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- Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017
Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017
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The rhizome, the net and the book
More LessAbstractIn A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari launched the concept of rhizome as a critical alternative to the ‘root-book’. However, the environment in which we now cultivate our reading habits is not the printed book, but the rhizomatics of the World Wide Web, which according to some leads to distracted ways of reading. Due to the plasticity of the brain, new habits of shared attention make it physiologically more difficult for us to do a deep reading of books. Are Deleuze and Guattari, who simply wanted to open the way to more experimentation, victims of the irony of history? Has the concept of rhizome finished its task? The article discusses the tortured relationship between the rhizome as a philosophical concept and its success as a way to describe the Internet. The Internet, however, only conforms to what they called the ‘canal-rhizome’: the rhizome in its despotic form. Herein lies the concept’s continued relevance.
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Explanation and theory in linguistic inquiry
By Jon OrmanAbstractIn this article, I argue that the later Wittgenstein’s related conclusions regarding the importance of a non-theoretical understanding of human behaviour and the essentially therapeutic function of philosophy can be arrived at without subscribing either to the position that description and explanation are necessarily distinct activities or the idea that language is an inherently rule-based activity operating within determinate conceptual-cultural regimes. I aim to do so by bringing together two figures, A.R. Louch and Roy Harris, both of whom stand within a post-Wittgensteinian tradition, but whose kindred yet hitherto unconnected departures from the orthodoxy of that tradition render their work not only distinctive but all the more compelling for it. I shall try to exhibit the affinity between Louch and Harris by means of an expository discussion of the former’s thesis regarding the role and form of explanation in the social and behavioural sciences, followed by an account of explanation in linguistic inquiry consistent with the latter’s ‘integrationist’ philosophy of language and communication. I will also claim that the thought of both Louch and Harris points towards a form of atheoretical empiricism in the investigation of human action, as well as a broadly therapeutic conception of philosophical and linguistic inquiry respectively. However, I will suggest that such a conception is not necessarily best served by the adoption of an overtly therapeutic rhetoric.
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Backing away from circles of control: A re-reading of interpassivity theory’s perspectives on the current political culture of participation
More LessAbstractThe article re-examines the concepts of interpassivity with Pfaller and van Oenen in order to clarify conceptual difficulties and to develop a specific understanding of interpassivity and its counterpart interactivity. Contrary to the philosophers of interpassivity, it is argued that interactivity does not encompass any form of participation. Instead, the current culture of participation and the interpassive retreat are discussed as elements of a specific circular association connecting humans and other entities, or as a form of (quasi-cybernetic) control mechanism in relation to which the occurrences of interpassivity turn out to be different ways to drop out.
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Speaker meaning, utterance meaning and radical interpretation in Davidson’s ‘A nice derangement of epitaphs’
By Imogen SmithAbstractIt is central to Davidson’s argument in ‘A nice derangement of epitaphs’ that a speaker’s utterance can have a non-standard meaning, rather than that the speaker can mean something non-standardly when so uttering. Linguistic conventionalism typically holds that Mrs Malaprop, in uttering ‘a nice derangement of epitaphs’, might mean a nice arrangement of epithets but that her words do not. I suggest that Davidson’s view of language provides him with good grounds to claim that the nonstandard meanings can be attributed to a speaker’s utterances and not merely the speakers themselves. However, I also suggest that in many cases of interpretation of non-standard utterances, communication is successful because an interpreter first grasps the speaker’s relevant intentions, rather than the meaning of the utterance itself. Indeed, in a single communicative exchange containing an innovative utterance successfully interpreted, it is not the meaning of the utterance that one is entitled to say is identified, but what a speaker means to communicate when he produces an utterance.
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Creating is resisting: A Spinozian-Deleuzian reading of Andrei Rublev
More LessAbstractThe aim of this article is to outline a Spinozian-Deleuzian analysis of audio-visual experience and to combine this account with an embodied cognitive perspective on cinema. Thus, film experience integrates affection and intellection and is not a passive and contemplative phenomenon, but a constructive interaction that involves a creative encounter between the screen and the viewer. Furthermore, I will address the role of sad passions and the problematic relation between creation and resistance, also by drawing upon Primo Levi’s work on memory and on the shame of being human. Consequently, I will argue that my Spinozian-Deleuzian perspective involves an idea of cinema and art as ethically productive events since they allow a creative opposition against all those forces that mortify and enclose existence. Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Andrei Rublev offers the possibility to develop this discussion; in this biopic, the life of the famous Russian painter is pervaded by problematic questions upon the nature of God, the necessity of Evil, the role of art within a world of violence and misery and, at the same time, the tension and the marvel in the discovery of the real. Following the ideas on spectatorship outlined by Deleuze and combined with Spinoza’s thought, we can say that the film makes us perceive these issues through the embodiment and the engagement of the relations it describes. At the same time, the movie gives us the possibility to re-discuss these terrible questions revealing the active and productive nature of art, as different sequences (like the enigmatic prologue) demonstrate. A further aim of this article is, then, to show how this assemblage of different concepts is possible through the vivid and interactive dimension of film experience.
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Reviews
Authors: Carlos M. Roos, Sean Leahy, José Gomes Pinto and Imke MaessenAbstractHarold INNIS’S History of Communications: Paper and Printing – Antiquity to Early Modernity, William J. Buxton, Michael R. Cheney and Paul Heyer (eds) (2015) Lanham and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 200 pp., ISBN: 9781442243385, h/bk, £52.95
Philosophy for Multisensory Communication and Media, Keith Kenney (2016) New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 250 pp., ISBN: 9781433122057, p/bk, 35
When the Word Becomes Flesh. Language and Human Nature, Paolo Virno (2015) South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 263 pp., ISBN: 9781584350941, p/bk, £14.95
Wild Beasts of the Philosophical Desert, Hein van Dongen, Hans Gerding and Rico Sneller (2014) Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 185 pp., ISBN: 9781443854535, h/bk, £39.99
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