Educational drama or drama-in-education, also known as process drama, is intrinsically an inclusive, mosaic pedagogy that utilizes various dramatic techniques and exercises as educational tools in schools. The goal of this teaching discipline is to engender a holistic and experiential learning that creates meaning and enhances self-expression and personal growth, leading the students to a better understanding of the complexity of human behavior, while also containing the “others” and their viewpoints.1Under the umbrella of D.I.E. there exists a range of different (...) and heterogeneous concepts, objectives, and practices. The contest between drama and theater, process and product, content and free expression... (shrink)

When Albert Hunt joined the staff of the Regional College of Art, Bradford, in 1965, he found himself working mostly with ‘non-academic’ students on a fascinating range of games, projects and theatre events outside the main stream of exam-oriented education. In this title, first published in 1976, Albert Hunt describes this experience, and explains how he himself evolved from a conventional grammar school teacher to a radical and experimental educator. In particular, Hunt describes the evolution of new working relationships (...) between teachers and students, which in turn highlight an alternative way of viewing society. _Hopes for Great Happenings_ is not only a vividly interesting account of Albert Hunt’s teaching methods, but is of practical value to anybody involved in the study of liberal arts, theatre studies or in community arts work. (shrink)

The article argues that the theory of plebiscitary leader democracy, originally developed by Max Weber, is in its somewhat rejuvenated version a helpful framework in interpreting longer-term and more recent empirical trends in contemporary democracies, such as the growing personalization of politics, the emergence of populist leaders, rising levels of polarization, and the growing importance of social media. However, to realize the potential of the theory, it should be detached from Jeffrey Green’s most original, yet insufficiently realistic elaboration of plebiscitary (...) democracy that he made a decade ago. The article argues that instead of a passive and unifiable entity, the citizenry should be thought of as reactive and deeply divided, a setting which can be characterized by the metaphor of the infamous Byzantine chariot races rather than that of the theater, implicit in Green’s theory. Plebiscitary democracy should be thought of as representational, where popular control is manifested as the veto power of the popular voice. Additionally, despite its realist minimalism, the theory we propose may still have some critical potential, because it adopts the refurbished ideal of competition. The article closes by identifying further avenues of theoretization leading towards a more elaborate view of PLD. (shrink)

In his “A Programmatic Attempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge,” published in 1981, Yehuda Elkana briefly introduced the notions of dramatic and epic theater as metaphors for distinct and opposite conceptions of history. He elaborated more fully on this theme in a paper published in 1982 on the occasion of the Albert Einstein centenary celebration. Elkana there criticized the “myth of simplicity” surrounding Einstein, and proposed to replace a “facile holism” often attributed to Einstein with “two-tier thinking.” According to Elkana, (...) Einstein's historical epistemology was a blend of an epic, contingent view of historical scientific change coupled with strong scientific realism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Art of Theater—A PrécisJames R. Hamilton (bio)In The Art of Theater I propose and explain a claim that many theater people hold true in some form but, so far as I can tell, have defended in a manner that has had almost no success outside discussions among themselves.1 The claim proposed is that, in an unqualified way, theater is a form of art. By that I mean theatrical (...) performances are what are created in the practice of theater and that theatrical performances are works of art because they can be picked out and appreciated in the same ways we appreciate other kinds of artworks.2The agenda I set for the book is to state and explain what that claim comes to—exactly and in detail. Accordingly, most of the book consists of explanations of what else must be true if the claim is true, together with arguments defending the truth of those entailments. Some of the material consists of clarifying what the claim does not entail, and some passages contain arguments to show that alternative claims have problems that this one does not. Of these, I have allowed the explanation and clarification materials to carry the burden. Many philosophers and literary theorists are likely to find the claim incomprehensible because they have inherited, rather than critically accepted, a conception of theater as centrally dependent on literary texts.3 Philosophers, literary theorists, and theater theorists are better served by the explanations and clarifications I offer, however, because they show the claim can withstand the immediate objections or worries likely to arise.The direct argumentation I offer for the claim is historical. Indeed, I begin the book by tracing how theater has been conceived and practiced in the European theatrical tradition since the 1850s. I start there and then for several reasons. First, it is the beginning of a period of great achievement in theater, when literary artists began again to write for theater. Second, the same period also gave rise to a now dominant conception of theater: namely, [End Page 4] the idea that theatrical performances, or at least the most often performed, are events that are dependant primarily if not exclusively on literary texts. Finally, the 1850s were also the beginning of a period in which theater people were both doing and thinking about theater in ways that resisted that very same dominant conception. The conclusion I come to in tracing this history is that—without always intending to and sometimes by intending the opposite—theater’s theoretical practitioners have put us in a position to see the truth of the claim that theatrical performance itself is an independent form of art. Assured we can see that truth in the actual historical practices of theater, even in its most self-consciously text-oriented period, I then proceed to explain and clarify the claim.To begin with, the enormous success of the conjunction of literature and theater in late European theater practice means that any view of the art status of theatrical performances must explain the relation between a performance and a literary text, at least when a literary text is used in the performance. This is the first bit of explanation I undertake. A number of models of this relationship have been proposed, and I survey three of the primary ones. First, the “literary” model holds that performances illustrate or, at best, interpret the text and exist as a means to present the content—or the interpreted content—of the text in a performance mode. Second, the “two-text” model holds that the content of the literary text must be translated, adapted, transformed, reconstructed, or otherwise “reinscribed” in the language of theater. A third model, popular in analytic aesthetics, attempts to piggyback an account of theatrical works, texts, and theatrical performances on the well-developed ontology of musical works, scores, and musical performance.4 This third model might provide the right ontology of theatrical performances. Before we try to determine what kinds of things or events make our experience of theater what it is, however, first we should seek the best explanation of that experience. And that is the task I undertake in... (shrink)

Over the past 30 years, the Australian state of Victoria has made numerous reforms to a set of jury directions purporting to address concerns that rape trials do not adequately respond to the reality of sexual offending in the community. Building on work identifying the predominant narratives mobilised in rape trials, in this article we consider whether the way in which a jury consumes information during a trial explains why the jury directions, positioned and utilised as they are, appear to (...) have been inadequate to the task of enabling juries to re-imagine evidence through alternative narrative frameworks. (shrink)

The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art's politics is limited to a recondite space of 'autonomous resistance'. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art's exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural (...) theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to 'effect' to offer a nuanced account of art's political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the 'new' through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator. (shrink)

Hobson & Friston (2014) outline a synthesis of Hobson's work on dreaming and consciousness with Friston’s work on the free energy principle and predictive coding. Whilst we are sympathetic with their claims about the function of dreaming and its relationship to consciousness, we argue that their endorsement of the Cartesian theatre metaphor is neither necessary nor desirable. Furthermore, if it were necessary then this endorsement would undermine their positive claims, as the Cartesian theatre metaphor is widely regarded as (...) unsustainable. We demonstrate this point and then develop an alternative formulation of their position that does not require the Cartesian theatre metaphor. Our positive goal is to clarify Hobson & Friston’s confusing usage of philosophical terminology, replacing it where possible with the more transparent language of the forward models framework. This will require some modifications to their account, which as it stands is philosophically and empirically unsustainable. (shrink)

The present article focuses on the notion of intertextuality as put into practice on the Russian stage by the Podval generation (late 1980s). The author documents the aesthetic complexity of the stage imagery employed by this generation in an analysis of performances staged by the most important dramatist and theatre maker of Russian alternative theatre, Klim (born 1952 in Ukraine).

