Search

One of the central tenets of contemporary media theory is encapsulated in Marshall McLuhan’s famous proposition that media are “extensions of man”, that they prolong our senses into the world. In his latest book, Francesco Casetti challenges exactly this assumption by arguing that media just as much protect and enclose, as they extend and protract. He claims that what he calls “the projection/protection complex […] stands for a set of interrelated processes and components […] aimed at creating a ‘protected’ confrontation with the world and at the same time at ‘projecting’ individuals beyond the safe space in which they are located” (14). Like Deleuze and Guattari took Freud’s Oedipus theory and turned it on its head (in Anti-Oedipus), Screening Fears could be read as a kind of “Anti-McLuhan” which acknowledges the significance of the original, but adds important dimensions to it.

This interdisciplinary study integrates spatial theory and trauma studies to explore Jeremiah's Temple Sermon (7:1–8:3) as a literary landscape in the context of cultural trauma. This study reads the Temple Sermon as a traumascape: a literary landscape constructed to shape and contain trauma stemming from Babylon's subjugation of Judah. This reading proceeds in four parts structured around the metaphor of the phantasmagoria: the first analyses how the Sermon navigates the politics of memory to legitimise its interpretation of Judah's past; the second explores how the Sermon constructs Judah's past as a geography of national failure culminating in divine punishment; the third examines the rhetorical techniques which position the reading community to affirm YHWH's rejection of their past selves. The final part integrates the findings of the prior three to read the Sermon as a traumascape wherein the tension between remembering and repressing trauma is navigated in the act of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the theme of indenture and its connection to race and labor. It argues that indenture should be seen as a set of forms and structures, rather than just a buffer between slavery and free labor. The article examines the aesthetics of indenture through the works of visual artists who draw on the legacies of unfree labor. It highlights the use of grids, citation, and flows as means to understand indenture and its impact on brownness. The text discusses the artwork of several artists who explore themes of indenture and labor struggle in the Indian Ocean region, using various mediums to convey their messages. The artworks critique exploitative labor conditions and challenge dominant narratives, shedding light on the struggles and resistance of indentured peoples. The text also discusses the experiences of indentured laborers and the artistic work of Quishile Charan, referencing social ostracism and financial burdens faced by returnees. It provides links to oral histories and visual projects related to the Collective's work. [Extracted from the article]

Unlike English or French, early twentieth-century German did not adopt a single term for "screen." Instead, a range of terms—and practices—proliferated. This essay explores three terms and practices developed especially within avant-garde circles: Fläche (surface), Leinwand (canvas), and Schirm (scrim). Fläche was championed as material and real; Leinwand was dismissed as immaterial and illusionistic. Schirm, however, challenged these oppositions. Rather than succumb to the traditional avant-garde choice between material reality and immaterial illusion, László Moholy-Nagy advanced a third option: the immaterial reality of Schirme, that is, phantasmagoric presences in our real time and real space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of property encompasses a series of material and sensible relations expressed in space products. Its organization in space outlines the daily habitat of cities by identifying at least two tenure regimes, stratified between those who legitimately hold it in the domain titles and those who expect to access it from the location based on land takeovers. Situations like this are not considered in the classical work plan of Marxism; however, they have been implemented in various contemporary research fronts, aided by contributions and interpretations from Walter Benjamin and other visions of property, nature, and the environment. From the perspective of Marxism, these questions are examined in the case of Machalí, a commune located in central Chile, where the development of property is erected as a material response to economic and class transformations. Evidence-based theoretical elements are examined to evaluate the representational capacities of orthodox Marxism and Benjamin's vision, more situated in the cultural dynamism in the relations between subjectivities and subjects present today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes Ebrahim Golestan's 1964 film "Brick and Mirror". It explores the film's historical significance; its subsequent recognition; its unanalyzed connection to German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin's concept of "Phantasmagoria;" examining how the film reflects the phantasmagoric attitude of the Pahlavi government towards the city during that era; and the first Iranian film with synchronous sound technology and having a potential impact on the country's cinema.

