The emergency department (ED) is a fast-paced, highly stressful environment where clinicians function with little or suboptimal information and where time is measured in minutes and hours. In addition, death and dying are phenomena that are often experienced in the ED. Current end-of-life care models, based on chronic illness trajectories, may be difficult to apply in the ED. A philosophical approach examining end-of-life care may help us understand how core medical and nursing values are embodied as care practices and as (...) ethical comportment. The integration of Aristotle's notions of phronesis and praxis with Merleau-Ponty's ontological notions of intentional arc and maximum grip in the context of the culture and practices of the ED offers a unique view of clinical and ethical practice at the end-of-life in the emergency setting. Caring for people at the end-of-life calls us to act virtuously based on previous experience, meanings and local practices. The maximum grip of the ultimate particulars of the situation combined with one's experiential and theoretical knowledge opens up situated possibilities for the expert clinician. (shrink)

가장 단순한 유기체의 행동인 ‘반사(reflex)’는 통상 감각수용기에서 운동실행기로 이어지는 신경전달과정, 즉 자극에 대한 거의 자동적 반응으로 간주된다. 메를로-퐁티는 반사에 대해 신경생리학이 취하는 이러한 견해를 ‘고전적 견해’라고 부른다. 그런데 실제 유기체의 행동에서는 고전적 견해로 설명되지 않는 현상이 관찰된다. 이에 ‘뉴런’의 발견을 통해 신경생리학의 혁신적 도약을 이룬 셰링턴(C. S. Sherrington)은 새로운 해법을 제시한다. 즉 반사란 ‘중추’의 개입에 의해 자극이 통합되고 조정되는 과정을 통해 산출되는 결과라는 것이다. 그런데 메를로-퐁티에 따르면, 셰링턴은 고전적 견해가 남긴 문제를 진정으로 ‘해결’한 것이 아니라 그저 ‘지연’시킨 것일 뿐이다. 왜냐하면 (...) 셰링턴의 신경생리학 역시 고전적 견해의 선입견을 고스란히 견지하고 있기 때문이다. 여기서 메를로-퐁티가 지적하는 고전적 견해의 선입견은 바로 유기체를 ‘부분 밖의 부분’의 관점에서 ‘자연’으로 간주하는 입장, 즉 유기체의 행동을 원자론적·기계론적 ‘인과관계’에 의해 지배되는 것으로 간주하는 ‘자연주의’다. 본고는 반사행동에 대한 메를로-퐁티의 현상학적 분석을 고찰할 것이다. 이러한 과정에서 우리는 방법적 전제인 ‘현상학적 환원’의 의미 역시 검토할 것이다. 이로써 우리는 『행동의 구조』에서 수행되는 신경생리학의 ‘반사궁’ 개념에 대한 메를로-퐁티의 비판이 『지각의 현상학』에서 제시되는 ‘지향궁(arc intentionnel)’ 개념으로 발전함을 확인할 수 있다. (shrink)

This article questions the aptness of ‘discourse analysis’ as a label for our field, and prefers the less reductionist concept of ‘Discourse Interpretation’. It does this through drawing on ideas from the field of philosophical hermeneutics – the theory and practice of interpreting texts. It operationalizes and adapts the construct of the Interpretive Arc from the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur in order to address issues that are central to discourse work, including that of how we warrant the validity of our (...) textual interpretations. The Interpretive Arc consists of six inter-linked phases, which the article presents and exemplifies through discussion of a single text – the story of Babel. Phase 1 of the arc defines readers as being in a state of Estrangement before the text because of the distancing created by its written or technological form. Phase 2 is that of Pre-view, the state of opinion or knowledge that readers bring to a text. At phase 3, a first reading forms readers’ Proto-understanding, their initial ‘guess’ at what the text means. Then processes of Analysis test and evidence the validity of alternative readings, limiting the interpretations which can plausibly be taken from a text. Three byways of interpretive analysis are challenged and discarded: the dominance of author intention, structuralist analysis and limitless polysemy. Analysis then leads into 5, the phase of informed Understanding of the matter or injunction of the text, of what is disclosed or unfolded before the text. The Interpretive Arc is completed in phase 6, Ownership. Here, through processes of critique of their own and the text’s ideologies and of fresh listening, readers are led to a new self formed by the matter of the text. There is a dialectic amongst Analysis, Understanding and Ownership, with each informing and modifying the other. The approach emphasizes interpretation as the heart of discourse work. The 3000-year-old narrative of Babel is a subject as well as an object here. It contributes to the matter of the article and its interpretation is interwoven with the theoretical substance. The story is shown to be an integrated narrative abounding in sophisticated linguistic techniques which show a delight in language. The traditional Christian and Western interpretation of Babel – as an affront to God which results in the curse of multilingualism – is challenged. A re-constructed interpretation informed by intertextual evidence reads the fault of Babel to be the people’s refusal to spread through the earth. Babel can be interpreted as a manifesto against the monolingual and monocultural impetus of empires ancient and contemporary. The multilingual outcome is a positive affirmation of sociocultural and linguistic diversity. (shrink)

The temporality of intentions and actions in situations of social interaction can sometimes be paradoxical. I argue that in these situations it may sometimes be possible to conceive of individual acts that can, in a strong sense, be intended retroactively. This could happen when the relational patterns in social interaction literally alter the virtual structure of a participant's past corporeal intentions resulting in an odd experience of having intended something all along without knowing it. I propose that this possibility should (...) be interpreted as more than just a narrowly epistemic phenomenon. Examining this claim involves clarifying the enactive perspective on intentionality, which I do here. The enactive approach rejects the model of a causal relation between intention and action for one of an intrinsic qualitative relation between the two as facets of sense-making. I develop this idea and compare it with Merleau-Ponty's Fundierung model of the mutual relation between corporeal and reflexive intentionality to show that co-regulated moves/affections during social interaction may modulate both arcs of this relation, creating the possibility of a re-signification that alters not the actuality but the virtual tendencies that preceded the social act. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of being motivated or solicited to act has recently been the focus of extensive investigation, yet work on this topic has tended to take the general notion of being motivated for granted. In this paper, I shall outline an account of what it is to be motivated. In particular, I shall focus on the relation between the affective character of states of being motivated and their intentional content, i.e. how things appear to the agent. Drawing on Husserl’s (...) discussion of perceptual awareness, I suggest that the intentional content of states of being motivated has a horizonal structure, in which both affective and perceptual features are implied. In states of being motivated, the agent becomes aware of certain possibilities for action, towards which they feel drawn. This structure is what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the “intentional arc” (1962, 136). (shrink)

This essay interprets the controversy over Richard Serra's monumental sculpture, Tilted Arc , which was designed for a public plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1979 and then torn down five years later after intense public outcry. Levine reads this controversy as characteristic of contemporary debates over the arts, which continue the tradition of the nineteenth century avant-garde, pitting art against a wider public, and insisting that art must deliberately resist mainstream tastes and values in favor of marginality and innovation. This (...) definition of art has posed a lasting dilemma for democratic societies: how, after all, should a democracy deal with art that represents an intentional rejection of the majority? The problem becomes even more intractable when it comes to avant-garde art commissioned for public spaces, where the art object can challenge public tastes and movements in a way that is inescapable for those who must live and work in the space. Disturbed by the imposition of a massive and incomprehensible art object in a public plaza, Serra's opponents argued that Tilted Arc frustrated a whole range of socially beneficial activities, labor and leisure alike. And they claimed that Serra's supporters were dangerously anti-democratic. But despite the avant-garde's challenge to majority tastes, this essay makes the case that it remains a democratic value to continue to sponsor avant-garde art in public spaces. (shrink)

The empirist tradition has it that the genuine explanation of the occurrence of an event requires citing its cause and citing its real cause requires specifying a law that subsumes the explanandum-event and the explanans-event Davidson denies that the mentalistically described antecedents of intentional actions can be subsumed under strict laws, but nonetheless affirms, that beliefs and desires arc causes of actions. Some critics pointed out that this position is not a consistentone and levelled the charge of epiphenomenalism against (...) it. It is shown that there are reasons for thinking that Davidson's position is sound. (shrink)

The empirist tradition has it that the genuine explanation of the occurrence of an event requires citing its cause and citing its real cause requires specifying a law that subsumes the explanandum-event and the explanans-event Davidson denies that the mentalistically described antecedents of intentional actions can be subsumed under strict laws, but nonetheless affirms, that beliefs and desires arc causes of actions. Some critics pointed out that this position is not a consistentone and levelled the charge of epiphenomenalism against (...) it. It is shown that there are reasons for thinking that Davidson's position is sound. (shrink)

