Of Market Vendors and Waste Collectors: Labour,Informality, and Aesthetics in the Era of World-Class City Making

A growing literature demonstrates the significance of aesthetics within processes of world-class city making, as decisions about who gets to live and work in the city are increasingly made on the basis of codes of appearance. However, less attention has been paid to how such codes are (re)produced and (re)directed by informal workers and their organisations in everyday practice. Drawing upon a multisided ethnography in Kampala and Delhi, this paper explores the ways in which market vendors and waste collectors have responded to the proliferation of three aesthetic technologies: the identity card, the uniform, and the code of conduct. We show that workers have appropriated these technologies in creative ways in order to defend their livelihoods against the threat of displacement. However, this act of appropriation has come at the cost of the exclusion of the more vulnerable workers, who now find their activities policed not only by the state but also by a range of non-state organisations. These findings contribute to debates on labour organisation and world-class city making by demonstrating the ways in which aesthetic rationalities emerge through an encounter with the tactics of everyday life.     

Police and Politics in Aesthetics-Based Urban Governance: Redevelopment and Grassroots Struggles in Enninglu,Guangzhou, China

Rancière's theorisation of police, politics, and aesthetics offers an illustrative framework to understand urban (re)developments. While extant works have examined separately the art of governing through aesthetics and the political subjectivities of those having no part in the frame of visibility and intelligibility, this study argues that hegemonic aesthetic regime and bottom-up aesthetic practices can be mutually constitutive and reside in relationships of co-existence and mutual negotiation. Drawing on over a decade's investigation in Enninglu, a neighbourhood district in Guangzhou that underwent several rounds of political struggles related to redevelopment and conservation, we reveal how local residents negotiated aesthetic norms enacted by the state. Particular attention is paid to the interactions between the aesthetic regime imposed by the state and grassroots people reclaiming their own aesthetic sensibilities, culminating in a contingent, inconclusive, and “impure” space of politics. Both political subjectivities and aesthetic norms are redefined ongoingly in this process.     

Resistance politics of non-violence: Jean Paulhan’s ’Fautrier the Enraged’ (1943)

ABSTRACT

The idea of adequately ‘representing’ violence was an important point of discussion amongst Resistance artists and intellectuals at the time of the French Occupation. In particular, intellectual resistant Jean Paulhan had written on the subject in his text introducing Jean Fautrier’s retrospective exhibition of November and December 1943 in occupied Paris, ‘Fautrier the Enraged’. While the thematic of the exhibition proposed an academic and traditional subject matter, Paulhan demonstrated that Fautrier’s typically matierist and anti-naturalistic approach was instrumental in ‘suggesting reality’. Fautrier’s individual creative process, Paulhan argued, led to a transparent experience to be shared between viewer and artist not only on an aesthetic level, but also from a political point of view. At the time of ‘Fautrier the Enraged”s writing, Paulhan had indeed been concerned with issues of political engagement, as is evident from his essay ‘The Flowers of Tarbes or Terror in Literature’ (1941), which reflects upon the human condition and is concerned with reconciling poetry, politics and ethics. The author believes that such questions were being addressed in Paulhan’s text on Fautrier and by Fautrier’s art and that an aesthetic reading of Paulhan’s text is inseparable from a political interpretation of Fautrier’s art within the context of the Occupation. Indeed, the aesthetic criteria used in Paulhan’s text as framework to his argument were then loaded with political meaning. For instance, Paulhan considered virtuosity as an essential artistic characteristic to be opposed to the art of imitation based on the technical ability to observe and simulate ‘nature’ as imposed by the occupants. With excerpts from Paulhan’s essay and exchange of letters with Fautrier as well as visual analysis of some of the artworks presented in the exhibition, this paper deals with the wider issues of ‘representation’ in the historical and cultural context of the Second World War in France.     

Is Man a “Sabbatical Animal”? Agamben,Rosenzweig, Heschel,Arendt

Giorgio Agamben lists the Jewish Sabbath as an example of “inoperatvity.” This essay explores both how Sabbath fits into and puts pressure on Agamben’s account, by working through readings of the Sabbath given by Agamben, A.J. Heschel, and Rosenzweig, who associate Sabbath, respectively, with Inoperativity, Eternity, and Creation. To these, I add another, called the Sabbath of Equality, building on connections among the weekly Sabbath, the septannual land Sabbatical and the Sabbath of Sabbaths, the Jubilee. The reading of Rosenzweig, in particular, opens the way to a queering of Sabbath, also explored here. The essay concludes with the suggestion that Hannah Arendt’s political thought is “sabbatarian” and asks whether this is an effective way to respond to earlier critiques of her work for promoting an “aestheticized” politics not adequately oriented to use. Is Agamben vulnerable to the same critique now?     

A Decadence Baedeker: D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death

This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.     

Conceptual Debts: Modern Architecture and Neo-Thomism in Postwar America

This article analyzes the formative role of medieval theology and aesthetics in the development of postwar American architecture by focusing on the architectural theory and practice of Mies van der Rohe and Jean Labatut, both of whom became actively interested in Neo-Thomism from the late 1940s. More specifically, a closer look at their reliance on the work of Jacques Maritain, the preeminent promotor of Neo-Thomism, sheds light on the transmission and circulation of old and new concepts within twentieth-century architectural theory. By revealing how Maritain’s ideas helped to codify the latter and thus exposed the premodern ideas at the heart of modern architecture, I argue that modernist aesthetics should be re-evaluated with regards to its definition of “the new” and its emphasis on the breakdown or mutation of premodern frames of reference.     

Red Aesthetics,Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949

Abstract

This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptualised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or constructs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s.     

试论中国传统音乐的美学特征

中国传统音乐审美活动以及音乐美学思想具有三方面的基本特征。一是乐感文化与伦理道德的合一,强调音乐的美与伦理道德的善相统一;二是传统性与开放性的统一,既吸收不同的音乐文化,又统一为一个相对稳定的音乐文化整体;三是以"和"为美的审美意识,遍及儒、道各家,在不同的哲学流派中被赋予不同的意义。     

＂铁路便当＂与日本的现代文明

“铁路便当”可谓日本最值得骄傲的饮食文化之一。在日本乘坐着列车品尝着各地风味不同的铁路便当已经成为一种时尚。它已经形成了一种地区文化,积极地带动着当地的经济发展,目前日益受到各相关部门的重视。它具有其独特的魅力,不仅地域特色强,而且成为增进家庭成员之间交流的话题;它是色彩美学与营养学融和的集合体。