Aesthetic Harmony and Aesthetic Agonism

This chapter provides a concise working review and critical examination of the long history of scientific and neurological interest in art as it intersects with research about the brain. Examining the historical connections between aesthetic practices and compositional performances with the constitution of the changing or atypical brain offers interesting epistemological insights into the relationship between art and neurodegenerative disease at the intersection of illness and creativity. This regards the aesthetical, practical, and methodological foundations of human creativity and neuroscientific imagery throughout time. The current chapter studies several profound issues regarding classical empirical “styles” in neurophysiology and brain research, including how knowledge is generated in the laboratory and the neurological clinic. Contemporary practices of investigation and communication in brain research have appeared to move the arts and neurosciences ever more apart yet, in fact, through analyzing and appreciating artistic elements such as visual beauty, aesthetic practices, as well as the emotional appreciation of research data and clinical insights, these two fields can be brought closer together. This chapter thus circumscribes—through taking a historical and critical perspective—the turning points where physiological recording devices have broken through the boundaries of human perception as well as aesthetic judgments and deductions by researchers and clinicians. It offers good reasons and tangible examples why modern-day clinical neurologists and bench neuroscientists should start to appreciate the richness of their own creative solutions and aesthetic concepts, as these are deeply ingrained in every system used or innovated in the sciences of the brain. The artistic presentations, aesthetical criteria of their selection, along with the interrelation of visual products in the arts have only recently become the subject of considerable historiographical research (Dierig and Schmidgen, Physiological and psychological practices in the 19th century: Their relation to literature, art and technology. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2001). While this broad tendency began in areas of art history and media studies, the historiography of clinical neuroscience has now participated in these new analytical perspectives. The fundamental epistemological questions of creative expression, the relationship between life science practices and the diagnostic views of neurological disorders remain unfortunately quite under-explored. The “iconic turn” (Nikolow and Bluma, NTM 10:201–8, 2002) and the investigation of “visual cultures” (Heintz and Huber, Mit den Augen denken. Voldemeer: Strategien der Sichtbarmachung. Vienna, 2001) moved in the direction towards more in-depth analyses of the media products as well as the practical aesthetic means of modern brain research, in the way they are received in this historically and epistemologically focused chapter.

The aim of the paper is to examine the possible relationships between the different dimensions of aesthetics on the one hand, and medical practice and medical ethics on the other hand. Firstly, I consider whether the aesthetic perception of the human body is relevant for medical practice. Secondly, a possible analogy between the artistic process and medical action is examined. The third section concerns the comparison between medical ethical judgements and aesthetic judgement of taste. It is concluded that the mutual relevance between the aesthetic sphere, moral judgement and medical practice can be understood only if we recognize these spheres as distinct.

