Showing papers in "parallax in 2007"
TL;DR: In this paper, Ryle defined the notion of thinking as "the pitting of an acquired competence or skill against an unprogrammed opportunity, obstacle or hazard" and defined it as "a bit like putting new wine into some old bottles".
Abstract: If he is not at once improvising and improvising warily, he is not engaging his somewhat trained wits in some momentarily live issue, but perhaps acting from sheer unthinking habit. So thinking, I now declare quite generally, is, at the least, the engaging of partly trained wits in a partly fresh situation. It is the pitting of an acquired competence or skill against an unprogrammed opportunity, obstacle or hazard. It is a bit like putting new wine into some old bottles. Gilbert Ryle, ‘Improvisation’.
25 citations
TL;DR: The book I don't write? I was about to say. What did I have in mind? Or who? You say that, and the thing becomes a forest, a temple, an army, and each word divides itself up and eats itself as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The book I don't write? I was about to say. What did I have in mind? Or who? You say that, and the thing becomes a forest, a temple, an army, and each word divides itself up and eats itself. The Bo...
11 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors look at the marching bands of different socio-political and cultural contexts, primarily British, and explore questions of the construction or repositioning of urban space via music'how the sound of music can alter spaces'; participation, pleasure and the political body; subculture and identity.
Abstract: What happens in social movements when people actually move, how does the mobile moment of activism contribute to mobilisation? Are they marching or dancing? How is the space of action, the street itself, altered, re-sounded? The employment of street music in the very specific context of political protest remains a curiously under-researched aspect of cultural politics in social movements.... By looking at the marching bands of different socio- political and cultural contexts, primarily British, I aim to further current understanding of the idea and history of street music itself, as well as explore questions of the construction or repositioning of urban space via music'how the sound of music can alter spaces'; participation, pleasure and the political body; subculture and identity.
11 citations
TL;DR: The question of the racial identity of the Ancient Egyptians passed beyond the narrow confines of academia onto television and into the national newspapers when, in the wake of Mar... as mentioned in this paper, the question of race and ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians was discussed.
Abstract: Not so long ago, the question of the racial identity of the Ancient Egyptians passed beyond the narrow confines of academia onto television and into the national newspapers when, in the wake of Mar...
10 citations
TL;DR: Aristotle as mentioned in this paper points out that technics [la technique] belongs to the field of contingency, to which is opposed the necessity of necessity, and argues that necessity is opposed by necessity.
Abstract: Tekhnen tukhen esterxe kai tukhen tekhnen. 1 With this quotation from Agathon, Aristotle lays down that technics [la technique] belongs to the field of contingency, to which is opposed the necessit...
9 citations
TL;DR: In The Education of Henry Adams, privately printed by the author in 1906, Adams selfconsciously marks the rupture between the ordered certainties of a Newtonian world and the chaotic multiplicities that he saw as characteristic of the twentieth century as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In The Education of Henry Adams, privately printed by the author in 1906, Adams selfconsciously marks the rupture between the ordered certainties of a Newtonian world and the chaotic multiplicities that he saw as characteristic of the twentieth century. His complex, nonlinear and ultimately unresolved personal journey marks an important entry point into a century perhaps best characterized by the ‘crisis of representation’ that swept across academic disciplines. From the sciences to the arts and humanities, researchers in the twentieth century were led, often reluctantly, to shift their focus from objects to relationships, from products to processes, from content to context, and from ideas of permanence to those of permeability and polysemy. Articulating this pronounced conceptual shift – often from several directions at once – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write in their influential book A Thousand Plateaus: ‘[I]t was a decisive event when the mathematician Riemann uprooted the multiple from its predicate state and made it a noun, ‘‘multiplicity’’. It marked the end of dialectics and the beginning of a typology and topology of multiplicities.’
8 citations
TL;DR: The authors make the point that much of the commentary on the major changes of our time pivots on the notion that the national state is under attack, or at the minimum, that it is suffering the erosion of its territorial protections.
Abstract: This is a time of epochal, even if partial, transformations. Some use the notion of globalisation to capture the change — a ‘national versus global contest’ view. Others focus on the ‘War on Terror’ and its aftermath, emphasising the ‘state of exception’ that gives governments legal authority to abuse its powers. There are several other interpretations and naming of the character of today’s major transformation. But this suffices to make the point that much of the commentary on the major changes of our time pivots on the notion that the national state is under attack, or at the minimum, that it is suffering the erosion of its territorial protections.1
6 citations
TL;DR: In the transcription of the interview ‘From Speech to Writing’, Roland Barthes ‘speaks’ of the trap of scription, of the snare of the written word which deprives the spoken word of its innocence.
