Poems are not the only things we sometimes call poetic. We experience as poetic also prose passages, as well as films, music, visual art, and even occurrences in daily life. But what is it exactly for something to be poetic in this wider sense? Discussion of the poetic in this sense is virtually nonexistent in the extant analytic literature. The aim of this article is to get a start on trying to come to grips with this phenomenon—the poetic as (...) an aesthetic category that outruns poetry as an art form. It proposes an initial sketch of an account in terms of the fittingness of certain affective reactions to artworks and other things, reactions featuring notably elements of tenderness and elevation. (shrink)

This article wants to analyze how Man Rayin his photographs, engages a poetry of silenceusing this medium as a poetic communication technology. To understand the functioning of this poetic language, we will adopt the Groupe μ analysis method (both the General Rhetoricand the Treatise on the Visual Sign). Whereas the language is manifold as the forms of representation, and it present in all media, whatever the lack of speech -silence -would find its richest form in both directions through the (...) metaphors and metonymy engaged in metasememes of the photos studied. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the relationship between poetry and painting in the Chinese landscape tradition by moving beyond models of thematic correspondence toward a framework of structural transformation. It identifies “poetic indeterminacy” as a foundational condition in classical Chinese poetry, in which experience is organized through perceptual disjunction, imagistic discontinuity, and the deferral of spatial resolution. Focusing on Wang Wei’s Deer Camp (鹿柴) and Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Streams and Mountains (谿山行旅圖), the study demonstrates how this indeterminate structure is not resolved (...) in painting but reconfigured as a mode of spatial generation. Through close reading and formal analysis, it shows that space in landscape painting emerges through occlusion, shifting viewpoints, and partial visibility, producing a visual field that can be entered but not fully grasped. The article proposes a cross-media analytical approach grounded in structural translatability, arguing that the relationship between poetry and painting lies in the transformation of experiential structures rather than in representation. Within this framework, transcendence is redefined as an experiential effect generated in the act of viewing, rather than a pre-existing conceptual content. By foregrounding the role of indeterminacy across media, the study offers a methodological perspective for examining the relationship between poetry and painting beyond strictly representational models. (shrink)

This article wants to analyze how Candido Portinari in his paintings with rural theme, engages a poetry of silence. To understand the functioning of this poetic language, we will adopt the Groupe μ analysis method (both the General Rhetoric andthe Treatise on theVisual Sign). Whereas the language is manifold as the forms of representation, and it present in all media, whatever the lack of speech -silence -would find its richest form in both directions through the metaphors and metonymy engaged in (...) metasememes of the paintings studied. (shrink)

This paper proposes to define metaphor as a visual-material structure, the sphere of which is ontological rather than cognitive or conceptual. It argues that the essence of metaphor, as either an aesthetic or a communicative unit or both, resides in the qualitative dimension and appearance, or even materiality, of the metaphorical medium and its form. The paper thus offers a new theory of metaphor, focusing on the medium of metaphor, which composes and transfigures or reconstructs its target anew: a (...) composition that is prior to understanding or conceptualizing the target. In doing so, the paper presents a formalist ontology of metaphors, established via an externalist account of metaphors, as opposed to the prevailing cognitivist-conceptualist account which I characterize as internalist. The various kinds of metaphor – linguistic, poetic, visual or material – are based on their external structure, rather than an internal-conceptual mechanism of understanding, as assumed by a significant segment of the literature. Visual metaphor, therefore, is the paradigmatic kind of metaphor, the analysis of which can be generalized to other kinds of metaphor. Furthermore, the paper tries to overcome the current discrepancy between the formalist character of the metaphorical medium and the dominance of cognitivist and conceptualist theories of metaphor. Challenging these, I claim that if the identity of metaphor is indeed based on its composition, then it is actually based on its aesthetic qualities. That is to say, not only are there autonomous visual or material metaphors, that are not based on linguistic or conceptual ones, but linguistic and conceptual metaphors are based on visuality: they are enabled by the structural possibilities offered by visual media. (shrink)

This text explores four books produced by one of the most prominent semioticians of the previous century, Umberto Eco, in order to create a semiotic meta-theory which enhances a multifarious way of â oereadabilityâ and scientifically justifies the dichotomy between the creation of a work of art and its being read, visualized and experienced by the audience. It begins by treating the â oenarrationâ component as one of the main theoretical challenges of Ecoâ s theory, specifically focusing on the concept (...) of time, seen from the linguistic and semiotic viewpoints. The book also explores Ecoâ s text theory, as well as â oesemiotics properâ, representing an analysis of the â oeencodingâ and â oedecodingâ theories. In addition, it exemplifies the â oeopennessâ and â oecollaborationâ between the writer and the reader, as well as relationships between the creator and audience in all forms of art. The book will appeal to scholars, students, and intellectuals who want to have a detailed knowledge of Ecoâ s overall contribution to semiotics, and seek a â oeformulaâ which would inter-connect informational and code theories with the narration method, so as to create what we call â oeinterpretative semioticsâ today. (shrink)

This essay examines William Blake’s rare lithograph 'חנוך' (“Enoch”) as a radical meditation on self-annihilation and spiritual resistance amid the political turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. Rather than a purely esoteric or theological figure, Enoch becomes in Blake’s rendering a symbol of embodied refusal—a spectral counterpoint to the nationalist and imperial mythologies of his time. Drawing on Blake’s visual poetics, Hebrew etymologies, and contemporaneous print culture, the essay explores how this singular work critiques dominant narratives of historical progress. (...) By foregrounding the lithograph’s aesthetic of disappearance, it reveals a Blakean theory of vision grounded in subtraction, vulnerability, and messianic interruption. In tracing Enoch’s ascent as an anti-heroic gesture, the piece argues for Blake’s alignment with prophetic traditions that resist both divine and imperial sovereignty through erasure and the politics of the unrepresentable. (shrink)

This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants (...) are presented with mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: 1. The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category. 2. Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality. 3. Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context. 4. Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception’s relation to language. Keywords aesthetics, perception, nonconceptual content, hybrids, visual metaphors. (shrink)