Reviewed by: Kant's Theory of Normativity: Exploring the Space of Reason by Konstantin Pollok Matthew C. Altman Konstantin Pollok. Kant's Theory of Normativity: Exploring the Space of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi + 326. Cloth, $99.99. Konstantin Pollok's ambitious aim in this book is to formulate a unified theory of normativity that runs throughout Kant's three Critiques. Specifically, he argues that, on Kant's view, synthetic a priori principles structure "the space of reason" and determine the validity of our judgments. Such principles are constitutive of our epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic practices by setting the conditions for what makes a meaningful judgment in those areas, but they are also normative in that the particular judgments we make can be right or wrong depending on whether we successfully apply the principles. For example, to be making knowledge claims, we must use the pure concepts of the understanding to interpret our experience; but we may use the category of causality wrongly if we misidentify the cause of an event or attribute causality to what lies beyond possible experience. Pollok provides the vocabulary to explain what is happening here: in claiming that our judgments are valid, we acknowledge the rational standards against which our claims can be understood as claims about something, we can fail to meet these standards, and the judgments can be imputed to us. [End Page 177] The book is divided into three parts. Part I sets Kant's theory of normativity in its historical context. Pollok interprets Kant's Copernican turn as a rejection of rationalist perfectionism. Instead of focusing on the reality of ideas, and subjecting them to norms (i.e. different degrees of clarity or perfection), Kant focuses on relations of ideas (i.e. judgments) as the medium of normativity. Pollok then sets out a taxonomy or division of judgments for nature, freedom, and purposiveness that defines possible judgments in terms of several dichotomies: a priori or a posteriori (regarding the source of a judgment's propositional content), analytic or synthetic (regarding its scope), objective or subjective (regarding a judgment's validity), determining or reflective (regarding the extrinsic and intrinsic guidance of the power of judgment), and constitutive or regulative (regarding the justificatory status of principles). In Part II, Pollok turns to what he calls Kant's "transcendental hylomorphism." Hylomorphism is the idea, traceable to Plato, that objects are the result of matter and form together. Kant's hylomorphism is transcendental because the form of a given judgment determines, or is a condition for the possibility of, how propositional content or matter becomes available to us. What makes a form reasonable is its adherence to synthetic a priori principles. The content of our judgments must be determined according to these forms to count as experience, moral maxims, or aesthetic judgments. Pollok talks at length about how matter and form are related in our use of concepts, our judgments, our inferences, and a system of knowledge. Pollok demonstrates the need for synthetic a priori judgments in Part III. The norms of thinking and acting are inherent to the nature of reason—he draws on the natural rights tradition to explain this—and thus they are universal constraints for any imperfectly rational being. He argues against Christine Korsgaard's constructivist interpretation of Kantian normativity, claiming that self-legislation is a matter of holding ourselves to the laws of reason that make epistemic, practical, and aesthetic judgments possible. We do not create such laws, but subject ourselves to synthetic a priori principles by engaging in norm-governed practices. Pollok concludes the book by applying his theory to judgments of experience, practical judgments, and judgments of taste, in order to show how these judgments are made possible by synthetic a priori principles, and how communication among rational beings is governed by them. I have no doubt that Pollok's interpretation of Kant is mostly correct. Those who appreciate Robert Pippin's and Terry Pinkard's work on Kant and Hegel will find this book especially compelling. Pollok's resistance to naturalistic interpretations of Kant is well-founded because explaining judgments in naturalistic terms misses the normative dimension of whether and how our judgments are...

The author of the article analyzes the concept and primary factors of personality aesthetic culture development in the context of higher education in England. The scholars’ works and pedagogical advanced experience of the country nowadays pay special attention to forming personal creativity and self-realization of modern specialists. They are grounded on a high level of aesthetic culture. Among these essential conditions, the following are indicated: solving the issue of forming aesthetic culture at the national level, financing educational cultural projects and the cultural environment in educational institutions, functioning a wide network of cultural centers, which create the opportunities for everybody to aspire to cultural development. Determining the role of control and coordination of the process of forming students’ aesthetic culture, the author highlights the state policy that is interested in education of personal aesthetic culture as well as encourages students’ creative projects. The pedagogical factors of forming aesthetic culture in higher education institutions have been distinguished, namely, aestheticization of the education process, integration of academic subjects and art, implementation of art disciplines, introduction of new methodologies and technologies in the education process. In the article, there have been shown the best standards of experience of English pedagogy for higher education institutions, indicated on the research base of foreign and native scholars. They deserve a thorough study and adoption: collaboration between artists, culture experts an educational institutions, aesthetic practice of students as a part of public life, support of modern cultural-aesthetic environment of educational institutions. It has been concluded that the British education system offers exciting possibilities for development of aesthetic interests for everybody who aims at cultural growth with the help of the wide network of creative centers, educational institutions, public institutions and churches.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Lucrative Fandom: Recognizing the Economic Power of Fanworks and Reimagining Fair Use in Copyright

