The Political Life of Sensation

The Political Life of Sensation PDF Author: Davide Panagia
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390817
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The taste of chocolate, the noise of a crowd, the visual impressions of filmic images—such sensory perceptions are rarely if ever discussed in relation to democratic theory. In response, Davide Panagia argues that by overlooking sensation political theorists ignore a crucial dimension of political life. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s and Jacques Rancière’s readings of Kantian aesthetics, Panagia posits sensation as a radical democratic moment of aesthetic judgment. He contends that sensory experience interrupts our perceptual givens, creating occasions to suspend authority and reconfigure the arrangement of a political order. Panagia claims that the rule of narrative governs our inherited notions of political subjectivity and agency, such that reading and writing are the established modes of political deliberation. Yet the contemporary citizen-subject is a viewing subject, influenced by film, photos, and other perceptual stimuli as much as by text. Challenging the rule of narrative, Panagia analyzes diverse sites of cultural engagement including the visual dynamics portrayed in the film The Ring, the growth of festival culture in late-fifteenth-century Florence, the practices of convivium espoused by the Slow Food movement, and the architectural design of public newsstands. He then ties these occasions for sensation to notable moments in the history of political thought and shows the political potential of a dislocated subjectivity therein. Democratic politics, Panagia concludes, involves a taking part in those everyday practices that interrupt our common modes of sensing and afford us an awareness of what had previously been insensible.

The Political Life of Sensation

The Political Life of Sensation PDF Author: Davide Panagia
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390817
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
The taste of chocolate, the noise of a crowd, the visual impressions of filmic images—such sensory perceptions are rarely if ever discussed in relation to democratic theory. In response, Davide Panagia argues that by overlooking sensation political theorists ignore a crucial dimension of political life. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s and Jacques Rancière’s readings of Kantian aesthetics, Panagia posits sensation as a radical democratic moment of aesthetic judgment. He contends that sensory experience interrupts our perceptual givens, creating occasions to suspend authority and reconfigure the arrangement of a political order. Panagia claims that the rule of narrative governs our inherited notions of political subjectivity and agency, such that reading and writing are the established modes of political deliberation. Yet the contemporary citizen-subject is a viewing subject, influenced by film, photos, and other perceptual stimuli as much as by text. Challenging the rule of narrative, Panagia analyzes diverse sites of cultural engagement including the visual dynamics portrayed in the film The Ring, the growth of festival culture in late-fifteenth-century Florence, the practices of convivium espoused by the Slow Food movement, and the architectural design of public newsstands. He then ties these occasions for sensation to notable moments in the history of political thought and shows the political potential of a dislocated subjectivity therein. Democratic politics, Panagia concludes, involves a taking part in those everyday practices that interrupt our common modes of sensing and afford us an awareness of what had previously been insensible.

Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation

Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation PDF Author: Christopher Holma
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487503938
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Presenting a detailed reinterpretation and reconstruction of the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation uses original readings of Machiavelli's texts to develop a new theoretical model of democratic practice. The book critically and creatively juxtaposes certain concepts drawn from Machiavelli's work in order to produce new political insights. Christopher Holman identifies two unique ideas in Machiavelli through his rearrangement of Machiavellian concepts. The first, drawn primarily from The Prince, is an image of the individual human being as a creative subject that seeks the exteriorization of desire via political creation. The second, drawn primarily from The Discourses on Livy, is an image of the democratic republic as a form of regime in which this desire for creative self-expression is universalized, all citizens being able to affirm their psychic orientation toward innovation through their equal access to political institutions and orders. Such institutions and orders, to the extent that they function as media for the expression of a fundamental human creativity, must be arranged so that they are capable of continual interrogation and refinement. In the final instance, a new ethical ground for the normative defense of democratic life is constructed, one grounded in the orientation of individual beings toward novelty and innovation.

Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language

Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language PDF Author: Megan V. Nicely
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031302966
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This book is about dance’s relationship to language. It investigates how dance bodies work with the micromovements elicited by language’s affective forces, and the micropolitics of the thought-sensations that arise when movement and words accompany one another within choreographic contexts. Situating itself where theory meets practice—the zone where ideas arise to be tested, the book draws on embodied research in practices within the lineages of American postmodern dance and Japanese butoh, set in dialog with affect-based philosophies and somatics. Understanding that language is felt, both when uttered and when unspoken, this book speaks to the choreographic thinking that takes place when language is considered a primary element in creating the sensorium.