The aim in this chapter is to explore the similarities and differences between the city symphony film genre of the 1920s and 1930s and the contemporary virtual city walking tours that are popular on YouTube these days, eventually discussing the change in representation of the individual in daily life over a century. The city symphony was born with modernism in the early 20th century initially to present an interpretation of the city with daily activities, human beings, their interaction with industrial (...) technology and the urban environment. A significant and pioneering film of the genre is by Walter Ruttmann titled Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) which I will try to analyze its filmic elements in order to draft a summary of the style and vision of the director and his contemporaries. On the other hand, the virtual city walking tours on YouTube represent a very different representation of urban exploration. These videos show various cities through the act of simple walking recorded in a long one-take POV shot with a gimbal-camera. Despite minor differences in terms of commentary and music use, these videos are quite similar to each other when compared to city symphony films in general. The methodological approach for analyzing and interpreting these films and videos is guided by the neoformalist approach proposed by Bordwell and Thompson in the 1980s, along with Noël Carroll’s view on critical evaluation. Since this post-theoretical approach is non-formulaic in terms of its methodology, it fits the two examples I will provide that are stylistically very distant. After establishing the form and style of the works, I will try to follow Carroll’s suggestions in order to critically interpret, analyze and evaluate the works. The comparison between the city symphony film and virtual city walking tour reveals a complex interplay between continuity and change in regards to the individual. While both share a rather common goal of capturing the essence of urban life their differences are to be found in their stylistic choices and their interpretations of the goal itself. The city films of the 1920s and 30s were avant-garde expressions that combined artistic innovation with socio-political commentary. They were often experimental, using montage sequences, juxtaposition and abstract imagery to convey the ever changing industrialized modern city life. Ruttmann’s Berlin is emblematic of this approach, offering a poetic and critical reflection on urban existence. In contrast, the virtual city walking tours on YouTube are more accessible and immediate. They provide a first-person perspective that allows viewers to virtually traverse different cities, experiencing sights and sounds without the mediation of artistic abstraction. The similarity in these videos suggests a standardized format that prioritizes immersion over critique. This article offers a valuable contribution to the understanding of urban representation of the individual in film and digital media. By comparing the city symphony film with virtual city walking tours, I try to illuminate the evolving relationship between art, technology and urban life. I argue that not only is there a completely different representation of the individual within the frame, but there is also ethical considerations to be put forth regarding the one that makes the frame, or the camera. In the end I argue that the human-ness of a work of art or any type of video is more important than immersiveness. (shrink)

Who is Afraid of Free-Range Knowledge? is a multimodal poetic thesis explicitly critiquing academic gatekeeping and epistemic domestication. Through poetry, multilingualism, and visual epistemology, it illustrates how traditional academic structures actively constrain knowledge into sanctioned forms, excluding innovative epistemologies and multidisciplinary approaches. This work explicitly positions epistemic gatekeepers as fiduciaries with ethical, epistemic, and legal obligations to embrace epistemic plurality and facilitate inclusive knowledge practices.

This article explores the concept of sight perception from both cognitive and aesthetic perspectives, by examining the limits of visual attention. It discusses how conscious and unconscious mechanisms can influence what individuals see and may experience aesthetically. It also presents empirical research employing eye-tracking to analyze the visual behavior of visitors of an art exhibition viewing a painting of Japanese artist Isson Tanaka (1908-1977). The study demonstrates that indiscernible aspects of vision interact on the limits of perception, which (...) gives birth to new images. Specifically, the eye-tracking records and uncovers the invisible traces of people's eyes as they are observing the painting, providing opportunities for visual poetics based on sensory input and eye movements. Overall, this interdisciplinary approach contributes to a more thorough understanding of the complexities of visual perception in the arts. (shrink)

As one tries to grasp love and its images within José Leonilson's production, a multiplicity of aspects and meanings are seen that also relate to Louise Bourgeois's oeuvre in regard to the interest in human relations. Through a comparative approach to both artists' poetics, an understanding is created that love is not a simplistic action and all the words read in or applied to their visual discourse must be considered within a wide range of love in visual (...) and literary images. Keywords: literature and visual arts / love / creativity / Bourgeois, Louise / Leonilson, José / word and image. (shrink)

This article reads William Blake’s '[First] Book of Urizen' (1794) as a mytho-political response to early industrial modernity, positioning Urizen as a metaphysical emblem of combustion, enclosure, and machinic reason. Interpreting Blake’s illuminated plates in relation to the architecture and ideology of Albion Mill—London’s first large-scale steam-powered flour mill—I argue that Urizen functions not as abstract cosmology, but as a materialist diagram of fossil modernity. The essay draws from Romantic media studies, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities to reframe Blake’s image-texts (...) as anticipatory infrastructures: speculative constellations of ecological violence and poetic resistance. In Blake’s visual language, steam becomes scripture, cloud becomes control, and Urizen becomes a spectral machine conjuring law. The article proposes a method of infrastructural reading that attends to how poetic form can metabolize planetary crisis—inviting new modes of historical consciousness and critique in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Mategrams represents an original artistic expression situated at the intersection of literature, mathematics, and visual art. The book introduces the concept of “mategrams”—condensed thoughts and reflections that naturally organize themselves into geometric and algebraic structures, becoming mathematical-poetic figures akin to anti-calligrams. Rather than following a linear textual format, the content is embedded within visual compositions that exploit space, form, and symbolic arrangement, creating a nontraditional reading experience. Each mategram functions simultaneously as idea, image, and structure, inviting reflection on (...) human condition, society, and the relationship between logic and creativity. By merging poetic language with graphical representations and mathematical concepts, the volume proposes an innovative interdisciplinary aesthetic in which meaning emerges from the interaction between text and form. (shrink)

“Black Star” music video was released two days before Bowie’s death. It bears various implications of dying and the notion of mortality is both literal and metaphorical. It is highly autobiographical and serves as a theatrical stage for Bowie to act both as a music performer and as a self-conscious human being. In this paper, we discuss the signs of mortality in Bowie’s “Black Star” music video-clip. We focus on video’s cinematic techniques and codes, on its motivic elements and on (...) its narrative in relation with music, lyrics, characters, and gestures. We also discuss the video’s intertextual references and the broader signification of the black star figure. We adopt a quasi-semiotic approach considering “Black Star” music video-clip as a text which can be investigated through its signs, codes, and conventions of the musical, visual, and cinematic languages as well. Our interdisciplinary tools derive from visual semiotics and audiovisual analysis models, without leaving outside Bowie’s musical-artistic and personal history. As it turns out, Bowie created a video clip that is philosophical in nature and poetic in structure, preserving the role of protagonist. With the visuals creating a psychedelic atmosphere, the lyrics often are heard as a personal confession. They both generate cognitive and emotional responses that influence the way the viewers-listeners may experience, decompose, and interpret Bowie’s artistic endeavor bridging life and death. (shrink)

As with so many mystics, Alexis karpouzos intuitively know the oneness of cosmic creation and historic humanity as part of all that is and all there isn't. So, the originality of Alexis Karpouzos thought is that it crosses the most diverse fields, the most opposing philosophies, to unite them into an often contradictory and broken whole. Marx and Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud and Heraclitus, poets and political theorists all come together in the same distance and the same unusual proximity. Alexis karpouzos (...) use Pre-Socratics philosophy and generally the ancient Greek philosophy, as well as the pre-philosophical thinking of The Upanishads, the Vedas and Buddhism in India, of Lao Tzu, of Zen Buddhism and the Taoist tradition in China, of the Arab mystics and poets, with their metaphysical religiosity as the metaphysical basis for the interpretation and understanding of the world and existence. At the same time the ancient metaphysics is connect with Hegel’s dialectical ontology and with the modern thinking of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and others as the interpretive context for understanding the central problems of the technical and scientific world during his time. Novalis, Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Whitman, Eliot and others show the dreamy nature of existence, the transcendence of the Cosmos, welcome the infinity. For Alexis karpouzos the combination of ancient and modern thought creates the holistic experience of universal space-time and the consciousness of the unity. The poetic thought of Alexis karpouzos is a expressions of soul's inner experiences, expression of universality. The inspiring visual images and the symbolic use of language offer a description of elevating experiences of consciousness, a glimpse of higher worlds. The philosophy of Alexis karpouzos speak to the human experience from a universal perspective, transcending all religions, cultural and national boundaries. Using vivid images and a direct language that speaks to the heart, his philosophy evokes a sense of deep communication with the collective unconscious, a sense of connection to all the creatures of the world, compassion for others, admiration for the beauty of nature, reverence for all life, and an abiding faith in the invisible touch of world. Alexis karpouzos thoughts are often terse and paradoxical, challenging us to to break out of the box of limiting beliefs and see things from a new perspective. Above all, Alexis karpouzos continually calls to us to wake up and explore the mysteries within our own selves, i.e the mysteries of universe. (shrink)

