A Mubi Brighenti
Biographic Data
| ID | 34281 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Mubi Brighenti |
| GIVEN NAMES | A Mubi |
| FAMILY NAME | Brighenti |
| SIGNATURE | BRIGHENTI A M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Trento |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7498-9857 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 692 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
On bioabilities: A new approach for ecological thinking and action
The article submits the notion of bioability as a new lens for ecological theorization and ecocriticism. Bioability can be defined as the subjective counterpart to biodiversity: it consists of all action potentials that increase the flourishing of living others, both human and non-human. The bioabilities approach intersects the philosophy of biology, biosemiotics, environmental ethics and social science, revealing how such capacities have emerged…
Graffiti in the Lawscape: Seizing the Circuits of Valorization of an Elusive and Resistant Practice
In this piece, we approach graffiti from the perspective of the ‘circuits of valorization’ that qualify as well as quantify it. We understand a valorization circuit as an assemblage of cultural, legal, economic and geographic dynamics surrounding a given artefact, which eventually confer a certain ‘value’ to it. Here, we look at examples of global graffiti, with attention to how cities and administrations juggle with its controversial valorizatio…
Envisaging terrestrial territories: How to take up Gaiapolitics
Activated. Towards a sociology of reaction
The reactive character of social relations, though empirically pervasive, is analytically neglected. Yet, reaction seems a surprisingly useful category to make sense of the extensive environmental links of behaviour/action lying at the very junction of social phenomenology (the here-and-now) and social ecology (the elsewhere-at-other-times). To advance a deeper theorization of this category, we start by mobilizing Mauss's notion of 'counter-gift'…
Terrestrial territories: From the Globe to Gaia, a new ground for territory
Territory is a central tool for analysing the politics, primarily between nation-states, of the division of a world based on the figure of the Globe. However, with the Anthropocene, the ground of territories has somehow changed, shifting from ‘the Globe’ of the globalisation age, to the Anthropocene, where Gaia, or the earth-system, ‘irrupts’ onto the political scene. Yet, both sovereign territories and critical approaches to territoriality, desp…
Elias Canetti and Social Theory: The Bond of Creation
Elias Canetti is a key thinker in the trend towards the renewal of social theory for the 21st century. He is increasingly being recognised in the social and political sciences for the seminal text, Crowds and Power (1960). While this work can sometimes be criticised for its alleged anti-historicity, anti-modernism, fixation on death, and a dark vision of humankind, Crowds and Power can, in fact, be interpreted as a study and a critique of the mon…
Matters of revolution: Urban spaces and symbolic politics in Berlin and Warsaw after 1989
Matters of revolution: Urban spaces and symbolic politics in Berlin and Warsaw after 1989." European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Urban crystallization and the morphogenesis of urban territories
We develop the perspective of crystallization as a way to shed a light on the morphogenesis and stabilization of urban territories. We start by describing crystallization as a consolidation of a visible and singular order that establishes certain privileged directions of growth and breaks spatial and temporal symmetries. We then illuminate how crystallization processes unfold at different scales, going through a series of historical cases, from t…
On urban trajectology: Algorithmic mobilities and atmocultural navigation
In this piece, we introduce the notion of ‘atmoculture’ as a conceptual tool to analyse the new forms of mobility supported and enacted by digital algorithms. In historical perspective, we analyse how modernity has created a movement-space where the problem of finding one's way through an increasingly ‘displaced’ urban space first emerged, with noticeable psycho-social consequences. Reconstructing the new digital media as a continuation of this s…
Science evaluation - As it is, as it could be
In this short commentary, I discuss Olof Hallonsten's argument against science evaluation. My invitation is to place the discussion in a wider frame that takes into account the many challenges scientists and scientific institutions face today. I argue in favor of a 'start from the middle' approach that gives emphasis to the inner principle of valorization of the scientific endeavor
Urban phases: Crystallisation
Situating urban animals – a theoretical framework
This introduction to the special issue of Contemporary Social Science: 'Urban Animals – Shifting Ecologies of Proximities', argues that the focus on urban animals is not to be treated as just another specialisation in urban ecology or biology, rather, as a perspective from where the field of urban studies at large, and the domain of social science more generally, can be re-thought in the novel and challenging ways. To do so, first, the text situa…
Vertical vision and atmocultural navigation. Notes on emerging urban scopic regimes
