Critique & Humanism Journal | Vol. 59, No. 2/2023 | Space and Environment
Editors of the issue: Simeon Kyurkchiev, Bogdana Paskaleva, Maria Martinova, Veronika Dimitrova, Vol. 59, No. 2/2023, p. 359, ISSN: 0861-1718
Contents
* The issue is available in Bulgarian.
Editorial
Issue No. 59 of Critique and Humanism Journal is addressing two concepts that are generally familiar, yet easily fading into the background ‒ space and environment. How to think of that which is around us? When, with the aid of what expert knowledge, through which notions and images do we manage to speak of it? What types of techniques are utilized to make it comprehensible and governable? When does space successfully turn into ‘alien’ or ‘ours’? How do we interact with all around us that we recognize as environment; how do we find its rules, regularities, and frontiers? What practices of representation or mapping, real or symbolic, can we describe? How does space relate to freedom and order?
Thinking Space
The Steersman of the Limit, or The Ship of Philosophers and the Invention of Space. On three fragments of Anaximander and Heraclitus
Abstract: How to think the origin of philosophy? On the basis of a detailed analysis of two fragments of Anaximander and one of Heraclitus, this paper aims to contribute to the elucidation of several unexplored semantic elements of the formation of philosophical space, mobilizing their semantic potential through etymological, cultural-historical and archaeontological means. The paper develops the hypothesis of the relationship between space and philosophy, while opposing the traditional conception of the relationship between philosophy and land, focusing instead on the relationship between philosophy and the sea, and in particular, on the key function of the technology of ship navigation. A major emphasis is placed on the relationship of Anaximander’s concept of apeiron to the Ancient Greek verb κυβερνάω. According to the hypothesis of the text, the semantic abstraction of κυβερνάω exemplifies the process of the creation of an abstract idea, respectively an abstract principle for the organization of space, an abstract principle for movement, through which space is identified as space and woven into dimensions and relations, into rhythm, into measure and limits. This pro-conceptual move, building upon a series of semantic abstractions and intensifications, brings about the possibility of the semantic order that will later be defined as philosophy.
Keywords: origin of philosophy, abstract space, apeiron, navigation, κυβερνάω, ontology, archaeontology, Anaximander, Heraclitus.
Space and Assemblage
Abstract: Building upon Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy, assemblage thinking has been gaining currency in recent critical debates in human geography and cultural studies alike. As such, it has proved to be an influential tool for conceiving space and place. This paper provides an overview of contemporary assemblage theory and its applications within the framework of urban studies. As the concept of assemblage is fundamentally a spatial one, it can be employed in various ways in order to conceptualize the spatiality of the city. First, I try to elucidate the concept as developed by Deleuze and Guattari and elaborated further by the American philosopher Manuel DeLanda. Then I examine some of the ways in which home and urban places might have the characteristics of assemblages. Finally, I reflect on DeLanda’s idea of multi-level ontology and nested assemblages. By bringing together various aspects of assemblage thinking, I place an emphasis on the processual nature of cities and the way space is co-constituted along with the urban assemblage.
Keywords: assemblage, space, place, urban space, cities
Biopolitics as Art of Circulations
Abstract: This article maintains that if disciplinary technology could be analyzed as political “art of distributions” of individual bodies in an enclosed space, biopolitical power could be viewed as art (or technology) of circulations. As the case of the French XIXth-century intersections of urban planning, public health, medical theories, architecture and engineering shows, biopolitical rationality and technology take place in order to regulate the biological life of urban population through the regulation of the circulation of air, water and human flows in the modern industrial city. One of the main reasons for this transformation being that at that time, public health practitioners and medical doctors considered stagnating air and water as principal epidemiological risks through the production of miasmas. Special attention is given to the historical appearance of artifacts and methods such as modern street planning, paving, drainage, tree planting, etc. which are interpreted as means of biopolitical regulation. These means and methods endure despite the change of medical paradigm and the microbiological revolution which dethroned the miasma as a chief disease-causing agent.
