Haptic Sensation and Instrumental Transgression

Anyone who has ever played a musical instrument will certify the development of a particular type of relationship between the instrument and the performer. This relationship goes beyond a convenient coupling that is optimized for sound production. Every musical instrument defines ways in which to be touched, felt, activated. Music performance is dependent on bodily involvement that goes beyond the auditory and the sense of hearing. This article investigates the role of haptic sensation in the context of the performer-instrument relationship and draws on the writings of Georges Bataille to illuminate a discussion of the erotic in performance.

The Legal, Medical and Cultural Regulation of the Body: Transformation and Transgression

The regulation of the body provides an important concern in law, medical practice and culture. This volume contributes to existing research in the area by encouraging experts from a range of related disciplines to consider the legal, cultural and medical ways in which we regulate the body, further exploring how conceptions of self, liberalism, property and harm inform and influence contentious legal and ethical questions about what we can and cannot do to or with our own bodies.

Correlating Alpine glaciation with Adriatic sea-level changes through lake and alluvial stratigraphy

We compare lake and alluvial stratigraphy along a frame connecting the southern Alpine foothills and the Adriatic Sea, with the aim of matching the effects of Alpine glaciation and sea-level changes on sedimentation during the last glacial cycle. The palynostratigraphy of Lake Fimon provided proxies for regional vegetation and climate change and was coupled with sediment petrography, loss on ignition and magnetic susceptibility, disentangling alluvial phases from fluvioglacial activity related to culminations of the southeastern Alpine glaciers. The Fimon area was not reached by alluvial fans during the penultimate glacial maximum, nor by the sea transgression during the last interglacial, but a closed lake soon developed at the Eemian onset due to enhanced rainfall. Sea-level fall at glacial inception triggered the entrenchment of the drainage network in the plain reaching the outer Fimon Basin. Slow aggradation, but no sign of fluvioglacial activity, lasted to 38.2 +/- 1.45 cal. ka BP, when a major forest withdrawal took place, coeval to the spread of alluvial fans. By 27.5 perpendicular to 0.5 cal. ka BP the Fimon Basin was dammed by the Brenta outwash system. The main step of of forest recovery commenced at around (15.8) cal. ka BP, when apex trenching of the outwash fans was triggered by the glacier's decay. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Wino's vanitas:Ivresse transgressive et affirmation littéraire dans les romans noirs de Ken Bruen

Based on a theoretical framework owing to Bourdieu, Viala and Meizoz successive adjustments of the notion of literary posturing, and on Maingueneau's concept of auctorial scenography, this chapter probes the writer's ethos of Irish crime fiction author Ken Bruen and its impact on his reception in the French literary field. It studies in particular the double transgression characteristic of his ethos as a pioneer of the Irish noir : a cultural transgression attacking relentlessly the international currency of myths and stereotypes of Ireland, and a generic transgression, which thrives in the tension between codes and constraints of the noir novel.

Tragedy, Euripides, Melodrama: Hamartia, Medea, Liminality

This article examines socio-historical dimensions and cultural and dramaturgic implications of the Greek playwright Euripides’ treatment of the myth of Medea. Euripides gives voice to victims of adventurism, aggression and betrayal in the name of ‘reason’ and the ‘state’ or ‘polity.’ Medea constitutes one of the most powerful mythic forces to which he gave such voice by melodramatizing the disturbing liminality of Greek tragedy’s perceived social and cultural order. The social polity is confronted by an apocalyptic shock to its order and its available modes of emotional, rational and social interpretation. Euripidean melodramas of horror dramatize the violation of rational categories and precipitate an abject liminality of the tragic vision of rational order. The dramaturgy of Euripides’ Medea is contrasted with the norms of Greek tragedy and examined in comparison with other adaptations — both ancient and contemporary — of the myth of Medea, in order to unfold the play’s transgression of a tragic vision of the social polity.

Moral emotions and the envisioning of mitigating circumstances for wrongdoing

Anger may be more responsive than disgust to mitigating circumstances in judgments of wrongdoing. We tested this hypothesis in two studies where we had participants envision circumstances that could serve to mitigate an otherwise wrongful act. In Study 1, participants provided moral judgments, and ratings of anger and disgust, to a number of transgressions involving either harm or bodily purity. They were then asked to imagine and report whether there might be any circumstances that would make it all right to perform the act. Across transgression type, and controlling for covariance between anger and disgust, levels of anger were found to negatively predict the envisioning of mitigating circumstances for wrongdoing, while disgust was unrelated. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings to less serious transgressions, using a continuous measure of mitigating circumstances, and demonstrated the impact of
anger independent of deontological commitments. These findings highlight the differential relationship that anger and disgust have with the ability to envision mitigating factors.

Soundspace: A Manifesto

The manifesto is a long-standing and powerful tool for challenge within architecture, deployed by those as diverse as Vitruvius and Frank Lloyd Wright (who proposed a Walt Whitman-inspired “Work Song” of 1896) to those publishing in blogs across the designing planet today. Manifestos are locations for dreaming, for the banging of shoes, for passion in words about the environment we invent. Our manifesto follows in that tradition of poetry and critical optimism in calling for a new architecture of soundspace.

Here we wish to act as Markus Miessen’s “uninvited outsider” (Miessen 2010), a transgressive voice that disturbs the status quo beyond comfortable familiarity and brings together different types of thinkers and various modes of critique.[1] In this article we seek to probe “fundamental questions about how and for whom the built environment is produced and … conventional frameworks or oldestablished rules and regulations” through the interdisciplinarity that sound studies demands.[2] The ear to transgression is open.[3]

Landscape and Cosmology in the Dindshenchas

This contribution presents an analysis of the relationship between transgression, naming and the formation of the landscape in the medieval Gaelic collection of place-name lore known as the Dindshenchas. It includes analyses of the origin legends of the rivers Boyne and Shannon, as well as those of Lough Neagh and Lough Ree.

Harmful transgressions qua moral transgressions: A deflationary view

One important issue in moral psychology concerns the proper characterization of the folk understanding of the relationship between harmful transgressions and moral transgressions. Psychologist Elliot Turiel and associates have claimed with a broad range of supporting evidence that harmful transgressions are understood as transgressions that are authority independent and general in scope, which, according to them, characterizes these transgressions as moral transgressions. Recently, many researchers questioned the position advocated by the Turiel tradition with some new evidence. We entered this debate proposing an original, deflationary view in which perceptions of basic-rights violation and injustice are fundamental for the folk understanding of harmful transgressions as moral transgressions in Turiel’s sense. In this article, we elaborate and refine our deflationary view, while reviewing the debate, addressing various criticisms raised against our perspective, showing how our perspective explains the existent evidence, and suggesting new lines of inquiry.