scholarly journals (Words and) Images of power in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Petrolio

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Alberto Vespaziani
Keyword(s):  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Pier Paolo Pasolini ◽  
Central Thesis ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Infinite Network ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Limit Power

This contribution focuses on an unfinished novel, Petrólio by Pier Paolo Pasolini to reflect on nature and images of power, as interpreted by one of the greatest Italian post-war intellectuals. The central thesis is that while the peasant and fascist society was based on the male command, on the normative force of tradition, the contemporary consumer society is based on female persuasion, on the push to conform and not to differentiate. However, while patriarchal authoritarianism allowed emancipatory rebellion, consumerist homologation was able to prevent forms of resistance by disseminating power in an infinite network of relationships, whose plot cannot be dissolved. The reading of Petrólio invites the jurist not to focus exclusively on the rational aspects of the rules and procedures that limit power, but also to devote herself to reflecting on the two dimensions of power, the discursive and the aesthetic.

The invention of the shopping mall

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Styhre
Keyword(s):  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Market Liquidity ◽  
Shopping Mall ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Visual Index ◽  
Post War

Purpose The economic system of competitive capitalism strives toward liquid markets wherein the cost for transacting is minimized. Liquidity is mostly addressed in association with abstract markets (e.g. the securities market), but also consumer markets are determined by liquidity concerns. The purpose of this paper is to examine the shopping mall concept, developed by the architect and social reformer Victor Gruen during the early 1950s, as a form of production of capitalist space, intended to reduce transaction costs. As an auxiliary benefit, Gruen envisioned the shopping mall as a cultural and civic center in the midst of the satellite town of suburbia, the new site of urban expansion during the post-war boom decades. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews secondary literature on the historical development of the shopping mall as a consumer space. In addition, relevant economic and social science literature is referenced. Findings The architecture, design, ornamentation and day-to-day management of the shopping mall were premised on a consumerist way of life, ultimately serving as an all-too-visual index of the triumph of competitive capitalism in the cold war era. However, Gruen’s accomplishments were gradually compromised by the interest of money-minded developers and construction industry actors, and the shopping mall arguably never fulfilled the social and cultural function that Gruen anticipated. Regardless of such outcomes, the production of capitalist space as scripted by Gruen is still determining everyday life in consumer society, making Gruen a key figure, albeit only limitedly recognized, in the history of late modern society and in the capitalist economy. Originality/value The paper emphasizes the role of Victor Gruen in the post-Second World War period, being one of the most influential practitioners and social reformers in the era. Furthermore, the paper stresses how market liquidity is a key concern in Gruen’s project to create a communal space for the American suburban population in the era of the expanding welfare state.

scholarly journals Classrooms for Consumer Society: Practical Education and Secondary School Reform in Post-Second World War Canada

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Rollwagen
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Research Committee ◽  
Canadian Education ◽  
Practical Education ◽  
Education Association ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Canadian Research

ABSTRACTYoung people’s intersecting roles as students, workers, and shoppers have received little attention from historians, who have focused on young people as either students or workers. This paper begins to examine these roles by analyzing the efforts of the Canadian Education Association to define and promote practical education in the late 1940s. The Canadian Research Committee on Practical Education solicited industry and business perspectives and surveyed students that were leaving school before graduation. The committee’s work and the discussion it generated reveal a desire to make secondary schools more profitable and palatable for Canadian teenagers. Educators and industry leaders wanted the post-war high school to serve all young Canadians by catering to their interests, keeping them in school, and preparing them to be both workers and consumers upon graduation.RÉSUMÉLes jeunes comme groupe peuvent se définir selon trois caractéristiques : élèves, travailleurs et consommateurs. Cette façon de concevoir la jeunesse n’a reçu que peu d’attention de la part des historiens. Ces derniers ont étudié les jeunes soit comme élèves ou soit comme travailleurs. Cet article s’intéresse à ces trois caractéristiques en s’intéressant aux actions entreprises par l’Association canadienne d’éducation. L’auteure analyse les efforts de cette dernière pour définir et promouvoir les arts et métiers en éducation à la fin des années 1940. Le Comité de recherche canadien sur l’éducation pratique a sollicité l’aide des industries et des maisons d’affaires pour recenser les élèves qui quittaient l’école avant la fin de leurs études. Le travail du comité et les discussions qui s’ensuivirent ont révélé le besoin de rendre les écoles secondaires plus utiles et plus attirantes pour les adolescents canadiens. Les éducateurs et les chefs d’entreprises souhaitaient que l’école secondaire d’après-guerre soit utile aux jeunes Canadiens ; ils désiraient susciter leurs intérêts, les garder à l’école et les préparer à devenir des travailleurs et des consommateurs une fois leurs études terminées.