Keywords: Foucault, biopolitics, circulations, XIXth century, France, urban planning, public health
Spaces of Еxclusion
About the Communist Spaces of Exception: The Camp versus the Prison
Abstract: This article is a comparative sociological analysis of two communist institutions: the camp versus the prison. On the one hand, the prison is a totalitarian space of exception and a power mechanism of reformation; the penal detention encompasses both the imprisonment decreed by legal sentencing and the ideological conversion of the convicted persons into the communist spirit. There are seven constitutive principles that mirror the modern institution of detention, but they are reworked and reintegrated to ensure the social efficacy of communist imprisonment; there is also a generalized meta-principle that coordinates, subordinates and subjects them: ideological-educational political work permeates every cell of the prisoner’s time, space, activity, communication, bodies and strengths. On the other hand, the camp is a totalitarian space of exception whose social organization is historically unique: neither in the punitive colony, penal servitude or mass deportation, nor in forced displacement or compulsory resettlement, nor in torture or correctional punishment are human beings rendered absolutely killable as in this experimental laboratory of total domination. The complete totalitarian society imposes a perfect camp system that will not only replace the penal system of prisons, correction houses and reform schools, but will detain forcibly the entire population in. And this was no utopia – the state border of communist Bulgaria was ringed from beginning to end with barbed wire; an enclosed camp territory from which no one – without the permission of political, military and administrative power – was to (even think of) leave.
Keywords: communist regime, totalitarian society, penal power, space of exception, prison, camp
Spaces of Confinement and Dynamics of Institutionalization: Family Care for People with Disabilities in Bulgaria
Abstract: The main focus of the article are the families of children with disabilities in Bulgaria as spaces that generate and affirm institutional culture. We conceptualise them as situated in a complex of legacies and current conditions that are deeply disabling in their very essence. It is these elements that drive families of children with disabilities in Bulgaria to almost invariably take on basic institutional characteristics. We highlight the dynamics and interactions of the traumatic images of the legacy of state socialism, the actual barriers during the transition period, the coping strategies chosen by families and, ultimately, the grim effects with regard to the affirmation and implementation of the idea of independent living for people with disabilities in Bulgaria.
Keywords: deinstitutionalization, care, children with disabilities, independent living, spaces of confinement.
Environment, Poverty, and Future
Abstract: This article presents the results of a participant observation (2000–2023), a qualitative study (2023) and a quantitative questionnaire study conducted in two stages (2002 and 2017) with the aim of investigating how the residents of Glaveva Mahala (the poorest part of the Faculteta Roma neighborhood) understand poverty and how living in poverty affects young people’s life perspectives. The environment, comprehended as human relationships, as a source o f stimuli, and as an ecological habitat to give protection to vulnerability, forms community norms and hierarchy that further reproduce poverty and keep boundaries rigid and impermeable. The results relate to two models of thinking about poverty: forms of urban marginality (Waquant, 2008b) and a nine-dimensional model for explaining poverty (Bray et al., 2019). This article adds new nuances and dimensions of poverty in Glaveva Mahala to the nine dimensions of poverty according to Bray et al.’s model.
Keywords: poverty, ghetto, Roma communities, life perspectives, youth
Space, Culture, Consumption
The Consumer City: Socialist Sofia in the 1970s and the Global Society of the Spectacle
Abstract: This article is a chapter from a book dedicated to the visual culture of Sofia. It explores the evolving historical relationship between the official architectural and visual decisions of the city government and how they are perceived by city dwellers. The article delves into how official spectacles, carrying certain ideological messages, become part of everyday life and how city dwellers and visitors utilize them for non-ideological purposes. The chapter focuses on moments from the 1970s when the socialist government shifted from proletarian asceticism to catering “more and more to the needs of the working people.” This transformation is evident in the emergence of a new consumer city beneath the surface of proletarian Sofia. The cityscape changed with the influx of advertisements, shop windows, new stores, furniture houses, household goods, Western-style cafes, clubs, and self-service restaurants. However, the article also investigates how the people of Sofia interpret and utilize these new benefits offered by the government. They strive to appropriate and inhabit these new places, often shaping their own, sometimes non-communist, ideas of consumption.