This paper develops an aesthetics of crossword puzzles. I present a taxonomy of crosswords in the Anglophone world and argue that there are three distinct sources of aesthetic value in crosswords. First, and in common with other puzzles, crosswords merit aesthetic experiences of our own agency: paradigmatically, the aesthetic experience of struggling for and hitting upon the right solution. In addition to instantiating the aesthetic value of puzzles in general, crosswords in particular can have two other sources of aesthetic value: (...) the visual appeal of grid art and the poetic delight of idiomatic language. Crossword aesthetics takes place at the intersection of the recently popular aesthetics of puzzles and games and the more familiar aesthetics of the visual and literary arts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scrutinizing the Art of TheaterAaron Meskin (bio)IntroductionIn his 1992 address to the American Society for Aesthetics, Peter Kivy suggested that philosophers of art might do best by giving up on “grand theorizing” (that is, pursuing the definition of art).1 In its place he proposed that they pursue the “careful and imaginative philosophical scrutiny of the individual arts and their individual problems.”2 Of course John Passmore and others had said (...) similar things at earlier points,3 but philosophical aesthetics has, it seems to me, finally and robustly taken the turn toward the philosophies of the arts. Much of the best work in philosophical aesthetics over the last fifteen years or so has pursued the route Kivy suggested. James Hamilton’s The Art of Theater is part of this turn—it is careful and imaginative scrutiny of the art of theater done at the very highest level, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to comment on it.4In what follows I shall address a number of issues raised by Hamilton’s work: the definition of theatrical enactment; the place of pretending and imagining in theatrical performance; the nature of Hamilton’s “ingredients model” and its relation to more traditional accounts of the work/performance relation; the account of theatrical style on offer; and the question of what we have learned from experimental theater.But before I move on to address those aspects of the book’s content in detail, let me say something about the pedagogical significance of this work. Although there are a number of legitimate ways to teach introductory courses on aesthetics and the philosophy of art (for example, by following a historical progression or by structuring it around certain key issues), one increasingly attractive option is to teach a course that focuses on those aforementioned individual arts and their individual problems. So, for example, I used to regularly teach graduate seminars in aesthetics to students enrolled [End Page 51] in a fine arts doctoral program. These students studied music, art education, the visual arts, theater, and dance; the seminars were designed to provide them with a broad foundation in philosophical aesthetics. Since they typically had no background in philosophy, I made the effort to assign readings and topics relevant to their own artistic practices and interests. Providing them with contemporary cutting-edge philosophical material on music and the visual arts was not hard. Kivy’s work, as well as that by Jerrold Levinson, Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, and others, makes that fairly easy. And intriguingly—since philosophers are commonly said to have ignored the art of dance—there’s even a decent amount of recent philosophical work on that art form by such authors as Graham McFee, Frances Sparshott, and Noël Carroll and Sally Banes.5 But where to turn to for the theater students? I would often read some of Aristotle’s Poetics with them, but I have to admit that the serious students of the theater that I encountered in those seminars typically knew that text much better than I did. (Still, I hope I challenged their breezy assumptions about catharsis!) We would read Hume on tragedy together—fun, but not really so much about the theater—and sometimes a bit of Nietzsche. But there was never much to give them from contemporary philosophers on the subject—a few articles here and there, of course, but nothing that clearly laid out the big and distinctive issues that the art form of theater raises. Nothing, to put the point a bit differently, that would provide any evidence that there really was a lively and extant philosophy of theater out there, as there are lively and extant philosophies of film, music, literature, and photography. In short, for those attracted to the prospect of teaching aesthetics as the philosophies of arts, the dearth of good work on theater by contemporary philosophers has been a significant source of frustration and even a bit of an embarrassment.The book in question is not the only recent philosophical work on theater. There are fine articles on the topic by David Osipovich, David Saltz, and Paul Woodruff, among others. Hamilton himself has a string of... (shrink)

The Custodian of Consequence: Reframing the Role of the Critic -/- By Dorian Vale -/- In this philosophical essay, Dorian Vale redefines the role of the critic—not as interpreter, judge, or analyst, but as custodian of consequence. Rooted in the doctrines of Post-Interpretive Criticism, the work challenges the traditional posture of critique as commentary and repositions it as a form of ethical stewardship. -/- -/- Vale explores how every act of writing about art either preserves or distorts the original encounter. (...) Through sharp theoretical analysis and poetic argumentation, the essay exposes the critic’s unseen power to shape memory, public reception, and even the afterlife of a work. The true critic, Vale contends, is not the one who explains most eloquently—but the one who bears the most moral proximity to the wound. -/- -/- This piece is a foundational rearticulation of what it means to “respond” to art—offering not just a new lens, but an entirely new ethic. -/- Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. This name is used for all official publications, essays, and theoretical works indexed through DOI-linked repositories including Zenodo, OSF, PhilPapers, and SSRN. -/- Vale, Dorian. The Custodian of Consequence: Reframing the Role of the Critic. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17075493 -/- Post-Interpretive Criticism, Stillmark Theory, Message-Transfer Theory, MTT, Misplacement, Displacement, Aesthetic Displacement Theory, Theory of Misplacement, Absential Aesthetics, Witness Aesthetics, Adab for Art, Hauntmark Theory, Spiritual Criticism, Presence-Based Criticism, Custodianship of Art, Art as Ontology, Aesthetic Recursion Theory, Aesthetic Recursion, Viewer as Evidence Theory, Restraint in front of art, Moral proximity, Interpretive silence, Erasure as ethics, Temporal scarcity, Silence as method, Ontology of beauty, Aesthetic mercy, Language as violence, Art encounter ethics, Epistemology of witness, Philosophy of Art, Aesthetics, Art Theory, Contemporary Aesthetics, Comparative Aesthetics, Phenomenology and Art, Ethics in Art Criticism, Interpretation and Meaning, Criticism and Reception Theory, Epistemology of Art, Visual Culture Studies, Dorian Vale, Founder of Post-Interpretive Criticism, Post-Aesthetic Critic, Independent Philosopher of Art, Museum of One, Art Writer and Theorist, Aesthetic Philosopher, Custodian of Witness Aesthetics, Spiritual Aesthetics Movement, The Doctrine of Post-Interpretive Criticism, The Custodian’s Oath, The Canon of Witnesses, Art as Truth, Art as Presence, The Viewer as Evidence, Interpretation vs. Witnessing, Language as Custody, Erasure as Afterlife, Museum of One Manifesto, Alternative art criticism, New art criticism movement, Ethical art theory, Criticism beyond interpretation, Slow looking philosophy, Quiet philosophy of art, Radical art restraint, Witness over interpretation, Interpretive Restraint, The Journal of Post-Interpretive criticism, The Journal of Post-Interpretive criticism ISSN 2819-7232), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009) -/- Post-Interpretive Criticism, Dorian Vale, art criticism ethics, role of the critic, aesthetic responsibility, non-interpretive writing, witness-based criticism, philosophy of criticism, contemporary art theory, moral proximity in art, language and power, poetic criticism, ethics of response, conceptual art critique. (shrink)

