The Forgotten Political Art Par Excellence? Architecture, Design and the Social Sculpting of the Body Politic

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Rockhill
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Art ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Relationship

With a few rare but important exceptions, it is arguable that major contemporary debates on the historical relationship between art and politics—from the work of Lukács and Adorno to that of Lyotard and Rancière—have generally favored the visual arts and literature over and against architecture and urban design. However, as a few thinkers like Benjamin and Foucault have recognized, if there is one art that appears to be prototypically political (in the sense that it is almost inevitably the site of collective decisions that directly shape the social body while simultaneously being subject to multifarious communal appropriations), it is surely architecture. This paradox leads to a question of central importance, which serves to guide the analysis in this final chapter: why have many of the foremost philosophic debates on the historical relation between art and politics sidelined what is perhaps the political art par excellence? This leads to a critical re-examination of the metaphilosophical assumptions undergirding many of the standard historical narratives regarding the development of art and its relationship to politics.

scholarly journals Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Risk Discourse

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.

The Microbial State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie R. Fishel
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Radioactive Isotopes ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Radical Shift

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.

The Social Body of Béla Balázs

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Erica Carter
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Expressive Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Realm ◽  
Politics Of The Body ◽  
Film Aesthetics

Abstract Focusing on the interwar writings of the film journalist and theorist Béla Balázs, this article argues for an understanding of Balázs’s film aesthetics as grounded in a popular politics of the body. Balázs understood film as a medium in which experiences of image, sound, and expressive movement and gesture shape human subjectivities within a newly mediatized social realm. The article explores Balázs’s consequent plea for a film politics of popular embodiment and asks what a survey of Balázs’s writings as both critic and theorist tell us about the political valences of his film theory now.

scholarly journals Population Aging as the Social Body in Representation and Real Life

2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Crampton
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Population Aging ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Social

This article uses three levels of body analysis as presented by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock to compare old age as a construct in population aging discourse with research on lived experience of people aging in the United States and Ghana. I first describe how demographers construct social bodies as becoming “gray” through population statistics and how policy makers then use dependency ratios to rationalize intervention on behalf of older adults in the body-politic.  The construction of old age within this discourse is then compared with ethnographic research that suggests this construct leaves out much of the lived experience familiar to anthropologists of aging.  Rather than debunk the old age construct, however, the purpose of this article is to argue for study of population aging discourse as constituting a social body reflecting cultural constructions of nature and society.  Moreover, this representation is made real through policy and social intervention work, and with very real effect on people’s lives. As such, an anthropology of aging bodies can include the social life of old age as a social construct.

All Aboard the Louis Vuitton Train!

Pólemos ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-195
Author(s):  
Leif Dahlberg
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Social ◽  
Continuous Running

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.

scholarly journals Body experience in the east-slavonic culture tradition

2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 74-82
Author(s):  
Ye. I. Kirilenko
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emotional Intensity ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Body Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
Culture Tradition

In the modern science, the body is an object of interest not only to the natural science and medicine, but also the humanities. Of special interest, in particular, for the medical discourse, is the ethnic body experience. The paper reveals features of the body experience in the east-slavonic culture from the analysis of the mythological tradition. This experience is characterized by the pronounced interest and ambivalent attitude to the body’s life, natural body standards; and emotional intensity. The experience of the social body is of highest priority in the culture.

scholarly journals Sorismo en el contexto del geunismo

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Sánchez-Seco López
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Efficient Markets ◽  
Efficient Markets Hypothesis ◽  
Economic Philosophy ◽  
The One ◽  
Regulatory Proposals ◽  
Economic Globalisation

En el contexto de una obra mucho más amplia y en ciernes, que propone como único sistema plenamente legítimo aquél cuyo cuerpo político viene constituido por la totalidad de habitantes del planeta, es conveniente traer a colación la filosofía política y económica de George Soros, porque aporta una visión muy diferente a la aplicada por los endiosados economistas que no supieron ver con antelación la Gran Recesión global en la que seguimos inmersos. La relación entre la realidad y el pensamiento es clave en el sorismo, como también lo es la distinción entre los diversos tipos de ciencias. La hipótesis de la eficiencia en los mercados también es cuestionada, junto con el concepto de equilibrio en economía, la incertidumbre y la falibilidad. También se acomete la crítica del fundamentalismo de mercado y a las propuestas regulatorias. Y todo en el contexto de una globalización económica poco política.Within the context of a much wider and developing piece proposing as only fully legitimate system the one the body politic of which is composed of the totality of inhabitants on the planet, it is convenient to bring to us the political and economic philosophy of George Soros for it adds a very different vision to that applied by the deified economists who could not in advance see the global Great Recession in which we keep on living. The relation between reality and thought is key within Sorism, as it is the distinction amongst the several kinds of sciences. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is also put into question side by side with the concept of equilibrium in Economics, uncertainty, and fallibility. The critique of market fundamentalism is also implemented as well as the regulatory proposals. And all of it taking place within the context of a scarcely political but very economic globalisation.

The Japanese Village in the Seventeenth Century

1952 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Vital Function ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Barriers ◽  
The Middle Ages

As in the Middle Ages in the West, so in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) men were fond of explaining the hierarchical society in which they lived by comparing it to an organism. Social classes, Confucian scholars said, were like parts of the body: each had a vital function to perform, but their functions were essentially different and unequal in value. In this scheme the peasants were second in importance only to the ruling military class. Just as the samurai officials were the brains that guided other organs, so the peasants were the feet that held the social body erect. They were the “basis of the country,” the valued producers whose labor sustained all else. But, as a class, they tended innately to backsliding and extravagance. Left alone they would consume more than their share of the social income, ape the manners and tastes of their betters, and even encroach upon the functions of other classes to the perilous neglect of their own. Only the lash of necessity and the sharp eye of the official could hold them to their disagreeable role. They had to be bound to the land; social distinctions had to be thrown up around them like so many physical barriers; and, to remove all temptation to indolence and luxury, they had to be left only enough of what they produced to let them continue producing.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document