Inherent to the concept of style is an idea of historical necessity. A true style, like the Baroque of the seventeenth century, is not copied from a previous epoch, but arises out of some structural necessity, out of the manifest needs of man and society. "Style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and meaningful expression through which the personnality of the artist and the broad outlook of a group are visible." (Meyer Shapiro, Style, in M. Philipson Ed., Aesthetics Today, p.137) (cf morphology) Style is an essential object of study for the historian of art. For the synthesizing historian of culture or the philosopher of history, style is the manifestation of the culture as a whole, the visible sign of its unity. The style reflects or projects the "inner form" of collective thinking and feeling.
Read MoreIn The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau proposes an antidiscipline of tactics, similar to Michel Foucault's analysis of micro-technologies, but focused on the resistant rather than the dominant. (see also molar / molecular)
Of course, the distinction between strategy and tactics is derived from warfare. It is based on a distinction between general ideas about objectives and specific ways of achieving them. Many contemporary critics, suspicious of large-scale formations, have focused on the smaller scale, both as sites of resistance, and as enabling fine-grained analysis.
Read MoreComputer profiles generate objects for surveillance - they instruct or train the observer in what to watch and how to watch for it. Police, psychiatrists, educators, physicians, to name just a few groups, increasingly use profile technology for early or pre-identification of various traits within preselected populations - if you match enough elements of the profile, you could become atarget, even before any trait has manifested itself. To prepare the observer, to train the observer to see, and in the last instance, to be the observer's eyes, this is the imaginary of the simulation of surveillance.
Read MoreAt issue within the philosophical tradition is the relation of the subject to thought. (see also consciousness ) Ever since Aristotle the nous had been separate from the psyche. "At the moment of its manifest emergence in the Cartesian formulation, the subject is not in fact a psychic reality, but a pure Archimedean point." (Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History)
Read MoreHow can people in developing countries achieve a decent standard of living from the land without destroying it? Habitats cannot be saved unless the effort is of immediate economic advantage to the poor people that live in and around them. (E.O. Wilson)
Read MoreIn "The Mass Ornament", Siegfried Kracauer claims that "An analysis of the simple surface manifestations of an epoch can contribute more to determining its place in the historical process than judgements of the epoch about itself," and that "the very unconscious nature of surface manifestations allows for direct access to an understanding of these conditions."
Read MoreHow long can we sustain the unsustainable?
The rapid increase in the world's population as a whole, the presence of many people that live below the level of any equitable living standards, the emergence of large and rapidly developing economies such as India's and China's, and the profligate model of the American lifestyle (and to a slightly lesser extent, the Western European) have all contributed to concern over the "carrying capacity" of the planet. How many people can obtain adequate amounts of clean water, food, and shelter, let alone automobiles, computers, and a constant supply of consumer goods? The environmental group Bioregional.com calculates that if everyone on earth adopted the British lifestyle, it would require three planets to support. The American lifestyle would require seven planets, but we still only have one. Will wars and catastrophes be the only way to know when those limits have been reached?
The growing awareness of environmental consequence, and the sense that "we can't go on this way" without serious adverse consequences for future generations underlies the development of the term sustainability. The expression was first put into widespread political use by the United Nation's World Commission on the Environment and Development, which issued a report in 1987 known as the Brundtland Report, named after its chairperson, Gro Harlem Brundtand, the former prime minister of Norway.
Although it draws on scientific study and environmental forecasts, the concept of sustainability is a political and moral term, like justice or freedom, and the history of sustainability as as much social, political, and economic as it is environmental.
Read MoreThe term symbiosis was defined by the German mycologist Anton De Bary (1879) as meaning the "living together" of "dissimilar" or "differently named" organisms.
Today, in most current biological literature, it is taken to mean "mutualistic biotrophic associations" (biotrophy: one partner requires a nutrient that is a metabolic product of the other partner.) For example, lichens consist of algal and fungal components in nearly equal mass in symbiosis.
Read More"Synergetics is a mathematical-physical way of studying how collections of subsystems (such as atoms, cells, animals) can produce structures and patterns of self-organization.
Read MoreB-cells are formed in the bone marrow, and provide humoral immunity mediated by antibodies. They can recognise parts of antigens free in solution, by fitting them to the antibodies they carry on their surface. When a particular B-cell come into contact with an antigen which it fits, the B-cell swells and divides (through mitosis, or clonal selection)and the new activated B-cells (Plasma cells) secrete antibodies proteins that attack the invader. Once activated, a B-cell can pump out more than 10 million antibody molecules per hour. The antibodies neutralize or precipitate the destruction of the antigens by complement enzymes or scavenger cells. The B-cell can also produce different isotypes of the antibodies, who fit the same antigen but who defend the body in different ways.
