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- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
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Gendered spaces for survival: Citizens and aliens in contemporary European cinema
More LessAbstractThe contemporary urban space is dominated by neo-liberism, and represented in European cinema as a hostile environment for the disadvantaged or illegal citizens inhabiting it. The ‘aliens’ penetrating Fortress Europe are forced to find original and secluded routes in the stratified city map, or to blur the borders of their confinement with incursion in the outside world, which can be physical or virtual, however illegal. The aim of this article is to depict the complex relations represented by contemporary European cinema between the policies of globalization, neo-liberist economies and migration flows, as they all clash one against the other within the cityscape. European metropolizes are represented as layered interfaces actively producing the hegemonic narratives, where each subject has to negotiate an impossible position between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, public and private. In such a scenario, both citizen and human rights are deprived of any value, and the same happens to the idea of political representation. The main activity organized by the institutions is border patrolling, as many films represent surveillance policies and actual raids through the city to detect the ‘aliens’ and remove them from the national territory. In most European films addressing issues of gendered and illegal citizenship, the urban space actively produces the narrative in a symbiotic relation among ethics, politics, the cities and their inhabitants. Access to different and multiple public spaces, and the visual representation of characters and settings, propose a discourse about agency and subalternity, communities and the excess. The fragmented tissue of streets and buildings generate a condition of difficulty or impossibility for the subject to be involved in intimate relations. Even the existing families are taken in the net of the economy of exploitation and consent. In order to survive, the individual has to be part of an original human network, enabling a counterhegemonic pattern for affective, emotional and cultural relations. The subject’s experience depends hence upon her or his abilities to escape or recreate the geometries of vision, gendered gaze and possessive desire usually shaping European cinema.
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Toxicscape: An epistemological approach to graffiti through American narrative cinema
More LessAbstractWhy are people and institutions more inclined to tolerate a street art piece rather than a graffiti tag? Even if legally authorized, graffiti still largely epitomizes a symptom of urban decay, while municipalities hire street artists to rehabilitate poor neighbourhoods with their stunning artworks. Starting from this assumption, the aim of this article is to understand the political roots of such negative attitude towards graffiti in the western imaginary. In doing so the article addresses graffiti as an epistemological object. First, by following Jean Baudrillard, who looks at graffiti as a counter-colonial phenomenon rather than a form of self-expression, the article explores and debunks the most common epistemological attitudes towards graffiti. Second, through an accurate historical and political analysis of New York’s welfare and city planning policy, it is shown how graffiti became a pivotal topic in the politics of demonization and exclusion of the ethnical minorities during the Reagan presidency. Drawing from Craig Watkins’ notion of ‘ghettocentric imagination’ – a racial discourse produced by emphasizing images of inner-city villainy within American film production – the ideological use of graffiti aesthetics in visual communication is termed ‘toxicscape’. By displaying ‘toxicscapes’, American narrative cinema uses graffiti as fetishist visual objects that drive the audience in perceiving graffiti (and events or characters related to them) as ‘toxic objects’. Therefore, in the second part of the article, a reconstruction of the American conservative discourse involving graffiti is proposed. The text analyses toxicscapes by focusing on action-crime films of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Death Wish (Winner, 1974), Fort Apache, The Bronx (Petrie, 1981), Escape from New York (Carpenter, 1981), Colors (Hopper, 1988) and Batman (Burton, 1989). Finally, hip-hop visual narratives like Wild Style (Ahearn, 1983), Bomb the System (Lough, 2002), The Graffiti Artist (Bolton, 2004) and The Get Down (2016) are addressed as an alternative to the toxicscape for their employment of graffiti in a more progressive and dramaturgical sense. In conclusion, graffiti appear to be challenging ideological and epistemological objects. Therefore, a more accurate analysis of the graffiti discourse that stemmed in the 1970s and 1980s would provide a more critical and sophisticated perspective to the understanding of contemporary ‘street art’s’ political and cultural investment.
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Neorealism, genre and nostalgia: Italian urban modernity in Renato Castellani’s Sotto il sole di Roma
More LessAbstractThe article centres on Italian Neorealist cinema and its crucial role in negotiating the positioning of Italy in the transnational post-war scenario. Recent scholarship on the topic has come to challenge many deeply rooted assumptions about Neorealism, claiming that the disproportioned attention paid to this particular filmic trend has proven in the long term to be an hindrance to a full comprehension of the Italian visual culture of the period. I seek to contribute to such a renewed understanding of the ideological and aesthetical issues at stake in the definition of Neorealism. It is indeed very important to underscore that the innovations brought about by Neorealist films (connected in particular to the diffusion of location shooting practices) must always be framed in the context of a lively relationship with popular genre cinema. The article thus focuses on the close reading of one specific filmic text, Sotto il sole di Roma (1948). Castellani’s film proposes an original blending of Neorealist techniques, melodramatic structures and comedic tones: an hybridization of genres representing in itself a most apt correlate to the moment of flux Italy and Italian cinema were experiencing at the time. The film’s use of Rome’s ‘Non-synchronous’ and ‘Heterotopic’ spaces can be read as an attempt to come to terms and overcome fascism’s agendas about history, community, and, last but not least, masculinity. While offering a very ironic interpretation of Italy’s deeply conflicted route to modernity, Castellani’s film also reflects on (personal as well as national) identity as the result of a performance: a performance in which loss and nostalgia play a major role.
