Search Results

In The Order of Things, Foucault writes that the interest in formal languages opens up ‘the possibility, and the task, of applying a second critique of pure reason on the basis of new forms of the mathematical a priori’. My book argues that The Archaeology of Knowledge is intended to begin the work of such a critique, albeit one that is revealed as radically historical. This chapter traces the idea of a mathematical a priori back to Bachelard (who uses the expression) and Cavaillès.

Representation is an acknowledgment that the political order is a constructive enterprise. Political representation is made by free citizens who are unified by a representative person or claim around some ideas or goals and in view of competing for the majority and for having representative recognition.  Representation is not a prerogative of the majority nor does its function end with the formation of a majority. The question that requires close analysis is whether constructivism is in itself democratic. In the paper I explore this conundrum and show what makes political representation a democratic form of constructivism. .

The future is an idea about worlds to come. The world we live in is seen as more uncertain, and demand for predictions and forecasts about international politics is growing. This book explores the political and epistemic status of future claims and their effects on contemporary international politics. It also develops a normative analysis of what future claims ought to be in a democratic society. It shows the importance of going beyond the two main sociological approaches to fully understand the political nature of future claims. This includes classical sociology, which is mostly focused on the hypothesis of the self-fulfilling nature of future claims and critical theory, emphasizing the arbitrariness of the social construction of the future and its accelerating effects. This book analyzes four paradoxes that characterize predictions and forecasts in international politics. Claims about the future are linear and trace continuity between the past, the present and the future; therefore they tend not to anticipate radical junctures. There is very limited pluralism in predictions and forecasts. They can slow down some processes while they stabilize beliefs and favor inaction. Future claims help create surprises when major changes happen.

Chapter 1 discusses the key issues related to assessment. It explains what assessment is by detailing its meaning, distinguishing it from other assessment-related terms, clarifying its functions and roles, and offering tips for ensuring the quality of assessment practices. To give teachers some background on the changing views of assessment over time, some influential learning theories are discussed, including behaviourism, constructivism, and cognitive science. These three major learning theories are linked with three different assessment approaches, which will be presented in detail in Chapter 3. Attention is then given to ten assessment guiding principles for teachers to follow while bringing the concepts of assessment for learning to classroom use.

This chapter examines the origin of Russian painter Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism. It explains that Malevich first mentioned this term in a September 24, 1915 to a fellow artist and that it had its roots from the Latin word supremacia, which means superiority or dominance. The chapter discusses Suprematism's competition with Constructivism and highlights the embittered discussions about this art movement among the participating artists in the 0.10 futuristic painting exhibition in Petrograd.

Taking a more theoretical approach, this chapter explores Brunias’s depiction of racially ambiguous bodies. It offers an in-depth investigation of the ways in which the subtext of the artist’s work subtly undermined the fixed racial categories. Presaging constructionist theories of racial identity, these works point to the dilemmas of visualising ‘race’ in the Anglo-American world, gesturing toward ‘race’ as a category inextricably rooted in visual knowledge yet incapable of being sustained by it.

Chapter 2 considers the introduction of modernist aesthetics in Sweden in the early 1930s in the image communities of marketing and visual art. The main focus is the Stockholm Exhibition held in 1930 in which marketing and advertising played an integral part in the presentation of modern architecture, design and visual art. The exhibition area hosted the first large presentation of modernist visual art in Sweden and was simultanoeusly a decisive event for the introduction of modernist window displays. From the late 1920s and onwards window displays were clearly being influenced by avant-garde modernist art such as cubism, futurism and constructivism. This is evident in the designs themselves but it was also spelled out in professional journals and handbooks. In the commercial context pure marketing rationales and arguments were linked to the modernist aesthetic.The modernist design in window displays was not unique to Sweden around 1930. However, this is an instructive case as the reception of modernist images differed widely between the two image communities. Within marketing aesthetics the Stockholm exhibition marks the breakthrough for modernism. But simultaneously, the art field was very resistant to modernist aesthetics and the Art Concret exhibition proved to be a complete fiasco.

Chapter 1 maps how petroleum development revenue allowed Venezuelans to acquire and not produce the same type of modernity that had been created elsewhere in response to vastly different conditions. Instead functionalism and the varied genealogies of Constructivism, geometric abstraction and kinetic art in particular, became the architectural and aesthetic signposts of this elusive paradigm. Yet internal conditions limited the reach of these ideologically “neutral” international tendencies as well as of the overarching national modernization project of which they were a part. A close examination of extant texts and photographs by El Techo reveals how the group challenged the cultural establishment, exposed its political dissidence, and anchored its project in the harsh material reality of the human underbelly that fuelled the dreams of progress in Venezuela.

This chapter sets up the book by considering another of introductory themes. ‘The red Atlantic’ involves an American-Russian transnationational interchange across several media in relation to the aesthetic of the machine as a signifier of the influence of American technology on Soviet communism. For the Soviets, America represented the means to construct communism in the USSR, albeit without a capitalist economy. It asserts the need to think beyond the Franco-American paradigm as a means of figuring the emergent radical culture of the 1930s. The putative area of ‘American Constructivism’ mainly involved cultural interrelations of American communists and Soviet counterparts. Finally, there is a consideration of methodology including assessments of transnationalism, Interdisciplinarity, and the avant-garde.

