Animal camouflage is said to be a mode of being negative, implying a setback visibility. On the contrary, we try here to restore all its aesthetic positivity considering the singularity of extremely varied forms it produces. It soon becomes apparent that the camouflage forces us to question the privilege of individuality and traditional drawdown on singularity. The disruptive camouflage, especially, that crushes the individual formal unity provides the argument in favor of an individuation with the environment, and (...) more with the world: the animal camoufleur disappears under only an individual visibility; it appears on the contrary in all its pre-individual splendor when it involves with environment components to make them the most expressive. (shrink)

The notion of “camouflage” offers a new way to articulate some central ideas of direct realism. Through a certain natural history, physical objects would be able to adopt as a “second skin” the qualitative appearances they have when they are perceived. This entails the rejection of the “things-having-effects-on-us” model for perception. The physical objects themselves would be crucially involved in the constitution of the intentionality of perception.

The First World War was the scenario that led to the invention and systematic use of military camouflage techniques. Between them, the two fundamental modes of static or pictorial camouflage: mimetic, known as Disruptive Pattern Material, and the naval, called Dazzle Painting. Avantgarde artists contributed to their birth. Immediately, there was the transfer of these techniques to the civilian sphere, revealing that its essentially practical essence did not prevent the exploitation of its aesthetic potential by contemporary visual culture. (...) Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the fields of art, architecture and design continue importing and exploiting the strategies of these two types of military camouflage. This article analyzes the artistic potential of static military camouflage devised during World War I and its impact on the setting of an expanded notion of camouflage. If the camouflage was in its origins and early history a form of disclosure of modern art on a global scale, the use of DPM and Dazzle by contemporary artists, is a form of dissemination of military camouflage to civil level. We explore a double investment produced by military camouflage: providing avantgarde art with a practical sense, and providing camouflage with an aesthetic sense. (shrink)

What stands out when we blend in? Performing Ground is the first book to explore camouflage as a performance practice, arguing that the act of blending into one's environment is central to the ways we negotiate our identities in and through space. Laura Levin tracks contemporary performances of camouflage through a variety of forms - performative photography; environmental, immersive, and site-specific performance; activist infiltration; and solo artworks - and rejects the conventional dismissal of blending in as an abdication (...) of self. Instead, she contemplates the empowering political possibilities of 'performing ground,' of human bodies intermingling with the material world, while directly engaging with the reality that women and other marginalized persons are often relegated to the background and associated with the properties of space. Performing Ground engages these questions through the works of some of today's most exciting performance artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Liu Bolin, Janieta Eyre, and Violeta Luna, and groups like Gob Squad, Punchdrunk, The Yes Men, and Urban Mimics. (shrink)

Despite decades of study, mimicry continues to inspire and challenge evolutionary biologists. This essay aims to assess recent conceptual frameworks for the study of mimicry and to examine the links between mimicry and related phenomena. Mimicry is defined here as similarity in appearance and/or behavior between a mimic and a model that provides a selective advantage to the mimic because it affects the behavior of a receiver causing it to misidentify the mimic, and that evolved (or is maintained by selection) (...) because of those effects. Mimics copy cues or signals that are already in use as part of a stable communication system, but offer misleading information to receivers. Mimicry overlaps, both conceptually and evolutionarily, with camouflage and perceptual exploitation but the overlap is only partial, which may create some confusion. Certain types of camouflage (e.g. masquerade) conform to the definition of mimicry, while others (e.g. background matching) are not considered mimicry because they prevent detection rather than recognition of the camouflaged animal. Mimicry, on the other hand, works by exploiting peculiarities of the receiver at higher stages of sensory processing involving recognition and classification of stimuli. Perceptual exploitation models of trait evolution are also closely related to mimicry, and sensory traps in particular may act as a precursor for true mimicry to evolve. The common thread through these diverse phenomena is deception of a receiver by a mimic. Thus receiver deception (i.e. perceptual error) emerges as a key characteristic of mimicry shared with some types of camouflage and perceptual exploitation. (shrink)

This paper is about perception and its objects. My aim is to suggest a new way to articulate some of the central ideas of direct realism. Sections 1 and 2 offer from different perspectives a panoramic view of the main problems and options in the philosophy of perception. Section 3 introduces the notion of “camouflage” as an interesting and promising alternative in order to explain the nature of the intentional objects of perception. Finally, section 4 makes use of this (...) new notion in the analysis of the relationships between the intentionality of perception, the intentionality of thought, and the intentionality of language. (shrink)

