Global cycles of rising and declining hegemonies within the world-system have been associated with periods of war and peace, free trade and protectionism, and economic expansion and contraction. Periods of hegemonic decline are also associated with the cultural production of a certain strain of self deprecating, or even self-hating, literary output. And, because we are dealing with the world-system, the popularity of such icons of national self-deprecation should be gappreciated within other countries. We see this in the fact that (...) Don Quixote, poking fun at Spanish chivalry was an immensely popular book outside as well as inside Spain. Similarly, the James Bond books, and particularly the movies had a huge audience world wide, and, the same could be said for the Rambo movies which poked fun at the chivalric Green Beret American military figure. We see, then, three instances of hegemonic decline—Spain, Britain, United States—and three instances of self-deprecating literary figures—Don Quixote, James Bond, and Rambo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato's Timaeus as Cultural IconGerard NaddafGretchen J. Reydams-Schils, editor. Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon. Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 334. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $29.95.This volume emanates from an international conference entitled "Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon" held at the University of Notre Dame in 2000. In the introduction, the editor and organizer, Gretchen Reydams-Schils (GRS), contends (...) that the title is meant to communicate the considerable influence of Plato's Timaeus on so many different intellectual traditions and asks "What could account for this philosophical and cultural status?" (1).There are thirteen essays by distinguished specialists in the field. For some reason, a number of the essays do not focus on the general theme of the volume and the question GRS raises, "what could account for this philosophical and cultural status?" is never directly, or even indirectly, addressed. In this short review, I will examine the essays in their order of appearance and make some general comments at the end.Mitchell Miller, in the opening essay, argues that the Timaeus must be understood as addressed to a nonphilosophical audience, although he endeavors to show how the philosophically minded could interpret the Timaeus in light of the god-given method, the longer way, of the Philebus (16c-17a). With this in mind, Miller shows that the constitution of the elements and animals in the Timaeus was in fact determined in light of this method. From this perspective, the Timaeus is addressed not only to a nonphilosophical audience—albeit chiefly to these—but also to a philosophical audience.Kenneth Sayre discusses a number of inconsistencies and incoherences in Plato's description/analysis of the Receptacle and concludes that it is nothing short of a "failed experiment." Personally, I find Plato's analysis rather helpful in a manner analogous to the famous similes he employs in the Republic to help us grasp the Form of the Good. Meanwhile, there is nothing in the essay, as with Miller's essay, to indicate why the Timaeus would constitute a cultural icon (unless as a paradigm for opacity and thus as a catalyst for allegorical interpretation, but again this is not Sayre's intent). [End Page 335]John Dillon, with whom the notion of the Timaeus as a cultural icon begins to emerge, emphasizes that most of the members of the Old Academy, including Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Cantor, maintained (contra Aristotle) that Plato did not hold that the universe was created. While it is true, as he notes, that they were in a better position to interpret the master, the fact remains that they all had different interpretations. There is thus a sense in which Dillon's analysis confirms Miller's position that Plato meant the Timaeus for two very different audiences.Carlos Lévy focuses on the difficulty that Cicero had in translating the Timaeus without reverting to Stoic concepts. He argues that a Latin reader, unfamiliar with the Greek, would assume that transcendence is nonexistent and that mind and matter, as with the Stoics, are one. However, Lévy remains silent on why Cicero would not allow Plato to speak for himself, given that this appears to be the norm with many of his other interlocutors. Moreover, it is difficult again to see why the Timaeus would constitute a "cultural icon."Luc Brisson presents the Timaeus in a radical new light. He shows the extent to which the Timaeus, or more precisely the highly exegetical Middle Platonist interpretation of the work, was the primary reference text for the influential Chaldean Oracles. This is an excellent example of the iconic status of the Timaeus, but it is worth noting that the Chaldean Oracles themselves and their doctrine of salvation may have been historically more influential than the Timaeus itself.David Runia's essay is also an excellent example of the iconic influence of Plato's Timaeus, but unlike Brisson, he focuses on a particular feature of the cosmogonical account rather than the entire treatise: how the Timaeus influenced the debate, including with regard to the opening verses of Genesis, on first principles and the doctrine of creation. Runia... (shrink)