Abstract: In the transcription of the interview ‘From Speech to Writing’, Roland Barthes ‘speaks’ of the trap of scription, of the snare of the written word, which deprives the spoken word of its innocence. ...
5 citations
TL;DR: Freud, a self-described "conquistador" discovered the workings of that great 'dark continent' the unconscious mind as mentioned in this paper, using Reason and Science to shed light on the 'terra incognita' within us.
Abstract: Freud, a self‐described ‘conquistador’, discovered the workings of that great ‘dark continent’ the unconscious mind. Using Reason and Science to shed light on the ‘terra incognita’ within us, he pr...
5 citations
TL;DR: Chare as mentioned in this paper gave a potent, highly original rendition of Paul Celan's well known poem Todesfuge, which was sung by Ute Lemper in Michael Nyman's Songbook.
Abstract: Nicholas Chare: As part of Defixiones you give a potent, highly original rendition of Paul Celan's well known poem Todesfuge. Other Celan poems have been sung before; perhaps most notably by Ute Lemper in Michael Nyman's Songbook, but these interpretations have always seemed too beautiful given the pain resting beneath Celan's words. We do not think that this is a claim that can be made about your own performance but when you were singing about the genocides perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks and the Nazis, were you conscious of the danger of aestheticizing the horror?
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a collection of photographs of the sites visited along with texts articulating some of the points and issues raised by the participants in each walk. These photographs and texts are made available as an archive printed on transparencies.
Abstract: It is on the basis of the struggles' of each age, and the style of these struggles, that we can understand the succession of diagrams or the way in which they become linked up again above and beyond the discontinuities. The documentation of each walk comprises photographs of the sites visited along with texts articulating some of the points and issues raised. These photographs and texts are made available as an archive printed on transparencies. A kind of peripatetics against the academy (the drunken crew, the stray dogs of a minor philosophy); a movement against stasis; a process against teleology and finality; a question against the answer, against possession of the answer, of the origin of meaning, against propriety. An image of something going on at the peripheries of things, a bunch of bodies spinning off in perpetual movement, a community of the broken, a community of the exhausted.
TL;DR: In this paper, the reader will, sooner or later, experience a certain difficulty as regards the delimitation of speed, as if Stiegler on the other hand, is on the one hand.
Abstract: Entering into a dialogue with Bernard Stiegler's work on technics and time, the reader will, sooner or later, experience a certain difficulty as regards the delimitation of speed, as if Stiegler on...
TL;DR: When Napoleon traveled to Egypt during his military campaign of 1798 to 99, he took a copy of Constantin Francois Volney's Voyage in Syria and Egypt first published a dozen years earlier as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: When Napoleon traveled to Egypt during his military campaign of 1798 to 99, he took a copy of Constantin Francois Volney's Voyage in Syria and Egypt first published a dozen years earlier. The young...
TL;DR: In this article, Stiegler's concept of "orthographic moment" is addressed with regard to the philosopher's commentary on Roland Barthes's essay on photography, Husserl's melody as a temp...
Abstract: This paper addresses Bernard Stiegler's concept of ‘orthographic moment’, especially with regard to the philosopher's commentary on Roland Barthes's essay on photography, Husserl's melody as a temp...
TL;DR: Bernard Stiegler is best known for his multi-volume work La technique et le temps, where he first expounds his ideas on la technique (technics) These ideas are developed and extended in more recen
Abstract: Bernard Stiegler is best known for his multi‐volume work La technique et le temps, where he first expounds his ideas on la technique (technics) These ideas are developed and extended in more recen
TL;DR: In this paper, a transcript of an interview conducted via email by Nicholas Chare, Peter Kilroy, Marcel Swiboda, and Liz Watkins is presented, along with a discussion of the afterimage, the index, and the index.
Abstract: What follows is a transcript of an interview conducted via email by Nicholas Chare, Peter Kilroy, Marcel Swiboda and Liz Watkins. Peter Kilroy and Marcel Swiboda: In ‘The Afterimage, the Index, and...
TL;DR: I cannot imagine that Sigmund Freud saw Karl Freund's 1932 film, The Mummy in which Boris Karloff gives a subtle and moving portrayal of a man driven by love to defy death.
Abstract: I cannot imagine that Sigmund Freud saw Karl Freund's 1932 film, The Mummy in which Boris Karloff gives a subtle and moving portrayal of a man driven by love to defy death.1 Although Freud's last a...
