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face, Friedrich Nietzsche, instant, intensiology

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)

crystallisations, milieu, urban

Urban Phases: Crystallisation

 

An analysis of the city through its crystallising processes is here proposed. Because crystallisation involves phase transition, a review of the latter, as well of the notion of phase in its relation to order, is first submitted. Then the question is posed: Can we suggest that cities have phases? What would it imply to study cities as “phased beings”, or phased phenomena? Which characteristics of crystalline phases can prove most relevant for cities? The paper explores crystallisation as a lens for understanding spatial order, temporality, individuality and perception in the course and in the context of the urban process and urban life.

Keywords: urban phases; urban crystallisation; crystal growth; crystalline life; crystallised cities; urban perception; urban individuality

Now published in City, Culture and Society

also here_.

heliodore-crystals28a-creative-commons-by-spiriferminerals-com

Gabriel Tarde, Pierre Janet, resist, surface / depth, the reactive

The Reactive: Social Experiences of Surface and Depth – Chapter

9781138490642

“The Reactive” chapter now published in the Volume edited by Christian Borch (2019) Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society. (Routledge, 2019) https://www.crcpress.com/Imitation-Contagion-Suggestion-On-Mimesis-and-Society/Borch/p/book/9781138490642

PDF brighenti-2019-the-reactive

(( Based on a speech I gave at this 2015 conference in Copenhagen: http://www.capacitedaffect.net/?p=771 ))

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

Deligny's Lignes d'erre
rhythms, territoriology, urban

Beyond rhythmanalysis: towards a territoriology of rhythms and melodies in everyday spatial activities (with Mattias Kärrholm)

NOW PUBLISHED in CITY, TERRITORY & ARCHITECTURE

Abstract: The recent, rich scholarship on rhythms, following in the wake of Lefebvre’s book Éléments de rythmanalyse (1992), proves that rhythmanalysis is an important sensitising notion and research technique. Despite its increasing recognition, however, rhythmanalysis has not yet become a proper science as its proponents had hoped. In this article, we argue that rhythmanalysis could benefit from being further developed and integrated into a wider science of territories. What research must attain is, we suggest, not simply a recording, description or analysis of rhythms; instead, the goal is to capture the life of rhythms as they enter territorial formations. A neo-vitalistic conception, in other words, could enrich the standard social-scientific understanding of the relation between rhythms and territories. More specifically, we submit that the notion of rhythm could be explored not only in terms of the recurrent patterns of association it defines, but also with essential reference to the intensive situations and moments it generates and, in the end, territorialises.
Keywords: Social rhythms, Rhythmanalysis, Synchronisation, Science of territories, Territorial intensities

Open Access PDF

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

 

Artwork Courtesy of John Fekner ©1978
urban, walls

Urban Walls. Political and Cultural Meanings of Vertical Structures and Surfaces

Volume Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti & Mattias Kärrholm. Published by Routledge – Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series, 2018.

https://www.routledge.com/Urban-Walls-Political-and-Cultural-Meanings-of-Vertical-Structures-and/Brighenti-Karrholm/p/book/9781138304338

 

Artwork Courtesy of John Fekner ©1978
Artwork Courtesy of John Fekner ©1978

In recent years, an increasing number of separation walls has been built around the world. Walls built in urban areas are particularly striking in that they have exacted a heavy toll in terms of human suffering. At the same time, however, homeless and displaced people, unprotected by any walls, often terrorised by irregular militias or evicted by the state police, have likewise endured terrible ordeals. From time to time, walls are invoked, promised, contested, challenged, struggled over. They can be protective, but the protection they grant is always selective to a significant degree. Not only does the fundamental ambivalence of walls seems intrinsic, but the spatial functioning cannot be reduced to a black-and-white picture – walls as either simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This collection invites to inquiry into the complexities of the social life of walls. Urban and urbanised spaces are here observed as veritable laboratories of wall-making, places where their consequences become most visible. In perspective, the essays collected here also invite to consider how urban walls today extend into media spaces, drawing a complex geography of separation, connection, control and resistance.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction. Andrea Mubi Brighenti & Mattias Kärrholm, The Life of Walls – In Urban, Spatial And Political Theory

Part I. The Politics of Urban Walls

Alison Young, On Walls in the Open City

Florine Ballif, Dismantling Belfast Peacelines. New physical arrangements in amidst conflict

Pete Chambers, Walling Through Seas. The Indian Ocean, Australian border security, and the political present

Claudio Minca & Alexandra Rijke, Walls, walling and the immunitarian imperative

Pedro Victor Brandão & Andrea Pavoni, Screening Brazil: Footnotes on a Wall

Part II. Cultures of Walls

Ella Chmielewska, Afterimages of Warsaw. Of Walls and Memories

Emma Nilsson, Wall Terrains. Architecture, body culture and parkour

Karin Grundström, Gating housing in Sweden: Walling in the privileged, walling out the public

Sabina Andron, The Right to the City Is the Right to the Surface: A Case for a Surface Commons

Jérôme Denis & David Pontille, The Multiple Walls of Graffiti Removal. Maintenance and Urban Assemblage in Paris

Lachlan MacDowall, Walls as Fleeting Surfaces. From Bricks to Pixels, Trains to Instagram

 

Endorsements

Walls and cities have long been partners, but their relationship has been understudied. This creative and important collection takes the social and political work of the urban wall seriously. Rather than a self-evident object, the wall becomes lively, talkative, mobile, and ambivalent, dividing yet also connecting. A valuable and original contribution.
Nicholas Blomley, Professor of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

It is a remarkable feat for an edited volume to read as cohesively and with such strong focus as Urban Walls. The walls included here (violent walls, but also vulnerable ones; aquatic, immunising, yet totally exposed and medialised walls; affective and playful, immaterial and palimpsestic walls) are marked by the wounds of history, geography and politics that surround them but also that are generated by them. These walls feel as material and fleshy as if we were placing our hand on their surface.
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Professor, Law & Theory, University of Westminster, London

An instructive and compelling examination of walls in their multiple present forms. The emphasis on the material and vertical puts this at the heart of contemporary debates. Historically situated, richly illustrated, and with a view to wider themes as much as empirical detail, this is an important contribution to politics, geography and urban studies.
Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, University of Warwick

 

 

 

 

resist, territoriology, urban, value

Airspacing the City. Where Technophysics meets Atmoculture

(with Andrea Pavoni)

NOW PUBLISHED in Azimuth 10.

 

Credit | http://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2014/07/airbnbs-consistent-rebrand-focuses-sense-belonging-community/
Credit | http://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2014/07/airbnbs-consistent-rebrand-focuses-sense-belonging-community/

In this paper, we seek to show how the notion of technophysics can be applied to better understand the experience of contemporary urbanism. We argue that technophysics exists in dynamic relation to an atmoculture of urban space, whereby the technological and the cultural meet on a deeply affective-atmospheric terrain. Contemporary technophysics and atmoculture collaborate in the quest for comfort and the flight from its antonyms (stress, unease, and fear), but they are also riddled with tensions and contradictory outcomes …

Paginated PDF Version

 

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