This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Multiplicity How Are Instances of Comics Created? Autographic and Allographic Conclusion Notes References.

There are many good reasons for seeing Aristotelian hylemorphism and atomism as diametrically opposed theories of matter. Aristotle himself had forcefully combatted the physical model of Leucippus and Democritus, whose ontology consisted of indivisible material bodies moving in an immaterial void, presenting his own model as an alternative. This alternative excluded both indivisibles and the void and postulated instead a plenist world made up of substances all of which were infinitely divisible continua composed of universal matter and specific substantial forms. (...) Unlike elementary atoms, Aristotle’s elementary substances could transmute into one another: water, when evaporating, was said to turn into air. (shrink)

Reflections on the relationship of aesthetics to politics tend to circle, almost compulsively, around a relatively stable set of conceptual oppositions, inherited from German philosophies of the late 18th century. This essay proposes an expansion of the theoretical terms of the debate by extending the field of transcendental aesthetics into the domain of historical temporalization. Fundamental art-historical categories may thereby be incorporated, philosophically transformed, into ‘aesthetics’ as forms of historical temporalization: avant-garde, modern, contemporary. The essay expounds two theses, in particular: (...) 1. The historical subsumption of the temporality of the avant-garde by the temporality of the modern: the modern stands to the avant-garde as the negation of its politics by the repetition of the new –‘the new as the ever–same’; 2. the historical subsumption of the temporality of the modern by ‘the contemporary’: the contemporary stands to the modern as the negation of the dialectical logic – and hence specifically developmentalist futurity – of the new by a spatially determined, but imaginary co-presencing. One effect of this latter subsumption, it is argued, is a particular, regressive ‘repetition of the national’, at the level of cultural representation, on the terrain of the global. (shrink)

This article describes the short but remarkable sociopolitical life of the Russian rock group Pussy Riot. The group became famous in 2012 not only for the political content of its performances but for its transgressive performativity: its violation of established public settings and its creation of disturbing anti-authoritarianism images of today’s official Russia. The analysis aims to establish Pussy Riot as part of an avant-garde movement and as a radicalization of the very idea of the avant-garde against the familiarity of (...) the public aspect of everyday life. Public ‘normalcy’ reveals itself to be complicit in that what should be criticized is instead taken for granted, and legitimized. Pussy Riot is a new art avant-garde in terms of both how it relates to activism, social justice, feminism, and art, and to the general public, not only to the art world. (shrink)

In Avant Garde: An American Odyssey from Gertrude Stein to Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen specialist Robin Maconie reconsiders the role of music and music technology through careful examination of key modern concepts with respect to time, existence, identity, and relationship as formulated by such thinkers as Einstein, Russell, Whitehead, and Gertrude Stein, along with Freud, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, and Marcel Duchamp.

The present article considers the avant-garde as experience, and primarily as the experience of perceiving avant-garde art in terms of interruption, estrangement, and arrest. The focus is on the “internal”—utopian—time of the avant-garde, or the dimension of the social imagination. This is directly related to Walter Benjamin’s concept of history, and his idea of the interruption of time. The article analyzes the connection between the continuing interest in the avant-garde and the problem of representing utopia. Avant-garde art is considered as (...) a “sign of history” according to Kant: it takes on the function of an index in that it delineates space for new social relations. Avant-garde art is a form of mapping out a new community, which precedes any institutionalization. Such an intrusion of the “invisible” into avant-garde imagery is explored with the example of Jean-Luc Marion’s reflections on Rothko and Marie-José Mondzain’s conception of the icon as the forerunner of modern abstract art. (shrink)

In the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a (...) transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot. (shrink)

They envisioned a brave new world, and what they got was fascism. As vibrant as its counterparts in Paris, Munich, and Milan, the avant-garde of Florence rose on a wave of artistic, political, and social idealism that swept the world with the arrival of the twentieth century. How the movement flourished in its first heady years, only to flounder in the bloody wake of World War I, is a fascinating story, told here for the first time. It is the history (...) of a whole generation's extraordinary promise--and equally extraordinary failure. The "decadentism" of D'Annunzio, the philosophical ideals of Croce and Gentile, the politics of Italian socialism: all these strains flowed together to buoy the emerging avant-garde in Florence. Walter Adamson shows us the young artists and writers caught up in the intellectual ferment of their time, among them the poet Giovanni Papini, the painter Ardengo Soffici, and the cultural critic Giuseppe Prezzolini. He depicts a generation rejecting provincialism, seeking spiritual freedom in Paris, and ultimately blending the modernist style found there with their own sense of toscanità or "being Tuscan." In their journals--Leonardo, La Voce, Lacerba, and l'Italia futurista--and in their cafe life at the Giubbe Rosse, we see the avant-garde of Florence as citizens of an intellectual world peopled by the likes of Picasso, Bergson, Sorel, Unamuno, Pareto, Weininger, and William James. We witness their mounting commitment to the ideals of regenerative violence and watch their existence become increasingly frenzied as war approaches. Finally, Adamson shows us the ultimate betrayal of the movement's aspirations as its cultural politics help catapult Italy into war and prepare the way for Mussolini's rise to power. (shrink)