Different translations of Plutarch's De Pythiae oraculis 404B reflect an interpretative difficulty not yet adequately thematized by exegetes. Plutarch's dialogues on the Delphic oracle describe two perspectives on mantic inspiration: possession prophecy, where the god takes over the prophetess as a passive apparatus, and stimulation prophecy, where the god incites the prophecy, but the prophetess delivers the oracle through her own faculties. Plutarch understands the Pythia at Delphi to exhibit stimulation prophecy, not possession. One of his metaphors for inspiration comes (...) from the theatre: the god ‘puts the oracle into the Pythia's mouth, like an actor speaking through the mask’ (De Pyth. or. 404B [Russell]). Some translators take the metaphor as describing possession prophecy (Goodwin), while others take it as stimulation prophecy (Babbitt)—in other words, it may describe the view Plutarch affirms or the view he rejects. This article assesses the two alternatives, concluding that the theatre metaphor describes possession prophecy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From Children's Perspectives:A Model of Aesthetic Processing in TheatreJeanne Klein (bio)Since the children's theatre movement began, producers have sought to create artistic theatre experiences that best correspond to the adult-constructed aesthetic "needs" of young audiences by categorizing common differences according to age groups. For decades, directors simply chose plays on the basis of dramatic genres (e.g., fairy tales), as defined by children's presupposed interests or "tastes," by (...) subscribing to Winifred Ward's broad descriptions of the "imaginative period" (ages six to nine), the "heroic period" (ages nine to twelve), and the "romantic period" (over age thirteen).1 Years later, Moses Goldberg elaborated upon these generalized divisions while cautioning that "no individual fits exactly into any set of categories."2 In his position paper on aesthetic development, he argued for individual access to aesthetic techniques, processes, and products for all ages, paralleled by four stages of cognitive capabilities, based on exposure to (1) arena-style participation theatre (for ages five to eight), which emphasizes story enactments; (2) a wide range of proscenium-style theatrical conventions; (3) relevant play content that directly relates characters' problems to spectators' lives and growing self-awareness; and (4) social issue plays that pose ethical dilemmas as cultural reflections.3 Meanwhile, Jed Davis compiled Age Group Profiles, organized by cognitive, spatial, emotional, and moral/ethical development, from his review of Piagetian literature; and Johnny Saldaña summarized stages of young interpretations of theatre from his seven-year longitudinal study.4Suffice it to say, the field of developmental psychology has come a long way since Piaget formulated his four constructivist stages. Since the mid-1950s, the cognitive revolution has spurred more integrated theories of information processing and depth-of-processing models that explain and predict how people construct schematic frameworks of knowledge and [End Page 40] assimilate and accommodate new information as a function of perception, attention, emotion, comprehension, memory, and social and moral behaviors. Although masculinist metaphors of hierarchical "staircases" and linear networks of associative learning still dominate computational models, feminist perspectives, which engender social cognitive, co-relational negotiations of narratives in situated contexts, have gained more widespread acceptance—by including theatre as an apt metaphor for development.5 Over the past twenty years or more, cognitive psychologists have finally discovered what dramatic theorists have known about narrative structures since Aristotle's Poetics: Powerful stories contain universal themes about the human condition through characters' conflicting actions. The most successful dramas are those that allow spectators to enter into a protagonist's psychological consciousness or "inner" vision in order to empathize with her "outer" reality.6While several developmental models of aesthetic understanding, experience, and appreciation exist in the realms of visual art and music education, few examples have been proposed in regard to theatre, particularly for child audiences.7 Instead, producers of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) tend to romanticize its social and moral "effects" upon youth by believing passionately that viewing one remarkable performance has the potential (the operative word) to "cause" positive, social changes in children's minds, hearts, and behaviors, given the presumed "power of human imagination."8 This obsession with progressive change foregrounds adults' desires to control human destiny by predicting "causes and effects" located in children's responses to live performances. However, this "folk theory" fails to explain how young imaginations actually function aesthetically from the contextual evidence of reception studies with child audiences. Just as feminists have argued for a distinctive "feminist aesthetics," based on women's alternative ways of knowing,9 I argue that children gaze upon theatre in differential ways by including age as a variable factor. "Children's aesthetics," their perceived interpretations of theatre, differ from that of adults' theorized postulations, based in part on their shorter life experiences with this medium. To this end, over the course of my career, I have sought to understand theatre from children's perspectives by focusing my research in the social cognitive theories and social science methods of child development, primarily through the vast literature of television and mass media studies conducted with young people over the past forty years. In particular, medium-specific studies that parse theatrical forms from dramatic content... (shrink)

The enshrinement of William Shakespeare’s plays in printed editions has led to the assumption that they were performed with an ideal of exact verbatim reproduction of the language. Evidence drawn from alternative versions of the plays circulating in Shakespeare’s lifetime and from our knowledge of the material practices of playing in early modern England presents us with a very different picture. Performing practices in this period were marked by a tension between improvisational here-and-now languaging practices, including the use of (...) gesture in playing, and a new set of expectations based upon an emergent conception of plays as written documents. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the concept of collective improvisation and draws out its potentials for social and political theory. Translating the ideas of collective improvisation from their original context in the theatre into the field of political thought, I argue that they offer a new understanding of political action by reevaluating the concepts of dissensus and community, as well as the ways in which politics as a system needs to produce collectively binding decisions. I conclude that the ideas inherent in (...) the practice of collective improvisation, as it has been developed within the tradition of modern theatre improvisation, subvert our intuitive ways of thinking about politics and thereby offer an alternative model of being and acting together. nema. (shrink)

Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential (...) or semantic meaning and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. (shrink)

Healthcare practitioners are often presented with vulnerable encounters where their professional experience is insufficient when dealing with patients who suffer from illnesses such as chronic pain. How can one otherwise understand chronic pain and develop practices whereby medical healthcare practitioners can experience alternative ways of doing their practice? This essay describes how a group of researchers have, over a number of years, developed improvised participatory theatre as a means of engaging healthcare practitioners, patients and other lay people in (...) situations where it is legitimate to reappraise their practice and reunderstand the nature of an illness such as chronic pain. One conclusion was to consider that it is a relational rather than an individual phenomenon that in turn demands alternative practice. Through iterative workshop processes of improvised theatre, participants are encouraged to experience the vulnerable, the unknown, and the need to be alternatively present when dealing with patients whose situation is imbued with suffering. (shrink)

Based on the personal experience of the author, who is involved in theatre projects with women convicts, the article moves across issues of detention, migration, and precarity. Foucault's concept of governmentality is instrumental in describing the arbitrary exercise of power on incarcerated people and their precarious living conditions. Life in jail is especially uncertain for clandestine migrants. In the article, recollections from the rehearsals of the show / racconti del corpo (Tales of the body) alternate with images and quotes (...) from the play, poems by women convicts, and reflections on detention as the ultimate condition of precarity for migrant women. (shrink)

Gilberta Golinelli's book is set within an important area of utopian studies that, from the 1990s, also via archival studies, started to focus on the numerous utopias penned by women in the early modern English period. The book, significantly titled Gender Models, Alternative Communities and Women's Utopianism, analyzes some of the utopian writings by Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Mary Astell. Golinelli did not choose to use the term utopianism on a whim, since the utopias of these authors are (...) hybrids, mixing other genres in their makeup: travel reports, theater, romance, letters.... (shrink)

The increase of noise in man’s environment is a characteristic of aural human culture of the 20th century. Its subsequent involvement in artistic culture is a natural consequence of these processes. At its beginnings, noise, hisses, distortions, and various, originally non-musical, sounds came to be the means of expansion of potential aesthetic qualities of art. In the paper, the presence of noise elements as means of expression in the contemporary musical-dramatic genre is considered. Their aesthetic effects in alternative (...) class='Hi'>theatre are analysed using examples of performances and workshops at the “Academic Prešov” festival. (shrink)

Theatre has been used in psychological intervention and as a metaphor for social life, tendencies that affect the self, highlighting how influential theatrical performance can be for individuals. Their limitations – in terms of the empowerment of the self and its authenticity, respectively - can be overcome by treating theatrical performance as a leisure experience, which considers that freedom and satisfaction play a central role in a more comprehensive understanding and development of the self. With this in mind, we (...) present the conceptual and empirical bases of the leisure experience as an alternative conception of theatrical performance. To do so, we organised a 20-hour theatre exercise workshop with 16 university students (15 women, one man), aged between 18 and 21 years old (M = 19.06 years; SD = 1.06). Qualitative instruments used were: the Time Budget Technique (questionnaire about the activities carried out in the workshop, valued in relation to two items: perceptions of freedom and satisfaction); the Twenty-Statement Test (where people list characteristics of themselves – self-descriptions – related in this case to the theatrical exercises); and, as a third instrument, a combination of the other two – specifying which exercises were more closely related to the self-descriptions. The results showed that group discussion was the activity with the highest perception of freedom, followed by obstacle exercises; as regards the perception of satisfaction, the highest value was observed in the relaxations. In the case of the self-descriptions, the acquisition of practical and intellectual skills was significant, as well as emotional outlook and the expression of self-esteem. In sum, this empirical support - using qualitative instruments that invite an exploration of the self - revealed, on the one hand, which specific characteristics of the self are manifested by doing theatrical exercises and, on the other hand, which exercises – when experienced as leisure – have a more decisive impact on the self. Thus, this paper shows what aspects must be taken into account when deciding which activities to include in a psychosocial intervention addressed to the development of the self from the standpoint of theatrical performance as a leisure activity. (shrink)