The Gray Man is the antithesis of individual expression. He hides in the corners of conformity. He only flaunts a quotidian nature. He meanders through the mundane and occupies the ordinary. Individual expression and exceptionalism are his enemies. The Gray Man is the forgettable face, the ghost guy, the hidden human. Implementing the concepts is more than looking less tactical, less hostile, or less threatening. It is the willful abandonment of anything and everything that defines oneself as different. Using his (...) unique "S" word conceptual approach featured in Appear to Vanish, camouflage and concealment expert Matthew Dermody discusses the concepts, tactics and mindset necessary to assimilate into any urban environment. From the safety-conscious international traveler to the SERE contingencies of the deep cover foreign operative, GRAY MAN is the definitive urban concealment resource. (shrink)

Camouflage commonly refers to the ability to make something appear as different from what it actually is, or not to make it appear at all. This concept originates from biological studies to describe a range of strategies used by organisms to dissimulate their presence in the environment, but it is frequently borrowed by other semantic fields as it is possible to camouflage one’s position, intentions, opinion etc.: an interesting conceptual continuum between the multiple denotations of camouflage seems (...) to emerge from the multiple homologies. Following this outlook, the first part of this paper aims at sketching out the main forms of camouflage as understood within their biological framework, insisting on the inferential dynamics underdetermined and allowing camouflage, making use of the concept of abduction as received from the Peircean heritage. The second part explores some of the most relevant occurrences of camouflage in dialectical and rhetorical perspectives. The third section aims at drawing the sums of the comparison between linguistic and biological camouflage, showing how strategies aimed at debunking verbal camouflage correspond to their respective countermeasures in biologically-intended camouflage. (shrink)

The author responds to Professor Kottow's criticisms, explaining numerous errors and misconceptions.

While numerous studies have examined the impact that powerful CEOs have on their compensation and overall firm decisions, relatively little is known about how powerful CFOs influence their compensation and important firm financial reporting and operational outcomes. This is somewhat surprising given the critical role CFOs play in the financial reporting process of a firm. Using managerial power theory and the theory of power and self-focus :635–658, 2013), we predict that powerful CFOs employ a two-part strategy to camouflage excessive (...) incentive compensation above what efficient contracting would dictate. First, powerful CFOs use their power and influence to negotiate shorter incentive pay duration to maximize the present value of their performance—based compensation. Second, when their incentive equity compensation vests, we suggest that CFOs manage earnings to further enhance their personal income. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find higher levels of income-increasing accrual-based earnings management and real transactions management, a potentially unethical practice, in firms with powerful CFOs who have short pay durations. We discuss the implications of our analysis in the context of mitigating CFO power and managing the ethical environment “tone at the top.”. (shrink)

In the twenty-eighth book of the Naturalis Historia Pliny the Elder claims that, if a chameleon’s left leg is roasted together with a herb bearing the same name, and everything is mixed with ointment, cut in lozenges, and stored in a wooden little box, this will bestow on those who own it a perfect camouflage. The ring of Gyges (Plato, etc.), that of Midas (Pliny), the heliotropium (Pliny), the dracontitis (Philostratus): ancient cultures abound with references to objects, recipes, and (...) techniques able to bestow different kinds of invisibility, meant as a perfect resemblance with the environment. At the same time, these same cultures also teem with references to how to avert the perfect camouflage: for instance, by being endowed with a pupula duplex, a double pupil (Ovid).The paper explores such vast corpus of texts from the point of view of a semiotics of cultures, in order to track the roots of a conception of camouflage that, from these ancient cultures on, develops through intricate paths into the contemporary imaginaires (and practices) of invisibility.The paper’s more general goal is to understand the way in which cultures elaborate conceptions of invisibility meant as the perfect resemblance between humans and their environments, often on the basis of the observation of the same resemblance between other living beings and their habitat. Ancient texts aretherefore focused on in order to decipher the passage from camouflage as an adaptive natural behaviour to camouflage as an effective combat strategy. (shrink)

