Preservationist Aesthetics: Memory, Trauma and the New Global Enclosures

My dissertation is a comparative study of the role of memory in four intersecting spheres of contemporary cultural production: (memory) art, (war) photography, (trauma) literature and the (memory) museum. It argues that the sites of memory in this study—including museums of memory and human rights, the famous Sonderkommando photographs and experimental works in conceptual art and literature—are characterized by a preservationist aesthetic, which names the principle of preservation at the heart of new practices of cultural resistance and new forms of enclosure through which social, political and economic exploitation are reframed, as aesthetic problems, in terms of loss and erasure. Against the liberal principles of empathy and identification, which inflect the current fields of trauma theory and memory politics, I argue that the dialectics of preservation and recovery in contemporary trauma texts—from Robben Island Museum to Alfredo Jaar’s Real Pictures to W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz—demonstrate the relationship between cultural aesthetics and the ongoing process of primitive accumulation, and require us to rethink the politics of memory in relation to the recent wave of global enclosures. Drawing on Marx, Freud, Debord and Krauss, as well as a number of thinkers of trauma theory and primitive accumulation, my project examines how movements to preserve the memories of historical violence in the 21st century reflect the ways in which images of the past have become a ground for the new enclosures

Evaluating diagramming as praxis

Researching into systemic failure associated with complex situations of environmental sustainability involves many different interactions amongst many different entities (human and non-human). For example, the trigger of global warming (caused primarily by use of fossil fuels in developed countries) has encouraged the rapid development of biofuel agriculture through grants from rich countries in the global North to Brazil and other tropical countries in the global South. This has generated what Sawyer (2008) calls an eco-social collapse: involving both ecological problems (deforestation, pesticide pollution, etc.) and socio-economic problems (particularly with concentration of land tenure, very poor working conditions for those forced to provide cheap labour for biofuel plantations, and increasing food prices for the population). To what extent might such a situation arise from breakdowns in the quality of communications? Apart from researching the importance of inter-human communication, there might also be important factors associated with the quality of our ‘communication’ with the natural world. In this chapter I use the metaphor of ‘conversation’ for describing praxis. The chapter weaves together three stories about diagramming as a means of developing sustainability through praxis. The first story provides some context. It is about evaluation in the field of sustainable development, and particularly the conversation between what might be called big ‘E’ evaluation – institutionalised demands for evidence-based guarantors or assurances for successful interventions as expected, for example, by funders of research – and small ‘e’ evaluation – the multitude of practices including visual based tools that may contribute towards developing value in, for example, a funded research project. The story tracks the growing importance of what has been called ‘developmental evaluation’ (Patton, 2011) – a tradition involving research evaluation – as a means of conversing between big ‘E’ and small ‘e’. The second and third stories track the history of a particular diagram developed by the author; a representation of praxis that has been shaken-up, messed-about with, and adapted for different uses during the past 15 years. The first of these two stories relates to representing the praxis of environmental responsibility (as a core constituent of developing environmental sustainability), and the second relates to making visual representations of developmental evaluation. Both stories narrate the changing form of the diagramming to suit particular needs. The purpose here is to demonstrate how a diagrammatic representation might allow space for ‘conversation’ at different levels of practice, including disciplinary (amongst specialist experts), interdisciplinary (between different experts) and transdisciplinary (between experts and civil society) practices. Weaving the stories together, a mapping tool – the heuristic of systemic triangulation – is presented as a systems-based influence diagram. The tool can be used for evaluating interventions at different levels, including the intervention of using visual techniques

Transitioning from Natural Conservationism to Sustainable Development: A Shift in Environmental Policy

Contrasting the conservationist bias of environmental balance with that of sustainable development the author distinguishes the influence of both in the current formulation of environmental policies including trends respectively more regulatory or redistributive as public policies In this sense it highlights the global need to overcome natural conservationism a remnant of the 19th century and whose obsession with the untouchability of nature does not admit the synergies between nature and humanity fundamental to promoting sustainability Which if assumed as a progressive ideology it transcends the left-right differentiation implying broad coalitions both political and socioeconomic so that we become socially ecologica

Does informal logic have anything to learn from fuzzy logic?

