The term ‘identity politics’ is used to refer to a wide range of political movements. In this paper, we look at the theoretical ideas underpinning two strongly, mutually opposed forms of identity politics, and identify some crucial differences between them. We critically compare the identitarian ideology of the New Right with feminist standpoint theory, focusing on two issues: relativism and essentialism. In carrying out this critical comparison we illuminate under-theorized aspects of both new right identitarianism and standpoint theory; demonstrate (...) how the two are distinct; reveal the depth and pervasiveness of the new right ideology’s flaws; and show what a coherent left-wing identity politics could look like. (shrink)

The paper studies the significance of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of history for two key thinkers of contemporary radical conservatism and the Identitarian movement, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. Heidegger's often-overlooked affinities with the German “conservative revolution” of the Weimar period have in recent years been emphasized by an emerging radical-conservative “right-Heideggerian” orientation. I first discuss the later Heidegger's “being-historical” narrative of the culmination and end of the metaphysical foundations of Western modernity in the contemporary Nietzschean era of (...) nihilism and of an emerging postmodern “other beginning” of Western thinking, focused on historical and cultural relativism and particularism. In Heidegger's work of the 1930s and 1940s, we find attempts to apply this historical narrative to interpreting contemporary geopolitical and ideological phenomena in ways that connect Heidegger to certain central ideas and concerns of the conservative revolutionaries, especially Carl Schmitt's geopolitical particularism. De Benoist, the key name of the French Nouvelle Droite and a founding figure of contemporary Identitarianism, is particularly inspired by Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche as the culmination of the “metaphysics of subjectivity” dominating Western modernity. For de Benoist, this modern metaphysics is the root of the “ideology of the Same” underlying the liberal universalism and individualism that he opposes in the name of a cultural ethnopluralism. De Benoist's Russian disciple Dugin bases the pluralistic geopolitics of his radical-conservative “fourth political theory” on the legacy of the conservative revolution, the key intellectual model of which Dugin discovers in Heidegger's notion of the “other beginning”. (shrink)

Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift. Contesting the Far Right examines right-wing recruitment tactics in the United States and Austria, where people discontented with the status quo have turned to far-right parties and movements that further cement capitalism’s adverse effects. (...) Leeb contends that Freudian psychoanalytic theory and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory provide analytical tools to explain this apparent contradiction in psychological terms. Living under precarity capitalism generates feelings of failure and anxiety, which people experience as non-wholeness, because it has become difficult if not impossible to live up to the fetish of economic, interpersonal, and bodily success, and the far right preys on such feelings. Its psychologically oriented propaganda tactics produce the illusion of wholeness and a positive sense of self while leaving the socioeconomic conditions that cause people’s suffering intact. At the same time, they remove the inhibitions that keep people’s repressed aggression and racist and sexist attitudes in check. To demonstrate the workings of this process, Leeb compares cases including Trump and the alt-right in the United States and the Freedom Party and the identitarian movement in Austria. At once theoretically rich and politically engaged, this book also offers ways to resist the far right and counter the psychological appeal of its propaganda techniques. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the Alt-Right needs to be taken seriously by the liberal establishment, the general public, and leftist cultural elites for five main reasons: 1) its ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ borrows from the French New Right and the French and pan-European Identitarian movement. This means that it is engaged in the continuation of a larger Euro-American metapolitical struggle to change hearts and minds on issues related to white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racialism; 2) it is indebted to (...) the metapolitical evolution of sectors of the violent neo-Nazi and earlier white nationalist movements in the USA; 3) this metapolitical orientation uses the mass media, the internet, and social media in general to reach and influence the masses of Americans; 4) the ‘cultural war’ means that the Alt-Right’s spokesman Richard Spencer, French ND leader Alain de Benoist, and other intellectuals see themselves as a type of Leninist vanguard on the radical right, which borrows from left-wing authors such as Antonio Gramsci and their positions in order to win the metapolitical struggle against ‘dominant’ liberal and left-wing political and cultural elites; and 5) this ‘cultural war’ is intellectually and philosophically sophisticated because it understands the crucial role of culture in destabilizing liberal society and makes use of important philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola and others in order to give credence to its revolutionary, racialist, and anti-liberal ideals. (shrink)

In Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories, historians, sociologists, neuroscientists, lawyers, cultural critics, and literary and media scholars come together to offer an interconnected and comparative collection for understanding how contemporary far-right, neo-fascist, Alt-Right, Identitarian, and New Right movements have proposed revisions and counter-narratives to accepted understandings of history, fact and narrative. The innovative essays found here bring forward urgent questions to diverse public, academic, and politically-minded audiences interested in how historical understandings of race, gender, class, nationalism, (...) religion, law, technology and the sciences have been distorted by these far-right movements. If scholars of the last twenty years, like Francis Fukuyama, believed that neoliberalism marked an "end of history," this volume shows how the far right is effectively threatening democracy and its institutions through the dissemination of alt-facts and histories. (shrink)

Paulin J. Hountondji is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary African philosophy. His critique of ethnophilosophy as a colonial, exoticising and racialized undertaking provoked contentious debates among African intellectuals on the proper methods and scope of philosophy and science in an African and global context since the 1970s. His radical pledge for scientific autonomy from the global system of knowledge production made him turn to endogenous forms of practising science in academia. The horizon of his philosophy (...) is the quest for critical universality from a historical, and situated perspective. Finally, his call for a notion of culture that is antithetical to political movements focused on a single identitarian doctrine or exclusionary norms shows how timely his political thought remains to this day. This book gives a comprehensive overview of Hountondji’s philosophical arguments and provides detailed information on the historical and political background of his intellectual oeuvre. It situates Hountondji in the dialogue with his African colleagues and explores links to current debates in philosophy, cultural studies, postcolonialism and the social sciences. (shrink)

In The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler argues that nonviolent movements must replace a dominant neurotic identitarianism with a commitment to preserving relational life. However, Butler also argues that because relationality is volatile, freedom and equality cannot be accomplished through a simple negation of separation. Instead, nonviolence must be directed at moments of relational volatility precisely when violence is compelled. Drawing on Klein’s theory of subjectivity—in which imagining ourselves as other is a precondition for imagining ourselves independent—and on Benjamin’s vision (...) of conflict resolution in encountering the other without instrumentality, Butler asks that we meet such moments by honoring interdependence. While affirming much in Butler’s analysis, this article locates (1) a tension between Butler’s poststructuralist and psychoanalytic commitments, (2) the reification of a non-relational liberal subject as hegemonic, and (3) a tendency towards theoretical exclusivity. Through addressing these weaknesses, we can retain more of a positive role than Butler affords to traditional elements of the nonviolent toolkit such as love, morality, and upholding human rights prefaced on the integrity and dignity of the individual, to augment their theory as one among many resources for a diverse and multicultural nonviolent pursuit of social and political progress. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay tracks Heidegger’s thought from 1919 forwards to the decisive years of his political engagement, on behalf of the Nazi movement. Part 1 tracks how the question concerning Being devolves into the implicitly identitarian question of who “we” are. Part 2 addresses the “existential” of Befindlichkeit which Heidegger in Sein und Zeit positions as prior to understanding, and examines his esoteric mode of writing as the means to cultivate a prerational Stimmung. Part 3 examines Heidegger’s response to (...) his 1929–1930 questions of “What mood must we awaken?... Who are we, then?” in the decisive years of the Gleichchaltung, showing how Heidegger’s thinking elevates to ontological primacy a discriminatory and identitarian decision concerning who “we” are as the German volk. Part 4 examines in this light the Heideggerian “end of philosophy” in what the Black Notebooks talks of in terms of a “metapolitics ‘of’ the historical people”. (shrink)

