RELATED TERMS: Apparatus – Dispositif; Body; Politics and the political; Disciplinary societies and Societies of control; Psychopower The term biopolitics or biopower is defined by Foucault (2007: 16) as, “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power,Continue reading “Biopolitics and Biopower”
Author Archives: aparsons474
Being, Doing, Having
RELATED TERMS: Objects and Events; A design ‘is’ what it ‘does’. Although constituted by materiality in the form of ‘objects’ and ‘things’, a design ‘takes place’ as an ‘event’ in a situation. It ‘happens’, in a particular place, at a particular time for particular people. One could argue, and it is only an argument, thatContinue reading “Being, Doing, Having”
Avant-Garde Movements
RELATED TERMS: Agonism and Avant-Gardism; Aleatory; Alienation Effect (Verfremdungseffekt); Critical Theory; Defamiliarisation; Design of Narrative Environments; Dissensus – Ranciere; Distribution of the Sensible – Ranciere; Epic Theatre – Brecht; Feminist Avant-Garde Art Practices; Happenings; Methodology and Method; Modernism; Modernism and Avant-Garde Art Practices; Modernity; Ontological Metalepsis; Research Methodologies; Sabi and Wabi-Sabi; Situationist International; Theatre ofContinue reading “Avant-Garde Movements”
Author, Authority
RELATED TERMS: Intertextuality; Intersemioticity In the context of design practices, the concept of authorship is troubled, in part because the purity of the kind of ‘authorship’ that pertains to the writer of a book, as sole author, and the kind of ‘authority’ which accrues to such an author over time, does not often apply toContinue reading “Author, Authority”
Audience
RELATED TERMS: Film making; Graphic Design; Music; Narrative environment design; Performance; Theatre; Human Actantiality; Realism; Reception theory and reader-response criticism; Epic theatre – Brecht Audience comes from the latin audire meaning to hear. Nonetheless, it is used in film, theatre and performance to describe what might more naturally be called the spectators or viewers, as it isContinue reading “Audience”
Arendt
RELATED TERMS: Heidegger; Critical Thinking See also essay: Arendt, Phenomenology and the Design of Narrative Environments Why are the writings of Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975, important for design practices? They are important because she focuses on the active life in its many aspects: we labour, we work, we act and we think or judge, as sheContinue reading “Arendt”
Architecture
RELATED TERMS: Distribution of the Sensible – Ranciere; Interaction Design; Narratology; Sculpture; Urban design; “the sense of architectural space is … related to the political distribution of the sensible and the way it frames reality through fiction.” (Grabar, 2021: 279) Rowan Moore (2014) argues that it is a terrible misconception to think that architecture isContinue reading “Architecture”
Things
RELATED TERMS: Collecting; Defamiliarisation; Events; Material Culture; New Materialism; Representation; Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop “the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” (Brown, 2001: 4) “Thing theory is at its best … when it focuses on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or to classify. Thing theoryContinue reading “Things”
New Materialism
RELATED TERMS: Affordances; Object-Oriented Ontology; Speculative Realism; Like new materialism, design practice is interested in, “understanding things as active agents rather than passive instruments or backdrops for human activity” (Barnett and Boyle, 2016). Certain aspects of new materialist thinking, which Sara Ahmed has called white feminist materialism (Hickey-Moody, 2015: 169), may be of value inContinue reading “New Materialism”
Apparatus – Dispositif
RELATED TERMS: Actor-Network Theory; Collage, Montage, Assemblage and Bricolage; Biopolitics and Biopower; Cinema and Film Theory; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control; Distribution of the Sensible; Genealogy – Nietzsche; Practice ” ‘échafaudage‘ is the term Axelos suggests best translates the Heideggerian notion of das Ge-stell, usually translated as ‘en-framing,’ or, in French, as arraissonment orContinue reading “Apparatus – Dispositif”
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