Of Non-vital Interest: Art, Mimicry, and the Phenomenon of Life
| dc.contributor.author | Calhoon, Kenneth S. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2019-02-19T19:57:13Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2019-02-19T19:57:13Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2014 | |
| dc.description | 21 pages | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | My aim in this essay is to explore certain parallels—concerning anthropomorphism—in the work of Roger Caillois, Hans Jonas, Theodor Adorno and Sigmund Freud. Both Caillois (a thinker closely connected to French Surrealism and an important source for Jacques Lacan) and Jonas (philosopher and one-time student of Heidegger) take issue with the ban on anthropomorphism—an anathema that is the legacy of Western science. Part of the thesis in Jonas’ major work, The Phenomenon of Life, is that freedom is not exclusively a human quality but a potential within the simplest organic forms, even within inorganic matter. Anthropomorphism may be the legacy of a primitive stage in human development in which the whole of creation was endowed with a soul, but this attitude, Jonas argues, is the more natural one. Whereas in the early phases of humanity death was the stranger in a world that was fundamentally alive, modern thinking made life the riddle within a world of neutral matter and mechanistic principles. Freud’s own theory of the death-drive (“an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces”) seems quite consistent with the primacy of death over life instituted by modern thought. I have a general interest in comparing Freud’s theory of the death drive, the aim of which is the restoration of an original equilibrium, with music, whose traditional structure (via the cadence) is to relieve tonal tension through a restoration of the keynote (Grundton). This bears upon the problem of anthropomorphism in that “classical” music since the seventeenth century has cast expression in terms of simulated human emotions: we hear music and perceive love, longing or fear, not to mention (in the case of pastorale) the “cheer” of birdsong or the “rage” of a thunderstorm. Adorno’s critique of this tradition, in which true expression is replaced by mere images of expression, theorizes what he calls a “tendency of the material,” extolling the composer whose sheer mastery of technique enables the material to go where it “wants” to go. What Adorno means by “material” is not merely the inventory of sounds available to the musician but the historical experience sedimented within musical convention. Nonetheless, I would like to attempt an argument whose parameters are Adorno’s “tendency of the material” and Jonas’ idea that freedom must be conceived as a “genuine potency” within physical substance. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.citation | Calhoon, K. (2014). Of Non-vital Interest: Art, Mimicry, and the Phenomenon of Life. Konturen, 6, 82-102. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.7.0.3503 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.doi | 10.5399/uo/konturen.7.0.3503 | |
| dc.identifier.issn | 1947-3796 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/24399 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | en_US |
| dc.rights | Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-US | en_US |
| dc.title | Of Non-vital Interest: Art, Mimicry, and the Phenomenon of Life | en_US |
| dc.type | Article | en_US |