Cogitation described as calculation, the living being described as a machine, cognitive functions considered as algorithmic sequences and the ‘mechanization’ of the subjective were the theoretical elements that late heideggerian anti–humanism, especially in France was able to utilize[1], even more so, after the second cybernetics or post-cybernetics movement of the late ‘60s introduced the concepts of the autopoietic and the allopoietic automata[2]. Recently, neurologists pose claims on the traditional epistemological field of philosophy, proceeding from this ontological decision, the equation (...) of human cognition to cybernetic systems. -/- The emergence of the world-wide-web in the 1990s and the global expansion of the internet during the first decades of the 21st century indicate the fallacies of the cybernetics programme to mechanize the mind. We stand witnesses to a semantic colonization of the cybernetic system, a social imaginary creation and expansion within the digital ensemblistic – identitarian organization that cannot be described by mechanical or cybernetic terms. Paradoxically, cyberspace, as a new being, a form of alterity, seems to both exacerbate and capsize the polarization between the operational and the symbolic. The creation of the internet might be more than an epistemological revolution, to use the terminology of Thomas Kuhn. It might be an ontological revolution. -/- I will try to demonstrate that the emergence of the Internet refutes any such claims, since its context and utility can only be described by means of a social epistemology based on the understanding of social significances as continuous creations of an anonymous social imaginary proposed by Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997). I will try to explore some social-semantic aspects of the cyberspace as a nexus of social representations of the individual identity that forms a new sphere of being, where the subjective and the objective merge in a virtual subjective objectivity with unique epistemological attributes and possibilities. (shrink)

In this essay, I engage with the work of the mid-twentieth-century US suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith in order to open up the question of queerness as a historically locatable theory and practice of antinormativity in the post-identitarian, post-new-social-movement United States. I argue that Highsmith's Ripley novels offer a discomfitingly intimate counter-fantasy to the politically radical ambitions of both gay liberation and queer studies, one that reminds us of the constitutive power of commodification in the making of social fantasies (...) of gendered and sexual subversion in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. In offering her readers scenes that become situations in their reliance on repetition in order to create and then alleviate tension, Highsmith's Ripley novels enact a relation of attachment indicative of the momentary and addictive pleasures of consumer capitalism. Through this formal signature, I argue, Highsmith's work offers us access to a different affective history of queerness in the United States, one that illuminates the power and appeal of norms and their constitutive presence in the production of queer subjects and worlds. (shrink)

The Third Way To understand the French New Right, it is necessary to begin with its identitarian philosophy of history. This philosophy, however, is so entangled in an ideological thicket of critical scorn that it is all but impossible to approach with impartiality. Like revolutionary conservatism, national bolshevism, and various expressions of populism and syndicalism, the French New Right seeks a revolutionary course beyond the Left-Right politics it rejects; and, like these other “Third Way” tendencies, it, too, is routinely (...) compared with the most notorious of the Third Way movements: fascism and National Socialism.1 While liberalism, social democracy, and communism,…. (shrink)

In this paper, the author considers the concepts of xenophobia and nationalism. He distinguishes between three diferent forms of nationalism: 1) classical nationalism, 2) anti-colonial nationalism, and 3) identitarian nationalism. The frst is based on a belief in the racial and civilizational superiority of one’s nation, and is used to justify colonialism as a kind of messianic civilizing of the “inferior” Other. The second type emerges as a reaction to the frst one and acts as a defense against the (...) cultural subordination carried out by colonizers. To these two categories, the author adds a new kind of nationalism: identitarian nationalism. This type of nationalism shares with anti-colonial nationalism a defensive rhetoric, but it also advocates the preservation of the home culture’s specifcity, which is believed to be threatened by impoverished immigrants. In today’s Europe, we see this in the reaction to Muslim immigrants. The author argues that the right of foreigners to settle in other countries as immigrants cannot be unlimited, but also suggests that the demand of identitarian nationalists to preserve their own cultural identity from foreigners who change it does not apply in the case of wealthy foreigners who contribute to the economy of the country they come to. (shrink)

Based on an extended fieldwork, the paper discusses the construction of identity in a Brazilian quilombo - a term originally used by the Portuguese authorities to juridically define the flights of the Brazilian slaves. Appealing to a Constitutional Article granting the property of the land to the descendant of the fugitive slaves, the people of Frechal (Maranhão) obtained - after complex events overshadowed by tension and violence - the expropriation of the land bought by an entrepreneur of São Paulo with (...) the precise intent to forcibly expel the local population. Founding their right on an idea of cultural authenticity and mobilizing a symbolism capable of legitimating their claims and of giving them a legal weight, they transformed themselves from object of slavery, discrimination and racism to ethno-political subjects. Proceeding from the analysis of this paradigmatic case, the article shows how the term quilombo can be "re-semanticized" in order to be applicable to the contemporary situations of the Afro-Brazilian population. The actuality of the word, transferred from its original juridical meaning of colonial matrix, is founded on the idea that the quilombo s are not isolated survivals of the past to honor in the memory of the heroes that fought against slavery. Rather they represent true projects of a new political order, nuclei of the contemporary resistance founded on the collective property of the land. As such the quilombos are considered as real counterpoints to the neoliberal expansion in the rural areas. (shrink)