Saving Animals, a study of three different kinds of animal sanctuaries, is the first major ethnography to describe how sanctuaries “unmake” the notion of animals as property that reduces them to “bare life.” The study relies on numerous engaging narratives about rescue animals, their mutual interactions, and their interactions with the people who care for them—narratives that illustrate how the sentience and subjectivity of animals provide a firm ground for the author's ethical considerations. An animal sanctuary is ideally an (...) class='Hi'>intentional community of cocitizens whose pragmatic and symbolic value resides in its ability to lay the foundation for a broad challenge to all violent practices of exploitation “targeted at a range of different others.” The patient, incremental work of sanctuaries has implications not only for the future of human-animal relations but more broadly for the future of humans on the planet. The ultimate vision of sanctuaries is a world outside that mirrors the world inside, a pantopia where there will be no “others,” only “us.”. (shrink)

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are “stored”, not as representations in (...) the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stored, not as representations in (...) the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are “stored”, not as representations in (...) the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

The paper first introduces the concept of implicit and explicit temporality, referring to time as pre-reflectively lived vs. consciously experienced. Implicit time is based on the constitutive synthesis of inner time consciousness on the one hand, and on the conative–affective dynamics of life on the other hand. Explicit time results from an interruption or negation of implicit time and unfolds itself in the dimensions of present, past and future. It is further shown that temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity are closely connected: (...) While implicit temporality is characterised by tacit bodily functioning and by synchronisation with others, explicit temporality arises with states of desynchronisation, that is, of a retardation or acceleration of inner time in relation to external or social processes. These states often bring the body to awareness as an obstacle as well. On this basis, schizophrenia and melancholic depression are investigated as paradigm cases for a psychopathology of temporality. Major symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder, thought insertion, hallucinations or passivity experiences may be regarded as manifesting a disturbance of the constitutive synthesis of time consciousness, closely connected with a weakening of the underlying pre-reflective self-awareness or ipseity. This results in a fragmentation of the intentional arc, a loss of self-coherence and the appearance of major self-disturbances. Depression, on the other hand, is mostly triggered by a desynchronisation from the social environment and further develops into an inhibition of the conative–affective dynamics of life. As will be shown, both mental illnesses bear witness of the close connection of temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper I would like to explain, defend, and draw out the implications of this claim. Since the intentional arc is supposed to embody the interconnection of skillful action and perception, I will first lay out an account of skill.

In this paper I would like to explain, defend, and draw out the implications of this claim. Since the intentional arc is supposed to embody the interconnection of skillful action and perception, I will first lay out an account of skill.

Phenomenology is a useful methodology for describing and ordering experience. As such, phenomenology can be specifically applied to the first person experience of illness in order to illuminate this experience and enable health care providers to enhance their understanding of it. However, this approach has been underutilized in the philosophy of medicine as well as in medical training and practice. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of phenomenology to clinical medicine. In order to describe the experience of illness, we need a (...) phenomenological approach that gives the body a central role and acknowledges the primacy of perception. I present such a phenomenological method and show how it could usefully illuminate the experience of illness through a set of concepts taken from Merleau-Ponty. His distinction between the biological body and the body as lived, analysis of the habitual body, and the notions of motor intentionality and intentional arc are used to capture the experience of illness. I then discuss the applications this approach could have in medicine. These include narrowing the gap between objective assessments of well-being in illness and subjective experiences which are varied and diverse; developing a more attuned dialogue between physicians and patients based on a thick understanding of illness; developing research methods that are informed by phenomenology and thus go beyond existing qualitative methods; and providing medical staff with a concrete understanding of the impact of illness on the life-world of patients. (shrink)

The current medical approach to erectile dysfunction (ED) consists of physiological, psychological and social components. This paper proposes an additional framework for thinking about ED based on phenomenology, by focusing on the theory of sexual projection. This framework will be complementary to the current medical approach to ED. Our phenomenological analysis of ED provides philosophical depth and illuminates overlooked aspects in the study of ED. Mainly by appealing to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, we suggest considering an additional etiology of ED (...) in terms of a weakening of a function of sexual projection. We argue that sexual projection can be problematized through cognitive interferences, changes in the ‘intentional arc’, and modifications in the subject’s ‘body schema’. Our approach further highlights the importance of considering the ‘existential situation’ of patients with ED. We close by reflecting briefly on some of the implications of this phenomenological framework for diagnosis and treatment of ED. (shrink)

_Abstract_: The overarching aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive account of melancholic depression from the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology. More specifically, we propose that this condition should be interpreted as an alteration in the intentional arc that affects corporeality, temporality, and spatiality, rather than as a mood disorder. In fact, classifying melancholic depression as a mood disorder seems a particularly poor choice; the mood disorder is not a cause but a consequence of a primary disturbance in (...) operative intentionality. Our paper comprises four sections: (1) We provide a methodological and conceptual framework for our theoretical work, adopting a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective on melancholic depression, and underlining the main differences between melancholia and depression. (2) We offer a detailed reconstruction of the different interpretations of melancholic depression and their relationships to the issue of temporality. (3) We analyze the disruption of intentionality in melancholic depression and how it affects corporeality and directionality. (4) We focus on the disruption of moods and affects in melancholic depression, observing how they shape subjective experience. The goal of this theoretical contribution is to underscore the role of operative intentionality and its disruptions in melancholic depression. We argue that taking elements such as intentionality, embodiment, and spatiality into consideration could help to direct therapies along more promising paths. _Keywords_: Melancholic Depression; Operative Intentionality; Corporeality; Directionality; Temporality; Mood Disorders _La depressione melancolica. Un’interpretazione fenomenologico-ermeneutica_ _Riassunto_: L’intento generale di questo contributo è di fornire un’interpretazione della depressione melancolica attraverso la fenomenologia ermeneutica. Più specificatamente, la nostra ipotesi è che questa condizione potrebbe essere interpretata come un’alterazione dell’arco intenzionale la quale impatta la corporeità, la temporalità e la spazialità, e non come un disordine dell’umore. Infatti, classificare la depressione melancolica come un disordine dell’umore ci sembra una scelta particolarmente limitata; il disordine dell’umore non è la causa ma la conseguenza di un disturbo a livello primario dell’intenzionalità operativa. Il nostro contributo si articola in quattro sezioni: nella prima, forniamo una cornice metodologica e concettuale finalizzata a chiarificare le fondamenta teoretiche del nostro lavoro, ad illustrare l’utilizzo della fenomenologia ermeneutica in riferimento alla depressione melancolica, e a sottolineare le differenze principali tra melancolia e depressione. Nella seconda sezione, ricostruiamo in modo dettagliato le diverse interpretazioni della depressione melancolica e la loro relazione con la temporalità. Nella terza sezione, analizziamo l’alterazione dell’intenzionalità nella depressione melancolica e come essa impatti sia la corporeità che la direzionalità. Infine, nell’ultima sezione ci concentriamo sull’alterazione degli stati umorali e della componente affettiva, osservando come questi elementi vadano a caratterizzare l’esperienza soggettiva. Il fine di questo contributo teoretico è di evidenziare il ruolo dell’intenzionalità operativa e delle sue alterazioni nella depressione melancolica. La nostra tesi è che prendere in considerazione alcuni elementi, come l’intenzionalità, l’embodiment e la spazialità, possa contribuire a delineare interventi terapeutici in modo più promettente. _Parole chiave_: Depressione melancolica; Intenzionalità operativa; Corporeità; Direzionalità; Temporalità; Disturbi dell’umore. (shrink)

Resumen: Los objetivos de mi trabajo son: explorar la génesis de la función llamada “arco intencional” en la infancia, entenderla como un proceso de desarrollo paulatino y analizar los procesos intermedios que intervienen en su definición. Asimismo, intentaré demostrar que el concepto de arco intencional, aunque poco desarrollado por Merleau-Ponty, conlleva consecuencias que impregnan y sostienen gran parte de su teoría perceptual. Esclarecer la trama conceptual que lo fundamenta no sólo podrá arrojar luz sobre la génesis de la percepción en (...) su teoría, sino que también aportará herramientas valiosas para explicar los inicios de la constitución del cuerpo habitual en la niñez.: This paper aims to explore the genesis of the function called “intentional arc” during childhood, considering it as a process of gradual development and analysing the intermediate processes that collaborate in its definition. I also attempt to demonstrate that the concept of intentional arc, though scarcely developed by Merleau-Ponty, has consequences that imbue and support much of his perceptual theory. Clarifying the conceptual framework that sustains it can not only shed light on the genesis of perception in his theory, but also provides valuable tools to account for the beginning of the constitution of the habitual body in childhood. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for people to suffer identity crises. Yet, faced with similarly disruptive circumstances, some people plunge into an identity crisis while others do not. How must selfhood be construed given that people are vulnerable to identity crises? And how must agency be construed given that some people skirt potential identity crises and renegotiate the terms of their personal identity without losing their equilibrium -- their sense of self? If an adequate theory of the self and agency must (...) be able to account for this capacity to avert identity crises, I argue that it must include an account of agentic corporeity. After explaining what an identity crisis is, I examine Charles Taylor’s and David Velleman’s accounts of identity and agency and argue that their omission of agentic corporeity makes it impossible for them to convincingly account for the ability to avert an identity crisis. In the spirit of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the intentional arc and J. J. Gibson’s account of the relation between corporeity and affordances, I sketch an account of psychocorporeal practical intelligence that includes three main components – psychocorporeal insight, psychocorporeal values, and psychocorporeal versatility. I conclude by connecting my position to Aristotle’s views about practical understanding and by arguing that both Taylor and Velleman have reason to embrace my position. (shrink)

