Diversity Reading List

Summary: This chapter discusses the puzzle of imaginative resistance, partially defending and partially refining the account presented in the previous chapter. It explores imaginative resistance as a special case of a more general puzzle the author calls the puzzle of authoritative breakdown: that when an author follows standard conventions for fictionally asserting P, engaged readers typically imagine P—but in some cases this relation falls apart. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to systematically identifying and explaining where and why this breakdown occurs, and to drawing connections with the literature on metaphor and perspective‐taking. The author's views are contrasted with those of David Hume, Brian Weatherson, Gregory Currie, Stephen Yablo, and Shaun Nichols.

Abstract: The “paradox of fictional emotions” involves a trio of claims that are jointly inconsistent but individually plausible. Resolution of the paradox thus requires that we deny at least one of these plausible claims. The paradox has been formulated in various ways, but for the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on the following three claims, which we will refer to respectively as the Response Condition, the Belief Condition and the Coordination Condition.

Abstract: I draw a connection between the question, raised by Hume and Kant, of how aesthetic judgments can claim universal agreement, and the question, raised in recent discussions of nonconceptual content, of how concepts can be acquired on the basis of experience. Developing an idea suggested by Kant's linkage of aesthetic judgment with the capacity for empirical conceptualization, I propose that both questions can be resolved by appealing to the idea of "perceptual normativity". Perceptual experience, on this proposal, involves the awareness of its own appropriateness with respect to the object perceived, where this appropriateness is more primitive than truth or veridicality. This means that a subject can take herself to be perceiving an object as she (and anyone else) ought to perceive it, without first recognizing the object as falling under a corresponding concept. I motivate the proposal through a criticism of Peacocke's account of concept-acquisition, which, I argue, rests on a confusion between the notion of a way something is perceived, and that of a way it is perceived as being. Whereas Peacocke's account of concept-acquisition depends on an illicit slide between these two notions, the notion of perceptual normativity allows a legitimate transition between them: if someone's perceiving something a certain way involves her taking it that she ought to perceive it that way, then she perceives the thing as being a certain way, so that the corresponding concept is available to her in perceptual experience.

Abstract:

Published in French in 1990, this book is among the later conceptualizations of postcolonial and racial relations. Glissant (1928–2011) is a novelist, and his attention to politics operates through an interest in linguistics: studying creole languages, he exposes how colonized people transformed the tool of the master, leading to the creation of a new, creolized culture and expression. He reads the long-term effects of the slave trade, where people were forcibly taken from their cultural and linguistic milieu an put in another one, characterized by an extremely violent relation of subjection. In this context, he elaborates the notion of antillanité, as a French West Indies description of the unpredictable linking and blending of cultures and languages, extending and specifying the idea of négritude found in Césaire and Senghor in the 1930s. This complex analysis leads to two seemingly contradictory concepts: first, his idea of opacity argues in favor of untranslatability and of irreducible yet non-hierarchical differences. Second, his poetics of relation leads to an understanding of identity as an extension of the connection to the other. From there, he sketches a new definition of culture, taking into account power dynamics, which is also a departure from the idea of authenticity or autochtony. Against a binary reading of colonialist relations of power, Glissant explores the formation of identities through the process of creolization, where a new language is invented as a mean of resistance, thus undermining any possibility for a pure, uniform identity.

Introduction: On September 24th, 1947, a composer with "an international reputation" became the first Holly wood artist to be called before the Committee on Un-American Activities [HUAC]. The charge against him was that his music had aided the Communist infiltration of the motion-picture industry.' A significant part of his defense con sisted in his claim that he was only a musician and thus not responsible for any part of a Com munist conspiracy. What is peculiar is that he almost got away with this unlikely defense, unlikely because he had spent much of his life developing a political music consistent with the ideals of Communism. In the end, the Commit tee caught him out on technical grounds: it found a history of inaccurate statements in his visa applications. The composer was deported. It was the second exile of his life: the first had been from Germany ten years earlier.

Publisher's Note: What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer this question, Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. She describes how the concept of a musical work emerged as late as 1800, and how it subsequently defined the norms, expectations, and behavior characteristic of classical musical practice. Out of the historical thesis, Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates amongst conductors, early-music performers, and avant-gardists.

Summary: Goldberg sees the human body in performance art as a transmitter of erotics, gender tensions, cultural norms and political deviations. While two of the notable early works of performance art featured fully clothed male artists using naked female bodies (Yves Klein's Anthropometries of the Blue Period from 1960 and Piero Manzoni's Living Scupture from 1961), the work of female artists like Shigeko Kubota and Yoko Ono addressed the gender imbalance soon after. Goldberg sees the recognition of the body as "prime, raw material" as one of the central accomplishments of performance art. Through numerous examples she demonstrates how this notion enabled a spectrum of physical signification - from regarding the human body as a mere lump of undifferentiated flesh to capitalizing on its biological intricacies. Because of the irreducible intimacy of shared bodily experience, all creative choices along this spectrum - from the disquietingly erotic, to the anachronistically ritualistic, to the viscerally sacrificial - have affected the way we see art and the world around us.

Summary: In this brief historical note, Goldberg outlines the artistic response to the political upheavals of the 1960's. The general spirit of civic disillusionment offered the best conditions for the re-evaluation of art and its supporting social institutions. Not surprisingly, a new animosity emerged towards the objects of art and their claim to aesthetic pleasure. The farthest possible opposite, which many artists readily embraced, was found in conceptual art, which prioritized ideas, relations and experiences over traditional aesthetic categories. Goldberg sees performance art as a potent embodied application of these new artistic concerns, and thus as a rightful heir to conceptual art. Furthermore, each sub-genre of performance art - from body art to live sculpture to discussions and performative scripts - retains a conceptual core that finds its roots in that decade of strife and controversy.

Summary: Goldberg provides a richly illustrated historical account of the intimate connection between identity and performance art. Starting from the feminist art of the 1960's, the recognition and assertion of identity was a fundamental bid for social visibility. The next frontier was social recognition, which concerned ethnic and sexual minorities as much as it did women. The final frontier - political equality - is one that is still out of reach. Still, according to Goldberg, performance art continues to chart new territories of identification. In fact, while at the outset performance art used early feminist writing as inspiration, Goldberg recognizes a gradual reversal - today's feminists are as likely to chart new philosophical directions as they are to follow the exploratory charge of their performance art counterparts.

Abstract:
In this article, Gonzalez-Arnal challenges Susan James' embodied conception of personal identity by analysing transexual narratives. According to Gonzalez-Arnal, James' account cannot fully capture the experience of transexual persons since they describe the continuity of their personal (but also gender) identity despite significant changes in their bodies. Gonzalez-Arnal examines how other two theories of personal identity, a reductionist and a dualist one, might provide a better picture of the transexual narratives. After concluding that none the reductionist nor the dualist account does much better than an embodied view of personal identity, Gonzalez-Arnal proposes an improvement to James' view that accommodates transexual experiences, namely, acknowledging the integration of the "inner" self and other's perception of one's body in shaping one's "outer self".