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Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. I (1913-1926)
... And when such images transpire, they exceed the hold of prior historical determinisms and conventional ways of knowing. This is because memory is mediated and such mediations are "not temporal in nature but figural [bildich]," shattering the fantasy of a philosophy of history without interruption (Benjamin 2002(Benjamin [1940:463). The surviving image, then, is a testament to the world's fundamental contingency and to the schemes underlying the chaos of existence, as well as a figuration conjured through love against structural constraints and the work of time, "applying equally to the living and the dead, and which lies beyond our comprehension," as the luminous W. G. Sebald (2009:9) reminds us. ...
... His task was daunting from the start, as he was an insurgent archivist who knew of no touch with power that could provide repair or restitution. Noé's endeavor is redolent of the critic figure in Benjamin's (2004Benjamin's ( [1924) essay "Goethe's Elective Affinities," who is hailed as an "alchemist": while for the commentator or chemist, "wood and ash remain the sole objects of his analysis," for the alchemist, "the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been experienced" (298). ...
... His task was daunting from the start, as he was an insurgent archivist who knew of no touch with power that could provide repair or restitution. Noé's endeavor is redolent of the critic figure in Benjamin's (2004Benjamin's ( [1924) essay "Goethe's Elective Affinities," who is hailed as an "alchemist": while for the commentator or chemist, "wood and ash remain the sole objects of his analysis," for the alchemist, "the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been experienced" (298). ...
While studying immigrant worlding in Brazil’s nineteenth-century southern settler frontier, I stumbled across multiple ways of archiving, from poor farmers’ viva voce prayers and reminiscences to the nurturing of herbal gardens and usage of forest medicinal products to communal vital registries and home burials (including my ancestors’)—all bridging the sensual and conceptual realms through specific material constellations. I take the traces emanating from this unschooled sensorium as an “unfinished system of nonknowledge” forged against the specter of death, as in the 1874 fratricidal conflict that crushed the natural enlightenment of the so-called Mucker false saints. Here, on the edges of colonization, traces-of-what-one-does-not-know testify to the house as an ongoing index of survival and insurgency: both a cluster of materialities, relations, and affects through which complex practices of healing and living on emerge together and an archiving operation combining the historical and the unhistorical in the refiguration of humanness and futurity. As these flickering homespun traces exceed the racialization and necropolitics conjured by the ruling classes and confront brutal efforts at “silencing the past,” they also carry “the poetry it is possible not to write”—that is, folks’ imaginative and horizon-making capacities, which include the Spirit of Nature and relationships to our dead and which storytelling animates time and again.
... The Machiavellian idea of force, termed as 'economy of violence' (Wolin, 2016(Wolin, , originally published in 1960 advocates striking a fine balance in the use of force in the most efficient way possible by eliminating gratuitous and unnecessary use in order to achieve the desired result. Machiavelli sees force as a necessary element in the establishment of a new order, a 'law-making violence' (Benjamin, 1996) that the prince must abide by. Discourses: In Discourses (3:19,20,21,22,, through the examples of Roman leaders Appius and Quintus, Machiavelli puts forth that compassion is always more effective than cruelty. ...
... The Machiavellian idea of force, termed as 'economy of violence' (Wolin, 2016) advocates striking a fine balance in the use of force in the most efficient way possible by eliminating gratuitous and unnecessary use in order to achieve the desired result (1:5, p. 19). Machiavelli sees force as a necessary element in the establishment of a new order, a 'lawmaking violence' (Benjamin, 1996) that the prince must perform, which may be equally applicable for the leader/ manager. Cautious and low key (invisible) dominion is preferred to overt display of power (2:21, p. 177). ...
In business ethics literature, the figure of Machiavelli is often taken as a representation of that which is dark, sinister and negative—a source of inspiration for undesirable and unethical actions. In this research, we examine the evaluation of Niccolò Machiavelli’s thought in extant studies, and posit that Machiavelli’s works consist of ideas that may appear contradictory, which, coupled with historically contextualized close reading of his texts have more to offer. In this theoretical investigation, we construct new conceptual categories of a leader’s decision-making rubric and attempt to provide a structured framework that will allow us to specify the boundary conditions under which the apparent contrary views may be accommodated, by undertaking a close reading of Machiavelli’s texts. Our work contributes to business ethics literature in at least three ways. First, we present a holistic assessment of the research area that applies the tenets of Machiavelli’s writings to business ethics, management, and organizational studies, and delineate the dominant themes. We outline and substantiate the informal research networks, thought structures, and “invisible colleges” that form the intellectual framework of this research area through a bibliometric analysis and literature review. Second, we present a contextualized close reading of Machiavelli’s major treatises. Third, we reimagine the critical landscape of business ethics literature, specifically pertaining to Machiavelli’s oeuvre by shifting the single-minded focus from The Prince, by including The Discourses, which, as we show, has new and unprecedented implications for business ethics. In light of this, the parameters for ethical action by business leaders can be redrawn according to a Machiavellian schema. This marks a radical departure from the long-standing association between Machiavelli’s tenets and the absence of ethics, instead proposing a more positive and affirmative relationship between Machiavelli and business ethics. Specifically, while pointing out that the existing ethical frameworks foisted on Machiavelli’s texts do not do justice to the political philosopher’s worldview, which are complex insights into ideas of leadership, we urge researchers to incorporate the thoughts offered in this research in future investigations.