Here I will put forward a claim about rhythm – that rhythm is relation. To develop this I will explore the entanglement of and antagonism between two notions of the musical avant-garde and its theorization. The first of these is derived from the European classical tradition, the second concerns Afrodiasporic musical practices. This essay comes in two parts. The first will consider some music-theoretical and philosophical ideas about rhythm in the post-classical avant-garde. Here I will explore how these ideas have (...) been used to, on one hand, stage a critique of Afrodiasporic musics, and specifically jazz, and, on the other hand, diminish and obscure the relation between the post-classical and Afrodiasporic avant-gardes. In the second part I will develop another lineage of rhythm, orthogonal to that of the post-classical avant-garde. Drawing from philosophy and Afrocentric, Afromodernist and, finally, Afrofuturist theory, I will map a theoretical move from rhythm understood, in its post-classical guise, as an exclusive and strictly musical category, to rhythm understood as an inclusive and plural category. This likewise charts a passage from an aesthetically autonomous understanding of objects of art to social and collective forms of artistic practice. (shrink)

This essay explains Mariátegui’s critical relationship with Breton in terms of his views on Surrealism. In order to understand this relationship, this essay engages in an analysis of (i) Mariátegui’s notion of the avant-garde as a synthesis of aesthetics and politics and of (ii) the positioning of Mariátegui’s avant-garde in relation to post First World War European bourgeoisie and fascism. This interpretation of Mariátegui’s reveals a determination of Surrealism as discipline that preserves this movement’s revolutionary task in different geo-historical sites. (...) With attention to the difficult, non-systematic character of Mariátegui’s writings, this essay also provides a series of concepts that could assist further interpretations of Mariátegui’s aesthetics and politics. (shrink)

Decentring the Avant-Garde presents a collection of articles dealing with the topography of the avant-garde. The focus is on different responses to avant-garde aesthetics in regions traditionally depicted as cultural, geographical and linguistic peripheries. Avant-garde activities in the periphery have to date mostly been described in terms of a passive reception of new artistic trends and currents originating in cultural centres such as Paris or Berlin. Contesting this traditional view, Decentring the Avant-Garde highlights the importance of analysing the avant-garde in (...) the periphery in terms of an active appropriation of avant-garde aesthetics within different cultural, ideological and historical settings. A broad collection of case studies discusses the activities of movements and artists in various regions in Europe and beyond. The result is a new topographical model of the international avant-garde and its cultural practices. (shrink)

The concept of retro-avant-garde was first advanced by artists working in the late socialist and post-socialist contexts of Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and the territories of the ex-Yugoslavia. In general, its semantic field has been defined by a range of post-modern and mostly post-socialist art practices that draw formal, philosophical, and social inspiration from the politicized, powerfully utopian avant-gardes of the early decades of the twentieth-century, especially in the USSR and East-Central Europe. However, its paradoxical reference forward and backward in (...) time highlights the temporal dimensions of period concepts such as modernity, postmodernity, and avant-garde in ways that make retro-avant-garde worthy of theoretical reflection. I explore the nature of period concepts, which serve not only as historical metrics, but also as designations of basic characteristics of historicity, the configuration of the dimensions of past, present, and future in a given historical context and the limits and possibilities of historical experience and representation. I go on to explore the applicability to historiography of Gilles Deleuze's distinction, developed in his cinema theory, between "movement images" and "time images." In the case of historical thought, the distinction lies in whether the representation of time is thought to be a function of historical change or, on the contrary, whether the representation of historical change is qualified by the mode of time. I conclude by suggesting that if the avant-garde has primarily been conceptualized under the figure of "movement," retro-avant-garde reveals the degree to which classical avantgardism was dependent on an image of time: time itself as material to be artistically crafted and shaped into an historical experience appropriate to the modern age. (shrink)

Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside of the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the emergent field of film philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde do "do" philosophy and illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The book traces the avant-garde's philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how this cinema's reflections on the creation and (...) reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself, a responsibility to perpetuate thought in an enduring re-encounter with the world and with meaning's unfinished production. This entails the avant-garde's locating of cinema's-and thought's-ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found that unites their films with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson who believed the "journey's end is found in every step of the road" (Cavell). Rectifying film-philosophy's neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde's interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerges from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. Sheehan reads the avant-garde's interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as also an extension of Pragmatism's commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson's influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde's philosophies to Deleuze's time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche's "powers of the false.". (shrink)

The early twentieth century saw the rise of various movements and communities in response to a perceived crisis in a western modernity that many contemporaries viewed as decadent and in urgent need of social, cultural, and spiritual renewal. In Britain in particular, several groups of traditional artisans expressed their rejection of modernity by leaving the city to form small artistic communities. Such community experiments often had their roots in the nineteeth-century Arts and Crafts movement, a background shared by the founding (...) members of the community at Ditchling in Sussex — Eric Gill, Douglas (Hilary) Pepler, and Edward Johnston — but augmented by an increasing commitment to Roman Catholicism on the part of Gill and Pepler. The Ditchling group’s commitments to traditional handicrafts and the Church made their relationship to modernism tentative and difficult, but some members at least were familiar with artistic developments in the wider world. In particular, Eric Gill would reject modernism at Ditchling, while David Jones would embrace it to assert his artistic and spiritual independence. (shrink)