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Communication theory and integrational semiology: The constitutive metamodel revisited
By Adrian PabléAbstractIn this article I critically engage with Robert Craig’s constitutive metamodel of communication theory from the vantage point of an integrational semiology, as developed by Oxford Professor Roy Harris in his book Signs, Language and Communication (1996). I argue that Harris’ dichotomy of a ‘segregational’ vs. an ‘integrational’ tradition of theorizing language and communication makes the metamodel redundant on the grounds that Craig’s communicational perspective on social reality is replaced by two semiologies sponsoring mutually exclusive ontologies and epistemologies.
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A communicational matrix to the imaginary: Looking into the media imaginary
More LessAbstractPhenomenology, Sociology, Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis have accumulated different methods and knowledge on the imaginary. Nevertheless, the crucial connection between the social imagining and communication has not always been truly examined. In this article, we take the imaginary (seen as a symbolic thought of images) and communication (seen as a process of symbolic reproduction) as correlated notions, and work upon a communicational matrix of the imaginary. We emphasize three key elements of the imaginary: by pointing to the verbal-iconic, technical and mediatized dimensions we will be paying special attention to the media imaginary and the effects of its commemorative logic to the propagation of public imaginaries.
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Discourse, performativity and the Irish marriage equality referendum debate
More LessAbstractThis article seeks to explore key aspects of Habermas’s critical social theory through the prism of Ireland’s 2015 Same-Sex Marriage Equality Referendum. Beginning with an exploration of the Kantian and Hegelian basis of Habermas’s theory of modernity, this article traces how Ireland rejected in this instance the inherited tradition and practices of its past when it voted to strike down a constitutional clause prohibiting marriage between same-sex couples. Also discussed are the historical obstacles to this self-generated normativity and the role of performativity in the lead-up to the plebiscite, a topic that leads inevitably to an exploration of the scholarly synergies between Habermas’s thesis and the works of Judith Butler.
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Theorizing government communication with regard to the Dutch nature policy
Authors: Peter Jansen, Jan van der Stoep and Henk JochemsenAbstractThe implementation of a National Ecological Network poses a significant challenge to the Dutch government. The establishment of this ecological network has led to conflicts among various interest groups in the public sphere, each of which defends its own interests. In this struggle for recognition communication fulfils an important role. This article contends that the discourse about nature is driven by deep frames, is comprised of values and is rooted in world-views. The insight that worldviews play a role elucidates the various positions in the debate and shows normative dimensions in communication. This article argues that the network society, more than ever, requires the government to be explicit about its normative choices.
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Revisiting Rousseau’s amour propre: Self-love and digital living
More LessAbstractThe digital culture of the Internet and the emergence of social networking sites online have made identity construction a salient aspect of this economy. It also signifies a ‘narcissistic turn’ with increasing emphasis on self-construction and self-love from social profiles, self-representations, self-search to ‘selfies’. The construction of ‘self’ online is mediated through the gaze of the others, this being an important validation in the construction of self. By drawing on Rousseau’s ‘amour propre’ the article examines how this concept is relevant in today’s digital culture and self narration online through everyday communication including imaging, uploading, tagging and ‘liking’ making others’ validation of us an important element of self-esteem. Rousseau’s notion of self-love has both constructive and destructive configurations and the article argues that these can take different manifestations online in today’s contemporary digital culture.
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Motives and distractions: Schopenhauer’s actuality for technological media
More LessAbstractA. Schopenhauer has proposed some intriguing and even challenging views on the link of representation to sensoriality. Since this has become a key issue for studies on spectatorship, some aspects of Schopenhauer’s philosophy could be critically examined within the framework of audio-visual media. The present article undertakes this task with a focus on two different notions that concern spectatorship. First, it examines whether the Schopnehaurian conception of a representational ‘motive’ can be incorporated into the study of a cinematic product and suggests that this would involve a ‘realist’ account of cinema and audio-visual culture. Second, it associates the notion of ‘distraction’, which, since Benjamin, has been central to the reception of audio-visuality, with the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The article argues that current audio-visual culture resides in a simultaneous interiorization and exteriorization of ‘distraction’. In the light of this analysis, the work of Schopenhauer appears to be of use for understanding the wide distribution and deep insertion of audio-visuality in contemporary culture.
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