... The Watch, sold as a tool (or toy) to 'track', 'control', 'pay' and so on (as Apple's short films tell us), is really just another repetitive mindless task 'in ultramodern getup' (Benjamin, 1999: 116), extracting a surplus labour of leisure with every touch or tap, in an 'instant' that mimics the reduction of labour to gestures and digits in time (Benjamin, 2003) for little real gain: I won a badge. Not a plastic or metal one that I can pin on my shirt, but a brightly-coloured one that glows on my Apple watch, and can now be found safely stored in a digital vault between my arm and my phone (where I can return and see what I own). ...
... Play and work are closely linked: both in repetition and tactility, and in the transience of a touch that lasts only as long as it is embodied. The Watch is a hybrid object that does everything and nothing, hyper-connected to the multitude of forces that is the Internet of Things (Swan, 2012), highly suggestive of ludic interactions, but ultimately – in the cyclical 'drudgery of labour' it demands (Benjamin, 2003)– it 'has no connection with the preceding gesture' (p. 330). ...
In this article, we will use autoethnographic accounts of our use of the Apple Watch to analyse a new type of ludic labour that has emerged in recent years, in which leisure activities are redefined in terms of work and quantifiable data. Wearable devices like the Apple Watch encourage us to share data about ourselves and our activities, dividing our attention in everyday contexts as ‘quasi-objects’ that need our input to hybridise work and play, offering opportunities to merge leisure and labour, and also the possibility for resistant practices in the interstices between function and failure. We combine perspectives from Science and Technology studies, media studies and play studies, including the ‘quantified self’ and the ‘Internet of Things’, to argue that while the Apple Watch moves us closer to merging with the machine, its inability to provide what it promises offers a way out – a more positive understanding of intimate, wearable computing technology.
... As such, Benjamin maintains that as a direct result of the emergence of "mass culture" and proliferation of newspapers, along with the accelerating nature of the publishing industry itself, the everyday lives of ordinary people are increasingly able to become described, reported and presented to the public itself. Benjamin (1934) actually refers to this transformation in reporting and publication as the "literarization of the conditions of living" and sees within it a great deal of emancipatory potential (Benjamin 2005: 742). ...
This paper reconstructs the views of Walter Benjamin - with particular focus and emphasis on his analyses of mass culture and its reproductive technologies. This reconstruction is intended to highlight how Benjamin managed to develop a powerful, insightful and multifaceted theoretical platform from where the contemporary technologies of mass communication and modern culture can be assessed and understood. This line of ana- lysis and investigation highlights how the first gene- ration of critical theorists found themselves in a particularly nuanced, antagonistic and dialectically laden position with regard to the technologies of mass communication and the mass culture of the 20th century. It is further hoped that this reconstruction will aid us in our attempts to come to grips with the new communicational technologies confronting the society of the 21st century.
... Situated within spaces of remembrance that seek to produce alternative forms of knowledge, Courtheyn's work on the massacre commemoration practices of the San José Peace Community in Colombia explores practices of 'making memory with stones,' as being central to nurturing that solidarity and connection within autonomist movements, and as a material form of reflection practiced in the present (Courtheyn, 2016, p. 943). Benjamin remarks that the 'traces of the storyteller cling to a story the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel,' (Benjamin, 2002(Benjamin, [1936: p. 149) emphasising a notion of craft and tactility that lends itself to understanding cultural artefacts as forms of storytelling. These metaphors of craftwhilst perhaps romanticising pre-industrial modes of labourallow Benjamin to tell a story of change whereby after the First World War, 'stories are lost; that is to say, textured experience, graspable experience, is lost because of the loss of the weaving and spinning activities that went on while they were heard. ...
This article explores creative remembrance practices within the 39 and 40th commemoration of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising. It draws on interviews, cultural artefacts, and fieldnotes to focus on tactile forms of storytelling with an attentiveness to their potential to generate different affective encounters in a context of prolonged crisis, and rising neo-fascist, structural and police violence. The article discusses the ways in which the annual coming together on the site of the uprising creates a meaningful, intergenerational space of encounter, a time for reflection and sharing discontinuous histories of resistance, oppression, and solidarity. I propose that the specificities of the annual coming together can be considered a “space of transmission,” a concept that brings recent scholarship in urban geography on storytelling and spaces of encounter into dialogue with Walter Benjamin's work on tradition. This article contributes to urban studies through highlighting the importance of sustaining “spaces of transmission” in the context of wider situated practices of everyday urban politics.
Mexico's public security has been progressively moving towards militarization for at least eighteen years. The army's participation, previously reserved for war and exceptional junctures, has normalized. This article critically reviews the military's role in Mexico's bloodshed and human rights crisis during the 2006-2024 period. I argue that the ongoing phenomenon has perpetuated the cycle of violence, threatened democratic standards, and severely impacted human rights. In this framework, I question whether the policy of militarization can be placed in the context of a de facto state of exception. My aim, in short, is to assess the ways in which militarization reinforces exceptionality and how they both signal a counter-phenomena to human rights.
This fiction article is about trauma and grief, resilience and the celebration of life. It also addresses the role psychedelics can play in bringing about change in our traumatized society by inspiring us and showing us how to use the present as a possibility for fundamental transformation. It is written in the form of a short story to exemplify how these substances work and underline the critical importance of challenging protocols and conventional ways of thinking, and opening up a space for the unexpected. The story discusses societal trends, either already noticeable or hoped for, in the aftermath of the terror attack on the Nova music festival in Re'im, Israel, on October 7, 2023, where roughly two‐third of the partygoers were under the influence of psychedelics. Lilla, our fictitious main protagonist, first describes her experience on that day, at the interface of psychedelics and trauma. This part of the story is influenced by observations from our clinical work with survivors as well as by preliminary insights from our phenomenological study. She then goes on to share her fears, thoughts and visions, initiating a discussion on psychedelics and society. Read through the lens of Walter Benjamin's historical materialism, dialectics between past and present, old and new, we believe that insights from psychedelics can provide a critical view of society while allowing us to envision how this moment can be seized as an opportunity, right now, for creating a break in the continuum of history!
In this paper I present a novel understanding of diagnostic hypothesis that draws ideas from Walter Benjamin’s work on translation. My framework originates from previous literature that aligns diagnostic hypothesis with Peircean ‘abduction.’ I argue that the abductive step, rather than being an inference to the best explanation, is a strategic conjecture that is simultaneously interrogative and interpretive. While Peirce places the burden of interpretation solely on semiotic analysis, I develop a form of dialectical abduction that draws on Benjamin’s distinction between semiotic and mimetic faculties of language. I further argue that while all abduction functions through language interpretation, diagnostic abduction works not simply as interpretation but is more accurately described as the translation of patient narrative and clinician investigation into the language of clinical medicine. I then analyze diagnostic translation within the dialectical framework for translation described by Benjamin, and use this model to develop suggestions for a methodology of clinical abduction.
The expansion of presidential powers in many Latin American countries poses a serious threat todemocratic cohesion in the region. Chiefly, during the second half of the Twenty century, the administrativelegislation has overcome the boundaries of what is known as the Social State in Latin America. The latter has taken shape through constitutional and legislative reforms that have increased the “fire-power” of the presidential ruling. The “constitutionalisation”, as Loughlin calls it, which has taken place in Latin America at the begging of the Twenty-first century, shows up the instability of human rights of political and working-force minorities. Besides, the steady reduction of social security standards reflects the weakness of governments to take seriously economic equality as a priority. These social goals were some of the main conquests of democratic constitutionalism in Latin America in the late 1990s. Yet these constitutional changes represent the displacement of subcultures of the political scenario. Herein, Plan Colombia, as this essay will describe, becomes a neocolonial program that in the name of political homogenisation deploys warfare against basicliberties and social rights to enforce authoritarian presidentialism in the continent.
Ludwig Boltzmann’s Bildtheorie has been portrayed as a pre-cursor of the semantic view of theories and as such, the word “Bild” is translated as model. But this anachronistic understanding of Boltzmann’s use of Bilder fails to account for the wide range of roles they play in his understanding of scientific methodology. When the concept of Bild is understood historically in Viennese thought, a much broader sense emerges that leads to the investigation of its use in multiple ways in various contexts in the process of proposing, pursuing, and justifying scientific beliefs.
The ‘Romantic lyric’ as an idea or critical entity finds itself doubly maligned in contemporary lyric studies. As a perceived product of New Criticism, it finds itself accused by historicists of bringing about the ‘lyricisation’ of poetry in twentieth‐century criticism, and, as a mimetic model of subjective expression, it’s disfavoured by lyric theorists who view it as a stepping stone towards the currently common misconception that lyrics are a species of dramatic monologue. Yet returning to the Romantics themselves, we discover other models of the lyric that sit outside the expressive model or the paradigm of lyricisation, and which may well be of use to contemporary lyric studies. This essay offers a reading of one such model in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the form of lyric’s semblance character: Coleridge is peculiarly and persistently concerned with the way the world appears to be (which is often not how the world really is), and his lyric poetry figures as a kind of seemingness in its own right, and one that reflects on the nature of appearances themselves. Before making a case for lyric semblance, this essay offers an overview of the state of lyric studies today, taking as exemplary the work of Virginia Jackson and Jonathan Culler; it places emphasis on the role of the ‘Romantic lyric’ in both accounts, and teases out some of what’s at stake in the tension between historicism and formalism that is at the centre of lyric studies today.
Throughout the world, 785 million people lack a basic drinking-water service and at least 2 billion people consume contaminated drinking water. At the same time, numerous global water charities fronted by 'caring', politicized celebrity figures-dubbed the 'high priests' of global development by the authors of this article-have sought to 'solve' inequalities in access to clean water through market-based solutions and charity donations. This article engages with the fields of critical social theory, political theology, political ecology and celebrity studies to analyse the interrelationship between capitalism and religion, to interrogate the drivers of international development , and to historically situate the work of celebrity-led water charities and the growing role of these 'high priests'. It takes the case of Matt Damon's Water.org to examine the increasingly religious nature of these neoliberalized charity processes, and outlines the main elements of what the authors term a contemporary political economy of sacrifice. They argue that this results in charities that, rather than reducing inequalities, actually reproduce, normalize and legitimize the very system and exploitative relations that are responsible for these inequalities and environmental problems in the first place, while scattered and localized fixes sustain the illusion that things are getting better.
The Centre for Culture and Education "Logos" in cooperation with the Institute for Religious and SocialResearch and the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Tuzla organized a scientific conference: "Religion, Politics, Secularism" on the 2nd and 3rd October 2020., with the participation of scientists from Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), Croatia and Serbia. The consideration of the historical connection between religion and politics, through the meaningful understanding of secularization, contextualizes on the margins of the modern era where one can read the meaning and significance of the historical destiny of B&H and its social, religious, confessional, national, and cultural subjects. From eleven contributions from this scientific conference, only one of them (Tadic, Sljivo 2020) explicitly, and three of them implicitly (Krivak 2020, Pešić 2020, Hodžić 2020) contextualize the subject of their studies in the narrow framework of the given theme: "Religion, Politics, Secularism". The other seven contributions, although theoretically and methodologically outside of the (self)referenced, conscious epochal relationship of religion, politics, and secularization, illuminate the aspects of the problems in the question in their own way, and sometimes from a quite unexpected angle.
La crítica3 alude a la transformación y resistencia, y cada disciplina la asume
bajo sus miradas, pero ¿cómo comprenderla en tiempos de cambios
tecnológicos, postpandémicos y de incertidumbre económica? El presente
artículo ofrece una respuesta en diálogo con los estudios sociales de la
ciencia y tecnología, y el concepto de actitud crítica foucaultiana,
ejemplificada en el Programa Familias del Subsistema Chile Solidario. Esta
política pública es ejemplificadora por cuanto enlaza estratégicamente tanto
racionalidades de organismos internacionales como nacionales respecto al
abordaje de la pobreza, abriendo posibilidades para su transformación desde
el Trabajo Social. Esta profesión-disciplina actualmente es interpelada por
los fenómenos anteriores, los que demandan respuestas y acciones propias
desde y para los y las trabajadoras sociales. Así, nuestra propuesta consiste
en transitar desde una posición experta hasta un posicionamiento
diplomático, trasladándonos desde un domicilio estático a uno asociativo,
impregnado por mediaciones entre actantes humanos y no humanos.
This interview explores Fadi A. Bardawil’s general intellectual trajectory and the philosophical and methodological theses in his recently published book Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation. The interview explores themes such as the withdrawal from political militancy, the relationship between theory and praxis, the tension between immanent and external forms of critique, and the paradoxes of emancipation, among others. Bardawil insists on an understanding of Arab Marxism that neither takes its subject for granted nor condemns those who exit its tradition. The interview is prefaced by a short introductory book review that situates the themes of the ensuing discussion.
This article argues that David Markson’s four last works, often referred to as a quartet or a tetralogy (1996–2007), and Evan Lavender‐Smith’s From Old Notebooks (2010) can be classified as collage autothanatographies. Both authors construct their formally experimental books out of brief snippets that combine personal meditations on death with various facts, anecdotes, and self‐reflexive comments. What grants those fragmentary texts a degree of unity is their concern with mortality: the refrain “timor mortis conturbat me” reverberates throughout Markson’s tetralogy while Lavender‐Smith’s narrator announces that “death is the glue that holds the book together.” The article begins with an examination of the collage structure of both works. The formal analysis is followed by a discussion of the ways in which the works in question meet the generic criteria of both autobiography and autothanatography. The concluding part asserts the formal predisposition of collage to represent experiences of personal crisis such as an acute fear of death.
Despite the promise to save every life, the COVID‐19 pandemic has exposed social and racial inequalities, precarious living conditions, and engendered an exponential increase in overdose deaths. Although some lives are considered sacred, others are deliberately sacrificed. This article draws on the theoretical work of Foucault and scholars who further developed his concept of biopolitics. While biopolitics aims to ameliorate the health of populations, Foucault never systematically accounted for the unequal value of lives. In the name of saving the biological lives of people who use drugs (PWUD) during the pandemic, the harm reduction movement has emphasized the need for safe supply, decriminalization, and housing; governments have started implementing these measures, which were previously rejected as utopian and unrealistic. Paradoxically, the use of drugs itself, and therefore the increased risk of death from overdose or other medical sequelae, is the only way PWUD can achieve enough visibility to be recognized as a life worth saving. The humanitarian rationale of harm reduction concerns itself with the biological life and stipulates social and political rights in the name of its sacredness. This is what anthropologist Fassin and others called biolegitimacy—the recognition of life reduced to its physiological, biological essence.
Prevailing conceptions of disability in architectural discourse give rise to the devaluing of disabled people’s lived experiences. However, several studies in architecture and disability studies show how the experience of disability may lead to a careful attentiveness towards the qualities of the built environment that are relevant for design. Using focused ethnography, the authors of this article examine how architect William Feuerman’s disruptive vision impairment restructured his attention. The insights gained from his experience were incorporated conceptually into his design practice, and the resulting design principles were realized in one of his office’s projects – Urban Chandelier, a design intervention positioned in an urban installation. Feuerman’s experiences encouraged him to deliberately introduce disruption into his design, aiming not to disable everyone, but to make passers-by attentive to their surroundings. He re-organizes people’s modes of attention through the distinct visual qualities of architecture, generating new meaning, in a similar manner to the stroke that affected his attention. We conclude that considering disabled people’s lived experiences demonstrates potential in designing artefacts experientially interesting for a broad population, including but not limited to disabled people.
Prikazano istraživanje se u domenu teorije i filozofije bavi savremenim jezičkim problemima arhitektonskog crteža i pitanjima koja se tiču njegovih komunikacijskih svojstava. Arhitektonski crtež pritom smatramo kompleksnim medijem koji raspolaže višestrukom komunikacijskom ulogom – između ideje i njene formulacije u radu arhitekte i između arhitekte i drugih aktera u procesima interpretacije, analize, arhiviranja i izgradnje. Ispitivanje sprovodimo uzimajući u obzir dijagram, ne kao zasebnu vrstu crteža već kao jedno od osnovnih svojstava arhitektonskog crteža koje prevazilazi razlike u promeni paradigme sa ručne izrade na digitalni crtež. Uzimajući u obzir istorijske perspektive, u odnosu na savremeni trenutak predlažemo aspekte analize koji kroz pitanja jezika i dijagrama postavljaju kontinuitet u mediju arhitektonskog crteža i motivišu teme etike i politike crtanja u arhitekturi. Filozofsko-teorijski korpus istraživanja zasniva se na razmatanjima linije (Derida), slike i crteža (Bart) i koncepta prevodljivosti (Benjamin, Bendžamin). Utemeljenja u savremenim arhitektonskim teorijama izgrađena su na tezama o aktuelnim ulogama arhitektonskog crteža, o problemima prevođenja (Evans) i različitim aspektima dijagrama (Vidler). Oslanjajući se na istorijske, interpretativne i komparativne analize ovaj rad predlaže studiju koja u prvi plan ističe procese prevodljivosti i rezultira u domenu višeznačnosti arhitektonskog crteža i njene manifestacije u performansama dijagrama kao strategije prevođenja.
This article presents an ongoing project, Mneme‐Automaton/Memory‐Machine, which involves collaborative interventions with an existing body of amateur family film footage and written texts. As an integral part of engaging with this material, we identify our different relationships to it: one author as a direct descendant of its producers, the other with no personal connection to the collection. Although both of us are remote in time and space from the original contexts of its production, our intention is to identify a Benjaminian “now‐time” for the material to activate it in the present and render it visible and legible in new ways. In this article, we describe and appropriate selections of the film footage, thereby transforming it into an archive that evokes subjective and affective sensations and experiences that extend beyond the “historical index” of the source material.
This text is a reflection in action of an artistic process based on a scientific research. ENSAIO is the choreographic project that resulted from the translation mechanisms of laboratory concepts to a bodily approach, where it proposes a possible mainstreaming of artistic and scientific processes combined. This project joined artistic higher education schools in dance and scenic arts (ESD and FCSH) and Polavieja lab , a neuroscience research lab in Champalimaud Foundation – Center for the Unknown. This text aims to reveal the creative choreographic and performative potentials hidden in this scientific research concerning neurosciences. Identifying cross materials to artistic and scientific processes, it was possible to design a structure of the creation process and the construction of a choreographic performance. The common platform has been found in the process of translation and the definition of the same concept substrate, which made possible the approach of the two instances: studio and laboratory. One of its key features is the promotion of the communication among its agents: scientists and dancers. And the possibility of modelling and absorption from what it comes from this sharing and collaboration. The methods and the choreographic procedures mirrored and promoted this sharing and, therefore, the involvement of the body. Where, the body is the agent able to reflect and trigger this process, a body as an essay that is constantly in research. A body able to coordinate between various media and to expand the reflection on itself. Although science and art are individual instances that inevitably specialise and segregated away. Therefore, this text focuses on examples of cross-thinking of both scientific and artistic cultures, and the articulation of the theoretical and practical bodies in a practice-as-research on the development of the ENSAIO creative process.
In this research, it is examined how much the translation work called us Yunus Emre Selected Poems made by Talât Sait Halman reflects Yunus's understanding in the target language and the translation strategies applied in the work. The main purpose of the reserach is to find the answer to the question of Yunus Emre's idea and understanding in the translation of Talât Sait Halman. In addition, it is aimed to reconsider Yunus, which expresses the most needed human understandings centuries ago in today's world with his poems, to examine the extent to which the tasawwuf understanding translated into the target language is expressed and to create a unique tasawwuf terminology.
This thesis investigates the relationship between historical ethnographic photographs of Native Americans, their disposition in archives and collections, and the relationship of those images to their contemporary circulation and use by Native American artists, and others, particularly in New Mexico. Having undertaken original research into mid-19th century photographs in archives internationally, pertaining to Native America in the American Southwest, new histories and a reframing of the photographs in question has been assembled. This portion of the research was undertaken both as a starting point for further investigation, and as a return to the people of New Mexico, particularly the Indigenous inhabitants of that place. In light of the newly assembled history and reframing of various historical photographs within the photography complex/network, and in acknowledging the limitations of 20th century photographic theories, a variety of anthropological and visual culture theoretical frameworks, which value notions of ‘presence’ and ‘significance’ are given weight over previous ideas of ‘meaning’, ‘epistemology’ and ‘provenance’. This thesis explores the role of memory, notions of essentialism, and practices of racism, as they are strategically and aesthetically employed through the medium of the photographic image. The contemporary re-presentation of 19th century photographs by Indigenous artists is also examined, with an eye towards observing the manner in which, by reclaiming the past, Native Americans may go forward into the future in unimaginable and sovereign ways. The research centres on addressing the question: what is the role of the photographic image in the ongoing discourse about Native American identity?
This paper shows that contemporary Polish politics under the tutelage of Law and Justice (PiS) can fruitfully be analysed as a biopolitical production of political subjects. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s take on biopolitics, this paper asks how biopolitics and sovereign power materialized in two recent Polish parliamentary debates on EU sanctioned refugee quotas. The paper uses linguistic tropes to operationalize sovereign power and applies them to the analysis. The findings demonstrate the centrality of contingent factors in the ways to which biopolitics materializes in the debates and reveals the radically politicizing effects for a contemporary democratic system.
The Romanthropocene is a neologism that names the transits of meaning which shuttle between the terms it joins together. I explore this complex of meaning by retracing the histories of its component lexical, semantic, and conceptual elements. The word Anthropocene is constructed from two etyma, anthropos and cene, which first acquired their current sense in the Romantic period. The Anthropocene then brings together a Romantic conception of geological time with a Romantic conception of human cultures as empirical objects of naturalist study. While the history of the word Romantic is better known, it too merits retelling in the Anthropocene epoch. Its reflexive naming of the textualisation and historicisation of nature reads differently now that the human spirit has impressed its law on all earthly things. I would call the approach taken in this paper ecophilology, but one polysyllabic neologism per paper is probably more than enough already.
This paper contextualizes the Stanley Kubrick exhibition, a worldwide exhibition tour program dedicated to showcasing the complete oeuvre of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, within ‘post-cinematic’ conditions. Since the mid-1990s, the formal and experiential components of the cinema in the 20th century have increasingly become displaced from the traditional apparatus and site and ‘relocated’ within new technological and institutional platforms, and museums have become one of those new sites for content consumption. The paper discusses both the limitations and possibilities of the exhibition as it is considered to represent the migration of cinema into the art museum context as one salient phenomenon of post-cinematic conditions. The Kubrick exhibition is explored to uncover the underlying tensions of the ‘exhibition of cinema’ as a key trend of major international museums, between the movie theater as black box and the art museum's exhibition space as white cube. It considers the difference between these two institutional platforms and their conceptions of objecthood, artifact and the temporal economy of the viewing experience. The author argues that this event succeeds in realizing the possibilities for revivifying three constants of cinema: film auteur, cinematic apparatus, and intermediality. The ambivalence demonstrates that while the museum's exhibition of cinema inevitably removes some of its ontological essences, it also preserves and revivifies others.
Media use as a form of social action has risen to prominence since the 1990s with the proliferation of digital technology and its contemporary embeddedness and ubiquity. The Occupy protests and the Arab Spring demonstrated that widespread access to digital media potentially enables transformational social action that is multinational in scale and supranational in its effects. However, the development of the concept that various media can be used for either predetermined goals (media use for social action) or the emancipation of the society and the subject (media use as social action) has a historical lineage that dates back to Marx and has developed within paradigms as diverse as critical theory, media effects theory, propaganda theory, development communication, cultural studies, and collective action. This entry aims to provide a brief overview of these historical strands and also how they have contributed to our contemporary view in a rapidly evolving field.
Electric Signs
is a documentary film about signs, screens, and the urban environment. The film takes us on a journey through a variety of urban landscapes, examining public spaces and making connections between light, perception, and the culture of attractions in today’s consumer society. This chapter summarizes the research that underlies the film and extends the discussion of several key ideas. The film and this chapter are divided into six sections: New Sign Systems (the introduction, discusses the role that outdoor advertising plays in shaping public space and public expression in urban environments), Manufacturing Consent (the section looks primarily at Hong Kong and describes how networked LED displays are transforming public spaces in cities by creating a sophisticated level of mediated experiences; it makes connections between real estate developments, marketing strategies and technologies, consumerism, and public space), Sign Wars (this section looks at the political fight in Los Angeles between the outdoor advertising industry, politicians, and community activists who oppose more outdoor commercial signage; it also explores ideas about visual culture and the urban environment), Pale Daylight (a history section that connects the industrialization of light, outdoor advertising, and sign spectaculars), Media City (this section looks at the merging of the built environment and the media sphere; global cities; the etymology of the word screen; the connections between screens, surveillance, and data collection; and sustainability issues), and Urban Lightscapes (the conclusion, the importance of public space and people’s ability to shape urban environments).
“The Constellation of Social Ontology” says that Walter Benjamin, best known among scholars for his work on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in which he argues that all visual art, including its modern emanations like film, has always been constituted through modes not just of production, but also of reproduction. Relatively unknown, however, is that these claims about art and reproduction took shape as part of a larger set of arguments about the nature of historical knowledge and the ways that knowledge emerges and derives from embodied, corporeal practices. Benjamin made these arguments in his essay on “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian” (1937). This essay and its history further show that Benjamin’s thought belongs at the center of the Frankfurt School’s emergent Critical Theory in the mid-1930s, and reveals significant institutional and methodological links between Fuchs, Benjamin, and the major figures of the Frankfurt School like Max Horkheimer. More broadly, Benjamin’s work on Fuchs can be seen as a methodological attempt to demonstrate how critical methods that do justice to the material of history by attending successfully to the forgotten remnants of social, political, and economic life can create the possibility of concrete social ontology in the present.
Galvanised as a result of the founding of a film institute in Cuba in 1959, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos or ICAIC, which fostered documentary strongly, the documentary movement began to have a significant impact in Latin America in the 1960s. One of the highlights of the 1960s was La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), by the Grupo Cine Liberación, which provided the movement with a powerful philosophy of cinema as a form of political intervention. In the 1970s the lens of the documentary movement widened to take in national dramas; Patricio Guzmán's extraordinary three-part chronicle La batalla de Chile/The Battle of Chile (1976-1979) provided a meticulous record of the tumultuous months leading up to the military coup of 1973 in which Chile's president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown. In the mid-1980s a new movement of activists took shape with groups such as Teleanálisis providing a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse about political events provided on TV. New movements such as cine piquetero in the twenty-first century continued the political thrust of Latin American documentary by portraying the plight of the disenfranchised in the modern world.
The act of walking is examined as a basic and initial response and reaction to trauma. This is done through various modes of the practice of walking: Within religion walking is practiced as an a-nomic action, and it is developed here in relation to theories of trauma. Ritual is the space of processing trauma, and ritual walking is thus situated on the spectrum between acting out and working through.
This chapter explores sojourns and nomadic walking, journeys to the non-existent place (ex-territorial expulsion as well as Utopia) and as a reconnecting between the ego and the self, whether this occurs through punishment of the killer; the ostracized and banished from the city; and the ecstatic self-banishment of the prophet or hermit.
This also is the dynamic of the mystic walking as identifying with the displaced divinity, universal suffering, and a mode of ecstatic epiphany. Conversely there is the mystical act of redeeming, building up reality (both personal and writ large). On this level a distinction is made between regressive and progressive modes (Cordovero and Luria).
The projection of trauma in exploring space through walking is examined through its manifestation in Jewish time-perception, particularly Messianic conceptions of time and its progression developed by the Kabbalists—born out of the Spanish Expulsion. The strong affinities between walking as dispersion, scattering and collecting, and constructing—with its ramifications for internal identity construction—illuminate the modern conceptions of Benjamin and the metropolis.
With reference to Walter Benjamin’s work on nineteenth-century Paris, and Debord’s work on the spectacle, this article argues that the depiction of ruined cities in video games – as virtual ruins of the present – simultaneously reproduces the empty novelty of the commodity (the phantasmagoria of progress-oriented civilization), and offers a vision of failed progress through counter-spectacle. One means of understanding Benjamin’s dreamworld of modernity is through ruins and rubble – not only as material remnants, but in other visual or artistic forms that might reveal the illusion of progress as a fallacy, particularly in contrast to an urban-focused commodity capitalism. With an emphasis on Fallout 3, Hellgate: London and The Last of Us, and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series this article argues that, if cities can be read as dreamworlds, and films, art and ruination as the means for awakening, then urban destruction in the virtual sphere can provide a counter to the collective dream of eternal progress.
The study inquires on the ways content-specific social media pages can function as alternative public spheres, by examining the photography-orientated Facebook and YouTube pages entitled ‘old photographs of Thessaloniki’. The study focuses on the online encountering of absences, notably events of socio-political importance with a traumatic impact, which were marginalized by historiography and erased from the city’s material form. In particular, it looks at the ways these absences are witnessed, remembered and negotiated online, through their formal and informal traces. Departing from Benjamin’s and Agamben’s theorizations of memory, media and witnessing, and Derrida’s work on specters, the study concludes that the pages form a highly informed digital archive in constant development that fosters narratives enhancing cultural toleration and understanding, while challenging official master frames. A class-orientated understanding of the city’s ‘ruinification’ and oblivion is, however, undermined, although it remains in a ‘spectral’ form.
Screens today proliferate in all manner of public settings, from the iconic bank machine through rail station advertisements, Tube escalators and information panels to museum displays. They are, by turns, tools to get money and information; platforms to advertise, entertain, instruct and inform; and media to attract, occupy, preoccupy and distract your attention. Their presence or absence is an indication of modernity, tackiness, concern or suspicion. Built into them is a random spectator whose momentary glance whilst hurrying through their everyday resists the scrutiny and rich theorization traditionally enjoyed by visual studies of art or cinema. Who or what in these scenarios is the subject and who or what is the object? The address is not to one and everyone but to anyone. Infecting every facet of the urban experience, taken as a whole, they amount just so much visual noise, pulling your attention this way and that, repelling or seducing you with the warm glow of the commodity fetish. Despite the fact that we are dealing with moving images, investigating their medium specificity, their internal formal structures and the ingenuity of their siting, will not, on its own, suffice to understand the impact of this phenomenon on our daily experience of the city. The cinema that once might have satisfied the losses associated with modernity, when experience and contemplative thought were losing ground to representation and the fragmentation of perception, bears no straightforward relation to contemporary public screens.
