The Force that Is but Does Not Act: Ruyer, Leibniz and Deleuze

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 518-537
Author(s):  
Ronald Bogue
Keyword(s):  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Self Formation ◽  
The Brain

In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari attribute to Leibniz and Raymond Ruyer a vitalism of ‘a force that is but does not act’. This is a judicious characterisation of Leibniz's vitalism, but not Ruyer's. In The Fold, Deleuze presents Ruyer as a disciple of Leibniz, but if Leibniz's monads have no doors or windows, Ruyer's are nothing but doors and windows, nothing but liaisons actively forming themselves. For Ruyer, there is only one force, a consciousness-force, matter-form in sustained, non-localisable self-formation. In Deleuze's reading of Leibniz's concept of the vinculum substantiale, Deleuze comes close to presenting a notion of force like that of Ruyer's, in that the vinculum inextricably interfolds monads and bodies, but ultimately the separation of the forces of monads from those of bodies prevails in a fashion incompatible with Ruyer's conception of force. Deleuze and Guattari make use of Ruyer's understanding of consciousness and the brain as the auto-overflight of an absolute surface in their concluding remarks on philosophy and the arts in What Is Philosophy?, but they depart from Ruyer in their characterisation of the relation of force to those two domains, ultimately because they reject Ruyer's advocacy of a universal, goal-directed finalism.

Quantum Creativity: Afracting New Materialism in the Anthropocene

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110666
Author(s):  
jan jagodzinski
Keyword(s):  
Creative Destruction ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Quantum Level ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Karen Barad

This essay engages the vicissitudes of new materialism at the quantum level, attempting to differentiate what I take to be fundamental differences in the theoretical positions of vitalist theories as developed by Karen Barad and Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the Anthropocene. I treat matter at the quantum level to differentiate conceptions of apparatus and assemblage. It is argued that one should not treat them under the same signifiers. There is the question of creativity that runs through the essay which also raises questions concerning an “affirmative” Deleuze, the dominant position when it comes to the arts, humanities, and pedagogy. Against these particular developments, anorganic life as in|different comes to fore where issues of creative destruction must be faced.

scholarly journals Drawing in the Digital Age: Observations and Implications for Education

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Seymour Simmons
Keyword(s):  
General Education ◽  
Art Education ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Annual Symposium ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
Professional Programs ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Architecture And Design ◽  
The Brain

This paper looks at recent examples of how drawing is advancing into the digital age: in London: the annual symposium on Thinking Through Drawing; in Paris: an exhibition at the Grand Palais, Artistes et Robots; a conference at the Institut d’études avancées on Space-Time Geometries and Movement in the Brain and in the Arts; and, at the Drawing Lab, Cinéma d’Été. These events are contrasted to a recent decline in drawing instruction in pre-professional programs of art, architecture, and design as well as in pre-K12 art education due largely to the digital revolution. In response, I argue for the ongoing importance of learning to draw both in visual art and in general education at all levels in the digital age.

Synaesthesia: A Very Short Introduction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Simner
Keyword(s):  
Short Introduction ◽  
Neurological Condition ◽  
Genetic Causes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Brain

Synaesthesia is often described as a rare neurological condition where one sense appears to merge or cross with another. It is a multi-variant condition that can present itself in many different ways: some synaesthetes taste words, while others see colours when they hear sounds. Synaesthesia: A Very Short Introduction describes this extraordinary condition, explaining what synaesthesia is, how it manifests itself, what causes it, how it feels, how it links to creativity and the arts, and what it can tell us about every human’s perceptions of reality. Delving into the neuroscience behind synaesthesia, it also relates contemporary attempts at understanding both the genetic causes of synaesthesia, and how synesthetic sensations occur in the brain.