This paper discusses prominent examples of what we call “algorithmic anxiety” in artworks engaging with algorithms. In particular, we consider the ways in which artists such as Zach Blas, Adam Harvey and Sterling Crispin design artworks to consider and critique the algorithmic normativities that materialize in facial recognition technologies. Many of the artworks we consider center on the face, and use either camouflage technology or forms of masking to counter the surveillance effects of recognition technologies. Analyzing their works, we (...) argue they on the one hand reiterate and reify a modernist conception of the self when they conjure and imagination of Big Brother surveillance. Yet on the other hand, their emphasis on masks and on camouflage also moves beyond such more conventional critiques of algorithmic normativities, and invites reflection on ways of relating to technology beyond the affirmation of the liberal, privacy-obsessed self. In this way, and in particular by foregrounding the relational modalities of the mask and of camouflage, we argue academic observers of algorithmic recognition technologies can find inspiration in artistic algorithmic imaginaries. (shrink)

To understand why autistic people are misperceived in the way Jaswal & Akhtar suggest, we should embrace concepts like the “double empathy problem” and camouflaging and recognize the negative consequences these have for mental health in autism. Moreover, we need to value expertise from experience so that autistic people have a voice and indeed a stake in research into autism.

Sometimes, when a given person and/or his scholarly work are boring, it is intentional: that person is deliberately being boring so that nobody bothers to scrutinize, or therefore discover, the emptiness of either him or his work.

During World War I, in response to substantial advancements in wartime surveillance, it became a common practice to rely on “vision specialists” to devise effective methods of fooling the enemy. These methods, collectively referred to now as camouflage, were designed by so-called camoufleurs, men who in civilian life had been trained as artists, graphic designers, architects, and theatre scenographers. Among the techniques they employed were perspective-based spatial distortions, of the sort that are also frequently used in theatrical set design, (...) trompe l’oeil paintings, and wildlife displays. This paper describes these methods, explains how they were intended to work, and discusses their effectiveness. (shrink)

I present a novel argument against the epistemic conception of perception according to which perception either is a form of knowledge or puts the subject in a position to gain knowledge about what is perceived. ECP closes the gap between a perceptual experience that veridically presents a given state of affairs and an experience capable of yielding the knowledge that the state of affairs obtains. Against ECP, I describe a particular case of perceptual experience in which the following triad of (...) claims is true: The experience presents a given state of affairs ; The experience is veridical; The experience cannot yield the knowledge that the state of affairs obtains. This case involves an empirically well-studied phenomenon, namely perceptual hysteresis, which involves the maintenance of a perceptual experience with a relatively stable content over progressively degrading sensory stimulations. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore an overlooked aspect of deep-fake technology, specifically its application as a protective tool for concealing the identities of targeted individuals or whistleblowers. Since its emergence in 2017, deep-fakes have been intertwined with various sociotechnical imaginaries. Traditionally, deep-fake technology has been portrayed as a potential threat to privacy and a weapon for disseminating false information, evident from its definitions which emphasize its deceptive nature and malicious use. Moreover, the origins of deepfakes, such as the creation and (...) online distribution of altered pornographic material with harmful intentions, further reinforce this perception. As a result of blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, truth and falsehood, these synthetic media forms not only pose a risk of disinformation and deception but also offer unexplored avenues for creative expression. Thus, this study examines deep-fake technology as a form of ‘digital camouflage’ by analyzing its usage in David France’s documentary film Welcome to Chechnya (2020). The argument presented in this paper suggests that this illustration challenges the dominant narrative surrounding deep-fakes and highlights an ethical and potentially positive application of this technology. (shrink)

Focusing on the paradoxes revealed in the multibillion dollar mistake of the Universal Camouflage Pattern and the expansive ambit of a leaked National Security Agency briefing on its approach to “identity intelligence,” this article analyzes security glitches arising from the state’s application of mechanized logics to security and visibility. Presuming that a digital-looking pattern would be more deceptive than designs inspired by natural forms, in 2004, the US Army adopted a pixelated “digital” camouflage pattern, a print that rendered (...) soldiers more, rather than less, visible in the field; it acknowledged this error in 2012. Two years later, “Identity Intelligence: Image Is Everything” visualized the episteme of National Security Agency surveillance with an illustration detailing hundreds of different types of data—biometric, biographic, and contextual—that the agency believes it could exploit to identify and monitor “targets of interest.” These glitches originate in technofetishistic convictions about the nature of digital images and information, limited ways of imagining bodies and lives, and reductive understandings of complex relationships between power and perception. Together, they expose the paradoxes that arise as the state tries to extend its power over the body and the contingency of that power on the smallest of things. (shrink)