The Political Sublime

The Political Sublime PDF Author: Michael J. Shapiro
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372053
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In The Political Sublime Michael J. Shapiro formulates an original politics of aesthetics through an analysis of the experience of the sublime. Turning away from Kant's analysis of the sublime experience as a validation of the existence of a universal common sense, Shapiro draws on Deleuze, Lyotard, and Rancière to show how incomprehensible events and dilemmas provide openings for new political formations. He approaches the sublime through a range of artistic and cultural texts that address social crises and natural disasters, from the writing of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates to the films of Ingmar Bergman and Spike Lee; these works suggest ways to channel the disruptive effects of the sublime into resistance to authority and innovative political initiative. Whether stemming from the threat of nuclear annihilation or the aftermath of an earthquake, the violence of racism and terrorism or the devastation of industrialism, sublime experience, Shapiro contends, allows for a rethinking of events in ways that reveal, redistribute, and create conditions of possibility for alternative communities of sense.

King's Vibrato

King's Vibrato PDF Author: Maurice O. Wallace
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 147802299X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
In King’s Vibrato Maurice O. Wallace explores the sonic character of Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice and its power to move the world. Providing a cultural history and critical theory of the black modernist soundscapes that helped inform King’s vocal timbre, Wallace shows how the qualities of King’s voice depended on a mix of ecclesial architecture and acoustics, musical instrumentation and sound technology, audience and song. He examines the acoustical architectures of the African American churches where King spoke and the centrality of the pipe organ in these churches, offers a black feminist critique of the influence of gospel on King, and outlines how variations in natural environments and sound amplifications made each of King’s three deliveries of the “I Have a Dream” speech unique. By mapping the vocal timbre of one of the most important figures of black hope and protest in American history, Wallace presents King as the embodiment of the sound of modern black thought.

Political Theory and Film

Political Theory and Film PDF Author: Ian Fraser
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 178348165X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Critically examines how radical political theory and its application to film analysis can provide insight to the aesthetic self during political upheaval and conflict

Sentient Subjects

Sentient Subjects PDF Author: Gerda Roelvink
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100033337X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Non-cognitive expressions of the life of the subject – feeling, motion, tactility, instinct, automatism, and sentience – have transformed how scholars understand subjectivity, agency and identity. This collection investigates the critical purchase of the idiom of affect in this ‘post-humanist’ thinking of the subject. It also explores political and ethical questions raised by the deployment of affect as a theoretical and artistic category. Together the contributors to this collection map the theoretically heterogeneous field of post-humanist scholarship on affect, making inspiring, and at times surprising, connections between Spinoza’s and Tomkins’s theories of affect, the concept of affect and psychoanalysis, and affect and animal studies in art and literature. As a result, the concepts, vocabulary, compatibility, and attribution of affect are challenged and extended. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Cinema, democracy and perfectionism

Cinema, democracy and perfectionism PDF Author: Joshua Foa Dienstag
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 178499779X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. In the lead essay for this volume, Joshua Foa Dienstag engages in a critical encounter with the work of Stanley Cavell on cinema, focusing skeptical attention on the claims made for the contribution of cinema to the ethical character of democratic life. In this debate, Dienstag mirrors the celebrated dialogue between Rousseau and Jean D'Alembert on theatre, casting Cavell as D'Alembert in his view that we can learn to become better citizens and better people by observing a staged representation of human life, with Dienstag arguing, with Rousseau, that this misunderstands the relationship between original and copy, even more so in the medium of film than in the medium of theatre. Dienstag's provocative and stylish essay is debated by an exceptional group of interlocutors comprising Clare Woodford, Tracy B. Strong, Margaret Kohn, Davide Panagia and Thomas Dumm. The volume closes with a robust response from Dienstag to his critics.

Lights and shadows of New York life; or, The sights and sensations of the great city ... Illustrated with numerous fine engravings of noted places, life and scenes in New York

Lights and shadows of New York life; or, The sights and sensations of the great city ... Illustrated with numerous fine engravings of noted places, life and scenes in New York PDF Author: James Dabney MACCABE
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 878

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Book Description


Biopolitical Screens

Biopolitical Screens PDF Author: Pasi Valiaho
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262548976
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
An investigation of the aesthetics and politics of new visual media under twenty-first-century capitalism, from console games to virtual reality to video installation art. In Biopolitical Screens, Pasi Väliaho charts and conceptualizes the imagery that composes our affective and conceptual reality under twenty-first-century capitalism. Väliaho investigates the role screen media play in the networks that today harness human minds and bodies—the ways that images animated on console game platforms, virtual reality technologies, and computer screens capture human potential by plugging it into arrangements of finance, war, and the consumption of entertainment. Drawing on current neuroscience and political and economic thought, Väliaho argues that these images work to shape the atomistic individuals who populate the neoliberal world of accumulation and war. Väliaho bases his argument on a broad notion of the image as something both visible and sayable, detectable in various screen platforms but also in scientific perception and theoretical ideas. After laying out the conceptual foundations of the book, Väliaho offers focused and detailed investigations of the current visual economy. He considers the imagery of first-person shooter video games as tools of “neuropower”; explores the design and construction of virtual reality technologies to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan; and examines three instances of video installation art that have the power to disrupt the dominant regime of sensibility rather than reinforce it.