New forms of transnational mobility and diasporic belonging have become emblematic of a supposed global condition of uprootedness. Yet much recent theorizing of our so-called postmodern life emphasizes movement and fluidity without interrogating who and what is on the move. This book examines the interdependence of mobility and belonging by considering how homes are formed in relationship to movement. It suggests that movement does not only happen when one leaves home, and that homes are not always fixed in a single (...) location. Home and belonging may involve attachment and movement, fixation and loss, and the transgression and enforcement of boundaries. (shrink)

The embodied human subject is dynamically connected to his or her historico-sociocultural context, the soil from which a person’s psyche is nourished as multiplex meanings are absorbed and enable personal development. In each culture certain towering artistic works embody this perspective. The Dream of the Red Chamber introduces Jia Bao-yu—a scion of the prestigious Jia family—and his relationships with a large cast of characters. Bao-yu is controversial but, at the time of the family’s tragic collapse, he can be seen as (...) embodying a spiritual struggle in which his instinct, nature, sensitivity, and creativity are grounded in his transcendent relationship with a fragment of the world stone, an eternal source of energy and creativity. We are invited to draw on a metaphysical level of thought to consider his struggles with man-made hierarchies and a situated historico-sociocultural order in such a way as to live out his spiritual being. As such, the novel is closely relevant to questions of spirituality in bioethics. Through personal experiences, passions, creativity, and relationships with others, the body is inscribed, forming the soul, which may be misconstrued (for instance, through a medical or Cartesian reformulation of events) but which can be seen as the site of ethical and spiritual thought. (shrink)

We examine Paul Halmos’ comments on category theory, Dedekind cuts, devil worship, logic, and Robinson’s infinitesimals. Halmos’ scepticism about category theory derives from his philosophical position of naive set-theoretic realism. In the words of an MAA biography, Halmos thought that mathematics is “certainty” and “architecture” yet 20th century logic teaches us is that mathematics is full of uncertainty or more precisely incompleteness. If the term architecture meant to imply that mathematics is one great solid castle, then modern logic tends to (...) teach us the opposite lesson, namely that the castle is floating in midair. Halmos’ realism tends to color his judgment of purely scientific aspects of logic and the way it is practiced and applied. He often expressed distaste for nonstandard models, and made a sustained effort to eliminate first-order logic, the logicians’ concept of interpretation, and the syntactic vs semantic distinction. He felt that these were vague, and sought to replace them all by his polyadic algebra. Halmos claimed that Robinson’s framework is “unnecessary” but Henson and Keisler argue that Robinson’s framework allows one to dig deeper into set-theoretic resources than is common in Archimedean mathematics. This can potentially prove theorems not accessible by standard methods, undermining Halmos’ criticisms. (shrink)

The armed forces of World War II employed unprecedented numbers of mechanical transport vehicles, precipitating a spike in demand for automotive manufactures. Eager to capture a share of the less certain postwar automobile marketplace, defense contractors such as Willys-Overland pursued a diverse range of product development and advertising strategies, based on the foundation of their military output. This article considers the cultural significance of Willys-Overland’s 1/4-ton truck (“jeep”), one of the most widely recognized transport artifacts of World War II. (...) Working from a Canadian perspective, the discussion traces the jeep’s transformation from a versatile front line utility truck into an enduring icon of the postwar auto age. (shrink)

I develop an exploratory analysis of “post-mortem photography”, a social practice existing in different cultures. The study, part of a larger project in Denmark, “The culture of grief”, combines Dialogical Self Theory, mainly concerning verbal and textual objects, with the iconic framework of affective semiosis to discuss the function of taking and keeping pictures of dead persons as if they were still alive or just sleeping. How can this practice and artifact culturally mediate the experience of death and the elaboration (...) of grief? What kind of inner dialogue is developed through the internalization of this specific kind of presence/absence? These are some of the preliminary questions I will try to answer by discussing some examples of post-mortem photography from the 19th and 20th centuries in different countries. (shrink)

