Technē

COVID-19 infects cities, here grasped as quasi-living functioning systems, and the changes inflicted can poetically open us to certain things. Drawing on ecological psychology, we maintain that this brings people into contact with different realities depending on their overall wellbeing, arguing that the aesthetic experience of cities accordingly varies. We then consider iterations of these ideas in dystopian cinema, which portrays global threats altering human relations with technology, art, and the world.

COVID-19 infects cities, here grasped as quasi-living functioning systems, and the changes inflicted can poetically open us to certain things. Drawing on ecological psychology, we maintain that this brings people into contact with different realities depending on their overall wellbeing, arguing that the aesthetic experience of cities accordingly varies. We then consider iterations of these ideas in dystopian cinema, which portrays global threats altering human relations with technology, art, and the world.

EN
Fernando Pessoa placed the brief and unfinished work of his master heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, at the center of his literary, philosophical and poetological oeuvre. Therefore, the edition and hermeneutics of Caeiro’s texts are of fundamental importance to any interpretation of Pessoa’s literary work as a whole. Thus, the five commented, and more or less critical editions have been published during the last 25 years, require a critical evaluation. This study will focus primarily on the critical edition of Ivo Castro that was published in 2015, but it will also draw comparisons with the remaining four. It will be argued that all editions present incoherencies with regard to their methodologies, and that they do not correspond in a satisfying manner to the challenges involved in the heteronymical process of Pessoa’s creative practice. Consequently, a different method of reading and editing beyond the linear and orthotypographical genetic-critical traditions will be proposed. It will be argued that the unfinished character of Caeiro’s text represents a paradigm of non-linear poetic language and poetics, which can be made extensible to the literary context of all heteronyms.
Keywords: Fernando Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro, critical edition, heteronyms.

PT
Fernando Pessoa colocou a breve e inconclusa obra do seu heterónimo-mestre, Alberto Caeiro, no centro de todo o edifício literário, filosófico e poetológico que criou em vida. A edição e hermenêutica do texto caeiriano é, por isso, fundamental para qualquer interpretação da obra pessoana. O facto de nos últimos 25 anos terem aparecido cinco edições comentadas e, mais ou menos ,  críticas da obra do mestre, requer que se proceda agora a uma avaliação crítica deste conjunto. Assim, o presente estudo centrar-se-á, primordialmente, na edição de Ivo Castro de 2015 (por esta pertencer ao projecto da Edição Crítica de Fernando Pessoa) e traçará breves comparações com as quatro restantes. Argumentar-se-á que todas as edições resultam, em maior ou menor medida, ou incoerentes no que diz respeito às suas metodologias, ou insatisfatórias em relação ao processo heteronímico de criação poética praticado. Propor-se-á um método de leitura e edição para além das tradições genético-crítica linear e ortipográfica, e argumentar-se -á que o carácter inconcluso do texto caeiriano representa um paradigma de linguagem poética e ideário poetológico não-lineares que é extensível ao contexto literário de todos os heterónimos.
Palavras-chave: Fernando Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro, edição crítica, heteronímia.

This article deals with the philosophical idea of worldmaking pursued through techné, meaning the fusion of the technical means of artistic creation, theorizing, and analysis, but specifically occurring in a feedback loop involving introspection and computation (cybernetic phenomenology). The discussion ranges over a wide variety of topics, including (1) the history of music theory from Ancient Greece to the present (including a rebuttal to Daniel Chua’s (2001) account of music history); (2) emergent properties in music arising from self-organization (explored through the Ancient Chinese abstract strategy board game go); (3) the ontology of musical qualities (properties) and categories (including their relation to visual, tactile, and olfactory qualities and categories). 
Various repertoires, artists, and philosophies are referenced. The essay analyzes aspects of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, Carter’s String Quartet No. 5, and Lachenmann’s Kinderspiel.  Connections to the author’s own previous analytical and theoretical work are also discussed in relation to his interactive algorithmic audio-visual works (such as Fluxations and FluxNOISations). The techné of these is discussed in terms of logistics as well as aesthetic influences, including Wagner, Liszt, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Crawford, Babbitt, Carter, Xenakis, Parker, Reich, Ligeti, Truax, Oliveros, Kandinsky, Miro, Pollock, Pollock, Hofmann, Rothko, Louis, Frankenthaler, Moholy-Nagy, Newman, Richter, and Brakhage.  The essay touches on philosophical ideas of Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, Harman, and Bogost, and more fully engages the philosophies of Nelson Goodman and Hannah Arendt in connection with artistic creation as relating to the theorizing and analysis of artistic works.     