This paper analyses vertical vision by tracing its possible genealogy and exploring the forms it takes in the contemporary city. In the first section, vertical vision is situated in the context of its cosmographic tenets. In the second section, the critique of verticality is complemented by a topological approach where vertical vision can be seen folding into a novel visual grammar. The lineaments of this grammar can be retrieved by attending spe…
The reactive
Imitation, suggestion and contagion are all diffusive phenomena that globally affect social ensembles in a dynamic way. These events typically occur inside and throughout compositions of associated members – what may also call a social multiplicity, or an ensemble of consociates. Action and reaction constitute a model of understanding that is wide-ranging in the physical, biological, psychological, and sociological domains. As Starobinski has put…
Umwelt-measures. On extensive and intensive measures: Introduction to the special issue ‘Theorising measures, rankings and metrics’
In modern science, we usually associate value with a numerical determination – such as, for instance, the value of the Planck constant. However, once we examine value as a co-original facet of measure, we are led to distinguish – with Spinoza – what we could call the natura naturans of measure from what we understand by measurement as its natura naturata. First, I discuss the tensions and the connections between the extensive side of measures ( m…
Three presents: On the multi-temporality of territorial production and the gift from John Soane
Territoriality has primarily been seen as a spatial rather than temporal phenomenon. In this paper, we want to investigate how time functions in territorialising processes. In particular, we are attracted by the multi-temporality that is co-present in each process of territorialisation (i.e. processes in which time and space are used as means of measure, control and expression). The article is divided into two main parts. In the first part, we dr…
City of unpleasant feelings. Stress, comfort and animosity in urban life
The image of the city as a stressful place is an evergreen topic. In this article we review the imagination of urban stress, starting from Simmel's classic thesis that the modern city is an unavoidably psychic-stimulating environment potentially leading to stimuli overload. City dwellers are then supposed to counter stimuli overload with a series of adaptation strategies. However, the ways in which these phenomena can be conceptualised are varied…
Face and the City
This piece sets out an exploration of the relations between the city, the body and the face, seeking to understand in particular how the city and the face could be articulated with reference to an image of the body. It is suggested that the face and the city entertain a kind of privileged affinity. Just as the face unsettles the head and the bodily system to which it belongs, projecting the latter into an intersubjective social system of interact…
Beyond rhythmanalysis: Towards a territoriology of rhythms and melodies in everyday spatial activities
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…
Atmospheres of retail and the asceticism of civilized consumption
During recent decades, consumption-oriented spaces of comfort and hospitality have proliferated – including, for instance, lounge shopping malls, food court plazas, spas, entertainment retail, visitor centres, and the development of ever larger pedestrian precincts. In this article we explore shopping malls as capitalist “domes” in Sloterdijk's sense. We observe atmospheric production, atmospheric management and atmospheric culture (which we prop…
Urban Animals—Domestic, Stray, and Wild: Notes from a Bear Repopulation Project in the Alps
This piece explores “domesticity” as a social territory defined by its relationship with the conceptual and ecological space of “the wild,” and asks whether these spaces stand in opposition to each other or more subtle relations of co-implication are at play. As we look into the domestic and the wild, a conceptual map of notions emerges, including the public, the common, the civilized, and the barbarian. The paper suggests the domestic and the wi…
Morphogenesis and animistic moments: On social formation and territorial production
This article explores the issue of morphogenesis and metamorphosis in socio-spatial formations. The specific key 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 focus better not simply on the coming about of new forms, but also on the power forms are endowed with. The general social-theoretical horizon for the essay is an approach to social colle…
The Social Life of Measures: Conceptualizing Measure-Value Environments
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 article, 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 scholars…
The Visible: Element of the Social
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…
Domestic Territories and the Little Humans: Understanding the Animation of Domesticity
Domesticity is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. In this piece, we approach it from the point of view of a general theory of territories. To do so, we attempt to tackle simultaneously the ecological and spiritual dimensions of home by attending the expressive dimension of domesticity. We emphasize that the expressiveness of home inherently includes the register of the familiar as well as that of the unfamiliar (Freud’s unheimlich). The constant…
Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences
Can visibility be counted as a general category for the social sciences? The attempt to provide an answer to this question entails both describing actual phenomena of visibility, and defining the characteristics of visibility as a workable, unified category. This article analyses the relational, strategic and processual aspects of visibility as constituting a single field. The importance of this field is rooted in the deep epistemology of seeing …
On Territorology: Towards a General Science of Territory
The development of territorology requires the overcoming of the dichotomy between determinist and constructivist approaches, in order to advance towards a general science of territory and territorial phenomena. Insights for this task can come from at least four main threads of research: biology, zooethology and human ethology; human ecology, social psychology and interactionism; human, political and legal geography; and philosophy. In light of th…
At the Wall: Graffiti Writers, Urban Territoriality, and the Public Domain
The article is based on an ethnographic observation of a crew of graffiti writers in the northeast of Italy. Extending some considerations emerging from the case study, the article advances a reflection on the territorial dimension of graffiti writing in urban environments and the relationship between walls, social relationships and the public domain. This task entails understanding walls as artefacts that are subject to both strategic and tactic…
Immigrants and home in the making: Thresholds of Domesticity, Commonality and Publicness
The search for home as a material and symbolic space is an increasingly salient social question across contemporary multiethnic cities. The boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic are increasingly contested and yet remain a crucial issue, especially for minority groups such as immigrant and ethnic communities. The domestication of everyday living spaces carried out by immigrant and ethnic groups entails a variety of ways of 'cult…
On Territory as Relationship and Law as Territory
Contre les conceptions traditionnelles qui confondent le territoire avec sa prolongation spatiale physique, cet article fait une proposition antiréductionniste. Il explore les caractéristiques d'une conception radicale et non intuitive du territoire, et les applique au droit. Au coeur du concept du territoire, il identifie des relations plutôt que des espaces, de sorte que territoires spatiaux et non spatiaux puissent être vus superposés les uns …
The Social Life of Measures: Conceptualizing Measure-Value Environments
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 article, 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 scholars…
An interview with Laurent Thévenot: On engagement, critique, commonality, and power
City of unpleasant feelings. Stress, comfort and animosity in urban life
The image of the city as a stressful place is an evergreen topic. In this article we review the imagination of urban stress, starting from Simmel's classic thesis that the modern city is an unavoidably psychic-stimulating environment potentially leading to stimuli overload. City dwellers are then supposed to counter stimuli overload with a series of adaptation strategies. However, the ways in which these phenomena can be conceptualised are varied…
New Media and Urban Motilities: A Territoriologic Point of View
The paper aims to contribute to the study of new media technologies in urban environments. It unfolds at two levels, epistemological and substantive. First, it discusses the issue of the conceptual tools that we can deploy to understand new media, arguing in favour of notions and methods that enable research to capture the double nature, socio-technical and bio-political, of the new media in urban environments. In particular, the paper claims tha…
Lines, barred lines. Movement, territory and the law
In this paper an attempt is made to analyse the complex relationship between law, territory and movement. Beginning with a quick overview of the notion of property, the paper suggests that this legal notion represents a way of imagining the practice of inhabiting the planet. Dwelling and travelling are explored as two alternative and complementary ways of inhabiting, and a closer inspection is paid to the moments when they confront each other bot…
Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze on crowds and packs
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 inspi…
Three presents: On the multi-temporality of territorial production and the gift from John Soane
Territoriality has primarily been seen as a spatial rather than temporal phenomenon. In this paper, we want to investigate how time functions in territorialising processes. In particular, we are attracted by the multi-temporality that is co-present in each process of territorialisation (i.e. processes in which time and space are used as means of measure, control and expression). The article is divided into two main parts. In the first part, we dr…
Artveillance: At the Crossroads of Art and Surveillance
In this article I review a series of artworks, artistic performances and installations that deal with the topic of surveillance. My aim is twofold. On the one hand, I want to look comparatively at how different artists interrogate, question, quote, or critise surveillance society. On the other hand, I take these artistic actions as themselves symptomatic of the ways in which surveillance interrogates contemporary society. In other words, my claim…
Vertical vision and atmocultural navigation. Notes on emerging urban scopic regimes
