Building Calculated Uncertainty: Cedric Price’s Interaction Centre

As his friend Niall Hobhouse claimed, Cedric Price ‘wasn’t really an architect, but a social critic to the left of the Left who stumbled on the post-war ruins of modernism’.1 The role of Price’s unbuilt legacy for Western architectural culture has been praised extensively, with a special emphasis on the unorthodox nature of both his practice and academic contributions.2 Succeeding generations have found inspiration in Price’s personal view of the architectural profession, his work being positioned often within radical and utopian approaches yet involving a committed social agenda. The social role of architecture was for Price tightly linked to the capacity of the built environment to be adapted by its users. Buildings should be understood as temporary commodities, malleable objects with a short lifespan dictated by their usefulness for the community. Conceived as infrastructures, unbuilt projects such as the famous Fun Palace, Potteries Thinkbelt, or Magnet were formulated as productive objects with a profound commitment for socially regenerating the contexts into which they were to be inserted.

El crimen de Tekax: la crónica periodística y su narrativa crítica en Yucatán en 1890 / The crime of Tekax: the journalistic chronicle and its critical narrative inYucatán in 1890

Se documenta la nota roja publicada sobre un crimen acontecido en una hacienda henequenera de Tekax, Yucatán, en 1890. Se analiza el manejo que la prensa dio a un homicidio, mientras se explica cómo se construyó el control social en el Yucatán rural, y se exploran las razones por las que el periodismo yucateco se interesó en el suceso. El interés del trabajo es explicar cómo la prensa decimonónica meridana presentó evidencias sobre el homicidio de un jornalero y mostró evidencias de cómo se integró en su nota roja una crítica a las condiciones laborales y al andamiaje legal y de investigación que cimentaban el maltrato de los jornaleros mayas por el personal del hacendado.Abstract: The «red note» published on a crime occurred in a henequen farm of Tekax Yucatan in 1890 is documented. The handling of the press gave homicide is analyzed, while explaining how social control was built in rural Yucatan, and the reasons why Yucatecan journalism was interested in the event. This work explain how the nineteenthcentury press of Merida presented evidence about the murder of a day laborer and showed evidence of how a criticism of working conditions and legal and investigative scaffolding that cemented the mistreatment of day laborers was integrated in their red note Maya by the landowner’s staff.Keywords: social control; social change; journalism; social critic; homicide.Résumé : Il s’agit d’une note rouge publiée à propos d’un crime survenu dans une exploitation d’henequen à Tekax, Yucatan en 1890. Est ainsi analysée la manière dont la presse a rendu compte d’un assassinat, tout en expliquant comment fonctionnait le contrôle social dans le Yucatan rural, et pourquoi le journalisme du Yucatan s’est intéressé à cet évènement. L’intérêt de cet article se trouve dans la manière de rendre compte d’un double processus : la presse de Mérida a présenté les preuves de l’assassinat d’un travailleur journalier, tout en intégrant dans la note rouge une critique des conditions de travail et une analyse de l’échafaudage juridique qui a contribué aux mauvais traitements subis par les journaliers mayas de la part du personnel du grand propriétaire.Mots-clés : contrôle social ; changement social ; journalisme ; critique sociale ; assassinat.

De mulheres e casas: O espaço romanesco e patriarcal em Rachel de Queiroz

This books, oriented towards a social critic perspective, analyses two novels by Rachel de Queiroz – Dôra, Doralina e Memorial de Maria Moura – in which the relationship between the female protagonists within the space is loaded with a symbolic value – land and house – which reveals and interprets women paradoxical evolution in patriarchal society rooted vigorously in the rural Brazil, mainly in the northeast of part of the country. In a first moment, it aimed to draw considerations in relation to the function of space in the novel both in the point of view of relevant analysis of Literary Theory as well as analysis yielded from Sociology and Cultural Anthropology. In a second moment, it aimed to characterize the rural patriarchal society in Brazil during the first half of XIX and XX century, showing land and house’s symbolical importance in this society as well as women’s relationship with those spaces. In a third moment, the novel Memorial de Maria Moura, in which the XIX century patriarchal society is reported, the relationship between the female protagonist and the spaces encompassing the land and house. And, last of all, it aimed to compare the aforementioned novel with Dôra, Doralina, in which the action unfolds in the same space, cearense and rural, one century later, in the first half of XX century, in order to verify a possible women evolution and their relationship in relation to those spaces. Rachel de Queiroz, in her novels here in analyzed, discusses the problematic of female protagonists confronting a patriarchal world, showing the female evolution, in this type of society, was slow, gradual and contradictory, seeming at many times even impossible to occur.