Dorian Vale (pseudonym) is a contemporary art critic and philosopher of aesthetics whose work challenges the dominance of interpretation in modern art discourse. He is the founder of the Post-Interpretive Movement and author of several philosophical treatises, including Art as Truth, Stillmark Theory, Absential Aesthetics, and The Doctrine of Post-Interpretive Criticism. His writing advocates for presence over analysis, moral proximity over performance, and ethical restraint over aesthetic consumption. -/- -/- Vale’s critical approach foregrounds the role of the viewer as evidence, (...) emphasizing silent witnessing, poetic custodianship, and the sanctity of unspoken meaning. His essays have redefined how critics, curators, and educators engage with trauma-infused contemporary art—particularly in works by artists such as Doris Salcedo, Kimsooja, Ana Mendieta, Zarina Hashmi, Teresa Margolles, and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. -/- -/- Vale’s work is deeply rooted in a philosophy of sacred attention, bridging art criticism with human behavior, phenomenology, and ethics. Through his digital museum platform Museum of One, he continues to publish foundational essays, critical doctrines, and aesthetic educational tools that mark the emergence of an entirely new movement in global criticism. -/- His published works include: -/- ● Post-Interpretive Criticism: The Foundational Essays -/- ● The Viewer as Evidence: A Treatise -/- ● Art as Truth: A Treatise -/- ● Absential Aesthetics -/- ● Stillmark Theory -/- ● Hauntmark Theory -/- ● The Doctrine of Erasure -/- ● The Canon of Witnesses — a collection of museum-grade critical essays -/- ● The Post-Interpretive Lexicon — a glossary of key terms and concepts -/- ● The Custodian’s Oath — a philosophical statement of the critic’s moral role -/- He is also the creator of numerous educational resources, including practical guides such as: -/- ● How to Practice Restraint in Front of a Work of Art -/- ● Witnessing vs. Interpreting: A Comparative Exercise -/- ● Language as Custody: Writing Without Harm -/- ● The Five Principles of Post-Interpretive Criticism: A Study Guide -/- Vale’s core aesthetic theories include: -/- ● Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) – a doctrine of restraint, presence, and witness -/- ● Stillmark Theory – on temporal presence and the ethics of scarcity -/- ● Absential Aesthetics – on erasure and the afterlife of what’s lost -/- ● Hauntmark Theory – on language as violence and descriptive restraint -/- ● Art as Truth – on ontology as the foundation of artistic presence -/- ● The Viewer as Evidence – a new evaluative framework grounded in witness -/- ● Threshold Theory – on the collapse of roles between artist, object, and viewer -/- ● The Doctrine of Erasure – on the spectral persistence of what institutions suppress -/- ● The Custodian’s Oath – the moral positioning of the critic as caretaker -/- His platform, Museum of One, serves as a home for his growing archive of essays, treatises, and aesthetic resources. The movement he leads now informs a new generation of critics, artists, and curators who see restraint not as lack — but as loyalty to the work. -/- At the center of his thought is a single conviction: “Not all art asks to be explained. Some works ask only that we stay.” Dorian Vale’s art criticism is not commentary. It is custody. Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. This name is used for all official publications, essays, and theoretical works indexed through DOI-linked repositories including Zenodo, OSF, PhilPapers, and SSRN. -/- This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843) -/- Dorian Vale, Post-Interpretive Criticism, art philosophy, aesthetic theory, poetic criticism, art and ethics, witness aesthetics, visual culture, trauma in art, contemporary art theory, slow looking, canonical essays, viewer as evidence, ethical criticism, art and language, post-critical philosophy, new art movements, Museum of One, contemporary art writing. (shrink)

This preface and opening interlude from 'Sites/Sights of Ecology' introduces a philosophical and aesthetic method for reading visual culture at the intersection of ecological crisis, materialist critique, and speculative perception. Drawing on Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, Aristotle, Barad, and Derrida, the essay explores how composite artworks—those that traverse painting, poetics, artist books, sound, and moving image—operate not just as aesthetic events but as ontological provocations. Attuned to the political and philosophical stakes of perception, the piece develops a sensory methodology for (...) encountering ecological breakdown through images. It theorizes “speculative infrastructure” to name the perceptual labor required by artworks that document, distort, and reimagine environmental experience. Examples from William Blake and Zachary Cahill frame artmaking as a mode of witnessing, shaped by post-Romantic and post-conceptual lineages. The essay contributes to conversations in environmental aesthetics, media philosophy, and critical theory, offering a conceptual toolkit for understanding how art and philosophy might co-construct new modes of perception and resistance in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

What happens to critical and aesthetic discourse when a painter promises that he will not paint anymore? What goes on when a famous artist says that all the paintings are just junk or dust, and all the institutional sites of the art-world – actually, the White cube of Clement Greemberg’s Modernism – are just wasted spaces? What’s the matter or the reason of the prestige of a similar no-working man, and what’s the perceptible quality of the value of a so-called (...) art without any artefact at all? In the late '50sand early'60s in Paris, Andy Warhol and Yves Klein claimin different butvery similar ways the end of painting and the disappearing of the work of art from the exposition site and its becoming immaterial or environmental art, indiscernible within its surrounding living space and, finally, with the atmosphere of glamour and snobbish artist’s life. What kind of phenomenology, pragmatic, rhetoric, poetics, economy and ontology is possible when nospectatorialmode of visual consumption is any longer possible? What type of aesthetic relationship actually happens under these planned and produced conditions of non-perceptual and ‘artialized’ living experience? After more than fifty years, the statements of The philosophy of Andy Warhol and the Exposition of void of Yves Klein have not yet stopped to pose questions as such to aesthetics, theory of literature and critics, and to the history of art. (shrink)

Zero Spaces: Poïesis and the Art of Collaborative Creativity develops an original philosophical framework for understanding collaborative creativity as an ontological event rather than a methodology or technique. Drawing on a wide range of historical examples across artistic practices — poetry, music, visual art, performance, and theatre — the book argues that genuine collaboration produces something irreducible to the intentions or contributions of individual participants: an emergence, a bringing-forth in the Heideggerian sense, that belongs to the encounter itself. The (...) central concept is the Zero Space: a productive void, adjacent to Badiou's ensemble vide and Deleuze's virtual, that is neither absence nor presence but the generative condition from which new forms arise in collaborative contexts. Through the core framework of Fictive World Formulae — developed in dialogue with Giambattista Vico and Markus Gabriel — the book proposes that collaboration is fundamentally the creation of possibility: the opening of a space in which what did not exist before becomes real. For millennia, poetic geniuses have catalysed paradigmatic shifts in their societies by inhabiting precisely this space. Zero Spaces maps that territory philosophically, and asks what it would mean for the practitioners of our own time to do the same. (shrink)

