•  6
    'Schools quite like this': Issues of power, discourse and
    with Pat Sikes
    In Jerome Satterthwaite, Elizabeth Atkinson & Wendy Martin (eds.), The Disciplining of Education: New Languages of Power and Resistance, Trentham Books. pp. 2--89. 2004.
  • Dance and Subtraction: Notes on Alain Badiou's Inaesthetics
    Dance Research Journal 42 (03): 50-64. 2012.
    In an essay entirely devoted to the subject of dance in Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics [Petit manuel d'inesthétique (Badiou 2005b)], we find the following contentious statement: “Dance is not an art, because it is the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body” (69). At first glance, this statement seems strangely familiar to the reader versed in writing about dance, particularly philosophical writing. “Dance is not an art”: Badiou critiques Mallarmé as not realizing this a…Read more
  •  16
    This article concerns early music, the voice, and early music historiography. In his Harmonies of the World of 1619, Johannes Kepler makes an audacious construction that claims to link celestial harmonies with earthly polyphony singing. Following the lead of Gary Tomlinson, I consider this construction in the light of several ideas from poststructuralism, with a focus on the writing of Foucault, Lacan and Deleuze. Using the voice and its histories as a guide, the article culminates in a discussi…Read more
  • Geometry, Embodied Cognition and Choreographic Praxis
    with Taku Ando
    International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 10 (2): 179-192. 2014.
    A common approach to movement creation amongst contemporary choreographers involves dancers being asked to create movement in response to instructions that require them to form mental images, and then to make decisions in response to the internal feedback loops these images generate. The formation of these images is also facilitated in many cases by the use of digital technologies, via data representation and visualization. This article explores connections between technology, choreographic prax…Read more
  •  59
    Aesthetic Experience, Subjective Historical Experience and the Problem of Constructivism
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 7 (1): 57-81. 2013.
    This article takes as its starting point the recent work of Frank Ankersmit on subjective historical experience. Such an experience, which Ankersmit describes as a ‘sudden obliteration of the rift between present and past’ is connected strongly with the Deweyan theory of art as experiential, which contains an account of aesthetic experience as affording a similar breakdown in the polarization of the subject and object of experience. The article shows how other ideas deriving from the phenomenolo…Read more
  •  60
    This essay aims to answer a simple question: why dance matters to us. I will argue that of all the philosophical approaches to aesthetics, it is phenomenology that is best equipped to answer this question satisfactorily. Other approaches, which derive from poststructuralism, critical theory, semiotics or historicist hermeneutics tend to assimilate meaning in dance to the specific sociocultural and historical contexts in which dance works were produced, and hence to methodologies aligned with th…Read more
  •  13
    Aesthetic Negativity and Aisthetic Traits
    Critical Horizons 16 (1): 52-69. 2015.
    This article concerns the notion of aesthetic negativity, and related ideas regarding the autonomy of art. After giving some initial definitions and a brief historical sketch of these concepts, we will examine the definition proposed by arguably the greatest thinker of aesthetic negativity, Theodor Adorno, and its recent semiotic reconstruction in the work of Christoph Menke. This reconstruction configures aesthetic negativity and autonomy jointly as the capacity of artworks, and the experiences…Read more
  •  17
    Jacques Rancière has defined the 'distribution of the sensible' as the effect of a type of aesthetico-political decision making that creates a partitioning of the realm of the perceivable in relation to both art and society. The artworld itself constructs its own particular types of curatorial partitioning: between art and non-art, between 'dominant, residual and emergent', and between mainstream and periphery. This essay examines certain 'boundary effects' that come into being as a result of th…Read more