The article deals with an aspect of the phenomenon of controlled illusion — manipulating emotional reactions and behaviour through the space of an artificially created reality. The subject of the article is a relevant feature of the process — recursion within a fictitious space. The methods of mass suggestion become more complicated with each step of evolution, borrowing the techniques of the past and multiplying them by the technologies of the present. Today’s technologies create a process of self-repetition of elements — a process within a process: artificially created illusions are embodied and massively repeated as patterns. Nowadays, controlled illusion generates a problem of imbalance between the accumulated practice of control and an individual’s ability for distancing. The urgency of the problem is due to the obvious dominance of the methods of manipulating public conscience over the development of an individual via industries of culture. The aim of this article is to define the role of sensory suggestion capabilities through control spaces in the 21st century. The objective is to consider the features of the effects of radiance, the influence of flickering light, and the imitation of the world by adomed structure. These effects stem from the Baroque era, are passed on in evolution, and carry a suggestive potential through an emotional factor. While borrowing and accumulating the techniques of the past, new tools such as artificial intelligence, communication networks, electronics, and biotechnologies bring new qualities to manipulations, including a multisensory impact. The author proposes to reconsider the traditional view on the role of algorithms in cultural objects: what until recently was negatively described as “inanimate” and programmed is now able to control and reveal the emotional potential of a person. The outcome depends on what the algorithms are trained for, who trains them and why. The social function of illusionism is either commercial and political benefit or the promotion of an inclusive culture and the development of a person and their abilities. This cannot but affect the role of designer and artist, whose activity today is increasingly moving away from the decorative and turning to interaction through scientific approaches, which determines the property that offers a choice of path and goal in illusionism.

The novel "Späte Gäste" [Late Guests], published in 2020 by the Swiss author Gertrud Leutenegger (*1948), examines the relations between love and death. The first-person narrator travels to the Ticino village where her earlier life partner has died and is laid out in a funeral chapel. She wants to see him once more, but she never actually succeeds; for the chapel is closed. Yet, this blocked door is interesting for its metaphorical and metonymical meaning, as it stands for the barrier between the narrator and her earlier partner. Moreover, it is beneficial because it engenders a mental detachment which appears in several reflections and images that arise in her inner eye. They relate not only to the past, but also to her present life and even to the future. These apparitions can be interpreted as dialectical images as defined by Walter Benjamin. The present interpretation will examine this dialectic and demonstrate that the first-person narrator gains a new freedom in the process of this consideration of the death before her: freedom from the fear of death in general – and from the false certitudes of modern life.

