Seven Compact Essays on Color

Abstract

The article is a group effort consisting of an introduction and seven compact essays. It is focused on the problem of color from the perspective of current philosophical discussions on the role of the Enlightenment and the relationship between light and dark. The introduction by Michael Kurtov presents a roadmap for navigating through the seven essays by referring to a schema of “color knowledge” which has four dimensions: luminosity, resolution, saturation, and hue. Each of the texts in the article (the introduction and seven essays) deals mostly with one of “color knowledge”, which are formed by combining three color dimensions. Roman Mikhailov explores the plastic-dynamic correlates of colors and the chromaticity of the text understood broadly both as the text of nature and as an abstract symbolic complex. Eugene Kuchinov offers a “haptic criticism of the Enlightenment,” which is an analysis of color phenomena from the point of view of the skin (not the eye): on the basis of the logic of sensation, color is “viewed” beyond the light, beyond the optics. Yoel Regev develops a hermeneutics of color applied to the Torah: color is interpreted as a deception which is opposed to another deception belonging to a “true enlightenment.” Michael Kurtov addresses a revision of Goethe’s theory of color based on new physical experiments and on the logical geometry of color and then arrives at a critique of contemporary chromo-ideology. Nataliya Tyshkevich reveals the modern political meaning of coloring in the context of the recent “renaissance of modernist aesthetics” in which dealing with form is replaced by dealing with surfaces. Gray Violet describes color and darkness as political functions that turn into each other in the middle of a non-place in the “smart city.” The final piece by Nikita Sazonov elaborates the procedure of colorization by examining noncolor - a resource beyond the colored and the uncolored, most readily manifested in the printed character as well as in modern hip-hop culture.