Pure Sensation Research Articles

Enhancing Empathy Through the Body

Abstract In recent years, many scholars of performing arts, cinema, and mass media have been focusing their studies on the body, examining the perception of the physical experience of projection and connecting bodily states with spiritual and ethical constructs. The purpose of this article is to present how cinema and performance can utilize the body in ways that enhance the audience's empathy. The role of cinema is to enable the viewer to liberate their body from its “individual ownership” and to rediscover its potential. Similarly, performances challenge the audience to respond with their bodies to the stimulation of certain emotions, experiencing a pure sensation through participation. However, experiencing empathy, a viewer can impose their ideas or reactions onto the experiences or emotions of others, believing that what they are experiencing is what others experienced.

A Phenomenological Microgenesis of Art Experience: A Qualitative Study of Zero Mass by Eric Orr

The aim of this study is to provide a phenomenological description of the art experience and by doing so, explaining why art is generally associated with an emotional response, but talked about in cognitive terms. The study is based on a microgenetic experiment in which the informants, prior to an interview, encounter a work of art by the American artist Eric Orr. The work consists of a pitch-black space and provides optimal conditions for a microgenetic study with an actual work of art, not a reproduction, which are typically used in microgenetic studies. The study shows a microgenesis in which pure sensation gives rise to an emotional response without any cognitive inference, and only after the emotional response, cognitive functions such as exploration, contextualization, and comprehension take over in the order mentioned.

Induction and generalization of nocebo effects on itch.

Nocebo effects, that is, negative treatment outcomes due to negative expectancies, can increase itch. Moreover, indirect evidence has shown that nocebo hyperknesis can generalize to another itch modality. Knowledge on response generalization can help to prevent and decrease negative effects. The aims of this study were to investigate (1) the efficacy of inducing nocebo effects on cowhage‐evoked itch via verbal suggestions and (2) whether these effects can generalize to (2a) mechanically evoked touch and (2b) mechanically evoked itch. Forty‐four healthy participants watched a video suggesting that a nocebo solution increases cowhage‐evoked itch and that a control solution does not affect itch. Subsequently, cowhage, mechanical itch, and mechanical touch stimuli were applied. Nocebo effects were measured as the difference in both mean and peak of the outcomes itch and urge to scratch between nocebo and control trials. Main analyses revealed significant nocebo effects on mean and peak itch for all stimuli. For urge to scratch, a significant nocebo effect was only observed for mechanical touch (peak). As mechanical stimuli did not induce pure sensations as planned, posthoc sensitivity analyses were run for mechanical stimuli that individually induced either touch or itch at baseline. These analyses showed similar results for generalization to mechanical itch, but generalization to mechanical touch was non‐significant. This study showed that merely verbal suggestion can induce nocebo effects on cowhage‐evoked itch and that these effects can generalize to another itch modality. Future studies may examine how to prevent negative experiences from generalizing to subsequent encounters.

Das Recht in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft

Abstract Recent publications (Henrich, Seeberg) claim that Kant has been profoundly influenced by contemporary publications on juridical deductions. I try to show, that this cannot be right. The introductory note of the “Transcendental Deduction” (Critique of Pure Reason A 84) poses two questions: “quid facti?” and “quid juris?”. The first is answered by the demonstration of the possibility of relations between pure concepts and pure intuition und sensations, the second by the implicit refutation of David Hume. Kant and his interpreters sustain the possibility of using juridical concepts, that are neither related to real juridical facts nor are only metaphers, but have a special philosophical signification. But what should that be?

"It's Not Blood, It's Red": Color as Category, Color as Sensation in Jean-Luc Godard's Le M�pris, Pierrot Le Fou, Weekend , and Passion

Through a close Deleuzian reading of Le Mépris, Pierrot le Fou, Weekend, and Passion, this essay explores Jean-Luc Godard's use of color as the vehicle for a nomadic ballade/ballad (trans. excursion or road trip/song and dance), categorized by a weakness of motor-linkages that is capable of releasing huge forces of disintegration. Color thus acts as a powerful form of deterritorialization and re-territorialization, creating new conjunctions between and across genres and images, forming new categories in the interstices between series. The result is a logic of sensation that induces a heteroglossia of potential subjectivities, whereby the body is always its own other, always in search of the next series that will make it manifest as something incommensurable, as pure sensation.