The main point of our hypothesis “coloration undermines camouflage” is that many color patterns in plants undermine the camouflage of invertebrate herbivores, especially insects, thus exposing them to predation and causing them to avoid plant organs with unsuitable coloration, to the benefit of the plants. This is a common case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and a visual parallel of the chemical signals that plants emit to call wasps when attacked by caterpillars. Moreover, this (...) is also a common natural version of the well‐known case of industrial melanism, which illustrates the great importance of plant‐based camouflage for herbivorous insects and can serve as an independent test for our hypothesis. We claim that the enormous variations in coloration of leaves, petioles and stems as well as of flowers and fruits undermine the camouflage of invertebrate herbivores, especially insects. We assume that the same principle might operate in certain animal–parasite interactions. Our hypothesis, however, does not contrast or exclude other previous or future explanations of specific types of plant coloration. Traits such as coloration that have more than one type of benefit may be selected for by several agents and evolve more rapidly than ones with a single type of advantage. BioEssays 26:1126–1130, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

***Angaben zur beteiligten Person Kühn: Dr. Sebastian Kühn, wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter.

Review of a recently published collection of the complete writings of Suzanne C ésaire, arguing that it is an important moment for the emerging field of Afro-Caribbean philosophy.

Eroticism seems to be the essence of individuation and the freedom that brings Otherness into being. For this reason eroticism had to be disguised and softened by a mechanism of control within the society of any monolithic communist power. There- fore, one of the images that were altered was that of the woman. This was done under the pretext of a project of emancipation, initiated by the Communist party, which made claims in women’s name but utilized women’s organizations for socialist-communist (...) propaganda. The article analyzes this manipulative politics and it’s effects on the social imagery: it created the image of a New woman - the aggressive woman with the profile of a communist warrior and a masculine body in a carnival-like movement that was biased, restrictive, and gender-blind. (shrink)

Melanin, and other pigments have recently been shown to preserve over geologic time scales, and are found in several different organisms. This opens up the possibility of inferring colours and colour patterns ranging from invertebrates to feathered dinosaurs and mammals. An emerging discipline is palaeo colour: colour plays an important role in display and camouflage as well as in integumental strengthening and protection, which makes possible the hitherto difficult task of doing inferences about past ecologies, behaviours, and organismal appearance. (...) Several studies and techniques have been presented in the last couple of years that have described ways to characterize pigment patterns. Here, I will review the available methods and the likely applications to understand past ecologies. A golden age of colourized dinosaurs and other animals is now dawning upon us, which may elucidate the nature of ancient predator prey interactions and display structures.Also watch the Video Abstract. (shrink)

This article wants to investigate the logic of mimicry and their communicative function in animal life adopting an aesthetical perspective. The relationship between appearance and not-appearance, between the act of making itself visible and the act of disguising itself, is investigated starting from the morphological thought of the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann, in a continuous dialogue with great thinkers of past and actual time – Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Hannah Arendt and Roger Caillois – and with the artistic illustrations of the (...) American painter Abbott Thayer, concerned with the laws of color camouflage. This productive relationship among biology, aesthetics and artistic practice allows us to show that the sphere of the skin, far from being "superficial" and meaningless, is the privileged point of view for a true semiotics of the visible. (shrink)

Leafing a book quickly creates metamorphoses of its images and illustrations. Cinema as a medium is based on such visual discontinuity. Both Paolo Gioli, the Italian filmmaker, and Stan Brakhage in America, made very interesting flicker films with and about insects and butterflies : Farfallìo and Mothlight. Is the buttefly miming the filmic device? To what extent has a film to disguise its mechanism? What is the relation between animation and the animal? I intend to scrutinize the link between flicker (...) film and animality in regard of camouflage and mimicry. (shrink)

