Transforming Realities
Transferring Our Humanity to Imitations : From Plato to AI - Where Ss the Form? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dana Munteanu
Do people confuse a real object with its symbol represented as its artistic, literary, or computerized imitation? Surely not – or not in the strict sense of the word, but things are more complicated than we may presume. Plato already worried about the dangers of artistic mimesis, in book 10 of the Republic. In this paper, I suggest that, indeed, modern neuroscience confirms that our brain may be confused by symbols, through mimetic associations and transferences (e.g. Lakoff and Johnston, Metaphors We Live, 1980; cf. Sapolsky’s chapter “Metaphors We Die By,” in Behave, 2017; Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, 1980). Furthermore, our fascination with mimetic fictions has become deeper lately, and it can lead us into transferring our humanity to the pursuit of an artificial mode of life. Here I would like to emphasize the features of the mimetic worlds (which I take very broadly to include art, fiction in all its variety, social media, video games, computer simulations) that fascinate us to the point that we forget the real world. Coherence, emotional involvement, and a state being in the flow, all may entrap us inside mimetic worlds. The solution, in my view, is not simply to lament our addiction to the mimetic forms and disengagement from our mundane life, which many of us already, do but rather to re-glamorize our existence and our fellow-humans.
Imaginal Figures: Inquiry and the Methods of Magic
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Patrick Scanlon
Far from acquiring any skill in occult practices, or realizing whatever secret object their aims entail, this paper instead explores the challenges that these methodological systems present to the institutions that regulate knowledge, research, and reality. While often dismissed as strange, queer, archaic, and impotent, the indices of magic and the occult has been inextricable from positive science’s most triumphant discoveries. From Johannes Kepler’s science fiction pursuits, which placed him on Mars to measure Earth’s orbit, thus figuring planetary motion as elliptical, to the alchemical treatises of Islamic Egypt and the medical discoveries of Vedic India—esoteric methods remain especially vital as our experiential ground is ceded, ever steadily, to the technical. Associated with the vast realm of dreams, meditation, divination, the imaginal is a term that crosses various semantic and cultural borders, implying both the imaginary and the imagination, especially in their archaic meanings, as faculty or agency that not only translates experience, but that can also manifest phenomena. However varied its existence, the imaginal persists as a mythic if not mystic sphere that gives way to all manner of aberration—from impossible geographies and confusing temporalities, to odd impressions, arcane symbols and implausible beings. Regardless of how dubious these encounters may seem, they often suggest very practical concerns of a methodological sort: considerations both of access and prohibition, of conjuring and dispelling, and always in relation to an impossible knowledge. Here, the ends are never quite what they seem: preparation is certain, but it assures nothing.
The Transfer of Tasso's Narrative Theory to French Neoclassicism View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Matthew Motyka
What appears to be one of the French cultural distinctions, neoclassicism, has deep origins in the Italian debates of the sixteenth century about what constitutes good, acceptable artistic representation. In his theoretical works on poetics, as well as in his poetic practice, Torquato Tasso asserted that poetry and theater must conform to the immutable rules he believed to be established once and for all in Aristotle's Poetics. Tasso then applied them to his own time, arguing for their universality. In my paper, I argue and show through various historical documents, such as prefaces, that the French intellectuals who founded the French Academy in 1637 under the auspices of Richelieu used Tasso's ideas as the ideological basis for what they understood to be the only acceptable way to make art in the broadest sense. French theorists such as Scudéry and Chapelain quoted Tasso in their debates and composed their own poems, presenting the Italian author as their moral warrant for imposing their beliefs on future generations of art theorists. Thus, the roots of the famous three unities of time, place, and action can be traced back to the Italian debates of the previous century.
Imperial Debris in Polybius’ Histories: Excavating a Literary Artifact(ory) of Empire and Rome
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarah Davies
While Polybius of Megalopolis may not be a household name in the 21st century, there is an eeriness with which elements of his Histories – a ‘monumental’ work written in the second century BCE – are all-too-(disturbingly)-familiar. This presentation calls attention to such mirrored intersections while conducting a deeper, anti-imperial, and empathetic (un)reading of an ancient text-and-author. To experience Polybius’ Histories is to engage with the conundrums of imperial citizenship. It is to see how interlocking artifices have been filled with the co-complicities of pain, harm, fragility, and anxiety, thereby carving pathways out of such concepts (or ‘mobile essentialisms’) as “empire,” “modernity,” and “the West.” It is to grapple with and against ‘straightforward’ narratives regarding individual and collective lived-experiences of systemic and epistemic formations of “safety” and “security.” And it is likewise to be injured – while also inflicting injury – in desiring salvation, while running the risk of simply reiterating neo-imperial modes of (re)’mastery’ – and thereby missing the truest potentialities of-and-for liberatory futures. . For Polybius, the “moment” entailed what has since been all-too-simplistically (and problematically) understood as a “fall” of a ‘Hellenistic’ (“Greek”) international system to the “rise” of Rome as an “empire.” Such an overly reductive narrative arc is a historiographical product of which Polybius was/is part-and-parcel. This paper therefore rethinks the Histories as an epic testimony, as a written artifact(ory) of the epistemic ruptures of surviving empire, always-in-the-making via arts of annihilation. In the process, it highlights rebelliously-poetic potentialities, beyond banalities of the past-as-future.
