camouflage, fake, intensiology, publicness, transformation, visib, visual

Semblance. The uses of fakery

Abstract. News concerning revelations or allegations of counterfeited identities and racial passing unmistakably stir strong feelings in the public. The domain of semblance is a domain of first impressions, certainly, yet these fulfils major cognitive needs and moral evaluations in social life. The article surveys the domain of semblance as a peculiar social interaction space endowed with its own logic, highlighting the entanglements of strategic and emotional, of rational and gratuitous, that contradistinguish it. To theorize adequately the domain of semblance, it is suggested, we need to proceed through at least three moves: first, focus on how semblance work exceeds rational and strategic behaviour; second, consider the intensive regimes associated with becoming-minority through the deployment of desire and emotions; third, besides acts of mimesis (imitation), also consider the existence of processes of méthexis (participation), whereby semblants coalesce not so much through copying a model but through joining environments.

Keywords: passing; faking; appearances; semblants; social epistemology; social interaction

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transformation, urban

Deptford. Ageing in the City

with Caterina Nirta

 

Abstract. In this article, we conduct an applied territoriology of Deptford, a town in south-East London, to highlight the peculiarities of ageing in place in the context of a changing neighbourhood. We look in particular at the intersection of ageing and public space, devising a phenomenological gaze onto places, with an eager ear towards the stories they tell – and sometimes, conceal. An exercise in trans-scalar thinking ensues, whereby large-scale urban trends are illuminated through the mundane and the ephemeral. The neighbourhood emerges as a ‘fold’ of potentially conflicting but actually coexistent turns, whereby an emplaced ‘generational time’ is crafted.

 

Keywords: ethnography of public space; urban ageing; walking as method; urban transformations; London

 >>> draft available upon request

creation, element, Gabriel Tarde, Gaston Bachelard, Georg Simmel, Gilles Deleuze, intensiology, manifold, measure, memory, morphogenesis, René Thom, rhythms

On Social Intensiology

Conceptualizing social life through topological folding, braid operators and collapse functions

Abstract. Social intensiology is outlined here in its connection to morphogenesis. the latter aims to explain how form come into existence, just as the former seeks to tackle the intensive states of social life. A topological reference model is proposed for conceptualizing how social life operates immanently with saliences and pregnances. The paper starts from the famous Collatz conjecture, and reviews how it has been recently modelled by Danail Valov using braid groups and including thermodynamic irreversibility into the picture. A ‘Valov braid’ can be understood as a manifold, an entity that is, at the same time, individual and collective. Its collective structure can be reconstructed, through its operational logic, as a tensional field. An attempt is made to show how phenomena of memory and measure are intertwined with the braid’s developments, giving rise to a rich present, multi-faceted that lives in non-coincidence. Within such framework, rhythmanalysis is presented as a useful tool for assaying and experimentally improving social life.

Keywords: social theory; social modelling; topology; braid groups; rhythmanalysis

>>> draft available upon request

element, environment, intensiology, measure, morphogenesis, social manifold, visib

The Elemental Forms of Social Life

translucent-concrete-2Out now in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy

Abstract. The notion of elemental reality is parsed here as instrumental to a renewal of the understanding of social formations, orders, processes, events, and, more generally, social life. An attempt is made to revisit the element notion drawing insights from the classical imagination, so as to develop an ‘elementalism’ that does not imply a simple return to atomism, but rather retrieves some important insights from the Aristotelian tradition. Elementalism, it is suggested, enables us to see the limitations of both individualist and collectivist takes on social life, allowing for a more ‘environmentalist’ idea of what constitutes society. In an attempt to analyze how an elemental reality can be said to be at play, the category of ‘the visible’ is considered, so as to evince some of its constitutive dimensions, properties, and moments.

Keywords: social theory; medium theory; social environment; elemental reality; the visible

Link to OA article : https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1168

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Alex Langer, animals, body, commonality, environment, geo, life, measure, the vegetative stratum, value

On Bioabilities. A new approach for ecological thinking and action

Beaver Dam
source | https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/kZsn7fdLFPgmuJzEB4ntT3-1200-80.jpg

(with Carlo Brentari and Federico Comollo)

Abstract. We propose the notion of bioability as the subjective correlate to biodiversity. Bioability entails the capacity to maximize the forms and patterns of life within given ecosystems. Cutting across the natural and social sciences, the bioability approach opens up a field for research and intervention, which focuses on the imaginational and aspirational dimensions of terrestrial politics. In the context of increased awareness of climate tipping points, developing bioabilities help advancing experimental practices in ecological conversion.

>>> Draft available upon request.

 

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