scholarly journals Aesthetics and Creativity. Identity Configurations

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Livia Durac ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Human Attitude ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
The Way

Reflecting on human attitude towards reality, together with deciphering the emotional code that accompanies it, has configured - in time – the aesthetic universe, open to human reflection, creation, and evaluation. Aesthetics appears through the way in which consciousness reacts and capitalises upon things in nature and society, or which belong to human subjectivity, including on artistic work, which have an effect on sensitiveness due to their harmony, balance and grandeur. As a fundamental attribute of the human being, creativity is the engine of cultural evolution, meaning the degree of novelty that man brings in his ideas, actions, and creations. Aesthetical values, together with the other types of values, contribute to what society represents and to what it can become, hence motivating human action and creation. Their role is to create a state of mind that encourages the cohesion, cooperation, and mutual understanding of the society. Integrating a chronological succession of the evolution of the concepts that objectify its structure, its aesthetics and creativity, this article stresses the synergetic nature of the two dimensions of human personality, paving the way to beauty, as a form of enchantment of the human spirit.

scholarly journals Cultural Capital in China? Television tastes and cultural distinction among college students in Beijing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang GAO ◽  
giselinde kuipers
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Multiple Correspondence Analysis ◽  
International Experience ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Cultural Goods ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Cultural Hierarchies ◽  
First Time

Can television taste function as cultural capital in contemporary China? This paper investigates, for the first time, how Chinese engage with global pop culture to mark their positions in China’s swiftly changing social and cultural hierarchies. Using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) of a survey (n=422) and 48 interviews with students at an elite Beijing university, we identify three distinct taste dimensions: not-knowers versus dislikers; TV lovers versus avoiders; and Western and Eastern TV taste. We identify dimensions 1 and 3 as cultural capital dimensions: respondents on the “high end” draw taste-based social boundaries vis-à-vis those on the low end, who in turn accept the hierarchies implied in these tastes. The two dimensions differ in the criteria used to make aesthetic distinctions, the type of cultural knowledge they rely on, and in the strength of their boundary-drawing. We conclude that the “Western” taste is more exclusive than the “dislike” taste. The first is mainly based on aesthetic criteria (complexity, authenticity), whereas the second combines aesthetic (complexity, depth) and cosmopolitan (language skills, international experience) distinctions. While the liking of both dimensions is related to parental cultural capital (education, occupation, urbanity), the “Western” taste also correlates with parental economic capital and international experience. This “discovery” of cultural capital in China has implications for our understanding of cultural and cosmopolitan capital, of the global diffusion of cultural goods and the aesthetic and status systems implied in these goods, and for our understanding of culture and stratification in China.

Akomfrah’s Foreigner

2018 ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
James Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Aesthetic

In John Akomfrah’s essay-film, The Nine Muses (2010), the aesthetic paradigms of politics and art are broached so evenly that it is as possible to speak of a ‘cinema of politics’ as it is to speak of a ‘politics of cinema’ – both concepts are equalised, so that each is constitutive of the other. A bricolage of extraordinary intertextuality, Akomfrah’s film is equally concerned with the socio-historical problem of migrant subjectivity and the politico-aesthetic distribution of hierarchies relating to forms and technologies of art. The thematic concern for migration becomes a formal ‘foreignness’, creating a reconfigurative possibility for cinema and its adjacent art forms. Following Rancière’s utopian framing of the wandering ‘foreigner’ (1990: 3), I claim that Akomfrah film ‘persists in the curiosity of his gaze, displaces his angle of vision, reworks the first way of putting together words and images, undoes the certainties of place’ (1990: 3). The foreigner is an urgent political concept at a time of consensus and especially crucial in regards to public responses to mass migration from the Middle East to Europe.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Oldham
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Post War ◽  
Intelligence Service

This Introduction begins by exploring how key production personnel on both Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC 2, 1979) and Spooks (BBC 1, 2002-11) drew inspiration from the BBC itself when developing a fictionalised version of an intelligence service for the screen,. This is used to frame a brief overview of the histories of British intelligence, broadcasting and spy fiction through the early and mid-20th century, noting numerous intersections and parallels. In particular, it describes the expansion in all three areas in the post-war years, resulting from a complex blend of Cold War paranoia and the growth of an affluent, consumer society. Surveying the book’s methodology, it discusses how this account blends case study analyses with broader examinations of television institutions and British cultural history, in particular considering problems of 'realism' in relation to both the spy genre and British television drama. An overview of the main chapters is provided.