In the first part of this text, the author includes a synthesis of Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu’s thoughts regarding the actuality of ancient mythologies and their camouflaged presence within the cultural, political, social, and entertainment practices of the contemporary human being. The main idea of this text is that the Eliade-Culianu paradigm of the myths’ interpretations is of actuality because, in the first place, does not deceive the specific of mythology and explains myths through myths. The text then (...) presents the author’s ideas regarding the camouflaged presence of certain mythological phantasms within the games of the quotidian. Basically, these phantasms refer to the social mythologies reactivated in the world after September, 11, 2001, to mythological content of the neighborhood subcultures’ practices, as well as to the need of reinventing the “black sheep”. The author also mentions the mythological sequences disguised in a successful book - The Da Vinci Code - or in the extravagant car promotions in the contemporary Occident. (shrink)

The concept of simultaneous masking in visual field is discussed, in the light of classical examples, of the various kinds of the phenomenon, of a modal completion, of the figure/ground phenomenon, of ambiguous and reversible figures, of mimicry and camouflage and eventually of the complexity of the stimulus. There is some reference to masking in auditory field. The “reality” of the masked configuration is discussed, drawing the conclusion that it is perceptually unreal. The fact that the masking phenomenon cannot (...) take place without comparison between two perceptual acts – what we see at one moment and what we see a moment after LATER – and the fact that the masked configuration pops out with some surprise, lead to the conclusion that simultaneous masking in visual field is not a bare perceptual phenomenon, but a psychological process not unlike insight. (shrink)

Mimicry, camouflage, transvestism, chance or cryptic anamorphism, fascination – all ways of changing clothes, habits and habitats in nature as well as in culture, in any symbolic field created by human beings during their history. Art and artification, aestheticization, stylization and beautification are all practices reflecting the need and desire for biological as well as social adaptation, all performances producing functional and fictional frames, boundaries or hierarchies in ordinary life, including the artworld. They can persuade and convince by creating (...) consensus and belief, but they can also lead to a different common sense, a sensorium – a sensorial medium and an aesthetic mediation open to a new world and to new experiences. -/- By investigating mimetism as a fundamental and polymorphic aesthetic performance, this issue of «Aisthesis» aims to rethink the concept, value, and function of mimesis and its media in the context of camouflage, simulation, and dissimulation, where images do not reveal themselves as such, but are to be perceived unambiguously as what they are not – as hieroglyphs or puzzles. In the animal kingdom, as well as in war or in ordinary public life, camouflage consists in taking on the traits, colours, and shapes of a given form or environment. This is a twofold process: on the one hand, by blending two or more shapes in one, the camoufleur seeks to remain hidden and to mislead the others in order to keep a vital secret or an ephemeral whim; on the other hand, however, he/she aims to be recognized by a specific milieu or group, thus betraying a craving for communication and familiarity, as well as a need to convey an agreeable appearance and to share a way of life. (shrink)

Mimicry, camouflage, transvestism, chance or cryptic anamorphism, fascination – all ways of changing clothes, habits and habitats in nature as well as in culture, in any symbolic field created by human beings during their history. Art and artification, aestheticization, stylization and beautification are all practices reflecting the need and desire for biological as well as social adaptation, all performances producing functional and fictional frames, boundaries or hierarchies in ordinary life, including the artworld. They can persuade and convince by creating (...) consensus and belief, but they can also lead to a different common sense, a sensorium – a sensorial medium and an aesthetic mediation open to a new world and to new experiences. -/- By investigating mimetism as a fundamental and polymorphic aesthetic performance, this issue of «Aisthesis» aims to rethink the concept, value, and function of mimesis and its media in the context of camouflage, simulation, and dissimulation, where images do not reveal themselves as such, but are to be perceived unambiguously as what they are not – as hieroglyphs or puzzles. In the animal kingdom, as well as in war or in ordinary public life, camouflage consists in taking on the traits, colours, and shapes of a given form or environment. This is a twofold process: on the one hand, by blending two or more shapes in one, the camoufleur seeks to remain hidden and to mislead the others in order to keep a vital secret or an ephemeral whim; on the other hand, however, he/she aims to be recognized by a specific milieu or group, thus betraying a craving for communication and familiarity, as well as a need to convey an agreeable appearance and to share a way of life. (shrink)

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we (...) have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori. (shrink)

