Revisiting Cognitive Mapping

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-40
Author(s):  
Özgün Eylül İşcen
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Media Arts ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global North ◽  
State Capital ◽  
The Aesthetic

The increasingly complex, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, attentive to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations, is still helpful for addressing the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers of extraction. I am interested in tracing the historicity of those operations as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, and militarism. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in the realm of media arts that contest the aesthetic regime through which the state-capital nexus attempts to legitimize its imperial logic and violence. My reconfiguration of cognitive mapping as countervisuality in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms demonstrates that there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space across the Global North/ South divide.

THE FREEDOM OF THE AESTHETIC: MONTSERRAT ROIG’S USE OF THE CITY IN RAMONA, ADÉU

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
Catalan Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.

Socialism’s Past, New Social Democracy, and Socialism’s Futures

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad Rose ◽  
George Ross
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Work Experience ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Social Collaboration ◽  
The Social

The ideas of socialism grew in ordinary people’s lived experience of all-encompassing markets, totalizing doctrines of individualism, the power of capitalist property over human dignity and destiny, and equations between market success and human merit. Codified into doctrine, socialism was pro-ductivist, seeing the work experience as that which determined personal identity and the shape of social collaboration. It was also class analytical, mapping the social world in terms of classes in conflict and specifying the working class as the central social actor and agent for change. Third, it was egalitarian democratic, rejecting arbitrary distinctions determining different stations in life. Finally, socialism was Utopian, revolutionary at least in aspiration if not always in deed. The capitalist order could be, and ought to be, radically transcended. Socialism, which would follow, would reappropriate control over work and its fruits by “the workers” and would facilitate full democracy, equality, and the consecration of a creative and cooperative social order.

“TO HELP THE NATION TO SAVE ITS SOUL”: MUSEUM PURPOSES IN JAMES'S THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-254
Author(s):  
John Pedro Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
The Past ◽  
Explicit Statement ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Site

In a 1927 lecture the Director of the British Museum Sir Frederic Kenyon countered the futurist leader F. T. Marinetti's calls for the destruction of museums by arguing that “in times of upheaval . . . salvation is to be found in adherence to tradition” rather than in “break[ing] loose from” it. Kenyon explained the museum's role in promoting this salvation: A visit to a museum will not by itself quench a revolution. It would have been useless to invite the pétroleuses of the Commune to an official lecture in the Egyptian Gallery at the Louvre; but if they had been brought up to respect the past, there might have been a revolution without pétroleuses. Every form of instruction or experience which teaches men to link their lives with the past makes for stability and ordered progress. Hence the value of history and hence also the value of those institutions which teach history informally and without tears. (24–25) This is perhaps the most explicit statement of the British Museum's ideological function in early twentieth-century museum discourse. The museum acts as an ideological state apparatus that calls out to museum-goers to identify with, rather than agitate against, the social order symbolized in the “examples of great men” and the “monuments of the past” (23–24). Though not without critics, much of the new museology since the 1980s draws on this historical record and poststructuralist theory to argue that the modern museum operates as a site for the reflection or reinforcement of existing power relations. Critics have associated the museum, for example, with racism and sexism (Haraway), with classism (Bourdieu and Darbel), with imperialism and colonialism (Barringer and Flynn), with mechanisms of social control (Sherman and Rogoff), and with the consecration of state authority (Duncan and Wallach). Whereas Kenyon's defense of the museum suggests a reactionary position, the cultural destruction he combats amounts to a revolutionary act, whether accomplished by the “gay incendiaries with charred fingers” exhorted by Marinetti in his movement-founding manifesto of 1909 or the communardes accused of torching the French capital during the semaine sanglante in 1871 (43). For cultural destruction is inescapably political, as Antonio Gramsci argued in “Marinetti the Revolutionary” (1916). The Italian theorist and political activist identified the futurist discourse against the museum and the aesthetic tradition it perpetuates with the Marxist task of destroying “spiritual hierarchies, prejudices, idols and ossified traditions” to make way for the creation of a new, proletarian civilization (Gramsci 215).

scholarly journals The Explosive Potential of Artistic Activism: Factors – Functions – Response

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatjana Jovovic
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Group Leaders ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Art Activism ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Shed Light

This article considers the change in artistic means in the digital globalised world and the development of art actionism as a new inter-genre. The author provides an overview and comparison of the key actions of protest events in Russia, also focusing on some South Slavic practices. Additionally, the article analyses incentive impulses, ways of realisation, and the social response to the most impressive art actions. The correlation of the aesthetic and utilitarian component of events is the main goal of the research, as well as the assessment of their political potential. The paper uses cultural, semiotic, and interdisciplinary methods trying to clarify the phenomenon of protest culture, the role of urban space in it, and the development of protest techniques. The author mainly refers to electronic resources containing materials of the most prominent art activists. The methodological basis of the study is research on the culture of protest by А. Epstein, A. Etkind, A. Rosenholm, Irina Savkina, and others. The programmes of art group leaders help shed light on the topic. There are two basic directions of subversive actions of art actionism within Slavic cultures: emancipatory and traditional. The author concludes that their character correlates with the official ideological policy of the state and focuses on the promotion of the artist’s opinion. The dynamism of protest practices is characterised by intermediality and liminality, and their reliance on popular culture makes the path from the sender to a wide audience the shortest. As a result of the analysis of the connection with traditional left revolutionary and artistic practices, it is concluded that art activism intensively uses the memory of the greatest revolutionary events as an artistic decoration and an ideological means of encouraging subversion. The indissolubility of the life and art of art activists gives rise to a new type of artistic creation of one’s own life in the history of Russian culture. The ideological goals of the analysed direction contribute to democratic changes and the conquest of human freedoms.