‘Philosophic Numbers Smooth’: The Ambivalence of Song in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

ABSTRACTThis essay considers the double currency of song in Keats’s poetry. I read Keats’s presentation of song as a symbol of both transcendent purity and meaningless sensuousness against the eighteenth-century rise of abstract music and speculative histories of the origins of language. Conceptually released from logos, music is considered to be expressive of individual interiority through technique and structure. Traced to involuntary expressions of the emotions, human language finds kinship with (mechanical) animal vocalisation. At the intersections of language and music, song, as a motif, allows Keats to explore how we translate quantitative material into aesthetic experience through the projection of intentionality. Keats plays with the suppression of the anxious quantifying tendencies of the human mind through absorption into pure sensation and intransitive consciousness. Ultimately, however, Keats’s poetics, with animal song as its ideal, frustrates itself with its self-annihilating desire for sensation without meaning.

The early Yogācāra theory of no-self

ABSTRACTI reconstruct early Yogācāra theory of no-self based on works by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. I introduce the idea of the cognitive schema (CS) of the self, a conception borrowed from the developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget. A fundamental CS is a psychological function that guides the formation of perceptions. I propose that Manas can be understood in terms of being the CS of the self, a psychological mechanism from which perceptions of external objects are formed. In addition, I argue that non-imaginative wisdom can be regarded as an experience during which the CS of the self does not function, such that one only possesses pure sensations without perceptions of external objects. After the repeated experience of non-imaginative wisdom, the CS of the self is changed to the purified CS of no-self. It still supports interactions with the external world, but in a way that does not allow the four afflictions (self-delusion, self-belief, self-conceit, and self-love) to arise.Abbreviations: MS: Mahāyānasaṃgraha; TS: Triṃśikā-kārikā; TSN: Trisvabhāvanirdeśa; VVS: Viṃśatikā Vijñaptimātratāsiddhi