Secrets of Creativity

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Controlled Processing ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Scientific Mind ◽  
The Brain

This book draws from leading neuroscientists and scholars in the humanities and the arts to probe creativity in its many manifestations, including the everyday mind, the exceptional mind, the pathological mind, the scientific mind, and the artistic mind. It offers a brand new interdisciplinary approach revealing secrets of creativity that emerge from our everyday lives and from the minds of exceptional individuals and their discoveries or creations. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and humanities researchers provide new insights about the workings of the creative brain. Components of creativity are specified with respect to types of memory, forms of intelligence, modes of experience, and kinds of emotion. Authors in this volume take on the challenge of simultaneously characterizing creativity at behavioral, cognitive, and neurophysiological levels. It becomes apparent to all our authors that, with creativity, there is an interaction between consciously controlled processing and spontaneous processing. Neuroscientists describe the functioning of the brain and its circuitry in creative acts of scientific discovery or aesthetic production. Humanists from the fields of literature, art, and music give analyses of creativity in major literary works, musical compositions, and works of visual art. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of contributors for a novel discussion of creativity from the confluence of neuroscience and the arts.

Matching Reality in the Arts: Self-Referential Neural Processing of Naturalistic Compared to Surrealistic Images

Perception ◽  
10.1068/p7191 ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 569-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarita Silveira ◽  
Verena Graupmann ◽  
Dieter Frey ◽  
Janusch Blautzik ◽  
Thomas Meindl ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Input ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Visual World ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
Realistic Representation ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
The Brain

How are works of art that present scenes that match potential expectations processed in the brain, in contrast to such scenes that can never occur in real life because they would violate physical laws? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the processing of surrealistic and naturalistic images in visual artworks. Looking at naturalistic paintings leads to a significantly higher activation in the visual cortex and in the precuneus. Humans apparently own a sensitive mechanism even for artistic representations of the visual world to separate the impossible from what potentially matches physical reality. The observation reported here also suggests that sensory input corresponding to a realistic representation of the visual world elicits higher self-referential processing.

Feldenkrais Revisited: Tension, Talent, and the Legacy of Childhood

1998 ◽  
Vol 14 (56) ◽  
pp. 351-356
Author(s):  
Joanna Rotté
Keyword(s):  
Knee Injury ◽  
The Body ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Self Healing ◽  
Scene Change ◽  
Script Analysis ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Villanova University ◽  
The Brain

Moshe Feldenkrais developed his influential philosophy and physiology of movement from a background in engineering, and a concern to remedy a knee injury sustained in a game of soccer. Though he scorned psychoanalytical approaches to the remedying of poor or painful postures, he had great faith in the capacity of the body, through the brain, for self-correction and self-healing. Joanna Rotté met Feldenkrais shortly before his death in 1985, in his eightieth year, and talked to him during a nine-week course he was leading in his own methodology. Joanna Rotté now teaches Script Analysis and Voice and Movement at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia. Her travel memoir Scene Change, a theatre diary from Prague, Moscow, and Leningrad, was published by Limelight in 1994, and her performance piece, Death of the Father, was produced in the spring of 1998 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

scholarly journals Music education as manipulation – a proposal for playing

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Ketil Thorgersen
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Arts

An important feature of music is its ability to affect people in unpredictable and deep ways. Music has therefore been used to oppress and (mis)lead people by dictatorships, religious leaders and supermarkets amongst others, and to help lure people into acting in ways that are beneficial for the manipulators. Such forms of ethically dubious musical manipulation happen because of the sublime potential of music to do something to people, and in such a way that they have few ways to defend themselves against it. Thus, the power of music is also the reason people seek out the unforeseen affects and effects in their encounters with the arts. Building on a theory of aesthetic communication, and seeking support from Deleuze and Guattari (1994), Dewey (2005) and Spinoza (Spinoza & Lagerberg, 2001), the aim of this article is to propose the term manipulation as a tool in music education or as a vehicle for teachers and researchers to help frame activities in music education as meaningful for aesthetic communication. I argue that manipulation is a necessary component of all art and aesthetic communication, that, despite its usual negative connotations, manipulation is an act that can be used for good or bad purposes, and that music education has a duty to educate pupils in artistic manipulation. Manipulation is considered action, and as such, it is argued that it can take on any value from good to bad depending on the intentions and effects it causes. This article invites a discussion of possible ways of designing music education that revolve around tinkering with aesthetic communication, and wherein desirable manipulation plays a vital role, and outcomes-based curricula are replaced with an alternative more compatible with the arts.

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