TL;DR: The life and work of the African American musician and poet Sun Ra represents something of a singular challenge to contemporary cultural theory as mentioned in this paper, and this is some measure due to the fact that Ra is a singular figure in American culture.
Abstract: The life and work of the African American musician and poet Sun Ra represents something of a singular challenge to contemporary cultural theory. This is some measure due to the fact that Ra – origi...
TL;DR: In one of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, Raphael Ithodeus visited an unknown island: the recount he gives to Thomas More about this journey is the fictionalized pretext of Utopia (1516) as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In one of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, Raphael Ithodeus visited an unknown island: the recount he gives to Thomas More about this journey is the fictionalized pretext of Utopia (1516). In this book the English philosopher had, in fact, assigned a fundamental position to geography (in the etymological sense of the ‘writing of the earth’): Utopia was an artificial island constructed by Utopus, but also the cartography of an island described by More and an allegory of England. This geography acquired meaning on a cartography minutely defined through description: a system of 54 cities dispersed in the countryside, each equidistant from the others and each the same, which formed a regular dissemination of urban places. What would be interesting to emphasize, therefore, is the bond that runs between geography and its description, and to ask oneself if a map has to be seen or read.
TL;DR: La Momie as mentioned in this paper is a film that recounts the discovery in 1881 of the hiding place of sarcophagi of the Egyptian seventeenth to the twenty-first dynasties in Deir El Bahari.
Abstract: It is with these words that La Momie opens: a film that recounts the discovery in 1881 of the hiding place of sarcophagi of the Egyptian seventeenth to the twenty-first dynasties in Deir El Bahari. The RE of re-turning, of re-awakening, of re-living, the RE of reappearance incites, instructs and sustains the opening sequence of the film, a film that works on the body and is worked on by the body through the quotation. It rewrites a myth starting from a real document, the Book of the Dead, and is the only iconic witness to the mummy in the history of Arabic cinema.
TL;DR: In the Clos Salembier of Algiers, a young girl leaves her book to answer the doorbell, and does not see the dog coming as discussed by the authors. She and her brother had been thrilled when their father promise...
Abstract: One afternoon in the Clos Salembier of Algiers, a young girl leaves her book to answer the doorbell. She does not see the dog coming. She and her brother had been thrilled when their father promise...
TL;DR: In this paper, the birth and eventual death forty years earlier of the narrator's first son, a Down syndrome baby (mongolien or trisomique), is shown to be a wound and a loss.
Abstract: In common with a number of Hélene Cixous’s recent texts, Le Jour où je n’étais pas là effects a dramatic return to the past or, rather, here, as elsewhere, it is the past which, within the text itself, is shown to return and fire the writing. What returns in Le Jour où je n’étais pas là – as in other texts – is a wound and a loss: here, the birth and eventual death forty years earlier of the narrator’s first son, a Down syndrome baby (mongolien or trisomique).
TL;DR: The authors argue that Cixous's texts resist translation because they are originally written in a foreign language and hence are always already marked by a prior, primordial translation. But they do not specify a translation from French to English.
Abstract: Hélène Cixous’s writings are, to some degree, radically untranslatable. Not so much because they are written in French, but because they are not. If Hélène Cixous’s texts resist translation it is because, as we shall see, they are originally written in a foreign tongue and hence are always already marked by something like a prior, primordial ‘translation’. One might even say that this ‘original translation’ is not a translation from French, but within and into French. Born from the French language, this foreign tongue inhabits it the way, say, a tapeworm ‘inhabits’ its host. From French it borrows many – (but not all) – of its constituent parts – its seminal sounds, letters, grammar, syntax and even to some degree its lexicon, but this inner tongue remains estranged from French. In its intimate proximity to French it is infinitely removed from French. Cixous’s texts invent, discover and uncover a forgotten language that lies embedded within French’s inner reaches and untold depths – in the secret passages that it never knew it had and therefore never knew it lost. She mines the French language for its hidden treasures, extracting ‘gold’ (‘or’) from its seminal sounds. All of Hélène Cixous’s writings (albeit each uniquely and in its own singular idiom) bear the mark of this ‘original translation’ and are born from it. All of Hélène Cixous’s texts are signed with this primal ‘Birthmark’.
TL;DR: The face is a strategy of containment in which to digress even by the animation of smiling is to become potentially subversive as mentioned in this paper, regardless of the level of biometric information encoded it is always through the face that the stream of data must flow.
