The Techne of Giving

The Techne of Giving PDF

Author: Timothy C. Campbell

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2017-01-02

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 082327327X

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Over the last five years, corporations and individuals have given more money, more often, to charitable organizations than ever before. What could possibly be the downside to inhabiting a golden age of gift-giving? That question lies at the heart of Timothy Campbell’s account of contemporary giving and its social forms. In a milieu where gift-giving dominates, nearly everything given and received becomes the subject of a calculus—gifts from God, from benefactors, from those who have. Is there another way to conceive of generosity? What would giving and receiving without gifts look like? A lucid and imaginative intervention in both European philosophy and film theory, The Techne of Giving investigates how we hold the objects of daily life—indeed, how we hold ourselves—in relation to neoliberal forms of gift-giving. Even as instrumentalism permeates giving, Campbell articulates a resistant techne locatable in forms of generosity that fail to coincide with biopower’s assertion that the only gifts that count are those given and received. Moving between visual studies, Winnicottian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian biopower, and apparatus theory, Campbell makes a case for how to give and receive without giving gifts. In the conversation between political philosophy and classic Italian films by Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni, the potential emerges of a generous form of life that can cross between the visible and invisible, the fated and the free.

Techne Theory

Techne Theory PDF

Author: Henry Staten

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-02-21

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1472592913

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Only since the Romantic period has art been understood in terms of an ineffable aesthetic quality of things like poems, paintings, and sculptures, and the art-maker as endowed with an inexplicable power of creation. From the Greeks to the 18th century, art was conceived as techne--the skill and know-how by which things and states of affairs are ordered. Techne Theory shows how to use this concept to cut through the Romantic notion of art as a kind of magic by returning to the original sense of art as techne, the standpoint of the person who actually knows how to make a work of art. Understood as techne, art-making, like all other cultural accomplishments, is a form of work performed by an artisan who has inherited the know-how of previous generations of artisans. Along the way, Techne Theory cuts through the humanist-structuralist impasse over the question of artistic agency and explains what 'form' really means.

Giving Way

Giving Way PDF

Author: Steven Connor

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1503610845

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In a world that promotes assertion, agency, and empowerment, this book challenges us to revalue a range of actions and attitudes that have come to be disregarded or dismissed as merely passive. Mercy, resignation, politeness, restraint, gratitude, abstinence, losing well, apologizing, taking care: today, such behaviors are associated with negativity or lack. But the capacity to give way is better understood as positive action, at once intricate and demanding. Moving from intra-human common courtesies, to human-animal relations, to the global civility of human-inhuman ecological awareness, the book's argument unfolds on progressively larger scales. In reminding us of the existential threat our drives pose to our own survival, Steven Connor does not merely champion a family of behaviors; he shows that we are more adept practitioners of them than we realize. At a time when it is on the wane, Giving Way offers a powerful defense of civility, the versatile human capacity to deflect aggression into sociability and to exercise power over power itself.

Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre

Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre PDF

Author: Tony McCaffrey

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-04-26

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1000863549

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Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre offers unique insight into the question of ‘voice’ in learning disabled theatre and what is gained and lost in making performance. It is grounded in the author's 18 years of making theatre with Different Light Theatre company in Christchurch, New Zealand, and includes contributions from the artists themselves. This book draws on an extensive archive of performer interviews, recordings of rehearsal processes, and informal logs of travelling together and sharing experience. These accounts engage with the practical aesthetics of theatre-making as well as their much wider ethical and political implications, relevant to any collaborative process seeking to represent the under- or un-represented. Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre asks how care and support can be tempered with artistic challenge and rigour and presents a case for how listening learning disabled artists to speech encourages attunement to indigenous knowledge and the cries of the planet in the current socio-ecological crisis. This is a vital and valuable book for anyone interested in learning disabled theatre, either as a performer, director, dramaturg, critic, or spectator.

The Gift of Touch

The Gift of Touch PDF

Author: Stephen David Ross

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9780791438732

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Traces Western ideas of corporeal bodies from Plato to contemporary feminist and postructuralist writings, with the purpose of reexamining the good, identified in Plato as that which gives authority to knowledge and truth.

The Poverty of Strategy

The Poverty of Strategy PDF

Author: Robin Holt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-05-31

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1009327305

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At least since the ancient Greeks, strategists have sought to direct organized activity through planned, rational decision-making, through the imaginative creation of vision, or through the assertion of will. In all cases, argue Holt and Zundel, strategy impoverishes, not because it only ever offers a partial view, but because it is dedicated to concealing these limits. The situation is exacerbated when machines and algorithms, not humans, organize. Holt and Zundel draw on philosophy, literature, media theory, art, mathematics, computing and military thinking in an attempt to rescue strategy by isolating what, they argue, remains its essence: strategy is a continual organizational struggle towards authenticity. This, too, is a condition of poverty, but one that sets in place an unhomely condition of questionability as opposed to one of efficient predictability. It is, argue Holt and Zundel, the sole gift of strategy to thoughtfully refuse the imperatives being generated by machine relations.

Of Art and Wisdom

Of Art and Wisdom PDF

Author: David Roochnik

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0271041420

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A comprehensive discussion of Plato's treatment of techne (technical knowledge), which shows that the final goal of Platonic philosophy is nontechnical wisdom. The Greek word &"techne,&" typically translated as &"art,&" but also as &"craft,&" &"skill,&" &"expertise,&" &"technical knowledge,&" and even &"science,&" has been decisive in shaping our &"technological&" culture. Here David Roochnik comprehensively analyzes Plato's treatment of this crucial word. Roochnik maintains that Plato's understanding of both the goodness of techne, as well as its severe limitations and consequent need to be supplemented by &"nontechnical&" wisdom, can speak directly to our own concerns about the troubling impact technology has had on contemporary life. For most commentators, techne functions as a positive, theoretical model through which Plato attempts to articulate the nature of moral knowledge. Scholars such as Terence Irwin and Martha Nussbaum argue that Plato&’s version of moral knowledge is structurally similar to techne. In arguing thus, they attribute to Plato what Nietzsche called &"theoretical optimism,&" the view that technical knowledge can become an efficient panacea for the dilemmas and painful contingencies of human life. Conventional wisdom has it, in short, that for Plato technical, moral knowledge can solve life's problems. By systematically analyzing Socrates&’ analogical arguments, Roochnik shows the weakness of the conventional view. The basic pattern of these arguments is this: if moral knowledge is analogous to techne, then insurmountable difficulties arise, and moral knowledge becomes impossible. Since moral knowledge is not impossible, it cannot be analogous to techne. In other words, the purpose of Socrates' analogical arguments is to reveal the limitations of techne as a model for the wisdom Socrates so ardently seeks. For all the reasons Plato is so careful to present in his dialogues, wisdom cannot be rendered technical; it cannot become techne. Thus, Roochnik concludes, Plato wrote dialogues instead of technical treatises, as they are the appropriate vehicle for his expression of nontechnical wisdom.

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