I argue that Hubert Dreyfus’ work on embodied coping, the intentional arc, solicitations and the background as well as his anti-representationalism rest on introspection. I denote with ‘introspection’ the methodological malpractice of formulating ontological statements about the conditions of possibility of phenomena merely based on descriptions. In order to illustrate the insufficiencies of Dreyfus’ methodological strategy in particular and introspection in general, I show that Heidegger, to whom Dreyfus constantly refers as the foundation of his own work, derives ontological (...) statements about the conditions of possibility of phenomena not merely from descriptions, but also from analyses. I further show that deriving ontological statements directly from descriptions entails implausible results. I do so by discussing representative cases. Based on these general methodological considerations, I show that Dreyfus’ work on action, skill and understanding is introspective. First, I demonstrate that Dreyfus’ influential claim that rules and representations do not govern skillful actions is the result of introspection, because it is merely founded on the absence of rules and representations in representative descriptions of skillful actions. Second, I show that Dreyfus’ work on embodied coping, the intentional arc, solicitations and the background is also based on introspection. These ontological structures are merely reifications of descriptions and are not further substantiated by analyses. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship that obtains between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida through exploring an interesting point of dissension in their respective accounts of decision-making. Merleau-Ponty's early philosophy emphasizes the body-subject's tendency to seek an equilibrium with the world (by acquiring skills and establishing what he refers to as 'intentional arcs'), and towards deciding in an embodied and habitual manner that minimizes any confrontation with what might be termed a decision-making aporia. On the other hand, in his later writings, Derrida (...) frequently points towards a constitutive 'undecidability' involved in decision-making. He insists that a decision, if it is genuinely to be a decision, must involve a leap beyond all prior preparations, and this ensures that an aporia surrounds any attempt to decide. One must always decide without any equilibrium or stability, and yet these are precisely the things that Merleau-Ponty claims that our body moves us towards. Most of this essay will explore the significance of this disparity, and it will be argued that many of Merleau-Ponty's insights challenge the Derridean conception of the undecidability involved in decision-making. This becomes most obvious when comparing the decision-making processes of those expert in a particular field to those who are merely competent (for example chess), and this essay will attempt to establish that the aporia that Derrida discerns can actually be seen to constrict. (shrink)

Schizophrenic hallucinations can be understood only as a function of the totality of the schizophrenic's personality, that is, only in the context of the person's entire being-in-the-world. For essential reasons, there is a predominance of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia, and these typically take the form of human voices. This paper argues that the essential reasons here are human reasons. That is, hallucinations arise primarily on account of a human or personal deficit. We argue that the deficit in question is, most (...) fundamentally, the radical one of a disturbed relation between the subject and the world in general. The schizophrenic slackens the normal "intentional arc" that casts the subject out into a world. Our thesis is that this slackening has interpersonal roots and that hallucination can be understood as a desperate attempt to compensate for the impoverishment of being-in-the-world and, specifically, for the deficiency in human relations; hence, the "human" voices. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the concept of the "intentional arc" in Merleau-Ponty, who maintains that perception comes into play within, and is nourished by, an already established relation between the person and the world. That obscure relation, the intentional arc, is the "genesis" of perception, and this paper argues that in it resides the proper theme of a psychological phenomenology of perception. A study of the intentional arc shows that perception is not a passive, causal, impersonal process. (...) On the contrary, perception is active in that it requires the perceiver's free consent to the solicitations stemming from the world; it is thus only motivated or beckoned, but not caused; and it rests on a personal foundation, which is to say that it depends on the entire psychological life of the perceiver. A subsequent paper will enrich and develop the implications of this thesis by taking up the phenomenology of hallucinations. (shrink)

Schizophrenic hallucinations can be understood only as a function of the totality of the schizophrenic's personality, that is, only in the context of the person's entire being-in-the-world. For essential reasons, there is a predominance of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia, and these typically take the form of human voices. This paper argues that the essential reasons here are human reasons. That is, hallucinations arise primarily on account of a human or personal deficit. We argue that the deficit in question is, most (...) fundamentally, the radical one of a disturbed relation between the subject and the world in general. The schizophrenic slackens the normal "intentional arc" that casts the subject out into a world. Our thesis is that this slackening has interpersonal roots and that hallucination can be understood as a desperate attempt to compensate for the impoverishment of being-in-the-world and, specifically, for the deficiency in human relations; hence, the "human" voices. (shrink)

Merleau-ponty's phenomenology of the intentional arc uniting body and world is viewed as grounded in the meaningfulness and materiality of both. the genetic constitution of the interrelated meaning and physicality of body and world is sketched in a phenomenological interpretation of jean piaget's ``the origin of intelligence in children''. from this sketch emerges an assertion of the priority of action over perception in prepredicative experience.

Reason is the object of understanding. Cause is the object of explanation. The original aspect of this study, which argues that reasons are in some sense causes, is that it discusses the distinction between reason and cause in the context of agency. It first explains the logical arguments that reasons cannot be causes and that reasons must be causes, and then presents an ontological argument concerning the pre-linguistic and irreducible continuity of phenomenal existence, in which critical realism and phenomenology work (...) together. In discussing the manifestation of reasons in the form of beliefs, memories, and dream interpretations, the focus is on the irreducible phenomenological-psychological level between humans as an organic set of molecules and humans as beings emerging from a social network of meanings. Finally, non-human agency is discussed and the thesis is made that the capacity for agency is not a social gift. (shrink)

Intentional, ‘commonsense,’ or ‘folk’ psychology is, as Jerry Fodor has remarked, ubiquitous. Explanations of what we say and do in terms of our reasons for acting are the stock in trade of intentional psychology. But there is a question whether explanations in terms of reasons are properly explanatory. Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett, to name two, have defended intentional psychology and its reason‐explanations. Still, many philosophers – including Fodor, Davidson and Dennett – fail to pay due attention (...) to the narrative basis of such agent‐centered accounts of action. In this paper, I argue that psychological explanation is an agent‐centered, narrative‐based interpretive practice. To make my case, I present a poetics of psychological explanation: seven elements which collectively describe what makes psychological explanations work. Narrative form allows us to represent the temporal arc of agents’ actions – as well as the temporal arc of their reasoning about their actions, both prospective and retrospective. It allows us to negotiate between the canonical and the exceptional in human experience, and thus to account for actions that strike us as puzzling or unusual – whether the puzzle originates in our suboptimal understanding or the agent's suboptimal reasoning. And it allows us to juxtapose different perspectives on any action. Such juxtapositioning gives us a mechanism for coming to see how an action that strikes us as misguided might have been construed by the agent as reasonable given her understanding of her circumstances. After establishing the seven elements of the poetics, I address the objection that narrative‐based accounts of intentional action are not properly explanatory. (shrink)

