it drives their very operation, albeit in a manner that might not always fit with the instrumental, representational and cognitivist purposes that we have assigned to computing.

Journey Around the Studio

Journey Around the Studio PDF Author: Georgina Criddle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Since the late nineteenth century, contingency has been dealt with in anideologically oppositional fashion. Though scrupulously avoided by thenotorious doctrine of'process management', contingency was valued inthe emerging realm of photography for its ontological connection to thepresent.1 Long after early photography made a virtue of capturing contingencyon film, the experiments ofland and site-specific art in the 196osand 1970s sought to figure it sculpturally, using the existing contextual,material and spatial aspects of a site to inform their responses.The following exegesis seeks to explore the aesthetics of contingency:the unavoidable and potentially unmanageable presence of multiplepotentialities that both shape and interrupt our relationship to place,and open up new spaces for reflection and inquiry. This exegesis serves asa reflective inventory and travelogue that traces both theoretical and practice-based explorations in my studio over the course of one year.

Rights of Passage

Rights of Passage PDF Author: Trevor Mowchun
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Contingent Encounters

Contingent Encounters PDF Author: Dan DiPiero
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047290311X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Contingent Encounters offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns long-standing assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term.