The Challenge of the Avant-Garde is the fourth of six books in the series Art and its Histories, which form the main texts of an Open University course. The course has been designed for students who are new to the discipline but will also appeal to those who have undertaken some study in this area. This volume traces the challenge posed to the academic canon by the emergent avant-garde of the early and mid-nineteenth century.It looks at significant shifts in the (...) development of the concept, both in moves away from the sense of social leadership to a desire for artistic autonomy in the later nineteenth century and then a reverse movement to bridge the gap between art and life in the revolutionary avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. The book closes with an examination of the eventual incorporation of the avant-garde as a form of modern canon by the eve of World War II. Throughout, it seeks to relate the discourse of artistic avant-gardism in all its forms to contemporary social and political histories. (shrink)

An illustrated study of the early twentieth-century transformation from Expressionism to Constructivism and beyond in the Central European arts. Central European Avant-Gardes presents the first interpretive overview of the complex webs of interaction among the artists and intellectuals of early twentieth-century Central Europe. The key stylistic transformation of the period was from Expressionism to Constructivism, as artists and writers, against a volatile background of war and revolution, saw the opportunity literally to construct a new world through their work. The borders (...) between the visual arts, photography, film, architecture, poetry, and typography were obliterated, as artists sought to transcend the forces of traditionalism to forge an elemental visual language that would overcome national and linguistic boundaries. Yet at the same time that these artists advocated pluralism and unity, their work engaged issues such as nationalism and tradition that still resonate in artistic circles today. The book, which accompanies a major exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and curated by Timothy Benson, assisted by Monika Krol, is arranged around events and situations rather than by linear, art historical categories. It features hundreds of color plates and reproductions of documents; discussions of movements from Artificialism to Zenitism; essays on figures, publications, and exhibitions; and shorter "city views" of Belgrade, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Cracow, Dessau, Ljubljana, £ódz, Poznañ, Prague, Vienna, Warsaw, Weimar, and Zagreb. (shrink)

Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet, few sustained defenses of the avant-garde have been put forward. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is the first book of its kind to look at the legacy of the avant-garde in relation to the deepening crisis of capitalist non-reproduction. An invigorating revitalization of the Frankfurt School legacy, Roberts's book is unique in its penetrating definition and defense of the avant-garde idea, providing a refined conceptual (...) set of tools that critically engages with the most advanced art theorists of our day, such as Hal Foster, Andrew Benjamin, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Paolo Virno, Claire Bishop, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri. (shrink)

The most important modes of film practice, in my view, are art-house cinema and the avant-garde, both of which contrast with the classical Hollywood mode of film practice. While the latter is characterized by its commercial imperative, corporate hierarchies, and a high degree of specialization as well as a division of labor, the avant-garde is an “artisanal” or “personal” mode. Avant-garde films tend to be made by individuals or very small groups of collaborators, financed either by the filmmakers alone or (...) in combination with private patronage and grants from arts institutions. Such films are usually distributed through film cooperatives and exhibited by film societies, museums, and universities. (Consequently .. (shrink)

This essay proposes two examples of avant-garde theatre, Jerzy Grotowski's poor theatre and Augusto Boal's theatre of the oppressed, as resources for Christian ethics. Both pursue theater as bodily copresent interaction whose moral labor is the liberation of the human body from conventional gestures for the sake of authentic encounter and from oppressive postures for the sake of social intervention. Focusing on the body in this way reveals that the place of narrative, while essential to Christian ethics, is ambiguous. The (...) outcome of this argument is the possibility of combining the insights of monastic and liberation accounts of the moral life in order to release moral action in microsocial encounters, thus recovering the constitutive humility of Christian ethics. (shrink)

In her book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, Lea Ypi revisits the debate over the scope of justice between cosmopolitans and statists, which has been constitutive of the field of international normative theory. Against statists, Ypi defends the global scope of egalitarian principles of justice, deriving them from a causally fundamental relationship between relative and absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she demonstrates that associative political relations play an essential role in implementing egalitarian principles of global justice and that condemnations of (...) the state by cosmopolitans are both unnecessary and ill-advised. Advocating what she calls ‘statist cosmopolitanism,’ whereby domestic ‘avant-garde’ agents intervene politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow-citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, the book offers a dialectical account of political theory in an activist mode. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 142-154 [Access article in PDF] Critical Discussions The Fortunes of Avant-Garde Poetry Mary Anne O'Neil Invisible Fences. Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature, by Steven Monte; xii & 298 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, $50.00. Modern Visual Poetry, by Willard Bohn; 321 pp. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000, $47.00. The situation of French poetry at the turn (...) of the twenty-first century is far different from what it was during the last fin de siècle. In 1900, poetry was a booming art, and France was home to numerous poets of varied inspiration and expression. The religious verse of Claudel and Péguy shared the attention of the reading public with the philosophical poetry of Valéry and the futuristic celebrations of Paris and modern life found in Apollinaire's Alcools and Calligrammes. Long poems, short poems, poems written in standard verse, free verse, prose, and even published as drawings, suggested that the golden age of poetry begun in the early nineteenth century by the Romantics and continued after 1850 by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, would not soon come to an end. This indeed proved to be the case, for the heirs of the Symbolist tradition of the first decade of the twentieth century were soon followed by the Surrealist revolutionaries of the 1920s and 1930s, many of whom directed their talents to the composition of political verse at the time of the Second World War. Political poetry by and large disappeared from France after 1950, only to be [End Page 142] succeeded over the next two decades by two very different types of verse. On the one hand, writers like St. John Perse and Pierre Jean Jouve produced difficult works whose appeal was limited to a sophisticated audience, while lyricists, such as Jacques Prévert and even the songwriter Georges Brassens, made poetry more accessible to the general public, often through popular songs. The fact that, during the days of May 1968, students scrawled verses of the Surrealist-Communist poet Paul Eluard on the walls of the Sorbonne to encourage efforts to bring down the social order attests to the power exerted by poetry on the intellectual life of France well into the second half of the twentieth century. Such, however, is no longer the case today. There are only two well-known living French poets, Francis Ponge and Yves Bonnefoy. While reviews dedicated to original poetry do still exist, especially in the south of France where the poetic arm of the French Resistance was most active in the 1940s, poetry attracts many fewer readers--and fewer writers--than it did even fifty years ago.Such a radical change merits some reflection. What has happened to French poetry since the mid-twentieth century? In a sense, all good things must come to an end sometime, and a century and a half of inventiveness and poetic energy may simply have run its natural course. French publishing houses, well aware that prose sells better than verse, have done little to encourage young poets. However, certain trends in the subject matter and form of contemporary French poetry have probably contributed to the current lack of interest. Since the end of the Second World War, French poets have concerned themselves almost uniquely with everyday life--common objects, geographical locales, and ordinary people. This obsession with the ordinary has produced some excellent poetry, especially René Char's evocations of Provençal landscapes and Yves Bonnefoy's treatments of childhood. Yet, this concentration on everyday life has severed poetry from the traditional subjects that have sustained it ever since classical antiquity, such as the celebration of heroic figures and heroic deeds, philosophical and religious inquiry, love, loss, prophetic vision. This very narrow range of subject risks consigning poetry to the status of a minor art. At the turn of the twenty-first century, French poetry also finds itself at the end of a very long period of formal experimentation that began in the second half of the nineteenth century and which includes... (shrink)

