In his 1977 paper “Categories of Art” Kendall Walton argues that aesthetic categories like “piano music” or “bust” determine how an audience ascribes aesthetic significance to the non-aesthetic properties of the work such as their shape, matter or sound. Walton calls the perceptible properties that determine whether it belongs to a given category of artwork […]
Tag: deconstruction
Disconnection, Unbinding and Practice: Posthumanism as (maybe not) Non-Philosophy
Disconnection Speculative posthumanism (SP) is concerned with the prospect of a posthuman reality emerging from the technological alteration of the human one. This technological focus comports with a general concern with human-made futures that don’t include us. Outside fiction, our moral concern for a nonhuman future is prompted by the theorised potential of technology to […]
Braidotti Interviewed on the Posthuman
Rosi Braidotti provides a lively overview of the intellectual backdrop to posthumanism here. It’s interesting that she rejects the conception of technology as the “other” – a topic that also exercised Lenny Moss,Robert Pepperell and I at the Gazelli Art House.
A Post-Sellarsian Encounter
Modern philosophical aesthetics has been concerned with the special field of art and artistic expression, but always with a view to its implications for our understanding of sensation, emotion and their relationship to the wider field of conceptual thinking and knowledge. The wider and the special inquiries intertwine because art is thought to be an […]
Pornography and Resurrection
Ballard’s novella Myths of the Near Future [formulates] a deranged ‘metametaphorics’ for which pornography and a kind of autistic bricolage function as the privileged figures of knowledge. Myths relates the epidemiology of a mysterious schizoid condition that appears to emenate from the abandoned Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. When its protaganist, the Orphic architect Roger […]
Functional Semantics meets Radical Quotation
Wilfred Sellars (1974) argues that we should not construe claims about meanings as expressing a semantic relation between a verbal entity (a word, sentence, etc.) and a language-independent entity (abstract or concrete) but as claims about the functional roles of linguistic tokens. Thus we should construe “chat” (in French) means cat as *chat*’s (in […]
No Future? Catherine Malabou on the Humanities
Catherine Malabou has an intriguing piece on the vexed question of the relationship between the “humanities” and science in the journal Transeuropeennes here. It is dominated by a clear and subtle reading of Kant, Foucault and Derrida’s discussion of the meaning of Enlightenment and modernity. Malabou argues that the latter thinkers attempt to escape Kantian assumptions about […]
Braidotti's Vital Posthumanism
Critical Posthumanists argue that the idea of a universal human nature has lost its capacity to support our moral and epistemological commitments. The sources of this loss of foundational status are multiple according to writers like Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles (1999), Neil Badmington (2003), Claire Colebrook and Rosi Braidotti. They include post-Darwinian naturalizations of life […]
The Politics of Vermin: Anarchism and Relinquishment
There’s a very interesting discussion of the merits of Marxism and an Anarchist-Green politics set out in John Zerzan’s book Twilight of the Machines (which I’ll admit to downloading, not reading!) over at the (Dis)loyal Opposition to Modernity. As I understand from the gloss in the DOM post, Zerzan views technology as inherently alienating and destructive […]
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