Critical thought on immersive theatres is gathering in pace with many arguments centred on explorations of audience/performer interaction and the unique relationship these theatres create. Within this paper I look beyond these debates in order to consider the implications of immersive theatres within contemporary culture, with the aim of furthering the ways in which immersive theatres are presently being framed and discussed. Theatre and science fiction have shared a somewhat limited relationship compared to their burgeoning usage within other forms (...) of entertainment. This paper focuses on how the conceits of science fiction are being staged within this theatrical setting. Primary focus is given to Punchdrunk’s… and darkness descended (2011) and The Crash of the Elysium (2011–2012). This is considered alongside The Republic of the Imagination’s (TROTI) Cerebellium (2012–14), an original narrative created for the performance which has been subsequently developed over a three-year period to date. This discussion is presented and framed through my personal experience as both a performer in Cerebellium and (later) as audience member. The particular use of dystopian narratives and alternate worlds is given consideration, with reflection on the way these works destabilize and call into question the audience’s sense of self either through their ability to survive or understand their sense of self. By making evident the spectrum of practice, I endeavour to delve further into identifying and de-mystifying immersive theatres and their differences to conventional theatre. (shrink)

In this article I build on recent critiques of theological accounts of the eucharistic which overextend the practice's potential to form a Christian ethic and alternative polis. In analysing these critiques, often drawing on historical and contemporary cases of Christian malformation and its basis in liturgical practice, I suggest a greater distinction is needed between the practice's ability to raise political consciousness and the necessity of separate material political action. I approach this reconfiguration through appeal to debates on the (...) political efficacy and responsibility of art, focusing in particular on contemporary German theatre director, Thomas Ostermeier and his influential production of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Ostermeier distinguishes theatrical performance from material politics, while still demonstrating how theatre might enact a repoliticisation, provoking audiences to think beyond the story on stage to the world beyond where they live and try to act. Connecting the theological critiques with Ostermeier's work, I offer three areas in which a reconfiguration of the relationship between the Eucharist and Christian ethics might focus: depristinising in practice, disrupting catharsis, and being sent. These theatrical interventions allow for clearer recognition of the practice's ethical and political limits and potential. (shrink)

Because Sartre's theatre is one of representation and authenticity, plays like The Victors offer Sartrean philosophical explorations of subjects pushed to the limits of existence by torture and oppressive social edicts. It is in extreme situations that a subject most clearly exercises or fails to exercise his freedom and therefore his authenticity. But Sartre's interest in a complete explication of this process wanes before he fully outlines his project of self formation, which leaves the present paper to prove: (1) (...) the unattainability of any final or permanent authenticity, since each subject represents itself alternately in authentic and inauthentic ways and because the representations of a single subject are constantly in flux; (2) the primacy of representation as the force by which the self is formed and authenticity achieved or avoided; and (3) the criteria for the assessment of authenticity levels and how these processes come to light in plays like The Victors. (shrink)

This paper concerns the conditions under which realism is an artistic merit in perceptual narratives, and its consequences for the practice of non-traditional casting. Perceptual narratives are narrative representations that perceptually represent at least some of their contents, and include works of film, television, theatre and opera. On certain construals of the conditions under which realism is an artistic merit in such works, non-traditional casting, however morally merited, is often artistically flawed. I defend an alternative view of the (...) conditions under which realism is an artistic merit in perceptual narratives. I identify the two forms of realism at issue in debates about the artistic merits of non-traditional casting, and identify the artistic norms that determine the conditions under which each constitutes an artistic merit. I argue that, independently of the relation between moral merits and artistic merits, non-traditional casting violates these norms less often than is sometimes assumed. Moreover, in certain circumstances, non-traditional casting affects realism in artistically meritorious ways. I conclude by considering the implications of my view for the practice of whitewashing. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1 The Cartesian legacy -- The dominant paradigm -- Cartesian dualism -- The secret life of the body -- The Cartesian theatre -- The domain of reason -- The causal relevance of the mind -- Conclusion -- Further reading --2 Reductionism and the road to functionalism -- Causation, scientific realism, and physicalism -- Reductionism and central state materialism -- Problems with central state materialism -- Modified ontological physicalism: supervenience -- Modified explanatory physicalism: the disunity of (...) -- science picture -- Supervenient causation -- Functionalism -- Further reading --3 Computational models of mind -- Intentionality -- Rationality: the calculative account -- The computational model of mind -- Objections to the language of thought (1) -- Objections to the language of thought (2) -- Conclusion -- Further reading --4 The content of thought -- The internalist picture -- Externalism -- Singular thoughts -- Dual component theories -- Naturalistic externalism -- Teleological theories -- Conclusion -- Further reading --5 Anti-reductionist alternatives -- Interpretationalism -- Real patterns -- Direct interpretationalism -- Psychological causalism -- Modified psychological causalism -- Third-personalism and perspectivity -- The world from the point of view of the subject -- Context and culture -- Conclusion -- Further reading --6 The content of experience -- Consciousness -- The knowledge argument -- Absent qualia and inverted spectra -- Functionalist responses -- Internal monitoring -- Intentionalism -- Form and content -- The private language argument -- Further reading -- 7 Subjects of experience -- Subjectivity -- The subjective viewpoint -- Intersubjectivity -- Simulation theory -- Normativity and normality -- Expression -- Self-knowledge -- Conclusion -- Further reading --8 The embodied subject -- Mentality -- Desire -- Beyond the Cartesian body -- Metaphysical questions: multiple narratives -- Further reading -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

The right of audience, in common law, is the right of a lawyer to represent a client in a court. Royalty, the Pope and some Presidents grant audiences. What does the power to grant an audience consist in? And what does it mean to demand an audience? Through a reading of the way in which the vocabulary of theatre, acting and audience is involved in the generation of a theory of state by Hobbes and Rousseau, this paper looks to (...) reopen these questions as a political resource for us to re-imagine and refigure our ways of being together. Through readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, it looks at the ways in which the performance of politics creates the public, the representative and the sovereign and the ways these figures interact. It proposes an alternative role for theatre as places of affective learning and a civic ethics of playfulness, in which the auto-institution of the state as an imagined collectivity is fully assumed. nema. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Proust and the Phenomenology of MemoryThomas M. Lennon"I still believe that anything that I do outside of literature and philosophy will be so much time wasted." Thus did the twenty-two year old Marcel Proust (1871–1922) write to his father, reluctantly agreeing to consider a career in the foreign service as an alternative to the legal profession otherwise being urged upon him. ("I should vastly prefer going to work (...) for a stockbroker," was his comment.)1 Happily for us all, Proust was obliged to do neither, and in fact was able to do both philosophy and literature. As André Maurois puts it, "[Proust's] great novel is philosophy incarnate."2 Certainly, In Search of Lost Time is saturated with philosophy, the appreciation of which cannot help but enhance our understanding of this great work. The thesis here will be that a loosely phenomenological account of the work's central concept of memory gives us the structure of the work as a whole.The biographical facts suggest such an approach. Proust received a license from the Sorbonne in 1895, and, more importantly, had previously been a student of the philosopher Alphonse Darlu at the Lycée Condorcet. Although he published very little, Darlu was a charismatic, inspirational figure for his students—not least of all for Proust himself, who described him as "the great philosopher whose inspired words, more certain to last than any writing would, gave birth in me as in so many others to thought itself."3 A touching artifact of Proust's time with Darlu is his report card, preserved in the Proust Museum at Illiers-Combray. Not incidentally, it shows a concentration on the classical authors who will be deployed here. We also have a wonderful little text that argues a kind of phenomenalism influenced perhaps by Hume, and certainly by Kant.4 The one author important to our account whose name does not figure as such in any of this material is Malebranche; but we know [End Page 52] that Proust was familiar with the great Oratorian since he quotes him.5 In fact, the only author appearing below who could not have been on Proust's shelf is Kundera, the most philosophical and Proustian of all recent novelists.We begin with a text; it is the most famous of all in French literature, the episode of the madeleine from the Search. The text has become so well known—through hearsay more than from having been read, no doubt—that it has invited "kitchification."6 Even so, it is an exquisite piece of writing, which, in any case, is essential to the thesis here.Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray... had any existence for me, when one day in winter as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing that I did not ordinarily take.... She sent out for one of those plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines'.... I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body.... And suddenly the memory [le souvenir] returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of 'madeleine' which on Sunday mornings at Combray... my Aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flower tea.... Immediately the old grey house upon the street rose up like the scenery of a theatre... in a moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.7There are other such episodes of the past springing into being, but not many, and they occur but infrequently, until the very end of this vast work, when they come upon the narrator rapidly and almost... (shrink)