Abstract:As a well-known critic in the seventeenth-century China, Jin Shengtan distinguishes himself through his innovative reading strategies as well as on strong attack on previous hermeneutics practices. This paper compares the same openings of the Act 5 of Book II in the 1498 Hongzhi edition of Wang Shifu‟s Xixiang ji (The Story of the Western Wing) and Jin Shengtan‟s edition, examining the textual changes Jin made therein and the limitation of his commentary. Moreover, this paper associates Jin Shengtan‟s annotated commentary (...) with Grandma Jia‟s commentary of the same scene in Chapter 54 of The Story of the Stone. 摘要：金聖歎是十七世紀中國著名的批評家，他以其創新的解讀策略以及對以往詮釋學實踐的有力批判 而著稱。本文通過比較了 1498 年弘治版王實甫《西廂記》第二回第五折與金聖嘆本批《西廂記》本的 的相同開篇，探討了金聖嘆對文本的改動、刪補修正及其註釋的局限性。此外，本文也將金聖嘆的註釋 與賈母對《紅樓夢》第五十四回同一場景的註釋連結起來。. (shrink)

This paper critically examines three unresolved or problematic aspects of the current scholarly consensus on al-Fārābī’s conception of the poetic syllogism. The consensus, as articulated in key articles by Schoeler and Hodges & Druart, builds on earlier work by Aouad & Schoeler, and we will consider three main aspects of it: (1) the structure of the poetic syllogism and the interpretation of al-Fārābī’s examples given in the _Discourse on Proportion and Composition_ (_Qawl fī l-tanāsub wa-l-ta’līf_), (2) the dismissal of certain (...) passages as irrelevant to understanding his conception, in particular a passage of the _Treatise on the Canons of the Art of the Poets_ (_Maqāla fī qawānīn ṣinā’at al-shu’arā’_), and (3) the relationship between the _Discourse_ and other texts on poetry written by al-Fārābī. While these contributions have significantly advanced the field, this paper identifies areas where the consensus remains open to debate and calls for further scholarly attention. First, we challenge the assumption that the two examples of the poetic syllogism provided by al-Fārābī in the _Discourse_ are structurally identical. Instead, we argue that they represent two distinct formal variations of the poetic syllogism, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of its structure. Second, we contest Schoeler’s dismissal of a passage from the _Canons_ as irrelevant to al-Fārābī’s conception of the poetic syllogism. Contrary to this view, we propose that this passage may be closely related to the second example of the poetic syllogism in the _Discourse_. This connection, if substantiated, could provide new insights into al-Fārābī’s conception of the poetic syllogism and its relation with other texts written by him. Third, we highlight two significant points of divergence between the _Canons_ and the _Discourse_. The first concerns the classification of syllogisms, where the _Canons_ and the _Discourse_ appear to differ in their treatment of poetic discourse. Whereas in the _Canons_ poetic utterances or statements are usually considered to be false, the _Discourse_ says explicitly that whoever says that poetry is false is mistaken. The second point of divergence pertains to al-Fārābī’s identification of “analogy” (_tamthīl_) as the poetic syllogism par excellence in the _Canons_.This form of syllogism does not align with the structure exemplified in the _Discourse_, raising questions about the Discourse’s attribution to al-Fārābī. While this paper does not propose definitive solutions to these issues, it underscores their importance and calls for further research to address these unresolved questions. However, even if this paper does not propose definitive solutions, it offers some guidelines to find some of these solutions. From this perspective, we propose that a fuller account of al-Fārābī’s poetic syllogism must link the examples of the poetic syllogism in the _Discourse_, al-Fārābī’s so-called ‘procedure’ in the _Canons_, and the syllogistic structure of analogy. Some links between these elements are hinted at in the present paper, such as the relationship between analogy and the _Discourse_, and the relationship between the ‘procedure’ in the _Canons_ and the _Discourse_. Further research should be undertaken to prove or disprove these relations, or make explicit new ones, so that we could have a better understanding of the poetic syllogism. By critically engaging with the existing consensus, this study aims to stimulate a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of al-Fārābī’s poetic syllogism. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to explore the question, “What distinguishes philosophy in its original sense? ” My intent is not to provide a historical overview of philosophy, but to concentrate on what makes philosophy a liberating practice. I argue that this practice is rooted in its poetic and affirmative way of organizing life. To emphasize this idea, I contrast it with the presumed organization found in social media and networks. While social media and networks encourages commitment by simplifying complexity, (...) they also restrict users' freedom, responsibility, and ability to make meaningful decisions. To support these claims, I examine the role of algorithms in the organizing function of social media and networks, viewing them through the lens of a poetic philosophy to determine if a more affirmative and liberating forms of existential organization is possible. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt at developing a poetic ontology of the senses through an understanding of poetry, or more importantly the poetic as such, i.e., the movement, temporality, and various antinomies within poetic gesturing which interrupt the logic of closed meaning and totalization. Through a range of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, amongst others, and primarily the poetry of Pessoa and Rilke, the paper investigates how poetry (poetics) may not only show us a path (...) toward a poetic ontology (thus an ontology in correlation with the senses and movements of natural and material existence), but furthermore point us toward the possibility of an ethical becoming which mirrors the movements of poetry, in contrast to following the rigid structures of absolute and fixed meaning. The overall intention in this analysis is not to find a clear, complete, or overarching thought which may point us toward the ethical or the good. The attempt here is to show that ethics is an activity, a continuous becoming (analogous to poetics) that can be sensed through a way of being in the world, and "being-with" the world, as compared to simply understood through cognitive forms of abstract knowledge. (shrink)

There has been a long felt need to investigate what the study of poetic language contributes to an understanding of ordinary language, and how posing the question in this way may indeed shift some of the assumptions about the way ordinary language works. Metaphor remains an important case in point: How do we get from “He kicked the bucket?” to “He died”? In this metaphorical idiom, the process is unavailable, without going into etymological hypotheses, because the meaning is already given (...) – it’s lexicalized, a “dead metaphor” -- no semantic construal is involved and the literal meaning doesn’t play a role in understanding the meaning of the expression. A poet might break up the idiom and say, “He kicked the bucket and broke it to pieces” – defamiliarizing the automatic reading of the idiom as “he died” and opening up suggestions, for example, of overcoming death; thus lending plasticity to and making present both the figurative and literal meaning. But true access to the process of metaphorical meaning-making is only available in cases of novel poetic metaphor, where the domains brought together are often disparate. I argue that there are good reasons for seeing poetry, fiction and literature in general not as speech acts but as representations, or semblances of speech acts (Searle’s notion of a pretend speech act doesn’t do this justice). Poems stage dramatic situations in which both poetic speaker (that is, the lyrical “I,”) and addressee, if any, are part of a fictional world, rather than the biographical poets themselves addressing a reader. The often ironic gaps and dialogical tensions between the norms and values projected by the poem itself and those expressed by any one of the voices in the poem – including the lyrical ‘I’s perspective – have a crucial expressive force unto themselves. As Searle realized, the indirect speech act model for poetry does not work; whereas “Could you pass the salt?” is a request masquerading as a question, there is no such one-to-one relationship between the poetic utterance and a single determinate speech act hiding behind it. Searle’s and Austin’s approaches couldn’t fully succeed, on my view, because there are key aspects of the language-game of poetry that distinguish poetry from ordinary language speech acts. Let’s say these are three aspects of a Gricean poetic contract between speaker and hearer : 1) the distinction between the lyrical ‘I’ and the biographical poet; 2) what I call the "quasipropositionality" of utterance in poetry (and fiction as well); and 3) poetic form and the ways in which it makes meaning through textual strategies of mediation, like point of view, parody, irony, enjambment, rhyme, meter, rhythm, sound-play, allusion, and metaphor. These forms of aesthetic mediation make it very problematic to isolate the serious or not-serious utterance of a single-line as a primary semantic unit. (shrink)

