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The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge
... This study selected evaluation indicators based on theories from behavioral architecture, Maslow's hierarchy of needs [38], the Chinese Walkable City evaluation standards [39], the classification of outdoor activities into three types in Contact and Space [40], Rancière's theory of aesthetic fairness in "distribution of the sensible" [41], and other urban public space evaluation systems. Five primary criteria were established-"Accessibility", "Safety", "Comfort", "Aesthetic Appeal", and "Cultural Value". ...
As China’s urban development enters the era of stock optimization, the practice of transforming and utilizing spaces under urban overpasses is rapidly gaining momentum. Converting these underpass spaces into sports areas has emerged as a new form of creating public space. Understanding the perceptions of users from different age groups towards these underpass spaces holds significant guiding value for optimizing the design of such areas and improving the quality of service. Taking the Yanshan Interchange Lowline Park in Jinan as an example, this research applied methods of observation, interviews, questionnaires, and importance–satisfaction analysis (ISA) to investigate the activity preferences and the similarities and differences in the perceptions of spatial environment elements in underpass spaces among four age groups: children, youth, middle-aged adults, and the elderly. The findings indicate that different age groups exhibit varying degrees of sensitivity to spatial information, demand levels, and perceptual perspectives in underline parks, which result in distinct spatiotemporal distributions and spatial perception disparities when using the park. All the groups agree that the underpass sports space requires significant improvements in terms of comfort and safety. Based on this, this study proposes age-friendly urban space renewal strategies for spaces under elevated highways, focusing on addressing areas with lower satisfaction across all age groups. These strategies include optimizing the allocation of time, area, and activity types within activity spaces, enhancing the safety and comfort of activity areas, and enriching the cultural connotation and inclusivity of the space. This research provides a theoretical basis for optimizing and creating age-friendly or age-specific urban sports public spaces under elevated highways.
... Third, by considering the variegated ways through which bordering practices are reproduced across society, feminist and postcolonial approaches can help us look at peripheral, imperceptible acts that put into question and sometimes overtly challenge the whole governmental apparatus for the selection, filtering, and channeling of migration flows. Through the disclosure of the deficiencies and brutalities of the European border and migration regime, the everyday struggles at the periphery of Europe -Calais, Ventimiglia, Idomeni or Lampedusa are the most representative in this respect -acquire a visible political (Rancière, 2009) resonance, transcending the local boundaries and reverberating at the center of Europe. In this respect, not only are feminist and postcolonial approaches attentive both to the changing dynamics of capitalist operations and to the violence they exercise on the bodies of migrants, but they also have the merit of reinstating migrant agency, giving political visibility to their everyday struggles against the border and migration regime. ...
Drawing from empirical research in a purportedly peripheral location within a peripheral country-the port area of Patras in southwestern Greece-the article will critically reflect upon the intertwining, overlapping and increasingly blurred categories of 'center' and 'periphery,' arguing that borders can provide a crucial viewpoint for the analysis and potential challenge of the European border and migration regime. It will do so by a) theoretically analyzing Balibar's idea of the 'everywhere-ness' of borders in combination with feminist and postcolonial approaches; b) empirically investigating the continuous interplay between center and periphery, visibility and invisibility, border enforcement and border struggles in the port area of Patras, exploring in particular the multiple nuances, contradictions, and conflicts unfolding on the ground; c) reassessing the political importance of migrants' invisible struggles from the margins not only in the redefinition of borders, but also in the reconfiguration of the European border and migration regime itself.
... Rancière described his theoretical operations as being aimed towards "reframing the configuration of a problem" (p. 2), an approach which is of great significance during this time of climate chaos and environmental breakdown. Dissensus is not a conflict, but a neutralisation of hierarchy in terms of what is deemed common sense, a situation in which no standpoint is deemed as right or wrong, and no party forced to acquiesce to the other, but instead "the staging of an excess, a supplement that brings about a more radical way of seeing the conflict" [55] (p. 3). ...
The objective of this research is to offer a qualitative analysis of adult STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics) learning in a community setting, with a focus on sustainability and climate action. To date, much research on STEAM learning has been directed towards youth and children in formal educational settings. Our qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with community participants, artists, and scientists over the course of a six-month initiative in Ireland allowed us to develop a rich picture of a multi-faceted STEAM project that held space for both a social change agenda and a learning agenda. In our findings, we identified several contributing factors to transformative learning and changed feelings about climate change, including pride of place, the development of strong interpersonal relationships, and an emerging sense of collective agency through a shared emotional and affective journey. To design for meaningful, community-level climate action, we argue that learning may be supported in, with and through STEAM. Our study also showcases the value of the arts and aesthetic experiences to embrace dissensus when tackling a complex issue like climate change through STEAM education.
... Therefore, all services deserve deliberate appreciation. As a focus of aesthetics, aesthetics based on vision is a structural way people observe and appreciate objects (Rancière, 2009;Trinh and Ryan, 2013). The cognitive process and mental mechanism for humans enjoying the natural landscape and man-made landscape as well as the impacts that the environment exerts on human behaviors have been researched. ...
