All Aboard the Louis Vuitton Train!

Pólemos ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-195
Author(s):  
Leif Dahlberg

Abstract The article discusses fashion advertising as a means to access and understand contemporary social imaginary significations of the body politic, focusing on an advertising for Louis Vuitton. The article suggest that one can read advertising as a form of continuous, running commentary that society makes of itself, and through which one can unearth the social imaginary. The article finds a plethora of meanings in the selected advertising for Louis Vuitton, but the central finding is that the fashion advertising represents community as an absence of community; in other words as a deficit that the brand somehow is able to rectify.

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogl

AbstractSince the eighteenth century what is known as the ›body politic‹ has duplicated itself in a very specific way. Alongside the models of the social contract we can observe, under the label ›police‹, the emergence of political knowledge dealing with the regulation of social, economic, medical and moral spheres. This tension between sovereign representation and the empirical ›body politic‹ became critical after the French Revolution. The works of Friedrich Schiller may serve as an example of the intense exchange between aesthetic and police-theoretical problems: a quest to mediate between the laws of reason and the scope of empirical forces; and to grasp the economics of a political power which converts the inclusion of the excluded into a new form of degenerate life.


Author(s):  
Kandida Purnell

This article contributes to knowledge on the co-constitutive relation between emotions and bodies by describing the mechanisms enabling the social-political construction of ‘atmospheric walls’ (Ahmed, 2014) during the COVID-19 pandemic first wave of spring-summer 2020. Using auto- and digital ethnographies this article underlines gendered, raced and classed angles of arrival into the spring-summer ‘first wave’ and describes the social-political implications of individual bodies and parts of the body politic losing touch through the pandemic. In particular, this article highlights three mechanisms – angles of arrival, discord and losing touch – leading to the containment of grief within parts of the UK body politic, which, through the COVID-19 pandemic first wave worked to build up atmospheric walls segregating parts of the body politic and allow the continued circulation of some bodies while facilitating the continued circulation, use and using up of others.


1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton

Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent examples of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the individual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and divine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.


Author(s):  
Felipe Da Silva Triani ◽  
Cristina Novikoff

O objetivo foi analisar o currículo do Curso de graduação de licenciatura em Educação Física da cidade de Duque de Caxias para interpretar as representações sociais sobre corpo nele contidas. Para atingir o objetivo pretendido foi realizada uma pesquisa qualitativa, por meio de revisão bibliográfica e análise documental. Os resultados encontrados são de que as mudanças ocorridas no desenvolvimento da Educação Física acerca do corpo são resultado de desenvolvimentos culturais, que implicaram a transformação social dos grupos e que o currículo do curso analisado institui representações de corpo relacionadas com a ideia de saúde.Palavras-chave: Corpo. Representações Sociais. Imaginário Social. Formação de Professores. AbstractThe objective was to analyze the  undergraduate degree curriculum  in Physical Education Course of the city of Duque de Caxias to interpret the social representations about the body contained in it. In order to achieve the intended objective, a qualitative research was carried out through bibliographical review and documentary analysis. The results are that the changes that occurred in the  Physical Education development about the body are results of cultural developments that implied the groups’ social transformation and that the curriculum of the analyzed course establishes representations of body related to the idea of health. Keywords: Body. Social representations. Social imaginary. Teacher’s Training.


Author(s):  
Clifton Hood

For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed enough self-control and independence to take direction from their betters and accept their proper place in the body politic. But the New York City draft riots of 1863 – the worse urban disorder in American history – seemed to show that entire communities lacked the self-discipline and orderliness required of the citizenry of a democratic nation and instead were prone to a savagery that had ripped the city apart. Drawing on their memories of the draft riots and on Victorian cultural values, the upper class utilized the Civil War to counter the blurring of class boundaries and social credentials caused by urban growth of the first half of the century. They came to classify came to classify many workers and immigrants as dangerous classes that threatened the social order- and themselves as a community of heritage and feeling that provided leadership in government, the economy, and society. At bottom these representations involved social control, and upper-class people used them to help harden class lines and gain an understanding of themselves and the rest of urban society that was coherent and compelling.


Author(s):  
Stefanie R. Fishel

For three centuries the rational and disembodied state has been animated by one of the most powerful metaphors in politics: the body-politic, a claustrophobic and bounded image of the collective, the state, the nation, of the sovereign alienated among sovereigns. Drawing sources from continental philosophy, science and technology studies and world politics, this pathbreaking book challenges the body-politic on the grounds of its materiality. Just as the human body is not whole and separate from other bodies, but populated by microbes, bacteria, water and radioactive isotopes, Stefanie Fishel argues that the body-politic of the state exists in dense entanglement with other communities and forms of life. Yet rather than follow the nihilistic critiques of biopolitics and sovereignty into their political and metaphysical dead ends, Fishel challenges us to think and live hopefully beyond the body-politic: to think of bodies and states as lively vessels, living harmoniously coevolved with multiplicity and the biosphere. From global trade to people movements and climate change, this radical shift in metaphors promises to open up new forms of global political practice and community and challenge a politics based on fear and survival. Fishel concludes that we should not aim for mere living: we need to set our sights on building a world for thriving. This book will be of interest to a range of scholars in the humanities and the social and natural sciences. Fishel provides connections between the political and practical in clear terms using multiple approaches and disciplines.


1963 ◽  
Vol 159 (974) ◽  
pp. 245-255 ◽  

During the past two days we have seen how well the study of human population combines the interests of the founders both of modern demography and of the Royal Society. We have had abundant evidence that the study of population organizes the materials of the natural and social sciences in ways that give them both scientific and practical significance. The programme, I suspect, would have given our predecessors satisfaction, for the organizers of this Society, and of its daughter organizations around the world, were not just detached scholars of academic halls. Nature was to be studied for its beauty, of course, but also for the service of man. The practical implications of science for society, the economy, and the body politic were not considered inappropriate for the inner temple of science. They were drawn without apology; occasionally they were even correctly drawn. Perhaps I am overimpressed by the pragmatic stream in the Royal Society’s early work because I am most familiar with Franklin's interests. Both in this Society, and in its daughter organization, The American Philosophical Society, * his emphasis was always on careful observation, limited generalization, and practical application. The dividing line in the early histories of both our societies was not that between the natural and the social sciences, or between science and action. If there was a division it was between science and a system-building kind of social philosophy.


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