Probability theory is the arithmetic of the real line constrained by special aleatory axioms. Fuzzy logic is also a kind of probability theory, but of considerably more mathematical and axiomatic complexity than the standard account. Fuzzy logic purp orts to model the human capacity for reasoning with inexact concepts. It does this by exploring the assumption that when we argue in inexact terms and draw inferences in imprecise vocabularies, we actually make computations about the embedded imprecision s. I argue that this is in fact the last thing that we do, and indeed that we do the opposite

Truth is mighty & will eventually prevail Political Correctness, Neo-Confederates, and Robert E. Lee

Jefferson Davis sent Robert E. Lee an unusual note after the battle of Gettysburg. The dispatch did not contain any presidential recommendations or requests, only a clipped article from the Charleston Mercury criticizing Lee and his subordinates for failure in Pennsylvania. Why Davis sent this article is impossible to say, and Lee apparently was not interested in the president’s motivations. The General dismissed newspaper criticism of himself as “harmless,” but the Mercury’s condemnation of the army disturbed him. He considered the charges harmful to the cause, for his officers and soldiers were beyond reproach. Defeat, Lee insisted, was his responsibility alone. “No blame can be attached to the army for its failure to accomplish what was projected by me,” he wrote, “nor should it be censured for the unreasonable expectations of the public. I am alone to blame, in perhaps expecting too much of its prowess & valour. [excerpt

A Preservationist Approach to Relevant Logic

The semantics I develop extend an approach to logic called preservationism. The preservationist approach to logic interprets non-classical consequence relations as preserving something other than truth. I specifically extend a preservationist approach, due to Bryson Brown, which interprets various paraconsistent consequence relations as preserving measures of ambiguity. Relevant logics are constructible by extending one of these logics with an implication connective. I develop a formal semantics which I show to be adequate for interesting relevant logics. I argue that the semantics I develop extend the preservationist approach to relevant logic by showing how the approach treats the implication connective. I conclude by arguing that some of the most pressing objections to the standard semantics for relevant logics do not apply to the ambiguity preservation account

Thinking Forward through the Past: Prospecting for Urban Order in (Victorian) Public Parks

Supplementing familiar linear and chronological accounts of history, we delineate a novel approach that explores connections between past, present and future. Drawing on Koselleck, we outline a framework for analysing the interconnected categories of ‘spaces of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectation’ across times. We consider the visions and anxieties of futures past and futures present; how these are constituted by, and inform, experiences that have happened and are yet to come. This conceptual frame is developed through the study of the heritage and lived experiences of a specific Victorian park within an English city. We analyse the formation of urban order as a lens to interrogate both the immediate and long-term linkages between past, present and possible futures. This approach enables us to ground analysis of prospects for urban relations in historical perspective and to pose fundamental questions about the social role of urban parks

Reframing Rudolph's Tower for Boston

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Pages 152-154 blank.Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-151).By 2012, the fate of Paul Rudolph's tower in downtown Boston has been in question for years while a vision of a denser city calls for its demolition. Projected development on the site currently argues that to move forward, the existing building must be erased entirely. While progressive at the time of its construction, the outscaled tower is now perceived as obsolete and thus disposable. This brutalist work is representative of a class of buildings in crisis; architects and preservationists must decide quickly how to handle the sometimes fraught histories of the still massive urban infrastructures that are widely being excised from the urban landscape. This thesis questions how to balance the desire for some physical persistance of brutalist architectural ideals with the progressive spirit that marks the architectures of both past and present. The project proposes an aggressive, partial preservation of the Rudolph building that uses the original architecture as a basis for iteration. Investigation of the embedded tensions in preservation practice between the preserved and the intervention reveals space for preservation operations that translate architectures, holding more potential for projection than tactics of simple monumentalization or juxtaposition.by Jessica K. Turner.M.Arch