The Religious Experience of the Landscape Ruskin and Nature

This paper reconstructs Ruskin’s work from the perspective of the landscape, building upon the assumption that Modern Painters played a cardinal role in the emancipation of the genre. This reconstruction is complicated by the internal contradictions within the work: it cannot be regarded as a systematic work of philosophy, but belongs rather to the genre of sage writing. In volume I, Ruskin approached the landscape not from an aesthetic point of view, but from the direction of scientific truth. The aesthetic consequence of this was his anti-mimetic attitude, which differentiated between the imitation of nature and the uncovering of the truths of nature, and in this respect, he considered Turner the greatest master who had ever lived. Truth takes precedence over all aesthetic considerations, and for this reason Ruskin was resolutely against artistic tradition. Seen from his perspective, the history of landscape painting appeared as a series of scientific illustrations, which, with the forward march of science, came ever closer to truth-to-nature. The other two essential conditions of art, the other side of truth, were its moral and religious messages. Beauty is the work of God, and God must be praised in His work, in Nature. Only later did Ruskin introduce a historical dimension to the experience of the landscape. The modern era is characterised by the rise of the pre-eminent interest in the landscape, accompanied by a parallel decreasing interest in gods, saints, ancestors and humans. This later became the main motif of Ruskin’s activities as a social critic and reformer. In relation to the loss of faith and the prospect of regaining it, Ruskin saw landscape painting as the representative art of the modern era. In the later volumes of Modern Painters, Ruskin carefully distinguished between the task of science, which is to investigate the essence and uncover the truths of material nature, and the task of art, which is to explore the possible viewpoints or aspects of material nature. In volume V of Modern Painters he firmly asserted – in diametric contradiction to his earlier views – that the greatness and truth of Turner did not rest on scientific truth, for in this respect the artist was completely ignorant. This paper interprets and evaluates Ruskin’s extraordinarily harsh criticism of Claude Lorrain, which contrasts with the fact that Turner spent almost his entire life idolising and attempting to rival Claude.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Disability, and the Injustice of Misrecognition

This article makes the case that the normative aspirations of recognition politics are worth pursuing as a dimension of disability politics— although the tactics need to be revised— through an interpretation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Specifically, I read Frankenstein's Creature as a visibly disabled subject, as someone who is misrecognized and mistreated due to his body's physical features, in order to analyze the tragedy of the novel: how the not-so-monstrous Creature can never see himself as anything other than a monster since he is never afforded the positive recognition he desires. The article concludes by considering how the tragedy could have been avoided in an attempt to envision a better path toward social justice for people with disabilities and other victims of identity-based subordination. More broadly, this article attempts to bring Mary Shelley into the political theory canon, casting her as a progressive social critic who believed that misrecognition creates monsters out of those who are negatively labelled as such.

Feminist Utopias, Queerness and Paul Goodman

The question of whether a (queer) politics of utopia can be located in the past, the future or the present conjures a set of ambivalences and dichotomies, of which the creativity–negativity debate and the (non)future of neoliberalism are cogent for feminist praxis. Convergences can be traced between understandings of utopia grounded in everyday experimentation and queer feminist critiques of normativity as a life project as well as an ongoing educational project. This article dissects social critic, psychologist, poet, novelist and anarchist Paul Goodman’s essay ‘The politics of being queer’ (1969), reading it through a queer feminist lens in order to shed new light on his ‘buried conversations’ with feminism. Mindful of and in opposition to Goodman’s controversial avowal of ‘masculinities’—most notably in his Growing Up Absurd (1960)—the article situates his idea(s) of freedom-autonomy and the disidentifications he proposed—with gay liberation agendas/movements, with bisexuality, with ‘masculinity’—within a wider feminist educational/pedagogical project of experimenting with utopia in the here and now. Goodman’s calls for a liberated society left us a utopian imaginary for engaging with an embodied politics for the present—for teaching, educating, loving and living differently.