Bart Vandenabeele

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"New" Media, Art, and Intercultural CommunicationBart Vandenabeele (bio)It is fairly common — but perhaps not altogether innocent — to avoid addressing new media and intercultural aspects of communication in one and the same essay. Here, however, both issues are treated together. I shall investigate, in a perhaps somewhat unusual way, the phenomenon of "new" artistic media and some related issues such as virtual reality, computer and telecommunications technology, and cyberspace. I offer some philosophical remarks, especially of an epistemological kind, that are important to every debate in which terms like multimedia art, "new" media art, and screen based art occur. I argue that the novelty of some changes in the use of artistic media tends to be overemphasized and dramatized. Furthermore, I shall point to the lack of interest in intercultural aspects of artistic communication and to the relevance an intercultural orientation can have for reflection on the phenomenon of so-called "new" media in art.1It has often been claimed that art is the best possible window into another community. Art would be a universal language and contact with works of art supposedly offers the best direct or immediate internal access to another community. This is purported to be a kind of access that cannot possibly be matched by knowledge about the geography, religion, and history. Even John Dewey believes that "au fond, the aesthetic quality is the same for Greeks, Chinese, Americans."2 This idea is surprisingly reminiscent of Clive Bell's "discovery" of Significant Form in so-called primitive art.3 Dewey says thatbarriers are dissolved, limiting prejudices melt away, when we enter into the spirit of Negro or Polynesian art. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude."4To this contention one could object in the following way. Immediate contact with for example, Congolese Nkisi nkondi fetish statues (in the museum of [End Page 1] African Art and History in Tervuren), which are bristling with nails are quite shocking to Europeans — such as Joseph Conrad in the Congo.5 Only by acquaintance with facts that are external to the artwork can one get real access to and understanding of them. One has to know that the nails are meant to seal dispute resolutions and that the statues "were considered so powerful that they were sometimes kept outside the village."6 Only when I know this, will my first perception be seriously altered. It is an objection that is often made against the privilege enjoyed by the immediate contact with the senses: knowledge of the "context" can enhance our appreciation of the art of the foreign community.Both the universalist view and the objection are flawed.7 First of all, we have to ask whether we can make such a sharp distinction between internal and external information and, second, whether it is correct to presuppose a typical proper aesthetics to make artistic communication possible. Is not every form of life already the (not fully definable) outcome of conscious or unconscious influence by other forms of life? What would be the so-called "own" internal aesthetics by which we should judge the famous "Turkish" Iznik tiles that reflect especially the Ottoman rulers' interest in Chinese porcelain, or the "Japanese" aesthetics of Zen Buddhism that is the result of a century-long historical interaction between Japanese culture and the new, foreign religion of Buddhism, which traveled from Japan to India via China and Korea? What would be the "typical" English garden, which was realized on the basis of travel reports from the Far East? And what of the Eastern influence on so-called typical Western painters as Matisse, Whistler, and Degas or composers such as Debussy, Messiaen, Ravel, Rimski-Korsakow and Puccini? What is clear is that it is completely unclear what is "own," "typical," or "authentic." Live communities are never isolated islands developing by themselves. It is as impossible to demarcate strictly the "proper" from the "foreign" as it is to find a universal language that would make artistic communication possible in an absolutely definitive way.Just as it is not necessary to share a language to communicate8 — this holds both for people...

This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, as well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen).