The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojirō by Stephen Dodd

Reviewed by: The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojirō by Stephen Dodd Eve Zimmerman The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojirō. By Stephen Dodd. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 304pages. Hardcover $57.00; soft-cover $28.00. Stephen Dodd’s The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojirō contains the first complete translation of Kajii Motojirō’s works, along with a series of thoughtful and well-researched critical essays that situate the iconoclastic “modernist” in the intellectual and artistic currents of 1920s and 1930s Japan. Beginning with its appearance in the clever title, the word “things” is used to suggest the materiality of the modernist moment, or Kajii’s fascination with the speed, motion, and commodification of city life. At the same time, the phrase “the youth of things” foreshadows the end of a modernist movement that would soon rupture and slip away. In the case of Kajii, the divergent meanings of Dodd’s title converge at the level of the body: from the mid-1920s until his death in 1932, Kajii graphed his own physical decline from tuberculosis in a series of finely detailed and sensitive prose poems, pictures of the world and his own body falling through it. In his introduction, Dodd uses Kajii’s writing as a means to recreate the breadth and dizzying scale of cultural production that took place in Japan from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, along with the attendant social and political changes. By situating Kajii among a group of male contemporaries who made up the literary establishment (bundan) of his day, Dodd stresses that although Kajii was drawn to various movements, he never followed any one literary coterie in particular. Far more pressing was the question of his own mortality. The first chapter of the book focuses on how Kajii crafted a writer’s persona out of his experience of severe illness and impending death. This study does not fall under the category of the “literary biography” per se, but does demonstrate Dodd’s mindfulness of how bodily experience generates subjectivity. Indeed, this chapter goes one step further, arguing for a link between Kajii’s physical body and Japan’s “body politic,” which grew increasingly nationalistic in the early 1930s. By parsing Kajii’s use of the trope of darkness, for example, Dodd illustrates how it referred both to Kajii’s spiritual quest (for a darkness replete with peace) and to the ways in which the state attempted to banish those with unhealthy bodies and unhealthy thoughts. Dodd’s openness to reading the text through various lenses (including gender studies, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism) lends itself to a refreshing breadth of interpretation. Like his subject, Dodd’s work cannot be reduced to a single approach. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, Dodd turns an analytical eye to Kajii’s texts. At first, he pinpoints the modernist strain in Kajii and attempts to define the movement itself. Rather than locate modernist leanings in pulsating city streets or in the rows of commodities that line market shelves, however, Dodd focuses on the deep sense of loss that reverberated through the intellectual and artistic movements of Japan in the [End Page 126] 1920s, which were suffused with the sense that one could never go home again. He nevertheless identifies a sense of optimism in Kajii’s work, which increasingly reflects the writer’s growing interest in a realm of pure sensation and also explores “new meanings for space and time” (p. 67). Providing numerous examples of sensation in the texts he examines, Dodd traces how the nihilistic Remon (Lemon) can be refigured from a story of annihilation to one of epiphany: the bright yellow fruit splattered over the books that Maruzen had rendered as commodities. Other moments in Kajii’s writings also come to mind: his painfully beautiful evocation of the passage of a frog through water in Kōbi (Mating), or the main character’s midnight walk through the mountains in Fuyu no hae (Winter Flies). In Kajii’s hands, the world is rendered in shifting but vivid images, sounds, and sensory perceptions that reduce...

Sensorial, Supra-Sensorial, Hélio-Sensorial. Analyzing Oiticica in Action

Este texto estudia el conjunto de trabajos de los Parangolés que el artista brasileno Hélio Oiticica desarrolló entre 1964 y 1978 a partir de incursiones teóricas en la psicología del juego, del psicoanálisis, de los cultos religiosos y el arte op. Para Oiticica estas capas de uso interactivo ofrecen posibilidades de expresión creativa. Mediante el análisis de una película documental que muestra al artista usando un parangolé, se evidencia que la expresividad está destinada principalmente al participante mismo. Oiticica lo llama autosensación e intenta alcanzar lo suprasensorial. Es un experimento que emplea todo el cuerpo y especialmente los órganos sensoriales. Esto singulariza sus propuestas artísticas que requieren del participante una inmersión en sí mismo y disfrutar de las sensaciones puras, preferiblemente antes de cualquier conceptualización. Las estructuras y colores en constante movimiento conducen con una atención desenfocada a una especie de sobrecarga que atenúa una postura distanciada identificable para promover así una inmersión comparable a un trance.

Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and Fictions of the Enlightenment

This essay argues the chaotic, violent, and truly Lucretian implications of Michel Serres’s attack on the Empire of Signs is moderated and localized by Bruno Latour—figured more as a digital field or network than as the meteorology of “deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration, rendings, gaps” that Serres associates with the unpredictable drift of modernity. Latour tries to stabilize the non-metrical energy of Epicurean clinamina as cross-references arranged on a grid. The confidence of his tabulation stands in contrast to the effects of exigent powers escaping human self-mastery in Serres’s account of invariances such as the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. Similarly the ecstatic isolation of early experimentalists amidst the pressure and traction of pure sensation is a far cry from the mute Parliament of Things Latour spotted in Robert Boyle’s laboratory, whose vocalization he superintends under the aegis of representation, a word with a strange career in the history of civil society.

Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age

Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age

We Are Not All ‘Self‐Blind’: A Defense of a Modest Introspectionism

AbstractShoemaker (1996) presented a priori arguments against the possibility of ‘self‐blindness’, or the inability of someone, otherwise intelligent and possessed of mental concepts, to introspect any of her concurrent attitude states. Ironically enough, this seems to be a position that Gopnik (1993) and Carruthers (2006, 2008, 2009a,b) have proposed as not only possible, but as the actual human condition generally! According to this ‘Objectivist’ view, supposed introspection of one's attitudes is not ‘direct’, but an ‘inference’ of precisely the sort we make about the attitudes of others, an inference that has the advantage in our own case of only our own sensory data and memories, our behavior, and of the context we are in; i.e. we are all substantially self‐ blind. After sorting out a number of methodological and verbal issues, I argue, first, that the a priori arguments against Objectivism don't succeed, and that Gopnik and Carruthers are right to regard the issue as an empirical one. On the other hand, I think they seriously underestimate the difficulty of establishing Objectivism. It is unlikely there is an inferential procedure from the data of pure sensation, behavior and context to the relevant self‐attributions that would be as spectacularly reliable as people manifestly seem to be. Moreover, there is a simpler model: the mind very likely consists of a panoply of sub‐routines some of whose outputs are ‘tagged’ for their having been so processed, rather in the way that software ‘documents’ are on standard computers. Introspection plausibly consists in a person's simply attending to distinctive constellations of these tags, even though they may lack phenomenal feels. This draws attention to an important independent fact: that much of phenomenology (or ‘what it's like’ to be in a certain state) may be constituted by facts that are not phenomenal.

Beyond Percept and Affect: Beckett'sFilmand Non-Human Becoming

Film, Samuel Beckett's 1964 short starring Buster Keaton, dubbed by Deleuze as ‘The Greatest Irish Film’, is a seminal text in the latter's cinematic canon as it helps us to extrapolate the transition from the Bergson-based movement-image of Cinema 1 to the Nietzschean time-image of Cinema 2. Film is unique insofar as its narrative traverses and progressively destroys the action-, perception- and affection-images that constitute the movement-image as a whole, using Keaton's body, and more importantly his face, as a means of attaining a pure intensity or Entity abstracted from all spatio-temporal coordinates, a condition of exhaustion/saturation that Deleuze and Guattari call, ‘non-human becoming’. Beckett's film is predicated on Bishop Berkeley's fundamental philosophical principle, esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) and, using Keaton as its protagonist, raises the question of whether it is possible to escape perception, not only by a third party, but also by oneself. The latter is ‘played’ by the camera itself, which ‘stalks’ Keaton from behind, taking great pains not to exceed a 45-degree ‘angle of immunity’ (lest Buster experience percipi or the anguish of perceivedness) until the film's final close-up when he comes face to face with his own self-perception and affective annihilation. Film's denouement thus deconstructs the very nature of conventional cinematic language, whereby filmic suture – the enfolding of character, camera and spectatorial ‘viewing-views’ into a unified field of vision – gives way to a perspective where, at the very moment that the perceptive/affective body dies, the work of filmic art gives birth to itself as a being of pure sensation, exceeding lived experience.

Musil·s idea of poetic mastership and responsibility or: törless as his first attempt to become a serious writer

Musil costuma usar o termo Dichter, poeta, como um titulo de maior dignidade para grandes mestres (opondo esse termo a palavra mais contemporânea Schriftsteller, escritor). Esse uso sustenta a ideia das qualidades especificamente poeticas da literatura (e da sensibilidade poetica da critica), reagindo contra as tendencias contemporâneas de fundir os discursos literarios ou com a pura sensacao, ou com outras formas discursivas. Partindo de Torless e de alguns ensaios de Musil, esse artigo mostra como Musil entende a relacao entre o pensamento racional e as ideias latentes que emergem da dimensao poetica (do outro estado da mente ou da outra condicao). A abordagem ilumina a concepcao musiliana de precisao e alma, isto e, o entrelacamento entre percepcao sensitiva e rigor intelectual como uma condicao para a busca de valores literarios e existenciais.