The Wallflower Avant-Garde highlights a strain of formalism visible in both modernist literature and contemporary queer studies, drawing attention to an aesthetic that is as quiet and quirky as it is queer. In studies of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery, Brian Glavey argues for a recalibrated understanding of the relation between sexuality and the aesthetic, revealing a non-oppositional avant-gardism that opts out of some of the binaristic imperatives that have structured recent debates in (...) queer theory. Refusing to decide between positive and negative affects or to side with either utopian or antisocial ambitions, The Wallflower Avant-Garde explores models of reading and writing about art that remain flexible enough to dig deep even as they gloss the surface.At the heart of this argument is a revaluation of modernist ekphrasis, a mode understood as literature's imitation or description of the visual arts. From the well-wrought urns of the New Critics onward, ekphrasis has figured prominently in the legacy of modernist literary criticism, but a tendency to read its complicated modes of relationality in terms of either autonomy or antagonism has obscured the forms of creative failure and imitation embodied in the desire to confuse poetry for pottery. Attending to mimetic and descriptive strategies without dismissing the aspirations for wholeness and closure that often animate them allows for the recognition that queerness and modernism are intertwined in unexpected and unpredictable ways, revealing new insights into the varieties of abstraction, preterition, and spatial form that stand behind modernism's investment in the aesthetic. (shrink)

Last Spring two important German books on aesthetics finally appeared in English: Adorno's unfinished Aesthetic Theory, intended to summarize his philosophy and sociology of modern culture, and Büger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, in many ways a dialogue with Adorno and critical theory. Peter Bürger, a professor of French and comparative literature at the university of Bremen, has published extensively on a broad spectrum of classical to avant-garde literature, generally trying to combine an outline of a sociology of culture with detailed (...) socio-historical anaylses of specific works. Bürger sees himself as a mediator between hermeneutics and critical theory. He is an avowed disciple of the Frankfurt School in that the recognizes the cognitive and potentially moral function of art, bound up with art's necessary aloofness from practice in bourgeois society. (shrink)

This study of contemporary art and culture brings together Boyers's sharply focused essays on writers, filmmakers, painters, and critics, first published in the _TLS_, _The American Scholar_, _Granta_, _The_ _American Poetry Review, and Salmagundi. The essays respond to the diversity of "events" that make up our cultural life, and take as their central theme what Boyers calls "object loss" in the art and writing of some prominent contemporaries. The term designates a radical incapacity to think clearly about the objects—actual or (...) imagined—that give a work point or focus. He argues that this incapacity has produced various kinds of irrelevance and dishonesty, not so much in the art of our day as in the various critical theories and response patterns which are dominant among us._ Dwelling on such figures as Jean-Luc Godard, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marcel Duchamp, John Ashbery, and William Styron, Boyers frequently casts his reflections as responses to theories that have gained—especially among contemporary literary intellectuals—an indisputable currency. His essays constitute a negative aesthetic, a "definition by recoil" of postmodernist art and the ideology that promotes or defends it. (shrink)

In 1922, three young men founded the avant-garde magazine 7 Arts to promote the arts and in particular the synthesis of all the arts as only architecture and cinema can achieve. Pierre Bourgeois, a poet, his brother Victor, an architect, and the painter Pierre-Louis Flouquet were soon joined by the composer Georges Monier and Karel Maes, painter, engraver and furniture designer. "The five" succeeded in harnessing the vital forces of the Belgian avant-garde and in placing their magazine at the very (...) heart of the European avant-garde. Throughout the six years of publication the pages of the magazine provided a platform for the principal protagonists of the Belgian and international artistic scene: De Stijl, the Bauhaus, the Purists, the Constructivists, the Futurists and many other champions of the geometric abstraction to which they gave the name Plastique pure or Pure Plastic. Their ambition was to have the arts penetrate every dimension of modern urban life and to transform it in the process. In 2020, CIVA is devoting a retrospective exhibition to 7 Arts, the impressive adventure that this work presents. (shrink)

