Logos Ethos and Pathos

[Punitive] perspectives on artistic education and aesthetic knowing in classrooms void of creative expression. And how to get it back.
(A critique and response to the question:
What impact would art education have on creative cognition in both students’ ability to problem solve and on teachers’ ability to teach with passion as co-learners?)

Beginning with Giorgio Agamben’s alignment of ethics and potentiality, this essay questions the ethical dimension of gesture in the field of dance as an eminently potentiality-bound art form. This draws on Daniel Sibony’s concept of law and dance, according to which the body simultaneously repels and longs for the law as a nexus of heteronomous structures. I frame this through a revision of Aby Warburg’s rhetorical concept, pathos formula, into the corollary term, ethos formula, as the encoded movement patterns of ethical attitudes or comportments which are motivated by decision-making rather than emotional content. Do gestures and their citation in dance bear an ethical dimension similar to the encoded transmission of emotions through movement?

This new concept of ethos formula finds an excellent example in the work of the American choreographer Ted Shawn (1891–1972). His strikingly hybrid use of ethos formula from the 19th century Catholic theorist François Delsarte and his parallel practice of quoting liturgical gestures from Protestant church services, pursues the ambiguity and uncanniness of modernity itself. For Shawn—like many other protagonists of modernist dance—argues on the one hand for freeing the body from the boundaries of classical ballet in the name of individual expression, and on the other hand for an instrumentalized body that still clings to principles of taxonomy and normativity.

Multimodality scholarship has hitherto mainly focused on the combination of static visuals and written language (see Bateman et al., Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis-A Problem-Oriented Introduction, 2017; Tseronis and Forceville, Multimodal Argumentation and Rhetoric in Media Genres, 2017; and Forceville, 'Multimodality', in press, for discussion and bibliographies). However, drawing on visuals, written language, spoken language, music and sound, film is a multimodal medium par excellence. In this article, the authors specifically focus on documentary film. Documentary can be considered to be the cinematic equivalent of audiovisual rhetorical discourse, aiming to persuade its envisaged audience of something. Obviously, it is crucial for the credibility of documentaries that they are seen as indexically rooted in reality. But, recently, documentary film has witnessed the flourishing of a subgenre that may seem to challenge this indexicality: the 'animentary'-a documentary that consists to a considerable extent of animated images. While the completely constructed nature of animation means that animentaries' indexical relation between audiovisual representation and represented world is loosened, or even absent, animentaries also-and importantly-enable perspectives on reality that live-action documentary cannot. This article analyses how the visual, verbal, sonic and musical modes function rhetorically in four feature-length animentaries that share the theme of 'war': Waltz with Bashir (dir.

Resumo: O objetivo deste ensaio é analisar a questão da cultura da violência no presente, enfocando o tema de Benjamin de “barbárie irracional”, em que toda a cultura está em desequilíbrio, perdendo o controle sobre os fins do conhecimento, sobre os usos do tempo e da própria vida, sob o impulso de acelerar o tempo e o fetichismo de inovações e avaliações. A barbárie não é o começo de uma civilização nem seu apogeu. Chega “tarde” à cultura que privou e que perdeu suas fundações. Segundo Benjamin, uma civilização é cheia de “experiências”, enquanto a barbárie representa a exaustão que anula a faculdade da experiência e a capacidade de pensar.

Abstract: The objective of this essay is to analyze the issue of the culture of violence in the present, focusing on Benjamin’s theme of “irrational barbarism”, in which all culture is in disequilibrium, having lost control over the purpose of knowledge, about the uses of time and life itself, under the impulse of accelerating time and the fetishism of innovations and evaluations. Barbarism is neither the beginning of a civilization nor its apogee. It arrives “late” to the culture that has been deprived of and lost its foundations. According to Benjamin, a civilization is full of “experiences”, while barbarism represents the exhaustion that annuls the faculty of experience and the ability to think.

Resumen: El objetivo de este ensayo es analizar la cuestión de la cultura de la violencia en el presente, centrándose en el tema de Benjamin de la “barbarie irracional”, en el que toda cultura está en desequilibrio, habiendo perdido el control sobre los fines del conocimiento, sobre los usos del tiempo y la vida misma, bajo el impulso de acelerar el tiempo y el fetichismo de las innovaciones y evaluaciones. La barbarie no es el comienzo de una civilización ni su apogeo. Llega “tarde” a la cultura que ha privado y que ha perdido sus cimientos. Según Benjamin, una civilización está llena de “experiencias”, mientras que la barbarie representa el agotamiento que anula la facultad de la experiencia y la capacidad de pensar.