Urban borderwork: Ethnographies of policing

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-398
Author(s):  
Maya Mynster Christensen ◽  
Peter Albrecht
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Emotional Response ◽  
Police Work ◽  
Urban Policing ◽  
Global North ◽  
Fear And Anxiety ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The City ◽  
North And South

This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and South, borders and bordering practices are reconfigured to address mobilities and flows deemed to threaten social order and have thus become manifestations of fear and anxiety linked to these mobilities and flows. At the core of our framework is the argument that urban policing is principally a practice of bordering. By approaching urban policing as a practice of bordering that is informed by material and imaginary manifestations, tensions between (de)territorializing and (de)stabilization are highlighted as both the vehicle and outcome of bordering practices. These tensions, we propose, can be captured through the concept of trembling. Trembling implies both a physical and emotional response to anxiety, excitement and frailty that is paradoxically built into borders and bordering practices.

scholarly journals RITUEL GESTUS: Kroppen som skala og som æstetisk form

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørgen Østergård Andersen
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Concrete Material ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Semantic Domains

Jørgen Østergård Andersen: Ritual Gestures. The Body as Scale and as Aesthetic Form The article focuses on ritual gestures, and it delineates a theoretical field of investigation, which gives expression to aesthetic practices, which are beyond - or rather, intersticial zones in - the semantic domains. It is argued that the ritual gestures generate a contact with a sphere, which is termed “sacred” in the anthropological tradition and “sublime” in the aesthetic, philosophical tradition. It is further argued that the aesthetic field cannot be reduced to the social order of semantic domains, since this would imply a misrepresentation of the meaning of ritual performances. The widespread contextual signification of rituals in anthropological debates and in ritual studies is therefore challenged in the article, and it is argued that such analyses do not give expression to the meaning or structure of the rituals. Such analysis, which merely describes the social context of the ritual, puts an end to the theoretical exploration into the singular meaning of the ritual - even before the analysis of the meaning gets under way. To illustrate these points, the ahjaliputa gesture is decribed and two “rites de passage” in Sri Lanka are analysed: kota hålu (giris puberty rituals) and upasampadå (monks higher ordination rituals). The subtitle - the body as scale and as aesthetic form - points to a further argument in the article that the body is a scale, which organises the semantic domains in a hierarchy of concrete, material objects. The aesthetic zones are found in such transitions from object to domain and they imply a transition from one scale to another. It is argued that the ambiguity of ritual gestures explores such intersticial zones.

scholarly journals Dwelling in the dearth: Colonia Mexico 68 in poverty & exclusion

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (27) ◽  
pp. 267-279
Author(s):  
Tajudeen Noibi ◽  
Ojeiru Ezomo ◽  
Digvijay Pandey
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Exclusion Process ◽  
Spatial Proximity ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Economic Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

The growth of irregular settlements in Ciudad Juarez has largely contributed to the expansion of the city, where informal city expansion was later transformed to regular urbanization. The reason for this is not far-reaching as the agglomeration of migrants into the city frequently redefined its growth. Simultaneously, the economic significance of the city in the global capital process has further made it a destination point for the engagement of labour from the hinterland of Mexico to central and southern America. This paper investigates the historical context of the emergence of the lived experience amidst poverty and the social exclusion process in Colonia Mexico 68, a settlement to the west of the city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, a vicinity surrounded by multinationals otherwise known as Maquiladoras. The inhabitants are known to be poor and live in poverty and exclusion. The investigation is based on ethnographic research using the Bristol Social Exclusion Model. (BSEM) to measure poverty and social exclusion despite the spatial proximity of the maquilas that empowered the residents. A random sampling of the population was executed through interviews and pictorial evidence. Supporting documented interviews were conducted with the staff of Asentamientos Humanos to further understand the narrative and lived experience of the inhabitants. Luckman and Berger’s subjective reality paradigm was adopted in the execution of the ethnographic findings. It was observed that social policy that focuses on education, training, social security, housing, and health provision would further improve the lives of the inhabitants and foster more forms of inclusion.

The Social Order Yields to Functional Analysis

1958 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 158-160
Author(s):  
LAWRENCE SCHLESINGER
Keyword(s):  
Functional Analysis ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Social

Sex and the Social Order.

1946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgene H. Seward
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
The Social
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