In recent years, democratic theorists have inquired into the aesthetic dimension of contemporary politics. Influenced by Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, these scholars claim that there is an analogy between democratic politics and aesthetic experiences, since both involve the confrontation of an indeterminacy that cannot be overcome by means of rational argumentation. Contributing to this perspective, but challenging some of Rancière’s insights, this article shows the importance of Jean-François Lyotard’s writings on aesthetics for understanding what I call ‘democratic aesthetics’. This (...) aesthetics, I argue, consists in works of art that bring representation to its limits, thus arousing an experience of the unpresentable. Influenced by Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the sublime, Lyotard claims that avant-garde art, by disrupting the rules of representational art, put representation as such into question. This experience of the unpresentable contributes to cultivating a readiness to listening to voices that are not yet heard, because they lack a discourse by which to express themselves. Given that politics in postmodernity, following Lyotard, consists in shifting the dividing line between the sayable and the unsayable, avant-garde art is conductive to a postmodern politics – which, I argue, is analogous to democratic politics. (shrink)

This article argues that the sociology of knowledge as a critical subfield of sociology and the artist Marcel Duchamp are engaged in epistemologically analogous projects. Two sets of claims demonstrate the analogy: that Duchamp and the sociology of knowledge both have the same conception of and attitude toward their objects, and that they both mount similar critiques of the institutions they occupy. A set of similar practices leads both to adopt an attitude of reflexivity which courts self-refutation by changing the (...) ontological status of their objects and the epistemological status of their own practices. The analogy implies some new ways of thinking about the institutional role of the sociology of knowledge, the practice and epistemology of sociology, and perhaps the epistemic character of modernism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Recuperation of the Theory-Death of the Avant-GardeRobert Radin (bio)Paul Mann. The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.It is difficult to respond to an essay that so thoroughly lays bare (and thereby challenges) what it is we do when we respond to another writer’s writing. I find it hard to begin, caught somewhere in that terminal state between speech and silence, that moment Beckett captures at the (...) end of the The Unnamable: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Should I follow every word I write with “[sic],” at once quote myself and distance myself from what I have just written, indicate that I am aware of what it is I’m doing even as I’m doing it? I’ll go on.The fact that Paul Mann’s The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde has received relatively little critical response since its publication in 1991 may in fact be a measure of its success. Nevertheless, this lack of response seems worthy of attention, given that Mann devotes so much of his essay to making the point that art’s (and theory’s) raison d’être is to generate further discourse, to keep the discursive economy going, however resistant to dominant culture that art or theory may appear to be.After repeatedly, painstakingly pointing out the status of his own essay in the discursive economy he describes—the discourse of the avant-garde—Mann anticipates the likely response to his work:It is not difficult to imagine whatever little response this essay is liable to. For the most part dismissals of what will be taken as its nihilism, its cynicism, its defeatism, its adherence to this or that dubious theory, its outmoded obsession with recuperation. But the essay was not written for those who reject an insistence on recuperation only in order to conceal from themselves the extent of their own recuperation.[141]And further on in the same passage: “it [the essay] was also written precisely so that it could be dismissed” [141]. Mann, to varying degrees, has correctly diagnosed the critical reception of his work thus far. When the essay is dismissed in reviews it is because it is seen as both passé and nihilistic. Even in one of the favorable reviews of Mann’s essay the question of nihilism arises. It is this “specter of nihilism” that I want to take up here—after first reviewing some of the more salient features of Mann’s argument—as I think it is a response most readers will have to struggle through (as Mann correctly points out), and it might tell us something about the larger discursive economy of which The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde is now a part. That Mann’s position is seen as outmoded is less of an issue for me. It may be that his essay was already “old” by the time it was published, [End Page 41] his position already dismissable under the aegis of other names: Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida. But that his essay is no longer new, that his position has exhausted its discursive currency, only further makes his point: in the discourse of the avant-garde, and in the discursive economy generally, the new supersedes all other values. More important, Mann’s position in particular must exhaust itself quickly if the discursive economy is to continue to thrive.In The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes delineates what he calls the “versus myth”:Art seems compromised, historically, socially. Whence the effort on the part of the artist himself to destroy it.... Unfortunately, this destruction is always inadequate; either it occurs outside the art, but thereby becomes impertinent, or else it consents to remain within the practice of the art, but quickly exposes itself to recuperation (the avant-garde is that restive language which is going to be recuperated). The awkwardness of this alternative is the consequence of the fact that destruction of discourse is not a dialectic term but a semantic term: it docilely takes its place within the great semiological “versus” myth (white versus black); whence the destruction of art is doomed to only paradoxical formulae... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of disalienation, (...) that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

This introduction to the special section ‘The Half-Life of the Avant-Garde: 50 Years On from 50 Years On’ explains why the section is conceived to look back at the century since the First World War. It is designed to offer ways of rethinking the concept and the role of the anniversary, where the First World War constitutes the memorialized event. The organization of the section follows the movement between often hidden or submerged forms of continuity. It attempts to think some (...) of the aesthetic and technological legacies and inheritances of the First World War in its durational 100th anniversary through a specific temporal strategy most succinctly captured in the phrase ‘50 years on from 50 years on’. The entry point is the middle of the 20th century, allowing contributors to work backward and forward by examining links between the three separate temporal frames. The consistency but also the strangeness of critical practices, as world history passes with its violent climaxes and depressions, has unique contours in each frame, with Dada providing an exemplary through-line. (shrink)