Contact the author at [email protected]
Download the article through JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.54.1.0005
or http://tinyurl.com/zdvkllr

…the greatest point of art consists in the introduction of suitable abstractions. By this I mean such a transformation of our diagrams that characters of one diagram may appear in another as things. A familiar example is where in analysis we treat operations as themselves the subject of operations (Peirce CP 5, 162) 1

Three works by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) entail mythologized scenes of spontaneous generation, or the creation of species from nature’s raw matter: Head of Medusa (ca. 1613–1618), The Discovery of Erichthonius (ca. 1616), and the oil sketch Deucalion and Pyrrha (ca. 1636). In these works Rubens naturalizes the life of painting within its materials, implying matter—paint, with its pigments and mediating liquids—as an intrinsic, animating quality of his images and even as a counterpart to or collaborator with the artist. This essay explores these ideas to show how Rubens’s technical and artisanal understanding of painting and its materials could have informed his interpretation of ancient myths.

Despite claims that design has moved beyond making artifacts and products, prevailing theories of design thinking in organizations remain entrenched in the making or technē paradigm. Ironically, this serves to maintain the status quo and stifle progress. Two highly visible technē models are intervention design, publicized by IDEO, and enterprise design thinking, popularized by IBM. While distinct, they deploy the same strategy: locate the vectors of organizational change in individual agents-in projects (as complex artifacts) or in professionals (as reified resources)-and implicitly argue that constant proximity or direct contact between design actors and non-design actors is necessary to generate systems change. This constant interfacing, a natural outworking of the technē paradigm, ultimately limits real transformation-it ignores the importance of social location and symbolic capital in social systems and assumes that human organizations are deficient by default. As a result, the technē paradigm resorts to a "surplus by numbers" approach that leads to the excessive proliferation of a suboptimal form of design. For design to flourish in organizations and build better theories, designers need to become more critical of the productive world and critics (in the ameliorative sense of the term) who can reshape the social world.

This thesis analyzes the transformations of Karagöz that has emerged as technē in the 16 th century, and had vital connections with the very organization and the daily practices of the social life of the Ottoman society. The first visible modernization efforts in the Ottoman society began with the Tanzimat period, which also effected Karagöz's being. The debates among the intellectuals were the first sign of the division of technē in the case of Karagöz into art and craft in favor of art. By the 20 th century, already defined as the age of the world picture that the modern technology establishes its essence as Enframing as a destining of revealing by Heidegger, the popularity of Karagöz as a performance decreased but its most important peculiarities, such as political and social satire, were transmitted to the printed media that has flourished by Tanzimat. later, its absurdity and grotesque were abandoned after the proclamation of the Republic, which had irreversible effects on Karagöz for decades. After a several transformations related to the changes in the Turkish society, in the 21 st century, the contemporary performers claimed that Karagöz belongs to the domain of fine arts; with the safeguarding project of UNESCO, this claim has strengthened especially after the spread of the free market economy, which created "fake-performers" in interviewees' words. Therefore, the journey of Karagöz that started as technē and ended up as fine art is the main concern of this thesis.

This is an important, if disturbing, book about Gandhi. It's important because it offers an interpretation that runs against the grain of the domesticated Gandhi that can be found in such books as Joan V. Bondurant's Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, Bhikhu Parekh's Gandhi's Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination, and Ramin Jahanbegloo's recent The Gandhian Moment. Their Gandhi is largely reasonable, sensible, interpretive, a theorist whose ideas can serve as a model for political practice. By contrast, the Gandhi we encounter in Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography, by McGill University professor of comparative religion Arvind Sharma, is a little crazy, since he's a mystical creator rather than an interpreter, and his ideas are similarly meant to bring justice via inspiration. So it is because of its focus on the centrality of religion for Gandhi that Sharma's book is so valuable. And yet, as I said, there's also something disturbing about it, which is all the more troubling for coming near the end, after almost 200 clearly written pages of sensible judgments and intriguing, sometimes profound, insights.