Keywords: urban visual culture, consumption, consumption of images, society of the spectacle, socialism
Mental and Lived Spaces of Local Holidays
Abstract: Two festivals in Bulgaria: Rose Festival in Kazanlak and Festival of Peppers, Tomatoes, Traditional Foods, and Crafts (Kurtovo Konare Fest) have been scrutinized through Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad. Special accents were set on mental space, understood as urban revitalization towards improving the quality of local life and attracting visitors, and social space, interpreted as identity awareness and will for community associations. It could be observed through Lefebvre’s framework that revitalizating endeavours of the local actors inspires shaping of a single, integrated cultural and tourist product, where all spatial objects intertwine into an entirety of consented symbols, narratives, and creative imagery. Concrete examples of spatial renovation efforts have been presented in both festive locations, Kazanlak and Kurtovo Konare. Social, or lived space, on its turn, is the embodiment of people celebrating their local identity through the festivals. Infrastructures of association and widened spaces of inclusivity emerge around festivals and boost the sense of community and the sense of place where the social fabric is a resource of well-being.
Keywords: mental space, lived space, sense of place, local identity, creative imagery
Space and Culture: Mapping Culture and Culture Resources
Abstract: Space and culture are intertwined. Cultural significance is embodied in space, in the specific material dimension of objects. To better understand a place or a city, we should familiarize ourselves with its meaning and explore its cultural resources through a discursive and spatial analysis. In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to the method of mapping culture. The purpose of the present article is to problematize the way in which culture is placed in space and space is characterized by its cultural resources. The article focuses on the diverse experience of mapping cultural resources, the main participants in the process and the function of the maps. For urban and territorial planning mapping cultural resources could create conditions for community consolidation, management of cultural resources and promotion of cultural diversity and dialogue.
Keywords: space, place, culture, mapping, culture resources
Space and Environment in Arts
Transforming the Printed Book’s Space through the Avant-gardists’ Typographic Experiments at the Beginning of the 20th Century
Abstract: The linguistic content of a given text can take different visual forms through its typographic composition. These forms could be conventional, but they also could be unconventional, in which the visual content is inseparable from the linguistic content. There were plenty of design experiments with the text in the manuscript and printed books until the beginning of the 20th century. As a part of a larger research (PhD thesis The experimental forms of typography in the fictional and periodical printed editions), this article is focused on the avant-gardists’ typographic experiments that not only deviate from the layout standard of the period but also legitimate the unconventional typographic practice, turn it into a new visual language and thus transform the printed book’s space. On the one hand, the avant-garde movements in the visual arts have a great impact on the printed book’s typography. On the other hand, this transformed book space influences its cultural environment.
Keywords: experimental typography, graphic design, printed book, avant-garde, visual arts.
From the Space of Lucio Fontana to the Environment of Saburo Murakami
Abstract: Through Lucio Fontana’s spatialism, the text explores the illustration of three-dimensional Euclidean space, desolate as an external form, and its further development as a time-space continuum or environment constructed from the inside out in Saburo Murakami’s 1956 performance Passing Through.
Keywords: Lucio Fontana, spatial concepts, spatialism, two-dimensional – three-dimensional, Saburo Murakami, action art, performance, transgression, “passing through”, environment.
Approaches to the Problem of Theatre Space
Abstract: The article aims to bring out space as an aesthetic category, but also as a kind of metacategory that is of prime necessity for the creation, consumption, and analysis of theatrical performance. The text tries to outline the main historical situations and trace the processes of emancipation of space as an independent aesthetic dimension. The theme appears topical through the prism of space in theatre as a unifying category that can be thought of as a continuum, through the hypothesis of the construction of a narrative through which ideas and practices from the past are constantly re-actualised and transposed.
Keywords: theatrical space, scenography, stage directing, spatial organization
Space and Technologies
Man against Machine: On Otherly Space in the Novel "The Other Dream"
Abstract: This article offers a comparative analysis of Samuel Butler’s novel “Erewhon, or Over the Range” and Vladimir Poleganov’s “The Other Dream” through the topic of natural selection and the struggle for territory between machines and humans. Space is examined as a stake in the race for control in which virtuality performs the function of boundary extension for the losing side.