The method used in this study comprises of creating a literature research based on the concepts of culture, memory, cultural memory, aesthetics, art as the expression of aesthetics, and aesthetic culture and building a series of conceptual frameworks of aesthetics of urban space as a result of this reading and examining process. The approach that makes the basic proposition of this study is that “the examination of the physical structure that generates the general appearance of a city is insufficient to define urban aesthetics.” While the process and outcomes of the elements directing our culture, such as “social justice, quality of life, and ghettoization,” are the most prominent problems to be solved, we should prefer “innovative” attitudes, behaviors, methods, and means rather than “new” ones for development. Memory provides cultural transfer in every matter together with reminiscence. Cultural memory derives from customs and communication but is not identified by them. While human, capital, and culture mobilization are gaining impetus with globalization, cultural memory elements have become a consumption material and amnesia has risen. When we consider the relations between modernity and memory, we observe a constant progress and “memorylessness.” The real world that has no relation to an ideal has no aesthetical value. When the existence of aesthetics is considered, “criticism must be a vision of the world and a philosophical method.” This does not happen at a moment’s notice. Aesthetic perception is a kind of perception that discovers the infinite secret force that belongs to the object. We flourish as we perceive the richness of our surroundings. Besides, the most ethical judgment is aesthetic judgment. This is the sign that shows how important the concept of aesthetics is in our lives. Although we say there is a relative independence for aesthetic value, it can be a means of exploitation against the pragmatic value of the object it belongs to. In this respect, art as the carrier of cultural memory renews itself for the notion of building the ideal rather than rebuilding the reality. Spatial creations with applied arts reveal not only the technical improvement of a society but also the lifestyle, way of thinking, vision, understanding the ideals, and psyche of different social layers. Aesthetic culture is our way of life, reflected in urban space, that has been passed to us from our ancestors, is revealing our attitude and behaviors toward our surroundings naturally and unconsciously, by the summation of social experience, and is produced socially by our mental structure. Globalization threatens our cultural memory, and the culture industry jeopardizes our aesthetic culture. That’s why, urban aesthetics is under threat. Under these circumstances, reaching the ideal for aesthetics of urban spaces, based on today’s quality of life, the “unique” creativity in the reality of time with fictions, made with the help of art, embracing the self without denying universality, far from individual profit, in accordance with social decisions, must be inevitable.

What is New Media? Ten Years after the Language of New Media Alexander R. Galloway (bio) A frank assessment to begin: There are very few books on new media worth reading.1 Just when the naysayers decry the end of the written word, bookstore shelves still overflow with fluff on digital this and digital that. And even as a countervailing chorus emerged that was more skeptical of the widespread adoption of new media—in France, Jacques Chirac once spoke disparagingly about “that Anglo-Saxon network” (for, as anyone knows, in the beginning there was Minitel)—it was evident that the Internet revolution had already taken place in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Like it or not, the new culture is networked and open source, and one is in need of intelligent interventions to evaluate it. In the years since its original publication in 2001, Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media has become one of the most read and cited texts on the topic.2 It is a key entry in the disciplines of poetics and cultural aesthetics, and has helped define the new field of software studies. The book is not without its limitations, however, and perhaps today one may begin to reevaluate the text with the fresh eyes of historical distance, and through it reassess the rampant open sourcing of all aspects of cultural and aesthetic life, from our tools to our texts, from our bodies to our social milieus. The Language of New Media comes out of the first generation of Internet culture. What this means is that the book is the product of a specific sliver of history when the conditions of the production and distribution of knowledge were rather different than they are today. What was once a subversive medium is now a spectacle playground like any other. The first phase of Web culture, one must admit, carried a revolutionary impulse; call it the Saint-Just to today’s imperial era. Manovich’s book is a product of that first phase. Walls were coming down, hierarchies were crumbling, the old brick-and-mortar society was giving away to a new digital universe. On the one hand, new virulent ways of looking at the world were forming with unprecedented ferocity—sometimes conveniently labeled the California [End Page 377] ideology—coalescing around the neoliberal impulse to open source everything (information wants to be free, desire wants to be free, capital wants to be free) and the promise to liberate mankind in ways only dreamed of by our forebears in the social movements of the 1960s. On the other hand, amid this process of leveling, a new Republic of Letters began to form using e-mail and bulletin-board systems that seemed to offer a real intellectual and social community devoted to the exploration and critique of new media. The Language of New Media is a product of this community. Discussed and refined in online forums like nettime and partially previewed prior to publication on the e-mail list Rhizome (a website named enthusiastically, if naively, after the emancipatory topology described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), The Language of New Media was written for, within, and against the new Internet culture of the late 1990s. This is not to suggest that Manovich’s book has nothing more to say to us today, nor that we should look backward with nostalgic yearning for a simpler time. On the contrary, the simple premise of the book—that new media may be defined via reference to a foundational language or set of formal and poetic qualities identified across all sorts of new media objects, and indeed across historical and social context—suggests the opposite approach: we are required to think critically and historically because the digital is so structural, so abstract, so synchronic. The strength of the book lies in its description of digital technologies as poetic and aesthetic objects. It aims to be a kind of general textbook on new media. Manovich begins from his own experience with software and then he extends his observations so that the “telling detail” becomes a piece in a larger system. Is Manovich’s worldview a modernist one? I think...

