This Is Not Reality (Ceci n'est pas la réalité): Capturing the Imagination of the People Creativity, the Chinese Subaltern, and Documentary Storytelling

How has documentary(re)presented subaltern creativity? Focusing on post-socialist, globalizing China, I examine documentary narratives by and about the creative subaltern originating from Chinese “cool cities” and expanding in the virtual space of global digital media. In these narratives, the creative subaltern has appeared obliquely, tangential to other narratives, subordinate to internationally recognized artists, or with a more central role, as the author or the protagonist of documentary films. I analyze these narratives’ entanglement with elitist definitions of creativity, the representation of subaltern reality, the expression of subjectivity, and the tension between the political and the personal. I argue that documentary has played an important albeit ambiguous role—provocative and empowering, but also, at times, formulaic and constricting—in shaping the discourse on the subaltern as a creative subject, by amplifying creativity’s indexicality to the real and obfuscating its imaginative quality and its ambition of breaking free from the real. Reflecting on the contemporary relevance of the Free Cinema movement’s advocacy for a subjective, personal approach to capturing the “imagination of the people” and exploration of lyric realism in documentary filmmaking, I propose that documentary can and should dare to “make poetry.” Forms of documentary expressivity such as poetic, not plot-driven narratives can reconcile imagination with reality and offer alternative, more appropriate means of capturing the complexity, heterogeneity, and contradictoriness of the subaltern condition, and for subaltern creativity to be expressed, appreciated, and affirmed.

“Faces” and “Disguises” of V. Rozanov’s SolitaryThoughts and Fallen Leaves

An intensive study of V. Rozanovs work naturally actualizes the question of the reasons for the contradictory assessments that have accompanied it for more than a century. The author explains their polarity by the prevalence of subjective or stereotypical ideas about the fundamental novelty of V. Rozanovs approach to the psychology of literary creativity and to the aesthetics of secluded nudity, which the creative subject of his books invariably followed. The article examines the space of solitude as a sphere of creative realization of Rozanov, where the main attention is paid to the intuition of intimacy, interpreted by the writer as a genuine spiritual act underlying the true creativity of life and literature. In solitude the authors intuition of intimacy penetrates into the phenomena and objects of life, endows them with related intimate meanings, is reflected in them and contributes to the creation of a mythopoetic picture of the world, filled with a variety of subjective and personal ideas of V. Rozanov about God, the world, cultural and literary values, about to yourself. In the above examples, V. Rozanovs faces appear in the process of intimate rapprochement with the Absolute and revealed in ontological insights. Disguises are figurative dialectical projections of the intimate faces of the author, opposed to the traditional views on the writers personality. These are polar, familiarly traversed projections of his intimate faces designed to enhance their ontological and aesthetic significance. The philosophical concept of detachment in myth and literature, developed by A.F. Losev in Dialectics of Myth , served as a methodological basis for the study of the phenomenon of solitude and unity in V. Rozanov of the myth-maker and writer.

nature of money

In explaining the phenomena of life, thinkers have not clarified the relationship between money and standards and people. Man is a liberty, creative subject, truth in behavior and labor. The product of creative acts creates needs, and the product of labor fulfills human needs. Exchange between people is the exchange of behavior, labor for products as a broker. Relationships between individuals establish standards of ownership of property and people. People, property, and standards are unified, but when the state monopolizes the promulgation of laws and issues money, the state, money, and laws are unified. Laws, money and products exchanged with each other make the relationship between the state and citizens have different functions and tasks. Money is the purpose, so making money to live makes the love of money increase. People forget themselves, become hostile towards each other in the vicious circle of money. When USD became a popular spiritual demand, countries with USD need were in the whirlpool of the money game set by the American regime. Economic growth, war of aggression, defense of the homeland are common spiritual needs. Commodities, modern weapons, arms race, globalization make the USD stronger.

