The Forgotten Political Art par Excellence ?: Architecture, Design and the Social Sculpting of the Body Politic

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Rockhill
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Architecture Design ◽  
Political Art ◽  
The Social

The Forgotten Political Art Par Excellence? Architecture, Design and the Social Sculpting of the Body Politic

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Rockhill
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Art ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Relationship

With a few rare but important exceptions, it is arguable that major contemporary debates on the historical relationship between art and politics—from the work of Lukács and Adorno to that of Lyotard and Rancière—have generally favored the visual arts and literature over and against architecture and urban design. However, as a few thinkers like Benjamin and Foucault have recognized, if there is one art that appears to be prototypically political (in the sense that it is almost inevitably the site of collective decisions that directly shape the social body while simultaneously being subject to multifarious communal appropriations), it is surely architecture. This paradox leads to a question of central importance, which serves to guide the analysis in this final chapter: why have many of the foremost philosophic debates on the historical relation between art and politics sidelined what is perhaps the political art par excellence? This leads to a critical re-examination of the metaphilosophical assumptions undergirding many of the standard historical narratives regarding the development of art and its relationship to politics.

All Aboard the Louis Vuitton Train!

Pólemos ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-195
Author(s):  
Leif Dahlberg
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Social ◽  
Continuous Running

Abstract The article discusses fashion advertising as a means to access and understand contemporary social imaginary significations of the body politic, focusing on an advertising for Louis Vuitton. The article suggest that one can read advertising as a form of continuous, running commentary that society makes of itself, and through which one can unearth the social imaginary. The article finds a plethora of meanings in the selected advertising for Louis Vuitton, but the central finding is that the fashion advertising represents community as an absence of community; in other words as a deficit that the brand somehow is able to rectify.

Inclusions: Concerning a Theory and Aesthetics of Police

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogl
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form

AbstractSince the eighteenth century what is known as the ›body politic‹ has duplicated itself in a very specific way. Alongside the models of the social contract we can observe, under the label ›police‹, the emergence of political knowledge dealing with the regulation of social, economic, medical and moral spheres. This tension between sovereign representation and the empirical ›body politic‹ became critical after the French Revolution. The works of Friedrich Schiller may serve as an example of the intense exchange between aesthetic and police-theoretical problems: a quest to mediate between the laws of reason and the scope of empirical forces; and to grasp the economics of a political power which converts the inclusion of the excluded into a new form of degenerate life.

Out of touch, out of tune: the social-political construction of atmospheric walls during the COVID-19 pandemic first wave

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kandida Purnell
Keyword(s):  
Constitutive Relation ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk

This article contributes to knowledge on the co-constitutive relation between emotions and bodies by describing the mechanisms enabling the social-political construction of ‘atmospheric walls’ (Ahmed, 2014) during the COVID-19 pandemic first wave of spring-summer 2020. Using auto- and digital ethnographies this article underlines gendered, raced and classed angles of arrival into the spring-summer ‘first wave’ and describes the social-political implications of individual bodies and parts of the body politic losing touch through the pandemic. In particular, this article highlights three mechanisms – angles of arrival, discord and losing touch – leading to the containment of grief within parts of the UK body politic, which, through the COVID-19 pandemic first wave worked to build up atmospheric walls segregating parts of the body politic and allow the continued circulation of some bodies while facilitating the continued circulation, use and using up of others.

scholarly journals Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Risk Discourse

Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent examples of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the individual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and divine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.

All for the Union

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifton Hood
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
Democratic Nation ◽  
The City

For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed enough self-control and independence to take direction from their betters and accept their proper place in the body politic. But the New York City draft riots of 1863 – the worse urban disorder in American history – seemed to show that entire communities lacked the self-discipline and orderliness required of the citizenry of a democratic nation and instead were prone to a savagery that had ripped the city apart. Drawing on their memories of the draft riots and on Victorian cultural values, the upper class utilized the Civil War to counter the blurring of class boundaries and social credentials caused by urban growth of the first half of the century. They came to classify came to classify many workers and immigrants as dangerous classes that threatened the social order- and themselves as a community of heritage and feeling that provided leadership in government, the economy, and society. At bottom these representations involved social control, and upper-class people used them to help harden class lines and gain an understanding of themselves and the rest of urban society that was coherent and compelling.

The Microbial State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie R. Fishel
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Radioactive Isotopes ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Radical Shift

For three centuries the rational and disembodied state has been animated by one of the most powerful metaphors in politics: the body-politic, a claustrophobic and bounded image of the collective, the state, the nation, of the sovereign alienated among sovereigns. Drawing sources from continental philosophy, science and technology studies and world politics, this pathbreaking book challenges the body-politic on the grounds of its materiality. Just as the human body is not whole and separate from other bodies, but populated by microbes, bacteria, water and radioactive isotopes, Stefanie Fishel argues that the body-politic of the state exists in dense entanglement with other communities and forms of life. Yet rather than follow the nihilistic critiques of biopolitics and sovereignty into their political and metaphysical dead ends, Fishel challenges us to think and live hopefully beyond the body-politic: to think of bodies and states as lively vessels, living harmoniously coevolved with multiplicity and the biosphere. From global trade to people movements and climate change, this radical shift in metaphors promises to open up new forms of global political practice and community and challenge a politics based on fear and survival. Fishel concludes that we should not aim for mere living: we need to set our sights on building a world for thriving. This book will be of interest to a range of scholars in the humanities and the social and natural sciences. Fishel provides connections between the political and practical in clear terms using multiple approaches and disciplines.

Closing statement

1963 ◽  
Vol 159 (974) ◽  
pp. 245-255 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
The Past ◽  
System Building ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practical Implications

During the past two days we have seen how well the study of human population combines the interests of the founders both of modern demography and of the Royal Society. We have had abundant evidence that the study of population organizes the materials of the natural and social sciences in ways that give them both scientific and practical significance. The programme, I suspect, would have given our predecessors satisfaction, for the organizers of this Society, and of its daughter organizations around the world, were not just detached scholars of academic halls. Nature was to be studied for its beauty, of course, but also for the service of man. The practical implications of science for society, the economy, and the body politic were not considered inappropriate for the inner temple of science. They were drawn without apology; occasionally they were even correctly drawn. Perhaps I am overimpressed by the pragmatic stream in the Royal Society’s early work because I am most familiar with Franklin's interests. Both in this Society, and in its daughter organization, The American Philosophical Society, * his emphasis was always on careful observation, limited generalization, and practical application. The dividing line in the early histories of both our societies was not that between the natural and the social sciences, or between science and action. If there was a division it was between science and a system-building kind of social philosophy.

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