This article explores the theoretical and substantive connections between iconicity and consumerism in the field of contemporary iconic architecture within the framework of a critical theory of globalization. Iconicity in architecture is defined in terms of fame and special symbolic/aesthetic significance as applied to buildings, spaces and in some cases architects themselves. Iconic architecture is conceptualized as a hegemonic project of the transnational capitalist class. In the global era, I argue, iconic architecture strives to turn more or less all public (...) space into consumerist space, not only in the obvious case of shopping malls but more generally in all cultural spaces, notably museums and sports complexes. The inspiration that iconic architecture has provided historically generally coexisted with repressive political and economic systems, and for change to happen an alternative form of non-capitalist globalization is necessary. Under such conditions truly inspiring iconic architecture, including existing architectural icons, may create genuinely democratic public spaces in which the culture-ideology of consumerism fades away. In this way, a built environment in which the full array of human talents can flourish may begin to emerge. (shrink)

The present paper analyzes cultural attires and appearances of Marri and Bugti tribes in Balochistan to find out latent meanings attached to these artifacts. In doing so, the study uses Peirce’s framework of semiotics- an iconic perspective. The analysis has been carried out with the help of close reading of the cultural images and appearances. The results reveal underlying multi-meanings attached to these images and appearances. The findings reflect the richness and diversity of Marri and Bugti cultures and (...) the invisible representational meanings of these objects. This research endeavor may be helpful to promote pluralism, harmony and enhance intercultural awareness necessary for understanding cultural diversities within and across societies. More so, future researchers can explore cultural objects and appearances of Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtuns, Urdu speaking, and Saraiki people by applying various frameworks of semiotics. (shrink)

Since at least the late nineteenth century, a world-level moral culture has developed, providing a space for certain persons to be presented as global moral icons. This global moral space was already pointed to by Kant as an emergent form, and was later theorized by Durkheim. This article shows that an important institutionalization of global moral culture involved the founding of the Nobel Prizes, the subsequent mutations of which were also important in the constitution of that culture. These, and other (...) awards which imitated them, are performative in a profound sense: they simultaneously reflect and help bring into being a planet-spanning culture which demands moral icons which both exemplify and partly constitute it. How the Nobel Prizes and their imitators work to create moral iconicity that is globally relevant is explored. The case of Gandhi is taken as an example of how, despite not being awarded a Nobel Prize, some moral icons are also brought into being through symbolic contact with other such icons, including Nobel Prize winners. The article considers the lingering, powerful, but generally invisible, influence today on world moral culture of the innovations pursued by the early Nobel Prize committees. (shrink)

In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites provide the definitive study of the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art. Their critical analyses of nine individual icons explore the photographs themselves and their subsequent circulation through an astonishing array of media, including stamps, posters, billboards, editorial cartoons, TV shows, Web pages, tattoos, and more. Iconic images are revealed as models of visual eloquence, signposts for collective memory, means of persuasion across the political spectrum, and a (...) crucial resource for critical reflection. Arguing against the conventional belief that visual images short-circuit rational deliberation and radical critique, Hariman and Lucaites make a bold case for the value of visual imagery in a liberal-democratic society. No Caption Needed is a compelling demonstration of photojournalism’s vital contribution to public life. (shrink)

In language, recombination of a discrete set of meaningless building blocks forms an unlimited set of possible utterances. How such combinatorial structure emerged in the evolution of human language is increasingly being studied. It has been shown that it can emerge when languages culturally evolve and adapt to human cognitive biases. How the emergence of combinatorial structure interacts with the existence of holistic iconic form-meaning mappings in a language is still unknown. The experiment presented in this paper studies the role (...) of iconicity and human cognitive learning biases in the emergence of combinatorial structure in artificial whistled languages. Participants learned and reproduced whistled words for novel objects with the use of a slide whistle. Their reproductions were used as input for the next participant, to create transmission chains and simulate cultural transmission. Two conditions were studied: one in which the persistence of iconic form-meaning mappings was possible and one in which this was experimentally made impossible. In both conditions, cultural transmission caused the whistled languages to become more learnable and more structured, but this process was slightly delayed in the first condition. Our findings help to gain insight into when and how words may lose their iconic origins when they become part of an organized linguistic system. (shrink)

This article will investigate the paradoxical relation between iconic logos, such as the Nike logo, and architectural icons, such as the Sydney Opera House. Both logos and icons are immediately recognizable worldwide. Yet they function in seemingly radically different ways logos as signifiers of a single company: icons as signifiers that always represent something different from exactly what they are. How can these two different ways of signification produce the same result of instant recognition?

