We live today within a system in which state and corporate power aim to render space flat, transparent, and uniform, for only then can it be truly controlled. The gaze of power and the commodity form are capable of infiltrating even the darkest of corners, and often, we invite them into our most private spaces. We do so as a matter of convenience, but also to placate ourselves and cope with the alienation inherent in our everyday lives. The resulting dominant (...) space can best be termed totalitarian. It is space stripped of uniqueness, deprived of the “spatial aura” necessary for authentic experience. In Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura, Saladdin Ahmed sets out to help us grasp what has been lost before no trace remains. He draws attention to that which we might prefer not to see, but despite the bleakness of this indictment of reality, the book also offers a message of hope. Namely, it is only once we comprehend the magnitude of the threat to our spatial experience and our own complicity in sustaining this system that we can begin to resist the totalizing forces at work. (shrink)

When it comes to questions about alternative visions for philosophical engagement, Heidegger’s work makes for an interesting case study, especially if we focus on his texts from the turbulent 1930s. As a shortcut into this contested territory, it is instructive to examine Heidegger’s anti-journalistic gestures, centered on the question whether this animosity is bound to drive a wedge between, or rather prompt a re-approximation of, philosophy and public scholarship. To render this programmatic concern more specific, the present essay aims to (...) reassess Heidegger’s profile by considering his account of language as the “most dangerous of goods” bestowed on humans. This theme can serve as an expedient starting point for scrutinizing philosophers’ self-understanding as daring explorers in pursuit of profound insights into the human condition, and their ability to balance excitement and sobriety. (shrink)

Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas traditional theories of educational technology tend to focus on the harmonization of new technologies with extant curricular goals and educational practices, an educational (...) theory of technology looks to novel forms of technologically-mediated learning experience—from production pedagogies to role play in the virtual—to make visible the surprising relations, techniques, and opportunities that emerging media, and their attendant social contexts, may offer educational research. (shrink)

This article offers an interpretation of lawyers’ reactions to verse judgments, being judicial decisions rendered in rhymed poetry form. While, in recent history, there has been an unexplained break in the close historical connection between poetry and law, some judges nevertheless continue to render their judicial decisions in verse. This has met strong criticism from fellow judges, inevitably, but also from lawyers. However, there is no evidence in academic writing of anyone attempting to explain why lawyers are having these reactions. (...) Endeavouring to fill that void, this research employs hermeneutics to offer an interpretation of lawyers’ reactions to verse judgments. The article analyses the varied opinions uncovered in five qualitative interviews with lawyers of different backgrounds, and contends that a movement of poetry back towards its utilitarian origins would see lawyers change their reaction to verse judgments, instead viewing them as an appropriate form of judicial expression. (shrink)

This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the glamorization of the courtesan image as proposed by Baz Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge. The film sparked the appearance of high-street fashion inspired by the image of the 19th-century Parisian courtesan, which prompted the authors to examine how and why such images might appeal to female consumers. The critical analysis reaches beyond the images themselves to identify and discuss the modes of circulation of such images, and their function in achieving both the material (...) ends of capitalism and the promotion of one of the system’s core values. Moreover, the article hopes to illustrate the possibilities offered by integrating cultural and structural analyses of current social phenomena. (shrink)

Crisis jargon has become endemic in modernity. Whether in radical or in affirmative versions, the idea that ‘crisis’ offers ‘opportunity’, in accordance with the meaning of crisis as ‘decision’, is widespread. This paper questions the relationship between modernity and crisis, first by highlighting the ways in which modernity itself has been cast as ‘crisis’: first as crisis of tradition, then as crisis of modernity itself. The main part of this paper then consists of a reading of modernity-as-crisis inspired by Walter (...) Benjamin, most notably by his Passagen-Werk. It consists of an attempt to consider ‘crisis’ as what Benjamin calls a ‘wish image’, an image that contains hidden utopian ideals. In invoking ‘crisis’, I argue, a conception of modernity as shock, raised to the level of the collective, becomes apparent. Crisis jargon thereby remains wedded to what Benjamin calls a mythical conception of history. The paper ends with a discussion of the political consequences that follow from this that are grounded in the relation between messianism and profane politics in Benjamin. (shrink)