3 Such results, of course, are not necessarily direct actions, but rather, on some interpretations, may involve something more like intention formation. Given my present focus on deliberation, however, suffice it to say that the conclusion is action in some sense. See, for example, Philip Clark, "The Action as Conclusion,"

Lo studio di Giulia Lombardi, svolto sul Peri syndesmôn del grammatico alessandrino Apollonio Discolo (II sec. d.C.), è di grande interesse per il lettore che desideri entrare nella problematica del linguaggio e della grammatica antica, perché colma il vuoto di un lavoro preciso sui connettori, trattati dal punto di vista sintattico come una delle otto parti del discorso. Seguendo l’indagine dettagliata e approfondita di tutta la serie variegata di particelle incluse da Apollonio in questo suo scritto minore, e tutte debitamente trattate nella loro funzione sintattica e nel loro significato, l’autrice accompagna il lettore a familiarizzare con la traduzione meno comune del termine greco ‘syndesmos’ con ‘connettore’, rispetto a quella abituale di ‘congiunzione’, per condurlo a scoprire come, secondo Apollonio, nessuna parte del discorso possa essere compresa se non all’interno di una prospettiva semantica; e, quindi, come anche lo studio dei connettori, apparentemente marginale, si riveli ricco di insegnamenti su tutta la concezione sintattica antica, proprio per il carattere dinamico e relazionale esercitato dai connettori nei confronti degli altri componenti, più o meno complessi, del discorso. 
Giulia Lombardi invita, inoltre, il lettore a cogliere l’interesse filosofico di questa indagine non solo dalle fonti stoiche con le quali Apollonio si è direttamente confrontato, ma soprattutto dai riferimenti platonici ed aristotelici, mettendo in luce quanto essi siano indispensabili per comprendere la portata degli assunti sui quali il padre della syntaxis abbia regolato la costituzione di una vera e propria techne grammatike: il rapportarsi costantemente all’universalità e il rendere ragione di ciò che si propone, in modo da essere davvero capaci di insegnare, come si richiede ad un technikos.
Michel Fattal, Université Grenoble Alpes

Byzantium, like many other cultures, possessed a story of the origin of the crafts. Three ivory caskets in Cleveland, Darmstadt, and St. Petersburg depict the traditional story of Adam and Eve, only they include an unusual scene of the first couple at the forge as well as an image of Plutus, the god of wealth. Examining Byzantine ideas about the discovery of the technai, this essay interprets these boxes as object-genealogies, tracing their own material extravagance back into economic prehistory and eliciting wonder at the first couple's resourcefulness. The forge scene manifests a self-reflexive awareness within the artwork itself. The commodity claims to be descended from the first artifact. Romantically deriving craft labor from humanity's invention of metallurgy and farming, ivory workshops historicized a culture of consumption within the Byzantine capital. Adam and Eve's discoveries looked ahead to their own refined technology.

In Chapter 2 of Escape from Leviathan, Jan Lester defends two hypotheses: that instrumental rationality requires agents to maximise the satisfaction of their wants and that all agents actually meet this requirement. In addition, he argues that all agents are self-interested (though not necessarily egoistic) and he offers an account of categorical moral desires which entails that no agent ever does what he genuinely feels to be morally wrong. I show that Lester’s two hypotheses are false because they cannot accommodate weakness of will, because they are inconsistent with agency, which requires free will, because ends, obligations and values cannot be reduced to desires, and because maximisation is often not possible. Further, Lester’s claim that agents are self-interested is vacuous, his attempted reduction of moral behaviour to want-satisfaction fails, and his contention, that agents always do what they genuinely think to be morally required, seems untenable. A defence of freedom that depends on homo economicus is far from promising.

Three works by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) entail mythologized scenes of spontaneous generation, or the creation of species from nature’s raw matter: Head of Medusa (ca. 1613–1618), The Discovery of Erichthonius (ca. 1616), and the oil sketch Deucalion and Pyrrha (ca. 1636). In these works Rubens naturalizes the life of painting within its materials, implying matter—paint, with its pigments and mediating liquids—as an intrinsic, animating quality of his images and even as a counterpart to or collaborator with the artist. This essay explores these ideas to show how Rubens’s technical and artisanal understanding of painting and its materials could have informed his interpretation of ancient myths.

in: Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie 2: Techne/Mechane, übersetzt von Nadja Ben Khelifa. Englische Originalfassung: »›Susie Scribbles‹: On Technology, Technë, and Writing Incarnate«, in: Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 2004, S. 109–134.

Asked to edit and critically review the exchange between philosopher Rafael Capurro and Linda Treude on the concept of information, the below linked document presents the final version of the exchange, including my contributions to copy and content editing as well as bibliographic suggestions from my review. The final version of the document can be accessed at http://www.capurro.de/moraes.html

- Jared Bielby


"The term information is omnipresent in academic research as well as in everyday life. Buzz words such as information society, information age or information overload are floating around everywhere. But what do we mean exactly with 'information' in different contexts?

The philosopher Rafael Capurro dealt with this question in the late 1970's in his PhD thesis on the concept of information. Especially the philosophical community was suffering at that time from a lack of reflection thereupon. Capurro tried to fill this gap. The following remark by the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912-2007) had a particular impact on him.