Read MoreIn Totem and Taboo, Freud introduces the term taboo as a Polynesian word that means both sacred, consecrated and uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, unclean. The taboo seems to have a strength all its own. "Taboo restrictions have no grounds and are of unknown origins." (Standard Edtion, vol 13, p.18) nor are they subject to question.
Freud describes taboo as a magical power which is inherent in persons and spirits and can be conveyed by them through the medium of inanimate objects. He compares their dangerous charge to electricity and infection.
For Mary Douglas, taboos are reactions to events that seriously defy established lines of classification.
Read MoreLewis Mumford (following the Scottish sociologist Patrick Geddes) coined the terms eotechnology for the water-and-wood complex and paleotechnology for the coal and iron complex. (See Technics and Civilization, p.11)
Read MoreAlfred North Whitehead characterizes the scientific mentality as instinctively holding that all things great and small are conceivable as exemplifications of general principles which reign througout the natural order. He sees the alliance of science and technology as keeping learning in contact with irreducible and stubborn facts, and credits the Benedictine monasteries as providing much of this practical bent. (cf clock)
Read MoreTechnology is usually understood as having a primarily practical concern with altering the world, while science has a cognitive concern with knowing it.(see tech philos) In this sense, technology is more a "knowing how" than a "knowing that." (following the distinction made by Gilbert Ryle.)
Read MoreIn the Timaeus, Plato pictured the natural world as the product of a divine craftsman who looked to the world of eternal being for his model of the good and then created a natural order that was as good as it possibly could be. ("Teleology", by James C. Lennox, in Keller and Lloyd, eds. Keywords in Evolutionary Biology ) This model is the origin of what is sometimes referred to as "external teleology." The "externality" is twofold: the agent whose goal is being acheived is external to the object, and the value is the agent's value, not the object's. (This is much closer to the idea of the machine)
Read MoreAs opposed to the weird science section, the theory section is devoted to terms that come from criticism, from literary studies, and the humanities. The basis for this bipartite structure came from my interest in the borrowings and polyvalent meanings of terms, the ways that the same term might take on opposite valences. A prime example of this reversibility is chaos. (a key reading was Chaos Bound, by Katherine Hayles) For cultural theory, chaos is opposite of order. But for the "new sciences" chaos can be understood as a new extension of order. Order itself moves back and forth between reassuring stability and coercive power. Hayles desribes "The politics of chaos" as " local knowledge versus global theory." My interest is thus to see how the meanings of terms need to be understood in variable contexts. This document seeks to map out some of the convergences, overlaps, shifting perspectives, and outright conflicts between contemporary criticism and sciences.
Read MoreThe textual space of the printed page has come to be seen as arbitrary and self-contained. The arbitrariness is a result of the alphabet, referring to sounds in an arbitrary (and contextual) way, to the concept of the linguistic sign, which after Saussure, was described primarily as an arbitrary link between signifier and signified, and to the culture of the printed book, which has striven towards legibility through typographic simplicity and the exlusion of pictorial attributes to the page itself.
But at different moments in the history of writing, the surface has been endowed with pictorial qualities. Picture writing, which is generally thought of as the historical precursor of phonetic writing, refers through stylized images. The bridge from picture writing to phonetic writing was the realization that picture elements could be identified with sounds in language. Through the process of phonetization and abstraction, writing becomes a secondary system depending on spoken language for its meaning. (much of Derrida's work is a criticism of this idea...presumably because the system which is supposed to be secondary has become so important.) see writing.
An example of orchestrated simultaneity on the page is Blaise Cendrars' and Sonia Delaunay’s La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France , which combined poems, maps, and illustrations on a sheet two meters long.
Read More"In its attempt to subdue time's flux by harnassing the future predictably and reliably to the present," technology " tends to 'domesticate' our experience of time." (L. C. Simpson, Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity, p.9) For Simpson, "Domestication appears as the will to control." (p.53) "In technology, time is destined to be reified, to be transformed into a commodity." (p.55) Simpson contrasts the time of technology to the time of praxis, which, like repetition, does not seek to annihilate or even domesticate time, but rather to come to terms with it. Other philosophers like Don Ihde and historians of technology like Lynn White, Jr. interpret technologies as embedded in praxis. (see clocks.)
Read MoreIn a structuralist and anthropological context, human time and history are based on a signifying opposition between synchrony and diachrony. Giorgio Agamben underscores the inverse relationships of play and ritual with respect to time. If ritual serves to fix and structure the calendar, play, on the other hand changes and destroys it. For Agamben, the differential margin between diachrony and synchrony is produced by this system and is called history, or in other words, human time. (Infancy and History, p.75) In La Pensée Sauvage, Levi-Strauss drew the opposition between ritual and play into an exemplary formula: while rites transform events into structures, play transforms structures into events. For Schiller the function of the liberating play impulse is to "abolish time in time", to reconcile being and becoming, change and identity.
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