The primary aim of this essay is to present a case for a heavily revised notion of heterophenomenology. l will refer to the revised notion as ‘enkinaesthesia’ because of its dependence on the experiential entanglement of our own and the other’s felt action as the sensory background within which all other experience is possible. Enkinaesthesia2 emphasizes two things: (i) the neuromuscular dynamics of the agent, including the givenness and ownership of its experience, and (ii) the entwined, blended and situated co-affective (...) feeling of the presence of the other(s), agential (for example, human, horse, cat, beetle) and non-agential (for example, cup, bed, apple, paper) and, where appropriate, the anticipated arc of the other’s action or movement, including, again where appropriate, the other’s intentionality. When the ‘other’ is also a sensing and experiencing agent it is their - in this case, the pair’s - affective intentional reciprocity, their folding, enfolding, and unfolding, which co-constitutes the conscious relation and the experientially recursive temporal dynamics that lead to the formation and maintenance of the deep integral enkinaesthetic structures and melodies which bind us together, even when they pull us apart. Such deeply felt enkinaesthetic melodies emphasise the dialogical nature of the backgrounded feeling of being. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 12-22 [Access article in PDF] Art of a Child with Autism:Drawing Systems and Proto Mathematics Julia Kellman Sung, a five year old girl with autism, was enrolled by her mother in the university Saturday art program with the hope that Sung's favorite church school teacher, a graduate student in art education, would be able to tutor her daughter during the weekly classes. (...) Though hesitant because of her inexperience with autistic children and because of Sung's frequently angry tantrums on Sundays and the little girl's inability to speak, the young teacher, nonetheless, agreed to the plan. Her concerns proved unfounded, for Sung was able to work in the midst of the churning mass of noisy pre-K classmates without any signs of the fury that drove her to screaming, biting fits in church school. Additionally, and to everyone's delight, Sung's ability to develop as an image-maker was itself confirmed within the first few weeks of art class, dispelling any remaining doubts of her art aptitude or the value of art classes for the little girl.Additional questions and considerations arose about Sung and her art during the classes. How might one understand Sung's changing imagery? What might such explanations and images suggest about Sung herself and her activities? What might her art indicate about her similarity to other children and their art making? The possible answers to these and related queriespresented themselves during the semester, suggesting new avenues for inquiry surrounding both the wordless little girl and her Saturday morning creations.What follows is the story of Sung and her graphic development as it unfolded during the art class. Further, it is an attempt to uncover what Sung's drawings suggest about methods that are useful in the examination of the art of an autistic child. Documentation was carried out with a 35 mm. camera and color copier throughout the semester. Ethnographic methods including participant observation and interviews were employed to gather contextual data. Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology allowed for [End Page 12] consideration of nonverbal and verbal social interactions and behaviors. 1 A search of the literature of early mathematical development and drawing systems provided the underpinnings for early insights and later hypotheses. Here is Sung's story. Sung Sung, thick black hair swung forward to hide her face, lies prone in the middle of the busy classroom oblivious to the surging, chattering children around her, so intent is she on the sketchbook in which she draws. Next to her left elbow teeters a stack of a half dozen boxes of thick craypas from which she snatches colors, never looking at the hue she grabs. Her drawing behavior has a pattern; it looks like this. Shuffle through the identical boxes. Choose a box. Open it. Snatch out a bright waxy craypa. Hold it close to the eyes. Sniff it. Lick it. If the craypa passes muster, scribble with it in rich heavy lines — banana-like arcs, large solid dots the size of cherries, rectangular patches, and a variety of forms that come and go from one drawing to the next, like heat lightening on a summer evening. Her less frequent forms include: an enclosed yellow irregular shape with a dark dot in the middle suggesting a fried egg; a two-sided zig-zag; X forms; and solid and empty trapezoids made sail-like with superimposed crosses serving as mast and boom.Unlike the chosen craypas, however, those that do not pass Sung's inspection suffer a terrible fate; they are broken in two and their pieces tossed without ceremony to opposite sides of the room to be trodden into flat, bright smears by the other children in the class, pathetic traces of Sung's art. The craypas boxes themselves also play a role. For when they are closed they are used as blocks or toys, objects to be neatly stacked and restacked or placed side by side on the floor. When they are open, however, they are mere receptacles, passively holding... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 12-22 [Access article in PDF] Art of a Child with Autism:Drawing Systems and Proto Mathematics Julia Kellman Sung, a five year old girl with autism, was enrolled by her mother in the university Saturday art program with the hope that Sung's favorite church school teacher, a graduate student in art education, would be able to tutor her daughter during the weekly classes. (...) Though hesitant because of her inexperience with autistic children and because of Sung's frequently angry tantrums on Sundays and the little girl's inability to speak, the young teacher, nonetheless, agreed to the plan. Her concerns proved unfounded, for Sung was able to work in the midst of the churning mass of noisy pre-K classmates without any signs of the fury that drove her to screaming, biting fits in church school. Additionally, and to everyone's delight, Sung's ability to develop as an image-maker was itself confirmed within the first few weeks of art class, dispelling any remaining doubts of her art aptitude or the value of art classes for the little girl.Additional questions and considerations arose about Sung and her art during the classes. How might one understand Sung's changing imagery? What might such explanations and images suggest about Sung herself and her activities? What might her art indicate about her similarity to other children and their art making? The possible answers to these and related queriespresented themselves during the semester, suggesting new avenues for inquiry surrounding both the wordless little girl and her Saturday morning creations.What follows is the story of Sung and her graphic development as it unfolded during the art class. Further, it is an attempt to uncover what Sung's drawings suggest about methods that are useful in the examination of the art of an autistic child. Documentation was carried out with a 35 mm. camera and color copier throughout the semester. Ethnographic methods including participant observation and interviews were employed to gather contextual data. Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology allowed for [End Page 12] consideration of nonverbal and verbal social interactions and behaviors. 1 A search of the literature of early mathematical development and drawing systems provided the underpinnings for early insights and later hypotheses. Here is Sung's story. Sung Sung, thick black hair swung forward to hide her face, lies prone in the middle of the busy classroom oblivious to the surging, chattering children around her, so intent is she on the sketchbook in which she draws. Next to her left elbow teeters a stack of a half dozen boxes of thick craypas from which she snatches colors, never looking at the hue she grabs. Her drawing behavior has a pattern; it looks like this. Shuffle through the identical boxes. Choose a box. Open it. Snatch out a bright waxy craypa. Hold it close to the eyes. Sniff it. Lick it. If the craypa passes muster, scribble with it in rich heavy lines — banana-like arcs, large solid dots the size of cherries, rectangular patches, and a variety of forms that come and go from one drawing to the next, like heat lightening on a summer evening. Her less frequent forms include: an enclosed yellow irregular shape with a dark dot in the middle suggesting a fried egg; a two-sided zig-zag; X forms; and solid and empty trapezoids made sail-like with superimposed crosses serving as mast and boom.Unlike the chosen craypas, however, those that do not pass Sung's inspection suffer a terrible fate; they are broken in two and their pieces tossed without ceremony to opposite sides of the room to be trodden into flat, bright smears by the other children in the class, pathetic traces of Sung's art. The craypas boxes themselves also play a role. For when they are closed they are used as blocks or toys, objects to be neatly stacked and restacked or placed side by side on the floor. When they are open, however, they are mere receptacles, passively holding... (shrink)

The French astronomer La Condamine, sent to Perú to measure an arc of the meridian in 1736, decided to return to France by way of the River Amazon, mapping the river and collecting observations of all sorts. This intention was over-optimistic and the circumstances of the journey prevented La Condamine from gathering much new information or undertaking the necessary observations to improve existing maps. He published three popular versions of the journey but witheld most of the observations that he did (...) make for a later report which was never written. His journals are now lost, but his aims and achievements can be assessed from contemporary documents and the collation of his three accounts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GAUGUIN: THE OSCILLATING STRUCTURE OF DISGUISE Ralph Hajj University ofMontreal In this essay we will examine Gauguin's self-portraits as ritualistic activity. Through them we will attempt to determine the formal and iconographical consequences ofhis extensive use ofdisguise and how this use can illuminate the nature ofart in general. The ritualistic function of disguise Within the framework ofa given social order, disguise functions as a ritualistic activity. Ritual is aframed (...) event where concepts—which in a non-ritualistic context are strictly differentiated and which take their meaning from this very differentiation—become undifferentiated.In Violence andthe Sacred, René Girard studied the function ofmask in ritual activity: he concluded that within the function of ritual, which is to reinforce the cultural differentiation through a repetition of its undifferentiated origins, the mask introduces undifferentiation between the self, (the human being wearing the mask), and the other (who or what the mask represents): Masks stand at that equivocal frontier between the human and the "divine," between a differentiated order in the process of disintegration and its final undifferentiated state—the point where all differences, all monstrosities are concentrated, and from which a new order will emerge. There is no point in trying to determine the "nature" ofmasks, because it is in their nature not to have a nature but to encompass all natures. (168). Disguise as a form of ritual activity is the representation of undifferentiation or non-representability. It is then a fundamentally paradoxical 168Ralph Hajj activity; an actofundifferentiating which has its condition ofpossibility in differentiated meaning. In turn differentiated meaning has its condition of possibility in a transcendental undifferentiation which the disguise represents. The mutual determination of the two, the totality of meaning and its negation, which is the condition ofpossibility ofmeaning as such, is represented through disguise both as a synchronic state and as a diachronic process. Thus, disguise is one of the forms of synchronic condensation leading to diachronic oscillation. This structure/process of condensation/oscillation is posited here as the universal underlying principle ofritual and in extension ofart in general. The structure/process of condensations/oscillations are seen most clearly in Gauguin's letters and the self-representations put forward inthem where he liked to call himselfa "savage." It is also seen in his self-portraits of 1888-1890, were he alternatively disguises himself as Jean Valjean, as Jesus Christ, and as a Breton priest, among other roles. A study of the paintings were these disguises occur will allow us to make the connection between his self-representation, as seen through his letters, and its consequences on the formal and iconographical level of these and other paintings. This in turn, will allow us to see how the structure/process of condensation/oscillation affects the form and iconography ofhis two most complex works; La Vision après le sermon [Fig. 1], and Van Goghpeignant des tournesols [Fig. 2], both ofwhich were painted in 1888. This choice of paintings will allow us to examine some fundamental generative aspects of Paul Gauguin's work during that period. Self-Portraits as tropes In 1888 Van Gogh, who was interested in creating a colony ofartists, and as a means ofpreserving his ties with the painters ofPont-Aven whom he considered as likely candidates, wanted to exchange his self-portrait with a portrait painted by Paul Gauguin representing Émile Bernard and one by Gauguin representing Bernard (Sugana 94). Gauguin, who had trouble painting Bernard (Correspondence No. 165, 230), painted a selfportrait instead with an outline of Bernard's profile on the background, entitling it Les Misérables [Fig.3] after Victor Hugo's novel. Simultaneously, Bernard painted a self-portrait with Gauguin's profile. Gauguin'sLesMisérables [Fig. 3] is typical ofhis self-portraits, where he is usually disguised, in this case as Jean Valjean. The picture shows Gauguin looking straight at the viewer, his prominent arced nose—which he considered as a sign ofhis "primitive" origins—emphasized. The Gauguin: The Oscillating Structure ofDisguise171 background is painted yellow with decorative designs vaguely reminiscent ofPersian carpets, exceptforagreen areaonthetop rightofthe canvasthat contains a linear portrait of Emile Bernard. In a letter written to Shuffenecker in October 1888, he describesthispaintingand its intentions:...I did a portrait... (shrink)