This paper focuses on the function of the magic lantern, a seventeenth-century scientific invention with the ability to project frightening images painted on transparent slides, as a literary device intrinsically connected to the Gothic genre. Darkness, foul weather, animated portraits, eerie apparitions, crumbling abbeys and half-demolished tombs team with physics and optics in an intricate swirl of exchanges between literature and visual technology, still relevant today. These exchanges are vividly illustrated in Girona's spectacular Museu del Cinema – Col·lecció Tomàs Mallol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tropelías: Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada is the property of Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The purpose of this essay is to study Walter Benjamin's reflections on the phenomenon of fashion in the Arcades Project in order to clarify the dialectical nature that he observes in it. To this end, I first examine the important role of fashion, thanks to its valorisation of novelty, in capitalism's tendency towards the commodification of all things and in the development of the commodity cult. In connection with these aspects, I analyse how this social phenomenon contributes to the emergence of the view of history distinctive of capitalist society, linked to an ideal of progress that masks its social statism. Finally, an interpretation is offered of the political significance that Benjamin attaches to fashion both in terms of its relation to the task of the materialist historian and the utopian side that this phenomenon would include. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a comparative historical analysis of shopping environments, focusing on the aesthetic experience they offer to the consumer and underscoring their nature as phantasmagorias. At a time when digital disruption, exacerbated by the recent pandemic, has dramatically changed social habits and the cityscape, this research aims to investigate the impact of technological and social transformations on the buyosphere and the practice of shopping. The approach's original perspective looks at the close correlation between the flâneur and the consumer, examining how retail spaces in the modern metropolis have developed. The shopping experience is shown as a social ritual with complex facets, where the urban walker and the cityscape have gradually transformed, giving symbolic meaning to architectural forms and human identities. The findings of this study call for considering the opportunities and threats of the present scenario. The shift to the virtual realm has created new forms of phantasmagoria, such as the immersive experience in the brand's universe combined with omnichannel strategies. At the same time, the "retail apocalypse" and the reduction of spaces for wandering may risk limiting social encounters, the freedom of movement, and the individual's ability to interpret urban reality, elements that once defined the practice of flânerie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Turkish Studies - Social Sciences is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Susan Sontag, in her classic 1967 essay, "The Pornographic Imagination," argued: "Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness .... "In the last half-century, Sontag's demonic force of sexuality has transformed pornography and the "pornographic imagination"—let along social relations between women and men. In this essay, I adopt Walter Benjamin's concept of phantasmagoria—a magic-lantern show of optical illusions, rapidly changing size and blending into one another—as the metaphoric commodity form of postmodern capitalist society, fetishism-on-display. I examine the evolution of technological forms of pornographic representation over the last two centuries, including the magiclantern, daguerreotype, photography, stereoscope and film as well as the internet, erotic toys, electronic devises, VR and sex robots. These developments are set against a background of equally profound legal and cultural developments that have recast the sexuality of postmodern America. I argue that these (and other) developments have recast patriarchy and, in some important ways, the sexual relations between "consenting" adults. I conclude reflecting on the current intellectual and political debate about pornography between "pro-sex" and "anti-sex" feminists. With the enormous increase in the production and availability of pornography, I ask, perhaps "quantity" can give way to improved "quality"? I ask whether today's sexual phantasmagoria can fashion a "new" feminist sexuality—and a more humane pornography? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Colloquia Germanica Stetinensia is the property of University of Szczecin Press / Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Socio-spatial politics characterise the city and the subcultures that reside within her. This paper is centred on the visual tensions and dialogues embedded in the graffiti which shape and transform the public waterways, drains, tunnels and decommissioned coastal fortifications that cut through Sydney's built environment. It constructs a revealing portraiture of graffiti's multimodal engagement to further insights into the politicisation of place in these liminal realms. Nuancing Lefebvre's (1974) counter spaces of otherness, and Swyngedouw's (2006) networked phantasmagoria of waterways and sewers, I argue here that graffiti's transgression intervenes and diverts the socio-political directive of these utilitarian substructures, as well as the symbolic power of the State. Drawing on specific instances, this paper provides evidence of defiant and differentiated forms of visual expression that involve a separation from mainstream norms to reveal alternative narratives which redefines Sydney's subterranean cavities as a place for pilgrimage, passage, performance and play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arete Journal of Political Philosophy / Arete Politik Felsefe Dergisi is the property of Arete Journal of Political Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper provides a philosophical reflection of the crisis of democracy. Its central research focus is on what is referred to as “the world of artificial images and the lost truth” (or phantasmagoria), where the West European society experiences a sequence of distorted perceptions of reality (simulacra) broken down between various social movements, and the effect of those on the conflict-settling function of democracy, which less and less observable in contemporary societies of Western Europe. Starting from this very brief description, the article elaborates the issue of lost truth and meaning as well as the resurrection of myth based on a multitude of sub-realities or simulacra, which deprive democracy of its conflict settling mechanism and prevent social groups/movements in an atomized society from discursive consensus building.

The Phantasmagoria was not just a spectacle based on projections of images of ghosts and monsters. Relying upon new archival findings, this article claims that the Phantasmagoria was instead an optical–environmental dispositive that combined an enclosed space with the exploration of three worlds: the otherworld of the Dead, the physical world of Nature, and the inner world of spectators' Interiority. While its ultimate goal was to provide an unconventional map of the three domains that were of the greatest interest at the time, its combined interest in a spatial arrangement and a visual address suggests the need for a new, rhizomatic archaeology in which to include the screen-based dispositives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the role of the shadow in Edgar Allan Poe's "Ligeia" and its connection to English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theories on the supernatural. It argues that the narrator's perception of the shadow as a supernatural entity is a result of his own illusion and provides a psychological explanation for the illusion. The article highlights Poe's departure from Coleridge's theories and his use of misdirection to create the illusion of the supernatural.

The “phantasmagoria” is a term that originally referred to the ghost lantern shows first staged in France at the end of the 18th Century by the Belgian inventor and entertainer Étienne-Gaspard Robertson. The question to be addressed in this review concerns the link between the phantasmagoria (defined as a ghostly visual entertainment) and the multisensory sensorium (or sensory overload) of the fairground and even, in several other cases, the Gesamtkunstwerk (the German term for “the total work of art”). I would like to suggest that the missing link may involve the ghost attractions, such as Dr. Pepper's Ghost (first developed at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in London in the 1860s), and the Phantasmagoria, that were both promoted in fairgrounds across England in the closing decades of the 19th Century.

