The Bloomsbury Handbook of Susanne K. Langer

Description

Once an overlooked figure in 20th-century philosophy, Susanne K. Langer has become a prominent thinker among philosophers and artists, particularly because of her development of a new theory of art from symbolic logic.
This open access book brings together a collection of major thinkers on Langer and elucidates her transdisciplinary connections and insights across philosophy, psychology, literature, aesthetics, history, architecture and other arts. Adopting two approaches to Langer’s life and philosophy, Part I places her historically, documenting her origins and extensions and acknowledging Langer’s relationship to rich, ongoing traditions. Part II situates her work in conversation with current scholarship, expanding her ideas to provide new insights into current discussions about affect, materialism, embodied cognition, virtuality and the new media.
By recognizing Langer’s influences and contribution to contemporary knowledge, this international team of contributors positions her firmly in mainstream theory and asserts Langer’s ongoing importance to intellectual histories. Langer’s philosophical achievements, emerging from a web of key movements, make her a visionary of her time. For anyone looking to understand Langer’s impact and relevance for postmodern sciences and culture studies, here is the place to start.
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Lona Gaikis is an independent researcher, author and curator in Austria. She was Assistant Professor at the Institute for Art and Cultural Studies, Vienna, Austria.

PREFACE, Brian Massumi (Université de Montréal, Canada) INTRODUCTION, Lona Gaikis (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria) PART I: PLACING LANGER 1. SYMBOLS AND PROCESS: A Theory of Extensive Connection, Randall E. Auxier (Southern Illinois University, USA) 2. EXPANDING WHITEHEAD: Art as the Logical Form of Feeling, Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin (King’s College London, UK) 3. RADICAL EMPIRICISM AND PHENOMENOLOGY, Donald Dryden (Duke University, USA) 4. THE SYMBOLIC MIND: Psychological Roots and Cultural Consequences, Robert E. Innis (University of Massachusetts, USA) 5. PHENOMENOLOGY OF FEELING: A Foray into Art, Rolf Lachmann (Independent Scholar, Germany) 6. EXPANDING CASSIRER: Artistic Rituals in the Process of Self-Liberalization, Anne Pollok (University of South Carolina, USA) 7. LANGER AS THUMBELINA: Reading the Archive Diffractively, Iris v. d. Tuin (Utrecht University, the Netherlands) PART II: GENERATIVE IDEAS 8. NEW MATERIALIST LOGICS: Negation and Cosmetics, Vera Bühlmann (TU Vienna, Austria) 9. MUSIC: The DNA of Feeling, Lona Gaikis (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria) 10. SYMBOLS, Christian Grüny (Max Planck Institute, Germany) 11. VIRTUAL REAL: The Virtual Space of Everyday Aesthetics, Thomas Leddy (San Jose State University, USA) 12. VIRTUAL POWERS: Postcolonial Dance in Hong Kong, Eva Kit Wah Man (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong) 13. THE COMPLEXITY ORGANISMIC FEELING: A Media Theory of Mentality, Adam J. Nocek (Arizona State University, USA) 14. THINKING NON/HUMANLY, Eldritch Priest (Simon Fraser University, Canada) 15. VITALITY SEMIOTICS: A New Understanding of the Conditio Humana, Martina Sauer (Independent Researcher, Germany) 16. FROM FAIRYTALE TO KNOWING, Helen Thaventhiran (University of Cambridge, UK) 17. VIRTUAL ACTS: Taking Langer into Performance Art, Christophe Van Eecke (Radboud Nijmegen, the Netherlands) 18. PROTO-BIOSEMIOTICS: The Living in Form, Andreas Weber (Independent Researcher, Germany) PART III: CONTEMPORARY CONTRIBUTIONS 19. EPILOGUE, Lona Gaikis (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria) Annotated Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index