Tension appears in many contexts and carries diverse meanings. It tends to be viewed as something to be avoided and reduced in politics; to be explained, worked through, and resolved in therapy or science; to be endured and sustained in modern art; or to be sought after and enjoyed in popular culture. This volume brings together contributions from several academic and artistic fields in order to question the self-evidence of the deceptively simple term 'tension' and explore the possibility of productive transfers among different forms und understandings of tension. Refusing the temptation of a stabilizing synthesis, it establishes a dense web of approaches, providing a new critical paradigm for further inquiry. ; Tension/Spannung , ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 1 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010)
All tensions are not negative. There are structuring and destructuring tensions, and it is not always easy to decide which is which. By nature, democracy is inherently based on the institution of conflict, an institution which enables the representation of different interests in a society of free and equal individuals, multiple expressions of individual and collective agents, and the peaceful resolution of disagreements. Considering this framework, how can destructuring tensions be transformed into structuring ones? In this paper I will address the topic of society under tension with a case study, that of French society, and the type of individualism which characterizes it. A mapping of contemporary tensions in society cannot be established independently from globalization (the entry into a world culture, and generalized urbanization), which represents a change comparable to the Industrial Revolution, and the foundering of this industrial society, with the weakening of the welfare state and social protection, instituted in Western society after the Second World War. If collective challenges are similar everywhere, the path followed by the different national societies to address them differ somewhat. In the framework of globalization, to which the French are the most hostile in the European Union (after Greece), France offers images of pessimism, distrust, conflict, disquiet, and division among its citizens. It seems to be a society of malaise, in which the grammar of collective life is marked by strong negativity, though statistical data demonstrate that this society is doing rather well (in terms of degrees of inequality, the poverty rate, standards of living, health, etc.). Starting from the topic of collective malaise, the paper will highlight certain major tensions in French society. It will first situate them in the context of changes in collective representations of individualism marked by autonomy – the personal turn of individualism; then it will describe the features of this malaise (weakening of social links, new psychic pathologies, anxiety about the future and nostalgia for the past, etc.) by using the two examples of work and the welfare state (the French "social model" is invested as a foundation of the "living together"); after this, it will clarify underlying tensions which express, through this malaise (a crisis of equality à la française, and a difficulty to evolve the concept of protection); and finally, it will design paths enabling responses, to a certain extent, and will specify what a politics of autonomy could consist of. Video recording of the keynote
The 10,739 square miles which make up Burundi constitute one of the smallest countries in Africa. Burundi's population of between 3.5 and 5 million experienced six governments during the three years between independence in 1962 and the eruption of major ethnic violence in 1965. In 1966 the army took power in a coup that proclaimed Burundi to be a presidential republic. The change was not sufficient to resolve ethnic tensions, however, and by 1969 these were further complicated by regional divisions. During that year ethnic violence erupted once again but received little notice in the foreign press. The violence has pitted factions of the Hutu majority against factions of the Tutsi minority. Burundi's pre-colonial social system (which was grounded in a traditional monarchy) and its particular colonial experience account for the fact that the Hutu have had very little power over the country's political and economic affairs.
Based in the hilly, unglaciated Driftless Area of the upper Midwest of the United States, Common/Place is a self-organized, off-the-grid platform for ecological resilience, cultural inquiry, and land-based pedagogy. The rustic setting offers a space to examine how such rural spaces have been both produced by and mobilized within the linked projects of capitalist extraction and settler colonial extermination and to connect and grow the nodes of resistance always present within such systems. Our primary project up to this point has been a series of experimental seminars assembling artists, writers, and cultural workers to learn from and with naturalists, historians, farmers, citizens of the Indigenous Ho-Chunk Nation, and the land itself. This grounded creative research and pedagogy generates a network of informal relationships that connect the urban and rural to break through the present moment of political retrenchment and set the stage for social and ecological cooperation in the face of the climate chaos to come. This practice-based, epistolary essay reflects on the first four years of Common/Place, highlighting constitutive tensions and continued negotiations around property, relationships, ecology, and time—individual, generational, and geological—that can quickly become sedimented in infrastructure and no longer open to question.