This chapter considers the putative area of ‘American Constructivism’, a formation that did not have any organisational substance but existed as a number of respectively interconnected and discrete tendencies. Two exhibitions organised by The Little Review—the International Theatre Exposition (1926) and the Machine-Age Exposition(1927)—contained the largest amount of Constructivist works on display in the USA in the interwar years, in the form of theatre and architectural designs. The chapter charts the emergence of Constructivism and its reception in America. For the most part, the introduction of Constructivism into the USA involved the depoliticisation of the original Soviet version. Whilst largely apolitical, the exhibitions organised by The Little Review were unique in terms of the organisers’ grasp of Constructivist discourses and techniques, being informed by the International Constructivism of De Stijl via Austrian émigré Frederick Kiesler. The Machine-Age Exposition was notable for its detailed presentation of Soviet architecture, and therefore the chapter includes an extensive analysis of debates around functionalism, culminating in a consideration of the development of the International Style at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

This chapter looks at the most substantial manifestation of ‘American Constructivism’, which took shape in the radical theatrical productions of the New Playwrights Theatre, a short-lived group that operated between 1926 and 1929. The NPT was closely affiliated with the communist cultural organ New Masses, and included the magazine’s most prominent editor, Mike Gold, amongst its number. The chapter charts the emergence of theatrical Constructivism in the USA, noting its origins in the radical and Expressionist theatrical culture associated with The Masses. The NPT differed from these earlier versions by emulating the machinolatry of Soviet Constructivism, drawing in particular from the experiments of Vsevolod Meyerhold. If Soviet Constructivism aimed to reach the masses, then the NPT mixed the machine aesthetic with specifically American phenomena such as Jazz, racial politics, and automobile production. However, unlike Russian theatrical productions the NPT betrayed a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards the machine, demonstrating residual Expressionist machinephobia. Arguably the most sophisticated writer of the NPT was John Dos Passos, whose concept of New Realism is considered in depth. Finally, the chapter includes a summation of the legacy of the NPT in the radical theatre of the 1930s.

The chapter examines those factors that influence, either directly or indirectly, student learning in music classrooms and rehearsal spaces. Specifically,the notion of “teacher as empathetic leader” prompts readers to identify and reflect on teacher attitudes and behaviors that can motivate and facilitate the teaching of music listening and those that hinder or prohibit hands-on, active, and creative music listening and learning experiences. The chapter offerssuggestions foreffective verbal and nonverbal communications between teacher and students, and examines presentational styles, teacher/student role(s), feedback, questioning tactics, teacher observations, and teacher leadership styles. Undergirding the philosophy and pedagogyarethe theories of constructivism and discovery learning. Suggestions for student-centered music listening experiences are presented.

Pierre de Coubertin was responsible for the founding of the modern Olympics. Its antique ideals were consecrated in a painting by his father, an artist of the French salon, who pictured modern sportsmen from Paris paying tribute to Athena. The fourth chapter analyses the most notorious visual artwork concerning the games, Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia. Promoted as a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but enjoying state patronage from the fascist regime, the status of this film is highly contested in the fields of history and film studies. Here, it is argued that the film evinces attitudes not incompatible with, although not reducible to, Coubertin’s own conflicted views on modernity. This is contrasted with László Moholy-Nagy’s abortive project to film the same games, before a consideration of Gustav Klucis’ constructivist designs for the Soviet response to the Olympics, the Spartakiada, and other constructivist engagements with sport in light of the Soviet emphasis on fizkultura (physical culture).

For Bachelard, science is not the direct formalisation of experience, but the modification of the conditions of existing experience. The laws that give form even to phenomena as they present themselves at a given moment (so leaving aside future innovations in science) are therefore not to be drawn from empirical experience. Instead, one has to look for rational laws found at the level of what Bachelard calls a ‘noumenology’. significantly, he calls these laws the ‘mathematical a priori’, a phrase that Foucault will later use towards the end of The Order of Things in recommending a new critical philosophy. What Bachelard took from mathematical science and passed on to others, including Foucault, is that what for Kant were transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience, and for the forms of judgement appropriate to it, have been removed from consciousness and laid out in the practice of mathematics. The chapter then outlines Bachelard's conception of temporal discontinuity (a form of temporal atomism modified by what he called the arithmetisation of time), which will also be important for understanding the sense of temporal dispersion Foucault deploys in The Archaeology of Knowledge.

This chapter lays a conceptual foundation for the examination of the historical development of the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility that follows it. It examines how sovereignty has been understood in International Relations theory and argues, in contrast to some theorists, that sovereignty is not an objective and unchanging principle, but something that demands conceptual and historical inquiry. It defends a constructivist understanding of sovereignty which emphasizes its historically contingent and contested nature against the argument of Krasner about sovereignty which acknowledges historical deviations from the conventional story but refuses to allow that the meaning of sovereignty may have changed over time. The chapter then outlines a framework for conceptualizing the social and historical construction of sovereignty that enables us to understand the development of its relationship with notions of responsibility.

This chapter contrasts individualistic perfectionism with constructivism. Each section of this chapter considers a version of constructivism as developed by a prominent contemporary thinker: (1) Deontologist—Stephen Darwall; and (2) Virtue ethicist—Mark LeBar. Though each of these thinkers is considered in some detail, it is noted that they share a common assumption that constitutes the chief appeal of constructivism. This assumption is that we must be authors of our own moral universe in order to preserve the reality of human agency or self-direction. But it is argued that a commitment to the reality of human agency or self-direction does not require the adoption of a constructivist point of view—be it conceived in terms of the second-person perspective or the judgments of practical reason—and that it is possible for human agency or self-direction to be real and nonetheless have a natural telos or ergon. The truth or falsity of a normative judgment can be grounded in reality apart from moral thought without destroying human freedom.