This paper considers a key text in the field of Cultural Studies for its relevance to questions about the identity of knowledge in education. The concept of ‘aura’ arises as being of special significance in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ as a way of understanding the change that occurs to art when mass reproduction becomes both technologically possible and industrially realised. Aura seems to signify something of the symbolic halo generated by objects of special significance (...) that is both powerful and indefinite. This paper argues that aura is in fact the necessary property of symbolic representation—and that it attaches as much to the figure of Walter Benjamin as it does to any canonical work of art. But the paper also claims that Benjamin’s argument about the significance of popular forms of art—particularly photography and film—can be updated and applied to critical questions about the established order of knowledge in education. This is particularly relevant to those curriculum domains where specific objects—texts, for example—are invested with powerful auras. It may also be applicable to all forms of established knowledge and curricula. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Harold Bloom, and Theodor Adorno this article proposes the re-imageination of international law as a ‘pure means’ of representation rather than a means of exercising control over the world.

To claim that there is a politics to or expressed within media technology is of course by no means new, but it remains controversial and not always well understood. Walter Benjamin’s (1986b) essay from 1936 on the political import of media technology is often regarded as the starting point of such discussions, since it foregrounds a key theme in critical theory, namely the politics of perception. In what follows, I would like to review the importance of the politics of perception (...) by first outlining Benjamin’s political analysis of cinema and then engaging with a critique of Benjamin by recent American cognitivist philosophy. This will allow a consideration of the competing phenomenological cognitive science of embodied cognition that I argue offers a better account of the mind and cognition than cognitivism. As a result of this analysis of cognition, I conclude that the philosophy of embodied cognition supports Benjamin's political theory of media technology. (shrink)

This paper discusses corporate entanglement, impactfulness and responsibility in the Anthropocene, amidst events and conditions that ‘uncontain’ time. It takes its direction of travel from artist Brian Jungen’s ‘Cetology’ (2002), a whalebone sculpture made out of cut-up plastic garden chairs, which conjoins the times of earth and world history, as it hangs in the air of the art gallery, ‘as if’ exhibited in the natural history museum. The paper relates ‘Cetology’s’ engagement with natural history, time, and commodification to matters of (...) corporate entanglement and responsibility within company law and governance. Problems with understanding the comparable imprint of large and multinational companies on matters, places, and communities are identified, after the domination of corporate legal frameworks over nature and the stability and perfection of economic incentives at law. The reading of this (critical-legal) situation is developed through theory and engagement with materialist and critical thinkers, who unite in their concern with distributed human–nature relations and the ‘concreteness’ that attends collisions in time, ruin and affect. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s writings are central to this analysis, and strengthen the commentary on ‘natural history’ themes curated by Jungen. The paper contemplates how times’ uncontainment might invoke a change in expectation and method for the company law field, assigning contingency to the corporation and provoking a new mode of reflection about corporate entanglement and responsibility at law. (shrink)

The article intends to retrace, from a historical-philological point of view, the main steps of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished research and works, conducted during his later years, dedicated to Charles Baudelaire. Setting Benjamin’s translation of the Ta-bleaux parisiens as the first result of his interest for the poet, the text delves into the composition process of The Arcades Project, from which the idea of a book on Baudelaire then takes shape. The article examines the crucial stages of this second project’s development (...) through the correspondence between Benjamin and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer especially: from the 1935 exposé for The Arcades Project to The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, to the 1939 essay On some Motifs in Baudelaire. The focus is set, in particular, on the dialectical-constructive method that guides Benjamin in the composition both of the Passagen-Werk as of the Baudelaire-Buch and the essays. Finally, the article looks back over the transmission history of the project on Baudelaire, intimately bound to the one of the Passagenarbeit: the vicissitudes and findings of various manuscripts, of which the complete restitution of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe is soon expected. Therefore, the peculiar relationship between philology and philosophy of Benjamin’s experimental method is then examined further in depth; the configuration of the research object’s monadic structure according to a historical perspective, albeit in the context of a work that remained unfinished. (shrink)