The article explores German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's view on aesthetics and the values of art. It contends that some important aspects of Schopenhauer's discussion of tragedy indicate that the theory that the value of art is deductible to the aesthetic pleasure it affords is inadequate. Moreover, it claims that Schopenhauer attaches great importance to the distinction between concept and idea. It also asserts that Schopenhauer's account of aesthetic experience is inspired by Plato's ideas

Drawing on anthropological examples of first contacts between people from different cultures, I argue that non-verbal communication plays a far bigger part in intercultural communication than has been acknowledged in the literature so far. Communication rests on mutually attuning in a large number of judgements. Some sort of structuring principle is needed at this point, and Davidson's principle of charity is a good candidate, provided sufficient attention is given to non-verbal communication. There will always be more and less successful interpretations and translations, and their success will depend on the success of the non-verbal communication at hand. There is no need for cognitive or semantic universals: people understand each other because they share (a) certain form(s) of life. How ever, it is incorrect to treat forms of life as rigid entities with clear boundaries: it is both impossible and unnecessary to determine them in an exact way. Any appeal to cognitive or cultural essences to explain how people communicate successfully is flawed. My critique of essentialism is not a defence of linguistic ‘anything goes' relativism whatsoever. Assumptions underwriting a relativist stance often wrongly issue, in a decidedly non-relativist confidence in one fixed set of categories, values or meanings. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.21(2) 2002: 85-96

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetic Solidarity "after" Kant and LyotardBart Vandenabeele (bio)Whatever view we hold, it must be shown / Why every lover has a wish to make / Some other kind of otherness his own: / Perhaps in fact we never are alone.—W. H. AudenIntroductionUndoubtedly one of the most fascinating aspects of Kant's aesthetics is the link that the Königsberg philosopher establishes between aesthetic judging and the idea of being-together and being-in-community. This connection is developed through a subtle analysis of aesthetic communicability or shareability (Mitteilbarkeit). A judgment of beauty, what Kant terms "a pure judgment of taste,"—that is, a judgment "that is not influenced by charm or emotion (though these may be connected with a liking for the beautiful), and whose determining basis is therefore merely the purposiveness of the form" (CJ, §13, 223)1—does not postulate everyone's agreement. Yet Kant claims that it does require this agreement from everyone.The judgment of the sublime, on the other hand—which is not based on pure pleasure but on a "mixture" of pleasure and displeasure, on a rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, the same object" (CJ, §27, 258), or, as Kant writes, on "a displeasure that we present at the same time as purposive" (CJ, §27, 259)—also "demands" universal validity. But this "demand" (or "call," as Kant sometimes writes) is not as immediate (or unmediated) as in the pure judgment of taste. The universal shareability that is proper to the judgment of the sublime passes through the moral law. According to Jean-François Lyotard, this implies that "the sublime feeling is [End Page 17] neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the destruction of one by the other in the violence of their differend. This differend cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated to all thought."2 Whatever the exact meaning of these words may be, the gist seems to be that Kant's analysis of the judgment of the sublime implies the impossibility of any sort of genuine togetherness.I shall argue that this is too rash a conclusion and that a more "plastic" and pragmatic conception of "being-in-community" can be deduced from Kant's idea of the universal shareability of the judgment of the sublime—a conception lacking in Lyotard's characterizations of togetherness. In this article I merely hint at possible ways to connect the possibility of the communicability of the sublime and this more pragmatic conception of togetherness. I will try to show why Lyotard is wrong to suppose that Kant's analysis of the judgment of the sublime testifies to a crisis of being-together. If Kant's account really pertains to some sort of crisis, it may well be to the crisis of the highly contentious idea that being-together ought to be based on some harmony of feeling(s) or shared essence(s). To understand the gist and scope of Kant's complex analysis, however, we shall have to study first how pure aesthetic judgments that are grounded in the subject's pure feeling of pleasure and/or displeasure (Lust oder Unlust) can establish universally valid norms or an Idea of aesthetic solidarity without appeal to conceptual rules or rational laws. Only afterwards can we get a better view of Lyotard's misinterpretation of Kant's ideas on togetherness.The Feeling of the Beautiful: Solidarity in statu nascendiAdmiring a still life by Cézanne, one could say, "Look, that's an apple," which is a determinant judgment employing concepts. However, judging that the painting is beautiful occurs without the employment of any concepts and is completely disinterested; it reflects on the pure feeling of pleasure, which surges on the occasion of a particular empirical sensation. Our judgment is a pure judgment of taste only if the following conditions are true:1. The pleasure grounding it is not motivated by any (empirical, ethical, theoretical, or practical) interest.2. The subjective purposiveness of the pleasure we experience is not known (in contrast to the agreeable that we experience when we satisfy a desire or need).3. The judgment is singular—"this sunset in Urbana is beautiful" is an...