As heritage is the precious treasure of human society, heritage also carries the genes of culture. It is of vital importance to effectively develop heritage tourism resources and explore the mechanisms that influence tourists’ cultural identity. This study has integrated the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework with the attitude-behavior-context (ABC) theory to construct a hypothetical model of heritage tourism aesthetics, tourist involvement, mental experience, and cultural identity so as to figure out their relationships. The questionnaires were collected to investigate the impact paths and mechanisms between heritage aesthetics, tourist involvement, mental experience, and cultural identity. The structural equation model was used to examine the relationship between heritage tourism aesthetics, tourist involvement, mental experience, and cultural identity. The main findings include: (1) the positive impact of aesthetics driving mental experience and cultural identity is significant; (2) the impact of tourist involvement on mental experience and cultural identity is also significant; (3) the impact of aesthetics on cultural identity is not significant, but mental experience mediates the relationship between aesthetics and cultural identity in heritage tourism. This study provides a new research framework and perspective for the aesthetics, tourist involvement, mental experience, and cultural identity of tourists in heritage tourism. This study also provides practical implications for government culture sectors to propagandize culture and for heritage destination managers to better manage heritage sites.
... In political philosophy, conceptualisation of politics often takes as their object of analysis articulated struggles in 'public space' between agnostic entities (Mouffe, 2007;Rancière, 2009). Politics, in the agonistic model, unfolds through debate, contestation, and voiced disagreements. ...
This paper investigates how decentralised wastewater treatment initiatives experiment with ways to live in close proximity to wastewater and their potentiality for a future with less polluting wastewater. In the Netherlands, there is a contested political debate about whether centralised or decentralised technologies are better. Rather than engaging in this deliberative political debate, we articulate a less visible and more material politics by tracing different ways of ordering wastewater treatment in practice. Drawing on fieldwork with inhabitants, scientists, and engineers who have brought wastewater treatment ‘close to home’, we examine the turn to decentralisation as a material object of enquiry which, in turn, shapes our engagement with pollutants, technologies, and a range of non-human actors. We ask: What kinds of living together in close proximity to our waste do such decentralised experiments allow for?
... 8 This article approaches news media as part of an aesthetic regime mobilised around the latest wave of housing financialization: BTR. Key dissensual thinker Jacques Rancière (2009Rancière ( , 2013 conceptualised aesthetic regimes as involving distinct framings of visibility and intelligibility or a so-termed distribution (or partition) of the sensible ('le partage du sensible') that delineates what is (made) available to the senses (Dikeç, 2013). For Rancière, orders of governance-termed 'the police'-sustain these 'regimes of sensibility' by delineating 'what is visible, sayable, audible, thinkable, etc., what makes sense and what does not' (Dikeç, 2012a, p. 673). ...
This article explores how a technocratic consensus was constructed around the emergence of build to rent housing (BTR) in Australia which helped depoliticize this new wave of rental housing financialization. It argues that (digital) news media—an age-old medium for elite storytelling—operates as a key discursive technology of financialized capitalism through which this consensus is ‘policed’. Specifically, reporting scripted the rise of institutional investors into Australia's rental sector in ways that disavowed properly political disagreements vis-à-vis BTR. Its analysis is informed by post-political theories, which converge around a shared concern with how political disagreement is disavowed and replaced with technocratic governance, consensus and a privileging of certain orders of subjects. Post-foundational thinker Jacques Rancière's thinking on aesthetic regimes assists in exploring this consensus and its limits by foregrounding how regimes of representation delineate what can be said and argued (and different agents' authority to speak). This Rancièrian aesthetic analysis identifies that news media restricts the coordinates of public debate through: (1) technical storylines that guide public audiences to understand and evaluate BTR foremost as an asset class whose expansion is a matter of national economic interest; (2) strategic silences that obscure associated complexities and tensions surrounding BTR's dual function as an asset class and as housing; and (3) endorsement of BTR industry actors as ‘experts’ with authority to make BTR thinkable in this way. The aesthetic regime that circumscribes Australian public BTR debate represents a post-political strategy that assists in non-trivial ways to re-inscribe the financializing project in Australia, albeit with limits.
... In this part, in my opinion, Rancière condenses his critique of political philosophy from the point of view of the aesthetic dimension of human experience. Now, following a recent essay by Rancière (2009), I will understand by aesthetics not the sensible, but a certain distribution of the sensible. As we shall see below, this aesthetic dimension of human experience has two functions: on the one hand, it allows us to perceive the given and, on the other, to give it sense. ...
This article explores Jacques Rancière’s critique of political philosophy. I argue that, to understand this critique, it is necessary to explore the aesthetic dimension of philosophers’ politics, pointing out that, at its foundation, lies a certain understanding of time that, paradoxically, negates political practice. To get out of this paradox, I point out that Rancière proposes a politics of writing that allows us to understand political practice from the point of view of a heterochronic and conflictive form of time. This approach, which distances itself from the Western tradition of political thought, allows us to address the concepts of contingency and equality in a radical way.
... U svezi s tim, Rancière zagovara »disenzus«, za koji objašnjava da nije isto što i konflikt jer postoji isključivo onda, kada dolazi do neutralizacije konflikta, ali nema nikakve veze s pacifikacijom: »… neutralizacija konflikta između dvije moći, dvaju dijelova duše ili dviju društvenih klasa jest uvođenje viška, dodatka koji navedeni konflikt prikazuje u još radikalnijem svjetlu.« 36 Kao umjetnička propozicija, disenzus se temelji na kritičkom propitivanju mišljenja koja se u društvu podrazumijevaju i prihvaćaju bez rasprave i rasuđivanja (pred-rasude). ...