Drawing on methodological approaches used by visual anthropologists, film theorists and debates prevalent in the cultural studies literature, this paper is interdisciplinary in approach and attempts to tackle the challenge of collecting and analyzing embodied, sensuous and pre-reflective ‘data’ by advocating the value of integrating videography into research methodologies. The paper is illustrated with an examination of underwater videography footage, featuring scuba divers coming to terms with their surroundings. By considering the ways in which those featured in the film relate (...) to the onscreen images, upon watching the footage, the paper explores how we might begin to study and represent the ‘unrepresentable’ senses of, for example, touch and the somatic senses, including proprioception, in addition to the heightening or modification of these. (shrink)

What can postmodernism do for, or to, educational research? The article discusses its potential for resisting closure and simplification. Developing a ‘preposterous’, anachronistic postmodern method that is caught up with surrealism and the baroque, the article plays with trompel'oeil paintings and outmoded popular entertainments such as magic lanterns, peep shows and clockwork automata as figures for critique and analysis. It argues for defamiliarisation, fascination, recalcitrance and frivolity as methodic practices for research in the compromised conditions of postmodernity, and as forms (...) of ethical resistance to the risk-averse literalism that pervades contemporary education policy. (shrink)

Many different versions of cultural studies have emerged in the past decades. While during its dramatic period of global expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies was often identified with...

The paper develops a conceptual framework for understanding the work of ethical remembrance in the classroom. Using David Hansen’s recent example of using Sebald’s novels in his classroom to do the work or remembrance, the paper argues that the effect of Sebald’s novels is best understood using Walter Benjamin’s figure of the angel of history. That figure indicates a view of history that goes beyond the progression of everyday time, to one called remembrance. The paper suggests that the work of (...) mourning effects such remembrance, but simultaneously points to hope through the emergence of weak messianic power. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the concept of the flâneur, deriving largely from the works of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, and attempts to reveal its contemporary relevance for sociological practice. The flâneur is treated as an instructive metaphor for the sociologist's relationship with modernity and urban life, and therefore as providing insight into the social, historical and theoretical contexts for the analysis of the world today. More than this, the idea of the flâneur is treated as highly instructive of research strategies (...) confronting urban life, namely ethnography. The paper seeks to expose a critical space between ‘realist’ and ‘textual’ ethnographies and provide a locus for the discussion of associated methodological problems. A burgeoning literature and tradition of work in this area is examined which will also be of interest to the sociological theorist. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article explores the relationship between the historical materialism of Walter Benjamin and the poetics of Paul Celan, and claims that within Celan’s poetics, we find a form for thinking Benjamin’s Marxism beyond Benjamin. The driving force of Benjamin’s critique of historicism is the desire to free Marx’s ideas from the empty time of progress. By attending to the “breathturns” at the heart of Celan’s, The Meridian, this article uncovers a poetic historiography grounded in Benjamin’s now-time. It is with this (...) conception of history that Marx’s ideas can be reimagined as a historico-poetic materialism and reinvigorated with revolutionary force. (shrink)

Ron Harris captured the popular imagination in October 1999 with a website where he auctioned off the ova of fashion models to the highest bidder. This article treats the controversy surrounding Harris’ site within a dual frame of critical theory’s approach to reproduction and a folkloristic approach to discourse. The website fuses traditional narrative motifs and structures with the logic of advertising, seventies television, family-values rhetoric, and the fertility industry. I argue that the great attraction of ronsangels.com is that it (...) put into relief the intervention of mechanical reproduction in human fertility together with the state of genetics at the turn of the 21st century. The result is not only a disconcerting aestheticization and commodification of biological reproduction, but also the biological reproduction of a particular aesthetic and moral code—a generation of reality by model. (shrink)

The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in the work of (...) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions. (shrink)

In 2012–13, we signed up for Facebook in seven Middle East and North Africa countries and used Facebook advertisements to encourage young people to participate in our survey. Nearly 18,000 individuals responded. Some of the questions in our survey dealing with attitudes about women’s work and cosmetics were adopted from a survey conducted by the Frankfurt School in 1929 in Germany. The German survey had shown that a great number of men, irrespective of their political affiliation harbored highly authoritarian attitudes (...) toward women and that one sign of authoritarianism was men’s attitude toward cosmetics and women’s employment. We wanted to know if the same was true of the contemporary MENA. Our results suggest that lipstick and makeups as well as women’s employment are not just vehicles for sexual objectification of women. In much of MENA world a married woman’s desire to work outside the house, and her pursuit of the accoutrement of beauty and sexual attractiveness, are forms of gender politics, of women’s empowerment, but also of antiauthoritarianism and liberal politics. Our results also suggest that piety among Muslims per se is not an indicator of authoritarianism and that there is a marked gender difference in authoritarianism. Women, it seems, are living a different Islam than men. (shrink)

