Beyond Metaphor

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-50
Author(s):  
Joseph D. Bryan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Impartial Spectator ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
New Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Senses

Body-politic metaphors served historically as figurative vehicles to transmit assorted socio-political messages. Through an examination of the metaphors la mollesse (softness) and Adam Smith’s impartial spectator, this article will show that the language of eighteenth-century French and British writers was not simply heuristic or metaphorical. Contemporaries reacted to the growth of commerce and luxury, and the concomitant creation of new public spaces and forms of social interaction, by arguing that the corporeal mediated the social. I want to introduce the concept of corporeal sociability: cognitive physiology and the network of the senses, contemporaries argued, contained the information necessary to assess novel forms of commerce and revealed that sociability was congenitally embodied.

scholarly journals Public Space Update. Report from the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Margaret Crawford
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
New Public

Like everything else in this large and disparate country, public space, as a movement and as a collection of physical places is highly varied and unequally distributed. Even so, over the last decade public space in both senses has moved to the forefront of American urbanism. In terms of academic debates, the narratives of decline that dominated discussions of public space since the 1990s have been replaced with expanded definitions of public space. The number of actual new public spaces, public events and support for them has grown exponentially over the last decade.  These spaces continue to attract large numbers of people. For design professionals, this has meant new opportunities to connect their practices with the larger public realm.  At the same time, however, critics have raised important questions about their inclusivity and ability to promote genuine social interaction.

Inclusions: Concerning a Theory and Aesthetics of Police

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogl
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form

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.

scholarly journals An Uneasy Pleasure: Representing the Dangers of Skin-to-skin Contact in Eighteenth-century London ‘The William Bynum Prize Essay’

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-511
Author(s):  
Sara Fernandes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Social Function ◽  
Medical Writing ◽  
Skin Contact ◽  
Medical Tradition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Skin To Skin ◽  
Prize Essay

This article considers the social function of contagious disease as moderator of class relationships in England during the first half of the eighteenth century and takes into account the ways in which the ‘communicability’ of the plague, great pox (syphilis) and smallpox (variola) was used by authors to crystallise social interaction and tension along class lines. The essay begins by examining the representation of the plague, syphilis and smallpox in the medical tradition, before shifting its attention to the practice of maritime quarantine, as laid out by Richard Mead in his Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion (1720). By foregrounding medical writing on contagion through skin contact, I suggest that pornographic texts such as John Cleland’s The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) (1748) had an interventionist function. Cleland is often charged with sanitising the true horrors of sex work in this period. This article proposes that if we take the time to appreciate the way infectious cutaneous diseases were believed to operate and spread we can recognise the moments in which he not only alludes to disease but invokes it for structural and thematic purposes. In proposing this, I am challenging the dominant interpretation that the problematic realities of eighteenth-century prostitution, especially disease, are subordinated to the narrative’s greater interest in erotic pleasure.

scholarly journals Social Interaction in Public Spaces and Well-Being among Elderly Women: Towards Age-Friendly Urban Environments

2022 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 746
Author(s):  
Yingyi Zhang ◽  
Ge Chen ◽  
Yue He ◽  
Xinyue Jiang ◽  
Caiying Xue
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Elderly Women ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Field Investigation ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
The Social

The world’s population is aging and becoming more urbanized. Public space in urban areas is vital for improving the health of the elderly by stimulating social interaction. Many urban design projects are advertised as age-friendly but ignore the real needs of the elderly, especially elderly women, for social interaction in urban public spaces. Insufficient attention is paid to the physical and psychological characteristics of elderly women when shaping public space. This analysis addresses the question: What are the qualities of urban spaces which facilitate health-improving social interaction for elderly women? Methods include a case study in Beijing, field investigation, mapping, and qualitative and quantitative analysis. The survey was carried out in April 2021, and concerned 240 women aged 55–75 years. Results indicate that the social interactions of older women relate to both their physical and psychological situations. Public spaces can positively impact the psychological well-being and social participation of elderly women. Conclusions include insights regarding the relationship between social interaction and well-being among elderly women, as well as proposing a series of principles for shaping public spaces for an age-friendly urban environment.

Revisiting the End of Public Space: Assembling the Public in an Urban Park

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Madden
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Park ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Development

A case study of the renovation of New York City's Bryant Park, this article revisits the end of public space thesis. the renovated park signifies not the end of public space but the new ends to which public space is oriented. in Bryant Park, a new logic of urban publicity was assembled and built into the landscape. the social and technical means by which this transformation was achieved are analyzed. New public spaces of this sort promulgate a conception of the public that is decoupled from discourses of democratization, citizenship, and self–development and connected ever more firmly to consumption, commerce, and social surveillance. If such places do not herald the end of public space, they do represent “publicity without democracy.”

Epicurus in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Thought

2020 ◽  
pp. 710-728
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Kavanagh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
New Economy ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Century Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Senses

How was the celebration of pleasure, so central to the French Enlightenment’s Epicurean tradition, changed by the cultural and political upheavals of the French Revolution and its imperial aftermath? Why was it that, in March of 1800, Paris’s Préfet de police would announce his intention to respect what he called the “freedom of pleasures” due all citizens? This study looks at how the catastrophes of the Terror (white as well as red) followed by the rise and fall of an empire gave birth to a new form of Epicurean materialism. Displacing the eighteenth-century model of libertinage and its algebra of a sexual seduction promising protection from passion’s illusions, the shared pleasures of the well-appointed table made possible by an emerging consumer society brought into focus the possibility of a new economy of pleasures shared, exchanged, and multiplied. Works as different as a popular comedy by René de Chazet, a didactic poem by Joseph Berchoux, and the vastly popular gastronomical manuals of Grimod de La Reynière all contributed to this reconfiguration of the Epicurean paradigm around the newly elaborate rituals of the shared meal. The gustatory pleasures shared by hosts and their guests became the foundation of a conviviality presided over by the social contract of a politesse gourmande. Rehabilitating the senses and their pleasures, this nineteenth-century Epicureanism of the table sought to achieve a new civility capable of moving beyond the tragedies of history.

scholarly journals An exploration of streets as social spaces as informative for urban planning and design

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-27
Author(s):  
Susan Human ◽  
Karen Puren
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Functional Role ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Environment Interaction ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
The Social

Public open spaces can positively contribute to people’s quality of life. With the world’s growing urban population, especially in developing countries, quality public spaces are becoming increasingly important. Streets are considered important public spaces for people-environment interactions. Streets play an important social role in communities’ lives and can contribute to a sense of community. Using people-environment interaction as theoretical framework, the study used a qualitative approach to explore social dynamics in a multi-modal street (Helen Joseph Street) in a South Africa metropolitan city (Pretoria). Aspects of ethnography was applied using observations and semi-structured interviews to generate data from 32 participants about social dynamics in the street. Themes that emerged from the content analysis of the data include: the multi-functional role of the street, serving an economic, cultural, social, political and functional role; the generation of vigorous social interaction with multi-levels of contact/interaction; the interrelated nature of the social and spatial/built environment; the role of the street space in facilitating social interaction and being supportive of the social environment. The findings illustrate the interrelatedness and complexity of people and their environment in Helen Joseph Street. It is suggested that streets have the potential to positively impact on people’s social lives. Streets can act as platforms for social interaction by becoming self-reinforced social spaces that attract people and in return change urban spaces into vibrant public spaces.

Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Scottish History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document