RELATED TERMS: Anthropology; In anthropology, as discused by Victor Turner, liminality, from the Latin word līmen, meaning ‘a threshold’, is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, defined as a psychic-temporal-physical space. At this moment, participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun theContinue reading “Liminality”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Intertextuality
RELATED TERMS: Reception Theory and Reader Response Criticism; Semiotics Intertextuality, and its cognate term, citationality, is the shaping of a specific text’s meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. It is likely that theContinue reading “Intertextuality”
Intentionality
RELATED TERMS: Philosophy Intentionality has a more commonsense meaning, relating to one’s intention or what means to do or to say, and a more philosophical sense, which concerns the directedness of consciousness towards its other(s), highlighting the dependence of thought upon the world, in contrast to an idealist view of the self-sufficiency of consciousness. BothContinue reading “Intentionality”
In Medias Res
RELATED TERMS: Story (fabula) and Plot (sjuzet or sjuzhet); Semiotic Square “the world has always been in the middle of things in unruly and practical conversation, full of action and structured by a startling array of actants and of networking and unequal collectives.” Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters “As Frank Kermode has put it, manContinue reading “In Medias Res”
Humanism
RELATED TERMS: Enlightenment; Posthumanism; Posthuman; Postanthropocentrism; Realism; Modernity Michel Foucault argues that the term humanism should not be confused with that of Enlightenment. The importance of grasping the notions of humanism and Enlightenment for design practices is that it bears directly upon how the domain of humanity and the human is understood in the designContinue reading “Humanism”
History
RELATED TERMS: Historicism; Historical materialism – Marxism; For Georg Lukacs (c.1971, 1923), in History and Class Consciousness, often said to be the inaugural text of Western Marxism, “history lies precisely in the changes undergone by those structural forms which are the focal points of man’s [sic] interaction with environment at any given moment and which determine theContinue reading “History”
Historicism
RELATED TERMS: History; Design of Narrative Environments; Metalepsis; Genealogy – Nietzsche; Aleatory Historicism, Hal Foster (1996: 10) notes, can be negatively defined in the most simple terms as the conflation of before and after with cause and effect, by making the presumption that the prior event produces the later one. Foster also notes that historicism in this sense pervades art history and modernistContinue reading “Historicism”
Historical Materialism – Marxism
RELATED TERMS: History; Critical Thinking; Cultural Studies; Design of Narrative Environments; Epic theatre – Brecht; Feminism and Materialism; Lefebvre; Methodology and Method; Even though the crude teleological determinism, historicism and reductive economism of official communist ideology, or orthodox Marxism-Leninism, came to occupy the space of Marxist thinking, design practices may yet still benefit from considering aContinue reading “Historical Materialism – Marxism”
(The) Heroic
RELATED TERMS: Narratology; Protagonist; Human Actantiality In The Hero with a thousand faces, Joseph Campbell examines many of the world’s heroic myths and stories. He ties the processes of transformation in those stories of the heroic journey to the quest to know the truest self, a task which, he avers, takes much time. Campbell shows how,Continue reading “(The) Heroic”
Happenings
RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Environments – Art; Installation Art; Performance and Performativity Happenings, the forerunners of performance art, emerged from the theatrical elements of dada and surrealism. American artist Allan Kaprow first used the term in his 1959 work ‘18 Happenings in 6 Parts’ which took place over six days from 4–10 October 1959 atContinue reading “Happenings”
Incomplete ... 