For the better part of the past decade, global social movements have drawn popular attention to the power of image production and acts of representation, particularly the ways ubiquitous cameras challenge the exercise of power This essay lays out a theoretical schema for interrogating a broader “politics of visibility” at work in the early twenty-first century, most readily apparent through the activities of smartphone-enabled and visually-savvy activists. As new media technologies have opened up new strategies of representation, these modes of (...) representation have been incorporated into existing media practices that delimit the ways in which the consequentiality of various movements and political projects can be understood. Theoretically revisiting the concept of visibility, this essay critiques the relationship between technology and the production of knowledge in media studies before arguing that the visibility of an event presages a consequentiality partially determined by the ways in which it is rendered perceptible and thus, intelligible. (shrink)

Notions of complexity, non-linear dynamics and self-organization in the natural sciences seem to resonate with certain literary and social scientific traditions of thinking about cosmopolitan life in a sense that may be more than merely metaphorical. Just as science speaks of forms and patterns which come into being spontaneously, unpredictably and `from below', so too is there a resurgent interest in a `baroque' vision of modernity which foregrounds chance encounters and `underworld' associations. The parallels are still stronger if we take (...) a consider the life-world of embodied cosmopolitans as including not only other human beings and human artifacts, but also the many non-human life-forms that make themselves at home in our built environments, in our networks, and inside our own bodies. Contra theorists of risk society, fusion of complexity theory with cosmopolitan aesthetics raises the possibility of conceiving of runaway biological and technological events as both creative and destructive. (shrink)

Johannesburg has been described variously as an elusive, genre-less, blank, even self-cannibalizing city. Without refusing such rhetorical play, this article seeks to secure a mode of urban analysis that attends to the city’s material losses as well as its conceptual elisions. In so doing, it engages the critical potential, in particular, of melancholy, establishing through this concept not just an affective condition or a psycho-spatial categorization, but a way of mapping the city. Through analysis of Mark Gevisser’s Lost and Found (...) in Johannesburg, this article follows his self-styled ‘dispatcher’s eye’ in its efforts to navigate those spaces in the city otherwise erased from the city’s self-image. In particular, it finds important precedence in Ranjana Khanna’s notion of a ‘postcolonial melancholia’, as well as interventions by Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, as it elaborates upon the imaginative as well as political claims made available by such a melancholy mapping of Johannesburg. (shrink)

In Robinson in Ruins, the third of Patrick Keiller’s trilogy of fictionalised documentaries concerning the wanderings and speculations of an unseen protagonist, the narrator informs us that Robinson had been reading Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which ‘locates the origin of twentieth century catastrophe in the development of market society in England’. Polanyi identifies how the self-regulating market is not a naturally emergent social form, but was the product of the active interventions of the state. For Robinson (and for Keiller) (...) the contradictions between displacement and dwelling generated by laissez-faire can be revealed and challenged by an exploration of the relationships between landscape, space and politics. The melancholy tone of this trilogy can also be sensed in one of Henri Lefebvre’s final essays, in which he laments the dissolution of the utopian promise of the urban that he once dramatised through his thesis of the ‘urban revolution’. This article explores the themes that drive Keiller’s approach in the Robinson trilogy and draws out the associations in these works to Lefebvre’s writings on the politics of space, Polanyi’s critique of laissez-faire capitalism, and Walter Benjamin’s response to the historical catastrophe we understand as ‘progress’. I will argue that Keiller’s engagement with the idea of catastrophe, through spatial, social and historical registers, is an attempt to link the material ruins of our present with utopian imaginings of alternative forms of sociality—beyond the conceptual limits of capitalist realism and the catastrophic futures of neoliberal space. (shrink)