Background For the patients receiving care in the operating room, it emphasizes that the ethical behavior and attitude of health professionals should be aligned with patients’ basic human rights. Surgical ethics may provide an ethical alternative in a specific operating room context. However, it is unclear how actively research is being conducted in this regard. Aim This study determines the direction of future research by identifying ethical issues experienced in the operating room. Method This scoping review is based on (...) the methodological framework suggested by Arksey and O’Malley in 2005. PubMed, CINAHL, EMBASE, WOS, Cochrane, KISS, and KMbase databases were searched from January 2012 to May 2022. Two researchers independently screened the searched articles by reviewing the titles, abstracts, and full texts. Consequently, 19 studies were selected. Findings Five categories were identified: Professional ethics, Organizational ethics, Patients’ rights, Patient safety, and Allocating resources. The derived categories covered all the same content as the International Council of Nurses’ (ICN) code of ethics, with the exception of one element, that is, global health. Conclusions This study highlights ethical issues in the operating theatre and emphasizes the need for individual and organizational strategies aligned with the ICN code of ethics. Future research should cover a wider range of issues, employ diverse perspectives and methodologies, and enhance ethical practices to improve understanding and ethical practices in the field. (shrink)

The global workspace architecture is examined from an evolutionary perspective. It is argued that certain aspects of the theory are difficult to account for in terms of a sequence of evolutionary elaborations. These notably include distinct actors and audience members, and the lingua franca by which they communicate. An alternative metaphor of a ‘global arena’ is suggested, along with speculation on how this bottleneck of behavioural competition may have evolved toward a more sophisticated architecture, perhaps even a theatre (...) . . . (shrink)

Many philosophers of sport maintain that athletics can contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the environments in which we live. It may be relatively easy to offer accounts of how athletes might acquire self-knowledge through sport; however, it is far more difficult to see how sport could add to the general understanding of human individuals, cultural frameworks or the material world. The study of sport as a way of worldmaking is helpful in understanding how sport can contribute to the (...) pursuit of knowledge in such areas. The position I present is based on arguments made by Gunter Gebauer in his 1993 presidential address to the Philosophic Society for the Study of Sport, 'Sport, theater, and ritual: Three ways of worldmaking', and in my explanation and interpretation of Gebauer's position, I rely heavily on Nelson Goodman's Ways of worldmaking . Gebauer's work is focused on traditional sports, and he argues that such sports create worlds that represent fundamental attitudes and values of the cultures that produce them. I argue that alternative sports are well suited to create new and original worlds that instantiate value systems in opposition to mainstream culture. I argue further that nature sports such as climbing and surfing represent relationships between humans and natural features, and that such sports, as a subcategory of alternative sports, are in a position to create new and original frameworks that can help us to better comprehend our relationships with natural environments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Language in the Confessions of AugustineDanuta ShanzerPhilip Burton. Language in the Confessions of Augustine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii + 198 pp. Cloth, $72.Burton’s intriguing book explores language in the Confessions of Augustine. The topic is exemplified in action in Augustine’s own development from infans to puer loquens, to schoolboy, to young rhetoric student, to chattering Manichee, to professional rhetorician, Christian philosopher, and ultimately to biblical exegete (...) and preacher. Burton documents not only Augustine’s own development but also his abstract thoughts about language (development by physis vs. thesis; Latin vs. Greek; pagan vs. Christian), culture, speech (man’s, God’s, creation’s), silence, grammar, rhetoric, reading, prayer, and style (to name but a few). To study Augustine on language is to explore a crucial phase in the transition from the ancient pagan to the late antique, Christian world. Augustine’s views exercised tremendous influence in the medieval world.Burton takes an exemplary and essayistic British approach to the question rather than a systematic Teutonic one. The six chapters, three of which contain material published in other venues, explore “Sermo,” “Alternative Comedy,” “The [End Page 442] Vocabulary of the Liberal Arts,” “Talking Books,” “Biblical Idioms,” and “The Paralinguistic.” Despite its monographic cover, the book is best understood as a series of individual essays, since all can be read separately with no resultant loss of continuity or logic.After an often profound and wide-ranging introduction (“Sermo”), Burton bounces off those who view the Aeneid as a crucial subtext for the Confessions to discuss his new idea: the importance of comedy (by way of theatre in general). Three readings (Alypius in the marketplace, Monica abandoned, and Monica meribibula), which contain clearly comic lexical items as well as plausibly comic scenarios (in two cases), are supposed to invoke comic and mimic subtexts. While this reviewer is sympathetic to the approach, and has argued similarly for Apuleius (“Piscatum Opiparem... Praestinavi: Apuleius, Met. 1, 24–25,” RFIC 124[1996]:445–54) as well as for Augustine (“Avulsa a latere meo: Augustine’s Spare Rib—Augustine Confessions 6.15.25,” JRS 92[2002]:157–76 at 161) these particular interpretations, even supported as they are by sophisticated philological arguments, do not ring quite true or solve any problems in the passages. These constellations of apparently comic vocabulary (some of which is also late and biblical) may simply be an artifact of Augustine’s personal style, not the shadows of a genre or written source. Why would Augustine include a comic substrate in what Courcelle considered his inserted VAlypii? Is mime (41) really relevant, since Augustine never mentions it in the Confessions? Burton’s desire to see scenarios for moral contrast-imitation (58) seems implausible. Because we constantly confront the real coincidence of “life” vs. “literature” in the realistic genres, it is often hard to argue necessarily literary origins for a plausibly realistic motif. This fact makes the argument for “alternative comedy” in Augustine’s life-cursus somewhat unlikely.“The Vocabulary of the Liberal Arts” illustrates Augustine’s deep ambiguity about the artes through the language he uses of them. Burton uses the concept of substitutability of loan-words to explore alternative terms. In grammatica vs. litteratura and rhetorica vs. eloquentia, we see Greek terms used for distancing. Burton does some very interesting things with statistics of occurrence to show Augustine “going off” words and being defensive (for dialectica, see 76–77). He also shows us how a significant avoidance (arithmetica) enables linkage with the Bible (through numerus). The same applies to philosophia vs. sapientia (80–81). This chapter has much to say that is absolutely right and also important. Puzzling however is Burton’s concluding suggestion that Augustine varies his vocabulary for the artes to revalorize (86) and demystify them so they not appear a “knack or trade” (87). This seems unlikely, given the fate of his project on the disciplinae and the way he sneers at most of them in the Confessions.“Talking Books” develops ideas in Flores (1975) and Stock (1996) and contains much interesting material. The chapter takes us from the ancient querelle about the spoken vs. the written word, to books in the Bible... (shrink)