"Today we are getting accustomed [...] to understand information as something different from matter and consciousness. What we have discovered is an old truth in a new place. It is the Platonic eidos, the Aristotelian form, expressed in words such that also a human being in the 20th century can learn about them."

Weizsäcker’s step back to the history of ideas motivated Capurro also to deal with ethical issues of the information society particularly since the rise of the internet. The handling of digital information requires new cultural skills that are addressed with the term 'information literacy.' In the last ten years many projects in the Library and Information Science field (LIS) include or are even focused on information literacy (IL). In many of these projects there is a pre-understanding that IL has to do with the ability to find, filter, and process digital information. At the same time, there is a gap between this pre-understanding and an the ongoing academic discussion on the concept of information. The following dialogue deals particularly with this gap."

~ Linda Treude

El presente artículo desarrolla las características de un momento particular de la noción de technē. Parte de una definición actual de arte, entiende su simplicidad y la articula con el desarrollo de la antigua noción de technē. Como parte de este desarrollo, el texto vuelve explícitos los argumentos de los textos Hipocráticos que rechazaban las críticas a la práctica médica y las responden enlazando ésta con la idea de technē. Finalmente, el texto enlaza el concepto actual de arte relacionándolo con las respuestas a las críticas a la medicina desplegadas en los Tratados hipocráticos.

The following essay re-problematises the Aristotelian concept of technē in terms of the mathematical function. This is to argue that the Greek's deployment of the craftsperson is not merely analogical but rather operates as a paradigm that locates agency as an irreducible problematic. Insofar as this ancient account remains restricted to the productive activities of human beings, a reconsideration of Aristotle's method arguably indicates how technē is not only necessary for the " highest " abstract speculations, but also opens a way to a modern accounting for agential powers in the most primitive activities of the living. Where technē is the capacity for agency to deviate the flow of natural causation, a path is opened to re-conceive the artificial/natural dialectic as primitive, so that a series of reciprocal counter-causes can be understood to broadly operate upon primary, generative processes. This is to find that the minimal structure of technē in Aristotle arguably apprehends the irreducible causal torsion that announces agency, so that art and technics have a primordial precedence long predating homo faber. In order to demonstrate this, the following paper examines how the elaboration of the mathematical function, especially in the context of computational logic, overturns the dominant analogical use that technologies serve in modelling natural processes. What computational theory rather shows, is that at its most reductive and abstract, it is rather the

This is a new paper that I have written for my participation in the SINGAPORE OPEN MEDIA ART FESTIVAL 2017 forum on 21 January 2017, at LASALLE College of the Arts.

The forum is entitled Art of Things: Korea & Singapore Media Art Forum 2017, and takes place over 2 days. Day 1 explores: Why or How Object-Oriented Ontology in Media art? Day 2: Symptoms of Post-Digital and Post-Human.

Curator & coordinator for Korea: Yonghee Sung. Singapore coordinator: Urich Lau

Speakers (Korea)
Jae Hyun Lee, Professor, Seoul National University, Seoul Jangwon Lee, Artist, Programmer
Mioon, Artist Collective
Hoonida Kim, Artist, Media art workshop developer Heungsup Jung, Artist and writer
Moderator: Yonghee Sung

Speakers (Singapore)
Urich Lau, Video artist & educator (Lasalle)
Andreas Schlegel, artist, researcher, educator (Lasalle) SPANG&LEI, Artist-collective
Ong Kian Peng, artist
Tan Kai Syng, artist, researcher, educator (Leeds College of Art) Moderator: Yow Siew Kah

Este trabalho se dedica a investigar a téchne do governante elaborada
por Trasímaco. Julga ele existir uma arte adequada para se governar
que traria todos os lucros àquele que governa e que seria capaz de
torná-lo o mais feliz dos homens. A partir de um elogio à injustiça e ao
homem completamente injusto, ele visa desenvolver uma definição de
tirania que permita esta se manter por um saber político e não apenas
pela deturpação de um governo justo.