The flâneur has remained little more than a hazy, nostalgic figure since first described in detail by Baudelaire in 19th-century Paris. Here, the work of Walter Benjamin, who did more than any other to advance the notion of flânerie post-Baudelaire, is considered alongside that of his friend and critic Theodor Adorno, in an attempt to conceive of a modern-day version of the type. The many critical exchanges between Adorno and Benjamin are envisioned as a moving dialectic: a constant interplay between (...) anticipation and suspicion. What results is a concept of flânerie that mingles a tentatively optimistic Benjamin with a perpetually sceptical Adorno, in order to conjure up an image of the individual strolling and wandering about the margins of contemporary urbanity, balanced on the cusp of hope and hopelessness. (shrink)

Este ensayo analiza algunas semejanzas y diferencias entre la obra de Emmanuel Lévinas y la obra de Walter Benjamin . Se discute la crítica de ambos autores a la noción de totalidad, su cuestionamiento del historicismo y la exclusión de la alteridad que asocian con él, así como la propuesta de ambos autores de una noción de tiempo que rompa con la continuidad. Se discute de qué manera estas reflexiones se relacionan con la noción de responsabilidad hacia el otro.

Urban void sometimes amplifies alienation within urban space, and thus leads the way to the human craving for authenticity. Juxtaposing urban void with the conventional notion of urban objects, furthermore, conforms to Nietzsche's distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian deportment. The Apollonian is at the founding of the Platonic myth of the Ideal City and its modern descendant, the myth of the Rational City. Modern urban planning has been object-directed and, consistent with the historical trend since the Renaissance, has become a (...) constituent of a Neo-Platonic mythology that insists on forging a city as an urban technological artifact. Most existing urban parks and squares, as well as suburban gardens, within this approach, only augment the subordinate standing of urban voids. Yet the significance of urban void, as the unplanned place that represents the pre-rational, the genuine and the unadulterated, ought to lead to its re-introduction into city-form as a conduit for self-reflection and authenticity. Recognizing urban void for its significance may reintroduce an important Dionysian feature into city-form, leading to deliberate carving of authentic urban spaces. (shrink)

Mutual feedback between human-made environments and facets of thought throughout history has yielded two myths: the Garden and the Citadel. Both myths correspond to Jung’s feminine and masculine collective subconscious, as well as to Nietzsche’s premise of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art. Nietzsche’s premise suggests, furthermore, that the feminine myth of the Garden is time-bound whereas the masculine myth of the Citadel, or the Ideal City, constitutes a spatial deportment. Throughout history the two myths have continually molded the built (...) environment and thought, but the myth of the Ideal City – from Plato to Descartes to modernity – came to dominate city-form and ensuing aspects of contemplation. This relationship seems to have shifted during the twentieth century. Intellectual dispositions have begun to be largely nurtured by an incongruous city-form emerging from the gap between the incessant promise for an automated, well-functioning city, on the one hand, and looming alienation, coupled with the factual, malfunctioning city, on the other hand. Urban decay, a persisting and time-bound urban event that is a byproduct of this configuration, suggests the ascent of the Garden myth in post-modern city-form. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race provides up-to-date explanation and analyses by leading scholars of contemporary issues in African American philosophy and philosophy of race. These original essays encompass the major topics and approaches in this emerging philosophical subfield that supports demographic inclusion and diversity while at the same time strengthening the conceptual arsenal of social and political philosophy. Over the course of the volume's ten topic-based sections, ideas about race held by Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are (...) supplemented by suppressed thought from the African diaspora, early twentieth-century African American perspectives and Native-, Asian-, and Latin-, American views. The contributors bring philosophical analysis to bear on the status of racial divisions as categories of humanity in the biological sciences, as well as within contemporary criticism and conceptual analysis. Essays present the special applications of American philosophy and continental philosophy to ideas of race as methodological alternatives to more analytic approaches. As a collection of analyses and assessments of 'race' in the real world, the volume pays trenchant and relevant attention to historical and contemporary racism and what it means to say that 'race' and racial identities are socially constructed. The essays analyze contemporary social issues including the importance of racial difference and identity in education, public health, medicine, IQ and other standardized tests, and sports. Additionally, the essays consider the societal limitations and structures provided by public policy and law. As a critical theory, the volume compares the study of race to feminism. Historical and contemporary, academic and popular, racisms pertaining to male and female gender receive special consideration throughout the volume. While this comprehensive collection may have the effect of a textbook, each of the original essays is a fresh and authentic development of important present thought. (shrink)