Rad istražuje model društvenosti, interakcije i participacije kao političke elemente postmoderne umjetnosti. Postmoderno stanje nastupa nakon propasti glavne ideje modernizma, što se temelji na vjeri u napredak i emancipaciju čovječanstva odnosno nakon kraha velikih spekulativnih pripovijesti poput idealizma, scijentizma, marksizma ili utopije o promjeni svijeta pomoću umjetnosti. Otuda se kao opće mjesto nadaje teza da umjetnost nema više onu ulogu kakva joj se pripisivala od XIX. stoljeća nadalje, kao što je politička borba, kritika društva ili socijalni angažman, odnosno da više nema funkciju kritike, onoga što upozorava i što se avangardno suprotstavlja svemu postojećem. Nasuprot takvom stavu, rad nastoji podastrijeti kritički i politički potencijal postmoderne umjetnosti, pri čemu se usmjerava na umjetničku praksu nakon 1990-ih te njezino isticanje relacija, susreta i interakcije s publikom. Riječ je o aproprijaciji avangardnih strategija, ali s povijesnim odmakom i drukčijim kontekstom.
... While the two subaltern characters-the Dalit uncle and nephew who escape the misery of their village to be subjected to further violence by the Emergency Era Indian state-somehow find the capacity to continue, it is the more privileged, middle class student Manek who ultimately finds the despair overwhelming and commits suicide. This sensitivity could be read as his more heightened consciousness versus the brute experience of sensation so often ascribed to the world's oppressed (see Rancière 2009). But I suggest that he might encapsulate the very fragility of privilege: a fragility that in fact makes us illequipped to imagine or lead any truly radical political project in dark and difficult times. ...
Reflecting on the loss of my privilege as a transnational scholar during the London lockdown, in this essay I explore whether the COVID-19 pandemic may provide an important moment to return to questions of solidarity, resistance and progressive politics. Comparing my own experiences with those of people in my research fieldsite of Sri Lanka, I ask: do we have the necessary skills, tools and imagination to respond to this time of crisis? I suggest that the COVID-19 crisis has opened up possibilities of self-reflexivity that allow for the emergence of new epistemic and political practices that are not only more ethical but also more productive, radical and disruptive of the existing order.
This article investigates the reproductive health challenges faced by female mineworkers at Oyu Tolgoi, one of the world’s largest underground mines located in the Southern Gobi Desert. Harsh working conditions, driven by national objectives and the global resource economy, adversely impact female workers, who navigate expectations of motherhood in an environment that impedes their aspirations. Although women represent 18 per cent of the workforce, their efforts to address critical issues – such as sexual harassment and reproductive health problems – are often overlooked. Despite legal frameworks and discourses promoting gender equality, the male-dominated workplace culture creates a repressive atmosphere that discourages women from voicing their concerns. The article examines how female workers engage with everyday politics to address detrimental changes in their reproductive health. Through the lens of necropolitics, it highlights how women confront experiences of pregnancy loss and infertility, and navigate sociopolitical forces in search of care and healing.
We analyse audiovisual media discourse on Covid-19 through the lens of the politicalin order to illustrate how discursive practices establish and reconfigure subject positionsand social orders in times of crisis. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s understanding of thepolitical, we suggest that these reconfigurations can either stabilise existing (political)communities and power relations, or intervene in what is perceived as ‘normal’.Analytically, we approach these (re)configurations on the level of media-aesthetics (thetangible), language (the utterable) and audiovisual representation (the visible) todemonstrate how a sense of commonality is produced or revised through artistic mediapractice (Richard Rorty).We demonstrate our argument by means of Covid-19 ‘special programmes’ onGerman public television, as they can be considered cultural practices of making situatedsense of a global crisis. By analysing the tangible, the utterable and the visible in thebroadcast from 13 December 2020, our illustrative analysis reveals a constant strugglebetween reconfigurations of the political and stabilisations of (a new) normalcy. Weconclude with a plea for including a media-aesthetic perspective into the analysis of Covid19 discourse as it opens up a more comprehensive (multimodal) idea and experientialdimension of the discursive construction of the pandemic.
This chapter looks at the symptoms of the post-Anthropocene with the speculation that the capitalist system has brought on the onset of a range of neural disorders via the media and the commodification of the social order. I hypothesize that the autistic spectrum is indicative of the cultures that we live in which have been progressively ‘bubblized;’ that is, shrinking in terms of our perspectives toward open diversity. The case of the Hikikomori is presented as a symptom of this trend. There is a side-tracked discussion regarding Žižek and Malabou concerning brain physiology and psychoanalysis: what use is psychoanalysis in brain injury cases? There is a broad discussion on the role of dopamine in brain chemistry and what are the neurological implications concerning addiction in the post-Anthropocene. Sloterdijk’s ‘bubbles’ re-emerge as does the proletarization of contemporary society where the question of the pharmakon comes up once more. The dopamine system as linked with social media within ‘limbic capitalism’ ends in a relentless laboring under conditions of precarity and deficient social support systems. Given this situation, there is a section on learning to live with climate change. There are two further important discussions. The first is about the spectrum of autism, while the second discusses the question of neurodiversity in education. In brief, this chapter frames the symptoms of post-Anthropocene and what this means to education in relation to neurodiversity.
The idea for this essay originates in the ever-growing awareness of the importance that the notion of space has in the thought of Jacques Rancière. From his method of scene, the politics of space and the contributions on architecture and design to the admission that discussions about contemporary art revolve primarily around matters of spatialization, there is a connecting and evolving line that brings together in the same territory seemingly diverse domains. My main argument is that this territory is aesthetic in essence; I propose to approach it as a topology of senses. In this context, the use of the notion of topology satisfies a dual necessity: first, to reflect on the conceptual relations that are involved in aesthetic experience and the processes of aesthetic thought. Second, to set the ground for approaching an ontological model of art that will serve pri- marily the facilitation of a critical thinking in the Kantian sense and as exercised by Rancière, that is, a way of thinking about what renders possible the differences instituted in a sensible domain and furthermore, what “critical operations or dissensuses” produce such domains as that of art or politics (Rancière, Dissensus 219, 220).