From Gnỗthi seautόn (‘Know Thyself’) to cognitive theories of the self there has been a long time, but the paradigm has almost remained the same. This article proposes a reconsideration of their rediscovery filtered through Jean Rhys’ post-colonial sensitivity. Between the ‘core self’ and its iridescent, exotic edges, broadly speaking, the thoroughly analyzed facets of cultural identity interpose.

This essay examines the relationship between Americanism, the distinctive ideology of the U.S. American empire, and the predominant discourse in the age of its war on terror, and Eurocentrism, its competing ideology but nonetheless also its ally in defending the West against different "barbarian" threats. It characterizes them as two different forms of hegemonic identity politics: one based in the idea of the particularity of culture, and the other on the idea of universality. A different form of discourse based on (...) the struggles of the traditional targets of those two ideologies is proposed here as an alternative basis for a different historical projectcentered on the idea of decolonization. (shrink)

Bodily movement has become an interesting topic in recent philosophy, both in analytic and phenomenological versions. Philosophy from Descartes to Kant defined the human being as a mental subject in a material body. This mechanistic attitude toward the body still lingers on in many studies of motor learning and control. The article shows how alternative philosophical views can give a better understanding of bodily movement. The article starts with Heidegger's contribution to overcoming the subject-object dichotomy and his new (...) understanding of the primacy of the practical involvement with the surrounding world. Heidegger, however, in many ways neglected the role of the human body. Merleau-Ponty took a huge step forward when he focused on the bodily intentionality of our interaction with the world. The next step was taken by Samuel Todes who presented a better understanding of how we are bodily oriented in space. After having seen how the body is oriented outward towards the environment it is proper that the final part of this article goes inward toward the role of bodily awareness and the role of proprioception in human movement. The goal of the presentation is to contribute to a better understanding of what goes on in sport. The article therefore uses examples from sport, especially football, to show the relevance of the new insights for sport studies. (shrink)

The imperative to practice hospitality constitutes a mark of Western civilization. Already in Homer’s Odyssey, the hero Ulysses punishes Polyphemus for not having respected the obligation of hospitality towards him and his companions. In fact, hospitality has been a constitutive element of the West, marked by linguistic, cultural, and religious differences, in a world whose borders are supposed to be well defined. In his discussion of hospitality, Derrida shows how Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue The Apology of Socrates, places himself in (...) the position of a foreigner. In fact, Socrates presents himself as foreigner, that is, someone who is alien to the language and procedures of the court that is judging him. According to Derrida, he shows, in this way, the extent to which the foreigner is forced to ask for hospitality in a language he does not know. The court reduces Socrates to the other, the different. Moreover, the court forces him to deny his difference, his own identity, asking him to adapt himself to a system that he does not control. The paradox arises when Socrates, who regrets being regarded as a foreigner, asks the court to treat him at least as a foreigner. He feels so outraged that he asks to be granted at least the rights of a non-national. In doing so, Socrates shows how recognizing the rights of the foreigner generates hospitality but, at the same time, also limits it. Whenever a human being is recognized as human being, he or she will necessarily be seen as another, as someone different. This person will have to adapt him or herself to a system, culture or world that will define him or her as a foreigner. In short, in the phenomena that we tend to see as hospitality there is always a certain hostility. In a world of ongoing migratory crises, and in the context of a return to nationalisms of exclusion combined with populisms of prejudice and aversion to those who are different, it becomes imperative to rethink the ethics and politics of hospitality. In this context, Derrida’s distinction between conditioned and unconditioned hospitality can be useful. (shrink)

