Mapping migrant territories as topological deformations of space

Our research uses the concept of “territories” to describe the production of migrant space. The article describes a project based in London where the everyday practice of walking is used to map migrant territories, which are conceptualized as dispersed and overlapping, causing topological deformations to the actual lived space. We interrogate these deformations through focusing on the micro-scale and the everyday, mapping them as “scapes” and “spheres.” Using specific computational techniques, we transform the original walks into an architectural tool for investigating the fluctuations and flows of the contemporary city. In doing so, we approach territories from two distinct angles: from the geopolitical perspective of territories seen as the product of the interplay of politics, power, and space and from the biological perspective of territories seen as the primal need of all animals, including humans, for space and a certain distinction from their environment and from others

Cloud animation

Clouds are animate forms, shifting and evanescent, mutable and always in movement. They have also long been a subject of imagery, especially painting, because paint, most notably watercolour, as John Constable knew, seeped into thick drawing papers much as a cloud seeped itself through the sky. The drama of clouds in the 20th century was seized by film and it is striking to note that many Hollywood Studio logos use clouds. Clouds from Constable to the Hollywood logos are Romantic clouds. They drift and float, produce ambience and mood, along with weather. But the cloud appears in the digital age too, in more ways than one. Clouds have been constituted digitally by commercial animation studios and used as main characters in cartoons; they are available in commercial applications, such as architecture and landscaping packages; they have been made and represented by art animators. This body of work, kitsch and dumb as some of it is, is treated in this article as emblematic of an age in which the digital cloud looms as a new substance. The cloud in the digital age is a source of form, like a 3D printer, a source of any imaginable form. As such it comes to be less a metaphor of something else and more a generator of a metaphor that is itself. Now we live alongside – and even inside - a huge cloud metaphor that is The Cloud. In what ways do the clouds in the sky speak across to the platform and matter that is called The Cloud? What is at work in the digitalising of clouds in animation, and the production of animation through the technologies of the Cloud? Are we witnessing the creation of a synthetic heaven into which all production has been relocated and the digital clouds make all the moves? Keywords Cloud, day-dreaming, dust, digital, metaphor, Romanticis

Posthumanist Education

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Preparing to work: dramaturgy, cynicism and normative ‘remote’ control in the socialization of graduate recruits in management consulting

online) This paper examines the socialization of graduate recruits into a knowledge intensive labour process and organizational culture. Theoretically the paper draws upon the idea of ‘preparing for work’ to position this early socialization as a crucial moment in the production of subjectivities suited (and booted) for the labour process of management consulting. Empirically the paper reports on a two-day induction session for new graduate recruits joining a global management consultancy and their responses to this training. Particular attention is given to the use of role-play and a dramaturgical workshop used in part of the training process. The paper argues that the utilization of dramaturgy in training is consistent with the overall approach to control developed in the firm in response to the fact that the labour process of consulting is often conducted on client sites, away from any direct supervisory gaze. As such, the consultants were subjected to a form of cultural control that was designed to function independently of direct supervision. This control did not operate directly upon the new employees professed values, however, but at one step removed so that a ‘cynical distance’ from the content of the organization’s culture was accepted so long as a professional ‘ethic of behaviour’ was established. By focusing on an ‘ethic of behaviour’ these young professionals were encouraged to internalize a self-control akin to that of an actor, rather than internalizing the corporate values entirely

On waiting for something to happen

This paper seeks to examine two particular and peculiar practices in which the mediation of apparently direct encounters is made explicit and is systematically theorized: that of the psychoanalytic dialogue with its inward focus and private secluded setting, and that of theatre and live performance, with its public focus. Both these practices are concerned with ways in which “live encounters” impact on their participants, and hence with the conditions under which, and the processes whereby, the coming-together of human subjects results in recognizable personal or social change. Through the rudimentary analysis of two anecdotes, we aim to think these encounters together in a way that explores what each borrows from the other, the psychoanalytic in the theatrical, the theatrical in the psychoanalytic, figuring each practice as differently committed to what we call the “publication of liveness”. We argue that these “redundant” forms of human contact continue to provide respite from group acceptance of narcissistic failure in the post-democratic era through their offer of a practice of waiting

From Utopia to Science: Challenges of Personalised Genomics Information for Health Management and Health Enhancement

From 1900 onwards, scientists and novelists have explored the contours of a future society based on the use of “anthropotechnologies” (techniques applicable to human beings for the purpose of performance enhancement ranging from training and education to genome-based biotechnologies). Gradually but steadily, the technologies involved migrated from (science) fiction into scholarly publications, and from “utopia” (or “dystopia”) into science. Building on seminal ideas borrowed from Nietzsche, Peter Sloterdijk has outlined the challenges inherent in this development. Since time immemorial, and at least since the days of Plato’s Academy, human beings have been interested in possibilities for (physical or mental) performance enhancement. We are constantly trying to improve ourselves, both collectively and individually, for better or for worse. At present, however, new genomics-based technologies are opening up new avenues for self-amelioration. Developments in research facilities using animal models may to a certain extent be seen as expeditions into our own future. Are we able to address the bioethical and biopolitical issues awaiting us? After analyzing and assessing Sloterdijk’s views, attention will shift to a concrete domain of application, namely sport genomics. For various reasons, top athletes are likely to play the role of genomics pioneers by using personalized genomics information to adjust diet, life-style, training schedules and doping intake to the strengths and weaknesses of their personalized genome information. Thus, sport genomics may be regarded as a test bed where the contours of genomics-based self-management are tried out

Lifeworld Inc. : and what to do about it

Can we detect changes in the way that the world turns up as they turn up? This paper makes such an attempt. The first part of the paper argues that a wide-ranging change is occurring in the ontological preconditions of Euro-American cultures, based in reworking what and how an event is produced. Driven by the security – entertainment complex, the aim is to mass produce phenomenological encounter: Lifeworld Inc as I call it. Swimming in a sea of data, such an aim requires the construction of just enough authenticity over and over again. In the second part of the paper, I go on to argue that this new world requires a different kind of social science, one that is experimental in its orientation—just as Lifeworld Inc is—but with a mission to provoke awareness in untoward ways in order to produce new means of association. Only thus, or so I argue, can social science add to the world we are now beginning to live in