figuration

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figuration

1. Music

a. the employment of characteristic patterns of notes, esp in variations on a theme

b. decoration or florid ornamentation in general

2. Art a figurative or emblematic representation

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

figuration

configuration

the ‘nexus of interdependencies between people’, the ‘chains of functions’ and ‘axes of tensions’ -both of cooperation and conflict – which can be identified in any social context (ELIAS, 1978). The concept is the central analytical concept of Norbert Elias 's FIGURATIONAL SOCIOLOGY. Elias rejects any model of Man as homo clausus – the closed or discrete individual. Equally, however, he also rejects purely structural forms of explanation. It is the model of the ‘dance’ or the ‘game’ which Elias suggests best illustrates the focus he seeks to achieve in social analysis. The ‘image of the mobile figurations of interdependent people on a dance floor (or playing a sport-game) which makes it easier to imagine states, cities, families and also entire social systems as figurations’ (ELIAS, 1939). See also CIVILIZING PROCESS, COURT SOCIETY.

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Figuration

in music, the enrichment of a musical texture through the addition of melodic or rhythmic elements. In harmonic figuration, a voice, usually the bass, moves along the notes of a chord, producing a broken chord or harmonic ornament. The Alberti bass is a type of harmonic figuration. Rhythmic figuration involves the repetition of a single note, several notes of a chord, or an entire chord. In melodic figuration, turns or decorative figures, uniform in rhythm and frequently in melodic contour with the primary melodic line, are inserted between melodic phrases; these figures are close to melodic ornaments.

Since the 16th century melodic figuration has been used primarily when a melody is repeated at another pitch or on another instrument, in variations on the basso ostinato, and, in classical and romantic music, in the variational or reprise sections of a work. Melodic figuration also includes various types of discordant notes—suspended, passing, auxiliary, and changing notes.

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"Ghostly all along." This seems quite a good description not only of postwar poems but of poems more broadly--their diegetic scrims, their deictic overlays, their echoes and reverb, their figurations that at once bid for translucency and offer opacity, their strange submergence in and emergence from a long history of poets and poems.The point, then, is not to object by suggesting that this has all happened before, but to investigate how it happens now.

Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry

It is clear that the perception of gender bias in my review stems from the fact that I criticized and accorded less attention to the third of the show titled "Eccentric Figuration. " Accompanied by a catalogue essay signed by Manuela Ammer, who, of three curators, is the lone woman, the section also featured the greatest number of women artists in the show.

Opposite sexes

Figuration is an important semantic process in African American slang, and possibly the third most productive source of enriching slang lexicon after compounding and affixation.

Semantic change in African American slang

More is at stake than conventional ideas about abstraction and figuration. Ultimately, the alternation between opposition and fusion of the two unsettles the compositions, infusing them with a sense of risk, of invasion.

Disturbing dichotomies, Adrian Ghenie: Adrian Ghenie: new paintings

The striving of writing against figuration reveals that figuration occurs despite itself, is built in the very structure of language:

(Un)wordward Ho: decreation and the voiding of language in Beckett's late prose work

are complemented by CMD's RAID Management Software (RMS), graphical user interface for loca l or remote con figuration, and event notification.

CMD Announces Three New Redundant RAID Controllers

Vaughn explores the display of Igorots in the United States in the wake of the occupation of the Philippines, while Frost examines the political usefulness of the Circassian Beauty as a figuration of racial purity.

Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body

Since Ruether's work is well known, I begin with her particular figuration of Jesus as feminist, though many other feminist theologians make similar moves.

The risks of repeating ourselves: reading feminist/womanist figures of Jesus

In the present study, he treats the "aestheticization - the figuration - of the political" (p.

Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner)

With over 100 illustrations, 40 in color, this book traces recent developments in drawing with an emphasis on the experimental and new approaches to figuration. With many large color illustrations, representative of the work of sixty important contemporary artists, this publication will add an inventory of non-traditional drawings, supported by a well-written text, to your library.

Drawing Today

It implies a narrative history for German art composed of three phases or "moments," as a German metaphysician of history would say: Figuration, Defiguration, Refiguration.