Brouwer’s Weak Counterexamples and the Creative Subject: A Critical Survey

I survey Brouwer’s weak counterexamples to classical theorems, with a view to discovering (i) what useful mathematical work is done by weak counterexamples; (ii) whether they are rigorous mathematical proofs or just plausibility arguments; (iii) the role of Brouwer’s notion of the creative subject in them, and whether the creative subject is really necessary for them; (iv) what axioms for the creative subject are needed; (v) what relation there is between these arguments and Brouwer’s theory of choice sequences. I refute one of Brouwer’s claims with a weak counterexample of my own. I also examine Brouwer’s 1927 proof of the negative continuity theorem, which appears to be a weak counterexample reliant on both the creative subject and the concept of choice sequence; I argue that it provides a good justification for the weak continuity principle, but it is not a weak counterexample and it does not depend essentially on the creative subject.

Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (1368–1644)

Approaching the prison as a creative environment and imprisoned officials as creative subjects in Ming China (1368–1644), Ying Zhang introduces a few important themes at the intersection of premodern Chinese religion, poetry, and visual and material culture. The Ming is known for its extraordinary cultural and economic accomplishments in the increasingly globalized early modern world. For scholars of Chinese religion and art, this era crystallizes the essential and enduring characteristics in these two spheres. Drawing on scholarship on Chinese philosophy, religion, aesthetics, poetry, music, and visual and material culture, Zhang illustrates how the prisoners understood their environment as creative and engaged it creatively. She then offers a literature survey on the characteristics of premodern Chinese religion and art that helps situate the questions of “creative environment” and “creative subject” within multiple fields of scholarship.

Soundscapes

This article examines the issues of soundscape construction and reception and states that a city is a construction built from private sonic narrations that both shape and are shaped by spatial structures. The analysis of three audio-visual practices: Playtime,a film by Jacques Tati;Infrasonic Soundscape, an interactive online artwork by Hidekazu Minami; and Dialtones (A Telesymphony) by Golan Levin, a concert performance whose sounds were produced by theaudience’s mobile phones reveals the polyphonic character of space. These examples necessitate verifying the way one perceives the understanding of the concepts of sound and space as well as their interactions. The phenomenon of soundscapes requires transgressing the dichotomies of space/place, seeing/listening (sound/image), and listener (recipient)/creative subject (sender of a specific message), in favour of the intermediate categories. The core of the interspace which arises on this ground constitutes a dialog anyone might enter if they afford a gesture addressed to the other (various forms of space embodiment).

NATURAL AND CULTURAL IN CINEMA BASED ON REAL EVENTS

The article examines the paradox of feature films based on historical events. Such a movie is forced to hide its subjectivity. The historical requires an artistic form, however, it acquires it only by deforming its content or distorting the positions of the creative subject inherent in staged cinema, since desubjectivized or pseudo-subjectivized forms of expression are attributed to it. The author of the article puts forward a hypothesis about the conditionality of this paradox by the very nature of cinema. Turning to the films based on real events, the author demonstrates the contradiction between natural and historical-cultural, which lies at the heart of cinema.

CLUB COMMUNICATION AS THE BASIS FOR SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ACTIVITIES

Purpose of the Study: The article considers the phenomenon of club communication and possibilities of realizing its pedagogical potential by means of social and cultural activities. Methodology: The differentiated analysis of various directions of club communication in the aspect of improving the performance of cultural and art institutions has been carried out. Club communication in this regard is considered as an alternative to the dominance of formalized and regulated communications, blocking the development of an individual as a creative subject. Main Findings: The main characteristics of the organization of club communication processes for solving various psychological problems are identified. Various types of club communication are offered that form the basis of socio-cultural activities. Originality: The problem areas for further improvement of socio-cultural activities using the pedagogical content of created situations of interpersonal communication are identified.

Nominative – Communicative Research on Teaching Word-Formation

This article studies the communicative approach which has been holding a leading position in the field of theory and methodology of foreign language teaching for several years. Why is the communicative approach so popular? The communicative approach of foreign language teaching focuses on the subject-to-subject scheme of communication, that is, the student acts as an active, creative subject of educational activities controlled by the teacher; it promotes the development of students’ creativity and their ability to creative search.