In what follows, I will provide the general lines for understanding topology from an aesthetic point of view so as to set the ground for approaching aesthetics as a method of thought and for making sense of philosophy as an aesthetic practice, introducing more systematically the idea of topologies of senses as communities of transformed sensation and their shaping according to properties attached to Rancière’s groundbreaking conceptualization of the “aesthetic regime of art”. In the final part of my analysis, I will provide the backdrop for understanding the concept of dissensual ontology as an art of aesthetic ideas.
The teaching of design, the act of design itself, and its competencies are always conceived as a mystery – knowable to a certain extent yet unknowable in its totality. In studies of how design knowledge is transferred in the studio, the focus typically centers around a determinate and quantifiable pedagogical exchange between student and tutor, consistent with its etymological roots in paidagōgia, suggestive of instruction akin to the teaching of a child. Yet, we witness other kinds of exchanges and social formations in the studio that expand beyond the student-tutor exchange, more akin to the cultural transmission of a distinct set of codes, behaviors, norms, and organizations autonomous from pedagogical structures. In this paper, we shift the conversation from one solely centered around pedagogy to an orbit of the architecture studio’s culture, whose social making, we argue, produces the public body of the architecture community and is itself the competency acquired in the architecture studio.
Music provides a provocative landscape to consider a posthuman ontology of immanence for interpretive research. Since it is not an object per se, it challenges taken-for-granted beliefs about sense-making. This chapter reworks ontology as untology to reaffirm the aesthetics of hermeneutic understanding as a being always becoming anew as it differentiates itself from the flow of existence as sensible, and thus, as also inescapably implicated in world-making. The movement of understanding reverberates through unsettled meanings of sense, language, and being, opening up spaces for improvisations that disrupt their taken-for-granted definitions. Gadamer’s affinity for listening undermarks this hermeneutic process of re-composition. Since rhythms are immanent to linguisticality’s being and to world-making, interpreters are called upon to become compositional partners who attune their bodies to the polyphonic universe in which they find themselves immersed. The chapter concludes by suggesting a poetics of dissensus as a way to heed the ethical implications of rethinking interpretive inquiry as understanding’s improvisational attunements.
In this chapter, we consider several theoretical paradigms which have emancipation of the suppressed and subjugated as their focal agenda. We follow-up our discussion of these diverse theoretical paradigms with an evaluation of their usefulness in deconstructing, examining, and comprehending entrepreneurship as a socio-economic emancipation strategy. Additionally, we also address methodological concerns which might arise in emancipatory underlined entrepreneurship projects and identify appropriate research methods. The objective of the chapter is to provide the readers with several theoretical and methodological alternatives when considering entrepreneurship projects with emancipatory connotations.
This chapter gives an overview of dramaturgy as practice and discipline. Dramaturgy has its origins in Antiquity and established itself as a theoretical and analytical approach to understand and support narrative-performative arts in the eighteenth century. After comparing the most influential roots and tradition, from its European origins to its equivalents in India and in the Arabic world, as well as considering interpretations and receptions of Aristotle’s Poetics , the chapter looks at key influential figures such as G. E. Lessing, Max Reinhardt, Max Herrmann and Bertolt Brecht. It discusses dramaturgy as a subject for higher education and its correspondence to professional practice. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of dramaturgy for the screenwriting process and, consequently, how dramaturgy can support academic analyses of time-based and narrative-performative artworks.
Küreselleşmenin getirdiği hareketlilik, sosyal, ekonomik gerekçeler veya kimlik aidiyet problemleri nedeniyle ülkelerinden göç eden bireylerin yarattığı özel bir göçmenlik süreci ortaya çıkmıştır. Çalışma kapsamında yeni-göçmenlik (neo-nomadism) olarak ifade edilen bu göçmenlik türünün özneleri olan bireylerin farklılaşan ve dönüşen mekân aidiyeti incelenmiştir. Bu çalışmanın özgünlüğünü, yeni-göçmenliğin “öteki” ile karşılaşma alanı açan alternatif bir sosyal/toplumsal müşterek mekân üretimi potansiyelindeki rolünün sorgulanması oluşturmaktadır. Göçmenlikle birlikte oluşan mekânı sabit ve “olmuş” olan bir yer olarak ele almaktan ziyade yeni-göçmenin bireysel ve kolektif deneyimiyle aynı anda “oluşmakta olan” ve “çözünüp kaybolan” bir mekânsal düzen olarak görmek gerekmektedir. Araştırmada farklı disiplinlere ait çalışmaların ortak noktaları mekân aidiyet ekseninde analiz edilmiş, yeni-göçmenlik olgusu göç ve mekân çalışmalarının kesişiminde mekân dönüştürücü bir unsur olarak ele alınmıştır. Kendini her yerde “evinde” hissetme özgürlüğüne sahip sabit mekân aidiyetine uzak bireylerin gerçek mekânsal ihtiyaçlarının anlaşılabilmesi için alan açılması ve takip edecek çalışmaların disiplinler arası eleştirel bir yaklaşımla tartışılabilmesi amaçlanmıştır. “Yeni-göçmenlik” ve “mekân aidiyeti” kavramlarıyla ilgili farklı disiplinlerdeki çalışmalar içerik analizi yöntemiyle incelenmiş, sosyoloji, çevre psikolojisi ve mimarlık alanında ortak temaların analizi ve bağlanmasıyla sonuca ulaşılmıştır. Birey, çevre ve süreç olarak üç ana unsurla ortaya çıkan mekânsal aidiyete yeni-göçmenlik olgusu aidiyeti deneyim, hafıza ve müşterekleşme yollarıyla dönüştürerek ilişkilenmektedir.