Women, Modernism, and Performance is an interdisciplinary 2004 study that looks at a variety of texts and modes of performance in order to clarify the position of women within - and in relation to - modern theatre history. Considering drama, fiction and dance, as well as a range of performance events such as suffrage demonstrations, lectures, and legal trials, Penny Farfan expands on theatre historical narratives that note the centrality of female characters in male-authored modern plays but that (...) do not address the efforts of women artists to develop alternatives both to mainstream theatre practice and to the patriarchal avant garde. Focusing on Henrik Ibsen, Elizabeth Robins, Ellen Terry, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Edith Craig, Radclyffe Hall and Isadora Duncan, Farfan identifies different objectives, strategies, possibilities and limitations of feminist-modernist performance practice and suggests how the artists in question transformed the representation of gender in art and life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.4 (2001) 567-578 [Access article in PDF] Brief Mention Greek Tragedy Goes West:The Oresteia In Berkeley And Albuquerque Mark Griffith Aeschylus, The Oresteia, translated by Robert Fagles, directed by Tony Taccone and Stephen Wadsworth; Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 6 March-6 May 2001. Aeschylus, The Oresteia, version by Ted Hughes, directed by David Richard Jones; University of New Mexico Department of Theatre and Dance; (...) class='Hi'>Theatre X, 1-10 March 2001. Any opportunity to see a full-scale production of a Greek tragedy by a professional company is rare and precious, yet hedged with a certain anxiety. If things go well, the combined resources of designers, director, actors, and theater space promise to reveal things we had never previously imagined about a cherished text. But there are many ways for a production to go wrong, many obstacles to overcome in transposing the verbal, visual, and musical complexities of an Aeschylean drama into a modern idiom and context. Indeed, the more deeply committed we are to the idea that these plays depend upon live performance for their fullest effect, the more anxious we are likely to feel about seeing anyone try.In these days of videos and the Internet, fans of Greek tragedy can inform themselves far more extensively about previous productions and alternative performance styles than was possible even twenty years ago. Back then (as in the distant pre-phonograph days, when even an avid concert-goer might only get to hear her/his favorite symphony performed by a full orchestra a handful of times in a lifetime and had to be content otherwise with piano transcriptions and the printed score), we had only books, still photographs, and newspaper reviews. Nowadays, when teaching a course on Greek tragedy, one can expose students in quick succession to several radically different acting styles and directorial approaches; even a five-minute video clip of (e.g.) the Peter Hall/Tony Harrison [End Page 567] Oresteia or Julie Taymor's staging of the Stravinsky-Cocteau Oedipus Rex can immediately demonstrate to even the most inexperienced viewer how many more dimensions of meaning and emotional range reside in a tragic script than are evident on the printed page, or than can be conveyed by ordinary speech and "naturalistic" acting. Furthermore, as Helene Foley has recently remarked, the last twenty-five years have witnessed a veritable "deluge" of productions of Greek tragedy in all kinds of styles, all over the world. Indeed, it may be said that scholars, students, and audiences are in a better position these days to sample and critique the possibilities of Greek tragedy in performance than at any time since antiquity. 1The Oresteia has fared particularly well. Since the 1980s, in addition to the distinctive and internationally acclaimed productions of Peter Stein, Peter Hall, Karolus Koun, and Ariane Mnouchkine, several others have been mounted in London, New York, Epidauros, and elsewhere. And this spring brought two new productions to the American West, with an interesting and adventurous low-budget version at the University of New Mexico, and a full-scale professional production in Berkeley. The two were strikingly--and instructively--different.The Berkeley Repertory Theatre (BRT) was founded in 1968 by graduates and ABDs of UC Berkeley's Ph.D. program in Dramatic Art, as an alternative to a perceived blandness of mainstream Bay Area theater. A College Avenue storefront was converted into a 153-seat house, in which for several years enterprising and varied seasons were presented (including productions of Sophocles' Elektra and Antigone). With critical success and a growing reputation came the need for a bigger and better space, and in 1980 the company moved to a new building in downtown Berkeley, with a 450-seat thrust stage. Over the last twenty years, the BRT has built a national reputation and a solid subscription base (mainly upper-middle-class, well-educated, and liberal), with annual seasons that alternate original productions with imports from elsewhere. It is no [End Page 568] longer a "repertory" company (there are virtually none of these left in the United... (shrink)

Critical analyses of literatures of the Indian diaspora discuss the “home” of origin as a subtext and a site to which diasporas aspire to return even though it remains an unachievable ideal that is refracted through nostalgic retellings of a space that remains at best “imaginary” (Mishra 2007). Alternatively, some critics, as Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald point out, view diasporas’ relationship with the homeland in terms of “loyalty,” obscuring in the process the antagonisms that may arise depending upon one’s (...) circumstances, antagonisms that produce “interactions” between homes of residence and those of origin (2012). In South Asian drama in Canada, many of the concerns regarding race, multiculturalism, job discrimination and violence against women and other marginalized groups are propelled by their links to the playwrights’ “home” of origin. With attention to selected plays, this paper will analyze how the networks between home and spaces of residence in multicultural Canada come alive on theatre stages through visual motifs, actors, props, and photographic collages, which confront the different trajectories of “home” that resurface in these plays. Through live scenes of imagination that speak to spectators, several plays under discussion in this essay expose how, while providing emotional sustenance for some, the baggage of “home” may also pose challenges in the home of residence. So the questions I raise are: How does home appear? To what end? And what does returning “home” teach us about the inequalities and injustices underlying the current global order? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chaos and LiteratureCarl Matheson and Evan KirchhoffIChaos theory was the intellectual darling of pop-science writers of the late 1980s. 1 In their eyes, it would provide a new paradigm by which to describe the world, one that liberated scientists from clockwork determinism—or, alternatively, from incomprehensible randomness. In an introductory textbook of the period, Robert Devaney called chaos theory “the third great scientific revolution of the 20th century, along with (...) relativity and quantum mechanics.” Similar attitudes propagated into philosophy; for example, Stephen Kellert argued that an acceptance of chaos theory would involve a reconfiguration of scientific methodology. 2It was in the domain of literary theory, however, that chaos found its most enthusiastic reception in the humanities, and the enthusiasm lives on. Many literary theorists display no hesitation in touting the supposedly revolutionary implications of chaos science. Katherine Hayles, the chief among them, argues that because the concept of order has undergone a “radical reevaluation” in recent decades, “textuality is conceived in new ways within critical theory and literature, and new kinds of phenomena are coming to the fore within an emerging field known as the science of chaos” (CO, p. 1). She infers that the new “paradigm of orderly disorder” (CB, p. xiii) represented by chaos theory signifies a conceptual revolution in modern culture as a whole. 3 She attempts to establish a parallel between chaos theory and various poststructuralist philosophical positions, including those of Derrida and Foucault, claiming that this new paradigm “may well prove to be as important to the second half of the century as the field concept was to [End Page 28] the first half” (CB, p. xiii), and that chaos may soon be “on a par with evolution, relativity, and quantum mechanics in its impact on the culture” (CO, p. 4). Other theorists make claims for the interpretive power of chaos; according to William Demastes, “chaos theory can help in comprehending several paths that the theatre has followed since the inception of postmodernism” (p. 242). 4 By a conservative estimate, over fifty papers have been published which link chaos theory to literature or literary theory. Clearly, the idea that chaos theory has application outside of science is not restricted to one or two over-eager humanists.In this essay, we wish to address some of the claims which concern the relationship between chaos science and the study of literature. Three such claims are:a. There are significant similarities between the science of chaos, contemporary literary theory, and/or philosophy.b. We can trace a common etiology for chaos theory and poststructuralist criticism. The two are so intimately related that they are really different formulations of a common claim, as filtered through two different fields.c. The science of chaos can help us interpret and understand specific literary works, and perhaps contemporary literature in general.However, before assessing the relationship between chaos and literature, we will briefly introduce chaos theory itself and demonstrate that even a minimal understanding is sufficient to undercut the supposed revolutionary significance of chaos theory. 5IIChaotic systems are deterministic: an exact description of a system at any given time, together with the laws of nature that apply to it, will entail the entire future behavior of the system. In this sense, chaotic systems form a subclass of classical systems (and are to be distinguished from quantum systems, which are indeterministic). However, chaotic systems differ from the systems studied throughout most of the history of science in two major ways. First, the differential equations used to model them are nonlinear, while the history of mathematical physics is largely devoted to a treatment of linear differential equations. Technical issues aside, the ramifications of nonlinearity are: (i) equations which are impossible to solve using the general strategies designed for [End Page 29] linear equations; and consequently (ii) the need for solutions by methods of numerical approximation, generally performed on a computer. Second, chaotic systems exhibit a feature known as “sensitive dependence”—or, more colorfully, as “the butterfly effect,” a figure of speech intended to evoke the worry that our long-term forecasts of the weather can be hopelessly disrupted by the atmospheric fluctuations due to a single butterfly... (shrink)