Excerpt from The Fundamental Principle of Fichte's Philosophy The purpose of this monograph is to make a careful study of Fichte's conception of the ultimate principle. In his various writings the principle appears under many different names. 'The Ego, ' 'the Idea of the Ego, ' 'the moral world-order, ' 'God, ' 'the Absolute, ' 'Being, ' 'the Light, ' are some of the phrases by which it is most commonly designated. It is not the main purpose of this study (...) to examine tile much discussed question of the relation between the two periods of Fichte's philosophy. But the question is so intimately connected with the problem which I have undertaken that some discussion of it is inevitable. I have tried, however, to keep well within the limits of my theme, and instead of considering the relation between the two periods in all its aspects, have sought merely to determine how far the conception of the fundamental principle which we find in Fichte's later writings differs from that which appears in the earlier ones. The references to Fichte's writings are to the Sammtliche Werke (Berlin, 1845-1846, 8 vols.) and to the Nachgelassene Werke (Bonn, 1834-1835, 3 vols.). References to the Sammtliche Werke are indicated by the letters S. W.; to the Nachgelassene Werke, by the letters N. W. References to the Kritik der remen Vernunft arc indicated by the letters A (for the First Edition) and B (for the Second). All other references to Kant's writings are made to Hartenstein's second edition of the Sammtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1867-1868, 8 vols.) and are indicated by the letter H. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

Excerpt from Studies in Human Nature The aim of these studies is to examine with all possible freedom from theoretical bias some phases of human nature which are of great interest in themselves, and in the light of the analysis to draw certain conclusions. It would have been natural to have included in such a series the consideration of certain other aspects of human nature, more especially those which concern morality and civic institutions. Morality and the conditions of citizenship arc (...) in many ways the most important forms of human life which can engage our attention at the present time; and the influence of the recent upheaval in our experience has brought before us many moral problems with a peculiar, and perhaps even a new', prominence. It has seemed better, however, to reserve the consideration of these and kindred subjects for another occasion. It is not the purpose of these papers to defend or support any of the familiarly accepted theories, whether of idealism or realism. Human nature is far more interesting and much more important than any theory, and on that account perhaps is tolerant of many theories. It may be remarked, however, that the momentum which carried forward one peculiar form of idealism - the confident and confiding idealism of a generation ago - seems now to have spent its force; and that a realism which takes the form of a new materialism can hardly claim to be in a position to show a better way. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * ‘Kraftledningarna / spända i köldens rike / norr om all musik.’ TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER Attention! You are not dreaming, you are drifting into sleep. You are feeling veeeerrry sleepy now. The curvature of the earth is causing you to shift away from the pinpoint that you circled yesterday on a map, your eyes hazed. That was also a today, in a novel fashion—the today of days long gone, of clouds long transformed into rain, or else snow drifts. That’s okay, you know this: in cathedrals of bone we find arcs that keep us warm. In drift- wood we find the puzzles that madden us all night, Tetris dreaming. In from our past, deriving steam, straight lines, axes, branches, kindling. Attention! Does anyone here speak Spanish? Si? Bueno! Dream with me. Cry out in your sleep. Step fearfully out onto the ice and drift awhile, inside a massive Perspex speech-bubble dream. A massive bubble longing to become detergent. The louvres of a ribcage snapping shut. Awe. Curvature of the earth is a con job: ask a dervish. Hail an imaginary cab in a hail-struck avenue and wait for the popcorn to drop. Stop, drifter! In the pharmacies and in the alleys, popping rocks while money men drift by in stockings, purling and unfurling their ways, their means. Attention, people!ion hurts. Reading too much into things I know nothing about, the niceness of the void or else a philosopher’s mouth sewn shut. I know about that, at least: the madness of seeking asylum in antipodean dreams, drifting for weeks at a time on a boat more abstract than surreal. Oh, fuck Life of Pi! Heaven basks like a warm, square meal but I can’t get there from here. There is no shark travelling at speed X while I zoom at speed Y in the opposite direction. I can’t use a lasso. I no longer have fits. I am no, mad. Too bad. Attention! Ambient doom slash moon. Over! The curvature of a yawn, a dream sewn shut. This skin, that knows my dreams, forgets me. Fruit tingles, wet on the tongue: get me some analogue hits, expressways to frozen, lakeside moon-dream voiceovers. The narrator’s cues infuse the afternoon, the canoes, with nostalgia. Somewhere, out there, we become driftories. We lie down in atoms and the clinamina bore. We fight against our own handwritten lies, type marching letters into files and save. Awe. Fidelity is a kind of surveillance. Current A. Attention! It was never my intention to score cheap points at the expense of polar bears, of driftwood, shores. The cockatoos roar. Their explosive chatter could strip a pine tree raw. Implant in me some destructive grace, to drift. Planetoid lamps all along the turnpike’s busy arcs. Extreme emissions of things. Drift-rings. The target of my gaze, sewn shut. Your eyes rising slower than a star from what you read, condensed into steam, here, north of all music. Driftories, signal fires, smoke: disappear. Go back to sleep now. No, we were never here. (shrink)

