Category Archives: intensiology
The external form
We notice that, in a relationship between two people, the external form is rarely an adequate expression of its inner intensity. This inadequacy results from the fact that the inner relations develop continuously, while the external relations develop in a spasmodic fashion.
Georg Simmel, 1900
Theories of Meaning in the Social and the Natural World
for the time being
Monster-Measures and Monstrous Values. A short reflection on the foundations of individual-environmental theory

Chapter forthcoming in Caterina Nirta & Andrea Pavoni (Eds) (2021) Monstrous Ontologies: Politics Ethics Materiality. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press.
+ info | https://vernonpress.com/book/953

Teoria Sociale. Un percorso introduttivo
OUT NOW!

Robert Smithson, Geophilosopher
Where do we come from, where do we go – New Playlist
Umwelt-measures. On extensive and intensive measures
Introduction to the special issue ‘Theorising measures, rankings and metrics’
Now published: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0539018419858816
The whole Special Issue is due to appear soon…
Contribution to an intensiology of the public domain
A Keynote Address at the Urban Creativity Conference, Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art, Lund, Sweden.
May 17, 2019, 3pm
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This talk interrogates the nature of the urban public domain by specifically attending the intensities and the phases it generates. A comprehensive view on the phenomenon of publicness, it is suggested, is required to attend its ecological facet – more precisely, as it will be seen, its multi-layered ecology – but also to explain its intrinsic vital qualities. The latter hints to the phenomenon of intensity. After reviewing the main features of publicness (“what is specifically public in public space?”), a broader picture of the public domain can be sketched that includes the processes of mediation. But whereas mediation suggests a ‘continuist’ take, a discontinuities can likewise be detected in the public domain. Coining from physics, the latter could as well be called ‘phase transitions’. How are phase transitions correlated to the intensive moments of publicness? This is the pivotal question for discussion.
+ info | https://urbancreativitylund.tumblr.com

New Playlist – Dakar to Djibouti
The Wanderer
“He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth – though not as a traveller to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. But he will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world; for this reason he may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience. Such a man will, to be sure, experience bad nights, when he is tired and finds the gate of the town that should offer him rest closed against him; perhaps in addition the desert will, as in the Orient, reach right up to the gate, beasts of prey howl now farther off, now closer to, a strong wind arise, robbers depart with his beasts of burden. Then dreadful night may sink down upon the desert like a second desert, and his heart grow weary of wandering. When the morning sun then rises, burning like a god of wrath, and the gate of the town opens to him, perhaps he will behold in the faces of those who dwell there even more desert, dirt, deception, insecurity than lie outside the gate – and the day will be almost worse than the night. Thus it may be that the wanderer shall fare; but then, as recompense, there will come the joyful mornings of other days and climes, when he shall see, even before the light has broken, the Muses come dancing by him in the mist of the mountains, when afterwards, if he relaxes quietly beneath the trees in the equanimity of his soul at morning, good and bright things will be thrown down to him from their tops and leafy hiding-places, the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood and solitude and who, like him, are, in their now joyful, now thoughtful way, wanderers and philosophers. Born out of the mysteries of dawn, they ponder on how, between the tenth and the twelfth stroke of the clock, the day could present a face so pure, so light-filled, so cheerful and transfigured: – they seek the philosophy of the morning.”
Nietzsche, Human, All too Human (I, §638)
Tasting Wine Making Territories
NOW OUT in TASTE • Law and the Senses book series (Eds. Andrea Pavoni, Danilo Mandic, Caterina Nirta, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos). London: University of Westminster Press.
Available in Open Access – https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/books/10.16997/book21/
Onore, sacro, intensità. Per una sociologia del timotico
Pubblicato in La società degli individui, n. 56, anno XIX, 2016/2
A un primo sguardo, onore e dignità sembrano opporsi come l’arcaico e il moderno. In questo senso, la missione che il pensiero moderno, “democratico”, si auto-attribuisce è di sconfiggere e superare una regolazione sociale di tipo aristocratico. L’onore viene così considerato da un’ampia gamma di pensatori moderni come retaggio di forme tribali, particolariste ed elitarie di interazione sociale, a cui viene contrapposta una nuova forma morale universalista e democratica, quella della dignità. Tale, in breve, è il sogno kantiano che Rawls (2000: 328) ha denominato “aristocrazia di tutti”. Ma, come la stessa espressione paradossale lascia intravedere, il rapporto tra onore e dignità è estremamente più complesso di una semplice antitesi.
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