This paper analyses vertical vision by tracing its possible genealogy and exploring the forms it takes in the contemporary city. In the first section, vertical vision is situated in the context of its cosmographic tenets. In the second section, the critique of verticality is complemented by a topological approach where vertical vision can be seen folding into a novel visual grammar. The lineaments of this grammar can be retrieved by attending spe…
Politics between justification and defiance
The article discusses the status and role of politics - in its various facets - in the pragmatic sociology of critique. We focus on a number of different dimensions of politics - politics-as-justification, politics-as-distribution, politics-as-constitution, and politics-as-defiance - that can said to be of importance for a pragmatic sociology of critique, but that have not all been taken up equally in this approach. We situate pragmatic sociology…
Visualising the riverbank
Drawing on ethnographic observation of a tract of urban riverbank in the city of Trento, in northern Italy, we attempt to link phenomenological observation of social interaction in public places with larger political concerns about contemporary urban public space. While agreeing with Low et al. (Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space & Cultural Diversity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) that in order to foster public spaces it is necessary…
Situating urban animals – a theoretical framework
This introduction to the special issue of Contemporary Social Science: 'Urban Animals – Shifting Ecologies of Proximities', argues that the focus on urban animals is not to be treated as just another specialisation in urban ecology or biology, rather, as a perspective from where the field of urban studies at large, and the domain of social science more generally, can be re-thought in the novel and challenging ways. To do so, first, the text situa…
Urban Animals—Domestic, Stray, and Wild: Notes from a Bear Repopulation Project in the Alps
This piece explores “domesticity” as a social territory defined by its relationship with the conceptual and ecological space of “the wild,” and asks whether these spaces stand in opposition to each other or more subtle relations of co-implication are at play. As we look into the domestic and the wild, a conceptual map of notions emerges, including the public, the common, the civilized, and the barbarian. The paper suggests the domestic and the wi…
The Visible: Element of the Social
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…
The Public and the Common: Some Approximations of Their Contemporary Articulation
On urban trajectology: Algorithmic mobilities and atmocultural navigation
In this piece, we introduce the notion of ‘atmoculture’ as a conceptual tool to analyse the new forms of mobility supported and enacted by digital algorithms. In historical perspective, we analyse how modernity has created a movement-space where the problem of finding one's way through an increasingly ‘displaced’ urban space first emerged, with noticeable psycho-social consequences. Reconstructing the new digital media as a continuation of this s…
Dogville, or, the Dirty Birth of Law
While avoiding the pretence of producing an exhaustive reading of such a complex object as Lars Von Trier's Dogville, this article selectively uses the film to explore the process of the emergence of a new legality and a new set of legal relationships within a community. Two superimposed layers of meaning, the biblical and the mythic, are considered and their interaction with two different reasons, the symbolic and the economic, is suggested and …
Social camouflage: Functions, logic, paradoxes
Camouflage is usually understood as a type of deceitful communication strategy in the animal and human domains. In this piece, we invite scholars to consider how the phenomenon of camouflage, while certainly grounded in antagonism and selection, might exceed its strategic meaning. Using the case of undercover agents movies, we attempt to flesh out the inner logic of camouflage and the type of social-existential situations it gives shape to. Explo…
Revolution and Diavolution: What Is the Difference
Whereas revolution has often been viewed as contrary to organization, it in fact requires the overcoming of a present organization in the promise of achieving another superior organization. The article conducts a theoretical, rather than historical, reflection on the interplay among three concepts: organization, revolution, and diavolution. By exploring the modernist conception of revolution, the idea is advanced that the relationship can be fram…
Did We Really Get Rid of Commands? Thoughts on a Theme from Elias Canetti
Surveillance and the Visual - González-Crussi's On Seeing, Shih's Visuality and Identity, Reinhardt, Edwards and Duganne's Beautiful Suffering, and Apel and Smith's Lynching Photographs
Box girder bridge deck, is the most common type of bridges in world and India, it consists of several Slab or girders. The span in the direction of the roadway and connected across their tops and bottoms by a thin continuous structural stab, the longitudinal box girders can be made of steel or concrete. The Simple supported single span concrete bridge deck is presented in present study. Skewed bridges are suitable in highway design when the geome…
Apocalypso Disco: La rave-o-luzione della post techno (Riccardo Balli)