A serious crisis is identified in theories of neurocomputation, marked by a persistent disparity between the phenomenological or experiential account of visual perception and the neurophysiological level of description of the visual system. In particular, conventional concepts of neural processing offer no explanation for the holistic global aspects of perception identified by Gestalt theory. The problem is paradigmatic and can be traced to contemporary concepts of the functional role of the neural cell, known as the Neuron Doctrine. In the absence (...) of an alternative neurophysiologically plausible model, I propose a perceptual modeling approach, to model the percept as experienced subjectively, rather than modeling the objective neurophysiological state of the visual system that supposedly subserves that experience. A Gestalt Bubble model is presented to demonstrate how the elusive Gestalt principles of emergence, reification, and invariance can be expressed in a quantitative model of the subjective experience of visual consciousness. That model in turn reveals a unique computational strategy underlying visual processing, which is unlike any algorithm devised by man, and certainly unlike the atomistic feed-forward model of neurocomputation offered by the Neuron Doctrine paradigm. The perceptual modeling approach reveals the primary function of perception as that of generating a fully spatial virtual-reality replica of the external world in an internal representation. The common objections to this picture-in-the-head concept of perceptual representation are shown to be ill founded. Key Words: brain-anchored; Cartesian theatre; consciousness; emergence; extrinsic constraints; filling-in; Gestalt; homunculus; indirect realism; intrinsic constraints; invariance; isomorphism; multistability; objective phenomenology; perceptual modeling; perspective; phenomenology; psychophysical parallelism; psychophysical postulate; qualia; reification; representationalism; structural coherence. (shrink)

Mangan’s hypothesis, that consciousness is an information-bearing medium, presents an alternative to Dennett’s brand of functionalism, and Dennett’s counterattacks have yet to address Mangan’s main assertion. The medium hypothesis does not entail Cartesian theater assumptions concerning the localization, causal status, and “filling in” of consciousness in the brain. In principle, it is compatible with distributed information transfer between different media, epiphenomenalism, and gaps in visual experience. However, Mangan’s strongest empirical argument, based on consciousness’ limited “bandwidth,” does not necessarily show (...) that transduction between media of different information-bearing capacities occurs between the brain and consciousness. The features of consciousness that he attributes to a lower bandwidth medium can be explained in terms of functional constraints on a single medium. Furthermore, empirical results showing gaps and anomalies in visual experience speak against consciousness being a medium. (shrink)

Resumen Este trabajo tiene por objetivo considerar el papel atribuido al cuerpo en la discusión contemporánea sobre emociones. Examinaré en particular la metáfora de las emociones en el teatro del cuerpo, presentada por A.Damásio, con el propósito de revisar críticamente dos modelos dominantes de encarnación de la emoción-uno externalista o behaviorista y otro internalista o neurobiológico- y los problemas que ellos suscitan. Revisaré el concepto de cuerpo implicado en esos modelos e intentaré ofrecer una comprensión alternativa de la emoción como (...) un fenómeno corporal y motriz. Para ello profundizaré el análisis de la relación entre movimiento y emoción bajo los presupuestos de la Fenomenología de la Corporeidad desarrollada por M. Merleau-Ponty y sus seguidores. Mi propuesta alternativa consistirá, entonces, en comprender la emoción como performance corporal, lo cual nos proporcionará un modo de evitar los puntos de vista dualistas y reduccionistas comúnmente sostenidos sobre emociones.The central aim of this paper will be to consider the role assigned to the body in contemporary discussions about emotions. I will particularly examine the metaphor of the emotions in the theater of the body, presented by A. Damásio, with the purpose of raising doubts about two dominant models of embodiment of emotions -an externalist or behaviorist and an internal or neurobiological -which remain trapped in several difficulties. So I will reject the general concept of body these models are committed with, and I will suggest an alternative understanding of emotions along the line of a bodily and motor phenomenon. To do that, I will deepen the analysis of the relationship between movement and emotion by considering it under the theoretical framework provided by the Phenomenology of Body developed by M. Merleau-Ponty and his followers. Thus, my alternative proposal will be to take emotions as a bodily performance which can provide us a way to avoid both the dualist and the reductionist standpoint commonly held on emotions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rehearsal and Hamilton’s “Ingredients Model” of Theatrical PerformanceDavid Davies (bio)IArtistic performances can be thought of as “doings”—things that are done—that share the following features of performances in general: they involve actions aimed at achieving some result; they are open, at least in principle, to public scrutiny and assessment; and they are usually presented to a relevantly informed public with the intention that they be appreciated and assessed, and perhaps (...) also with the intention that some practical goal be achieved. A performance can be classified as “artistic” in a descriptive (rather than normative) sense if it bears in one of the following ways upon the appreciation and evaluation of a focus of artistic appreciation:1 either (a) the performance is itself a focus of artistic appreciation, or (b) the performance plays an essential part in the artistic appreciation and evaluation of something else that is a focus of artistic appreciation by virtue of being an instance of the latter.Many performances in the performing arts are described and treated as performances of something else that is itself an artwork of some kind. We can term the latter a “performed work” and the former a “work-performance.” A work-performance, insofar as it is an instance of a performed work that bears upon its proper artistic appreciation and evaluation, qualifies as artistic in sense (b). Arguably, a work-performance can itself be an object of artistic appreciation and evaluation and thereby also qualify as artistic in sense (a).2 Where we have an artistic practice in which some acknowledged artworks are designed to be performed works, the practice qualifies as what I shall term a “performance art.” The latter is an artistic practice in which our access to, and appreciation of, works (as receivers) is at least in part mediated [End Page 23] by performances of those works. Drama, music, and dance are usually taken to be performance arts in this sense. Intuitively, our access to performed works in the performance arts is at least in part mediated by performances because certain qualities of those works—relevant to their proper appreciation as the particular works they are—are only realizable, and thereby made apparent to receivers, in performances.Philosophical discussion of the performing arts has largely been concerned with performances taking place in the performance arts as characterized above, and thus with performances of performed works. Indeed, most philosophical discussion of the performing arts has focused on performances of performed works of classical music, the assumption being that the model seen to apply to such examples—what we may term “the classical paradigm”—also applies, with very few exceptions, to performances in other musical genres (in particular, jazz and rock) and to performances in other performance media (in particular, theater and dance). In all of these cases, it has been widely assumed, performances are generally of works, and the work-performance relationship is to be understood on the model of the classical paradigm. Performances not obviously open to such an analysis—free improvisations in music or dance, for example—have been viewed either as limiting cases of the classical paradigm or as of only marginal interest for a philosophical treatment of the performing arts.IIOne among the many virtues of James Hamilton’s book is that it challenges the hegemony of the classical paradigm in the performing arts by questioning its applicability to theatrical performances. He argues instead for an “ingredients model” of the relationship between a literary script and a theatrical work. According to the ingredients model, the text produced by a playwright is merely one ingredient that theatrical performance companies take into account when they set out to create a performance.3 It is taken to be a consequence of this that “a [theatrical] performance is... never a performance of some other work nor is it ever a performance of a text or of anything initiated in a text.”4 The alternative idea that theatrical works are to be understood in terms of the classical paradigm is what Hamilton terms the “text-based” view of such works. But adherents of the views that he opposes to the ingredients model may deny that theatrical... (shrink)

Two methodological remarks are needed at the outset. First, while I am going to treat the redemptive paradigm in full, I will — for obvious reasons of length — analyze the democratic paradigm only insofar as it is related to the alternative under discussion. Second, under the heading of “redemptive paradigm in radical politics,” I will address both left and right political theories. It is, however, only to the degree that conservatives embrace the redemptive paradigm that I speak of (...) “conservative political radicalism.” Redemptive politics was born at the end of the 18th century. It entered the theater mundi in the person of the hero whom Hegel appropriately called Weltgeist zu Pferde and on whom Weber modeled his principle of “charismatic legitimation.”. (shrink)

