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This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.
This article analyses two recent American rewritings of the Leviathan myth: Dan Simmons‘s The Terror (2007) and Tim Curran‘s Leviathan (2013). Belonging to a tradition that has fruitfully elaborated the sea monster paradigm, both novels respond to current concerns about the spiritual and ethical decline of Western culture, the perils of anarchy, the monetarization of relations, and the impending ecological disasters. Besides exploring the biblical and Hobbesian intertextuality of the two novels, the article investigates various meanings coalescing into the scary creatures represented by Simmons and Curran. Two other objects of scrutiny are the increasing spectacularization of horror in todays literature and the potentiality of nautical Gothic, a form of writing that connotes the sea as a perturbing generator of psychoontological distress.
As Gothic works knock the stuffing out their subject and splatter the remains over the page and screen, their obsessive focus on an economy of decomposing bodies in distress makes a compelling case for the attraction they exert on materialist criticism. A broad and heterogeneous spectrum of left social and cultural critique has always relied on Gothic referents to make descriptive sense of the teratology of life within societies dominated by the bourgeoisie. Marx‘s Capital begins, after all, by seeing the ‘monstrous ungeheure accumulation of commodities’ as the symptom of something gone terribly wrong in liberal political economy.1 What, though, if the Gothic codex is more than simply ornamental language or images added to the otherwise dry bones of philosophical, political, and economic writings and is itself a mode of critical inquiry into capitalist modernity that may also interrogate classical Marxisms precepts and underexplored aspects? If Marxism has depended on Gothic referents to make its point, can Gothic return the favor by thinking through obstacles and potentialities within familiar Marxist claims? In this light, we mean ‘material Gothic’ as something greater than simply a less provocative name for Marxist-inflected readings of Gothic works, and understand it as a project in which Gothic studies can inform and reshape cultural and historical materialism.
representational dilemmas confronted by humanitarian organisations since their early years and the ambiguities and indexical potentialities offered by the mechanical image. Critical historical inquiry also helps to overcome institutional blinders and offers spaces for reflection about core problems of humanitarian communication, including the ethics of image-making or the problems of agency, ideology, and power relations embedded in practices of image-making. At its best, the work of professional historians
tolerate their social drama and assume it as a pedagogical moment. However, not all displaced people have the same resilience and self-improvement potentialities or react in the same way to the offers of the national government. As some reports depict, there are displaced people who manage to become political actors or carry out various social self-entrepreneurship projects. 6 Conversely, there are displaced people who continue to be re-victimised or whose future remains uncertain. Thereby, from the point of view of resilience as a governance device, we could say the
, narrated, shown through voluntary or involuntary body signs as, for example, in an exclamation or in a cry of anguish). Experience, then, is socially controlled through the distribution of the sensible because it is made a social fact through exchanges of actions and expressions between people. Although the distribution of the sensible tries to limit and arrange the field of possible experiences and thus cripple experience as potentiality, the social life of experiences 6 Common spaces of urban emancipation is a process of sharing, which in principle may escape
double-sided, might it not also follow that ‘there is no document of barbarism that is not also and at the same time a document of civilisation’? This would be the shocking possible corollary of Benjamin’s famous thesis. The status of the document would thus become genuinely problematic: aesthetic documents – the artefacts of culture – are neither intrinsically civilised nor intrinsically barbaric; rather, the document manifests itself as the merest potentiality for either civilisation or barbarism. ‘Culture’ would now be the name that we give to the inhabiting of this
of challenging established common worlds, space (the site of experience and the means to 3 0 Common spaces of urban emancipation represent it and to reflect upon it) is being activated as a source of social potentialities. Insurgent public spaces, politicized cohabitation practices, territorialities of resistance and new spatial arrangements aimed at promoting democratic forms of participation: all these are rich sources for spatial potentialities that shape social potentialities. True, common space (as distinct from public space) existed and still exists in
Resisting urban renewal in Barcelona’s periphery 99 5 Commoning neighborhoods: resisting urban renewal in Barcelona’s periphery In search for the potentialities of emancipatory commoning, a lot is to be learned by studying practices of cohabitation in housing complexes. We know that in most cases people are forced to live together under conditions that they never chose merely because they don’t have other options. Neighborhoods of so-called affordable housing programs or social housing complexes more often than not become stigmatized areas for the urban poor
aesthetic objects. Instead of being merely a product of the market economy, a queer reuse modifies the goal of a commodity object. For instance, even the Coke bottle, which is one the most known examples of fetishized capitalism, can become a potential vehicle for a queer world. In Muñoz’s view, a commodity is a “potentiality” that represents a “certain mode