This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach to (...) meaning is compared with others — with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism. (shrink)

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend (...) to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection. (shrink)

The article describes manners in which history and culture influenced the details of the iconographic canon in the art of Orthodox church. The author was interested in relations existing between beliefs and their iconographic representation. Changes of the imagery of the damned in historical context portrayed in the Last Judgment icons painted in selected Orthodox churches in Romania came under the investigation of the author. Romanian icon painters using Byzantine characteristics of representation introduced some significant modifications into the canon. (...) We can divide icons of the Last Judgment into two groups – on the one hand we see sinners who rebelled against the moral canon of Christianity, on the other there are some nations unknown to Romanians, foreign people of various nationalities and faiths that can be grouped into a few categories. The largest of them is composed of pagans (Turks, Tartars and Arabs), infidels (Jews) and heretics (Armenians and Latin rite Catholics). With time this tradition turned into customary painting of the Last Judgment icons in Romania. It disappeared in the 20 th century, only to be reborn with the fall of the communist era in new historical contexts. Old enemies of the Orthodox were replaced by new ones, the representatives of the greatest totalitarian systems in the 20 th century – fascists, Nazis, communists; terrorists – the Muslims and their leader (Bin Laden) as well as contemporary Romanian politicians, who are being eternalized in the Last Judgment icons on the walls of Orthodox churches. (shrink)

For a sign to be a sign it must bond an object, a signifier, and the idea to which it gives rise. The paper focuses on the iconicity of silence as a hypoiconic signifier, exploring the semiotics of silence in light of the notions and studies of iconicity. Fascinating parallelisms hold between iconicity and silence. These raise many challenges to the study of each separately, let alone dealing with them jointly. Some icons and some silences are qualities in the real (...) world, others are semiotic forms standing for or denoting objects. Simple, intuitive qualities of iconicity and of silence are naturally grasped and shared from antiquity to the present by cultures and peoples. The paper employs Peirce’s initial basic trichotomy of iconic classes as well as his later hierarchies for studying the iconic stance of silence as a hypoiconic signifier. Analyzing and illustrating the possible complexities between forms, contents, their relations and their interpretations, group hypoiconic silences into silence as an image, silence as a diagram, and silence as a metaphor. (shrink)

This is one of those rare books whose influence will grow rather than diminish with the years. Icon and Idea is destined to take its place beside Ernst Cassirer's massive and difficult The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as a basic work on the original, creative power of the human spirit as it is enacted as culture -- in myth, religion, science, art. Sir Herbert Read's book is neither massive nor difficult. It was first delivered as the Charles Eliot Norton (...) Lectures 1953-1954, at Harvard. Text and pictures together illustrate the intellectual courage of a great art critic, aesthetician and intellectual theorist, as well as poet and novelist. Advancing beyond Cassirer's theory of the irreducible autonomy of culture, Read develops his theory that "the image always precedes the idea in the development of human consciousness." Having established this major thesis, Read goes on to elaborate it in a way that will interest not only students of art history and the social sciences but any reader interested in the right basis for education. In arguing the primacy of art work in human development, Read gives the reader a fine general education in the history and psychology of art. (shrink)

The Call for Papers invokes a history of thinking about images in terms of Western traditions, culminating in the ‘apocalyptic discourses of today’s cultural climate’ Jacques Rancière describes in The future of the image. Not considered in this scenario are other ways of looking at, being moved by, thinking about, going with and feeling through images, which I will unfold in this paper. Starting with filmmaker Merata Mita from Aotearoa New Zealand, who contrasts living images of her ancestors in (...) documentaries, ‘very much alive’ to her, with outsiders’ selective collecting of those images ; linking with Natalie Robertson’s tracing of takiaho, by which descendants keep connections with their ancestors in film fragments alive; I will also remember Aby Warburg’s notion of Nachleben – the ‘survival’, ‘continuity’ and ‘metamorphosis’ of images and motifs, and finally engage Mitchell’s consideration of a road not taken by Rancière in contemplating The future of the image. The paper explores a range of experiences, actions, reflections and emotions bundled in the terms appropriation and iconicity: from engaged encounters to consumptive misuse in the first case, from fleeting celebrity fame to a particular form of material presence that contributes to identification and community building in the latter. By bringing Māori and Pacific ways of thinking together with minor European thought traditions the paper shows that images, as appearance into visibility and doability, can not only connect the imagination with reality. They can also open up new and old realms of possibilities through affective and effective iconicity. Whether or not this can happen depends on the prevailing kind of belonging. (shrink)