Working in Germany between the two world wars, John Heartfield developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. As a pioneer of modern photomontage, he sliced up mass media photos with his iconic scissors and then reassembled the fragments into compositions that utterly transformed the meaning of the originals. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of a brilliant, radical artist whose desire to (...) disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and imperial propaganda made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture. Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic. Appearing on everything from campaign posters to book covers, the photomonteur’s notorious pictures challenged well-worn assumption and correspondingly walked a dangerous tightrope over the political, social, and cultural cauldron that was interwar Germany. Zervigón explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from a broadly-shared dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world. The result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history. (shrink)

This article presents how the act of falling has been used as a metaphor for invention within avant-garde art and aesthetics. It takes Lars von Trier’s documentary The Five Obstacles (2003) as its point of departure and seeks to historically contextualize the figure of falling by discussing Charles Baudelaire’s essay ‘De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques’/‘On the Essence of Laughter’ (1955 [1855–1857]). The article also discusses the fascination with falling in early cinema, stressing how (...) cinematic representations of the fall highlight the new medias potential for grasping general modern conditions like motion, speed and contingency. To think of art in terms of falling makes it possible to see a link between cinematic popular culture and so called high modernism. The article concludes with a discussion of the relationship between control and contingency within film aesthetics in the digital age. I will also discuss the aesthetics of Oulipo writers like George Perec and Raymond Queneau, and artists like Jackson Pollock and John Cage as exponents of what can be called an aesthetics of contingency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of disalienation, (...) that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

This essay interprets the controversy over Richard Serra's monumental sculpture, Tilted Arc , which was designed for a public plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1979 and then torn down five years later after intense public outcry. Levine reads this controversy as characteristic of contemporary debates over the arts, which continue the tradition of the nineteenth century avant-garde, pitting art against a wider public, and insisting that art must deliberately resist mainstream tastes and values in favor of marginality and innovation. This (...) definition of art has posed a lasting dilemma for democratic societies: how, after all, should a democracy deal with art that represents an intentional rejection of the majority? The problem becomes even more intractable when it comes to avant-garde art commissioned for public spaces, where the art object can challenge public tastes and movements in a way that is inescapable for those who must live and work in the space. Disturbed by the imposition of a massive and incomprehensible art object in a public plaza, Serra's opponents argued that Tilted Arc frustrated a whole range of socially beneficial activities, labor and leisure alike. And they claimed that Serra's supporters were dangerously anti-democratic. But despite the avant-garde's challenge to majority tastes, this essay makes the case that it remains a democratic value to continue to sponsor avant-garde art in public spaces. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking study, Nina Gurianova identifies the early Russian avant-garde as a distinctive movement in its own right and not a preliminary stage to the Constructivism of the 1920s. Gurianova identifies what she terms an “aesthetics of anarchy”—art-making without rules—that greatly influenced early twentieth-century modernists. Setting the early Russian avant-garde movement firmly within a broader European context, Gurianova draws on a wealth of primary and archival sources by individual writers and artists, Russian theorists, theorizing artists, and German philosophers. Unlike (...) the post-revolutionary avant-garde, which sought to describe the position of the artist in the new social hierarchy, the early Russian avant-garde struggled to overcome the boundaries defining art and to bridge the traditional gap between artist and audience. As it explores the aesthetics embraced by the movement, the book shows how artists transformed literary, theatrical, and performance practices, eroding the traditional boundaries of the visual arts and challenging the conventions of their day. (shrink)

By demonstrating that many of the concepts and styles associated with Modernism were actually derived directly from cultures such as Japan, China, Korea, India, Egypt, Assyria, West Africa, and the Pacific Islands, this book provides an entirely new way of looking at the evolution of Modernist art and literature in the West.