What is referred to as the “postsecular” situation is most properly conceived as an arc of trans-Atlantic self-understanding unfolding dialectically in the face of and in response to traumatically rapid, unprecedented patterns of globalization. I am myself so deeply immersed in the postsecular debates1 that I do not know whether this—what is meant to be—straightforward thesis strikes the reader as simple and self-evident, or rather as profoundly confused and jargon-riddled. Either way, my intention in this paper is to unpack the (...) terms used in my claim, flesh out their content and contexts, and attempt thereby to make the proposition as…. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terro(i)r Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage (Take One) * * * * Preface: Variations of Archiving the Anarchive Through Editorial Witnessing by April Vannini “a diagram is a map, or rather several superimposed maps.” 1 What do we do with essays, art, artefacts, and practices that go against, resist, challenge and reject archival capture or documentation since they do not fit within the screen or manage to move beyond conventional scales? What do we do with an essay or artefact that is the event of the event becoming-event itself, or how do we move from volumetric space to two-dimensional space? How do editors, curators, participants, etc. become witness to an anarchive? And most importantly, what are the potential and unanticipated ways in which a volumetric submission can be diagrammed within a two- dimensional space? In short, how do we archive the anarchive? These are questions that have emerged and have been consciously and purposely activated by Sean Smith’s thinkpiece for this issue, The Garage (Take One) . Sean, as part of his contribution to the special issue of drift within the thread in between space and place , created an artefact that emerged out of an event held during May 2013, titled Cottage University: Topology and Immanence . The visual documentation of The Garage (Take One) is not an archive but an anarchive due to its multimodal form, non-representational diagramming, and its reactivation of non-representational folding which animates its non-representational or more-than -representational condition. In short, The Garage (Take One) stymies attempts to be translated into digital text, representationally. As a reader of Sean’s submission you will only have access to a portion of the original submitted contribution (see “Take One”). At this time, I remain the only witness of The Garage (Take One) in its entirety: I was present at the original event, Cottage University: Topology and Immanence , and I was the sole receiver of the original package because of my role as editor for the thread, in between space and place . However, I would like to stress that I was unaware of what Sean would submit as his contribution to the special issue. What is presented here is an emergent rippling of the event that was not predetermined or arranged in advance ... a drifting of sorts! As for now, the artefact sits here on my desk next to a pile of books—folded, creased and somewhat lost in its translation into digital form. Questions of transcribing, translating and converting volumetric space to two-dimensional space have been considered throughout this process. And more importantly this artefact and its processes raise the issue of not what has been saved and included but what has been left out in each conversion of the original into the academic publication. What follows this preface are various “cuts” or “takes” from The Garage: Take One . Each take or cut is merely an interpretive and representational rendering of the original volumetric submission. Although with that said I would like to propose they are more than just representations or interpretations: each take or cut works as rippling variations of the event itself . It is important to acknowledge that much has been lost in the creases and much still lingers which will never be archived within an academic journal. Hence, a discussion of how to archive the anarchive is so crucial to para-academic “scholarship”. I will sum up the process that has emerged from The Garage (Take One) with a final word from Brian Massumi, written in his foreword to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus : Each 'plateau' is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplacement, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector. The vectors are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that is sustained, as an open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own trajectory. The word 'plateau' comes from an essay by Gregory Bateson on Balinese culture, in which he found a libidinal economy quite different from the West's orgasmic orientation. In Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist. 2 The Garage (Take One) Double Take 2:31pm/5:31pm Sean Smith You there? I just wanted to emphasize a couple of things about the process of the submission: 2:31pm/5:31pm April Warn-Vannini Yes, listening. 2:36pm/5:36pm Sean Smith 1.When you describe feeding forward from the CU (Cottage University) event, it is a WALKING ACTIVITY that reinvests/reactivates the intensive energies of the event. that is what my photos are in Take One......it connects the intensive state of CU to my "one-take" writing on construction paper experience. i'm not sure if i adequately conveyed that or not, or if you did, or how important that is. 2. In doing so, it ruptures open the "space" and "place" of material practice ...and how these may enter into the mediated production of academic journal work...and its flattened two-dimensional experience. 3. the abstract machines of CU (i.e.coming out of silence) are invested with a new diagramming practice (the photo walk) to produce a new text that is neither-nor: "spaced" as a content of that walk (garages), but "placed" as a technical question (coming out of silence to language). 4. the new text is precisely diagrammatic, non-representational, anarchival. ....multimodal. ok, that's all that comes to mind right now. appreciating your efforts. 5. oh, finally, i think you might need a better definition of "anarchive" here..... it was hard to pin them down in montreal on what this is, so you wouldn't be wrong, per se, but more require a working definition for the reader. obviously, as you say, without getting too academic/citations, etc. know what i am saying? 2:46pm/5:46pm April Warn-Vannini 1. Totally got it but I think I did because of our many past conversations about how to archive the event 2. Yes this is what I love about this. And I think you speak to this very carefully in your writing on the Garage. Now whether others pick up on this I don't know. This is why I wanted to see what it would look like if I flattened it (take 3). 5. I agree that a better definition is needed. This is where I've been stumbling because I have not found anything that clearly defines what is meant by anarchive. 2:47pm/5:47pm Sean Smith "with take one being the only remainder of the original submission left to reveal...." precisely because of its digitality!!! yeah, i would probably just append an edited version of what we are saying here, as if the editing process was still a ripple of the event. me "adding" new text later i think defeats the purpose, but if you were to take snippets of this dialogue as part of the anarachive/ 2:48pm/5:48pm April Warn-Vannini Totally! 2:49pm/5:49pm Sean Smith and just *use them*, i think that's fair game. that way i won't be crafting my words with intent. you can even use this profile pic. 2:50pm/5:50pm April Warn-Vannini Okay perfect. With that said, do you think I should just discuss your process further in the preface or include an introduction that would be in take one? 2:51pm/5:51pm Sean Smith could it be Take Two in its own right, like an atemporal ripple that coexists with the others and bumps them to Three, Four and Five? Or could it be called "Double Take" and leave the others as Two, Three, Four? 2:53pm/5:53pm April Warn-Vannini Perfect. I like double take 2:53pm/5:53pm Sean Smith and it's us hashing through this discussion 2:53pm/5:53pm April Warn-Vannini Double take will follow take one. i like this. The Garage (Take Two) Folded, taped (scotch and duct), folded recycled chart paper previous emergent thoughts: performed, inscribed and made anew Red jiffy, black jiffy, blue ink pen cursive writing/block writing diagramming amplification dilated » » » » directional arrows « « « « Moistened, torn, crinkled Ruptures Anarchive of thought events Deciphering language/writing Exchanged as a volumetrics of new spaces Performing tactics of “writing off the page” on the page Enclosed [OPEN THE DOORS, MOVE FROM SURFACE TO VOLUME…AND THE CONVERSATION JUST MIGHT BEGIN ANEW. *stamped* SEAN SMITH] Drifting Drifting Drifting The Garage (Take Three) 6 Sean Smith video from April Vannini on Vimeo . The Garage (Take Four) The Garage (Take Five). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Killing Our Way Out of ViolenceEngaging Wrangham's The Goodness ParadoxChris Haw (bio) and Richard Wrangham (bio)Wrangham's Goodness Paradox (GP) offers excellent anthropological research for mimetic theorists interested in the questions of human evolution and violence. It theorizes a framework of how group killing played a selective function in the emergence of our species, but it leaves open plenty of questions and concerns for productive, critical dialogue. Wolfgang Palaver has (...) written a short affirmation of the book, and Melvin Konner reviewed it for The Atlantic.1 But as one who has taken keen interest in the evolutionary and theological dimensions of mimetic theory,2 I offer here a longer engagement with the book and the author. I begin by extrapolating Wrangham's argument, I offer some critique, and then I share an edited version of my extended conversation with him.Wrangham's overall paradox is that humanity emerged through killing our way out of violence. More precisely, proactive coalitionary killing against aggressive, alpha-male individuals selected out, in a genetic pressure over hundreds of thousands of years, the more temperamental threads of Homo, resulting in a species (sapiens) who are relatively more domesticated and docile.3 [End Page 63]The argument proceeds as follows. First: Domestication is a real, genetic thing. Various domesticated species tend to share an odd, seemingly unrelated set of features called a "domestication syndrome." This refers to some combination of phenotype differences as compared to nondomesticated cousins: reduced skeleton mass, reduced/rounder cranium sizes and jaw lines, floppier ears, white patches of fur, extended juvenility, more frequent fertile periods, males with greater approximation to female characteristics, and so on. Beneath all these is a genetic reduction in "reactive aggression," which is the propensity for violence related to irascibility and short-fused tempers.Two: Domestication can happen intentionally or just randomly in nature. Humans have domesticated foxes in quick succession, breeding only ones with reduced reactive aggression, resulting in a domestication syndrome.4 The same seems to have happened slowly, with increasing intentionality over time, in the domestication of wolves into dogs. (This perhaps first began with the natural selection of wolves who were least aggravated by getting near humans to eat their camp detritus.) But domestication can also happen outside the human sphere, as in bonobos, who are basically a domesticated cousin of chimpanzees—evidenced not only in their reduced aggression but in their own domestication syndrome.5 This happened, he argues, largely through contingent, niche ecological features related to landscape, dramatic climate variations, and changes in competition over food.Three: It has long been asked whether humans are a "domesticated" species or whether such a thought is just anthropocentrism. The answer is definitely yes, but who domesticated us? A traditional answer, of course, was that God made us (or that some humans are properly domesticated, and others savage); but what if we ask in a more specifically scientific, causal framework? One early anthropologist posed that perhaps some now-extinct super-species domesticated us.6 Wrangham's answer is that we unintentionally domesticated ourselves by persistently killing off the genetic lines of the most aggressive individuals. This has resulted in Homo sapiens being basically a domesticated version of Homo neanderthalensis, erectus, and so on. Girard's not-unrelated answer is that religion domesticated us. By "religion" Girard means an integrated pattern of chaotic/exceptional and ordered/normal behaviors that contain violence, mediated through our mimetic capacity: chaotic mimetic violence restrained and channeled through mimetic ritual, taboo, and myth. This created an increasing feedback loop that exercised and intensified our mimetic capacity while protecting against its dangerous excess. Whatever the case, compared with our hominin cousins, the human phenotype shows strong signs of a domestication [End Page 64] syndrome: reduced cranium and jaw sizes, smaller skeleton mass, and a likely decreased reactive aggression in comparison to previous Homo.Fourth, and finally: Wrangham argues this domestication is related to a long, prehuman arc of transition, throughout the mid-Pleistocene (the Pleistocene ranges from about 2 million years ago to the thawing of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago), from older alpha-dominance patterns to tyrannies of egalitarian patriarchy. Wrangham draws upon hunter... (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * The gaze drifts where the stare dares not. The gaze is attentive while the stare is intent. Dériver : Equally to drift and/or to derive. —When drifting then, something must be taken along. Something must be derived from the drift. Something of oneself must always become other. Incorporating the other, incorporating oneself as other. Je est un autre , Rimbaud disait; 1 this in his last letter to Georges Izambard, a final correspondence to a former mentor and friend, from whom he was drifting away, having derived much. The drift is a control incomplete. To drift is to come closer and closer, but to always be turning away, pulling apart, pulling oneself apart. It is parabolic in the sense that it is always eluding a formerly established intent. Of all axes, it never finds room to rest. Filling new spaces, always changing places, ever escaping the Cartesian; the indubitable pinpointing of position. It is never pinned down. Love together what we will be apart. Once together, we will drift apart. Il le faut . Attention is held; it traces the path. It follows each point which traces the arc, the line, the swerve. It is not concerned with the figure being drawn, but rather the movement between one point and the next. The smallest movement. The clinamen of De Rerum Natura is the smallest of swerves, it is nothing more than the minimum — nec plus quam minimum . Michel Serres says of the clinamen , that it is an absurdity — a logical, geometrical, mechanical, physical absurdity. 'The clinamen, from here (its state of absurdity), finds refuge in subjectivity; it passes from the world to the soul, from the physical to the metaphysical, from the theory of inert bodies in freefall to the theory of the free movements of the living.' 2 So this swerve is something of the mind and something of the body, both in action, rather than a body which is merely acted upon. Swerve, however, has a connotation of suddenness. It is a movement which is made to avoid an otherwise inevitable impact. Drift, on the other hand, is the unleashing of something which is then allowed to follow a more complex series of forces. These forces now come from within as well as without. It is no longer tethered; now following tides, winds, flows or pitched slopes, now acting on its own. We are not atoms in freefall. Our attention long ago pulled us from this precipitous descent. We now live, ourselves, as one of the many forces. In the drift, as with the gaze, there is an ease. ‘Ease is the proper name of this unrepresentable space.’ It is the space nearest, the next, the neighboring space. To occupy this space requires a turn, a shift or a drift. It cannot be reached by proceeding straight ahead. ‘..the space adjacent, the empty place where each can move freely, in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity borders on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct relation.’ 3 Intention always seeks to straighten this line, to make it less complex, to isolate the point of departure and the desired destination. It believes there can be two points and, between them, there must be a straight line. Can there be? Maybe. Must there be? Never. Straight lines may exist, but they can never be followed to the finish. After leaving this point, we will never reach that one without being buffeted at least a little — at least the least. One foot in front of the other, this is a very restrictive dance, less even than a two-step. Straight lines lead only to lost intentions, being the shortest and quickest way to get there. When attention drifts it slowly turns away from the intended target, leaving it for something which pulls the attention away. Now we are for a moment free; all at once we can pivot, now we can waltz. Drifting along the page, deriving from what is seen. Reading is seeing; the movement of the eyes as they drift. Reading in the eyes what has been seen, what has been derived from the act of reading. Reading eyes drift back and forth down the page, now and then jump back and forth, up to the top, one word, back down, quickly a few pages back, now gaze out towards the horizon. When attention drifts it is the gaze that follows. Our attention is not restricted to the path the words follow, but links them together; deriving what is to be seen, rather than read. La philosophie fait voir . ‘Thus, philosophers speak through proverbs, and demonstrate. They connect their imaginations with foreign rings, flown into famous tombs.’ 4 Now drifting off to sleep, dreams come as unintended visions. To dream is pure drift, vision without an object, gazing into the dark, reading the unknown of the night. NOTES: Arthur Rimbaud, Poésies (Paris: Bibliothéque de Cluny, 1958), 57. Michel Serres, La Naissance de la Physique (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977), 10. Translation courtesy of R.H. Jackson. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), 25. Louis Aragon, Une Vague des Rêves (Paris: Editions Seghers, 2006), 10. Translation courtesy of R.H. Jackson.  . (shrink)

