Symbolism 2019 : Special Focus. Beyond Mind
- Submitting institution
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University of Dundee
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 48927691
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Walter de Gruyter GmbH
- ISBN
- 9783110667486
- Open access status
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- Month of publication
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- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
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- Criminology
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- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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4
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Beyond Mind is a special focus issue of Symbolism, the International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, edited by Natasha Lushetich (De Gruyter 2019). Following her work on the imperceptible and invisible and their cultural and epistemic regimes of invisibilisation in such monographs as Fluxus the Practice of Non-Duality (2014) and numerous articles, Lushetich was commissioned to edit the 2019 iteration of the annual. She proposed an investigation of symbolism’s ‘other’. While symbolism is cohesive (it gathers heterogeneity over time and systems of communication), non-sequiturs and paradoxes appear dissipative. Yet, as Beyond Mind argues, they are highly productive in reticular ways. In absurdist texts, such as Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, protagonists record empty time in order to mark the emptiness of the time they are recording; paradoxical games, like Maciunas’s Prepared Table Tennis, are played with paddles that have huge holes in them. Existence-apprehending processes here occur in vacant but nevertheless enunciative codes, and in a temporality that is the cumulative time’s ‘other’.
Lushetich’s examination of the territory that lies beyond mind and her selection and co-shaping of texts (including contributions from key literary and media scholars and practice-based research), places the (neo)avant-garde subversion of industrial rationality in dialogue with the proliferation of ‘rational’ algorithmic logics. Beyond Mind argues that every form of rationality, when taken to the extreme, is irrational. Likewise, every form of irrationality, when systematised, is rational. Crossing the cultural and historical divide this special issue investigates a-rational (neither-rational-nor-irrational) modes of thinking-doing in art, literature, music, dance, film, intermedia and photography as a form of critical epistemic cartography.
Beyond Mind has led to invitations to deliver talks on imperceptibility at the Yoko Ono Symposium, University of Cambridge (2019) and on the aesthetics of thought in the comparative philosophies of Derrida and Nishida at Wiener Forum Interkulturellen Philosophierens, Vienna (2019).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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