This article examines a key question emerging from the strong program in cultural sociology — can art provide a window into social life? An examination of Giacometti's Standing Woman shows that art attempts to express cultural structures via immersion into and through the material surfaces of aesthetic form. Through an analysis of the iconic significance of family photos, furniture and celebrities, the article goes on to suggest that such iconic experience remains at the basis of contemporary social life. (...) It explains how we feel part of our surroundings, how we experience the ties that bind us to the people we know and how we develop a feeling for cultural hierarchy. (shrink)

The paper examines one possible argument against restricting the display of religious icons in Romanian public schools. Opponents of this decision claim that cult objects affirm something essential about our cultural identity and therefore that using legal instruments to protect this identity is justified. Using a differential analysis of two models of identity recognition, Charles Taylor’s and Axel Honneth’s, this paper argues that the legal protection of cultural identity is compatible with value pluralism but only if its defense (...) is justified in the terms provided by Honneth’s theory of identity recognition. However, the argument in favor of displaying icons in Romanian public schools, unlike the argument against wearing the Islamic veil in French public schools, cannot be justified in these terms. (shrink)

Public discourse on religious matters is a sensitive issue in Romania. It has raised heated debates for at least two reasons: on the one hand, the repressive policy of the Communist regime concerning religion created a strong boomerang-effect, a religious renaissance after 1989; on the other hand, there is a deep cleavage between the “two Romanias:” the urban and the rural, the modernized and the traditionalist, the liberal and the conservative. Religion still serves as a major cultural marker of (...) national identity, and the church is one of the most trusted institutions in Romania. We are exploring the hypothesis that the 2006-2007 religious icon scandal in Romania is a typical example of heated public debate in a transitional society. (shrink)

"Essays examine philosophical aspects of the iPod portable audio player, focusing on its status as a cultural icon and object with many meanings"--Provided by ...

The glorious Sophia image of Nikolai Mokrogo, now completely forgotten, was the oldest national shrine and one of the first miraculous icons of Kievan Rus known to us. The name of the icon is associated with the "Miracle of the Infant in Kiev", which dates from the researchers no later than 1090. The legend tells about the marriage, which went to the pilgrimage to the relics of Boris and Gleb in Vyshgorod. They returned to Kyiv by the Dnipro in (...) a boat. In the road, a tired woman was asleep and dropped into the water a baby, which immediately drowned. Parents of the child turned to despair in despair. Mykola "having a great faith in him", asking for help. Indeed, the next morning the child of a bud was found undisturbed on the outside of the chambers of Sophia of Kiev: "... the child is lying wet in front of the image of St. Nikolai "[Leonid, Archimandrite. Life and miracles of St. Nikolai Mirlykysky and praise him. Investigation of two monuments of ancient Russian writing of the XI century. - St. Petersburg, 1881. - P. 90.] The icon of the saint, under which was found miraculously saved sv. Nicholas is a child in wet diapers, nicknamed Nikolay Mokrogo. For centuries it was located on the choirs of the St. Sophia Cathedral in the iconostasis of the Mykolaiv altar, on the right of the royal gates, occupying the place of the temple image. (shrink)

In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic turn’. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity of pictorial meaning. The essay has (...) two parts. In the first, it tries to assess the exact meaning of the ‘pictorial’/’iconic turn’, and (re)places it into the context of Anglo-American visual studies and German Bildwissenschaften. It the second, it addresses the famous claim by the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius that ‘image sciences are easy’ by advocating for three ‘turns of the screw’ to make visual studies more difficult: a shift from iconology to symptomatology, a shift from extensive to intensive and a shift from the indicative to the subjunctive. (shrink)

