Category Archives: social manifolds

morphogenesis, social manifolds, transformation

Imitation, metamorphosis, becoming: A comparative social-theoretical sketch

Happy to join Nidesh Lawtoo’s Mimetic Turn upcoming conference. Especially looking forward to hearing from the distinguished keynotes. On my turn, I’ll be contributing some reflections about

Imitation, metamorphosis, becoming: A comparative social-theoretical sketch

Abstract. In my talk, I would like to address the relation between three notions that share significant similarities, but also exhibit crucial differences: these are Gabriel Tarde’s imitation, Elias Canetti’s transformation (Verwandlung), and Gilles Deleuze’s becoming (devenir). Tarde, whose work spanned the 1890s, is famously associated with the idea that social life is essentially imitative in nature, and although imitation does not truly exhaust his whole conception, it is amply elaborated and variously illustrated throughout his work. Both Canetti, writing in the 1950s, and Deleuze, through the 1960s and 1970s, seem to have subsequently deployed mimetic-like notions in their respective research; at the same time, both have been careful to remark how their conceptions remained distinct from the notion of imitative behaviour. My aim here is thus to compare and analyse these three notions, so as to untangle a little bit their complex, dense relations.

 

+info | https://hiw.kuleuven.be/hua/events/conferences-workshops/mimetic-turn

Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dXJ_Lj9Umg

Adolf Portmann, morphogenesis, René Thom, social manifolds, territoriology

Morphogenesis and Animistic Moments (with Mattias Kärrholm)

On social formation and territorial production

louis-kahn-arts-center-campus-fort-wayne-indiana-x080416

NOW published in  Social Science Information – http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0539018418763560

 

Abstract. This piece explores the issues of morphogenesis and metamorphosis in socio-spatial formations and social assemblages. The specific key provided here to apprehend the issue of ‘form’ is what we propose to call the ‘animistic moment’ in form-taking processes. We believe that a conceptualisation of animistic moments might help us to better understand, not simply the coming about, but the specific yet elusive power forms are endowed with. The general social-theoretical horizon for the essay is an approach to social collectives as forms of territorialisation and territorial stabilisation. An inquiry into the genesis and the transformation of forms through animistic moments, we suggest, might also be employed in the study of processes of social territorialisation at large.

Keywords: social theory; genesis of forms; formative processes; individuals and social aggregates; socio-spatial formations; animistic moments;

 

Outline

Introduction
1. The mystery of appearances
2. Metamorphosis and investments into form
3. Form-taking and the environment
4. The formation of individual collectives
5. Animistic moments and the revelations of form
6. Territorial production through animation
Conclusions
 
Gabriel Tarde, measure, media, milieu, social manifolds, urban, value, visibility

The social life of measures

Now published in Theory, Culture & Society 35(1) http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tcsa/35/1

Burroughs-noMetrics

Abstract

Issues of measure and measurement, and their relation to value and values, are of concern in several major threads in contemporary social theory and social research. In this paper, the notion of ‘measure-value environments’ is introduced as a theoretical lens through which the life of measures can be better understood. A number of points are made which represent both a continuation and a slight change in emphasis vis-à-vis the existing scholarship. First, it is argued that the relation between measure and value is necessarily circular – better, entangled. Second, a conceptualisation of measures as territorialising devices is advanced. Third, importance is given to the fact that measures are not simply tools in our hands, they are also environments in which we live. Fourth, attention is drawn to the fact that the unit (n=1) is not just a quantitative happening among others, but is qualitatively distinct.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0263276416689028

The Social Life of Measures (pre-print version)

 

René Thom, social manifolds, visibility

The Visible: Element of the Social

Now Published in Frontiers in Sociology | Sociological Theory

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Abstract. In the context of a social-theoretical take on the link between social life and visibility, this paper invites to shift the focus from visibility phenomena to “the visible”. A theory of visibility, it is submitted, must be constructed as a theory of the medium. In opposition to visibility as a set of formal relations, what the visible brings to the fore is the existence of a mid-term, a connective tissue. Also, if a theory is a prelude to a science, then a theory is needed that makes possible to measure the visible in itself. The development of an “intrinsic” theory of the visible, one capable of generating its own variables and constants, along with the conceptual space for their articulation, is retrieved through the joint contributions of surface theories (Simmel, Goffman, Portmann) and intensity theories (Deleuze, Thom). The piece presents a set of notions that could be of use to analyze the fiber of the visible and the trajectories occurring in the visible, in view of laying out a series of laws of the visible.

Available at : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2017.00017/full

& a Related Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtK0nfA5r50&t=1s

measure, social manifolds

The Ambiguous Multiplicities

Materials, Episteme and Politics of Cluttered Social Formations

About

This book proposes a historical-conceptual journey into the cluttered social formations that have remained outside of mainstream sociology. In particular, it reviews urban crowds, mediated publics, global masses, population, the sovereign people and the multitude and addresses the question: ‘What is the building block of the social?’.

Contents

1. Multiplicities Old and New
2. Urban Crowds, Mediated Publics and Global Masses
3. Population, ‘the People’ and the Multitude
4. What is the Building Block of the Social? Episteme of the One and the Many
5. Across and Within: Issues of Virality, Imitation and Reactivity
Conclusions: Visible Multiplicities and Layered Individuals

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+ info | https://www.palgrave.com/it/book/9781137384980

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Download full book in pdf here : brighenti-2014-the-ambiguous-multiplicities

media, publicness, social manifolds, surveillance

Roundtable | Entre renaissance citoyenne et transparence politique

I’ve been invited at a roundtable at Les Rencontres d’Averroès (Marseille), titled “Entre renaissance citoyenne et transparence politique. Révolution numérique ou contrôle des libertés ?” (19th Edition, La cité en danger? Dictature, transparence e démocratie)

https://www.rencontresaverroes.com/rencontres/editions-precedentes/

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The debate has also been recently broadcasted on the French National Radio, Franceculture :

http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-culturesmonde-pensees-mediterraneennes-la-citoyennete-a-l’heure-du-numerique-12-2012-12-11

Posted also on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuZv9WBXqdM

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