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n°3 – April 18, Theater

Sounds, Visions, Affects. On the Para-Theatrical Aspects of Theatrical Action

Aleksandr Michajlovič Rodčenko: REad (1929)

ABSTRACT

A strong hermeneutical tradition insists that - in the relationship between human beings and artworks - there are aspects that are not liable to rational explanations, such as those that apply for instance to physical processes, geological sections, symptoms of disease. This peculiar character of the artistic works would have become even more evident with the emergence of abstractionism and – as far as theatre - with the progressive departure from text and the programmatic renunciation of representing something. In this work - after discussing the limits of psychoanalytic and semiological tools - I try to show the usefulness of cognitive sciences and today's theories of human communication in dealing with that problem, with reference to an emblematic case of "messages without meanings": pure (musical) sounds.

This article is available in: ITA

Author

Physicist, logical and philosopher of science, he taught at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where he is a member of the Doctoral School in History and Philosophic-Social Sciences. He has dealt with scientific ontology, philosophy of mind, theory of argumentation and logic of inferential processes. He has published articles and scientific essays on indeterminism, causal reduction, mental images, spatial / temporal representations, the nature of time, the relationships between syntax and semantics, physicalism, physical laws and modal logics. In the field of performing arts, he edited and introduced a collection of theoretical essays by Rafael Spregelburd, discussed the link between ethos and pathos in the Alain Badiou theater, reconstructed the cultural roots of Tadeusz Kantor's theater, analyzing the complex logical relationships that exist - in the theater of the latter - between reality, imagination and staging of both.