Poetry is the most complex and intricate of human language used across all languages and cultures. Its relation to the worlds of human experience has perplexed writers and readers for centuries, as has the question of evaluation and judgment: what makes a poem "work" and endure. The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and function: not interpretation but experience; not what poetry means but what it does. Using both historic and contemporary approaches (...) of embodied cognition from various disciplines, Margaret Freeman argues that a poem's success lies in its ability to become an icon of the felt "being" of reality. Freeman explains how the features of semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect work to make a poem an icon, with detailed examples from various poets. By analyzing the ways poetry provides insights into the workings of human cognition, Freeman claims that taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts are simply products of the aesthetic faculty, and not the aesthetic faculty itself. The aesthetic faculty, she argues, should be understood as the science of human perception, and therefore constitutive of the cognitive processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment. (shrink)

The paper examines one possible argument against restricting the display of religious icons in Romanian public schools. Opponents of this decision claim that cult objects affirm something essential about our cultural identity and therefore that using legal instruments to protect this identity is justified. Using a differential analysis of two models of identity recognition, Charles Taylor’s and Axel Honneth’s, this paper argues that the legal protection of cultural identity is compatible with value pluralism but only if its defense (...) is justified in the terms provided by Honneth’s theory of identity recognition. However, the argument in favor of displaying icons in Romanian public schools, unlike the argument against wearing the Islamic veil in French public schools, cannot be justified in these terms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Iconicity, Romance and History in the Crónica SarracinaMarina S. Brownlee (bio)Though seemingly alien discourses, romance and historiography are perennially linked. Far from offering an atemporal imaginary universe that bears no resemblance to historical specificity, romance is constructed as a response to it. Rather than simply projecting for the reader the naïve appeal of a prelapsarian escapism from the harsh realities of history, romance involves a continuous and sophisticated reinvention (...) of itself as a response to an ever-changing historico-political configuration. It is, in fact, a reciprocal relationship. We frequently see history appropriating romance paradigms explicitly, as, for example, when Bernal Díaz chooses to present Spain’s New World conquest and colonization as a continuation of the exploits of Amadís [see Gilman].Whatever form it takes, romance is committed to the celebration of a coherent system of socio-political values. This extra-textual frame of reference can take a variety of forms—from political propaganda that offers a self-aggrandizing depiction of the nobility or patron for whom the text is produced, to escapist fantasy—futuristic or archaizing. It is nostalgia for the lost world of chivalric romance which Cervantes embodies in the figure of Don Quijote, a foolish old man driven mad by his obsession with this perennial literary form. Cervantes is rightly credited with a brilliant and programmatic use of romance constructs to communicate the ongoing historical crisis of the Spanish empire. A byproduct of this romance scrutiny of history was his invention of the modern novel.Testimony to the long-standing interaction between romance and history in Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, is evident in the fact that its first romances were based on history, the so-called “romances of antiquity.” In those texts historical figures and events are evoked for the purpose of legitimating the present, vernacular poets as they celebrate the empowering myths projected by their society, as well as their own literary endeavors by invoking venerable Latin models. The well known translatio studii et imperii topos offers such allegory of empire.At the same time, the confrontation of romance and historical representation can also have a destabilizing effect, and this is programmatically explored in Pedro del Corral’s Crónica sarracina (c. 1430). His text ponders the possibilities of romance and historiography in an obsessive manner and he accomplishes his task by examining representation of the most iconic figures associated with the fall of Spain in 711, namely, La Cava and her father, Count Julián, King Rodrigo, and Pelayo, the messianic hope of the Reconquest effort which would last nearly 800 years.Of related and perhaps even broader importance, Corral’s text merits careful reading because its exploration of iconicity related to Spain’s fall offers meditations on the workings of ideology, which inevitably proposes “imaginary or formal solutions to unresolvable contradictions” [Jameson 79]. Ideology—its unmasking—is intriguingly posited by Corral in powerful ways.If we turn to Corral’s text, we find a work offering an extraordinary consideration of history and romance—their profound interaction—whose full title reads, La crónica [End Page 119] del rey don Rodrigo con la destrucción de España (The Chronicle of King Rodrigo with the Destruction of Spain). My interest in the Crónica here is primarily to consider the mechanisms by which it gestures boldly toward what Žižek has described as the project of the postmodern critique of ideology—though it is clearly a recurring cultural constant—namely to “designate the elements which point towards the system’s antagonistic character, and thus ‘estrange’ us to the self-evidence of its established identity” [Žižek 7]. A reading of the Crónica provides an extended paradigm of such estrangement.Iberia is the area of the Mediterranean which underwent the most protracted encounter between Christianity and Islam, and the events of the Moorish invasion of 711 constitute Spain’s unique foundational subject-matter—on a par with the Troy legend and with King Arthur [see Deyermond 355]. Like them, the retelling of 711 is all about forging mythic connections in order to legitimize empire in a temporally remote time-frame. What interests me in this essay is... (shrink)