In this essay we reflect on the relationship between aesthetic practices and racialised conceptions of belonging. In particular, we explore attributions of beauty and ugliness, order and disorder, as these are made in relation to local space, and we consider how these attributions can be linked to proprietorial claims about who is welcome in those spaces. Our focus is thus on the everyday aesthetics of location: the ways in which aesthetic judgements are tied to the inhabitation of space and, in this case, the exclusionary potential of ‘ways of looking’ at such spaces and at the social relations which exist within them. Drawing on data from qualitative research in two adjoining neighbourhoods in Glasgow’s Southside, we make three analytical contributions. First, we consider the racialising potential of everyday aesthetic responses to local space. Second, we explore the ways in which local social relations themselves can be aesthetically interpreted. Third, we reflect on forms of everyday aesthetic resistance.

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's <i>Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty</i>

The role of place in cultivating artistic practice, communities and audiences is well established and the economic, social and cultural benefits that flow from this are becoming better understood. By contrast, the factors impacting and influencing access to these places is poorly theorised. This paper identifies and examines these factors as they apply to live music in Australia, through a qualitative survey of live music patrons and venues. We compare the themes identified from our data with existing theories of access in the arts, with a particular focus on the ways in which place-based music scenes may encourage or exclude participation. We address the question of how access affects participation within these scenes, as well as how access might be improved.

Introduction: Facial aesthetics is an intricate domain bridging biology, psychology, and culture. It is influenced by evolutionary traits and societal norms, often driving demand for cosmetic treatments. While public perceptions of these interventions are widely studied, professional evaluations remain underexplored. This study examines differences in aesthetic judgement and treatment identification between healthcare professionals and laypeople, aiming to enhance clinical practice and research in facial aesthetics. Methods: A cross-sectional survey, administered via Microsoft Forms, assessed aesthetic evaluations from 88 participants, including professionals (e.g., dentists, dermatologists, and plastic surgeons) and laypeople. The survey comprised demographic questions, self-reported aesthetic assessment abilities, and visual evaluations of pre- and post-treatment images. Statistical analyses, including Fisher's exact test and the Mann-Whitney U Test, evaluated associations between expertise level and judgments of facial beauty and treatment accuracy. Results: This study found no significant differences in subjective aesthetic improvement ratings between professionals and laypeople, suggesting that aesthetic judgments are inherently subjective. However, professionals demonstrated greater accuracy in identifying treatments in 3 of 7 cases (p < 0.05). Self-assessment revealed a critical disparity, with experts often underrating their skills compared to non-experts. Discussion: These findings highlight the interplay between expertise and subjectivity in aesthetic evaluations. While professional training enhances procedural recognition, biases influence judgement regardless of expertise. Incorporating standardised evaluation frameworks can refine aesthetic assessments across groups. Conclusions: This study underscores the value of expertise in treatment identification and advocates for standardised assessment methods to minimise bias, improve training, and support patient-centred aesthetic care.