When Comedy, Music and Ballet step forward at the end of L'Amour medecin, the audience learns that in Moliere's theater the farcical passage from sickness to health is much more than a theme. Claiming to have a real therapeutic value, the three arts ask to be recognized as the grands medecins, and present themselves as an alternative to a dubious and rather mercenary medical profession.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whose New American Poetry? Anthologizing in the NinetiesMarjorie Perloff (bio)In the two-year span 1993–94, no fewer than three major poetry anthologies appeared that featured the poetry of what has been called “the other tradition”—the tradition inaugurated thirty-five years ago by Donald M. Allen’s New American Poetry: 1945–1960. These three anthologies are, in order of publication, Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders, Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry, (...) and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century. A New American Poetry 1960–1990. 1 In 1994, moreover, there were two other large anthologies of alternate poetries by “younger” poets, 2 these two in the tradition of Ron Silliman’s In The American Tree: Language, Poetry, Realism and Douglas Messerli’s earlier ‘Language’ Poetries: An Anthology. They are Peter Gizzi, Connell McGrath, and Juliana Spahr’s two-volume anthology called Writing from the New Coast, 3 and Dennis Barone and Peter Ganick’s The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets.Five volumes, then, of the “new” alternate poetries. And a sixth—this time a real blockbuster—is in progress: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s two-volume Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, which differs from all of the above by covering poetry and poetics of the entire twentieth century and from around the world. The first volume of Poems for the Millennium, From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude (1995), takes us from such “forerunners” of Modernism as Blake, Hölderlin, Dickinson, and Rimbaud through the Futurisms, Dada, Surrealism, and Objectivism, along with complex “galleries” of individual poets, while the second—and sure to be more controversial—volume (1997) brings us up to the global present.A new avant-garde thus seems to be in the making—indeed, oxymoronic as it may sound, a new avant-garde consensus. Yet the countercanonizing of the recent anthologies is not without its own aporias. What these are is my subject here.The Modest OppositionMy starting point is that of the avant-garde anthologists themselves: Donald Allen’s New American Poetry of 1960. From the vantage point of 1995, the most startling thing about the Allen anthology—still acknowledged by all later anthologists as the fountainhead of radical American poetics—is its modesty. The New American Poetry runs to 454 pages, including statements of poetics, biographical notes, and a short bibliography; it contains forty-four poets, all of them having come to prominence in the period between 1945 (the [End Page 104] end of World War II) and 1960 (the date of publication). The four-page preface opens as follows:In the years since the war American poetry has entered upon a singularly rich period. It is a period that has seen published many of the finest achievements of the older generation: William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, The Desert Music and Other Poems, and Journey to Love; Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, Section: Rock-Drill, and Thrones; H. D.’s later work culminating in her long poem Helen in Egypt; and the recent verse of E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, and the late Wallace Stevens. A wide variety of poets of the second generation, who emerged in the thirties and forties, have achieved their maturity in this period: Elizabeth Bishop, Edwin Denby, Robert Lowell, Kenneth Rexroth, and Louis Zukofsky, to name only a few very diverse talents. And we can now see that a strong third generation, long awaited but only slowly recognized, has at last emerged.[xi]Note that Allen introduces the “new” American poetry, not as an “alternative” to anything else but as the successor of two preceding generations. He does not quarrel about the Moderns: if Eliot isn’t included in the above list, it is because he had stopped writing lyric poetry after Four Quartets and had turned to the theater. The cited second generation, moreover, is more “diverse” (Allen’s word) here than it will ever be again in the anthologies: Bishop and Denby, Lowell and Rexroth and Zukofsky. And the third generation, presumably following in the footsteps of the first and second, is now said to... (shrink)

RESUMEN El 18 de febrero de 2000, un grupo de 450 paramilitares de las Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, armados hasta los dientes, incursionó en El Salado -corregimiento del Carmen de Bolívar. Aunque la masacre duró varios días, y cobró un saldo de 61 víctimas mortales, el 18 de febrero se puede decir que El Salado vivió un teatro real de lo atroz. La cancha principal sirvió como escenario, y el público, los mismos saladeros, fue obligado a presenciar una orgía de (...) goce y exceso. Los números y las escenas se caracterizaron por la variedad: jóvenes empaladas, ahorcamientos, ancianos asesinados a golpes, desmembramientos, apuñalamientos, asfixia con bolsas plásticas, violaciones. En lo que sigue, usando El Salado como ejemplo, trataré de caracterizar esta versión de la soberanía -este poder paralizante, con pretensiones de totalidad, que se ensaña sobre cuerpos inermes y vulnerables; un poder de naturaleza privada. Dos cuestiones me servirán de guía: ¿cuál es la mecánica o tecnología que hace posible esta relación disimétrica y absoluta de cuerpos? y ¿por qué este modo específico del poder soberano, no satisfecho con el aniquilamiento, busca representar espectacularmente dicha relación de dominación? Ante la primera cuestión, propongo ver el exceso como formando parte de planes, estrategias territoriales y formación militar. Quiero traer una alternativa a la perspectiva que habla del exceso como un arrebato de locura sin más o como lo otro irrepresentable. Frente a la segunda pregunta, intento revisar las condiciones del teatro soberano, y su modo llamativo de autorrepresentarse en las masacres de este tipo. ABSTRACT On February 18, 2000, a group of 450 soldiers of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia arrived at El Salado. Although the massacre lasted for several days, and left 61 dead, on February 18, it can be said that El Salado lived in a real theater of the atrocious. The main mini soccer field was a stage, and the public, the local population, was forced to witness an orgy of enjoyment and excess. The numbers and scenes were characterized by variety: impaled youths, hangings, old men beaten to death, dismemberment, stabbings, suffocation with plastic bags, rapes. The following article, using El Salado as an example, will try to characterize this version of sovereignty -this paralyzing power, with claims of totality, that rages on defenseless and vulnerable bodies, a power of a private nature. Two questions will guide this research: what is the mechanics or technology that makes this asymmetric and absolute relationship of bodies possible?, and, why this specific mode of sovereign power, not satisfied with annihilation, seeks to dramatically represent this relationship of domination? Faced with the first question, this paper proposes to view excess as part of plans, territorial strategies, and military training. It wants to bring an alternative to the perspective that speaks of excess as an outburst of madness or as the unrepresentable. Regarding the second question, it will try to review the conditions of the sovereign theater, and its striking way of manifesting itself in massacres of this kind. (shrink)

This paper examines the current interest in ‘art activism’, and the relationship between artistic expression and civil disobedience. Boris Groys has argued that the lack of political dissidence within contemporary art is not down to the ineffectiveness of the aesthetic, but the far more effective intrusion of the aesthetic by the political. As such, the political question of civil disobedience is necessarily an aesthetic one. At the same time, this raises problems for how politically effective artistic dissidence can be. As (...) Grindon argues, if art activism often only mimics ‘real’ social activism, it remains within the boundaries of the gallery system with no real consequences. Most art activism fails to be effective civil disobedience, in this sense, as it already operates within the confines of pre-established curatorial spaces. As such, the use of art for the purposes of civil disobedience cannot be, then, mere aestheticism, but rather must act as ‘an insight into the transformed mechanisms of conquest’ : a conflict over the topology of disobedience which exposes the interrelation of aesthetics and politics through medium, space and archive. This paper critically assesses attempts in contemporary art to re-appropriate the symbolic dimension of dissidence as an aesthetic; in particular the use of militancy, asceticism and dissidence as an attempt to move beyond mere counter-political protest and towards a reclaiming of aesthetics from the intrusions of politics. It uses as a specific case example Militant Training Camp, a social experimental performance camp held at Arcadia Missa Gallery in London, March 2012. This weeklong performance piece was designed to explore the activity and mind-set of militant groups and the idea of non-pacifist activity within wider social movements. Engaging with not only the tradition of anarchist activism, but also more recent artistic engagements with civil disobedience, the camp involved a residential ascetic ‘training programme’ followed by a series of violent performances open to the public, often disturbing other sites of protest such as Anarchist theatres and Occupy sites in the process. The paper uses first-hand documentary evidence and critical reflection on the event in order to argue that, as both an act of civil disobedience, and an exploration of the limits of its aesthetic treatment, the event raises two specific issues surrounding the notion of disobedience and its conceptual possibilities. The first issue is the representation of rage within the context of art activism. Here, the performance is discussed with particular reference to Sloterdijk’s arguments that argues that militancy and revolt operate under a ‘thymotic economy’. However, Sloterdijk’s re-appropriation of the thymotic – a conceptualising of ‘rage’ which is not absorbed within the sublimination of psychology or Habermasian symbolism – is not as simple as offering an alternative, ‘non-symbolic’ rage. Given that modern militancy is always subject to containment, the second issue raised is the formative role of ‘curating’ acts of disobedience. Using the work of Groys on aesthetics and power, the paper assesses how ‘events’ of civil disobedience such as Militant Training Camp are located, represented, circulated and even stored, and the ways in which they might resist their reduction to or supplementing of a further economy which conceals the formative ‘rage’ of disobedience. (shrink)

