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 […]
capitalism
Posted inGeneral
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 inLifestyle, Media
The Harlem Shake and Western illusion of freedom
Co-authored with Arsalan Khan When five teenagers in Queensland, Australia, uploaded a video of themselves dancing to a short excerpt of Baauer’s song Harlem Shake it immediately went viral, garnering some 400 million views and spawning well over 100 000 copycat versions. Critiques of the fad thus far have pointed out that it looks nothing at all […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The problem in SA is not the ANC
The oldest liberation movement on the continent, the African National Congress, is facing a crisis of great magnitude. Not only are there power struggles within the organisation but a sense of resignation towards the organisation in broader society. The masses have evolved from a state of defeatism — induced by the post-1994 euphoria — to […]
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 […]
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Drones: Panopticism intensified
Panopticism has just been ramped up a few notches. Panopticism is a Foucaultian concept (employed in Discipline and Punish) that encapsulates the paradigmatic condition of our society, namely that there is a pervasive tendency to subject all social life to modes of surveillance and judgement for purposes of disciplining the populace and ensure its economic […]
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The discursive forces that shape our lives
The 21st-century world, and with it, our lives, are shaped by powerful discursive forces that are distinct from one another, but are nevertheless interrelated in complex ways. Sometimes they intertwine and reinforce one another, and sometimes they conflict, and the clash between discourses often spills over into the lives of ordinary (and sometimes high-profile) individuals […]
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The neoliberal plague: Aids and capitalism
Another World Aids Day is behind us and the usual spatter of annual reports and politicians’ eager promises continue to reverberate through the media. If you’re like me, you’re probably tired of the whole show at this point. After all, it’s 2012, we were supposed to have this epidemic licked by now. Why, despite billions […]
Posted inBusiness
Amplats passing the buck after pocketing the rand
No wonder Anglo American Platinum, the world’s largest platinum producer, is fixing to lay off at least 14 000 workers. According to the Chamber of Mines of South Africa, the remuneration of a mineworker increased by an average of 30% each year between 1999 and 2011. I highly doubt the average mineworker increased his or […]
Posted inNews/Politics
After Kevin Bacon, the class struggle
As an analysis of our society race is still, to borrow a phrase from the mafia, the “boss of all bosses”. It’s a prefix, a subtext and for not an insignificant number — a totem pole. But there’s another heavy hitter — a rival explanation — that maintains that class increasingly matters. Most do not […]
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Tracking the aftermath of the financial crisis
In Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis (Oxford, 2012), Manuel Castells, Joôa CaraÇa, Gustavo Cardoso (editors) and a number of colleagues from the social sciences set out to provide some insight into the financial/economic crisis that flared up in 2008 (and has still not run its course). More than that, as the title of […]