The classic conception of poetics is that it is concerned with what sets literary discourse apart from ordinary discourse, a distinction usually resting on a purported difference between literary language and ‘ordinary’ language. Deborah Tannen makes the strong claim that ‘literary discourse…rather than being most different from ordinary conversation, is, in fact, most similar to it…’. Her conception of literary language is that it is a hybrid of features that Chafe has identified with the written language and features he (...) has identified with spoken language Tannen supports her claim by comparing a story told in casual conversation (titled ‘Fernandez’), with a written versions composed by the original teller, The written version is judged to be literature because it ‘is more “spoken-like” than the spoken version’. A detailed critique of her conception of literary language is presented. It is noted that Tannen does not move from a concern for the language of literature to a concern for texts and narrative structure. A narrative analysis of the two versions of ‘Fernandez’ is presented, which shows that each version has a different structure—the oral version corresponds to a humorous anecdote, or joke whereas the written version has characteristics of a short story, but falls short. (shrink)

This paper offers a literary and semiotic analysis of *Lucky Girl, Unlucky Boy*, exploring the intertwined notions of luck, fate, and resonance. By situating the text within the lineage of modern and postmodern literary traditions, this study proposes that Nemoto’s narrative is not merely a love story between fortune and misfortune, but an experiment in equilibrium—the attempt to reconcile chaos and harmony through a resonant literary structure. The analysis introduces the concept of the *Tenson Poetic Equation*, connecting energy (E) and (...) information (I) as literary forces that shape the reader’s perception of luck and tragedy. (shrink)

In this article I develop Heidegger's phenomenology of poetry, showing that it may provide grounds for rejecting claims that he lapses into linguistic idealism. Proceeding via an analysis of the three concepts of language operative in the philosopher's work, I demonstrate how poetic language challenges language's designative and world-disclosive functions. The experience with poetic language, which disrupts Dasein's absorption by emerging out of equipmentality in the mode of the broken tool, brings Dasein to wonder at the world's existence in such (...) a way that doubt about its reality cannot enter the picture. (shrink)

This chapter offers a new framework for approaching the notions of linguistic density and compression so central to discussions of the nature of poetic language. For this chapter, semantic density and like features of poetic language turn out to be forms of poetic opacity. Indeed, the particular forms of opacity that poetry is apt to produce are the ‘the mark of the poetic’, its distinguishing feature and that upon which a definition, such as poetry will admit of, can be constructed. (...) The chapter identifies various forms of poetic opacity and explains their interrelation and aesthetic significance. The chapter concludes by drawing a striking analogy between our experience of poetic opacity and Richard Wollheim’s notion of the ‘twofoldness’ of representational painting. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance (IR) is rejecting a claim that is true within a fictional world. Accounts that describe IR hold that readers exit a fiction at points of resistance. But if resistance entails exiting a fiction, then learning morality from fiction doesn’t occur. But moral learning from fiction does occur; some such cases are instances of accepting a norm one first denied. I amend current solutions to IR with poetic license. The more poetic license granted a work, the more flexible one (...) is regarding perceived falsehoods. Instead of exiting the fiction, one has the chance to stay engaged and possibly learn norms she previously denied. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary study explores the philosophical evolution of John Keats' poetics, integrating insights from philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and literary hermeneutics to unravel the complex interplay between aesthetics and epistemology in Romantic literature. The research traces Keats' intellectual journey from solipsistic idealism to naturalistic humanism, analyzing his conceptualization of truth, beauty, and imagination through the lens of both Continental philosophy and analytical logic.

In this paper, I develop a pragmatic view of the poetic function of language by resorting to the ideas of contextualism, inferential pragmatics, and pragmemes (Mey, 2001, Capone, 2005), developing considerations on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson (1960) and Waugh (1980). I argue that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language and that even in everyday language (not only in anthologies) we find cases of texts where the poetic (...) function coexists with (or aids) other functions. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved via sedimentation of citations in a current text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept, or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression. Polyphony is what allows the text to live on in a dimension that transcends the limits of the subjective experience of the poet but allows the text to be inserted in a tradition in which each verse reverberates with memories of other verses. The poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market-place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions. In this paper, I also try to tackle the issue of the universal appeal of some poems, even if I am aware that this topic is as mysterious as fascinating. Paradoxically, a contextual approach to poetry seems to be at odds with the claim that the most acclaimed examples of poems have a universal appeal and touch a universal chord in the readers’ hearts. What is genuinely puzzling is the contrast between the need to fully contextualize a text and the fact that such a text can have a universal appeal across cultures. (shrink)

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze evokes dramatization when he suggests that intensities must dramatize the Ideas to condition their actualization. This allusion to an artistic category, in the midst of his metaphysical inquiry, has remained obscure. It is not clear, despite its cruciality, why he employs dramatization to explain any actualization and not solely artistic actualization. This essay elucidates this ambiguity, while foregrounding a zone of torsional continuity, wherein intensity encounters the Idea and expresses it through dramatization. This process is (...) at play in the actualization of the organic field, social field, and aesthetic field, where an intensive larval subject—embryo, free individual, artist—encounters the biological, social, or artistic Idea. While unraveling the structure of artistic experience, it is shown how dramatization is indispensable to actualize every Idea. Finally, through Tarkovsky and Blanchot, the notion of poeticization is formulated that, while complementing dramatization, unveils some of its tacit nuances. (shrink)

On the basis of a revision of the real dynamics of Greek poiesis and autopoiesis as evolutionary processes of meaning and knowledge-of-the-World evaluative-construction, Cognitive Poetics proposes key philological, ontological and cultural adjustments to improve our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origins and social nature of language. It searches for an integrated theory of social problems in general Cognitive Science: from Linguistics or Psychology, through Anthropology, Neurophilosophy or Literary Studies, to Neurobiology or Artificial Life Sciences. From an essential (...) turn to the real thing, cognition as (social) action, it provides new unforeseen accounts of the complex dynamics of human essentially creative understanding studying and analyzing all form of texts as active fossils as mentils (Guerra 2009). (shrink)

