The model includes a SOCIOLOGY care (knowledge) domain with a related resource page:

http://www.p-jones.demon.co.uk/links3.htm

- where I already have a link here.

- and SCIENCES:

http://www.p-jones.demon.co.uk/linksTwo.htm

I am currently comnpleting a paper on global, local and glocal.

Best wishes
Peter Jones
h2cm: help2Cmore – help-2-listen – help-2-care
http://twitter.com/h2cm Link outside of Sociologically.net

Historical attempts to unite the good, the ethics, and the beautiful, the aesthetics, leading to both utopias and dystopias, suggest that their particular, rather than universal[ist], interpretations both have staying power and undermine one-size-fits-all definitions. As both a micro scale of design solutions can translate into macro outcomes through their mass applications, or vice versa, such as local power plants becoming sometimes regional/global problems, ecological concerns may allow translations into urban, aesthetic or design logics.

However, urbanism, [possibly apparently only] implying[/promising] concrete solutions, does not necessarily prevent general problems, such as ecological, to persist, given they are, more often than not, posited in a temporally and spatially localized manner.

In this respect, die Verdinglichung as a process of becoming reified, could be reinterpreted as a process that carries traces of the virtual in what becomes available thereafter. Basically, “becoming-real” and “becoming-aware” point into two opposite directions of concreteness and abstractness respectively that the virtual connects.

indeed, and I am also wondering what has happened to the Intifada since the the uprisings elsewhere. Whatever the world we live in, arbitrariness seems ubiquitous but it does not provide a legitimate excuse to only deal with what is made ‘present at hand’. What remains is the political necessity to resist – at all cost – the preemptive demogogic strike against analysis because that is exactly what is at stake here.

In the press, the foci of imitation and difference have different geography. Tel-Aviv’s urban space replicates in a pattern of uncanny repetition the difference between affluent north and struggling south, as illegal immigrants and rundown neighborhoods give to the tents in the southern area an off-mainstream character.

While Egypt’s Tahrir square acts as a subject of imitative discourse in both social and political sense, even though comparisons do not go far in view of starkly different conditions in the two countries, London riots are taken up as a premonitory example of a possible, and rather apocalyptic, future, should neo-liberal policies continue to be imitated.

-Pablo

thanks again for the comment. I like your link to grounding, although I fear that would only return the violence to more individuated domains, having similar statistical consequences regarding damage but without political consequences.

My initial response to your second comment was that the disparate instances of ‘apocalyptic proportions’ were ‘only’ a matter of discursive imitation (if there is ever such an innocuous shadow that we can call ‘only discourse’), but then I started to become more inclined to think about links between the various events, and also consider the less spectacular missing links, and then realised that it is far too early to dismiss any links ….

As far as my own anger goes, I am very tired of the fake opposition between accounts that refer to riots as caused and accounts that talk about ‘mindless, criminal copycats’. I am also tired of the idea that trying to provide proper analysis autimatically means searching to legitimate the violence. It is just that I would like to expand the list of suspects that should be investigated.

Finally, that issue of Space and Culture appeared when we were still working outside the establishment of academic publishers. I should still have a few rare copies of the issue somewhere in my office.

every good wish

Joost

i don’t understand the tardean stuff. but your reference to “groundless imitation” among the rioters prompts me to think you might be interested in a statement at another blog i follow today: “The parents of Britain need to get a grip. Every parent of a teenage child in London, Birmingham and other major cities needs to ‘ground’ their child tonight, and remove their mobile phone from them.” trying to ground the groundless sounds like a spatial challenge to me.
(source: http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2011/08/the-london-riots-a-time-for-big-society )

as for the temporal challenge of apocalypse: your list of disparate instances seems rather in the mode of the list of disparate riots earlier in the post. does this suggest that it’s a groundless apocalypse? in any case, i tried to look at the table of contents for the journal issue you mentioned, but it’s absent from the journal’s online archive.

btw, a fine blog for occasional posts about apocalyptic and millenarian thinking is zenpundit.com, especially the posts by charles cameron.

onward.

The more important question in this respect is an effort to deemphasize describing spaces and/or objects. What troubles me is events or their series that inherently escape descriptions or conceptualizations. What remains, probably, is either a philosophical or a historical dealing with larger context that an event takes place in. It is still unclear though what workable model of sociology will be adequate for this task.

Given what happens in, for example, German studies, efforts to derive philosophy from literature appear to be not irrelevant. As art becomes a matter of ontology, objects/spaces/events approached within the frame of the theory of art may also be readable from a philosophical or an aesthetic perspective. Less well-known philosophical and literary works can be self-reflexive objects standing in relation to spaces and spatializations I assume too.

-Pablo

many thanks for your reflections. The comments are not out of snc and if
they were, even better! Personally, I am very interested in the limits of
the everyday, especially when there is a breakdown, out of which something
extraordinary emerges (and may become news). We do need to engage exactly
with those issues that emerge as extraordinary spaces, yet retain an
everydayness, for many because they do not have to live in them, but also
for those who need to get used to them in order to live. The reason there
is little discussion on this blog is perhaps because we are a little too
academic sometimes and do not trust ourselves to take part in such open
debates. We did something a few years ago about Hurricane Katrina and this
proved to be a great experiment. Thank you therefore for showing an
intrerest. I intend to become more active on the blog, so that we increase
the chance that contributions like yours are being noticed and discussed.

So indeed, it does not need to be orderly or even ordinary everdyness that
we could focus on.

Regarding your comments about time and culture: we do take those on board,
I would not be able to talk about repetition or imitation or frequency
without a temporal dimension, just as we could not talk about breakdown,
innovation or rapture without a sense of time.

Every Good Wish

Joost