Background In the course of the last four decades, the profession of physiotherapy has progressively expanded its scope of responsibility and its focus on professional autonomy and evidence-based clinical practice. To preserve professional autonomy, it is crucial for the physiotherapy profession to meet society's expectations and demands of professional competence as well as ethical competence. Since it is becoming increasingly popular to choose a carrier in private practice in Denmark this context constitutes the frame of this study. Physiotherapy in private (...) practice involves mainly a meeting between two partners: the physiotherapist and the patient. In the meeting, power asymmetry between the two partners is a condition that the physiotherapist has to handle. The aim of this study was to explore whether ethical issues rise during the first physiotherapy session discussed from the perspective of the physiotherapists in private practice. Methods A qualitative approach was chosen and semi-structured interviews with 21 physiotherapists were carried out twice and analysed by using a phenomenological framework. Results Four descriptive themes emerged: general reflections on ethics in physiotherapy; the importance of the first physiotherapy session; the influence of the clinical environment on the first session and; reflections and actions upon beneficence towards the patient within the first session. The results show that the first session and the clinical context in private practice are essential from an ethical perspective. Conclusions Ethical issues do occur within the first session, the consciousness about ethical issues differs in Danish physiotherapy private practice, and reflections and acts are to a lesser extent based on awareness of ethical theories, principles and ethical guidelines. Beneficence towards the patient is a fundamental aspect of the physiotherapists' understanding of the first session. However, if the physiotherapist lacks a deeper ethical awareness, the physiotherapist may reason and/or act ethically to a varying extent: only an ethically conscious physiotherapist will know when he or she reflects and acts ethically. Further exploration of ethical issues in private practice is recommendable, and as management policy is deeply embedded within the Danish public sector there are reasons to explore public contexts of physiotherapy as well. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Nos faysoms contre Nature...”: Fourteenth-Century Sophismata and the Musical Avant GardeDorit TanayThe secular musical repertory of the late fourteenth century has been described in terms of unparalleled rhythmic intricacies, reflecting a conscious tendency to exhaust the scope of free play within the parameter of time in music. 1 Historians of music see in such musical complexity a case of a musical system in disarray, to be explained by patterns (...) that seem always adequate to account for phases of aberration from stylistic norm, such as the notions of mannerism or fin de siècle phenomenon, understood literally as well as figuratively. 2Current views seem to echo contemporaneous observations. The late fourteenth-century poet-musician Guido cast his critique on what he interprets as a shift towards chaotic musical expression, in a form of an introspective ballade:Or voit tout en aventure Puis qu’ainsi me convient fayre A la novelle figure Qui doyt a chascun desplayre; Que c’est trestout en contraire De bon art qui est parfayt: Certes, ce n’est pas bien fayt. [End Page 29]Nos faysoms contre Nature De ce qu’est bien fayt deffayre; Que Philipe qui mais ne dure Nos dona boin exemplaire. Nos laisons tous ses afayres Por Marquet le contrefayt: Certes, ce n’est pas bien fayt. L’art de Marquet n’a mesureN’onques rien ne sait parfyre; D’ansuir et de portrayre C’est trop grant outrecuidure Ces figures, et tout traire Ou il n’a riens de bon trayt: Certes, ce n’est pas bien fayt. 3Curiously enough, Guido set his ballade to a melody that evokes some of the obscenities deplored in the poem. The musical text displays needless complication, being notated by deceitful figures that are willful, misleading, and difficult to decipher and follow. 4 The literary text, similarly, diversifies words in a vein of irony and ambiguity, clouding any indication as to whether the speaker is for or against the new style. In other words Guido’s esthetic position is sophistic, self-amused, and self-conscious.Since artistic expressions are generally conceived as reflecting their consumers, late-medieval chansons have been interpreted as a manifestation of the incredibly decadent yet sophisticated social milieu in which and for which the music was created. To ground further the argument for the correspondence between the countenance of the music and that of its audience, historians invoke the proximity in time and space between the evolution of the manneristic musical style, significantly in Avignon, and the Great Schism (1378–1417) that [End Page 30] followed the Babylonian Captivity. This famous crisis in the papal reign has been associated with a strong tendency to secularization in the papal Court, by which life styles became luxurious if not licentious. 5This socio-historical account is based on suggestive conjectures, comprising in part explanatory commonplaces. No direct relation can be established between the “Great Schism” or the specific social condition, of Avignon and the most refined music of the late fourteenth century. Furthermore, the claim of the above social account for a contextual approach is misleading. In fact no solid immanent relations are shown to exist between a complex, quasi-degenerate society on the one hand, and the intricate rhythms of the music on the other. The attribution of complexity in the broadest sense of the term does not satisfy our curiosity as to the possible interdependence between style and society. Interestingly enough, as far as late fourteenth-century chansons style is concerned, such an association can even be countered, considering the coincidental cultivation of the new simple style in the complex and decadent Burgundian courts of the waning Middle Ages. 6Here I propose to examine the late fourteenth-century musical style not on the background of social procedures but in the context of fourteenth century scientific thought, and to demonstrate immanent and structural cohesion between a compositional trend that features manipulations within the dimension of musical time and the sciences which investigate the properties of time qua continuum. This affinity concerns a parallel, yet not a completely overlapping, development directed towards the ultimate refinement of the notion of mensura. In other words we are dealing here... (shrink)

There is an increasing demand for ethical and Corporate Social Responsibility practices by companies. This competence has to be introduced in students’ training in business degree programs, and a check must then be done to determine if the students have come to appreciate the importance of CSR commitments. Using the framework of Stakeholders Theory, this work aims to examine students’ perceptions of ethical and CSR practices and commitment to different stakeholders, as well as the factors that lead students to act (...) in a socially responsible way. Furthermore, we hope to identify how the perception of CSR can be improved when Web 2.0 and social media tools that have proven effective in transmitting emotions and values are used in classrooms to teach these ideas. To this end, a survey was carried out in the year 2019 with 1,030 first-year students; it was administered at the beginning of the semester and also at the end of the semester after the training activities had been carried out. The main finding of the research is that students start with the belief that ethics and CSR are developed for reasons of image and legitimacy; however, after receiving training on these topics through tools that take into account emotions and values, they start to value the importance of the company as an agent of social change. The main practical and managerial implication is that methods based on Web 2.0 and social media tools are useful to teach ethics and CSR; the theoretical contribution is that students take into account the welfare of others. This finding contributes to Stakeholder Theory in a higher education context. (shrink)