Excerpt from Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement: Translated, With Seven Introductory Essays, Notes, and Analytical Index It seems a strange fact that the works which have exerted the greatest and most permanent influence are those of which it is most difficult to give a final and conclusive interpretation. Is it that the philosophic mind merely amuses itself looking for the answers to riddles the solution of which destroys the interest, so that it is not so much misinterpretation as explanation that (...) great philosophers have to fear? Or is it that philosophers propose questions which depend upon higher categories than those of common understanding, with the natural result that their point of view is but imperfectly comprehended by lesser minds? Or is it simply that the works that have exerted most influence are those which arc most comprehensive and many-sided, and that different critics seize upon different aspects of the whole, and throw the emphasis on different points? It is not necessary to attempt to answer these questions generally, or further than affects Kant's Aesthetics. Certainly no work has exerted an equal influence on the subsequent history of aesthetics, and yet it has been most variously interpreted. However, while critics differ as to Kant's meaning on many essential points, they seem to be mostly agreed that the chief source of strength in the work lies in its comprehensiveness and its method. How they have been able to arrive at this conclusion in the face of their own criticisms, is a different matter. For they have for the most part attempted to show that the work as a whole involves an important modification of Kant's fundamental position of critical idealism, and that in its different parts it betrays considerable hesitation and vacillation of opinion on vital questions, and, moreover, frequently falls into flagrant inconsistency. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In the United States, property rights are afforded protection, but moral rights are not. Up until 1989, the United States adamantly refused to join the Berne Copyright Convention, the first multilateral copyright treaty, now ratified by seventy-eight countries. The American government refused to comply because the Berne Convention grants moral rights to authors. This international policy was—and is—incompatible with United States copyright law, which recognizes only economic rights. Although ten states have enacted some form of moral rights legislation, federal copyright (...) laws tend to prevail, and those are still wholly economic in their motivation. Indeed, the recent pressure for the United States to agree, at least in part, to the terms of the Berne Convention came only as a result of a dramatic increase in the international piracy of American records and films.In September 1986, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts first introduced a bill called the Visual Artists Rights Act. This bill attempts to amend federal copyright laws to incorporate some aspects of international moral rights protection. The Kennedy bill would prohibit the intentional distortion, mutilation, or destruction of works of art after they have been sold. Moreover, the act would empower artists to claim authorship, to receive royalties on subsequent sales, and to disclaim their authorship if the work were distorted.4 This legislation would have prevented Clement Greenburg and the other executors of David Smith’s estate from authorizing the stripping of paint from Several of Smith’s later sculptures so that they would resemble his earlier—and more marketable—unpainted sculptures. Such moral rights legislations would have prevented a Japanese bank in New York from removing and destroying a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi simply because the bank president did not like it. And such legislation would have prevented the United States government from destroying Tilted Arc. 4. Although this section appeared in the original version of Kennedy’s bill, the current version provides for a study of resale royalties. Richard Serra is known for his large-scale site-specific works in landscapes, urban environments, and museums. (shrink)

The nine responses to my focus article ‘Re-constructing Babel: Discourse analysis, hermeneutics and the Interpretive Arc’ are cross-disciplinary, as is the article itself. They come from discourse studies, cognitive science, Old Testament studies, hermeneutics, history and literature. I identify and address five main issues which I see these responses raising for discourse interpretation: the role of author intent and the original sociocultural context in interpretation; principles of translation, particularly in relation to the Babel story; issues of certainty and subjectivism in (...) interpretation, again including the Babel story; the role and limitations of cognitive approaches, and the potential of images like ‘unfolding the matter of the text’ to be realized in teaching hands-on discourse work; and finally a call to new listening in the encounter with hermeneutics, as a route to freshening the field I like to call Discourse Interpretation. (shrink)

In the absence of shared beliefs and even common interests, it should not be surprising that so much of the well-intentioned art acquired for public spaces has failed—failed as art and as art for a civic site. The conventional wisdom of simply choosing “the best artist” and then turning him or her loose to create a work within time and budget guidelines lost much credibility with the drama of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc commission: the process of selection, erection, litigation, rejection, (...) and removal of the sculpture from the Federal Building plaza in New York City. The new conventional wisdom? The jury, not the artist, was ultimately responsible. For Serra did precisely the kind of work for which he is respected worldwide but in a context and for a specific public whose requirements, in their view, were not met but even abrogated by what Serra had done so well: made a Serra.The issues raised by this particular controversy as well as by the very different response now accorded the once-controversial Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin, together with firsthand frustration with the selection process for public commissions, were some of the specific reasons for organizing the day-long symposium held 16 September 1989 in First Chicago Center under the auspices of Sculpture Chicago, a biennial exhibition and educational series. John Hallmark Neff, director of the First National Bank of Chicago’s art program, is a former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He is the author of Anselm Kiefer: Brüch und Einung , and he is currently working on a book on Max Neuhaus and a catalogue essay for the forthcoming Agnes Denes retrospective exhibition. (shrink)