Natural selection causes adaptation, the fit between an organism and its environment. For example, the white and grey coloration of snowy owls living and breeding around the Arctic Circle provides camouflage from both predators and prey. In this Element, we explore a variety of such outcomes of the evolutionary process, including both adaptations and alternatives to adaptations, such as nonadaptive traits inherited from ancestors. We also explore how the concept of adaptation is used in evolutionary psychology and in animal (...) behavior, and the adequacy of methods used to confirm evolutionary accounts of human traits and behaviors. (shrink)

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we (...) have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori. (shrink)

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we (...) have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori. (shrink)

This study investigates how firms in the gambling industry manage their corporate social disclosures about controversial issues. We performed thematic content analysis of CSDs about responsible gambling, money laundering prevention and environmental protection in the annual reports and stand-alone CSR reports of four USA-based multinational gambling firms and their four Macao counterparts. This study draws on impression management theory, camouflage theory and corporate integrity theory to examine the gambling firms’ CSDs. We infer that the CSD strategies of gambling firms (...) in Macao and the USA did not serve as vehicles for reflexivity about social responsibility or social responsiveness. Instead, the firms camouflaged legitimacy gaps about sensitive topics by adopting assertive or defensive façades, disclaiming ethical responsibility, curtailing disclosure, or offering zero disclosure. Differences between CSD strategies according to topic, location, time, and reporting channel appear to reflect four factors: pressure to report, availability of good news, whether a firm was assuming ethical responsibility for addressing the topic, and the prospective readership. This study extends our understanding of the contextual and topic-specific factors affecting the quantity and character of CSDs by firms in a contested industry. (shrink)

Les arts de la ruse constituent un champ exploratoire où se tissent et se recroisent des pratiques tant réflexives que non-réflexives: des tactiques animales de chasse ou de camouflage aux adresses agiles de scientifiques pour construire des théories pertinentes. Michel de Certeau, jésuite érudit, au carrefour des tournants linguistique et pragmatique de la fin du XXe siècle, a travaillé ce tissage insolite de pratiques à travers les sciences humaines, questionnant et braconnant tour à tour les ruses du théoricien et (...) celles de l'objet qu'il convoque : l'historien et le passé, l'ethnologue et la culture, le sociologue et le quotidien, le théologien et la mystique... L'étendue et la diversité des thèmes rigoureusement abordés par cet auteur inclassable lance un jeu d'adresses à ses lecteurs : Michel de Certeau nous demande à notre tour de ruser, autrement dit de saisir l'occasion de transformer le champ du savoir en évitant de tomber de Charybde en Scylla. Pour relever ce défi et y inviter, à leur tour, les lecteurs, cet ouvrage propose un "tango philosophique", danse par excellence d'une ruse permanente entre technique sophistiquée de pas et improvisation envoûtée, à partir des traces de pieds nus, laissés par Michel de Certeau, sur le bord de nos savoirs conquérants. Cette étude développe une expérimentation épistémologique des sciences humaines contemporaines. (shrink)

With this paper, from the perspective of ethics at the workplace, we problematize the taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in the use of artistic freedom in creative processes. Drawing on the notion of inequality regimes (e.g. Acker, 2006) and using empirical material from a performing arts organization in Sweden, we explore how the assumptions of artistic freedom facilitate and legitimize the emergence of inequality regimes in invisible and subtle manners. Our findings indicate that non-reflexive interpretations of the concept of artistic freedom result (...) in ethical dilemmas that impact the organization's pursuits of equality work. The aesthetic ethics oriented around the notion of ‘art for the sake of art’ tends to camouflage the centralization of aesthetic authority in processes where formal hierarchical structures are missing. Consequently, asymmetrical power relations between the Directors, actors, and producers are legitimized. Ethics of quality of art and that of the social ideal of equality have been constructed as dichotomic notions indicating that aesthetic ethics of art can only be preserved at the expense of social objectives of equality. We argue that the current interpretative practices of ‘artistic freedom’ in some cultural organizations add little value of ethics to the freedom of expressing artistic opinions and in achieving the social ideal of equality but lead to the emergence of inequality regimes in the artistic work processes. (shrink)

