Ribbon of Darkness: Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences

Over the course of her career, Barbara Stafford has established herself the preeminent scholar of the intersections of the arts and sciences, articulating new theories and methods for understanding the sublime, the mysterious, the inscrutable. Omnivorous in her research, she has published work that embraces neuroscience and philosophy, biology and culture, pinpointing connections among each discipline’s parallel concerns. Ribbon of Darkness is a monument to the scope of her work and the range of her intellect. At times associative, but always incisive, the essays in this new volume take on a distinctly contemporary purpose: to uncover the ethical force and moral aspects of overlapping scientific and creative inquiries. This shared territory, Stafford argues, offers important insights into—and clarifications of—current dilemmas about personhood, the supposedly menial nature of manual skill, the questionable borderlands of gene editing, the potentially refining value of dualism, and the limits of a materialist worldview. Stafford organizes these essays around three concepts that structure the book: inscrutability, ineffability, and intuitability. All three, she explains, allow us to examine how both the arts and the sciences imaginatively infer meaning from the “veiled behavior of matter,” bringing these historically divided subjects into a shared intellectual inquiry and imbuing them with an ethical urgency. A vanguard work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, this book will be sure to guide readers from either realm into unfamiliar yet undeniably fertile territory.

Arts & Photography

Stafford, Barbara Maria

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Barbara Maria Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain’s material realities. In Echo Objects, she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought. As a result, Echo Objects is a stunningly broad exploration of how complex images—or patterns that compress space and time—make visible the invisible ordering of human consciousness. Stafford demonstrates, for example, how the compound formats of emblems, symbols, collage, and electronic media reveal the brain’s grappling to construct mental objects that are redoubled by prior associations. In contrast, she shows that findings in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences are providing profound opportunities for understanding aesthetic conundrums such as the human urge to imitate and the role of narrative and nonnarrative representation. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgement that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation. “Heroic. . . . The larger message of Stafford’s intense, propulsive prose is unassailable. If we are to get much further in the great puzzle of ‘binding’—how the perception of an image, the will to act on intention, or the forging of consciousness is assembled from the tens of thousands of neurons firing at any one moment in time—then there needs to be action on all fronts.”—Science

Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images

Voyage into Substance reopens the whole complex question of how nature was perceived and penetrated during the Enlightenment—a time when artist-scientists trekked across Egyptian deserts, astronomer-mariners navigated the Polar seas, and meteorologist-aeronauts "sailed" through the atmosphere's "waves," all seeking to discover and record the non-human likeness of the phenomenal world. By examining the popular, multi-national illustrated narratives and atlases of the period, the book relates the voyagers' attentive, firsthand mode of seeing and precise copying of the enduring and the ephemeral features of the environment (before the advent of photography) to the major philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic debates of the time. Arguing that these accounts disclose an anti-Picturesque tradition of representation, the book opens new doors to establish the persistence of a "plain," that is, a style of landscape depiction that culminates in 19th-century realism. Voyage into Substance analyzes a vast repertory of geological, mineralogical and biological treatises concerning the self-expressive physiognomy of the earth and shows them to be important precursors and allies of the non-fictional travel narrative. Intertwining art, literature, philosophy, geography, and the history of science, with the aid of 304 plates, the book adds significantly to all these disciplines and is a unique contribution to the field of art and architectural history as well as to modern intellectual history. Publication of this book was partially funded by the Millard Meiss Fund of the College Art Association of America and by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840

MIT Press]

"Body Criticism" is a celebration of visual culture as well as a contribution to our understanding of the history of the human body. At its core is an exploration of the innovative strategies developed in the 18th century for making visible the unseeable aspects of the world. In the process it uncovers and analyzes the persistence of a set of body metaphors deriving from both aesthetic and medical practices. For Barbara Stafford, all forms of representation are metaphors for cognitive processes in a society, and the historian's job is to reconstruct the metaphors in order to shed light on the society. Here she looks at the changing nature of images of the human body as a key to understanding the changing status of the body as Western society was establishing the outlines of modernity. The six central chapters examine a range of images and representational practices under the headings Dissecting, Abstracting, Conceiving, Marking, Magnifying and Sensing. The importance of "Body Criticism" lies in its own visibilizing of previously unexplored interrelationships between art and medicine not only during the Enlightenment but now. Stafford also presents a strong argument for society's need to recognize the occurrence of a profound revolution - a radical shift from a text-based to a visually-centred culture. She offers an analysis of a philosophic, artistic, and scientific quest that continues in our contemporary technological search to reveal nonapparent physical and mental experience. Based on her study of the roots of this visual culture, she argues that modern societies need to develop innovative, nonlinguistic paradigms and to train a broad public in visual aptitude.

Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine

Mit Pr

Chronicles the suppression of a thriving oral-visual culture of the early modern period in favor of the current text-centered culture where the mistrust of visual information shapes approaches to education. Stafford's reinterpretation casts many paintings as instances of an instructive art of demonstration. The enlightener's association of sensory evidence with deception led to the submergence of a "tricking" oral visual culture by "serious" mass literacy drives. With the onset of computer graphics, Stafford suggests fresh ways of putting intelligence, enjoyment, and communicative power back into thinking with images. Many examples are reproduced in black and white. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education

"Good Looking constitutes an important and permanent contribution to the growing critique of text-driven post-structuralist critical practice as an efficacious tool for talking about visible and visual artifacts in this culture." -- David Hickey, Associate Professor of Art Criticism and Theory, University of Nevada, Las Vegas 
Building on the arguments of her previous books, Body Criticism (1991) and Artful Science (1994), Good Looking challenges the reflexive identification of images with vice. Today rampant criticism, both inside and outside the academy, condemns the immoralities of aesthetic illusion, museum display, cable televison, and hypermedia. Believing with the American pragmatists that it is harder to do than to denounce, Barbara Stafford urges imagists to abandon Foucault's bankrupt paradigm of verbal combat. Instead of more "improving" theoretical discourse, she calls for developing a positive visual praxis on the interpretive ruins of linguistic postmodernism. Not deconstructive autopsy, but demonstrating the historical virtues of visualization for the emergent era of computerism is the task at hand. These twelve essays meditate on the stunning implications of a global shift toward vision and visionary modalities. Apparatus changes, but the basic questions endure. Machine dreams flowing from laser disks, video tapes, CD-ROMs, and magnetic disks are transforming educational, medical, and legal institutions as well as on-line society at large. Organized around three major themes --- the explosion of optical information, the urgency of inventing an imagined interdiscipline, and the ethical dilemmas of technological transparency --- these pieces connect a disappearing lens culture to the digital diaphanousness of the twenty-first century. The essays: Introduction: Visual Pragmatism for a Virtual World. Enlightenment / Re-Enlightenment. The Visualization of Knowledge. Display and the Rhetoric of Corruption. The Eighteenth Century at the End of Modernity. The New Imagist. Practicing Vision. Making Images Real. Desperately Seeking Connections. The Natural History of Design. An Image of One's Own. Aesthetical Ethics. Medical Ethics as Post-Modern Aesthetics. Picturing Ambiguity. Difficult Content, or the Pleasures of Viewing Pain.

Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images

Recuperating a topic once central to philosophy, theology, rhetoric, and aesthetics, this groundbreaking book explores the discovery of sameness in otherness. Analogy poses an intriguingly ancient and modern conundrum. How, in the face of cultural diversity, can a unique someone or something be perceived as like what it is not? This book is for anyone puzzled by why today, as Barbara Maria Stafford claims, "we possess no language for talking about resemblance, only an exaggerated awareness of difference." Well-designed images, Stafford argues, reveal the mind's intuitive leaps to connect known with unknown experience. The first of four wide-ranging chapters paints a challenging overview of several pressing contemporary issues. Cloning, legal controversies about social inequity, identity politics, electronic copying, and the mimicry of virtual reality expose the need for a nuanced theory of similitude. The second examines the historical tug-of-war between analogy and allegory, or disanalogy. Stafford provocatively suggests that, since the Romantic Era, we have been living in polarizingly allegorical times. The third roots this divisiveness within the momentous shift from a magical universe, modeled on sexual bonds, to an engineered world built of discrete automated units. Finally, recent developments in computational brain research notwithstanding, major phenomenological questions about memory, emotion, intelligence, and awareness beckon. In the fourth chapter, Stafford intervenes in the consciousness debates to propose a humanistic cognitive science with bridging/analogy at its artful core.

Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

In this erudite and profusely illustrated history of perception, Barbara Stafford explores a remarkable set of body metaphors deriving from both aesthetic and medical practices that were developed during the enlightenment for making visible the unseeable aspects of the world. While she focuses on these metaphors as a reflection of the changing attitudes toward the human body during the period of birth of the modern world, she also presents a strong argument for our need to recognize the occurrence of a profound revolution―a radical shift from a textbased to a visually centered culture. Stafford agues, in fact, that modern societies need to develop innovative, nonlinguistic paradigms and to train a broad public in visual aptitude.

The MIT Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stafford, Barbara Maria. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Stafford, Barbara Maria

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stafford, Barbara Maria. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ribbon of Darkness: Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences

Ribbon of Darkness: Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences

Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images

Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images

Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840

Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine

Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education

Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images

Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting

Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine