The Emergence of Social Space
... This has echoes with Rimbaud's work, as Ross tells us that in Rimbaud, just as in Bonney's 'Letters', and in the communal surround they emerge from, what is slander for some becomes a rallying cry for others. 47 up to East Sixty-Seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw.' 55 In a discussion of this quote, Bonney states: 'In response to the bohemian clichés about the "tortured genius" we ask who is it doing the torturing, and would it not be better to take revenge on that torturer than for Bird to transmute the wounds of that torturing into the beauty of his music.' 56 The 'mystical shell' I have been touching on might return here as a conch, a wind instrument for Baraka's Charlie Parker. But it is also the boot, the a percussive instrument of torture in the image accompanying 'Further Notes on Teargas' (see Fig. 2) -a shell whose allegedly 'rational' kernel is mangled flesh. ...
This essay supplements Sean Bonney’s note-taking and note-playing practice by discussing the role of mysticism in his later work, roughly ranging from 2011 to 2019, in order to offer a preliminary reading of the poem ‘What Teargas is For’. I’m going to begin with a gloss on Bonney’s ‘Notes on Militant Poetics’ in order to explicate his understanding of ‘esoteric poetry’ and ‘poetic mysticism’. Those ‘Notes on Militant Poetics’ suggest that for Walter Benjamin the political crisis of the 1930s would ‘reveal the rational kernel of poetic mysticism’. What is poetic mysticism, and how would crisis crack it open to reveal its kernel? Those forms of art which currently rally under no particular banner, but which have been variously termed ‘avant-garde’ and ‘innovative’, have often had terms like mysticism and esotericism and degeneration and decadence and nonsense applied to them as slurs. I am interested in how these terms of denigration, with all their baggage, become raw material for Bonney’s thinking. Changing the valence and meaning of words and phrases and sentences is a frequent topic as well as tactic in Bonney’s work, and this is dramatized in the poem ‘What Teargas is For’ through references to the mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing, as well as the work of Lou Reed, Arthur Rimbaud, and William Blake. ‘What Teargas is For’ and ‘Further Notes on Teargas’ invoke mysticism in order to explore the relationship between protests, how protests are policed, and the continued privileging of the rich and powerful in the contemporary era. I want to highlight a wider dynamic in Bonney’s work which goes beyond ‘What Teargas if For’, a dynamic in which words and their definitions are shown to be sites of conflict. In doing so, I also want to illustrate how mysticism and esotericism are extremely important to Bonney’s poetic and critical vocabulary.
... The transformations of the border and its acceleration during the pandemic draw a new strategic border space and highlight the political and strategic character of the construction of the space itself, as Kristin Ross (1989) classically analyzed. At the same time, they accentuate the complexity of the relationship between sovereignty and territory inherent to the process of globalization. ...
Every crisis is a moment both of the intensification of borders (social,
economic, geographical …) and of their potential breaking down – a moment of the reaffirmation of a certain social model and of its questioning. Borders have acquired centrality in the imaginary of the management of the pandemic. They are a constitutive part of the pandemic condition, endowed with a new symbolic and cognitive force. The new importance of borders in times of a pandemic also shows the complexity of the concept of border itself and accelerates the trends underway regarding borders' transformations. The pandemic draws a new strategic border space and accentuates the complexity of the relationship between sovereignty and
territory inherent to the process of globalization. The massive interventions by states to shore up the economy and support businesses and
workers have the goal of stabilizing the economy, without any intention of
entering into a logic of redistribution and expansion of public services.
These massive bailouts may simply be the prelude to a more virulent phase,
where a crisis of legitimacy and a crisis of social reproduction and of the
global forms of governance of neoliberalism are interwoven. The contradiction between the free movement of capital and goods and the limited movement of labor that characterizes globalization can be further
intensified, while the rhetoric of borders and control takes on new
relevance.
... With illustrative reference to Faust, Berman discusses how modern values of development, expansion, flow, and newness plunged cities like Paris and New York into conditions of social crisis through the destruction and homogenizing of space and the removal of the "people in the way". Divisions created by massive infrastructural development projects of modernity are inherently connected to displacement and the economic disenfranchisement of poor residents and local independent businesses that results when neighborhoods are decimated (Jacobs 1961;Ross 1988;Lefebvre 1967Lefebvre translated 1996Harvey 2012). Design can reinforce class separation, policing, privatization, and the persistence of racial inequality through the built environment (Fry 1989;Schein 1999;Wilkins 2007;Maldonado and Cullars 1991;Cresswell 2006). ...
As professionally trained designers position their practices as central to social change, they bring with them efficiency in process, technical expertise, sophisticated aesthetic skills, and highly scripted narratives. In economically challenged cities like Detroit, creative professionals are hired to help transform neighborhoods that are described as abandoned, disorderly, and “blighted”. Residents of these neighborhoods are increasingly asked to engage in stakeholder meetings and design charrettes that promise greater inclusion and “a voice” in the process. These activities and interventions are sometimes framed as Design Thinking, human-centered design, or participatory design. However, as designer-adapted, re-contextualized anthropological methods, these approaches may ultimately diminish the value and understanding of applied anthropological enquiry. The author argues that design anthropology can offer a deeper, more grounded, and more equitable approach to design and design research processes in contexts of “urban renewal.”
This article theorizes how femme sociality and world-making provide a counterpoint to a politics that aims for neutrality or innocence, arguing that neutrality or innocence are hallmarks of different forms of patriarchy. Instead, the authors offer embracing complicity as a concept that structures practical ethics centered in abolitionism and nondisposability. Complicity is formulated as a mode of self-understanding that guides action, evading the social hierarchies demanded by a claim to innocence, uprooting (neo)liberal attitudes that look to evade friction by doling out punishment and exclusion. The proposal to embrace complicity is followed by a proposal for solidarity based on openness. Rather than being “right” or “solving problems,” a turn to the sensuous provides a form of world-making that can hold difference—without reducing life to the single organizational forms characteristic of liberalism. As a key part of this form of solidarity, the authors show how trans femmeness emphasizes possibilities for social and sensorial transformation. Practices of care and solidarity allow one to entangle with different forms of life. Instead of reforming the structures of oppression, femme practices encourage us to unlearn and uproot institutional forms that reproduce social and material oppressions, and to take agency in (re)constructing and nourishing one's own worlds—to collectively plant the rose garden of struggle for liberation.
This chapter analyses the meanings and affects of work in Frank O’Hara’s poetry, as it manifests as style, temporality and landscape. What follows is an account of O’Hara as a poet of mid-century labour, registering post-war changes in the composition of laborlabour, the transformations of lived time these occasioned, the professionalisation of the arts, and post-war New York as a city of work and an imperial centre occluding it. I begin with an account of O’Hara’s spectrum of vitality: that is, its aspirations towards energy amid a constant threat of boredom. O’Hara’s access to the former and escape from the latter is then outlined as a poetics of effortlessness, of a particular kind: a studied nonchalance achieving its transcendences and effortlessness through work, as encapsulated in the Italian Renaissance’s concept of Sprezzatura. From here I move to the temporal rhythms of O’Hara’s energies: on the one hand, the alternations of labour and leisure found in the working day and the working week; and on the other, the tendency of new work practices to blur these alternations, as post-war labour draws more and more of non-work life into its orbit. Finally, I examine O’Hara’s presentation of the labour of others in these contexts. Here I judge O’Hara’s landscapes against William Empson’s definition of pastoral as a process of simplifying and beautifying economic power relations.
Robert Linhart's L’Établi recounts the author's experience of ‘établissement’ as a young Maoist militant in the months immediately following May ‘68. Ten years after leaving the École normale supérieure to work and politically organize at the Citroën automobile factory in Choisy, Linhart reflects on his experiences on the assembly line, and his attempts to organize an ultimately unsuccessful wildcat strike from within the factory. This article revisits L'Établi alongside Linhart's littlestudied critical writings on racism, imperialism, and capitalist production in order to foreground two interwoven, yet under-appreciated facets of the work, and Linhart's corpus more broadly: first, Linhart's critique of a dense racial and colonial logic which undergirded the division of labor and maintenance of orderly production in the factory despite the purported demise of the French Empire. And second, the his innovation as not just a political memoirist, but as an inventive literary strategist. To this end, this article focuses on the surprising movements of poetic effervescence which appear throughout L'Établi, which reveal themselves to be thoroughly interwoven with Linhart's anti-imperial, anti-capitalist project.
Tracing the demonstrative aesthetic shift in literary writings of fashionable London during the late 1590s, this book argues that the new forms which emerged during this period were intimately linked, arising out of a particular set of geographic, intellectual, and social circumstances that existed in these urban environs. In providing a cohesive view of these disparate generic interventions, Christopher D'Addario breaks new ground in significant ways. By paying attention to the relationship between environment and individual imagination, he provides a fresh and detailed sense of the spaces and social worlds in which the writings of prominent authors, including Thomas Nashe and John Donne, were produced and experienced. In arguing that the rise of the metaphysical aesthetic occurred across a number of urban genres throughout the 1590s, not just in lyric, but also earlier in Nashe's prose, as well as in the verse satire, he rewrites English Renaissance literary history itself.
This article demonstrates that Beckett’s play Not I derives from a hitherto unrecognized source: Rimbaud’s poem of synesthesia, “Voyelles.” Revealing the significant intertextual links between Beckett’s play and Rimbaud’s poem, the article demonstrates that the striking central image of Not I—the disembodied mouth spewing out an almost incomprehensible torrent of words—directly recalls Rimbaud’s image for the vowel I in “Voyelles.” Beckett uses Rimbaud, the article argues, in a way that is distortive and translational: the image for I is carried across languages and across sensory planes: from French to English, from words on the page to theatrical performance; from verbal to visual and sensory experience. The correspondences between Not I and “Voyelles” are not only directly intertextual, however, but conceptual. Beckett draws particularly on two Rimbaudian concepts: the otherness of the poetic I, and the notion of a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” Adapting and translating Rimbaud’s conception of synesthesia in “Voyelles,” Beckett develops a theatrical mode that explores and manipulates various forms of cross-sensory experience, including synesthesia, to produce a “theater of the nerves.”
The accumulation of objects as an act or tactic of political protest makes its debut in history during the “Day of the Barricades” ( Journée des barricades ) of 12 May 1588. Cordons were set up to protect Paris from social unrest and people barricaded themselves in, notably with hogsheads ( barriques ). The same phenomenon plays itself out again on another “Day of Barricades” – 27 August 1648 – the first “Fronde” (insurrection) against the young Louis XIV. Subsequently, the practice of erecting barricades is not reported in France until the end of the French Revolution, during the days of Prairial year III (May 1795), when the French revolutionaries, who had exclusively used offensive tactics since 1789, deployed barricades as a defensive action.
Over the past decade, there has been a renewed interest in time within human geography. This temporal ‘return’ is especially pronounced in areas of migration research, where current scholarship examines the ways that asylum seekers are forced into racialized spaces of waiting and uncertainty. There has been less attention to the temporalities of resistance, the multiple ways that migrants and migrant activists disrupt the temporal frameworks of migration governance. In this paper I explore the ways that sanctuary practices achieve these forms of temporal disruption. Sanctuary challenges the flow of modern, progressive time by altering time’s rhythm and direction. It does so through four alternative time trajectories – historical-memory, legal, collective, and spiritual – that effectively challenge state hegemony over the meaning and control of migrant time. This challenge enables new forms of resistance to normative disciplinary temporalities associated with the control of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. It also explodes the linearity and stability of the modern present, revealing a constellation of subaltern movements contesting both the violent flows and blockages of racial capitalism. Through recognizing and refracting these global movements in what Allan Pred termed ‘a montage of the present’, an alternative spatio-temporality of modernity may be glimpsed.
Anonymität entwickelt sich im 20. Jahrhundert zu einem markanten Begriff der Gesellschaftsbeobachtung, der Utopie anderer Existenzweisen und der Gefährdung von Ordnung. Die Gesellschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts erscheint mitunter als eine immense Hotelhalle, in der sich die Menschen bezugslos tummeln. Die Zonen des Anonymen gelten gleichermaßen als unfassbar wie auch als Kristallisationspunkte, wo neue Formen des Sozialen entstehen. Dergestalt lenken sie den Blick einer neuartigen Sociology Noir auf sich, mehr noch, über die Fotografie, die namenlose Menschen auf neue Weise in Szene setzt, entwickelt sich eine eigentliche Ästhetik des Anonymen an der alltäglichen Bruchstelle von Individuum und Gesellschaft.
Allein, die wissenschaftliche Bestimmung des Phänomens des Anonymen erweist sich als unmöglich: »Das Anonyme, das begriffen würde, wäre es nie gewesen«, so Jaspers. Genau in dieser Unmöglichkeit liegt gleichzeitig auch der Kern einer Utopie, eines Jenseits der gesellschaftlichen Ordnung. Anonymität erweist sich zusehends als eine Maschine zur Erzeugung von Fiktionen. Avantgarde-Bewegungen beginnen mit der Anonymität zu experimentieren – und scheitern.
So droht die Anonymitätsvorstellung mehr und mehr zum Mythos zu werden, und Foucaults Ruf, »wir müssen die Anonymität erobern«, lockt in eine Falle, wie die aussichtslose Suche nach Anonymität in den Adressräumen des Cyberspace zeigt. Denn was Anonymität selbst anonymisiert ist die Tatsache, dass sie stets einer Ordnung entspringt und mehr noch über Verrätselung dabei hilft, diese Ordnung an neue Realitäten anzupassen. Anonymität und moderne Gesellschaft sind so auf das Engste miteinander verbunden. Das Widerständige, so die These in diesem Band, liegt in den Namen selbst.
Anonymität entwickelt sich im 20. Jahrhundert zu einem markanten Begriff der Gesellschaftsbeobachtung, der Utopie anderer Existenzweisen und der Gefährdung von Ordnung. Die Gesellschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts erscheint mitunter als eine immense Hotelhalle, in der sich die Menschen bezugslos tummeln. Die Zonen des Anonymen gelten gleichermaßen als unfassbar wie auch als Kristallisationspunkte, wo neue Formen des Sozialen entstehen. Dergestalt lenken sie den Blick einer neuartigen Sociology Noir auf sich, mehr noch, über die Fotografie, die namenlose Menschen auf neue Weise in Szene setzt, entwickelt sich eine eigentliche Ästhetik des Anonymen an der alltäglichen Bruchstelle von Individuum und Gesellschaft.
Allein, die wissenschaftliche Bestimmung des Phänomens des Anonymen erweist sich als unmöglich: »Das Anonyme, das begriffen würde, wäre es nie gewesen«, so Jaspers. Genau in dieser Unmöglichkeit liegt gleichzeitig auch der Kern einer Utopie, eines Jenseits der gesellschaftlichen Ordnung. Anonymität erweist sich zusehends als eine Maschine zur Erzeugung von Fiktionen. Avantgarde-Bewegungen beginnen mit der Anonymität zu experimentieren – und scheitern.
So droht die Anonymitätsvorstellung mehr und mehr zum Mythos zu werden, und Foucaults Ruf, »wir müssen die Anonymität erobern«, lockt in eine Falle, wie die aussichtslose Suche nach Anonymität in den Adressräumen des Cyberspace zeigt. Denn was Anonymität selbst anonymisiert ist die Tatsache, dass sie stets einer Ordnung entspringt und mehr noch über Verrätselung dabei hilft, diese Ordnung an neue Realitäten anzupassen. Anonymität und moderne Gesellschaft sind so auf das Engste miteinander verbunden. Das Widerständige, so die These in diesem Band, liegt in den Namen selbst.
This article draws on the concept of the Production of Space (Lefebvre, 1991) to interpret the silence of one female international student from Japan in two semesters of study in a New Zealand Tertiary institution. Data from an English for Academic Purposes course and mainstream courses, and from various sources including video/audio recordings of classroom interactions, interviews, diaries, field notes, institutional documents are presented. The findings show that silence is produced by the academic social space in three aspects of perceived, conceived, and lived. The new perceived space of learning positioned the focal student as unfamiliar in her new habitat. The conceived space also silenced the focal student because the conceived space exerted socio‐academic norms in which the individual was not invested. Finally, the lived space produced a silent individual in the sense that she appeared as less powerful in her interactions with other peers because her sociocultural and linguistic capabilities were not on a par with those of other peers. The study concludes that space is an active, dynamic, and social being that regulates the individual's interactions and that silence should be understood in relation to one's positioning by the social space, and the appropriation of space by the individual in social space. Notably, despite being positioned as a silent individual by the academic social space, the international student exercised agency both to respond to her specific temporal needs in the host learning context and to realize her future aspirations.
In the Paris Commune of 1871, collectives, collective action, and shared spaces were imagined through metaphors of mounding and scattering. This article explores the material imagination that underlies these metaphors and several improvised urban constructions through which they manifested. In particular, it refers to a mound of sticks and manure built to cushion the fall of the monumental Vendôme Column, heaps of meaningless consumer goods, impromptu barricades piled up in the streets, stellar matter imagined by Auguste Blanqui, conjugations of terms in poems by Arthur Rimbaud, and ultimately the piled bodies of the Communards themselves. This shared preoccupation, I suggest, enabled collective improvisation and the “articulation work” of cobbling together a new public world (Star and Strauss, 1999: 10).
Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21598282.2021.2024765
As cities experience the effects of increasing inequalities, so social movements, scholars and even mainstream institutions are once again placing Lefebvre’s notion of the “right to the city” on the agenda. This new popularity often strips the concept of its political meaning, namely by approaching Lefebvre’s notion as juridical and as an aspect of a more general way of proceeding by planning, that has effects in terms of what is recognised as part of the political sphere, and of claiming the city. We aim to contribute to the debate through the discussion of a case study interested in a yearly festive event in central Lisbon. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s lexicon for an interpretation of popular involvement with public urban life, the article starts with an account of Lisbon’s Fordist socio-spatial segregation, and the neoliberal deepening of gentrification and profit-making urban regeneration. It then focuses on the Cape Verdean performative event Kola San Jon in the context of Lisbon’s Festas da Cidade, and the active involvement of inhabitants of Cova da Moura, a marginalised neighbourhood which has, over the years, drawn on cultural and civic activities for reclaiming a voice in the public space.
Indeterminacy is a term that has been asked to do a lot of work for literary and cultural criticism. For strictly formalist critics, it might be the quality of a text or artwork that both preserves useful ambiguity and invites participation from respondents. For criticism that challenges the status quos of social and political life, it is often the interpretive condition that can unsettle existing patterns of recognition and judgment. What this essay finds in the work of Lisa Robertson is a more situated notion of indeterminacy, one that relates indeterminacies of speech, form, and affect to the destabilizing effects that postindustrial capitalism can have and has had on cities and their inhabitants. Following a brief overview of indeterminacy as a critical concept, from New Criticism to poststructuralist theory, the essay closely reads Robertson's Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003) as a multi-genre study in Vancouver becoming “money” and the effects of this process on work characterized as temporary or feminine. Indeterminacy becomes a double bind for the speakers of her “Office,” in that freedoms of expression, feeling, or movement fold into occasions for speculation and displacement. Finally, the essay relates Robertson's indeterminacies to recent debates about the character of avant-garde writing, arguing for a more socially and historically contingent notion of aesthetic experimentation.
After Marx:Literature, Theory and Value demonstrates the importance of Marxist literary and cultural criticism for an era of intersectional politics and economic decline. The volume includes fresh approaches to reading poetry, fiction, film and drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary literature, and shows how Marxist literary criticism improves our understanding of racial capitalism, feminist politics, colonialism, deindustrialization, high-tech labor, ecological crisis, and other issues. A key innovation of the volume's essays is how they attend to Marx's theory of value. For Marx, capitalist value demands a range of different kinds of labor as well as unemployment. This book shows the importance of Marxist approaches to literature that reach beyond simply demonstrating the revolutionary potential or the political consciousness of a 19th-century-style industrial working class. After Marx makes an argument for the twenty-first century interconnectedness of widely different literary genres, and far-flung political struggles.
Fiche catalographique ( élaborée par la bibliothèque de l’EA UFMG)H918 O humor contra a violência / Myriam Bahia Lopes, Claudine Haroche (Orgs.). Belo Horizonte: NEHCIT, 2018. 168 p, il. ISBN: 978-85-67547-03-9 1. Historiographie. 2. Corps - Histoire. 3. Sciences Sociales - Histoire 4. Caricature 5. Littérature - Humour. 6. Arts- Histoire I. Lopes, Myriam Bahia. II. Haroche, Claudine. CDD – 907.2
Gesellschaft ist Ordnung. Doch jede Ordnung kennt auch das Ungeordnete, die Anarchie: etwas, dass sich nicht bezeichnen lässt, das Namenlose. Ein Name für dieses Namenlose musste erst erfunden werden: Anonymität. Damit ist ein Grundstein gelegt von heftigen Auseinandersetzungen, Such- und Jagdstrategien, Utopien, die die modernen Gesellschaften seit ihren Anfängen begleiten, irritieren. Anonymitätsdiskurse entstehen in Zeiten gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche, technischer Revolutionen, um neu entstehende Wirklichkeiten zu benennen, zu kartografieren. Aber die Beschreibung, Identifikationen, Einordnungen produzieren erst das, was Anonymität überhaupt ermöglicht: unmarkierte Zonen, zugleich Zonen der Instabilität und der Ambivalenz.
Der erste Band der vorliegenden Untersuchung entwickelt einen theoretischen Rahmen, indem er gängige Namenstheorien auf den Kopf stellt und hin zu einer Theorie des Namenlosen umformuliert. Dieser theoretische Horizont bildet den Hintergrund für die Frage, in welchem technisch-sozialen Zusammenhang Anonymität ausgestaltet wurde. Dies geschieht im Bereich der Textproduktion und dem Versuch, eine Ordnung von Texten, Wissen und Fiktionen zu etablieren und zu kontrollieren. In der Presse werden immer wieder heftige Debatten entfacht über Sinn und Legitimität von Zeichnungsrecht und von Publikationen anonymer Stimmen. Analog erzeugt die Erfindung der Sociétés Anonymes (Aktiengesellschaften) Kontrollkrisen angesichts anonym zirkulierenden Kapitals. Erst allmählich erregt die Präsenz von unbekannten Menschen in den Städten Aufmerksamkeit. Hier zeigt sich eine spezifische Konstellation erwachender Anonymitätsdiskurse: Die Leute kennen sich sehr wohl, allein die kontrollierende Beschreibung der anarchisch anmutenden Gesellschaft und ihrer gefährlichen Klassen scheitert. Was zur bürokratischen Überförderung führt, freut die Literatur. Die Erfindung von Anonymität eröffnete Zonen der Unentschiedenheit, der Ambivalenz, die bis heute fortdauern. Die vorliegende Untersuchung liefert Mittel, ihre Unhintergehbarkeit zu begreifen.
Gesellschaft ist Ordnung. Doch jede Ordnung kennt auch das Ungeordnete, die Anarchie: etwas, dass sich nicht bezeichnen lässt, das Namenlose. Ein Name für dieses Namenlose musste erst erfunden werden: Anonymität. Damit ist ein Grundstein gelegt von heftigen Auseinandersetzungen, Such- und Jagdstrategien, Utopien, die die modernen Gesellschaften seit ihren Anfängen begleiten, irritieren. Anonymitätsdiskurse entstehen in Zeiten gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche, technischer Revolutionen, um neu entstehende Wirklichkeiten zu benennen, zu kartografieren. Aber die Beschreibung, Identifikationen, Einordnungen produzieren erst das, was Anonymität überhaupt ermöglicht: unmarkierte Zonen, zugleich Zonen der Instabilität und der Ambivalenz.
Der erste Band der vorliegenden Untersuchung entwickelt einen theoretischen Rahmen, indem er gängige Namenstheorien auf den Kopf stellt und hin zu einer Theorie des Namenlosen umformuliert. Dieser theoretische Horizont bildet den Hintergrund für die Frage, in welchem technisch-sozialen Zusammenhang Anonymität ausgestaltet wurde. Dies geschieht im Bereich der Textproduktion und dem Versuch, eine Ordnung von Texten, Wissen und Fiktionen zu etablieren und zu kontrollieren. In der Presse werden immer wieder heftige Debatten entfacht über Sinn und Legitimität von Zeichnungsrecht und von Publikationen anonymer Stimmen. Analog erzeugt die Erfindung der Sociétés Anonymes (Aktiengesellschaften) Kontrollkrisen angesichts anonym zirkulierenden Kapitals. Erst allmählich erregt die Präsenz von unbekannten Menschen in den Städten Aufmerksamkeit. Hier zeigt sich eine spezifische Konstellation erwachender Anonymitätsdiskurse: Die Leute kennen sich sehr wohl, allein die kontrollierende Beschreibung der anarchisch anmutenden Gesellschaft und ihrer gefährlichen Klassen scheitert. Was zur bürokratischen Überförderung führt, freut die Literatur. Die Erfindung von Anonymität eröffnete Zonen der Unentschiedenheit, der Ambivalenz, die bis heute fortdauern. Die vorliegende Untersuchung liefert Mittel, ihre Unhintergehbarkeit zu begreifen.
This thesis provides an ethnographic account of a Women's Centre in North London and focuses upon the negotiation of a distinctive feminist community of identity at the Centre, in the context of the women's movement. This account takes issue with the usual classification of Women's Centres as one instance of a range of local manifestations of the women's movement and its implication that their organisation and structure can be inferred from an analysis of the movement. The thesis is organised in two parts. In the first part, the first chapter addresses methodological issues and argues that the thesis presents material which is not available from the sociology or history of the movement. The following three chapters consist of an analysis of feminism and the women's movement as the context of the Women's Centre. They examine its discursive, social and political dimensions, the different relations of its participants with the political cultures and social groups from which the movement emerged, and the forms and means of communication which structure its different dimensions. Contrary to the; commonly held view that the small group is the basic unit, of the movement, it is argued that the movement is organized on the basis of social networks. The second part of the thesis examines the feminist positions and social relations at the Women's Centre in terms of hierarchies of identity and difference. These hierarchies are demonstrated by the analysis of the spatial organization of the Centre and the social positions and life-stories of women using the Centre. The negotiation of identity is pursued in the final chapter in an examination of instrumental negotiations between the Centre and the local government. It is argued that the mobilisation of a distinctive community of identity at the Centre is achieved through the activation of cross-boundary social networks which extend across the social field of the women's movement and beyond it. The relatively permeable nature of the symbolic boundary of the Women's Centre permits both cross-boundary networks and strategic exclusions which function to accommodate different feminist positions. This accommodation of difference is contrasted with the fragmentation of the movement at a national level.
This essay argues for reading Kathy Acker in terms of what the author calls the “plasticity” of her sentences. These syntactic structures disclose Acker's attempt to expose and negate a bourgeois ideology of adolescence and maturity. The essay pursues this argument through a reading of Acker's novel In Memoriam to Identity, in particular its interest in Rimbaud as both biographical icon and literary precedent. The essay then argues that Acker's concerted literary attack on an ideology of maturity relates to the projects of trans literature at several critical junctures.
The article argues that the social life of racialization in Tunisia can be traced back to colonial norms and that one cannot speak of racialization in isolation of class differentials, elements that arose historically with the spread of the tandem colonialism-capitalism in North Africa. From a direct form of racialized violence leaving Muslim Tunisians on the low end of the colonial social ladder of worth, salaries, and the right to life, one moved to a more symbolic form of violence, with the south of the country quasi-racialized as less valuable than the urban coastal areas around Tunis and the Sahel in contemporary Tunisia. In a polity that reached independence more than six decades ago, one can witness the perpetuation of a north-south divide that dates back to the colonial times; but a historical reading of racialized brutality can help us recognize a distinct tradition of activism, in particular trade union activism around the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT) and protests in the southern part of the country, such as the one that led to the ousting of dictator Ben Ali in 2011. Through a discussion of diachronic forms of racialization, the article suggests that Giorgio Agamben's focus on juridical issues of exception is partly misleading, for many forms of exception arise outside of the realm of emergency.
The US has been engaged in coercive projects of counterinsurgency since the Indian Wars in the 19th century. Racist constructions of the enemy have been central to this process. Counterinsurgency has called forth new waves of contestation at every juncture, which has in turn shaped the very texture of military doctrine. This article draws on archival research, historical geography, and Marxist theory to trace the dialectics of counterinsurgency and insurgency through a series of turning points in US imperial history from the development of small wars doctrine in the 1930s to renewal of counterinsurgency during hybrid wars in Venezuela and Latin America in the current conjuncture. Through a conjunctural analysis, we argue that racism performs fundamental work in achieving consent to counterinsurgency wars, allowing capitalism to survive challenges to its legitimacy.
By applying feminist geographical theories and qualitative research methods, this article reveals Chinese women’s exercise experiences in urban spaces and discusses how women, through physical activity in neighbourhoods, public places and commercial facilities, constructed social spaces of their own. The findings show that exercise spaces are potentially sites for women’s health, well-being, social networking and collective empowerment. They challenge traditional gendered urban spaces by deconstructing the dual structure of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, inducing women to gradually shift from the ‘edge’ to the ‘centre’. Though the spatial differences in women’s physical activities reflect the diversity and dynamics of women’s spatialities, they also imply the continuous social powers on women in exercise fields, where gendered disparities and class stratification may be sustained.
This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. The guest editors, idea collective John Q, examine the relationship between method and academic writing by riding a train as a public editorial act and a way of practicing empathy in public scholarship. Contributors to this issue produce the very kinds of culture they critique. John Q tracks these activities as the careful handling of particular kinds of cultural production with a critical and ethical aim.
Inside Tunisian civic training programmes funded by foreign donors in the post-revolutionary period, democratic training collapses into neoliberal frames of being and doing. This paper traces the ‘soft power’ that imbues the glossaries of democratisation with a specifically economistic logic. It argues that this economistic logic influences the shaping of an emerging civic public in Tunisia along international objectives despite the translation of the civic training lexicon into standard Arabic or the Tunisian dialect and the multilingual code-switching of the training sessions. Engendering this young civic public as a counter-public to earlier articulations of civic awareness and practice – that are now construed as unruly, violent, and unproductive – the internationally approved glossaries of democratic deliberation and civic action recalibrate democracy as predominantly the space for free competition, production, and consumption. While not unique to Tunisia, the Tunisian case urges us to think of the paradoxes of democratic transition in places where the state simultaneously strives to build institutions of liberal representative democracy and simultaneously alters the meaning of liberal representative democracy along neoliberal lines.
In 1950s’ Beijing, planners conjured up a city that could fulfill three different but inseparable functions: it should be a productive city, with a sizable industrial proletariat; it should serve as the host of a vast bureaucracy; and it should be remade into a more perfect urban structure, in which the people’s needs could be satisfied and themselves remade into new socialist individuals. This chapter traces the increasing distance between the projects of the planners and practices at street level, where the needs of bureaucracy and production led to scattered urban development and to continuing forms of oppression. I argue that these contradictions—reflected in Beijing’s urban structure—were intrinsic to the very project of Maoist modernization.
Over the last twenty years we have witnessed an increasing prevalence of ethnographic studies concerned explicitly with the social and cultural life, and production, of space and specifically of the urban public realm. In line with a wider trend, many of these studies seek to analyse urban public life through the prism of the ‘everyday’, using accounts of the ordinary to explore the ways that city streets are used and experienced. In this paper I seek to interrogate this multifarious deployment of ‘everydayness’ in ethnographic work on urban ‘streetlife.’ This interrogation is both theoretical, exploring how the everyday became the privileged approach for studies of the street, and methodological, asking what is it about our methodological choices that lends itself to conceptualising public life as everyday, and what might we do differently? At the same time, the paper will draw on ethnographic work on London’s South Bank to open up a space to consider the exceptional in sociological studies of streetlife
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