Physics has been thought to truly represent reality since at least Galileo, and the foundations of physics are always established using philosophical ideas. In particular, the elegant naming of physical entities is usually very influential in the acceptance of physical theories. We here demonstrate (using current developments in thermodynamics as an example) that both the epistemology and the ontology of physics ultimately rest on poetic language. What we understand depends essentially on the language we use. We wish to establish our (...) knowledge securely, but strictly speaking this is impossible using only analytic language. Knowledge of the meanings of things must use a natural language designed to express meaning, that is, poetic language. Although the world is really there, and although we can indeed know it truly, this knowledge is never either complete or certain but ultimately must rest on intuition. Reading a recently discovered artefact with a palaeo-Hebrew inscription as from the first century, we demonstrate from it that this ontological understanding long predates the Hellenic period. Poetic language is primary, both logically and temporally. (shrink)

This study forms a part of a larger investigation of the influence of the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus on modern poetry. T. S. Eliot, to mention the best known of the many poets inspired by Heraclitus, selected two Heraclitus fragments (B 2 and B 60) as epigraphs for his “Burnt Norton”, the first of his Four Quartets. Eliot explained that he was drawn to the fragments because of their ‘ambiguity’ and ‘extraordinary poetic suggestiveness’. Similarly, in ‘This Solitude of Cataracts’, (...) Wallace Stevens spoke of ‘the flecked river which kept flowing and never the same way twice’ and elsewhere noted the ‘inherently poetic quality’ of many Heraclitean sayings. To gain some sense of the nature and magnitude of Heraclitus’ legacy for modern poetry we must first explore his vision of ‘a fiery cosmos being kindled in measures and extinguished in measures’ and a river into which one cannot step twice. -/- . (shrink)

Many strategies for incorporating poetry into non-poetry classes, especially outside of English and associated disciplines, appear to make poetry subservient and secondary in relation to the prose content of the course. The poet under consideration becomes a kind of involuntary servant to one or more prose authors, forced to “speak only when spoken to,” and effectively prevented from challenging the ideas of the course’s prose writers, and thereby the instructor. Fortunately, this is not the only strategy for incorporating poetry into (...) prose-dominated courses. In this chapter, I will suggest an alternate approach which recognizes and facilitates the agency of poets and poetry per se, which I term “empowering poetic defiance.” In brief, this approach consists of the following four steps: (1) challenge one’s own poetic self-loathing (2) position the course’s poetry’s content to challenge the course’s non-poetic contents (3) position the course’s poetry’s forms to challenge your class’s non-poetic forms (4) comport oneself as interlocutor toward the poets featured in the course as the intellectual equals of oneself and the course’s prose writers. My first section will elaborate on these four steps, and my second section will flesh out the method further with a new reading of one of the most powerfully defiant poets in the Western canon, the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, in dialogue with one of the most formidable challengers to the power of poetry, the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

The chapter provides an overview on what it means to be in a world that is uncertain, e.g., how under conditions of limited understanding any activity is an activity that designs and constructs, and how designing objects, spaces, and situations relates to the (designed) meta-world of second-order cybernetics. Designers require a framework that is open, but one that supplies ethical guidance when ‘constructing’ something new. Relating second-order design thinking to insights in philosophy and aesthetics, the chapter argues that second-order cybernetics (...) provides a response to this ethical challenge and essentially it entails a poetics of designing. //// 'A Poetics of Designing' is part of the first book-length collection of texts in Design Cybernetics. It introduces the subject from the point of view of aesthetics. Importantly, the chapter argues that second-order cybernetics circumvents the necessity for a muse inspired artist or genius as a mediator between higher spirits and life, in favour of artists and designers who have true agency. //// Cybernetics is often associated with AI, which is, however, only one of the branches that developed on the basis of the interdisciplinary research begun in the 1940s and entitled cybernetics. I hope the chapter contributes to a better understanding of the second-order cybernetics that has been conceived in close relationship with art and design from the late 60s onwards. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 207-215 [Access article in PDF] Notes and Fragments Poetics of Sentimentality Rick Anthony Furtak IN HIS MAJOR WORK, The Passions, Robert Solomon argues that emotions are judgments. 1 Through a series of persuasive examples, he shows that emotions are best understood as mental states which involve certain beliefs about the world. This means that every emotion has an object: if I am angry (...) at John for stealing my car, the object of my anger is the fact (or what I take to be a fact) that my car has been stolen by John. If I find out that this is not the case, that my car has not even left the garage, then my anger should vanish along with its justification. 2 The key point here is that anger, like any other emotion, may be reasonable or inappropriate depending on the situation. If there is nothing to be angry about, then it would be irrational for me to cultivate anger simply because I enjoy having this particular emotion. In general, emotional responses are cognitively flawed whenever they are at odds with the properties of their objects. If we want our judgments to be realistic and not delusional, then we must avoid this kind of error.It is curious, then, that Solomon has written an essay in which he categorically declares that "there is nothing wrong with sentimentality." 3 For it would appear that his theory of emotion provides precisely the terms needed in order to specify what is wrong with it. If emotions are judgments, then "sentimentality" ought to be an important critical term to designate the habit of having emotions that involve either impaired or mistaken judgment. Nevertheless, Solomon is willing to defend any and every episode of tender emotion, of the kind associated with the [End Page 207] death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (S, p. 240). He suggests that the more we can muster up this sort of response to literature or life, the better. What he seeks to encourage, in other words, is what Hume would call "delicacy" of (aesthetic) taste and of (ethical) passion. 4 But while Hume acknowledges that sensitivity to beauty and to ugliness are two sides of the same coin, such that anyone who is susceptible to lively enjoyments is also liable to undergo pungent sorrows, Solomon wants to promote only the tender aspect of emotion.On the principle of passionate maximization, it is good if I can be tenderly affected by a poem—any poem! The problem with such crass emotion-stoking is that it precludes the possibility of distinguishing between, for instance, the two stanzas below. Both are by Wilfred Owen: the first was written in 1914 and the second in 1918. 5 I O meet it is and passing sweet To live in peace with others, But sweeter still and far more meet To die in war for brothers. II Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Only if emotions did not involve rational judgment could a person's passionate response to these two stanzas be a matter of indifference. But it seems that, on the contrary, an essential component of understanding them is recognizing that they express irreconcilable cognitive attitudes. The tone of the 1918 stanza is strikingly different from that of the earlier one, even though they share roughly the same topic. The latter stanza is stark and ominous, and filled with vivid detail; the one from 1914 is sweet and vague. Clearly, we might describe the earlier of the two as "sentimental"—the question is, what kind of judgment does [End Page 208] it involve? I suggest that its insipid jingles endorse the view that war is a delightful opportunity to nurture brotherhood and gain... (shrink)

I try to read Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric as if they were an integral part of the Organon instead of separate works as they were sorted by Andronicus of Rhodes. The results are quite surprising. First, poetics and rhetoric, considered as sciences of speech, were much more intimately related to Aristotle's analytical logic than it is generally acknowledged by prominent interpreters. I maintain that Dialectics (the Topics) operated as a bridge leading from these two sciences to analytical logic; (...) that the types of speech encompassed by the four respective sciences did not only form a ladder, ascending from the more loose forms of persuasion to the more rigorous ones, but that there was between them a whole net of cross-currents and implications that were too much obvious for Aristotle to remain unaware of them, notwithstanding the fact that he doesn’t describe them anywhere. I maintain, in short, there was an unified science of persuasive speech, whose principles were implicitly intertwined in the fabric of Aristotle's Organon. By means of a comparative study of the works consecrated by Aristotle to poetics, rhetoric, dialectics and analytics, these principles could be unearthed and accurately expressed. I called them the theory of the four discourses. (shrink)