In French, the verb "to live" designates both being alive and the experience of something. This ambiguity has a philosophical meaning. The task of a phenomenology of life is to describe an originary sense of living from which the very distinction between life in the intransitive sense and life in the transitive, or intentional, sense proceeds. Hans Jonas is one of those rare authors who has tried to give an account of the specificity of life instead of reducing life to (...) categories that are foreign to it. However, the concept of metabolism, by which Jonas characterizes vital activity, attests to a presupposition as to life: life is conceived as self-preservation, that is, as negation of death, in such a way that life is, in the end, not thought on the basis of itself. The aim of this article is to show that life as such must be understood as movement in a radicalized sense, in which the living being is no more the subject than the product. All living beings are in effect characterized by a movement, which nothing can cause to cease, a movement that largely exceeds what is required by the satisfaction of needs and that, because of this, bears witness to an essential incompleteness. This incompleteness reveals that life is originarily bound to a world. Because the world to which the living being relates is essentially non-totalizable and unpresentable, living movement can not essentially complete itself. Thus, in the final analysis, life must be defined as desire, and in virtue of this view, life does not tend toward self-preservation, as we have almost always thought, but toward the manifestation of the world. (shrink)

Movements of the Mind is about what it is to be an agent. Focusing on mental agency, it integrates multiple approaches, from philosophical analysis of the metaphysics of agency to the activity of neurons in the brain. Philosophical and empirical work are combined to generate concrete explanations of key features of the mind. The book should be relevant and accessible to philosophers and scientists interested in mind and agency.

The Movement for Black Lives has gained worldwide visibility as a grassroots social justice movement distinguished by a decentralized, non-hierarchal mode of organization. MBL rose to prominence in part thanks to its protests against police brutality and misconduct directed at black Americans. However, its animating concerns are far broader, calling for a wide range of economic, political, legal, and cultural measures to address what it terms a “war against Black people,” as well as the “shared struggle with all (...) oppressed people.” Despite the significance of the social, political, and economic goals of MBL, as well as the innovative organizational leadership strategies it employs, MBL has received little sustained philosophical attention. The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives brings philosophical analysis to bear on the aims, strategies, policy positions, and intellectual-historical context of MBL. Leading scholars address the following themes: “Black Lives Matter” as a political speech act, MBL’s conception of the value of black lives, the gender dynamics of the Movement, the relation of MBL to other black liberation movements and transitional justice movements, the Movement’s new forms of leadership and organization, and the impact of racism on the normative assessment of the criminal justice system. Accordingly, the volume broaches a wide range of pressing issues in the philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of gender, and the philosophy of punishment. It is important reading for students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences interested in race, inequality, and social justice movements. (shrink)

In order to understand ongoing activity, observers segment it into meaningful temporal parts. Segmentation can be based on bottom‐up processing of distinctive sensory characteristics, such as movement features. Segmentation may also be affected by top‐down effects of knowledge structures, including information about actors' intentions. Three experiments investigated the role of movement features and intentions in perceptual event segmentation, using simple animations. In all conditions, movement features significantly predicted where participants segmented. This relationship was stronger when participants identified (...) larger units than when they identified smaller units, and stronger when the animations were generated randomly than when they were generated by goal‐directed human activity. This pattern suggests that bottom‐up processing played an important role in segmentation of these stimuli, but that this was modulated by top‐down influence of knowledge structures. To describe accurately how observers perceive ongoing activity, one must account for the effects of distinctive sensory characteristics, the effects of knowledge structures, and their interactions. (shrink)

Prelude -- What moves as a body returns as a movement of thought -- Introduction: Events of relation : concepts in the making -- Incipient action : the dance of the not-yet -- The elasticity of the almost -- A mover's guide to standing still -- Taking the next step -- Dancing the technogenetic body -- Perceptions in folding -- Grace taking form : Marey's movement machines -- Animation's dance -- From biopolitics to the biogram, or, how Leni (...) Riefenstahl moves through fascism -- Of force fields and rhythm contours -- Relationscapes : how contemporary Aboriginal art moves beyond the map -- Constituting facts : Dorothy Napangardi dances the dreaming -- Cornering a beginning -- Conclusion: Propositions for thought in motion. (shrink)

Using the work of philosopher Henri Bergson to examine the nature of movement and memory, this article contributes to recent research on the role of the body in learning mathematics. Our aim in this paper is to introduce the ideas of Bergson and to show how these ideas shed light on mathematics classroom activity. Bergson’s monist philosophy provides a framework for understanding the materiality of both bodies and mathematical concepts. We discuss two case studies of classrooms to show how (...) the mathematical concepts of number and function are themselves mobile and full of potentiality, open to deformation and the remapping of the possible. Bergson helps us look differently at mathematical activity in the classroom, not as a closed set of distinct interacting bodies groping after abstract concepts, but as a dynamic relational assemblage. (shrink)

More and more people would like to migrate, but find that every state places barriers in their way. At the same time, most governments not only permit but court foreign investment. Can this difference between the treatment of people and the treatment of money be justified? This book asks this question from the point of view of five different ethical perspectives: liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, Marxism, natural law and political realism. -- FROM BOOK JACKET.

