Second-order cybernetics and enactive perception

Purpose - To present an account of cognition integrating second-order cybernetics (SOC) together with enactive perception and dynamic systems theory. Design/methodology/approach - The paper presents a brief critique of classical models of cognition then outlines how integration of SOC, enactive perception and dynamic systems theory can overcome some weaknesses of the classical paradigm. Findings - Presents the critique of evolutionary robotics showing how the issues of teleology and autonomy are left unresolved by this paradigm although their solution fits within the proposed framework. Research limitations/implications - The paper highlights the importance of genuine autonomy in the development of artificial cognitive systems. It sets out a framework within which the robofic research of cognitive systems could succeed. Practical implications - There are no immediate practical implications but see research implications. Originality/value - It joins the discussion on the fundamental nature of cognitive systems and emphasise the importance of autonomy and embodiment.

Reflexive stasis, scale reversal and the myth of modern cinema

This chapter looks at three films whose Portuguese urban settings offer a privileged ground for the re-evaluation of the classical-modern-postmodern categorisation with regard to cinema. They are The State of Things (Wim Wenders, 1982), Foreign Land (Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, 1995) and Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz, 2010). In them, the city is the place where characters lose their bearings, names, identities, and where vicious circles, mirrors, replicas and mise-en-abyme bring the vertiginous movement that had characterised the modernist city of 1920s cinema to a halt. Curiously, too, it is the place where so-called postmodern aesthetics finally finds an ideal home in self-ironical tales that expose the film medium’s narrative shortcomings. Intermedial devices, whether Polaroid stills or a cardboard cut-out theatre, are then resorted to in order to turn a larger-than-life reality into framed, manageable narrative miniatures. The scaled-down real, however, turns out to be a disappointing simulacrum, a memory ersatz that unveils the illusory character of cosmopolitan teleology. In my approach, I start by examining the intertwined and transnational genesis of these films that resulted in three correlated visions of the end of history and of storytelling, typical of postmodern aesthetics. I move on to consider intermedia miniaturism as an attempt to stop time within movement, an equation that inevitably brings to mind the Deleuzian movement-time binary, which I revisit in an attempt to disentangle it from the classical-modern opposition. I conclude by proposing reflexive stasis and scale reversal as the common denominator across all modern projects, hence, perhaps, a more advantageous model than modernity to signify artistic and political values.

The politics of slowness and the traps of modernity

This chapter re-evaluates the diachronic, evolutionist model that establishes the Second World War as a watershed between classical and modern cinemas, and ‘modernity’ as the political project of ‘slow cinema’. I will start by historicising the connection between cinematic speed and modernity, going on to survey the veritable obsession with the modern that continues to beset film studies despite the vagueness and contradictions inherent in the term. I will then attempt to clarify what is really at stake within the modern-classical debate by analysing two canonical examples of Japanese cinema, drawn from the geidomono genre (films on the lives of theatre actors), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, 1939) and Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1954), with a view to investigating the role of the long take or, conversely, classical editing, in the production or otherwise of a supposed ‘slow modernity’. By resorting to Ozu and Mizoguchi, I hope to demonstrate that the best narrative films in the world have always combined a ‘classical’ quest for perfection with the ‘modern’ doubt of its existence, hence the futility of classifying cinema in general according to an evolutionary and Eurocentric model based on the classical-modern binary. Rather than on a confusing politics of the modern, I will draw on Bazin’s prophetic insight of ‘impure cinema’, a concept he forged in defence of literary and theatrical screen adaptations. Anticipating by more than half a century the media convergence on which the near totality of our audiovisual experience is currently based, ‘impure cinema’ will give me the opportunity to focus on the confluence of film and theatre in these Mizoguchi and Ozu films as the site of a productive crisis where established genres dissolve into self-reflexive stasis, ambiguity of expression and the revelation of the reality of the film medium, all of which, I argue, are more reliable indicators of a film’s political programme than historical teleology. At the end of the journey, some answers may emerge to whether the combination of the long take and the long shot are sufficient to account for a film’s ‘slowness’ and whether ‘slow’ is indeed the best concept to signify resistance to the destructive pace of capitalism.