This article examines the making of clinical care by tracing how music therapists integrate their work within North American hospitals. Situated on the margins of the clinic, music therapists are in pursuit of clinical recognition—to be perceived and understood as valuable to biomedicine. The pursuit of clinical recognition illustrates how the configuration of care is an aesthetic concern, negotiated not only through processes of reasoning and rationalization but also through sensory‐affective experiences. Music therapists cultivate a clinical aesthetic to their care by demonstrating clinical efficacy to their medical colleagues and self‐fashioning clinical subjectivities through participation in medical rounds and charting. While clinical recognition creates conditions of possibility for music therapists to provide care in biomedical institutions, recognition is perpetually elusive for hospital music therapists. By cultivating sonic atmospheres and connections, music therapists disrupt and exceed a normative clinical aesthetic, illustrating ways of caring in the clinic beyond biomedical scripts.
Military literature was one of the most prevalent forms of writing to appear during the Romantic era, yet its genesis in this period is often overlooked. Ranging from histories to military policy, manuals, and a new kind of imaginative war literature in military memoirs and novels, modern war writing became a highly influential body of professional writing. Drawing on recent research into the entanglements of Romanticism with its wartime trauma and revisiting Michel Foucault's ground-breaking work on military discipline and the biopolitics of modern war, this book argues that military literature was deeply reliant upon Romantic cultural and literary thought and the era's preoccupations with the body, life, and writing. Simultaneously, it shows how military literature runs parallel to other strands of Romantic writing, forming a sombre shadow against which Romanticism took shape and offering its own exhortations for how to manage the life and vitality of the nation.
Teniendo como motivo para análisis político filosófico, las expresiones artísticas ocurridas en el Paro Nacional de Colombia del 2021, en las siguientes páginas me propongo reconstruir algunas de las propuestas conceptuales de Rancière en torno a la política y lo que él ha llamado estética, tomando como clave de interpretación la lectura hecha por Laura Quintana en su artículo La estética de la política y la política de la estética: Colaboraciones, pasajes, fronteras (2016). Esta perspectiva permite pensar lo que ella llama registros de lo político, con el objetivo final de hacer una lectura atenta de ciertos textos de Rancière a fin de comprender aquello que sean unos registros de lo político. Lo anterior permitirá empezar a construir una caja de herramientas para que, quien así lo quiera, pueda usarlas y de esta manera, escuchar de un modo diferente aquellos esplendores artísticos ocurridos en nuestro presente. Se tratará entonces de un artículo eminentemente filosófico con las propuestas del filósofo francés.
In this article, I engage a key claim of Ulrich Beck’s theorizing of global risks, to the effect that socio-political collectivities are currently being re-imagined through the anticipation of endangered long-term futures. Such dynamics of temporal reordering are visible, the article shows, in the imaginative politics of climatic projections. To rethink the resultant political aesthetics of climate change, the article maps out the visual, experiential, and affective forms in which endangered climatic futures come to saturate public culture. Such encounters, the article suggests, constitute inter-media events, drawing on scientific, artistic, and mass media registers, and embodied in what Karin Knorr Cetina call scoping devices of information and visualization, involving particular ‘fateful’ time transactions. These conceptual suggestions are illustrated and elaborated by drawing on auto-ethnographic observations during a particular event of intense futurity, that of the international COP15 climate change conference held in Copenhagen during December of 2009.
The ambition of Footprint 23 is to provide a critical survey of the architecture of logistics, unfolding the multivalences of its apparatus, dissecting its buildings and spaces, its technologies and labour relations, its historical evolutions as well as its future projections. Gathering academic papers and visual essays from researchers and emerging scholars in the field, the issue follows three main directions of inquiry.
The first trajectory attempts to define what logistics is and how it operates, focusing on the inherent ambivalence of its apparatus, able to cope with different scales and various temporal dimensions – from barcodes and gadgets to global routes and territorial infrastructures – constituting both a physical and abstract framework supporting, measuring and quantifying movements and actions, thoughts and desires. The second trajectory investigates the way logistics penetrates our existences, not simply by affecting how we live and work but the way in which it provides the very possibility of life as such, or, in other words, how logistics is inherently political. The third trajectory tackles the past, present and future of logistics, considered as the most crucial apparatus determining the human impact on the earth, controlling the distribution and organisation of organisms and ecosystems, triggering new and more violent forms of colonisation and exploitation.
This issue of Footprint does not seek definitive statements or hypothetic solutions for the monstrous nature of logistics. On the opposite, it aims at unfolding its inner contradictions to propose new possibilities of exploration for an architecture and its project.
Authors
Negar Sanaan Bensi, Delft University of Technology
Negar Sanaan Bensi is an architect, educator and researcher. She received an honourable mention in National Archiprix 2011 in the Netherlands for her graduation project. She is a PhD researcher at TU Delft, as part of the research group Border Conditions and Territories and an UKNA fellow. Her research focuses on the relation between architecture and territory, infrastructure and inhabitation, specifically in the context of the Iranian Plateau and Middle East. She has taught at TU Delft, Tilburg Fontys Academy and IUST Tehran University and lectured at the University of Antwerp and International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. As a practicing architect she has collaborated with GFC, ZUS and Import Export Architects. She has contributed to several publications, among them the forthcoming books Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage (Springer, 2018) and Inside/ Outside Islamic Art and Architecture: A Cartography of boundaries in and of the field (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the journal Volume 27.
