Imaginarien der Kraft
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Edited by:
Frank Fehrenbach
Forces elude perception. Since antiquity, however, perception itself (aisthesis) has been considered a force (dynamis). Thinking about perception means balancing the tensions between truthfulness and susceptibility to deception, passive impression and active imagination, hidden cause and perceptible effect. Aesthetically encoded perceptual attitudes such as stimulus, overwhelmedness, attention, or distraction also give rise to reflections on aesthetic concepts of force. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the contributions to this volume ask how conceptualizations of sensory forces relate to the problematic perceptibility of forces, how artistic processes are adapted to perceptual models, and how this plays out in the formation and modification of perceptual conventions.
Julia Weber’s book demonstrates how Aristotle’s understanding of virtual forces as undetectable but nonetheless effective has shaped philosophical discourse up until the modern age. It traces developments from philosophical debate about the existence of virtual forces in antiquity and the Middle Ages to the emergence of virtual spaces in the early modern period, and the appearance of virtual worlds in 18th-century literature. In this way, it reveals the seldom traced continuities and shifts between ancient philosophical discussion of forces and contemporary virtual realities.
The power of poetry, a topos since Plato, undergoes a radical transformation in literary texts between 1770 and 1830. Concepts of divine or unconscious inspiration or of the overwhelming impacts of poetry are recast in notions of the transformative potentials of poetry. The author discusses these reconfigurations of poetic power in the context of early thermodynamic thinking, where the world presents itself not as a mechanism but as a self-organised metabolism. In images of nature as well as in machine-like arrangements for burning and consuming, breathing and eating, Goethe and Novalis develop models of a formal dynamic that, along with Herder and W. v. Humboldt, can be understood as energeia, i.e., as continuous shaping and reshaping.
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Rewrites the long history of force in natural philosophy and poetics of the 17th and 18th centuries
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Takes up current initiatives of energy studies
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Goethe and Novalis as observers of the entry into fossil combustion cultures
By the end of the 18th century, notions of "forces of nature" (Naturkräfte) were increasingly discussed across disciplinary bounds: attraction and repulsion, vital forces and electric fluids, formative drives and biological organisms were examined as forces linked to ‘natural’ processes. German Romantic literature, science, and philosophy – from Schelling and Novalis to Günderrode and Hölderlin – pondered interrelated notions of forces considered as dynamic and continually active in nature – forces which, in turn, also appeared to shape human actions, social structures, and cultural developments. This volume explores the points of reference for, approaches to, and afterlives of Romantic conceptions and representations of natural forces at the intersection of natural sciences and cultural imaginaries.
Throughout the fin de siècle, "energy" was a buzzword that was used far beyond the boundaries of the sciences to negotiate the formative scope as well as limits of Western modernity. The human body was positioned at the center of the visualization of this enigmatic drive of all movement in discourses on labor and economics, physical culture, sport, art, and literature. It was through the body that this all-pervading and conditioning physical principle as well as its perceptual qualities were to be made tangible. This volume is dedicated to these "energetic bodies." The transdisciplinary individual contributions trace body scenarios of force and energy over the course of history from 1800 to the peak phase around 1900 and up to the present.
Dealing with forces is part of the basic inventory of artistic processes. In giving shape and movement to material, such forces are manifested in a specific form; as push and pull, for example, as heaviness and lightness, but also as attachment and dissolution. The articles in the book examine notions of formative and motive forces using examples from art, music, dance, theater, photography and literature. The questions posed not only cover how historical notions of force (such as energeia and vis from ancient rhetoric) are adopted, taken further, and correlated with mechanically, metaphysically and organologically based concepts of force, but also how, in the examination of form and movement, the inherent concepts of force are manifested or presented in a new light.
Gewaltbilder durchdringen in vielfältigen Formen nahezu alle Lebensbereiche. Ihr Erscheinen ist dabei nicht nur auf ihre Wirkkräfte selbst, sondern auch auf die Rezeptionsbedürfnisse potentiell aller Mediennutzerinnen und -nutzer zurückzuführen. Der vorliegende Band widmet sich ebendiesem komplizierten Verhältnis von medialisierter Gewalt und ihren Nutzerinnen und Nutzern, das insbesondere von zwei Grundkräften geprägt zu sein scheint: jenen der Anziehung und der Abstoßung. In diesem Kräfteverhältnis sehen sich Nutzerinnen und Nutzer in Konfrontation mit Gewaltbildern unter moralischem und ästhetischem Selbsteinschätzungsdruck einem Dilemma ausgesetzt: Sollen sie besser hin- oder doch lieber wegsehen?
Was the post-antique depiction of cast shadows really a Florentine innovation of the 1420s, as Giorgio Vasari and subsequent scholarship have led us to believe? In this study, Gerd Mathias Micheluzzi undertakes the first comprehensive examination of this question, combining art-historical inquiry with an interdisciplinary approach. Through detailed analyses of Early Christian mosaics, medieval knowledge traditions, and Italian illuminated manuscripts, wall and panel paintings from the 14th and early 15th centuries, he demonstrates that the cast shadow occupied a more substantial role in pre-Renaissance visual culture than has hitherto been acknowledged. His study uncovers a rich history of visual experimentation, in which developments were intertwined yet neither constant nor teleologically directed towards the imitation of nature.
- First systematic study of the cast shadow in Italian painting, literature, and natural philosophy of the Middle Ages
- Revises a long-standing topos in art history