Our insight into the paradoxical nature of the human situation and the awareness of the polarity of man's being has not been transmitted through rigorous philosophical reflection but has been nurtured by the mystic, religious and poetic traditions of all times. It is therefore all the more necessary to detect and recognize the religious and mystic accents of recent philosophic thought in their philosophical camouflage, and try to see how philosophic reflections on man's pre-philosophic awareness of himself in his (...) archaic experience can significantly contribute to build an authentic image of him. An alleged incident in the life of the great Persian poet and mystic, Shaikh Faridubbin Attar, will illustrate better what we mean than any philosophical sophistication. Once taken captive by a soldier of the Tartar hordes which sacked Nishapur, he refused to let his life be redeemed by the offer of a substantial sum as he considered himself worth much more. However he later urged on his captor to accept as lowly a price as a bundle of grass since he deemed himself not worth even that much. The consequence can easily be imagined. The authenticity of this story, like that of all beautiful stories which make history meaningful, is now disputed. Its meta-historical relevance remains unchallenged nevertheless. What is really intended to be conveyed by weaving an imaginary anecdote round the life of a great Sufi is probably the paradoxicality of man's existence alluded to in the Quran: “Verily we created man in the most excellent stature and then reduced him to the lowest of the low” (Quran XCV). Consequently man moves between two infinites, the infinite which makes him swing to dizzy heights and the infinite which allows him to sink to frightening depths. In other words he can rise so high as to assimilate the attributes of the divine and fall so low as to forfeit his human identity. (shrink)

My intention in writing “The Politics of Redemption” (Telos #63) — which was admittedly polemical and therefore somewhat overstated — was in part to stimulate theoretical controversy within me journal. It seemed at the time that Telos was suffering from stagnation camouflaged by animated political debates, and that an open and even heated discussion of basic theoretical issues might prove healthy and productive. I was therefore pleased to see the responses to my article and welcome the opportunity to clarify and (...) elaborate my position. I would now state my diesis in die following way: Modernity is a fundamentally ambivalent — if not antinomic — phenomenon which requires a sufficiently differentiated conceptual scheme to capture die elements of diat ambivalence; contrawise, an insufficiendy differentiated theory cannot do justice to that ambivalence and mutatis mutandis to the social, political and historical situation in which we find ourselves. (shrink)

This text reads into the work of Ibrahim Nubani (1962—), a Palestinian-Israeli painter who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1988, during the first Intifada. Nubani’s painting has undergone a tremendous change from the 1980s and the period of his hospitalization to his painting style today: from geometric, Modernist-type painting, gradually moving into his contemporary chaotic and saturated style of expression. I draw parallels between Nubani’s personal and psychological condition and the political events that affected him. I refer to his state (...) in relation to the discourse of mimicry and camouflage in nature, comparing his position to that of the invisible presences in the background in a perfect camouflage, referring to Roger Caillois’ interpretations. I look at his diagnosed psychiatric state of schizophrenia as the materialization of the meaning of being a Palestinian-Israeli in a life of fragmentation and rejection, by referring to Bhabha and Shammas. I relate to Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of schizophrenia as a cultural rebellion against the moderating mechanisms of cultural/national identification. I demonstrate how Nubani’s work and speech undermine the modalities of mainstream Israeli society, acting like a cultural insurgent, terrorizing Zionist axioms. While analysing Nubani’s iconography I identify several tropes, images and icons that serve as signifiers of his personal crisis and artistic development. I link Nubani’s eyes/ocelli images to Lacan’s discussion of ‘symbolic castration’ as the core of his personal becoming part of Israeli society and his collapse, the in-between desire to assimilate in the early stages of his life, and his current desire to fully live his life as a Palestinian. The text moves between his images and images from other sources that open Nubani’s world into the discourses of Western painting, schizophrenia, high Modernism, the postcolonial condition and so forth. The text is fragmented into eight pieces, following the schizophrenic break-up of Nubani’s personal state and his painted work. I read his work as a destabilizing agent, and identify visual references drawn from the wider context of art history, and specifically referring to masterpieces of the Israeli art canon. (shrink)

Human dignity—is it a useful concept in bioethics, one that sheds important light on the whole range of bioethical issues, from embryo research and assisted reproduction, to biomedical enhancement, to care of the disabled and the dying? Or is it, on the contrary, a useless concept—at best a vague substitute for other, more precise notions, at worst a mere slogan that camouflages unconvincing arguments and unarticulated biases?