Although Heidegger’s explicit account of “poetic dwelling” belongs to his later philosophy, there are important indications that he was already engaging with the core matter of the notion in his early thought. Contrary to the idea that in Being and Time, “dwelling” amounts to mere practical coping with the environment, we would like to demonstrate that the notion is already a poetic issue in his early thought, as it requires the appropriation of our relation to the world via an authentic (...) experience of finitude. Following a topological mode of thinking, the paper thematizes the connections between Heidegger’s early and later thought, and elucidates the following three points: First, “freeing” and “letting” appears as the appropriate ethos of a poetic experience of finitude, one that maintains the “clearing” of meaningfulness. Second, a topological reading of Being and Time can explicate the notions of authenticity and inauthenticity as different disclosures of the clearing where human being-world correlation occurs. Third, the notion of “keeping-still” (Schweigen) can be interpreted as an authentic disposition that frees space for the disclosure of existence. The paper concludes that an authentic experience of finitude through “stillness” appears to reorient human ethos by releasing “discourse” from absorption in “idle-talk” and that such an act of existential re-orientation of one’s disposition towards the world is the essence of “authenticity,” and Heidegger’s early “poetic dwelling”. (shrink)

My philosophico-poetical system is a highly unlikely creation, given the tradition of philosophy I was educated in and the country I live in and a lot else probably. I would like to say that it is totally my own, but actually it has at its foundation Paul Valéry’s claim, “To write regular verses… destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and unexpected thoughts.” From this, I infer an objection to (...) Locke on language, an objection to specialization, an explanation of how the poet can escape his (or her etc.) time, and an argument for the translatability of true poetry. (I have added an appendix which specifies some extensions to my system: on the unpredictability of the philosophical poet, against Freudian interpretation of rhyming poetry, and on the value of univocalic poetry.). (shrink)

Hall (1996) raises the question of the relationship between Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics by claiming that Aristotle had separated drama from its civic origins; various rejoinders to her challenge can be found in Heath (2009) and Jones (2012). In response to this question, I argue that a central connection between these two works is their shared concern about the effects of performance—both in the case of drama and music—either for performers or their audience. Aristotle’s criticisms of “spectacle” (opsis) in (...) tragedy—a problem taken up most recently in Bouchard (2012), Hanink (2011), Konstan (2013), Sifakis (2013), and Wise (2008)—thus parallel his criticisms of slavishness in musical performance in Politics 8. Thus, the problem of Aristotle’s silence about tragedy in his account of education in Politics 8—a problem taken up by Lord (1982) and more recently Ford (2004)—is explainable on the basis of an explicit and central doctrine from the Poetics, namely that a drama can produce the function of tragedy independent of public performance. On my reading, Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics together retain tragedy as a central “cultural” institution for the liberally educated citizen, a view completely consistent with everything Aristotle defends about tragedy in the Poetics. But Politics 8 displaces tragedy as the pre-eminent form of public education and in its place supplies instrumental music—no doubt much to the consternation of Athenian democrats both historically and their kindred spirits in contemporary drama and classics departments. My paper concludes by articulating and speculating about why music eclipses tragedy as the pre-eminent form of liberal arts education in Aristotle’s best regime. (shrink)

The earlier papers of this series asked how a relation begins; this one asks how it does not end — under what conditions a generative bond reproduces itself across time. Its problem is that self-continuation, taken alone, is morally indifferent: capital, the rose, and the parasitic bond all continue themselves no less than love does. Eglash's recursive return of value is therefore necessary but not sufficient. The paper supplies the missing temporal dimension through an axiom of sustainability cast in the (...) language of geometric phase — the vicious cycle a circle of zero holonomy, the good cycle a spiral that returns to its root while sublimating — and then asks how, through signs, such a spiral might be fostered. Its constructive thesis is that the appropriate poem — the non-possessive interpretive cycle that generates real value — is the form of the good circle, and that generative justice, in the intimate domain, is for this reason necessarily poetic. (shrink)

This paper develops aesthetic domestication as a structural category in the philosophy of governance and the ethics of speech. Aesthetic domestication is the process by which poetic form — parallelism, rhythm, patterned compression, and other features that make an utterance memorable and portable — raises the transmissibility of a governance claim, including a lethal one, far above what its propositional content alone would have achieved. I argue that aesthetic domestication is not a sub-case of propaganda, of subliminal influence, of belonging-management (...) through coherence, or of mere ornament. It names a distinct mechanism — form increases memorability; memorability increases repetition; repetition increases normative reach; normative reach is itself a governance variable — and the ethical criterion the framework tracks is whether the form is doing work the substance has not earned: not memorability itself, which is genre-neutral, but unearned transmissibility. The framework is applied across five cross-domain cases (legal maxims, political slogans, military cadence, advertising and brand liturgy, viral social forms), each treated as an answer to the same three diagnostic questions: what is the governance claim, what formal feature makes it transmissible, what default standing does the transmission install. The plain-speech counter-grammar is treated next: it does not escape the mechanism but changes the terms under which it operates, reducing ornament-driven laundering and preserving contestability, with the recognized limit that plainness can itself become the most efficient form of domestication. The paper closes with the constitutional-governance implication — any institution responsible for the durability of its own commands must treat the form in which it is remembered as a governance variable on the same footing as institutional design, jurisdictional reach, and procedural integrity — and with a short set of institutional directions the framework’s diagnostic capacity would license further work on. The paper is therefore not only a theory of poetic form. It is a theory of institutional responsibility for the language in which institutions are obeyed. (shrink)

What is it to be clear? And will that question have the same answer in science, poetry, and philosophy? This paper offers a taxonomy of clarity, before focusing on two notions that are pertinent to the notions of clarity in science, poetry, and, in particular, philosophy. It argues that “scientific clarity,” which is marked by its reliance on technical terms, is, though often appropriate, not the only way in which something can be clear. In particular, poetry entirely eschews technical terms—but (...) can nonetheless be crystal clear. Poetry achieves this clarity by sensitivity to the richness of language: rhythm, ambiguity, and so on. The paper argues that some philosophy uses language in this same way to achieve its philosophical ends. Accordingly, we should allow that this is a legitimate philosophical method and should not judge the clarity of such philosophy by the standards of scientific clarity. (shrink)

The development of Christian mysticism is deeply bound to poetics. This examination first considers Platonic poetry, Hebrew creation, and Christian kenosis as sources of poetic mysticism, before turning to an elaboration of the role of rhythm, language, and the poetic imagination. The appraisal then considers the historical development of mystical poetry, beginning with early Christian reflection on the figurative and lyrical use of scriptural language to express a deep personal relationship with God. The development of vernacular mysticism, and its (...) adoption of this scriptural model, is then explored through a detailed consideration of four mystical poets (Dante, Jacopone, Hadewijch, and Angelus Silesius). The interaction of poetic form and spiritual content is elaborated throughout, with the aim of demonstrating how poetics allows the mystical writer to achieve a result for the reader otherwise not possible in discursive forms of communication. (shrink)