Abstract: The face is a strategy of containment in which to digress even by the animation of smiling is to become potentially subversive. Whatever the level of biometric information encoded it is always through the face that the stream of data must flow. Whilst attempts to manage and control desire are ever present, the city always also includes multiple and diverse locations where the pressures of containment work to produce zones of intensity that escape any authoritarian regime. There is a causal connection between the city and creativity, just as there is between capitalism and the new. One name for this connection is modernism. Another name is simply the Spectacle. The air is thick with incense and mantra, with only candlelight to see by. People sit on the floor, stand by the walls - waiting, sweating.
TL;DR: In his essay "On the Protection of Buildings from Lightning" as discussed by the authors, James Clerk Maxwell applies his research into electromagnetic force to the problem of protecting a "gunpowder manufactory" from being struck by lightning.
Abstract: In his essay ‘On the Protection of Buildings from Lightning’, James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) applies his research into electromagnetic force to the problem of protecting a ‘gunpowder manufactory’ from being struck by lightning. His largely forgotten essay makes a contribution to the ancient problem of how to propitiate and hopefully avoid the chance event of being struck by lightning. The ancient solution of divinizing chance, by making lightning the weapon of Zeus and its avoidance a matter of prayer and sacrifice, was fundamentally questioned in Epicurus’ meteorological Letter to Pythocles and the last book of Lucretius’ Poem on Nature. Both show that lightning is a natural event explicable without any reference to divinity, yet this knowledge alone does not necessarily liberate us from the fear of chance. At the other end of the same tradition, Aby Warburg closes his 1923 lecture Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America with a reference to ‘The lightning imprisoned in wire-captured electricity – [that] has produced a culture with no use for paganism’, decrying the hubris of the technological civilization made possible by Maxwell’s discoveries that considered itself to have overcome chance by means of technology. Warburg’s diagnosis of the optimism of technology, however sound, nevertheless underestimates the persistent centrality of chance in Maxwell’s work and, by extension, in the technological civilization that it made possible.
TL;DR: The title for this issue of parallax as mentioned in this paper was suggested by Helene Cixous for suggestions from the editors of Parallax, who were under growing but friendly pressure from our evercompassionate and longsuffering editors.
Abstract: Under growing but friendly pressure from our ever‐compassionate and longsuffering editors1 to supply a title for this issue of parallax, I recently asked Helene Cixous for suggestions. Without sayi...
TL;DR: In this article, an edited transcript of an interview conducted via email between David Wills, Peter Kilroy and Marcel Swiboda is presented. And the authors discuss the initial impetus for t...
Abstract: What follows is an edited transcript of an interview conducted via email between David Wills, and Peter Kilroy and Marcel Swiboda. Peter Kilroy and Marcel Swiboda: Part of the initial impetus for t...
TL;DR: Nesbit, referring to the archive documents of Eugène Atget throughout, places Atget's photograph entitled "Corsets" opposite (en face) these considered introductory questions as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Nesbit, referring to the archive documents of Eugène Atget throughout, places Atget’s photograph entitled ‘Corsets’ opposite (en face) these considered introductory questions. Indeed, Atget’s photograph of a shop window, ‘Corsets’ could be considered as the very image that renders these questions pictorial. Demonstrating as it does, the simultaneous absence/presence of the parisienne made profound by the corseted identical feminine figures of the mannequins – headless – faceless. Four of these figures are fully visible in the photograph, one of which hangs on the exterior of the shop frame, and all severed at the neck by a ribbon bow. Torsos of the three remaining (top shelf) mannequins eerily drift into shadow and disappear in the reflection of a building, the sky and a few tree branches.
TL;DR: Friedman as discussed by the authors argues for a replacement of the architect with a rational artisan, whose sole task would be to facilitate the user/client's wishes by building not so much form, but a repertoire of possibility.
Abstract: In Toward a Scientific Architecture Yona Friedman argues for a replacement of the architect with a rational artisan, whose sole task would be to facilitate the user/client’s wishes by building not so much form, but a repertoire of possibility. In such a move, Friedman seeks to undo an age-old architectural problematic, that of the tension or disparity between form and use, plan and its application, architectural intellectualism with individual life. Toward a Scientific Architecture locates resolution within a democratization of the planning process, enabling individuals to intervene within the building process with their own set of ideas, determine the material conditions for their own place of residence, and stage an articulation of their own set of spatial values. The architect is thus a kind of guide, facilitating such moves through providing knowledge of potential solutions – the architect builds the repertoire, and not so much the final product.