Francesco Marullo, University of Illinois at Chicago
Francesco Marullo is an architect and educator. His research focuses on the relations between architecture, labour and the space of production. He holds a PhD in History and Theory of Architecture from TU Delft and he is an assistant professor at the UIC School of Architecture in Chicago. Previously, he taught at the Berlage Center, TU Delft, the Rotterdam Architecture Academy and collaborated with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, DOGMA and the Urban Planning Department of the Roma Tre University. He is a founding member of the research collective The City as a Project, the think tank Behemoth Press and Matteo Mannini Architects. His work has been internationally exhibited and featured in various architectural publications. He contributed to recent volumes Into the Wide Open (dpr-barcelona, 2017), Counter-Signals (Other Forms, 2018), Work, Body, Leisure (Hatje Cantz, 2018) and co-authored the book Tehran: Life within Walls (Hatje Cantz, 2018).
Clipping Wings: A Chronicle (剪翼史) by Wang Wen-hsing (王文興), published in 2016, is the latest milestone in Taiwan’s Modernist fiction. The novel delves deeply into disturbing spiritual and ethical issues while bringing to a culmination Wang’s lifelong language experiment. Reading the work can be a soul-wrenching and aesthetically gratifying experience for those equipped with the proper decoding tools. However, the novel’s contemporary reception has been dishearteningly apathetic. It is a phenomenon this chapter intends to explore and hopefully illuminate. Following an introductory section on the general background, this chapter goes on to explore the novel’s central themes by referring to a specific narrative device Wang professed to have employed: covertly positing an “implied author.” The subtle but readily discernible oscillation of narrative distance that results may hold the key to a more nuanced interpretation of the work’s thematic messages. Next, the chapter brings attention to the modernist-inflected cultural elitism that principally informs the novel’s sociocultural critique. Notably, through Wang’s proficient employment of “parodic mimicry,” poignant criticism is “put into brackets” and transformed into ambivalent showmanship. The chapter then tries to enhance our understanding of Wang’s radical language experiment with insights drawn from Brian Massumi’s theory of affect. The concluding section consists of brief remarks on the implications of the novel’s parting of the ways with Taiwan’s younger-generation critics from the perspective of literary history.Keywords
Clipping Wings
Wang Wen-hsingLiterary genealogyAesthetic modernismFlaubertMimesisTranslocal phenomenaParodic mimicry
This essay argues that an alternative conception of time to that underlying the ideology of productivism and growth is not only possible, but desirable. The creation of this time requires what I refer to as the practice of refusal via taking time: the self-determined arrangement of the nexus of time, action and utility that begins with the a-synchronous insertion of unproductive time into the synchronous horizontal time of productivism. The essay is divided into three sections. The first offers the reader a discussion of Jacques Rancière’s notion of time as a social and political medium that partitions and distributes actions and utility. The subsequent section of the essay elaborates in aesthetic terms an account of unproductive time that is indifferent to the time of productivism. In the final section, I discuss examples that show how taking time to do ‘nothing’ can elicit an emancipatory politics that seeks to liberate us from the hegemony of productivism. I conclude that political theory should attend to time as a political medium and to the possibilities of its occupation, and that picturing the taking of time in terms of stopping the force of productivism’s normalized horizontal time by entering the unproductive time of reverie and aesthetic experience, provides a promising perspective from which to apprehend a time for thriftless refusals, deliberate dis-identifications, and the forging of cooperation among people(s) and with nature.
Del performance musical de Las Tesis en Chile hasta el perreo en el movimiento de protesta en Puerto Rico, la música es lugar de resistencia. En este número, colaboramos con Enkelé para pensarnos las musicologías feministas, para explorar lugares de disidencias artísticas y para sentir el deseo, el amor y la política al son de las tamboras, flautas, maracas.
This article presents the forward-looking project of Polish Futurism, seen as a radical critical movement. It focuses on the concept of the "futurization of life", one of the Polish Futurists' main ideas. The article discusses the social and economic postulates of the movement and how they wanted to achieve the following goals: to intervene in a language in a revolutionary manner, to break free from the bourgeois culture, to democratize art, to emancipate women, to extend the concept of a nation, and to abolish the capitalist division of the world into the core and its periphery.