Herpes Zoster Cervical Myelitis in a Young Adult

Varicella zoster virus infection, which causes chickenpox and herpes zoster (HZ), is not uncommon in the general population. Varicella zoster virus can be latent in cranial nerve or dorsal root ganglia, and reactivate several decades later to produce vesicles with post-herpetic neuralgia. HZ myelitis usually occurs in elderly or immunocompromised patients. We report here a case of HZ myelitis of the cervical spinal cord in a 35-year-old woman who was immunocompetent. Cervical myelitis developed 1 month after the eruption of vesicles. Pure sensation loss was limited initially from the C2 to T1 dermatomes, but later progressed to lower limb sensory loss and sphincter function impairment. The patient's motor function was also mildly affected. Despite the initial rapid neurological deterioration, the symptoms dramatically improved after 5 days of parenteral acyclovir and steroid administration with rehabilitation. We therefore propose that early medical intervention is necessary for better and earlier recovery.

Pure Sensations? From Abstract Film to Digital Images

This article is a study of ‘film as sensation’. It provides a new approach to abstract cinema practices and demonstrates that they include the idea of ‘pure sensation’. Therefore, abstract cinema should not be interpreted as purely structural and conceptual. The author argues that ‘film as sensation’ has been part of the essence of cinema since the very beginning. The argument proceeds from a brief rewriting of the history of abstract cinema with a view to demonstrating how ‘film as sensation’ is present in the essential moments of cinema’s history. Furthermore, it is argued that this concept of ‘film as sensation’ does not correspond to an idea of cinema or visual effects as ‘pure entertainment’ but should be understood as ‘critical rupture’. This idea of ‘critical rupture’ finds its theoretical justification in the concept of ‘perceptive shock’ or ‘perceptive trauma’ from which Walter Benjamin justified the aesthetic intentions of the new-born art.

Deleuzian sensation and Maurice Jaubert's score for L'Atalante (Vigo, 1934)

In this article I advance a new methodology for the analysis of film music, one which uses philosophical concepts drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze as a way to create a dialogue between music and film theories. The practical application of this will be the analysis of Maurice Jaubert's score for Jean Vigo's L'Atalante. I will suggest that while film music is often understood as sound, it is best perhaps understood as pure sensation, a concept that Deleuze puts forth in his study of the painter Francis Bacon. In this work, Deleuze draws from biology, by which he means the establishment of precognitive meaning. By referring to film music in this way, I will then be able to place it on a common footing with the film's other elements, allowing a truly interdisciplinary discourse to take place.

Lifestyle, aesthetics and narrative in luxury domain advertising

This study investigates a pattern observed in recent lifestyle advertisements. In the domain of luxury goods a certain type of advertisement has emerged that relies almost exclusively on the evocation of pure sensation. Only in part do the depicted scenes, characters or objects trigger these sensations. Rather, aesthetic features of style – such as depth of field, diffusion, colour or light – enhance the spectator's sensorial response. In the context of the avant-garde of the 1920s, similar strategies were employed. While these avant-garde films combined a modernist hope for utopia with a democratisation of aesthetics and taste for the masses, contemporary lifestyle advertisements tend to be suffused with nostalgia. However, this nostalgia is ahistoric, offering only the most pleasurable aspects of an imaginary experience.

Domestic Phantasmagoria: The Victorian Literary Domestic and Experimental Visuality

In the first section of her Autobiography, Harriet Martineau recollects the first eight years of her life as a series of traumatic events in which illusion and reality merge. One event is prompted by an encounter with a domestic magic lantern. In its dismantled state, the lantern holds no mysteries for her. She recalls seeing it cleaned by daylight, handling all its parts, and “understanding its whole structure.” It was a different story at night, in a darkened room, when “my panics were really unaccountable. They were a matter of pure sensation without any intellectual justification whatever, even of the wildest kind.... such was my terror of the white circle on the wall, and of the moving slides.” Using Martineau's anecdote as a starting point, this essay considers the ways in which optical devices became an integral part of the “sensory structuring of experience” in the Victorian home, cultivating an active skepticism, effectively functioning as “furniture-to-think-with,” to quote Barbara Stafford. In this context, domestic space becomes integrated into an experimental process that tests the limits of the visual and introduces an element of doubt into the psychic structure of belief. This cultivated speculative mentality is both replicated and reinforced by Victorian literary narrative's structural and thematic illumination of the constructed nature of the real, down to its most banal everyday manifestations.