Film is an urban phenomenon. From its inception, film has depicted the burgeoning city and screened these images to an urban audience (Bruno, 2007). Since the birth of cinema, urban landscapes have inspired filmmakers and storytellers. Even in the early soundless films, made in studios, the city was integral to film and was often constructed in new and bold ways (Bruno, 2007). Cinemas have always traditionally been situated within urban centres, limiting the audience but reinforcing the urban qualities of the medium. The urban film is an embodiment of modernity, reflecting repeated attempts to capture the fleeting moments of life in the metropolis.
This geography of media studies is concerned with the geographical, institutional, and national co-ordinates of mediatic inquiry; but at the same time, it insists that these concerns be translated through a local/global dynamic, such that the terrain it maps is tectonic and trans-locational. Speaking of the “transatlantic,” attention is consistently directed in this volume and this introductory chapter to the “trans,” that is, on sites of dynamic interfusion of cultural vectors, while maintaining the central focus of the present volume on two specific sites of hyper-active media theorization: North America, especially Canada, and Germany. This conjunction is historically justified, as the present volume argues forcefully, even where the outcomes of media research differ radically, as in the inquiries into orality and literacy of Innis and Kittler.
The legacy of the military comedy began with theater prior to World War I and later appeared in films prior to the Second World War. 08/15 provides citizens of postwar West Germany with a model for dealing with the future while also reconciling with the past. One of the implicit missions of 08/15 was to provide West German citizens with valuable lessons about how to deal with the war. It also attempted to build upon some of the positive traditions of the pre-Nazi legacy. 08/15 highlights the importance of breaking down class barriers. Paul May's war movie also contained a new type of masculinity, an important contribution of the female characters to evolving gender issues, and a shift away from more traditional notions of morality. May also attempted to impose certain barriers to distance the military and the German viewer from the problematic past.
Deadliness always brings us back to repetition: the deadly director uses old formulae, old methods, old jokes . . . they do not start each time afresh from the void, the desert and the true question—why clothes at all, why music, what for? A deadly director is a director who brings no challenge to the conditioned reflexes that every department must contain (Brook, 1968, p. 39).
Kant's Copernican RevolutionGerman Idealism: Fichte, Schelling, HegelEarly German Romanticism: Schlegel, Novalis, HölderlinLegaciesReferences and Further Reading
This paper responds to a recent paper by Wolfgang Giegerich entitled 'Two Jungs: apropos a paper by Mark Saban'. Giegerich disputes my assertion that the 'rigorous notion' at the heart of his psychology 'finds no source in Jung's psychology, implicit or explicit'. In order to do this he posits the existence of two Jungs, an exoteric Jung and an esoteric Jung. The implications of Giegerich's binary scission of Jung are explored in this paper, and show that the tendency to exalt one Jung while disparaging the other betrays a comprehensive blindness toward the contradictory complexity of Jung's psychology as a whole. It is suggested that this blindness is the consequence of Giegerich's systematic prioritization of a neo-Hegelian agenda that is in profound conflict with the telos of Jung's psychology.
Reclaiming Beauty is a title bringing together authors from a range of fields (architecture, political and social disciplines) each employing their particular view to the role of beauty in social life and in the academy.
The idea for this book was born from the perception that beauty in the contemporary world should not simply based on the pursuit of senses, instead- it is deeply penetrated by rational concerns and forces. Evidence for this is visible in the phenomena of Palaeolithic cave paintings, ancient Greek politics and culture, Renaissance paintings and modern city planning.
In this article I explore the relationship between the secular and ‘cultural’ Catholicism in France through the lens of a contemporary art exhibit displayed at a new project of the French Catholic Church. Visitors’ varied responses to the exhibit, I argue, ultimately reinforced the organizers’ claim that the activities that occur within this ‘non-religious’ space of the French church are self-evident aspects of a broadly recognizable and ‘secular’ French or European culture.Au-delà du blasphème ou de la dévotion : art, siècle et catholicisme à ParisRésuméL’auteure explore ici la relation entre le séculier et le catholicisme « culturel » en France à travers le prisme d’une œuvre d’art contemporain exposée dans le cadre d’un nouveau projet de l’Église catholique française. Selon elle, les réactions diverses des visiteurs à l’exposition sont finalement venues à l’appui de l’affirmation des organisateurs selon laquelle les activités qui s’inscrivent dans l’espace « non religieux » de l’Église française sont des aspects évidents d’une culture « séculière » française ou européenne largement reconnaissable.
Despite his con dence that he could create a simple and lucid masterpiece of descriptive narration, Adalbert Stifter’s “Tourmaline” turned out to be the most obscure and complex tale in his story-collection Many-Colored Stones (1852). This essay traces the cryptological drive undermining the coherence and closure the realist nar- rator attempts to provide. Stifter’s abundant description of seemingly super uous details, the numerous narrative gaps and various rumors confuse any suf cient account of what really happened. The breaks and leaks in sto- rytelling can be understood as indices leading to a sub- merged work of mourning. The pedagogical intention organizing Stifter’s meticulous story-telling not only in this story turns upon itself through the incessant sup- ply of these commemorative indices or fragments. Not only is such pedagogy unable to nd an ef cient narra- tive mode, it also consistently undermines the authority whereby the instructor-narrator might come to terms with his own tale.
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