Since the advent and standardization of the theatrical feature length film, the audio-visual short has been more or less marginalized in the discussions on cinematic experience. Historically stretching from the ‘early cinema’ of the vaudeville, to the now obsolete ‘little films’ of YouTube and beyond, the audio-visual short traverses a wide variety of media platforms, practices and technologies, including animation, video installation art, video clips and TV commercials, as well as animated GIFs, machinima and DIY movies, made to measure for handheld devices. The widespread usage of the format suggests that short audio-visual artefacts are not an anomaly or rarity on the periphery of cinema, but rather should be put at the centre of our discussions when rethinking cinematic experience and the moving image today. Such is the request we have made to the contributors to this volume: to write a short essay on short film experience

The mainstream interpretation of Schopenhauer's philosophy is dialectical and stresses the continuity between aesthetics and ethics. This interpretation has its own plausibility but is overly confident in the letter. Restricting the value of Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory to a mere propaedeutic of an ethics, wherein the ascetic ideal of the denial of willing is central, might seem fully justified at first sight, but clearly overlooks a number of crucial complexities and ambivalences. First of all, it obliterates the specificity and complexity of Schopenhauer's theoryof (aesthetic) pleasure. In the first section, aesthetic pleasure is shown to be closely linked with a peculiar form of non-conceptual insight, which is at the core of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In the second section, it is argued that aesthetic pleasure cannotbe reduced to the so-called negative pleasure that accompanies the liberation from individual willing. The dialectical reading of Schopenhauer's philosophy invariably stresses the negativity of aesthetic pleasure to argue for the 'bridge' between the aesthetic disinterestedness and the ethical denial of willing. Schopenhauer's aesthetics, however, acknowledges a kind of intrinsic and positive pleasure, which is bound up with the perception of the (Platonic) Idea in and through the concrete object and with the non-ordinary use of the cognitive faculties. The aesthetic contemplation is a peculiar kind of(non-conceptual) self-consciousness, which is itself a source of pleasure and is to some degree independent of the pleasure of relief from the demands of desire. Moreover, this dialectical interpretation avoids a detailed and radical scrutiny of Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime feeling. In the second section, the sublime feeling is contrasted with the beautiful and is shown to be a pure feeling that meets the specific conditions of an aesthetic appreciation. An attentive reading of Schopenhauer's fascinating theory of the sublime intimates a new interpretation of his philosophy, in which the fissures between aesthetics and ethics appear. The aesthetic feeling of the sublime hampers a smooth crossing from the aesthetic realm to the ethical denial of willing in asceticism, since it is not at all an harmonious feeling which accompanies the liberation from the will and does not promise an everlasting freedom from willing. The sublime feeling is an ambivalent mixture of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow and reveals a deep and unbridgeable gap in the heart of subjectivity itself. It is clearly distinct from and even contradictory to the ascetic's ideal of restraint and denial of the will

In Schopenhauer’s view, the whole organic and inorganic world is ultimately governed by an insatiable, blind will. Life as a whole is purposeless: there is no ultimate goal or meaning, for the metaphysical will is only interested in manifesting itself in (or as) a myriad of phenomena, which we call the “world” or “life.” Human life, too, is nothing but an insignificant product or “objectivation” of the blind, unconscious will, and because our life is determined by willing (that is, by needs, affects, urges, and desires), and since willing is characterized by lack, our life is essentially full of misery and suffering. We are constantly searching for objects that can satisfy our needs and desires; once we have ..