The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic reputation. What does it take to become ‘a founding father’ of a humanistic discipline? How do social thinkers achieve the status of a trans-disciplinary star? Why some intellectuals attract tremendous attention and ‘go down in history’ despite personal and professional failures, while others enjoy only limited recognition or simply sink into (...) oblivion, even if they have met all the standards of their day? Quite a few sociologists have tackled this elusive issue. Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont and Randall Collins are among those who fleshed out strong explanatory frameworks. This project adds to this body of knowledge by emphasizing cultural factors that these authors downplayed in their seminal accounts, despite being aware of their significance. By showing why these underdeveloped aspects of their works need to be incorporated into the debate and how this can be achieved, this article introduces a new theorization of the iconic, lasting intellectual reputation substantiated by evidence from the lifeworks of Bronisław Malinowski and Michel Foucault. As such, it aims, minimally, to make sociology of knowledge decisively ‘cultural’. Maximally, it seeks to demonstrate that the iconic success of intellectual intervention in social theory depends on carefully performed and contingently mediated engagement with the binary systems of symbolic classification. (shrink)

This text presents a comprehensive survey of the intellectual developments that have brought about a shift in cultural perspectives of postmodernism. It is divided into three sections: essays; biographical entries; and a glossary of terms.

As the pagan classical world was subsumed into Christianity sexually hyperactive gods and goddesses transmuted into saints, their former statues that glorified the perfection of their bodies smashed into pieces and reimagined as austere two-dimensional icons to be worshipped by the new faithful. That dualistic and polemic narrative, where the soul’s purpose was to annihilate the body, survives today in the distinction between software and hardware, algorithms and robots, the former as the “ghosts” that animate the empty vessels, the “machines”. (...) But how does this narrative impact our cultural and social fantasies in the twenty-first century as we accelerate toward coexisting, uniting, or merging with intelligent artifacts? How does “humanness” blur when it is claimed by no-biological human-like entities too, or when humans augment their perception, consciousness and physical power through genetic engineering, drugs, or software and mechanical prostheses? Suppose we are destined to remake ourselves in the image of our ancient gods. Will it be through the embodiment of technologies in the physical reality, or through the complete disembodiment of our minds inside virtual worlds? (shrink)

1936 was a watershed year for computability. Debates among Gödel, Church and others over the correct analysis of the intuitive concept “human effectively computable”, an analysis at the heart of the Incompleteness Theorems, the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of what a finite computation is, and most urgently—for Gödel—the generality of the Incompleteness Theorems, were definitively set to rest with the appearance, in that year, of the Turing Machine. The question I explore here is, do the mathematical facts exhaust what is to (...) be said about the thinking behind the “confluence of ideas in 1936”? I will argue for a cultural role in Gödel’s, and, by extension, the larger logical community’s absorption of Turing’s 1936 model. As scaffolding I employ a conceptual framework due to the critic Leo Marx of the technological sublime; I also make use of the distinction within the technological sublime due to Caroline Jones, between its iconic and performative modes—a distinction operating within the conceptual art of the 1960s, but serving the history of computability equally well. (shrink)

With the advancement of digital technology in contemporary art, new hybrid forms of interaction emerge that invite viewers to make images present in physical space as events that claim a life of their own. In breaking away from representational and performance art theories that have dominated the critique of new media artwork since the 1980s, this article analyses an iconic vision of mobile touchscreens based on the medieval Byzantine chorographic inscription of the sacred in profane spaces. As defined in recent (...) art historical studies on Byzantine icons, chorography builds on a multisensory spatial interaction between the beholders of icons that results in feeling the presence of a divine, invisible image. In light of postmodern critique of digital images’ capacity to manipulate notions of reality, new media aesthetic theory hardly addresses this Byzantine iconic vision that is fundamental to western visual culture. Jeffrey Shaw’s installation, The Golden Calf, is discussed to offer an alternative in understanding how digital and physical spaces function together to evoke something essentially real. (shrink)