The Future of Post-Human Performing Arts: A Preface to a New Theory of the Body and its Presence - Hardcover

Peter Baofu

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 144383520X ISBN 13: 9781443835206

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011

Synopsis

Are the performing arts really supposed to be so radical that, as John Cage once said in the context of music, “there is no noise, only sound,” since “he argued that any sounds we can hear can be music”? (WK 2007a; D. Harwood 1976) This radical tradition in performing arts, with music as an example here, can be contrasted with an opposing view in the older days, when “Greek philosophers and medieval theorists in music defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies, and vertically as harmonies. Music theory, within this realm, is studied with the presupposition that music is orderly and often pleasant to hear.” (WK 2007a) Contrary to these opposing traditions (and other views as will be discussed in the book), performing arts, in relation to both the body and its presence, is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. Needless to say, the challenge to these opposing traditions in performing arts does not imply that performing arts are worthless human endeavors, or that those fields of study related to performing arts like aesthetics, acoustics, communication studies, psychology, culture studies, sociology, religion, morality, and so on should be rejected too. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book provides an alternative, better way of understanding the future of performing arts, especially in the dialectic context of the body and its presence―while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. In other words, this book offers a new theory (that is, the transdisiciplinary theory of performing arts) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about performing arts, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its “post-human” fate.

About this title

About the Author

Dr Peter Baofu is the author of 54 new theories in 46 books (as of July 2011) to provide a visionary challenge to conventional wisdom in all fields of knowledge ranging from the social sciences through the formal sciences and the natural sciences to the humanities, with the final aim for a unified theory of everything―together with numerous visions about future history. As a polymath, he is known for his pioneering works on “transdisciplinary performing arts,” “interventive-reshaping geography,” “complex data analysis,” “creational chemistry,” “comparative-impartial literature,” “supersession computing,” “detached gambling,” “multilateral acoustics,” “metamorphic humor,” “heterodox education,” “post-human mind games,” “post-Earth geology,” “substitutive religion,” “post-cosmology,” “contrarian personality,” “post-ethics,” “multifaceted war and peace,” “post-humanity,” “critical-dialectic formal science,” “combinational organization,” “hyper-sexual body,” “law reconstruction,” “comprehensive creative thinking,” “hyper-martial body,” “multilogical learning,” “contingent urban planning,” “post-capitalism,” “selective geometry,” “post-democracy,” “contrastive advantages,” “ambivalent technology,” “authoritarian liberal democracy,” “the post-post-Cold-War era,” “post-civilization,” “transformative aesthetic experience,” “synthetic information architecture,” “contrastive mathematical logic,” “dialectic complexity,” “after-postmodernity,” “sophisticated methodological holism,” “post-human space-time,” “existential dialectics,” “unfolding unconsciousness,” “floating consciousness,” “hyper-spatial consciousness,” and other visions. Dr Baofu earned an entry to the list of “prominent and emerging writers” in Contemporary Authors (2005) and another honorary entry in The Writers Directory (2007)―and was also interviewed on television and in newspapers about his original ideas. He was a US Fulbright Scholar in the Far East. He has taught as a professor at different universities in Western Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, South Asia, North America, and Southeast Asia. He has completed more than 5 academic degrees, including a PhD from the world-renowned MIT, and was a summa cum laude graduate.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 144383520X
• ISBN 13: 9781443835206
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560