Abstract
Arnheim’s media theory is introduced amidst the uncertain context of the contemporary post-medium condition. After decades of suspicion of both medium and media systems, some robust theory of medium is needed. Nevertheless, those process-based accounts of medium introduced recently with the turn to “materialism” and “ontology,” and, influenced by Deleuze, do not directly address an affirmative account of medium, instead substituting partial systems intended to account for the determinacy of media in a half-hearted way. Against caricatures of traditional ontological theories as “essentialistic,” or defining fixed and eternal natures, it is argued that they are sufficiently rich to stake out a variety of commitments and to deal with the persistent aspects of media without erecting a rigid and reductive system. Indeed, the conflation of the possession of powers with their actualization confuses the description of a medium and the norm of its use.
I am talking about what phenomenologists called Wesensschau, i.e. the viewing of essences: seeing the nature of a kind of thing in each of its manifestations, the way you see ‘fire’ and not just ‘this’ fire when you look at your fireplace.
Arnheim to John M. Kennedy, 30 Nov 1987 (Archives of the History of American Psychology, Akron, Ohio).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
E.g. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002); and John Protevi, Life, War and Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
- 2.
Manuel DeLanda, “Deleuzian Interrogations: A Conversation with Manuel Delanda and John Protevi,” Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization (2005). As a note, Lovejoy’s critique of Whitehead is still devastating: “Mr. Whitehead and the Denial of Simple Location,” in The Revolt against Dualism (New York: Macmillan, 1930).
- 3.
Gottfried Boehm et al., “Ontology,” in James Elkins and Maja Naef, eds., What is an Image (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011).
- 4.
Christopher Norris, Badiou’s Being and Event (Continuum, London and New York, 2009), 109.
- 5.
See my discussion in “New Materialism and Visual Studies: A Critical Realist Critique,” in Roger Rothman and Ian Verstegen (eds.), The Art of the Real: Visual Studies and the New Materialism (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 172–188.
- 6.
Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Posthumanism, or the Cultural Logic of Global Neo-capitalism,” in What’s Critical About Critical Realism? Essays in Reconstructive Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2014), 246–329.
- 7.
On the school of Brentano, and Gestalt theories relation within it, see Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano, Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1994); Liliana Albertazzi, M. Libardi, and Roberto Poli, eds., The School of Franz Brentano (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996).
- 8.
Wolfgang Köhler, Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand (Braunschweig: Friedr. Viewig & Sohn, 1920); Max Wertheimer, “Zu dem Problem der Unterscheidung von Einzelinhalt und Teil,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie 129 (1933): 353–357; translated by Michael Wertheimer as “On the problem of the distinction between arbitrary component and necessary parts,” in Productive Thinking (New York: Harper, 1959), 260–5; c.f. Barry Smith and Kevin Mulligan, “Pieces of a Theory,” in Smith (ed.), Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1982), 15–109; Barry Smith, “Gestalt Theory: An Essay in Philosophy,” in Barry Smith (ed.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory (München: Philosophia Verlag, 1988).
- 9.
Rudolf Arnheim, “Gestalten von Gestern und Heute,” in Ferdinand Weinhandl (ed.), Gestalthaftes Sehen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960), translated by R. A. as “Gestalten - Today and Yesterday,” in Mary Henle (ed.), Documents of Gestalt Psychology (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1962), 90–6.
- 10.
Edwin Rausch, “Über Summativität und Nichtsummativität,” Psychologische Forschung 21 (1937): 209–89; Smith and Mulligan, “Pieces of a theory,” §6.
- 11.
Ingarden, Der Streit, I, and vol. II, Part 1, Formalontologie (Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1965); c.f. Barry Smith, “An Essay in Formal Ontology,” Grazer Philosophische Studien (1978).
- 12.
Rausch, “Über Summativität und Nichtsummativität;” Barry Smith and Kevin Mulligan, “Pieces of a theory,” in Smith (ed.), Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1982), 15–109.
- 13.
Smith, “Gestalt Theory,” 272–3.
- 14.
Roman Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, vol. I, Existenzialontologie (Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1964), 29; c.f. Daniel von Wachter, “Roman Ingarden’s Ontology: Existential Dependence, Substances, Ideas, and Other Things Empiricists Do Not Like.” In Existence, Culture, and Persons: The Ontology of Roman Ingarden (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2005), 55–82.
- 15.
Moritz Geiger, “Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung,” Neue Münchner philosophische, eds. Ernst Heller and Friedrich Löw (Leipzig: Barth, 1933), 1–16.
- 16.
Wolfgang Köhler, “Über unbemerkte Empfindungen und Urteilstäuschungen,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie 66 (1913): 51–80, translated as “On Unnoticed Sensations and Errors of Judgment,” The Selected Papers of Wolfgang Köhler, ed. Mary Henle (New York: Liveright, 1971), 13–39.
- 17.
Aron Gurwitsch, “Phänomenologie der Thematik und des reinen Ich. Studien über Beziehungen von Gestalttheorie und Phänomenologie,” Psychologische Forschung 12 (1929): 279–381; Eng. Trans. “Phenomenology of Thematics and the Pure Ego: Studies of the Relation between Gestalt Theory and Phenomenology,” Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 175–286. It is clear that both Köhler and Gurwitsch were overly harsh in their criticism of Husserl.
- 18.
Arnheim, “Art among the Objects.”
- 19.
Ilkka Niiniluoto, “Margolis and Popper on Cultural Entities,” in Dirk-Martin and Robert Sinclair (eds.), Pragmatism, Metaphysics and Culture – Reflections on the Philosophy of Joseph Magolis (2015), 124–136.
- 20.
See D. T. Campbell, ‘“Downward causation” in Hierarchically Organized Biological Systems,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Biology, eds. F. J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky (London: Macmillan, 1974), 179–186; Rom Harré and Edward Madden, Causal Powers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975) and Bhaskar, Realist Theory of Science, 2nd Edition (Brighton: Harvester, 1979).
- 21.
Roberto Poli, “Levels,” Axiomathes 9 (1998): 197–211, 203; citing Nicolai Hartmann, Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie (Berlin, W. de Gruyter, 1935).
- 22.
Peter Simons, “Strata in Ingarden’s Ontology,” in Kunst und Ontologie. Für Roman Ingarden zum 100. Geburtstag. Edited by Galewicz Wlodzimierz, Ströker Elisabeth, and Strózewski Wladylasw (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1994), 119–140.
- 23.
Simons, “Strata in Ingarden’s Ontology,” 137.
- 24.
Arnheim, “Composites of Media,”
- 25.
Manovich, “Post-Media Aesthetics.”
- 26.
The reader will note the similarity to the discussion in Montfort and Bogost, Racing the Beam, 145–147. As I note, deciding on a number of layers is not as important as causally active mechanisms in a given system.
- 27.
Hayles, Writing Machines; and Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms.
- 28.
Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? Montford and Bogost, Racing the Beam.
- 29.
D. M. Berry, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (London: Palgrave, 2011).
- 30.
For lamination, see Elder-Vass, Causal Power of Social Structures, 44.
- 31.
Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms, 13.
- 32.
Negroponte, Being Digital; Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
- 33.
Arnheim, Film, 209. This is from the second half of Film als Kunst that was not translated into Film as Art and therefore is only available in English in the 1933 edition.
- 34.
Doron Galili, “Television from Afar: Arnheim’s Understanding of Media,” in Scott Higgins, ed., Arnheim for Film and Media Studies (Routledge, London, 2011); citing Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” Differences (2007): 128–152.
- 35.
Dominic McIver Lopes, “The Aesthetics of Photographic Transparency,” Mind 112 (2003): 446.
- 36.
For a review, see Irvin Rock, “Frame of Reference,” in Irvin Rock, ed., The Legacy of Solomon Asch (Hillsdale, N. J.: Erlbaum, 1990), 243–68.
- 37.
Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 150.
- 38.
Arnheim, “Art Today and the Film,” Art Journal 25 (1966): 243.
- 39.
Rudolf Arnheim, “Virtues and Vices of the Visual Media,” in David Olson (ed.), The Media and Symbols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 180–210; “Splendor and Misery of the Photographer,” Bennington Review (September 1979): 2–8; reprinted in New Essays in the Psychology of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).
- 40.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
- 41.
Rudolf Arnheim, “Disciplina del grammofono, della radio, del telefono e della televisione,” Sapere 6 (1937): “Discipline and Media,” Modernism/modernity 16 (2009): 421.
- 42.
Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as a Communications Apparatus,” in Marc Silberman (ed.), Brecht on Film and Radio (London: Methuen, 2000), 41–46; Theodor Adorno, “How to Look at Television,” Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 3 (1954): 23–25.
- 43.
Arnheim, “Composites of Media.”
- 44.
David F. Noble, Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1993); Christian Fuchs, Reading Marx in the Information Age (Routledge, London, 2016).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Verstegen, I. (2018). Gestalt Ontology. In: Arnheim, Gestalt and Media. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02970-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02970-8_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02969-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02970-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)