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17 items
Book Section
Backmatter
Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Notes on Contributors / Index / Volumes in the Series Cultural Inquiry
2010
Book Section
Selected Bibliography
Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Christoph F. E. Holzhey, ‘Selected Bibliography’, in
Tension/Spannung
, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 1 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010), pp. 275–84
2010
Book Section
Ozren Pupovac
The Violence of Form: Philosophical Remarks on Mazen Kerbaj’s Sound Piece
Starry Night
The article offers a philosophical reading of Mazen Kerbaj’s sound piece Starry Night. Recorded in 2006 during the bombing of Beirut by the Israeli Air Force, the piece stages an acoustic encounter between the improvised sounds of the trumpet and live bomb explosions. Arguing for a formal examination of the ways in which Kerbaj stages the problem of the genesis of musical order in the exchange between trumpet and bombs, the article draws parallels with explorations of the problems of the State and of political contradiction in the Marxist tradition. Three common points are identified: the contingency of the appearance of order, its inseparability from an excess of violence, and its spatializing function. The last part delineates parallels between Kerbaj’s subversive aesthetic strategies and Badiou’s elaboration of the concept of the subject as the interruption of a repetitive logic of placement.
2010. aesthetic form; Badiou, Alain; Kerbaj, Mazen; splace; state; violence
Book Section
Antke Engel
Desiring Tension: Towards a Queer Politics of Paradox
The article provides a close reading of the video Sometimes you fight for the world, sometimes you fight for yourself, dir. by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz (2004, 5’). It reads the video as promoting what it calls a ‘queer politics of paradox’, that is, a politics that acknowledges desire as a constitutive moment of the political and at the same time challenges the political via a queer understanding of desire in order to make room for the political articulation of the Other. The article argues that a reworking of the political — one that aims at de-centring its hegemonic dynamic and creating space for Otherness — becomes possible if one invites paradox as a specific, anti-identitarian, and agonistic mode of tension to function as a constitutive moment of desire and of the political.
2010. Boudry, Pauline; Lorenz, Renate; paradox; politics; queer theory; tension; video
Book Section
Martin Doll
The Topoi of Utopia: A Topology of Political Tensions
Writing a positive account of utopias has always been a difficult and risky task. Utopias have always already been out of fashion and outside of time. Since 1989 at the latest, visions of utopia appear to have come to an end. Twenty years after Fukayama’s ‘end of history’, this article re-assesses the potentially fruitful roles for utopia’s out-of-timeness. Focusing on the critical potential of utopias through the concept of tension, it argues that utopian thought must be conceptualized through its tensile connections both to the status quo of a given society and to its possible futures.
2010. atopos; Engels, Friedrich; Marx, Karl; eutopos; outopos; Owen, Robert; utopia
Book Section
Jean Terrier
On Social Forces: Tension as a Metaphor and the Image of Society
This article conceptualizes tension as a relation between elements in which at least two forces with different directions are involved. How can this concept of tension be applied to the analysis of the peculiar logic of life in common? The article offers a reading, inspired by the method of conceptual history, of the use of the concept of ‘force’ in three models of society: Hobbes’s political model, the economic model proposed by the thinkers of commercial society, and Durkheim’s social theory. The analysis sheds some light on the ways in which the presence of contradictory forces can be taken to be constitutive of the social itself. This observation is then used to suggest that the puzzling fascination exerted by the notion of tension can be better understood if we see it pointing to some fundamental features of our way of collectively inhabiting the world.
2010. Durkheim, Émile; Hobbes, Thomas; social theory; tension
Book Section
Bruno Besana
Tension on Tension: Some Considerations that Might Help to Produce an Increasingly Precise Understanding of a Problem which Has No Specific Object
This article shows that ‘tension’ cannot be conceived as a specific object of an analysis for which one could determine a precise field of enquiry. Instead, it establishes tension as a specific mode or angle of approach with which any given contingent object or set of objects can be explored. The wideness of its applicability and the specificity of its angle suggest that research on tension can help to unfold a better understanding of a classical ontological question concerning the essential value of actions and relations in the definition of what a thing is. The text follows this line of argumentation by pairing contemporary philosophical sources and specific aesthetic and political examples. Suggesting the possibility of an open classification of different modes of tension, it clarifies the extent to which the essential definition of a thing is bound to the contingent analysis of its transformations.
2010. cinema; duration; harmony; interruption; Klee, Paul; suspense; tension
Book Section
Siouxzi Mernagh
Disappear Here: Adventures in Subconscious Narrative Filmmaking
This contribution consists of an explanatory introduction and extracts from recent fiction works, ‘White Tales’ (novel) and ‘Peep Show’ (novel in progress). Both fiction works explore the spiralling tensions between intensity and excess, desire and jouissance, via the structure and methodology pioneered in the author’s previous work with ‘subconscious narrative’ film. The result of this prior work was the 18-minute subconscious narrative film ‘The Dangers’, which explores an experimental narrative structure and is fascinated by the creation and sustenance of suspense, particularly when created with the notion of the uncanny in mind.
2010. fiction; film; suspense; uncanncy
Book Section
Laura Taler
ici uniglory, 2009: Installation. Ink, paper, images & text
‘ici uniglory’ is an installation on paper. The piece intertwines fragments of six texts by Bruno Besana, Fabio Camilletti, Antke Engel, Sara Fortuna, Laura Taler, and Andrea von Kameke, written in response to the video installation UNIGLORY, a work-in-progress exhibited at ICI Berlin. The responses are edited, fragmented, and re-assembled to reflect the way the filmmaker worked with the filmed dance footage in the original installation, essentially re-choreographing words. The subtle tensions between the different responses allow for shifts and movements within the piece. The result is a poetic intermingling of voices that rub up against one another. Tension also acts as a binding agent, holding all the fragments together and allowing them to be woven into a collective text.