The author of the article considers the fact that art is a factor of integration of an individual and an environment, a person and a society. Every personality asserts in various spheres of social reality. Thus an effective means of aesthetic development is the involvement of future teachers in national heritage and culture, which manifests itself in the traditions of national holidays in order to form an aesthetic culture of the individual.The concept of "aesthetic culture of the individual" is a multi-faceted category; therefore its structural elements are information, emotional and feeling, and activity components. The basis of the information component is knowledge of the development and formation of Ukrainian national culture, the ability of the individual to reconstitute them in aesthetic judgments. The emotional and feeling component is reconstituted in emotional and feeling attitude to aesthetic values, the interaction of the subject through feelings with the object. Activity component is the orientation of a person towards activity and the process of creating aesthetic values. It integrates information and emotional and feeling factors, gives dynamic nature to the concept of "aesthetic culture"; it is realized in the orientation of a person to create, spread, consume aesthetic values and affects the level of aesthetic culture of the individual.It is determined that the means of formation of aesthetic culture of the individual is a folk holiday as a model of highly aesthetized life; the conditions for its effective formation are outlined, in particular: updating of the content, forms, methods and techniques of aesthetic education; taking into account age and individual peculiarities of the person in the process of aesthetic education; application of psychological and pedagogical principles, in particular emotional and feeling, rational, systematic, principle of consistency; creating of human recourses for formation of the aesthetic culture of the individual.The importance of complex training of future teachers to form the aesthetic culture of the individual, which can be realized in the course of non-formal artistic education through participation in various artistic groups while studying at higher educational institutions, is emphasized.

Research on Bollywood cinema's increasingly global presence identifies the genre as a significant cultural domain for the articulation of diasporic Indian identity and its constitution. Focusing on the appropriation of Bollywood cinema and its filmi song and dance, regarded as a multi-sensual media, the article investigates Bollywood's popularity among Bene Israel immigrants in Israel and explores the aesthetics of diaspora, understood as a politics of consumption, embodied performance of identity and claims to ownership of tradition shaped by commercialized popular culture imported into Israeli society. I suggest that a sentient anthropology may provide insights into cultural identity as emerging out of material, social and aesthetic practices. The participatory culture and multi-sensual milieus inspired by Bollywood's sensorium are constitutive, the paper argues, of diasporic identity and community through their potential to evoke shared emotions and a sense of place and subjectivity, mediated by the qualities of objects, performance styles and etiquette.

The paper establishes the principle of ‘back-formation’ of artistic creation, the process by which artists realise in their work a theme or motif that had not been previously intended but is brought into being as the work comes to fruition. The authors suggest that teaching also should be guided by this principle. To solve the inherent problem of power imbalance in teaching, they appeal to Bakhtin's recourse to aesthetical judgment in addressing relational issues. Gadamer's rehabilitation of prejudices shows that not only is an ethics of relation worked out as an aesthetic practice, but also that aesthetic practices are worked out within an ethics of relation.

Kant interpreters are divided on the question of whether determinate cognition plays a role in the harmony of the faculties in aesthetic judgement. I provide a ‘non-cognitive’ interpretation that allows Kant’s statements regarding judgements of natural beauty to cohere such that determinate cognition need not be taken to perform any role in such judgements. I argue that, in aesthetic harmony, judgement privileges the free activity of the imagination over the cognizing function of the understanding for the purpose of unifying the object, although the free imagination cannot violate the obscure concepts and principles of ordinary common sense.