One Who Hears, and: Horse Latitudes, and: Against Darkness

ONE WHO HEARS / Frankie Paino It is believed that the place where Sodom once stood now lies beneath the south end of the Dead Sea. I do not regret the need to know what befeU those I loved, what brought unseasonable thunder, shook the earth beneath me. I turned to face the burning horizon, despite warnings from a boy my husband caUed an angel the night before, both of them slouched across the table, drunk and whispering, eyeUds smudged with shadow from the dying candle flame. My poor city. How briUiant the Ught which climbed your waUs until sable smoke extinguished everything and the men laughed somewhere behind me whüe my body grew strangely soüd. Pure sensation, part pleasure, part pain, gripped the arches of my feet then climbed my calves, thighs, left an iron heaviness between my hips. My lungs seared, Ups smouldered—volcanic. A miraculous tongue of Uquid fire furled in my mouth Uke a secret flower. My gown twisted, coüed in smoky tendrils above my waist, unchaste and lovely in that arid, ancient wind. I cursed Lot and his angel as they stumbled off toward some distant city, bringing with them 116 · The Missouri Review the Ue which transformed my love into vulgar curiosity, my flesh into a pülar of salt—something impermanent, forgettable. They were afraid of what I had become, a woman sculpted in glass, eternaUy fixed in my final attitude, neither demure nor horrified, but with a shout on my lips, opaque arms outstretched as if I meant to embrace the cinders which rained Uke stars around me. Now Lot's bones are less than dust, but I remain, transfixed at the bottom of the sea which long ago enfolded me. Each dawn these waters burn with rising sun, crystaUine salt glimmers Uke flecks of copper on my shoulders, breast, weaving a mantle of Ught, and I gaze toward the place where Sodom once stood. What do I have left? Lot erased even my name, Simone, meaning one who hears, and I did—the pitiful cries of my lover, my sisters, my friends, united in the terrible music of fire. What choice but to turn back? Even if it meant I would be remembered only as a fool, a woman who could not resist mystery, who was transmuted into a piUar of salt, left as a lesson which instructs us to close our eyes against the bitter Ught and turn away, pretend we hear at every moment, only the music of heaven, the exquisite voices of angels. Frankie Paino The Missouri Review · 117 HORSE LATITUDES / Frankie Paino In horse latitudes saUors once lashed the flanks of stalUons, mares, until those wUd-eyed, gentle beasts plunged overboard, cleaved the still surface, water churning grey froth on their muzzles whüe trumpets of brash neighs turned to whinnies, turned to what they'd say was nothing more than a sudden breeze which filled saus, pushed the ship, water lifting in an eerie sweU Uke the cold silk of your marriage bed, unnatural white, and you weren't even innocent though you tried to be until he pressed his mouth to yours and you snaked your tongue between his teeth so you both knew but didn't care. After twenty-five years, you say, even passion, that universal desire, that voracious brat, grows lean, simple. You learned to go farther on less and less whüe your fingers grew slender, then ugly, slack, and your rings sUpped over bone meaning, one and one and one makes one and you tried to make it back to the beginning of your past when he was a stranger, aU arms and legs gone bronze with sun and you leaned in the window so he could see your breasts, how they were shaped Uke his cupped palms and he gave you his ring which you let dangle at the center of that fleshy parabola. But there was a past before that past, someone 118 · The Missouri Review who had a name only he remembers and when you ask he shrugs and drifts off toward another night pissing beer downtown on the backstreets in front of whores who...