Exploring the intimate tie between body movement and space and time, Lee begins with the position that body movement generates space and time and explores the ethical implications of this responsibility for the situations one’s body movements generate. Whiteness theory has come to recognize the ethical responsibility for situations not of one’s own making and hence accountability for the results of more than one’s immediate personal conscious decisions. Because of our specific history, whites have developed a particular embodiment (...) and body movement that generates places that can only be characterized as more comfortable and more enabling to whites. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2014, given by Elizabeth Anderson, an American philosopher.

This book provides a historical and theoretical analysis of the Ayotzinapa social movement from the perspective of Latin American philosophy. The author addresses questions such as how a social movement is born, how (and if) the distinct social movement organizations should be defined, and what (if any) should be the extent of these organizations.

The key role that animals play in our aesthetic appreciation of the natural world has only gradually been highlighted in discussions in environmental aesthetics. In this article I make use of the phenomenological notion of 'perceptual sense' as developed by Merleau-Ponty to argue that open-ended expressive-responsive movement is the primary aesthetic ground for our appreciation of animals. It is through their movement that the array of qualities we admire in animals are manifest qua animal qualities. Against functionalist and (...) formalist accounts, I defend and develop an account of expressive-responsive movement as the primary perceptual sense of animals. I go on to suggest that the primacy of movement in the aesthetic appreciation of animals is also the primary sense of animal 'wildness', and that a key part of the rewilding paradigm should be the development of such appreciation. (shrink)

This book offers sweeping and cogent arguments as to why analytic philosophers should take experimental cinema seriously as a medium for illuminating mechanisms of meaning in language. Using the analogy of the movie projector, Barnett deconstructs all communication acts into functions of interval, repetition and context. He describes how Wittgenstein's concepts of family resemblance and language games provide a dynamic perspective on the analysis of acts of reference. He then develops a hyper-simplified formula of movement as meaning to discuss, (...) with true equivalence, the process of reference as it occurs in natural language, technical language, poetic language, painting, photography, music, and of course, cinema. Barnett then applies his analytic technique to an original perspective on cine-poetics based on Paul Valery's concept of omnivalence, and to a projection of how this style of analysis, derived from analog cinema, can help us clarify our view of the digital mediasphere and its relation to consciousness. Informed by the philosophy of Quine, Dennett, Merleau-Ponty as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, among others, he uses the film work of Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, A.K. Dewdney, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, Saul Levine, Gregory Markopoulos Michael Snow, and the poetry of Basho, John Cage, John Cayley and Paul Valery to illustrate the power of his unique perspective on meaning. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the usefulness of the concept of ‘movement compression’ for understanding sport and games, and particularly the differences between traditional sport and eSport (as currently practised). I suggest that movement compression allows us to distinguish between different activities in terms of how movement quality (in the sense of the qualities the movement possesses, rather than that the movement is of ‘high quality’) affects outcome. While it applies widely, this concept can (...) in particular help us to understand the persistent idea that eSports are in some key way distinct from traditional sports. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper addresses an underexplored puzzle about pictorial representation, a puzzle about how depiction of movement is possible. One aim is to clarify what the puzzle is. It might seem to concern a conflict between the nature of static surfaces and the dynamic things that they can depict. But the real conflict generating the puzzle is between the pictorial mode of presentation and what can be seen in pictures. A second aim of the paper is to solve the (...) puzzle. While many take it that depicting movement is to make visible something that has duration, I suggest that it is to make visible something atemporal. (shrink)