Copyright of Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present article configures a constellation of images of thinking in work, mainly from Nietzsche, Benjamin and Foucault, bearing in mind the concept of the politics of experience represented by Miguel Morey. Some critical references to Biopower and Biopolitics are shown, especially the idea of progress of the 19th century bourgeois order in the midst of the technical reproduction of merchandise and its consequences. A possibility of figuration of the instant of readability is shown from the Eternal Return, the Jetztzeit and the Cynical Militancy, to shape a scheme that brings together doctrine and philosophical practice, assuming the expressive effort of a writing that apprehends and constructs those moments of interruption of thinking that could generate a genuine and unique experience for another life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a political interpretation of La notte (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France, 1961) and proposes that the central theme of the film is the identity of the discourse of capital and the discourse of patriarchy, both as solipsistic, self‐perpetuating enjoyment. On the narrative level, the capitalist‐patriarchal discourse is incarnated in double complementary figures, both male and female. The male couple consists of a traditional fatherly moralizing figure and a modern mute solipsist, who is also a sexual predator. The female one is constructed out of mute enjoyment of a nymphomaniac and a phantasmagoric figure of Valentina whose power of fascination is utterly mediated by the commodities among which she moves and the fashionable intellectual commonplaces she utters. This configuration is set up to map a labyrinth of existential im/possibilities that a non‐spectral new woman, Lidia, faces at a particular juncture in Italian history. Her initial flânerie, in which she attempts to dissolve her bourgeois identity‐property, fails as she becomes conscious that what seems to be the space of indeterminacy and becoming is in fact a thoroughly organized urbanist hyperspace that aims at absolute management of people and commodities. Unable to find something really new in new Italy, Lidia returns to the constricting discourse of melodrama she has been inscribed into as a long‐suffering wife in order to undermine its conventions and use its utopian potential to put her relationship with her husband on a new footing. Although her attempt fails, an attentive viewer is given two glimpses that catch something beyond the commodity‐oriented melodramatic universe: a timeless moment of transcendence created in writing and a reconciliation of subject and object in a female dance act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following essay intends an approach that comprises a combination of aesthetics, history and philosophy to reproduce the perception of certain elements of image contradictions in contemporary times. It discusses the concepts of phantasmagoria and apparition regarding technical and memory images and will be presented contemporary examples that contribute to the understanding of those types of images as irrefutable components in the fields of current ontology and epistemology.

The article presents the discussion on emergence of film studies as a discipline in the 1970s and 1980s marked by a recalcitrance dealing seriously with other media. Topics include discussions of precinematic media from the magic lantern and the phantasmagoria to the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope; and film history and media archaeology sharing for the archive as a site of conceptual innovations.

Ben Okri is one of the leading writers in the Nigerian literature in English. Songs of Enchantment belongs to the The Famished Road trilogy. The novel pursues the life of Azaro, an abiku. The novel reveals the rich culture of Africa. This paper attempts to study the use of myth and death in the novel. It also studies how death and dream serve as both theme and technique. The paper also attempts to explore the dream background of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By looking at ethnography as a multi-sited and evolving field in the tradition of George Marcus and Michael Fischer, the article returns to the cinematic concept of 'expanded cinema', focusing on current forms of expansion in audiovisual ethnographic representation (i.e., 'expanded ethnography'). In doing so, it analyses the live cinematic performances of Supereverything* (The Light Surgeons, 2011-2017) and Invisible Cities (59 Productions, 2019) in terms of convergences, correspondences and intermedial staging, all of which dialectically synthesise the expanded field as it emerges from within the world system. The article deconstructs the aesthetical dialectics that produce the collective feeling of enlargement of the ethnographic field from a singular stage to a multiplicity of actors and stages (fields) via staged live interconnections made between intermedia technologies and social/bodily intersubjective relations, as they emerged via exploratory practices on and beyond the limits of the stage. By using sources deriving from cinematic theatre and philosophy, the article argues that the illusion of enlargement of the effigy of the world picture is techno/socially manufactured as part of the marketed media turn to imagination and subjectivity, with political consequences for ethnographic representation and its 'expanded' claim to a reality beyond the material history of the cosmopolis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we make a parallel reflection between the meaning of love and death and the literary creation in Cours sur la rive sauvage by Mohammed Dib. In order to understand the irradiation of the Orpheus myth, we show that the interrogation formulated by the novel takes the form of an initiatory journey in the footsteps of the Thracian cantor. We strive to study the phantasmagoria of love in the dibian conception of love. The article seaks to identify traces of Orphism and Kabbalah in the metamorphoses of Iven Zohar's "l’esprit de l’amour" and to dispel the misunderstanding that this love arouses and illustrates on the one hand by an Orphic air in searching the mysteries of art and, on the other hand, being in search of salvation.

