Category Archives: commonality

commonality, intensiology, morphogenesis, social manifold

The Social Logic of Leadership

Triangle-of-Sadness

A reading of Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness through Fascist and Aberrant Leadership

Abstract. This piece puzzles about the social logic of leadership through the lens of the movie Triangle of Sadness (2022), directed by the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund. A distinction is introduced between two modes of leadership, here called, respectively, ‘fascist’ and ‘aberrant’. Phenomena of leadership, it is contended, illustrate the workings of social logic ex vivo, and offer exquisite examples of how intensities intervene in social interaction, giving rise to the tensive states in which the local protagonists of interaction are caught. Östlund’s film has noticeable diagnostic power, so that the piece unfolds as a study of the sociological materials it provides, even apart from the narrative plot and the satirical or critical intentions.

Keywords: social theory, social interaction, social logic, social intensities, leadership

Now out in The Journal for Cultural Research : https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FKVPYAEGKCASAXPCAXRC/full?target=10.1080/14797585.2026.2682597

 

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)

Out now in Global Social Challenges

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.

pdf

 

commonality, environment, geo, measure, territories, territoriology

Mess of A Planet: Terrestrial politics in the age of climate change

Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Alexis Gonin & Mattias Kärrholm

Forthcoming with Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026

 

The book seeks to contribute to the debate on the political and societal impact of climate change, with a focus on the new epistemologies that are being developed to recompose and expand ecological thinking. The approach is interdisciplinary across the humanities and social sciences (philosophy, social theory, sociology, anthropology, architecture, political ecology, and human geography). The discussion is theoretically-led and theoretically informed, with rich ethnographic case studies included to provide grounding for analysis. Through a number of “terrestrial stories”, a notion of “terrestrial politics” is developed so as to clarify the role of territories in the current planetary transition. Issues of globalisation, coloniality, ecology and territoriality are here explored through the modes of knowing and experiencing that correspond to them. The book thus enriches the current discussions on climate change and climate politics by emphasising the role of territories in prefiguring an emergent terrestrial politics suitable for conceptualizing an ecological civilization.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Theorizing Terrestrial Politics

Part I. Debating Terrestrialism
1. Luigi Pellizzoni, Mess of a problem. The climate crisis debate as a governmental dispositif
2. Michael J Shapiro, The Ecological Sublime
3. Jeanne Etelain, Towards a Terrestrial Nomos of the Earth: Rethinking Planetary Politics in the Age of Gaia
4. David Blanchon, Sentinel territories

Part II. Terrestrial Stories
5. Andreas Blok and Casper Bruun Jensen, Re-Placing Latour’s Eco-Politics: Cosmopolitics in Cambodian Territories
6. Emile St-Pierre, Living with the unthinkable: System failure, ecology and energy practices in Hokkaido
7. Giuseppina Forte, Raising the Ground, Climbing the Trees:
Territorial Irreversibility and Its Contestation in East River Park
8. Konstantinos Avramidis, Taking Care of Refugee Estates, Refugee Estates of Care. Design Scenarios in Nicosia
9. Priyam Tripathy, Planetary Crisis and Uneven Worlds: Air, Heat, and Infrastructures

commonality

… but no city of philosophers

Following the law of separation of the old Herbert Spencer, the selection of heterogeneous talents and vocations was bound to take place of its own accord. In fact, at the end of a century there was already underground in course of development and continuous excavation a city of painters, a city of sculptors, a city of musicians, of poets, of geometricians, of physicists, of chemists, even of naturalists, of psychologists, of scientific or aesthetic specialists of every kind, except, strictly speaking, in philosophy. For we were obliged after several attempts to give up the idea of founding or maintaining a city of philosophers, notably owing to the incessant trouble caused by the tribe of sociologists who are the most unsociable of mankind.

Gabriel Tarde, Underground Man

commonality, creation, life

…something else the same

“We go on living, we permit ourselves
to continue—but certainly
not for the university, what they publish

.
severally or as a group: clerks
got out of hand forgetting for the most part
to whom they are beholden.

.

spitted on fixed concepts like
roasting hogs, sputtering, their drip sizzling
in the fire

.

Something else, something else the same.”

William Carlos Williams

animals, civility, commonality, publicness, territories, urban

Urban Animals – Domestic, Stray and Wild

Urban Animals—Domestic, Stray, and Wild

Notes from a Bear Repopulation Project in the Alps

Daniza in the year 2000 – Photo by Gilberto Volcan – Courtesy of Parco Naturale Adamello Brenta
Daniza in the year 2000 – Photo by Gilberto Volcan – Courtesy of Parco Naturale Adamello Brenta

by Andrea Mubi Brighenti & Andrea Pavoni

Finally OUT in Society & Animals

https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341580

Abstract. This piece explores ‘domesticity’ as a social territory defined by the relationship it entertains with the conceptual and material space of ‘the wild’. The leading research question can be framed as follows: do these two spaces stand in opposition to each other, or are more subtle relations of co-implication at play? As we enquiry into the domestic and the wild, a richer conceptual map of notions is drawn, which also includes the public, the common, the civilised and the barbarian. The case study that illustrates this dense intermingling of categories is offered by the case of Daniza, a wild brown bear introduced in the Brenta Natural Park on the Italian Alps in the 2000s, who repeatedly came into unexpected, accidental contacts with humans. Declared a ‘dangerous animal’, Daniza was controversially killed by public authorities in 2014, officially in an attempt to capture her with anaesthetising bullets, but in a way that still leaves doubts about the degree of voluntariness of the killing. The piece argues that the domestic and the wild constitute two semiotic-material domains constantly stretching into each other without any stable or even clear boundary line, and elaborates a series of corollaries for studying animals in urban contexts.

Keywords: Domesticity; Domestication; Wildness; Bears; Urban Animals; Territorial Governance

 

TOC

Introduction – Domesticity as Urban Prolongation

  1. Animal Governance, Domestication, and Classification
  2. Locating the Wild in the Urban
  3. Domesticity, Domestication and Civilisation
  4. The Unlucky Case of Bear Daniza
  5. Which Sort of Wild?
  6. The Barbarian

Conclusions

pdf version here

Courtesy Atelier delle Verdure– Il Malerbario @ 2009
commonality, interstices, milieu, rhythms, the vegetative stratum, urban

The Vegetative City

Courtesy Atelier delle Verdure– Il Malerbario @ 2009
Courtesy Atelier delle Verdure– Il Malerbario @ 2009

OUT NOW in CULTURE, THEORY AND CRITIQUE

The vegetative stratum is a layer of existence that is inherent not only in plants. Here, I propose to look at how vegetative life – or, the vegetative mode of existence – affects cities. The vegetative mode of existence is not focused on activities, routines, achievements. Here appears a city that is not industrial or industrious. When the industrious city retreats, or falls apart, the vegetative stratum becomes visible. The vegetative city is a city without any central nervous system. I suggest the interpretation of the vegetative city as a hopeful manifestation of the urban that only takes place when the time is ripe.

Also here