Junk aesthetics in a throwaway age

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Dezeuze
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Planned Obsolescence ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
East And West ◽  
Post War

For Arendt, the fragile balance between labour, work and action that lies at the heart of the human condition was fundamentally endangered by the planned obsolescence characteristic of the new post-war consumer capitalism. Artworks displaying a ‘junk’ aesthetic produced on the East and West Coasts of the United States in the period between 1957 and 1962 can be read in light of Arendt’s perspective, which intersected with both sociological critiques of the new capitalism and the writings of Zen master D.T. Suzuki and other popularisers of Zen Buddhism. Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums resonated with both critiques of consumer society and newly discovered Zen alternatives. This chapter outlines some of the links between Kerouac’s Beat aesthetic and the assemblage and happenings of the early 1960s, by analysing the reception of landmark exhibitions such as The Art of Assemblage in 1961, and the practices of Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Conner and Allan Kaprow.

Verbicide

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Orr
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Society ◽  
Young Scholar ◽  
Sat Scores ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
First Impression ◽  
Steep Decline ◽  
The Media ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
Academic Record

He entered my office for advice as a freshman advisee sporting nearly perfect SAT scores and an impeccable academic record—by all accounts a young man of considerable promise. During a 20-minute conversation about his academic future, however, he displayed a vocabulary that consisted mostly of two words: “cool” and “really.” Almost 800 SAT points hitched to each word. To be fair, he could use them interchangeably as “really cool” or “cool . . . really!” He could also use them singly, presumably for emphasis. When he became one of my students in a subsequent class I confirmed that my first impression of the young scholar was largely accurate and that his vocabulary, and presumably his mind, consisted predominantly of words and images derived from overexposure to television and the new jargon of computer- speak. He is no aberration, but an example of a larger problem, not of illiteracy but of diminished literacy in a culture that often sees little reason to use words carefully, however abundantly. Increasingly, student papers, from otherwise very good students, have whole paragraphs that sound like advertising copy. Whether students are talking or writing, a growing number have a tenuous grasp on a declining vocabulary. Excise “uh . . . like . . . uh” from virtually any teenage conversation, and the effect is like sticking a pin into a balloon. In the past 50 years, by one reckoning, the working vocabulary of the average 14-year-old has declined from some 25,000 words to 10,000 words (“Harper’s Index” 2000). This reflects not merely a decline in numbers of words but in the capacity to think. It also reflects a steep decline in the number of things that an adolescent needs to know and to name in order to get by in an increasingly homogenized and urbanized consumer society. This is a national tragedy virtually unnoticed in the media. It is no mere coincidence that in roughly the same half century the average person has learned to recognize more than 1,000 corporate logos but can recognize fewer than 10 plants and animals native to their locality (Hawken 1993, 214).

Exercitatio Austriaca

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Timm
Keyword(s):  
Literary Representations ◽  
Abstract Concept ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Aesthetic

Thomas Bernhard’s protagonists are practicing all the time. The rigorous practice procedures, however, have no goal other than perfection. The study approaches the described diagnosis with a two-part approach, which brings together results from the subjectivity debate of the 20th and 21st centuries with the aesthetic consequences resulting from the historical situation in Austria after 1945. This leads to the description of an abstract concept of practice which is used to analyze Bernhard’s novels and plays. Based on this, the questions – how the constitution of literary subjectivity in Austrian post-war society is undermined in Bernhard’s literary representations and how this manifests on the surfaces of the texts – are examined.

scholarly journals El árbol de Adán, de Gerardo Guinea Diez. Narrativa y memoria del genocidio guatemalteco (El árbol de Adán, by Gerardo Guinea Diez. Narrative and Remembrance of the Genocide in Guatemala)

LETRAS ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (59) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
María Del Pilar López Martínez
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Central American ◽  
Central American Literature ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Poetic Style

El estudio analiza la propuesta estética de una de las novelas menos estudiadas sobre el genocidio guatemalteco: El árbol de Adán. Se efectúa un recorrido sobre la obra de ficción del escritor Gerardo Guinea Diez, e incursiona en algunos elementos de su poética para señalar las diferencias con la llamada «literatura de posguerra centroamericana», así como con el modelo predominante que entre los historiadores literarios se tiene. Muestra esos otros imaginarios que desde el interior de los países centroamericanos se construyen, muchas veces a contrapelo de lo que se conoce desde fuera de las fronteras del Istmo.This study analyzes the aesthetic proposal of one of the least known novels about the Guatemalan genocide: El Árbol de Adán (Adam’s Tree). It explores the fictional works of Gerardo Guinea Diez, and addresses the author’s poetic style, to emphasize the discrepancies between his work and that of the so-called “post-war school of Central American literature” and the predominant model supported by historians. The article reveals these other imaginary worlds created from within the Central American countries, but which often contrast with widespread perceptions of those who are outside the region. 

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