When I saw the report in the Mail & Guardian about the death of Vuyo Mbuli, I could not believe my eyes — he still seemed so young, and life-loving. But then, death does not really discriminate between the young and the old. Still, it was saddening to learn that Vuyo, who has always come […]
Bert Olivier
As an undergraduate student, Bert Olivier discovered Philosophy more or less by accident, but has never regretted it. Because Bert knew very little, Philosophy turned out to be right up his alley, as it were, because of Socrates's teaching, that the only thing we know with certainty, is how little we know. Armed with this 'docta ignorantia', Bert set out to teach students the value of questioning, and even found out that one could write cogently about it, which he did during the 1980s and '90s on a variety of subjects, including an opposition to apartheid. In addition to Philosophy, he has been teaching and writing on his other great loves, namely, nature, culture, the arts, architecture and literature. In the face of the many irrational actions on the part of people, and wanting to understand these, later on he branched out into Psychoanalysis and Social Theory as well, and because Philosophy cultivates in one a strong sense of justice, he has more recently been harnessing what little knowledge he has in intellectual opposition to the injustices brought about by the dominant economic system today, to wit, neoliberal capitalism. His motto is taken from Immanuel Kant's work: 'Sapere aude!' ('Dare to think for yourself!') In 2012 Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University conferred a Distinguished Professorship on him. Bert is attached to the University of the Free State as Honorary Professor of Philosophy.
Posted inGeneral
South Africans present their papers at the Theoretical Psychology Conference in Chile
Here in Santiago, Chile, a number of South Africans have made thought-provoking contributions to the International Theoretical Psychology Conference at the Pontifical Catholic University. Almost without exception, the South Africans’ presentations were of the critical-psychological variety. Claire Haggard of UCT, for instance, explored the spatial situatedness of human bodies in phenomenological terms through the work […]
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Critical psychology in Santiago, Chile
When it is your first time in Santiago, Chile, you may be forgiven for being somewhat taken aback by the friendliness and warmth of the people in this South American country. Few people here speak English, but it has happened several times that, when we stop to consult our map, someone comes up to us […]
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Resisting the dehumanising architecture of the ‘space of flows’
Against the background of my previous post on “The ‘space of flows and the social elites of today”, it is illuminating to take note of Manuel Castells’s (The Rise of the Network Society, 2010: Chapter 6, Section 6) interpretation of contemporary, “postmodern” architecture as an architecture that has been redefined by the space of flows […]
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The ‘space of flows’ and the social elites of today
In Manuel Castells’s influential book, The Rise of the Network Society (Second edition, 2010, Chapter 6), he devotes a very revealing discussion to what he describes as the dominant spatial form of the network society, namely the “space of flows”. In his theorisation of the novel, now dominant spatial mode – the “space of flows” […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality
The age of the indebted, mediatised, securitised and depoliticised
In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s latest book Declaration (Argo Navis, 2012) — although, probably given its brevity (just over a hundred pages) compared to the books comprising their trilogy (Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth), they refer to it as a “pamphlet” — they articulate the global crisis of the present era in terms of four […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
How the largest movement in history is restoring justice to the world
Paul Hawken, writer of Blessed Unrest — How the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming (Penguin 2007), is an indefatigable speaker and champion for environmental justice, who gave more than a thousand talks on the environment in the course of 15 years, before writing the book. […]
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Painting, equality and the ‘aesthetic regime of art’
There is a painting by Degas in the Philadelphia Art Museum that illustrates well what Jacques Ranciére means by the “aesthetic regime of art” (one of three “regimes”, the other two of which — the “ethical regime of images” and the “representative regime of art” — preceded the “aesthetic regime” historically). It shows a man […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle
An alternative to the typical shopping mall
Not all places where shopping is or may be done, necessarily have to be of the reductive, spatially homogeneous, dehumanising type, exemplified by the standard shopping mall. An example of a shopping space design that is heterogeneously structured, into which ”other” spaces ”flow”, or with which it intersects, is furnished by Erik Grobler, a final-year […]
Posted inBusiness, General, Lifestyle, Media
The shopping mall as consumer architecture
Referring to the moment, in Plato’s Symposium, where the lover supposedly beholds a completely disembodied, atemporal “beauty”, in the process conforming to the character of this abstraction, Kaja Silverman says (World Spectators, 2000: 10): “This deindividuation of the look represents a crucial feature of the process through which Socrates negates phenomenal forms. This is because […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Guns, patriarchy and violence against women
In Ridley Scott’s (for a male director) astonishingly feminist film, Thelma and Louise (1991), there is a scene-sequence that graphically captures the indissoluble connection between patriarchal men and guns. And, at the same time, it shows how much the vaunted power of patriarchal men depends on their guns. The scene-sequence commences at that point in […]
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The discourses directing our actions
During a discussion at a staff seminar today one of the participants, who teaches public administration, was explaining to the rest of us that in his research on, broadly speaking, the communication between government officials (including ministers) and ordinary citizens comprising various constituencies, he constantly comes across communicational gaps — between the documents released by […]