Temporal binding occurs when people observe two events that they believe to be causally connected: They underestimate the length of the interval between those two events, when compared with their estimates of the length of intervals between events they believe to be causally unrelated. I discuss temporal binding in the context of Dennett and Kinsbourne’s (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15(2), 183–201, 1992) influential argument levelled at what they call ‘Cartesian Materialism’. In particular, I argue that Dennett and Kinsbourne’s argument trades (...) on a representational conception of perceptual experience, which blurs the boundary between perception and judgement, and that temporal binding can serve as a case study for developing an alternative, relational, conception of perceptual experience and of its relation to judgement. Based on research on the mechanisms underlying temporal binding, I provide an explanation of the phenomenon in which perception and judgement play clearly distinct roles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Henry Newman's Art of the EndRebekah LambIn Discourses to Mixed Congregations (1849), John Henry Newman pastorally approaches the question of divine providence by envisioning the purpose or "end" of each life as a dramatic role which unfolds within the theatre of history and which, in turn, has a heavenly destiny, lying within but far beyond the world as we know it, within but beyond the play of (...) the sensible and immediately discernible. In Newman's homiletics, we frequently find him turning and returning to the Christian belief that each life is an unduplicable manifestation of the divine plan, a plan enfolded into the eschatological realization of a new heaven and a new earth.1 In meditating upon this fundamental aspect of the Christian creed and its attending doctrines, Newman appeals to St. Paul and the idea of the world as a theatre, of Christians as spectacles on the world stage of history (1 Cor 4:9; Heb 10: 32–33), in which each person is part of the drama of salvation history:St. Paul on one occasion speaks of this world as a scene in a theatre. Consider what is meant by this. You know, actors on a stage are on an equality with each other really, but for the occasion they assume a difference of character. … Is it not his business, and nothing else, to act his part well? Common sense tells us so. … We are all but actors in this world; each has his special part at present, each has his work, [End Page 893] each has his mission not to indulge his passion, … not to be selfish and self-willed, but to do what God puts on him to do.2Here, we see Newman yoking together eschatology and the everyday through the image of the stage as soteriological microcosm. Throughout his writings, Newman frequently appeals to the arts, to their forms in particular, to flesh out the implications of eschatology in daily life. Paradoxically, he often concludes with the conviction that, however profound and however beautiful, the arts are always already most instructive in pointing to that which transcends or overcomes them. That is to say, the arts are as instructive, as beautiful in their insufficiencies as they are in their capabilities. The arts, in Newman, incline after not only incarnation but also an overcoming, a consummation fully realized through, with, and in beatific vision.3This essay therefore examines Newman's developing perspective on the place of the arts within the Christian life and, by extension, the degree to which his view of the aesthetic is end-driven or eschatological in character. It therefore draws from his poetry and sermons, since, for Newman, the literary is a distinctive mode of theologizing, as opposed to an alternative to it. In so doing, it offers one of the most sustained accounts of Newman's poetic and aesthetic appraisal of daily life in light of eternity. The few extant works touching on Newman's aesthetics have focused on liturgical theology or the devotional imagination, especially as found in Guy Nicholls's Unearthly Beauty: The Aesthetic of St. John Henry Newman (2019) and Ian Ker's The Catholic Revival in English Literature: 1845–1961 (2003). Drawing from these scholarly precedents, my essay also highlights the inextricable links between prayer, liturgical worship, and aesthetic philosophy in Newman's thought. However, it also widens out to consider, among other things, Newman's assessment of the instructive insufficiencies of aesthetics for the spiritual life; the links between aesthetics and doctrine in his thought; and the degree to which Newman's theological aesthetics engaged with the emerging decadent aesthetics of his time. In so doing, this essay offers new directions in engagements with Newman's aesthetics, placing in view the degree to which his end-driven or eschatological imagination enlivened and integrated his considerations of beauty not only in light of history but also in relation to its ultimate unveiling—which lies within yet beyond the historical plane, within yet beyond the veil of sensible things, and in the time [End Page 894] of the Second Coming, when, as Isaiah prophecies, "thine eyes shall see the King in his... (shrink)

As prose dramatic texts Plato's dialogues would have been read by their original audience as an alternative type of theatrical composition. The 'paradox' of the dialogue form is explained by his appropriation of the discourse of theatre, the dominant public mode of communication of his time. The oral performance of his works is suggested both by the pragmatics of the publication of literary texts in the classical period and by his original role as a Sokratic dialogue-writer and the (...) creator of a fourth dramatic genre. Support comes from a number of pieces of evidence, from a statue of Sokrates in the Academy to a mosaic of Sokrates in Mytilene, which point to a centuries-old tradition of treating the dialogues in the context of performance literature and testify to the significance of the image of 'Plato the prose dramatist' for his original and subsequent audiences. (shrink)

Le philosophe populaire berlinois Johann Jakob Engel a amorcé, à la fin du XVIII siècle, des recherches importantes dans le domaine de la sémiotique esthétique, problématique alors presque entièrement neuve que venait de lancer le Laocoon de Lessing. A peine quelque années plus tard, l’œuvre de Engel constitue déjà un élargissement considérable de la problématique lessingienne, tout autant d’ailleurs qu’une remise en cause de certaines de ses prémisses : la sémiotique théâtrale ne peut-elle constituer une alternative à la scission (...) sémiotique des « arts du temps » et des « arts de l’espace » ? Plus spécifiquement, l’analyse sémiotique du geste sera pour Engel l’occasion de dégager deux notions singulièrement opératoires : « peinture » et « expression » (Malerei, Ausdruck) qui seront transposables dans une sémiotique esthétique générale. En effet, elles permettent à Engel est de dégager analogies fortes entre musique, poétique, gestuel, pour s’acheminer vers une sémiotique comparée dont la perspective est entièrement neuve. On en retracera les ressorts essentiels en mettant en lumière le rôle intermédiaire important dévolu d’une part au modèle rhétorique de l’éloquence, d’autre part à la fonction métaphorique – moteurs de la transposition d’une sémiotique du langage à celle d’un « langage du geste ». (shrink)

The form of an action has a strong influence on the interaction between humans. According to their mood, people may perform the same gesture in different ways, such as gently or rudely. These aspects of social communication are named vitality forms by Daniel Stern, represent a mean to establish a direct and immediate connection with others. Indeed, the expression of different vitality forms enables us to communicate our affective states and at the same time the perception of these vitality forms (...) enables people around us to understand how we feel in that moment. In the last years of research, different fMRI studies have been carried out to investigate the neural correlates of vitality forms recognition and execution. Moreover, recent psychophysics studies conducted from our research group have demonstrated the presence of an affective contagion effect, during which vitality forms expressed by an agent affect the action perception and the motor response of the receiver. This means that vitality forms expressed by others can influence our mood positively or negatively, modulating as consequence our behavior. Note that vitality forms pervade our lives in a continuous manner and thus they are not expressed and perceived only during social interactions. For example, when we observe an artistic representation at the theatre, the dynamic postures of dancers, together with an alternation of acceleration and deceleration in their movements, communicate to us different affective states. Also when we are in a museum in front of a painting, lines, colors and shapes used by the artist can elicit in us different sensations and modify our attitude. In this view, with the aim to extend the concept of vitality forms from neuroscience and psychology to other disciplines of study, we dedicate part of this review to discuss how art, in all its forms, can be considered a pure expression of vitality forms. (shrink)

For Kierkegaard the ‘psychological experiment’ is a literary strategy. It enables him to dramatize an existential conflict in an experimental mode. Kierkegaard’s aim is to study the source of movement that animates the existing individual (this is the psychological part). However, he is not interested in the representation of historical individuals in actual situations, but in the construction of fictional characters that are placed in hypothetical situations; this allows him to set the categories in motion “in order to observe completely (...) undisturbed what these require” without caring to what extent someone has met this requirement or is able to meet it (this is the experimental part). -/- The ‘psychological experiment’ is a category of indirect communication that is developed most extensively by Frater Taciturnus, the pseudonymous author of the third part of Stages on Life’s Way. (I) Taciturnus introduces the psychological experiment as a new trajectory in modern literature that offers an alternative to poetry and speculative drama. He develops this new trajectory in praxis (in the novella ‘“Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?” A Story of Suffering: A Psychological Experiment by Frater Taciturnus’) as well as in theory (in the ‘Letter to the Reader’ that accompanies his novella). (II) Two other pseudonymous authors further enrich the conceptual field of the psychological experiment. Constantin Constantius develops the notion ‘experimenting psychology’; Johannes Climacus reflects on the reader’s contemporaneity with the character. (shrink)