All posts by admin
2023
…toute la route
“On ne peut avoir la vérité sans les risques. Il n’y a plus de philosophie si l’on regarde d’abord aux conclusions; le philosophe ne cherche pas les raccourcis, il fait toute la route.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Punk is magic
‘…and those people who believe in the hairstyle, they call ‘em punk, and if you want to know the truth then I am really a punk. I’m a punk. I’m out of control and I can’t be controlled, if I want to spit here I spit here, if I want to piss there I piss there, anything I want to do I do it. Punk is magic.’
Lee Scratch Perry

Inhabiting the ecological conversion. Experiments in diavolution
New paper on Alex Langer, ecology, politics, measure.
Now published at | https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-36667-3_5
…dans la genèse de l’individu, une hantise de la forme sociale…
… il n’en est pas moins vrai que les choses se passent comme si tout organisme supérieur était né d’une association de cellules qui se seraient partagé entre elles le travail. Très probablement, ce ne sont pas les cellules qui ont fait l’individu par voie d’association ; c’est plutôt l’individu qui a fait les cellules par voies de dissociation. Mais ceci même nous révèle, dans la genèse de l’individu, une hantise de la forme sociale, comme s’il ne pouvait se développer qu’à la condition de scinder sa substance en éléments ayant eux-mêmes une apparence d’individualité et unis entre eux par une apparence de sociabilité. Nombreux sont les cas où la nature paraît hésiter entre les deux formes, et se demander si elle constituera une société ou un individu : il suffit alors de la plus légère impulsion pour faire pencher la balance d’un côté ou de l’autre … dans des organismes rudimentaires faits d’une cellule unique, nous constatons déjà que l’individualité apparente du tout est le composé d’un nombre non défini d’individualités virtuelles, virtuellement associées. Mais, de bas en haut de la série des vivants, la même loi se manifeste. Et c’est ce que nous exprimons en disant qu’unité et multiplicité sont des catégories de la matière inerte, que l’élan vital n’est ni unité ni multiplicité pures, et que si la matière à laquelle il se communique le met en demeure d’opter pour l’une des deux, son option ne sera jamais définitive : il sautera indéfiniment de l’une à l’autre. L’évolution de la vie dans la double direction de l’individualité et de l’association n’a donc rien d’accidentel. Elle tient à l’essence même de la vie.
Henri Bergson 1907 (§III, 4)
top2% (whatever that means)
For what rankings are worth, I’ve been included in Stanford-Elsevier database of top-2% cited scientists (by single recent year rank) as calculated by John P.A. Ioannidis (data available at https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/5 ).
Friedrich Nietzsche | Exit | Exil
A Walk in Naples
With many thanks to Cristina for touring me around.
Presentiamo Terrae\X @ Perditempo
Lo spazio del visibile…
Looking forward to join the colleagues in Rome for a seminar on visibility & related matters. With many thanks to Lorenzo Sabetta for setting up the event!
Visibilità e Governanza
A walk in Düsseldorf
penséesauvage_encore!
Theories of Meaning in the Social and the Natural World
Fosse così, cara…
« Fosse così, cara, che in realtà nulla si perde o si divide. In questi strani giorni, qui a casa sua, mi sembra di essere “nel vero” – non ne so il perché, ma ho una sensazione di vero, di verità, forse perché noi due siamo persone senza più giovinezza. Le dispiace, questo?»
Anna Maria Ortese, Alonso e i visionari
A World of Pregnances. Researching the Visible
A keynote speech to be given at Jahrestagung DigiKomm22, Düsseldorf, 10-11 Nov 2022
In this short talk, I briefly introduce what I regard as the major social-theoretical challenges today in the study of inter-visibility relations, as specifically applicable to the digital domain. In a nutshell, my argument is that, besides the architectures and infrastructures of visibility, we also need to take into account what I call the world of pregnances, that is, the intensive states associated with the visible. If we follow this avenue, a few fault-lines in our categorical apparatus need to be rearranged.
+ info : https://in-visibility.net/digikomm22/
Event beautifully hosted at Haus der Universität, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf : https://www.sozwiss.hhu.de/institut/abteilungen/kommunikations-und-medienwissenschaft/beispielseite
…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
…Yet I still believe…
“Yet I still believe in another possible perspective on life: one that does not separate the whole and the parts, one for which the category of the whole and parts is not applicable to life at all but that takes life to be a unified process whose nature it is to exist only in moments that can be differentiated by their qualities or contents. Life … is an absolute continuity in which there is no assembly of fragments or parts. Life, moreover, is a unity, but one that at any moment expresses itself as a whole in distinct forms. This cannot be deduced further because life, which we attempt to formulate here in some way, is a basic fact that cannot be constructed. Each moment of life is the whole life whose steady stream — which is exactly its unique form — has its reality only at the crest of the wave in which it respectively rises. Each present moment is determined by the entire prior course of life, is the culmination of all preceding moments; and already, for this reason, every moment of life is the form in which the whole life of the subject is real.”
Georg Simmel, Rembrandt
My Review of Dominik Bartmanski’s «Matters of Revolution» (2022)

Online here : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23254823.2022.2125730
Archived here
Magic portal…
Tesserae Dialogues – Tuesday 20 September, 9pm
Happy to join a Tesserae Dialogues online, with Stavros, Laura & Lorenzo:
http://www.tesserae.eu/tesserae-dialogues-7-stavros-stavridis-and-andrea-mubi-brighenti/
Register free at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tesserae-dialogues-7-stavros-stavridis-andrea-mubi-brighenti-tickets-419499824267

The Bond of Creation
The Canetti book is now published: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/elias-canetti-and-social-theory-9781350344419/
See also on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-auVEAAAQBAJ
“Animated Lands” reviewed
Thankful for Gordon Waitt’s review of Animated lands, recently published in Social & Cultural Geography, www.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2022.2077571
La vita dei territori
Happy to be included witha short feature in Coabitare l’isola. Spazio pubblico e cura dei luoghi, Edited by Giorgio Azzoni and Pasquale Campanella (Mimesis, 2022).