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resist

Politics between justification and defiance

with Paul Blokker

European Journal of Social Theory August 2011 vol. 14 no. 3 283-300

http://est.sagepub.com/content/14/3/283.abstract

Abstract

The article discusses the status and role of politics — in its various facets — in the pragmatic sociology of critique. We focus on a number of different dimensions of politics — politics-as-justification, politics-as-distribution, politics-as-constitution, and politics-as-defiance — that can said to be of importance for a pragmatic sociology of critique, but that have not all been taken up equally in this approach. We situate pragmatic sociology in a tradition of thought that views politics as emerging in the settlement of disputes over differences without resorting to violence. However, we argue that pragmatic sociology tends to ignore questions of the constitution of politics, and suggest that one way of bringing the foundational aspect upfront is by conceptualizing and studying defiance, including forms of explicit (dissent) and implicit critique (resistance) of the existing order.

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Elias Canetti, resist

Elias Canetti and the counter-image of resistance

Thesis Eleven August 2011 vol. 106 no. 1 73-87

http://the.sagepub.com/content/106/1/73.abstract

Abstract

The attempt by Arnason and Roberts to interpret Canetti’s work in the context of social theory is taken here as the point of departure to investigate Canetti’s view on the phenomenon of resistance. Resistance is explored in the context of Canetti’s reflection on power and transformation. Further, it is argued that through his substantive concern for crowds (but also for packs, or small bands), an epistemological challenge emerges for social theory. Canetti gives us some precious insights on phenomena of ambiguous multiplicity, which are neither simple sums of separate individuals nor an ontologized Durkheimian collective. Not only this, he resolutely ventures towards the contingency at the foundation of social order, the ‘just-thisness’ of power, revealing its non-symbolic basis in gestures that impart affects. It is at this level that resistance can be best understood as a movement of liberation from the grip of power.

pdf version here

media, publicness, territories

New Media and Urban Motilities: A Territoriologic Point of View

Urban Studies April 12, 2011
doi: 10.1177/0042098011400771

Abstract. The paper aims to contribute to the study of new media technologies in urban environments. It unfolds at two levels, epistemological and substantive. First, it discusses the issue of the conceptual tools that we can deploy to understand new media, arguing in favour of notions and methods that enable research to capture the double nature, socio-technical and bio-political, of the new media in urban environments. In particular, the paper claims that new media can be seen as a continuation of the process of ‘urbanisation of territory’ described by Foucault, aimed at the creation of a flexibly controllable space of events. Secondly, it criticises substantively the techno-enthusiast user-empowerment ideology that surrounds new media and addresses issues of inequality, control and resistance in and through new media in the city. The argument is that the augmented, hybrid or mixed urban reality of new media like personal and locative media is neither determinist nor unboundedly mobile. While the freedom of movement and the diverging styles of mobility are becoming a crucial factor of stratification, new tensions and struggles over the nature of urban ‘events’ are likely to take place.

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http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/04/12/0042098011400771.abstract

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Elias Canetti, social manifolds

Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze on crowds and packs

Journal of Classical Sociology November 26, 2010 vol. 10 no. 4 291-314

http://jcs.sagepub.com/content/10/4/291

https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X10379675

Abstract

A discussion of the works of Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze reveals some common insights into a social epistemology that rejects both methodological individualism and methodological holism. In this respect, the debate on crowds in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is particularly interesting because it is the historical context within which the individualist and holist epistemologies took shape. Arguably, that debate is still rich and inspiring today insofar as it can be said to open the problem field of the relationship between the individual and the group in social thought and sociological theory. Despite several differences, Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze converge on a concept that can be termed ‘multiplicity’. It includes phenomena like crowds and packs (or ‘sects’, in Tarde’s terminology) that are properly speaking neither subjects nor objects. The concept provides a prism that also has relevant consequences for an understanding of the processes of imitation and leadership.

pdf here

media, urban

New Media and the Prolongations of Urban Environments

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies November 2010 16: 471-487, doi:10.1177/1354856510375528

http://con.sagepub.com/content/16/4/471

Abstract

The article addresses the relationships between new media and public urban environments. It advances an anti-reductionist argument, which seeks to understand the material and the immaterial as two irreducible yet intertwined layers or levels of the social sphere. In order to do so, the notion of prolongation is proposed. This notion, together with those of territory and visibility, is explicitly designed to escape both reductionist monism (material as immaterial or vice versa) and dualism (material versus immaterial). The hypothesis is that the environments created and edited by the new media can be conceptualized and studied as specific visibility regimes of urban territoriality. The use of the concepts of territory, prolongation, and visibility also leads to deexceptionalizing the new media, insofar as new media are explained as a specific techno-social configuration, determined by a pattern of the same analytical variables that are at stake in the social sphere at large.

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urban

Periferie italiane

L’interesse per il tema delle periferie urbane – oggi variamente ribattezzate
«città abbandonata», «città negata», «città senza città», «quartieri sensibili» o altro – che è fiorito in anni recenti nella sociologia italiana può essere letto in modo ambivalente. Da un lato infatti esso corre dei rischi, dall’altro offre però delle importanti possibilità. I rischi sono legati al fatto che l’agenda degli interessi della ricerca sociale venga dettata dai mass media e dalle priorità di questi ultimi. Nel momento in cui i media sollevano a gran voce i temi della sicurezza urbana, agitano lo spettro dei quartieri-ghetto e dipingono le periferie come il ricettacolo di tutti i cancri sociali del paese, la ricerca sociale è in un certo senso forzata a correre a verificare, ma l’operazione corre sempre il rischio di finire per adottare e più o meno inconsciamente avallare e legittimare tutta una serie di retoriche e parole d’ordine di stampo politico-mediatico. Come cantava Battiato, non è facile restare calmi e indifferenti mentre tutti intorno fanno rumore. Dall’altro, in positivo, una serie di possibilità sono aperte da quelle ricerche, di cui vorrei parlare in questo breve testo, che hanno prodotto dei risultati interessanti e soprattutto hanno saputo difendere la specificità epistemica e, non da ultimo, la temporalità propria della ricerca sociale – una temporalità che per sua costituzione dovrebbe contrapporsi ai ritmi fibrillanti, ai riflessi condizionati del pensiero e alla mancanza di memoria a lungo termine che caratterizza i mass media.

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Una discussione sui seguenti libri:

Caritas Italiana – Mauro Magatti (a cura di), La città abbandonata: dove sono e come cambiano le periferie italiane, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2007.
Paola Briata, Massimo Bricocoli e Carla Tedesco, Città in periferia: politiche urbane e progetti locali in Francia, Gran Bretagna e Italia, Roma, Carocci, 2009.
Franco Ferrarotti e Maria I. Macioti, Periferie: da problema a risorsa, Roma, Teti, 2009.
Antida Gazzola, Intorno alla città: problemi delle periferie in Europa e in Italia, Napoli, Liguori, 2008.
Laura Bovone e Lucia Ruggerone (a cura di), Quartieri in bilico: periferie
milanesi a confronto, Milano, Mondadori, 2009.

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territories

Lines, barred lines. Movement, territory and the law

International Journal of Law in Context, 6,3 pp. 217–227 (2010) Cambridge University Press

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7878758&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S1744552310000121

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In this paper an attempt is made to analyse the complex relationship between law, territory and movement. Beginning with a quick overview of the notion of property, the paper suggests that this legal notion represents a way of imagining the practice of inhabiting the planet. Dwelling and travelling are explored as two alternative and complementary ways of inhabiting, and a closer inspection is paid to the moments when they confront each other both ideologically and practically. A territorial question is identified at the core of law, namely the issue of the movement of bodies in space (or motility), together with the control of such movements. From this perspective, movement is not simply one among the many objects over which law exerts control, rather law itself is a territorial endeavour, a movement that acts upon other movements.

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urban, visual

At the Wall: Graffiti Writers, Urban Territoriality, and the Public Domain

Space and Culture, Vol. 13(3): 315-332, July 2010

http://sac.sagepub.com/content/13/3/315

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The article is based on an ethnographic observation of a crew of graffiti writers in the northeast of Italy. Extending some considerations emerging from the case study, the article advances a reflection on the territorial dimension of graffiti writing in urban environments and the relationship between walls, social relationships and the public domain. This task entails understanding walls as artefacts that are subject to both strategic and tactical uses, as well as the relationship between walls and the public domain as a territorial configuration. In particular, graffiti writing is observed as an interstitial practice that creates its own specific way of using walls: it is a “longitudinal” rather than a “perpendicular” style, which transform the wall into a fragment of a “prolongable” series, a part of a continuing conversation.

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media, surveillance, visibility

Artveillance: At the Crossroads of Art and Surveillance

436

Surveillance & Society, Vol 7, No 2 (2010)

http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/artveillance

PDF version here

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In this article I review a series of artworks, artistic performances and installations that deal with the topic of surveillance. My aim is twofold. On the one hand, I want to look comparatively at how different artists interrogate, question, quote, or criticize surveillance society. On the other hand, I take these artistic actions as themselves symptomatic of the ways in which surveillance interrogates contemporary society. In other words, my claim is that surveillance does not simply produce substantive social control and social triage, it also contributes to the formation of an ideoscape and a collective imagery about what security, insecurity, and control are ultimately about, as well as the landscape of moods a surveillance society like ours expresses.

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territories

On Territorology. Towards a General Science of Territory

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 27(1): 52–72, March 2010

http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/1/52

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The development of territorology requires the overcoming of the dichotomy
between determinist and constructivist approaches, in order to advance
towards a general science of territory and territorial phenomena. Insights
for this task can come from at least four main threads of research: biology,
zooethology and human ethology; human ecology, social psychology and
interactionism; human, political and legal geography; and philosophy. In
light of the insights derived from these traditions, the article aims to conceptualize
territorial components, technologies, movements, effects, and their
interplay, in order to establish the main lines of inquiry for territorology. A
general territorology, it is argued, amounts to a sociology of territorial acts
and relations, whose aim is to analyze the expressive and functional components
of territories, as fixed through their organizational and technological
devices.

pdf version