The article analyzes the peculiarities of the conflict and the system of characters in contemporary Ukrainian plays with an “irreal” (unreal) chronotope. The works of Ukrainian playwrights from 2000 to 2010 featured a variety of conflicts embodied in them, the combination of different types of conflicts in one work, the flow of one species to another (internal – external conflicts, ideological, social, love, family, moral, religious, existential and no existences; conflicts Character – Character, Character – Group, Character – Environment, Character – Metaphysical notion). The heroes in “irreal” plays are people with extraordinary abilities, bioroboty, fantastic creatures, angels and characters from the other world. Characters are revealed in actions, dialogues and small monologues. In plays by S. Shchuchenko, interpersonal, love conflicts are the main ones. The author shows the type of hero who has killed himself in extreme abilities and kills them in all people who are not like him (“Return”); he persuades readers and viewers that harmony prevails in the world, and all people, animals and plants are connected with each other – so that the world needs to be grateful and positive (“HELP”); The playwright develops the theme of harmonious relationships between men and women (F.ART, Relic). In the works of S. Shchuchenko “Without a Horse”, J. Bezpyatchuk “The Court”, “Truba” and A. Naumov “Forward in the Promised” illustrate the conflicts between man and society. Moral conflicts become the main in the plays of N.L. Miroshnichenko “The Agreement with the Angel” (search for the main character of the meaning of his life), O. Goncharov “Seven Steps to Calvary” (creation of a vivid image of the thief-anti-Messiah Messiah-Japheth), O. Mykolaychuk-Nizovtsya “Take away the waiter from heaven, or Why do we get last year’s snow” (the creation of the static character of the hero – “antimitstsa”). In a psychological play with elements of the symbolism P. Arie “Colors” personified different age periods of Mary’s life in such characters as Woman in Pink, Woman in Orange, Woman in Red, Woman in Purple, and Woman in Black (White). The conflict of this work is exalted, it is closely connected with the main existential conflicts of mankind. In the fabulous plays of S. Shchuchenko, “Snow Queen” and V. Kovalenko, “Mirror” the world of fantastic creatures and common things is projected into problems of human relationships (interpersonal and interpersonal). The conflict of V. Kovalenko’s fairy tales can be considered internal: the results of internal conflicts that occur in the “souls” or “thoughts” of human things, affect the real reality and can change the thoughts and feelings of their masters.

Taking up the challenge of comprehending the history of gardening in the Atlantic world through the frame of "moving landscapes" demands that we confront the wake of the unfinished histories of transatlantic slavery, settler coloniality, and dispossession. Such a confrontation obliges us to reckon with the spectral violence of landscaping in the making of the Atlantic world, or what I call landscape vertigo. In understanding landscape vertigo not only as a matter of effects and affects but also as a call for praxis, I lay out four propositions for understanding landscaping as machine of necropower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delves into the interaction between newly emerging technologies, sciences and a new theory of knowledge that the spectacles of the phantasmagoria were calling up at the end of the 18th century. It claims that - having been established as a permanent attraction - these practices unfolded a specific energy, caused by the anachronistic mix 'between a science centre and an amusement arcade', between techno-logics (the scientific discourse on technics) and techno-magics (the experience of sensation, wonder and the supernatural caused by technical effects) in a context in which science - as a theory of nature and a theory of knowledge - drastically changed due to the emergence of new, modernizing kinds of machines, such as steam engines, batteries, electrical and atmospheric instruments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nueva Revista del Pacífico is the property of Universidad de Playa Ancha de Ciencias de la Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)