Keywords: Erewhon, machines, virtual reality, Vladimir Poleganov, territorial dispute
Virtual Spaces: Synthetic Worlds
Abstract: The increasing access to the Internet and the growing presence of individuals in social networks highlight the importance of virtual spaces for the contemporary human. Companies like Amazon, Meta, Google and others, providing hundreds of diverse services through complex constellations of physical and virtual infrastructure, mediate an ever-increasing part of our everyday life activities. Dwelling in the spaces and using the services of these techno-agglomerations produces vast arrays of data. Through complex and opaque methods and practices of machines and algorithms, sensors and artificial intelligence, the data generated by consumption is rendered into sustainable behavioural patterns and predictive models. Property of the companies owning the technological infrastructure, this newly created knowledge remains inaccessible to the user in its entirety, although generated by the user’s very own interactions within the virtual spaces delineated by the companies. The knowledge-derived power possessed by companies is used primarily for their own purposes – maintaining asymmetric power/knowledge relations vis-à-vis consumers, pursuing financial and other goals, often in tandem with third parties. Thus, in pursuit of their own goals, companies very often violate users; personal privacy in the virtual space through the purposeful use of this knowledge in a variety of ways. A service or app’s terms of use create the aperture through which surveillance practices and privacy violations slip. Containing important, but often vaguely formulated information about the operational activity of the service in use, they are almost always accepted by the user with disdainful trust. Through these legal cracks seep the elusive practices of tech companies, manifesting in deliberate alterations of small details within our personal virtual space, or questionably relevant offers to purchase an item or service. This calls into question the democratic nature of the Internet, as well as human notions of space and freedom of choice in the digital age.
Keywords: space, user, techno-agglomeration, data, knowledge, technology.
Varia
Why is it Easier to Change Nature than Culture in the 21st Century?
Abstract: The text is a critical approach to one of the biggest problems our society is facing: the climate crisis. The article poses and traces a tendency: the tendency is that the mastery, rule over nature and transformation of nature precede the transformation of culture. The ecological critique is used as an immanent critique of hypermodern capitalism: human activity, which has as its horizon increasing exploitation, the use of nature as a resource. All that destroys the conditions of endless economic progress, as it exhausts the resources that maintain this progress. I take as an initial point the phrase of Fredric Jameson it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of late capitalism, which can be explained with the concept of ideology. My claim is that in the 21st century, it is not only easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but it is easier to cause it.
Keywords: ecology, nature, culture, critical theory, transformation, ideology
COVID-19 and Two Forms of Resistance to the Triumphalist Narrative of the Domination over Nature: „The Gods of Greece“ of Friedrich Schiller and the Concept of Truth of Jacques Lacan
Abstract: The text is dedicated to the development of the concept of truth by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, which is opposed to the concept of scientific truth, scientific fact and the instrumentalization of scientific knowledge as a whole. The context of the theoretical work is the pandemic of COVID-19 that is deemed by the text to have exposed many contradictions in our perception of science, and in particular – of medicine. Yet, it is necessary to first juxtapose both the concepts of psychoanalytic truth and truth in science with their reincarnations in the past in order to outline their significance for society. The text examines truth and knowledge in the Seminars of Lacan, but also in some authors from the Age of Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant and his concept of lie is a subject of this research, together with his disturbing moral imperative that we should never tell a lie under no circumstances. The research concentrates on Friedrich Schiller and his poem “The Gods of Greece”. This poem, as well as some seminars of Lacan, suggests a peculiar resistance to the Enlightenment idea of the dominance of reason over nature. The two resistances are opposed to the attempt to deal with the pandemic in the most technologically sophisticated manner. The text uses dialectical analysis of the said social phenomenon, working in the tradition of authors like Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič and the Italian Lacanian critical theorist Fabio Vighi.
Keywords: COVID-19, domination over nature, Schiller’s “Gods of Greece”, Lacan, Žižek, successful paranoia.
Stances
The End of Peace? Thinking Critically about War and World
Book Reviews
On the Phenomenological Nerve of a Sociological Analysis (Review of Boryana Bundzhulova’s Book Life with Dementia. Anglеs towards Elusive Attempts, 2023)
Intersubjective Archives and Maps of the Life with Dementia (Review of Boryana Bundzhulova’s Book Life with Dementia. Anglеs towards Elusive Attempts, 2023)
Overlivings: Towards a Pathos Analytics of the Generative Time (On Svetlana Sabeva’s book Overlivings. Phenomenology and Socioanalysis on Generative Time, 2023)