Inom den svenska och norska förskolan förstås ofta musik som en praktik som bör följa vissa normativa antaganden om rösten och dess ljud. Den framförliggande avhandlingen ifrågasätter dessa normativa antaganden då den undersöker hur förskollärare och förskollärarutbildare uppfattar musikalisk lek. Musikalisk lek kan förstås som ett spontant musikaliskt utforskande och som en sorts kommunikation som individer kan delta i genom att använda sin röst och sin kropp. Musikalisk lek kan överraska och den kan utvecklas genom samspel med andra. Eftersom musikalisk lek kan möjliggöra en upplevelse av frihet och emancipation så har denna avhandling som syfte att öka kunskapen om vad som hindrar eller möjliggör för förskollärare och förskollärarutbildare att delta i musikaliskt lekande. Data samlades in med hjälp av iscensatt musikaliskt lekande under träffar med förskollärare och förskollärarutbildare, vid vilka jag deltog aktivt. Deltagarna hämtade sedan inspiration från dessa sessioner då de deltog i gemensamma gruppdiskussioner och beskrev sin förståelse av musikalisk lek. Diskussionerna spelades in, transkriberades och analyserades genom en reflektiv och tematisk analys. Resultaten visade att deltagarna delvis sade emot sig själva då de beskrev sin egen entusiastiska delaktighet i musikalisk lek och de begränsade möjligheterna för musikalisk lek i förskolan och i förskollärarutbildningar. Förskollärare och förskollärarutbildare kan delta i musikalisk lek, men de väljer att avstå. Jag drar slutsatsen att förskollärare och förskollärarutbildare hindras från att delta i musikalisk lek av att de uttrycker en repressiv argumentation som gör gällande att enbart vissa särskilt lämpade individer kan och bör skapa musik. Deltagarna hävdar också att syftet med musik i förskolan är att skapa gemensam sång och därigenom en form av konsensus, medan de betraktar musikaliskt lekande som ett lättsinnigt nöje. Avhandlingens resultat visar således att det är svårt att delta i musikalisk lek i både förskolor och förskollärarutbildningar på grund av vissa normativa föreställningar. Med inspiration från Habermas och Rancière utvecklar jag, i avhandlingens diskussionsavsnitt, en teoretisk förståelse för hur ett annorlunda sätt att resonera kan möjliggöra för musikalisk lek i förskolan och i förskollärarutbildningar. ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Abstract: Music in preschool is generally understood as a practice that ought to be governed by normative presuppositions about voices and sounds. The current dissertation questions this normative stance by examining the views of preschool teachers and preschool-teacher educators on musical play. Musical play can be understood as a spontaneous musical exploration and form of communication that an individual conveys through his or her voice and body. Musical play can be surprising, and it can evolve through interaction with others. Noting the emancipatory possibilities inherent in musical play, the current dissertation aims to provide more knowledge about what facilitates and what impedes musical play among preschool teachers and preschool-teacher educators. Data were collected through orchestrated sessions of musical play during meetings with preschool teachers and preschool-teacher educators, respectively, where I as a researcher actively participated. Informed by their experiences from the musical-play sessions, the preschool teachers and preschool-teacher educators discussed their understandings of musical play in subsequent group talks. The discussions were recorded, transcribed, and analysed through a qualitative and reflective thematic analysis. The results indicated that the participants provided contradictory accounts of their own enthusiastic musical play and the difficulties of having musical play in preschool and preschool-teacher education. Preschool teachers and preschool-teacher educators are able to participate in musical play, but they choose to abstain. I conclude that both the preschool teachers and the preschool-teacher educators are hindered from participating in musical play by their reiteration of a repressive argumentation that suggests that only some distinguished individuals are able to create music. Furthermore, the participants suggested that the purpose of music in preschool is to create communal singing and consensus, while they considered musical play as merely frivolous. The results of the current dissertation highlight that it is difficult to engage in musical play in both preschools and preschool-teacher education due to this argumentation and these normative restraints. Inspired by Habermas’ and Rancière’s theoretical oeuvres, the dissertation theorizes about ways of reasoning that may facilitate musical play in preschool and in preschool-teacher education.
Me propongo en este artículo perseguir, siguiendo algunas producciones discursivas de ciertos movimientos populares, la manera en que estos, en sus prácticas transformativas, reivindican un derecho que no puede reducirse a los derechos instituidos en un marco legal, ni interpretarse desde una comprensión meramente reformista de la acción política. En este sentido hablo en el texto de un “derecho que no es un derecho” sino una estructura política del desacuerdo; esto es, un derecho que resulta clave para mostrar cómo en tales acciones pueden desplegarse procesos de subjetivación política que hacen emerger, a la vez, instancias polémicas de desidentificación y formas otras de ser en común, que pueden considerarse a la vez disensuales y “experimentales”.
In the following paper, I put forth a claim that literary works created according to the rules of conceptualism, seemingly devoid of expression, often reveal that values are inseparable from any textual operations. This is visible in Kenneth Goldsmith’s recent project, “The Body of Michael Brown,” which follows the format of Goldsmith’s previous book-Seven American Deaths and Disasters-a transcription of news reports of American national disasters, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the attacks of 9/11. The text rewrites the autopsy report issued by the St. Louis County Coroner’s Office on the shooting of Michael Brown, an African-American teenager shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The problem with the new conceptual art practice is that it disregards the ethical dimension of creation. For Goldsmith, ethical issues in art are limited to the question of “faithful” copying/rewriting, regardless of the fact that an appropriated text always reflects editorial manipulation and politics behind it. Goldsmith thinks of himself as a daring disciple of Duchamp, but he fails to understand that his text propagates racist violence, performing anew the autopsy’s latent, institutional racism. In terms of methodology, I rely in my analyses on Marjorie Perloff’s understanding of the concept of avant-garde and refer to the theories about literature and ethics emerging from recent writings by Cathy Park Hong and Jacques Ranciére.
This chapter suggests that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics can be applied as a method for questioning our understanding of management. We explain the method through demonstration. More precisely, we contrast organization shown in the work of the video artist Francis Alÿs with Gareth Morgan’s seminal palette of images of organization. We argue that Morgan’s metaphors convey a distribution of sensitivities and sensibilities with regard to organization that partition and tie people to particular places and functions in organizations. The work of Alÿs involves a dissensus of that partitioning and hence a rupture of business ethics based on images of self-serving organizations. We assert that this dissensus opens the possibility for a business ethics scholarship that decenters the organization and fundamentally changes how we can ethically speak of organizations, i.e., how we can do business ethics.
In this article, Schleiermacher’s idea of a divine service as mitteilende Darstellung (communicative presentation) will be brought into conversation with Gräb’s homiletics as religious speech and then, adding to the conversation, Latour’s tormented religious speech.
Latour’s religious speech will, in turn, be brought into conversation with Rancière’s idea of politics in contrast to police, thereby proposing a non-colonial [divine] service, which might have certain similarities with Badiou’s interpretation of theatre. However, being vigilant of the
constant threat of again becoming colonial. This temptation or danger could be prevented by a communicative presentation (theatrical performance or enactment) of the Christ Event through a Christ-poiēsis that does not colonise time or space but brings into close proximity
(communicative presentation) space and time as the fulfilment of time.