InThe Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon offers a distinctive revisionary account of American poetry written in the wake of the ideological retreats of Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden around the time of the Second World War. Nealon argues that American verse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was profoundly influenced by an unfolding context of capitalist development and crisis, in ways that have not been fully accounted for in orthodox accounts of recent literary history. Ruth Jennison’sThe Zukofsky Era: (...) Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Gardeseeks similarly to highlight the centrality of leftist critiques of capitalism in modern American poetry. Her focus is the Objectivist group of poets, in particular Louis Zukofsky, a Jewish-American Marxist often regarded as the major successor to Pound in the interwar years. Jennison applies the theory of ‘combined and uneven development’ to the 1930s work of Zukofsky and his circle. (shrink)

In _Beyond the Sovereign Self_ Grant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in _The Sovereign Self_, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester shows how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. Among others, Kester analyzes the work of conceptual artist Adrian Piper, experimental (...) practices associated with the escrache tradition in Argentina, and indigenous Canadian artists such as Nadia Myer and Michèle Taïna Audette, showing how socially engaged art catalyzes forms of resistance that operate beyond the institutional art world. From the Americas and Europe to Iran and South Africa, Kester presents a historical genealogy of recent engaged art practices rooted in a deep history of cultural production, beginning with nineteenth-century political struggles and continuing into contemporary anticolonial resistance and other social movements. (shrink)

Play is becoming increasingly central to our society. This is not only confirmed by the excessive attention for sports in mass media. In the corporate world also, particularly in management, the importance of play is acknowledged, as well in, for instance, role training, meeting skills, and team-building. The annual “outward bound” business retreat often includes group play. Metaphorically as well, life and professional life have come to be viewed as a game. Without batting an eyelid, speculators play their virtual game (...) in the financial markets as if they were no longer aware that their actions also affect the real economy. More and more people increasingly lose themselves in play. Since the 1950s, play has also... (shrink)

The aim of this research was to delimit the predictive and mediational model of resilience between character strengths to predict flourishing, in a sample of undergraduate students. After signing their informed consent, 642 university students completed three validated scales. Using an ex post facto design, regression, structural modeling, and mediation analyses were carried out, in order to construct a multi-causal predictive model. Results indicated a consistent predictive direct effect of character strengths on resilience and flourishing and of resilience on flourishing. (...) As hypothesized, resilience also showed a mediating effect on the relationship between character strengths and flourishing. Additionally, results also revealed that the reactive and proactive factors of resilience were explained by different character strengths, reinforcing the idea that the two directions are complementary and necessary. Finally, several implications were established for the practice of positive psychology. (shrink)

Despite an increasingly growth of professional guidelines, textbooks and research about ethics in health care, awareness about ethics in Danish physiotherapy private practice seen vague. This article explores how physiotherapists in Danish private practice, from an ethical perspective, perceive to practice physiotherapy. The empirical data consists of interviews with twenty-one physiotherapists. The interviews are analysed from a hermeneutic approach, inspired by Ricoeur’s textual interpretation of distanciation. The analysis follows three phases: naïve reading, structural analysis and comprehensive analysis. Four main themes (...) are constructed: Beneficence as the driving force; Disciplining the patient through the course of physiotherapy; Balancing between being a trustworthy professional and a businessperson; The dream of a code of practice. Private practice physiotherapy is embedded in a structural frame directed by both political and economical conditions that shape the conditions for practicing physiotherapy. It means that beneficence in practice is a balance between the patient, the physiotherapists themselves and the business. Beneficence towards the patient is expressed as an implicit demand. Physiotherapeutic practice is expressed as being an integration of professionalism and personality which implies that the physiotherapists also have to benefit themselves. Private practice seems to be driven by a paternalistic approach towards the patient, where disciplining the patient is a crucial element of practice, in order to optimise profit. Physiotherapists wish for a more beneficent practice in the future by aiming at bridging ‘to be’ and ‘ought to be’. (shrink)

Background: In the course of the last four decades, the profession of physiotherapy has progressively expanded its scope of responsibility and its focus on professional autonomy and evidence-based clinical practice. To preserve professional autonomy, it is crucial for the physiotherapy profession to meet society's expectations and demands of professional competence as well as ethical competence. Since it is becoming increasingly popular to choose a carrier in private practice in Denmark this context constitutes the frame of this study. Physiotherapy in private (...) practice involves mainly a meeting between two partners: the physiotherapist and the patient. In the meeting, power asymmetry between the two partners is a condition that the physiotherapist has to handle. The aim of this study was to explore whether ethical issues rise during the first physiotherapy session discussed from the perspective of the physiotherapists in private practice. Methods: A qualitative approach was chosen and semi-structured interviews with 21 physiotherapists were carried out twice and analysed by using a phenomenological framework. Results: Four descriptive themes emerged: general reflections on ethics in physiotherapy; the importance of the first physiotherapy session; the influence of the clinical environment on the first session and; reflections and actions upon beneficence towards the patient within the first session. The results show that the first session and the clinical context in private practice are essential from an ethical perspective. Conclusions: Ethical issues do occur within the first session, the consciousness about ethical issues differs in Danish physiotherapy private practice, and reflections and acts are to a lesser extent based on awareness of ethical theories, principles and ethical guidelines. Beneficence towards the patient is a fundamental aspect of the physiotherapists' understanding of the first session. However, if the physiotherapist lacks a deeper ethical awareness, the physiotherapist may reason and/or act ethically to a varying extent: only an ethically conscious physiotherapist will know when he or she reflects and acts ethically. Further exploration of ethical issues in private practice is recommendable, and as management policy is deeply embedded within the Danish public sector there are reasons to explore public contexts of physiotherapy as well. (shrink)