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through (...) the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators’ philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what “really” happened in the past, literature’s powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of epochal and ongoing progression in interaction between mind and the built environment. Since early antiquity, the present study suggests, Benjamin’s notion has been manifest in metaphors of gender in city-form, whereby edifices and urban voids have represented masculinity and femininity, respectively. At the onset of interaction between mind and the built environment are prehistoric myths related to the human body and to the sky. During antiquity gender projection can be (...) detected in western perceptions linking natural and built environments, commencing with Plato’s Atlantis and his Myth of Er, and later as a likely import of the Chinese yin-yang mythology. Culminating with the Age of Discovery, alongside advances in experiential awareness of the Earth’s sphericity, respective feminine and masculine earmarks can be detected in early modern perspicacity of the Earth’s southern and northern hemispheres. Our conceptions of natural and built environments inherently continue to contain gender traits. Yet urban voids, as the feminine face of city-form, have been severely understated in the built environment. Through design and configuration of urban voids, allegories of femininity in city-form ought to be celebrated, not discarded. (shrink)

The modernization of Burgundy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on the coordinated efforts of numerous industrial and cultural sectors. Among these innovative developments, new tourism industries played a prominent role in providing new opportunities for the consumption of local products while redefining existing conceptions of Burgundian landscapes. This entailed collaboration of a variety of cultural intermediaries ranging from local boosters to politicians and from merchants to academics. Geographers contributed by incorporating symbolic, subjective, and performative practices into (...) the existing regional concepts of terroir and genres-de-vie. The result was newly scripted roles for tourists and locals to participate in gastronomic activities that, by virtue of the experience, altered participants’ experience of time, space, and themselves. Rapidly institutionalized in Burgundy, these developments illustrate how contemporary commercial interests influenced geographic notions of place in the French provinces. (shrink)

The modernist concept of life-building as an architectural method for improving the conditions of everyday life originated in Europe during the 1920s. This book explores three modes of functionalism by way of a comparative analysis of both the theoretical discourses and architectural practices associated with functionalism in Russia, Germany, and Sweden. These three countries made significant contributions to the application of functionalism within mass housing construction, the overarching purpose of which was to transform the traditional home into a rational living (...) space. This study provides both close readings of foundational modernist texts as well as an empirical study of the avant-garde heritage in Russia, Germany, and Sweden. As a special case study, a visual analysis of IKEA catalogues is presented, the purpose of which is to provide an illustrated history of modernist aesthetics within mass-produced living spaces, from the era of functionalism up to the present day. (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

One of the important challenges in the philosophy of mathematics is to account for the semantics of sentences that express mathematical propositions while simultaneously explaining our access to their contents. This is Benacerraf’s Dilemma. In this dissertation, I argue that cognitive science furnishes new tools by means of which we can make progress on this problem. The foundation of the solution, I argue, must be an ontologically realist, albeit non-platonist, conception of mathematical reality. The semantic portion of the problem can (...) be addressed by accepting a Chomskyan conception of natural languages and a matching internalist, mentalist and nativist view of semantics. A helpful perspective on the epistemic aspect of the puzzle can be gained by translating Kurt G ̈odel’s neo-Kantian conception of the nature of mathematics and its objects into modern, cognitive terms. (shrink)

Vilém Flusser's Vampyroteuthis Infernalis reenacts and actualizes the time-honored tradition of a mental experiment that purports to efface the boundaries between man and animal. This ancient conceptual device, known in Baroque times as physica naturalis, seeks to illuminate the world of culture by means of its approximation with the world of nature. Instead of opposing poles, nature and culture become reflecting mirrors where man can acknowledge his ties to nature and the animal kingdom. More than just a rhetorical trope, the (...) so-called allegory of natural history comprises what could be defined as a "philosophy of animality," espoused by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Gilbert Simondon and Jacques Derrida. In Vampyroteuthis, Flusser resorts to a strange marine creature in order to elaborate a sophisticated meditation on human existence and our relationship with the technological apparatuses we incessantly devise. The goal of this paper is to examine the recent history of the allegory, tracing its developments in the works of contemporary scholars, such as Siegfried Zielinski, Manuel de Landa and Vilém Flusser himself. Moreover, it investigates the applicability of the "philosophy of animality" within the field of film theory, suggesting an approach to filmic experience that focuses on the "material" aspects of cinema and regards the spectator's body as a site for the translation of images into affect and sensation. (shrink)

