Johan Siebers

Why drawing, now?

This article takes the question ‘why drawing, now?’ as a speculative way to enter the debate on the relationship of art to different understandings of community. Drawing offers a paradox around the place of art in society. Drawing can be thought about as a traditional medium that yields an individually focused interior exploration. It has also performed a social or ritual role historically, in different times and places. Imagine a public event to which participants are invited to draw. There is a large, single sheet of paper or drawing surface and the offer of different drawing implements. Participants respond by drawing with their own style and understanding of what drawing is. The accumulation of individual marks and imaginations make up a whole, in as far as the surface drawn upon is singular and brings these individual productions into one space. Imagine the same shared drawing surface, held up around the edges by a group of participants. A drawing emerges through the marks of an inked ball rolling across the flexible moving surface. In this scenario, the drawing traces – literally marks – the emergent relationship of one individual to another through the shared activity. Both scenarios are possibly very familiar activities in participatory art practices and each offers a different way of imagining community. In both, the act of drawing is pivotal to shared activity. The first assumes that community can be constructed by bringing a group of individuals into the same space and activity. Many of us are enculturated to think that it is individuals – singular units – that make up society. The second, however, suggests that community as already present can be made visible through the drawing activity. Our exploration draws on a period of a collaborative practice-led experimentation, in particular a three-day research workshop involving drawing and writing. The aim was not to focus on what the results ‘looked like’ as art products, an approach that arguably fails to reveal the knowledge underpinning art’s appearances. Instead we set out to create the conditions for experiencing community through drawing. We found that drawing, in its most intimate relationship between maker/viewer, surface and mark, evokes a world to come, a world in formation rather than pre-formed. This revealed the need for careful scrutiny of the ways in which community itself is imagined. Our offer to the practice of participatory arts is to question deeply held assumptions about what community is rather than to propose new forms of access or techniques that can be transferred from one situation to another.

The Utopian Function of Film Music

Ernst Bloch, the utopian Marxist thinker born in 1885, before cinema existed, wrote, on and off, about film from the early years of the 20th century until the end of his life in 1977. He was concerned with the meaning of film as a new medium, its capacity for social transformation and critique, its status as an art form and its role in the process of modernisation of society. As a Marxist, Bloch was critical of a cinema which was already by his time becoming a commercial vehicle, but arguably it is his ability to see the revolutionary and utopian potential of film that is most important and that can offer us insights regarding the nature of film which are relevant today. Supportive of Lenin’s statement that film was the most important form of contemporary art because it could reach the people and directly engage with their consciousness, Bloch added, implicitly, an aesthetical understanding of cinema which emphasised the way in which cinema can take apart the integrated experience of reality and distort, fragment or transform it by virtue of its technical affordances — zooming in and out, panning, slow motion and fast forward, but also the use of music, which I will explore in this chapter. We know these ideas also from Benjamin’s remarks on film as the art form commensurate to a fragmented, shattered modernity. But for Bloch they are part of a utopian aesthetic of cinema; the parameters of montage are different for Bloch than they are for Benjamin.

The destiny of metaphysics in Russia: an investigation of being and communicative behavior

In discussion with the work of communication philosopher Schrag, this forum contribution discusses the contemporary state of metaphysics, with particular reference to Russian philosophy.

Rephrasing Heidegger – a companion to Being and Time

There are many ‘introductions’ and ‘companions’ to Heidegger’s philosophy, and also to specific aspects of his work and to specific texts. Sembera’s text singles itself out by its intended audience: undergraduate and graduate students encountering Being and Time for the first time, or others who want to get a firm first grounding in the text. While the book begins with a general introduction to Heidegger and phenomenology, and while there are several references to other texts by Heidegger and to philosophical and academic discussions of some of the problems and issues raised by them throughout the book, this Companion is for the most part just that: a guide, an accompaniment, to a first reading of Being and Time. Sembera must be commended, I think, for engaging in such an undertaking. There is far too little emphasis today, especially in the English-speaking academic traditions and especially where contemporary philosophy is concerned, for the patient and slow reading of philosophical texts. Especially at undergraduate level, it has become customary in many instances to introduce students to cut-up, pre-baked selections or summaries of historically important philosophers and their ‘positions’. Yet a serious, prolonged engagement with a single, important, philosophical work is the best, if not the only, way to start to appreciate the nature of philosophical problems and philosophical thinking. Heidegger’s post-war seminars (after his teaching ban had been lifted by the allied authorities) were advertised in his university’s course guide simply as ‘reading exercises’ – something of that spirit pervades Sembera’s orientation. He writes that he has been inspired by Kenny on Wittgenstein and by Rescher on Leibniz and that he has aspired to develop a lively and clear prose style, like Ryle had. These alliances are to be much welcomed, of course. The book is divided into an introductory chapter, detailed explanations of paragraphs 1–83 of Being and Time and a set of Appendices facilitating study of Heidegger’s text (a glossary of technical terms; a list of German terms and their translations in, respectively, Sembera’s Companion, the translation of Being and Time by Macquarrie and Robinson (1962) and by Stambaugh (1996); and a set of tables laying out important conceptual divisions in Heidegger’s text). A bibliography with references for further study will help students who want to move on to the next level of their engagement with Heidegger. Sembera pays close attention to problems of translation. He notes the pedagogical reason for doing this – Heidegger’s language is of course notoriously problematic, evocative to some, obscurantist or even verkitscht to others, and the available translations can often be quite unclear if students do not have a minimal acquaintance with the original. He spends a lot of time explaining how he arrived at his own translations of key terms, explaining their German forms for those who do not speak German. This can be very instructive and helpful to students, and again speaks of the philosophically grounded close-reading approach of the author. It cannot substitute, I think, for learning German when you want to study Heidegger, but at the level of the novice the Companion might actually stimulate that desire in some, and of course the reader learns a lot, at least, about Heidegger’s German in passing. The author is faithful in pointing out difficult passages in the text, and does not force interpretations on his reader. He has tried to help the reader get into a position with respect to