A Critical Introduction to Philosophy of Language is a historically oriented introduction to the central themes in philosophy of language. Its narrative arc covers Locke's 'idea' theory, Mill's empiricist account of math and logic, Frege and Russell's development of modern logic and its subsequent deployment in their pioneering program of 'logical analysis', Ayer and Carnap's logical positivism, Quine's critique of logical positivism and elaboration of a naturalist-behaviorist approach to meaning, and later-Wittgenstein's 'ordinary language philosophy'-inspired rejection of the project of logical (...) analysis. Thus, it historically situates the two central programs in early twentieth-century English-speaking philosophy -- logical analysis and logical positivism -- and discusses the central critiques they face later in the century in the works of Quine and the later-Wittgenstein. Unlike other secondary studies in philosophy of language, A Critical Introduction to Philosophy of Language is not just a 'greatest hits album', i.e., a discontinuous compilation in which classics in the field are presented together with their standard criticisms one after the other. Instead, Fennell develops a particular, historical-thematic narrative in which the figures and ideas he treats are introduced in highly intentional ways. And by cross-referencing them throughout his discussions, he highlights the contributions they make to the narrative they comprise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 216-223 [Access article in PDF] Notes and Fragments Genre Fiction and "The Origin of the Work of Art" Nancy J. Holland I FIRST, A CONFESSION. Like, I suspect, many of my readers, I am an unpublished fiction writer. Unlike most of the closet fiction writers in academia, however, I write genre fiction. The question that immediately follows is how that writing is related to (...) the intellectual work I do in philosophy.This question, of course, is open to a broad range of answers, from the possibility that the two aren't related at all, to potential Freudian answers it might take years of therapy to unearth. Teaching informs one's life, however, as much as the reverse, and in teaching Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" to my Metaphysics class last year, I began to understand at least one dimension of the appeal that writing genre fiction has for me as a philosopher.But first, let me explain what I mean by genre fiction. In what follows, I will be referring primarily to four forms of genre fiction that have clear roots in the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America: two gender-segregated genres, the western and the romance, and two gender-marked genres, science fiction and detective novels. I will be comparing these to two other forms of "popular culture" that also developed in the nineteenth century and have, I would argue, similar relationships to the older, more "legitimate," more elite art forms which they closely resemble: photography 1 and popular music, [End Page 216] especially those forms of popular music such as ragtime, blues, jazz, and rock that are informed by the African-American experience in the United States. 2These "low brow" art forms all appear to have arisen out of the growth of the middle class in developing parts of the world during the nineteenth century and the correlative confluence of greater leisure, greater aggregate prosperity, and higher levels of education across a broader spectrum of society. Further, these art forms all combine the surface appearance of their respective "high brow" correlate arts with the reassurance of repetition that is the cornerstone of the folk arts with which they are also correlated. Each of these forms of popular culture balances itself, then, between a demand for more and more "works of art" (and/or class aspirations based on the appearance of such) and a demand for the familiar in a rapidly changing, materially challenging world.Thus, photography gives us a frozen and thereby purified visual reality, an icon of memory to which we can return at will. The truth it reveals is most often starker than that of folk painting and portraiture, but also gives the appearance of being free from the subjectivity of the artist. Great iconic photographs such as the kiss on V-E day, I have heard it said, become more real than the reality they encapsulated.Popular music similarly combines often amazing musical complexity (which is not unknown, although rarer, in western folk music) with the reassurance of a form that not only repeats itself within a song, but also between songs of the same genre. Thus, blues can be recognized by both the minor chords in its melodies and the characteristic rhyme pattern of its lyrics. Moreover, most western popular music, even to some extent free-form jazz, has a familiar and reassuring beginning-middle-end structure, both melodically and dynamically, that locates a listener immediately within the song's "story-arc." 3This same beginning-middle-end structure is one clear hallmark of genre fiction. Another is repetition. We all immediately know the plot of a detective novel or science fiction adventure: where it will begin, what the key stages of the story will be, and how it will end—not just happily, but with a specific form of reassuring outcome, be it the victory of well-intentioned intelligence over cunning evil or humanity's ability to survive even the most alien (and so most familiar) of threats. At... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Locke on the Knowledge of Material Things ROBERT FENDEL ANDERSON IT IS nOT John Locke's intention, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to deal with matter and material substance nor with how these are able to affect the mind. These are considerations for natural philosophy; Locke counts himself rather among the moral philosophers. He does not propose, therefore, to meddle with the physical aspects of the mind, nor with (...) the physical production of sensations through the organs, nor with the production of ideas in the understanding, nor even with whether ideas depend upon matter for their source. He defers to the wisdom of such men as Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens and Newton in these considerations, and finds it "... ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge....,, 1 It is true that Locke's Essay is characterized chiefly not by an interest in matter and the mechanics of perception but rather by an interest in epistemology and in the ordering and assessment of our knowledge. Because of the very nature and emphasis of this epistemology, however, Locke finds that he must, from time to time, at least mention the nature of matter and how it affects us. Finally, it becomes apparent, certain changes or ambiguities in his point of view regarding the mode of our knowledge and its certainty are consequences of his understanding of matter. It is a demonstration of these elements of his doctrine, which seem not to have obtained the full attention of such scholars as Aaron, Fraser, and Gibson, that I shall attempt in this paper. Fundamentally, Locke's theory of matter appears to be that of Democritus and Epicurus. Like the Greek atomists, he conceives of matter as consisting of particles or corpuscles infinite in number. At least some of these are so minute as to be individually insensible, and probably he intends that all are, although, to my knowledge, he never states that this is so. In the aggregate, in any case, particles do constitute perceptible bodies. As for the Greeks, so also for Locke, the particles arc all extended, having size and shape. They are said also to possess motion or rest, although he takes care to say that matter cannot produce motion in itself,e Locke frequently mentions other properties as being "primary" or "really in" material things. Some of these are solidity, texture, cohesion of parts, situation, and number. Apparently some of these may be ranked under others since, as he 1"Epistle to the Reader," Vol. I, p. 14. All footnotes refer to passages in John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, collated and annotated, with prolegomena, biographical, critical, and historical by Alexander Campbell Fraser, in two volumes (New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 1959). Large Roman numerals refer to books of the Essay; small Roman numerals refer to chapters of the books; Arabic numerals refer to sections of the chapters. 2 IV, x, 10. [205] 206 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY remarks, figure presupposes extension, and receiving or communicating motion through impact presupposes solidity. The influences of these particles upon one another are treated by Locke under the topic of "powers," a notion which includes in it some kind of "secret relation of parts." 3 The capacities in any substance to give alterations of primary qualities are active powers; the capacities to receive such alterations are passive powers. This alteration must be accomplished by impact or impulse since this, Locke says, is the only way in which bodies can be conceived to operate. Sensation in the percipient being then is to be understood as a special case of this impact of particles upon others. It is evident to Locke that from external obiects some motion must be conveyed by some parts of our bodies to the brain or seat of sensation to produce in our minds the particular ideas we have of these external objects. We are able by sight to perceive at a distance the primary qualities of bodies of observable size. Locke reasons that therefore "... some singly imperceptible bodies must come from them to the eyes, and thereby convey to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Stumbling Block its IndexBrian Catling (bio)The Stumbling Block is a graphic font. This black plinth was once a brush or similar terminal that was the lips of an intense electrical arc. Industries proud and violent need spoke through it to turn the wheel or smelt and cast the constructed challenge. Now abandoned it finds benediction in seclusion. It has softened its mouth to hold water, so that small (...) animals and disjointed humans may drink or sign themselves in their passage. [End Page 218]The Stumbling Block has been used like an entrance step to sharpen knives on. Its fossil bristle of bright stone forcing the heavy blades down to a hiss along one edge. These are knives of gleaming hubris, long intentions honed for malice. They are magnetized and have been placed to construct a lectern. Each blade holding the next to form the platform. It may hold this index at its centre, hovering, placed outside in the aorta of streets. The removal of any of the blades from the assembled cluster will spill their fish bodies to the ground. The paper will drink any of the stains of their usage. [End Page 219]The Stumbling Block is an ark of extinction. A bouillon hive of the murdered past, frozen dry to a mass. Something has warmed its corner, the oxoed grit bleeds a vein of contagion, virulent in its passion to embrace and swim in human tides. [End Page 220]The Stumbling Block is unfound to the stained and unclear eye. But its nest, its negative hollow can be discovered in the mounds of waste and detritus that choke the streets. Its possible wedge, sphere or beam form is there; a vacant socket, easily trampled, destroyed or cleared away. It is watching. Its obstinate grace squinting across the demonstrations of power. It is the light in the eye of the needle grown solid with anger, a fat sugar that clogs the passage to any kind of paradise. [End Page 221]The Stumbling Block is a bell that sounds a deeper voice than the throats of men. Their image and cry shrinks the world.The communication of global gossip becomes a barbed wind of trivial penning; television enclosures of wired indifference, the reduction of memory removes the open field and causes blurred shivers to be understood as the same thing. The bell hums as acceleration eradicates silence, the foundation for stillness is removed. The speed of language clones its own restless manic hunger. The portable telephone, miniature televisions, satellites and their collection dishes are the cutlery for this gluttony.The inedible thinness they devour is obvious. To feed this addiction soapy fictions are boiled from the skin and bone of poverty. Tribes, villages, jungles and the very air itself can be wasted or burnt to secure a dry armpit in puppeted dramas of nightmare lives. Condensation is sweating inside the bell; a human modes sound that is unwelcome. It drips from the rim in whispers and pools beneath its limited protection. [End Page 222]The Stumbling Block is a shape shifter, a spirit bench that dwells in the cuffs of the expanding city. Over its warn layers of woven scars many forms have been stretched, clamped and tasted, licked and cut; reshaped. Anointed by abstraction, they are put back on the blinking streets, patted and set loose. In the deep pocketed burrows of the bench, termite-size clones dream white directions to colour the tiredness of their somnambulistic donors. [End Page 223]The Stumbling Block is a barrel organ dragged to the site of a crime. Its tin cup catching rain as it judders on the pounding box. The moon is caught between its throat and the water, and in the black gleam of its varnished vibration. It spills dance into the causeways, sucking revelers along the spindle of its cranked tune. They will spin and curl their lumpen massed centrifuge around the bellowing thing. The laughter is momentary but has soaked away the blood, only the scuffs of shoes and the scratched cobbles sing on. [End Page 224]The Stumbling Block is not a coffer, disguised by a wig of artifice. It cannot offer erudition or... (shrink)