2010. video installation; tango; tension; contact improvisation jam
Book Section
Laura Taler
Kleist’s Puppet Theatre and the Art of Tango: Looking for the Back Door to Paradise
This edited transcript of a presentation by filmmaker/choreographer Laura Taler responds to Heinrich von Kleist’s text by taking him on as a dancing partner. It follows a simple structure of proposal and response similar to that found in the movements between leader and follower in Argentine tango. Engaging Kleist’s text in the double form of a speech and a tango performance, this critical contribution follows a twofold direction: it questions Kleist’s representation of dance as a mechanical activity deprived of any form of intelligence and it refuses his attempt to force the aesthetic experience of dance into a framework that privileges theory over bodily experience. These two classical philosophical positions are questioned and provocatively opposed to the dynamic, situated, and dialogic thought performed within a witty tango interaction.
2010. Kleist, Heinrich von; puppet theatre; tango
Book Section
Rupert Gaderer
Strategies of Tension: A. Boissier’s
Les amants électrisés par l’amour
(1797)
The article analyses A. Boissier’s image Les Amants électrisés par l’amour in view of the larger question of how something is able to arouse interest on first sight, but also in repeat encounters. Highlighting the engraving’s didactic iconography, the article shows how it revolves around the solution to a riddle and uses a typical design of the Enlightenment to show the uncovering of a deception. As such, the engraving is part of a long tradition of showing (supposedly) supernatural events, more specifically the tradition of Magia naturalis. At the same time, the image contains dissonances and can be seen to simulate suspense through dichotomies that can be identified as antagonistic historical concepts. The article furthermore discusses the amalgamation of love and electricity in contemporary discourses and addresses the temporal dimension of the engraving, which constructs itself out of an absence, out of something yet unseen.
2010. tension; electricity; love; history of science; enlightenment
Book Section
Fabio Camilletti
Oblique Gazes: The
Je Ne Sais Quoi
and the Uncanny as Forms of Undecidability in Post-Enlightenment Aesthetics
The article compares the aesthetic notions of the je ne sais quoi (as it emerges in the Renaissance and is widely debated in the eighteenth century) and of the ‘uncanny’ as theorized by Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century. Its hypothesis is that both notions, in situating aesthetic experience in a liminal space between pleasure and trouble, can be considered after-images of non-aesthetical notions — notions that belong to the domain of the sacred and have metamorphosed as forms of aesthetic undecidability through the paradigmatic fracture of early modernity. The article focuses on depictions of female figures directing their gaze upward — in the iconography of Sade’s Justine, in popular imagery connected with Lourdes apparitions (1858), in medium photography, and in the images taken by Charcot of his hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière — and argues that they become a Warburgian Pathosformel indicating a space of undecidability and ‘non-sense’ between the subject and otherness.
2010. uncanny; je ne sais quoi; hysteria; aesthetics; post-enlightenment
Book Section
Sabine Arnaud
Tension and Narrative: Autobiographies of Illness and Therapeutic Legitimacy in Eighteenth-Century French and English Medical Works
This article discusses the function of tension in autobiographies written by eighteenth-century doctors George Cheyne, Francis Fuller, Claude Revillon, and the Viscount de Puysegur. It studies how their rhetorical strategies stir tensions in readers through the narration of their own periods of infirmity and search for a remedy. The descriptions of their recoveries offer resolution, legitimate their medical practices, and help diffuse their works. Through the staging of these reversals, the authors suggest a shift in the way the role of medical doctors was perceived as well as a fundamental change in their relationship to illness.
2010. autobiography; history of medicine; tension
Book Section
Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Tension In/Between Aesthetics, Politics, and Physics
The article sketches a critical paradigm for interdisciplinary work that is centred on tension as a highly ambiguous and ultimately deeply paradoxical notion. It highlights that a unifying account of what tension is or a systematic classification of its diverse meanings would risk resolving tensions between different approaches and privileging a particular mode of doing so. Successively focussing on aesthetic, socio-political, and physical tensions, the essay articulates tension rather as a broad umbrella term that is stretched by multi-perspectival articulations, unified through its intensive surface tension, and at the same time full of transformative and generative potentials. In particular, it proposes that tensions between different cultural or disciplinary fields can be made productive by inducing tensions within each field so that different fields can be related to each other on the basis of tension rather than some substantial commonality.
2010. tension; aesthetics; politics; physics; field theory; intensity
Book Section
Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Preface
Tension/Spannung explores the critical potential of tension by bringing together contributions from several academic and artistic fields, including history of science, philosophy, literature and media studies, political and social theory, visual and performing arts. Both individually and in their combination, they produce a rapprochement and confrontation between different meanings and models of tension that unsettle the apparent self-evidence that any particular model has when considered in an isolated context.
2010
Book Section
Frontmatter
Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Title Pages / Description of the Series Cultural Inquiry / Imprint / Table of Contents
2010
Book
Tension/Spannung
Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Tension appears in many contexts and carries diverse meanings. It tends to be viewed as something to be avoided and reduced in politics; to be explained, worked through, and resolved in therapy or science; to be endured and sustained in modern art; or to be sought after and enjoyed in popular culture. This volume brings together contributions from several academic and artistic fields in order to question the self-evidence of the deceptively simple term ‘tension’ and explore the possibility of productive transfers among different forms und understandings of tension. Refusing the temptation of a stabilizing synthesis, it establishes a dense web of approaches, providing a new critical paradigm for further inquiry.
2010 | Cultural Inquiry, 1. tension; Spannung; tension (aesthetics); tension (politics); tension (physics); interdisciplinarity