The thesis argues that the notion of film consciousness deepens a wide-range of philosophical issues in ways which are only accessible through film experience. These issues, directly related to the continental tradition, deal with consciousness, experience, intentionally and meaning. We look to the implications of the initial acts of film reproduction as it creates 'images' of the world which reconceptualise vision in terms of space, time and dimension. We move from ontology to experience and examine an aesthetic form with radical (...) implications for spectator consciousness. These issues are explored from two philosophical positions. Firstly, phenomenology, especially Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Secondly, the work of Gilles Deleuze who presents the most penetrating insights to date into film consciousness and its repercussions for thought and affectivity. The focus of this study is to draw together these two philosophical positions, showing their fundamental differences but also similarities where they exist. This approach is rarely attempted but the belief running through this thesis is that film is one arena which is invaluable for making such comparisons. It is argued philosophically that film writes large key phenomenological concepts on intentionality, time-consciousness and the relation of the lifeworld to the predicative. In terms of Deleuze, film is shown as a unique artform which in allowing us to link otherwise casts light on Deleuze's own complex system of thought. Chapters 1-3 are concerned with phenomenology and detail the role of film in terms of the lifeworld, intentionally, reduction and the transcendental in a way which has not been attempted elsewhere. The linking chapter on time is used to introduce the work of Henri Bergson and its influence both on phenomenology's inner time-consciousness and Deleuze's fundamental categories of film movement and time imagery. The final two chapters look at the way film is reconfigured through montage and the implications of this for film's unique expression of movement and time. (shrink)

This thesis examines how designs based on a conjunction between craft and digital techniques may offer new possibilities for an architect or designer in contemporary practice. How is it relevant that what initially appear to be two distinct approaches to designing and making can be introduced to each other and coalesce to form a constructive attitude of mutually borrowed logic? The thesis champions the crafting of innovative design and the incorporation of digitally derived procedures that allow for globally efficient dissemination (...) and malleability. Such procedures have occupied the practice of architecture and design for some time, giving rise to the current sobriquet of a 'post-digital age'. I propose that at this point in time we can usefully speculate on the relationship between physical making and computer-based production. Too often the stylistic overtures popularly attached to the terms 'digital' and 'craft' narrow our perception of what each term may encompass and how they are likely to manifest. Traditionally, digitally derived design practice is attributed the efficiency of a mathematically precise mode of operation - an oscillation between zeroes and ones that produces a universal logic of smoothly rendered forms. By contrast, 'craft' is often cast into the realm of amateurish making, complete with mistakes, dropped stitches, fingerprints or other traces of human fault that are understood as being charming in the context of handmade human endeavour yet fall short when measured against 'serious' artistic categories that include architecture, design and fine art. This thesis seeks to move beyond such accepted and somewhat polarised positions. First, the thesis offers clearer and more dynamic definitions of the terms 'craft' and 'digital', seeking the ability for each to hold fast to the inherent merits of their particular logic while also finding productive opportunities to integrate with each other. Second, the thesis examines how crafted production can combine with digital tools to offer a useful direction for contemporary design practice. Case studies of contemporary architects' and designers' works are drawn on to illustrate and make observations on the different relationships that the selected practitioners have discovered in their projects, all of which conjoin the conception and manifestation of digital craft. The case studies vary in scale from fabric and furniture production to large-scale installations of significant spatial effect, to entire architectural projects. The range is useful in discussing how the concept of digital craft in architecture can be re ad from various perspectives. This reflects the numerous ways in which digitally created design is used to realise crafted results and is mindful of the fact that architectural processes often follow technological innovation first practiced at more intimate scales such as in industrial design. It is also interesting to compare the idea of the more intimately scaled relationship that craft has traditionally held with architectural practice. Finally, the thesis will speculate upon future developments for the conjunction of digital craft in architecture and design, and will pose several questions for further discussion. (shrink)