I contributi presenti in questo volume sono stati redatti dai diversi studiosi ed esperti che, dal 2013 al 2015, si sono avvicendati nella serie di incontri sul tema "Arte, Cultura e Tecni ca" presso la Rettoria di Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza a Roma. L'occasione è stato l'omonimo ciclo di formazione culturale promosso dal Centro Culturale "Paolo VI" in collaborazione con la Facoltà di Filosofia (Progetto STOQ-UPS) dell'Università Pontificia Salesiana e con l'Ufficio di Pastorale universitaria del Vicariato di Roma. «I vari percorsi qui proposti si diramano a ventaglio avviandosi su diversi orizzonti, da quello teoretico-filosofico e storico alla teologia e all'antropologia fino ad allargarsi al mondo variegato dell'arte. Quest'ultima, poi, rivela, come è noto, al suo interno molteplici iridescenze espressive, dall'architettura alla scultura, dalla pittura alla poesia, dalla musi ca al cinema, fino ai beni culturali materiali e immateriali, ossia il grande patrimonio mo numentale e persino il paesaggio (nel senso di landscape elaborato dalla presenza umana) ma anche le tradizioni popolari e il folclore. [… In queste pagine] si alternano tante voci, attraverso la via privilegiata del dialogo, così da ricomporre in piena armonia Cultura, Arte e Tecnica, trilogia dalle mille sfaccettature» (dalla Prefazione del card. Gianfranco Ravasi).

The revolutionary concept of rhetoric introduced by Plato not only stood firmly against the oratorical practices of his times, but also established first “scientific” art of rhetoric applicable into the frames of philosophical paideia. His perception of rhetorical tasks was strictly related to the goals of political formation and was absolutely indispensable for the purposes of a pursuit of political wisdom, in its exceedingly distinctive meaning. Plato initiated a century-long dispute on rhetorical ends and its political - paideutic value. First, criticized by Isocrates, later, resumed in the most exceptional treatise of Aristotle, he delineated a path of a new display of educational value of the art of rhetoric.

"Full text published in english (translation from polish)

http://www.stageplays.com/products/cuts_last_but_one_seancecategorycyberpresscode366/
Marat%20Dakunin

""ABOUT CERTAIN FORMAL ASPECTS OF THE “CUT’S LAST (BUT ONE) SÉANCE” DRAMA



„Cut’s Last (But One) Show” is a drama of ego – actually, it is a monodrama; still, it is written for two actors. Cut’s personality is not revealed through actions – Cut prides himself on not taking any actions (dicit et non facis – though referring to which as devil’s definition is an exaltation in a certain way). There is no conflict – but a longing for a conflict (even shown literally). A conflict between existence and aspirations of existence (their irrelevance). A certain staticality is a dramaticality here, as Pieta or the Thinker by Rodin are static.

The drama has some features of a mass.
A mass is a celebration – a celebration can be either a despair or hope.
The essence of a mass is based not only on a ceremonial but also on evoking – one evokes “deeds and conversations, impressions, thoughts, and they become symbolized. A mass is a way of sharing collective consciousness and emitting of collective consciousness. Everything that happens on the stage evokes everything what happened outside but; also and first of all, „inside”. Ceremonies evoke memory; sometimes they try to sift it, determine it more, catch it in the past and in everything that is changing; everything what „happens” is a ritual which refers to something (particularly, it concerns recollection, hope, experience, ultimate – boundary idea (of love) – it concerns absolutely). Exceeding the limits of permissible repetitiveness, we refer by a ritual to what was before an „automatism” of sensation.
Everything is a ceremony since everything is a reference.
Paradoxically, a ceremony is horrendously difficult to be played. It is also about grasping a plane – where between a blasé ritual, which is actually empty, and a pure idea (which is not fouled by it) the truth about a man is revealed. But this truth must be purified.

The „séance” is a black mass („burying” Isis little by little) and an Easter morning mass. At the end of drama some “movement” is started – a movement (a change) is earlier referred to statically – because a change is something that hurts Cut („former days were better than these”…”Say not thou that the future days would bring what they always bring” – melancholy of loss, of what is removed by a change, of what is gone) – still, a movement simultaneously means life, stillness means death. „A moment, last forever” actually means „it would be better for me to never be born”.
Written for two actors, the monodrama, the ego drama has, in an ideal prospect, another function of ceremony, ritual – forgetting about your ego.
Isis a total reference for Cut because she is: the absolute (the One, perfection), the personal God (and these are both this withdrawn one and this engaged one, immanent towards Cut and transcendent one); besides she is Isis – a mother, Isis – a wife, Isis – a feminine element, exiled Shekinah, a woman as everything what is different but also everything what is found in yourself, a neighbor (“You”, a man). What is more and first of all – she is hope for Cut to find himself.
In everything that Isis on the stage and Isis on the screen do (and in the fact of her being divided into stage and projection) there is a consequence of it (a consequence of a total reference – a word – a thought – a feeling – an impression – magic (what is mystic, what is seen). Prima facie, it might seem to have other type of consequence – a rather banal consequence: the stage – reality, the projection – Cut’s images or dreams."""