In this article, Schleiermacher’s idea of a divine service as mitteilende Darstellung (communicative presentation) will be brought into conversation with Gräb’s homiletics as religious speech and then, adding to the conversation, Latour’s tormented religious speech. Latour’s religious speech will, in turn, be brought into conversation with Rancière’s idea of politics in contrast to police, thereby proposing a non-colonial [divine] service, which might have certain similarities with Badiou’s interpretation of theatre. However, being vigilant of the constant threat of again becoming colonial. This temptation or danger could be prevented by a communicative presentation (theatrical performance or enactment) of the Christ Event through a Christ-poiēsis that does not colonise time or space but brings into close proximity (communicative presentation) space and time as the fulfilment of time.
Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The article, ‘Towards a non-colonial [divine] service’ is written from the South African context, but its relevance is global as it proposes a non-colonial perspective on homiletics and liturgy. It brings together various disciplines (philosophy, political science and economics) into critical constructive conversation with Practical Theology, specifically homiletics and liturgy.
Jacques Rancière is one of the most prominent contemporary French philosophers. His thoughts on equality cover the fields of political theory, history, literature, art, and cinema studies, whereby “the politics of aesthetics” are considered. Furthermore, Rancière’s insights in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation have influenced discourses on modern pedagogy in education.
By verifying the presupposition of “equality of intelligence,” the ignorant schoolmaster has students that initially follow the given configuration of “knowing teacher and ignorant student” independently make use of their own understanding to learn without direction from the teacher. The teacher who believes in equality lets students have opportunities to disrupt the representation of “the distribution of the sensible” and possibly create a discrepancy. Moreover, Rancière’s argument on the teacher-student reverberates the views of Kant and Foucault of “what is enlightenment” and could be combined with “the attitude of modernity:” the pupil can have courage “at the present moment” to produce a practical critique and transgress the limitation of one’s “self-incurred immaturity.”
Accordingly, this thesis addresses Rancière’s theory and educational perspective, as well as the relationship between the implications of enlightenment and the teaching-learning process. More specifically, the thesis of this research began with the connection between education and enlightenment. Subsequently, through an examination of Rancière’s life and theoretical background, Rancière’s key concepts are outlined, including aesthetics, politics, democracy, equality, and emancipation. Furthermore, based on the previous investigation on Rancière, this study interpreted the educational implications of his thoughts.
To summarize, the purpose of this study was to demonstrate that intellectual emancipation, in particular, the teaching-learning act, is an experiment on the possibility of whether students can equally use their capacity of intelligence; in other words, the experiment introduces the motto of enlightenment, “Sapere aude !,” as a point of departure in the agnostic educational process. It is hoped that this thesis will help educators reflect on theory and practice, thereby expanding an experimental activity that encourages escapes from the solidified frame in the name of the teacher and the student.
In this paper, we attend to the everyday creative practices of residents of a riverbank settlement, kampung Ratmakan, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and the materials through which urban imaginaries are constructed. Building on Colin McFarlane’s recent insight that while ‘fragmentation’ is a crucial term in the grammar of urban theory, the fragments themselves have received little attention, we inquire into how children mobilise material and temporal fragments to produce unique forms of public life and imaginaries of what is possible in the city. Through a collaborative art project conducted with residents of kampung Ratmakan, we contribute an empirical richness to McFarlane’s calls for a politics of urban fragments. Using art practice as both a method of inquiry and means of co-producing knowledge, we document some of the ways in which a sensory politics is articulated through children’s embodied modes of relating to their urban environment.
This paper explores the relationship between accounting, standardisation and politics through the case of a protest surrounding Manchester’s carbon accountability. Responding to critiques that literature on the relation between accounting and politics tends to overlook silences and fundamental disagreements surrounding the ‘uncounted’, this paper mobilises the political thinking of Jacques Rancière. In doing so, it joins an emerging body of literature considering accounting in relation to pluralism and difference. Rancière’s political thought provides a way to consider the limits of consensus on what should count, the subjectivity in how we count, who is able to make things count, and how particular regimes of counting are sustained and disrupted. Empirically, this paper considers the City of Manchester's carbon accounts and targets at the time of their 2010 Stakeholder Conference and an activist attempt to declare Manchester Airport as the ‘elephant in the room’. It draws upon interviews with policymakers, activists, experts and accountants working in Manchester. Mobilising Rancière’s notion of postdemocracy, I demonstrate how the consensus around standardisation is used to depoliticise disagreements on what emissions should ‘count’ and conclude by offering reflection on how repoliticisation might occur.
The inhabitants of the squatted settlements in the border city of Arica, mostly indigenous migrants from the Peruvian–Bolivian highlands, feel the effects of the racialized geography of northern Chile through social discrimination, economic exploitation and deprivation of political rights. In these settlements, their migrant residents make palpable the pervasive tension between a mode of visibility that I analyse in terms of a ‘politics of presence’ and another kind of visibility that is created by the state’s ‘legibility’ techniques. Three aspects come together in this process of conflicting visibilities: (1) the reciprocal influence between a borderland and its police order; (2) the relationship between biopower and the (in)visibility dynamic of migrant lives; and (3) the generative relationship between a redefinition of security and altered citizen practices. Through an analysis of these sets of relationships, the article provides a richer understanding of how, in the struggle between the political logic of equality and the police logic of domination, border migrants forge cunning and rebellious political subjectivities that challenge the border regime in which they find themselves by questioning both the basis on which rights are defined and the boundaries of citizenship.
The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?)
- Derrida
Derrida, "The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?)," p. 84.