An absolute insider of the international underground electronic music scene for 20 years or so, Riccardo Balli is the best conceivable Charon for those who weren't there and want to get at least a flavour of what it was-and still is-all about. But beware, Balli is neither a music critic nor a music historian. Rather, a DJ, label owner, composer, novelist, live performer and, above all, a relentless experimenter in every domain of cultural product…
Did We Really Get Rid of Commands? Thoughts on a Theme from Elias Canetti
On Territory as Relationship and Law as Territory
Contre les conceptions traditionnelles qui confondent le territoire avec sa prolongation spatiale physique, cet article fait une proposition antiréductionniste. Il explore les caractéristiques d'une conception radicale et non intuitive du territoire, et les applique au droit. Au coeur du concept du territoire, il identifie des relations plutôt que des espaces, de sorte que territoires spatiaux et non spatiaux puissent être vus superposés les uns …
Dogville, or, the Dirty Birth of Law
While avoiding the pretence of producing an exhaustive reading of such a complex object as Lars Von Trier's Dogville, this article selectively uses the film to explore the process of the emergence of a new legality and a new set of legal relationships within a community. Two superimposed layers of meaning, the biblical and the mythic, are considered and their interaction with two different reasons, the symbolic and the economic, is suggested and …
Canetti, Elias (1905–1994)
Born in 1905 in a small village in Bulgaria along the Danube, into a Sephardic community, raised multilingually in Germany, England, Switzerland, and Austria, Elias Canetti was a truly European intellectual, as well as a stern critic of European culture. Best known as a writer of one novel, a few plays, various essays, several collections of aphorisms, and a monumental three‐part autobiography (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literat…
Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences
Can visibility be counted as a general category for the social sciences? The attempt to provide an answer to this question entails both describing actual phenomena of visibility, and defining the characteristics of visibility as a workable, unified category. This article analyses the relational, strategic and processual aspects of visibility as constituting a single field. The importance of this field is rooted in the deep epistemology of seeing …
Revolution and Diavolution: What Is the Difference
Whereas revolution has often been viewed as contrary to organization, it in fact requires the overcoming of a present organization in the promise of achieving another superior organization. The article conducts a theoretical, rather than historical, reflection on the interplay among three concepts: organization, revolution, and diavolution. By exploring the modernist conception of revolution, the idea is advanced that the relationship can be fram…
Artveillance: At the Crossroads of Art and Surveillance
In this article I review a series of artworks, artistic performances and installations that deal with the topic of surveillance. My aim is twofold. On the one hand, I want to look comparatively at how different artists interrogate, question, quote, or critise surveillance society. On the other hand, I take these artistic actions as themselves symptomatic of the ways in which surveillance interrogates contemporary society. In other words, my claim…
Conclusions
In this book, we have analysed a series of social phenomena from the perspective of a relational ontology of visibility. Visibility has proved to be a useful category for theorising and studying phenomena that are inherent, for instance, in mass media and social representations, new media and networked social morphology, the public domain, recognition, surveillance, social control and the life of democratic societies. Throughout the book an attem…
Visibility and Social Theory
In the previous chapter we observed the curious zone of convergence according to which, on the one hand, neurophysiological cognitive research is discovering and increasingly recognising the relevance of the social (traditionally conceived) and emotional aspects of seeing, while on the other fashionable social theories like ANT tell us that we should displace the centrality of humans in the ensemble of the social world as exclusive agents and the…
Visibility and Democracy
From Chapter 3 onwards, we analysed a series of situations in which visibility assumes a more or less direct political significance. In this final chapter, an invitation is made to social and political theory to engage visibility more thoroughly. This invitation calls for the consideration of a larger historical horizon. A historical parallel can be established: from the late eighteenth century, with the French and the American revolutions, it be…
Visibility and the Public
This chapter considers three major areas of theorisation and research on the ‘public’ which are essential to us in terms of their relationship with visibility. First of all, visibility is one of the key aspects political philosophers have traditionally associated with the public sphere. Suffice it to say that Habermas’ (1989[1962]) original term for the public sphere is Öffentlichkeit , which directly refers to the features of openness and visibi…
Surveillant Visibility
The management of visibilities lies at the core of all forms of social control, whether formal or informal. More precisely, as we will come to see, control consists of a purposeful and contextual asymmetrisation and hierarchisation of visibilities. In Chapter 2, we described recognition and control as two opposite poles of visibility. From this perspective, recognition — together with its alias, emancipation — can at first appear as the opposite …
New Media and Networked Visibilities
Besides traditional mass media, ‘new’ media, too, give rise to specific visibility regimes, which are different from the diagram of the broadcast analysed in Chapter 3. Of course the category of ‘new media’ is always historically relative, given that every medium functions through re-mediation of former media, so that what seems to be most immediate is in fact hypermediated (Bolter and Grusin 1999). For us, writing at the beginning of the second …
Media Visibilities
In Chapters 1 and 2 we observed that visibility cannot be reduced to its visual dimension but must be conceptualised within the framework of a wider ecology of attentions. Communication media further illuminate this fact. In this chapter, we will focus on media visibilities as a fundamental component of contemporary social-technological complexes. It is necessary to consider how visibility shapes global ideoscapes, that is, the global arenas of p…
Urban Visibilities
This chapter extends the analysis of the interplay between visibility and publicity delving into the city as a site of intersecting visibilities, motilities and stratifications. Urban studies literature is immense; in this instance, I choose as interlocutors Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift and their recent call to ‘reimagine’ the urban dimension. Inspired by a Deleuzian perspective, Amin and Thrift (2002) have argued against the priority given to a phe…
Visuality and Visibility
Looking at someone who looks back at you is, in a sense, the beginning of all society. But, what if what you think is the face of a fellow human being looking back in fact turns out to be just a full-sized photograph on an advertising billboard in the street, or the head of a mannequin in a shop window? More radically, what if the ‘look’ that is thus misguided is actually that of a CCTV camera equipped with facial recognition software or, to give…
Lines, barred lines. Movement, territory and the law
In this paper an attempt is made to analyse the complex relationship between law, territory and movement. Beginning with a quick overview of the notion of property, the paper suggests that this legal notion represents a way of imagining the practice of inhabiting the planet. Dwelling and travelling are explored as two alternative and complementary ways of inhabiting, and a closer inspection is paid to the moments when they confront each other bot…
At the Wall: Graffiti Writers, Urban Territoriality, and the Public Domain
The article is based on an ethnographic observation of a crew of graffiti writers in the northeast of Italy. Extending some considerations emerging from the case study, the article advances a reflection on the territorial dimension of graffiti writing in urban environments and the relationship between walls, social relationships and the public domain. This task entails understanding walls as artefacts that are subject to both strategic and tactic…
Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze on crowds and packs
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 inspi…
On Territorology: Towards a General Science of Territory
The development of territorology requires the overcoming of the dichotomy between determinist and constructivist approaches, in order to advance towards a general science of territory and territorial phenomena. Insights for this task can come from at least four main threads of research: biology, zooethology and human ethology; human ecology, social psychology and interactionism; human, political and legal geography; and philosophy. In light of th…
Power, subtraction and social transformation: Canetti and Foucault on the notion of resistance
Resistance is often understood as a practice that stands against change. The main characteristics of resistance are consequently identified in refusal and rejection. Even when it is acknowledged that change is in fact imposed change – so that resistance is actually resistance against imposition – the implicit premise is that resistance is centred upon inertia vis-à-vis some active force. In this way, resistance is framed as a practice essentially…
New Media and Urban Motilities: A Territoriologic Point of View
The paper aims to contribute to the study of new media technologies in urban environments. It unfolds at two levels, epistemological and substantive. First, it discusses the issue of the conceptual tools that we can deploy to understand new media, arguing in favour of notions and methods that enable research to capture the double nature, socio-technical and bio-political, of the new media in urban environments. In particular, the paper claims tha…
Elias Canetti and the counter-image of resistance
The attempt by Arnason and Roberts to interpret Canetti's work in the context of social theory is taken here as the point of departure to investigate Canetti's view on the phenomenon of resistance. Resistance is explored in the context of Canetti's reflection on power and transformation. Further, it is argued that through his substantive concern for crowds (but also for packs, or small bands), an epistemological challenge emerges for social theor…
Sociology (46 works) · Epistemology (33 works) · Philosophy (30 works) · Political science (29 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Law (19 works) · Geography (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Aesthetics (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works)