This article begins with a summary phenomenological analysis of movement in conjunction with the question of “quality” in movement. It then specifies the particular kind of memory involved in a dancer’s memorization of a dance. On the basis of the phenomenological analysis and specification of memory, it proceeds to a clarification of meaning in dance. Taking its clue from the preceding sections, the concluding section of the article sets forth reasons why present-day cognitive science is unable to provide (...) insights into dance, notably because being largely tethered to happenings in the brain, it lacks foundational grounding in experience, specifically, the actual experience of movement, which is to say in kinesthesia. (shrink)

Sequential action makes up the bulk of human daily activity, and yet much remains unknown about how people learn such actions. In one motor learning paradigm, the serial reaction time (SRT) task, people are taught a consistent sequence of button presses by cueing them with the next target response. However, the SRT task only records keypress response times to a cued target, and thus it cannot reveal the full time‐course of motion, including predictive movements. This paper describes a mouse (...) class='Hi'>movement trajectory SRT task in which the cursor must be moved to a cued location. We replicated keypress SRT results, but also found that predictive movement—before the next cue appears—increased during the experiment. Moreover, trajectory analyses revealed that people developed a centering strategy under uncertainty. In a second experiment, we made prediction explicit, no longer cueing targets. Thus, participants had to explore the response alternatives and learn via reinforcement, receiving rewards and penalties for correct and incorrect actions, respectively. Participants were not told whether the sequence of stimuli was deterministic, nor if it would repeat, nor how long it was. Given the difficulty of the task, it is unsurprising that some learners performed poorly. However, many learners performed remarkably well, and some acquired the full 10‐item sequence within 10 repetitions. Comparing the high‐ and low‐performers’ detailed results in this reinforcement learning (RL) task with the first experiment's cued trajectory SRT task, we found similarities between the two tasks, suggesting that the effects in Experiment 1 are due to predictive, rather than reactive processes. Finally, we found that two standard model‐free reinforcement learning models fit the high‐performing participants, while the four low‐performing participants provide better fit with a simple negative recency bias model. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper addresses an underexplored puzzle about pictorial representation, a puzzle about how depiction of movement is possible. One aim is to clarify what the puzzle is. It might seem to concern a conflict between the nature of static surfaces and the dynamic things that they can depict. But the real conflict generating the puzzle is between the pictorial mode of presentation and what can be seen in pictures. A second aim of the paper is to solve the (...) puzzle. While many take it that depicting movement is to make visible something that has duration, I suggest that it is to make visible something atemporal. (shrink)

Group dynamics play an important role in the social interactions of both children and adults. A large amount of research has shown that merely being allocated to arbitrarily defined groups can evoke disproportionately positive attitudes toward one’s in-group and negative attitudes toward out-groups, and that these biases emerge in early childhood. This prompts important empirical questions with far-reaching theoretical and applied significance. How robust are these inter-group biases? Can biases be mitigated by behaviors known to bond individuals and groups together? (...) How can bonds be forged across existing group divides? To explore these questions, we examined the bonding effects of interpersonal synchrony on minimally constructed groups in a controlled experiment. In-group and out-group bonding were assessed using questionnaires administered before and after a task in which groups performed movements either synchronously or non-synchronously in a between-participants design. We also developed an implicit behavioral measure, the Island Game, in which physical proximity was used as an indirect measure of interpersonal closeness. Self-report and behavioral measures showed increased bonding between groups after synchronous movement. Bonding with the out-group was significantly higher in the condition in which movements were performed synchronously than when movements were performed non-synchronously between groups. The findings are discussed in terms of their importance for the developmental social psychology of group dynamics as well as their implications for applied intervention programs. (shrink)

The effect of concurrent movement on incidental versus intentional statistical learning was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants learned the statistical regularities embedded within familiarization stimuli implicitly, whereas in Experiment 2 they were made aware of the embedded regularities and were instructed explicitly to learn these regularities. Experiment 1 demonstrated that while the control group were able to learn the statistical regularities, the resistance-free cycling group and the exercise group did not demonstrate learning. This is in contrast (...) with the findings of Experiment 2, where all three groups demonstrated significant levels of learning. The results suggest that the movement demands, rather than the physiological stress, interfered with statistical learning. We suggest movement activates the striatum, which is not only responsible for motor control but also plays a role in incidental learning. (shrink)

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. (...) Renewing and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

People often make use of a spatial “mental time line” to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are simultaneously taking (...) place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to “detect” invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)