Suchergebnisse

Refugees are possibly the most creative people. Forced to move by any number of pressures — military, social, political, economic — they make perilous journeys to places safer than those of their origin, which may nevertheless be fraught with danger. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai states that as refugees move through shifting contexts and "can never afford to let their imaginations rest too long, even if they wished to." The requirement for refugees to "build worlds" in response to the destruction of their homes — places that have constituted their worlds for years — highlights both their closeness to, and their distance from, those into whose worlds refugees now impact. We all need to build worlds, but for some this imaginative requirement is more pressing. This is a moment of heightened importance for the many senses of dignity, subjectification and anticipation that Hannah Arendt had already noted.

'And ecstasy is the way out! Harmony! Perhaps, but heart-rending. The way out? It suffices that I look for it: I fall back again, inert, pitiful: the way out from project, from the will for a way out! For project is the prison from which I wish to escape (project, discursive experience): I formed the project to escape from project!' Georges Bataille (1988) Inner Experience, p. 59 The most notable feature of the last ten years of going to Milan to visit design companies, studios, manufacturers and the Salone di Mobili, has been the lack of change in outlook on the part of the Milanese Design community (not necessarily all Italians, we should remember). The focus of any discussion centred around what has made Milanese design so special and always seemed to be focussed on the past. We revisited the 1960s and 1980s mainly—the Pop and the Postmodern, the bright colours and sensual shapes attesting to the stereotype of Milanese Design as energetic and desirous. The 1990s revisiting of a Scandinavian Modernist æsthetic particularly in furniture and kitchen appliance design seemed only to reinforce such a stereotype: "we can engage with this styling," they seemed to say, "but it will always have our signature elegance and sophistication, that demands display and passion rather than objective appreciation." Only Studio Mendini seemed to have no truck with the vagaries of fashion. Asked in Spring 2002 whether the studio's playful style—so reminiscient of Design's Postmodern turn of the 1980s as well as Pop's 1960s exuberance—was still relevant in a world experiencing suicide terrorist attacks in many of the world's cities (this visit was the Spring following the iconic Twin Tower attacks in New York City on 11th Spetember 2001, of course), our guide told us that Signore Mendini believed that now, as much as ever, was it necessary to have some joy in people's lives. And that is all.1 This is design as frippery, as an escape from the everyday, from the dirtiness of culture, of society and of politics. This is design which ignores the everyday experiences and concerns of people. This is design which has turned in on itself. This is not good enough.

"Drawing on a range of contributors, case studies and examples, this book examines ways in which we can think about design through Deleuze, and likewise how Deleuze's thought can be experimented upon and re-designed to produce new concepts. Discussions include materiality, creativity, objects, the future, innovation, the designed environment and the interaction between human non-human agents." -- Back cover

Killgrave, The Purple Man, is a supervillain whose powers give him the ability to command extreme obedience to his will. With particular focus on his appearance in the Jessica Jones comics and television series - both of which give slightly different versions of his characterization - this chapter will examine the issue of violence expressed through The Purple Man from the perspective of Michel Foucault, and others, on biopolitics, biopower and control. While he never lived long enough to develop his thoughts on biopolitcs fully, Foucault's lectures on this topic, its relations to and differences from his earlier notions of state violence mediated through bodily discipline, provide an insight into more contemporary technologies of control that have been taken further, most notably, by Giorgio Agamben. On the surface, it appears that Killgrave's powers are a purely personal, sadistic delivery of a quiet violence: one mediated through thought (viruses or pheromones depending on when we read about him) and is manifest only in the performance of his willed acts on those surrounding him. Yet Killgrave's abilities, emanating as so often from a military-techno-scientific accident, align him with a system of biopolitical power that exceeds and yet condenses within his person. In this chapter, we will focus upon how Killgrave's singular, sadistic illustration of his power associate both with Foucault's biopolitics/biopower.

This work was published in a Special Issue of Re-Public on Distributed Creativity and Design. Jamie Brassett and Peter Booth set out a project where the designing and redesigning that people (who were once merely users, or consumers) undertake, are taken seriously, adopted and adapted. This is more than user-testing or focus-grouping, as these two activities merely set the responses of the users etc. in already well-defined projects, as digested things are folded back into the designers' projects swerving them in hitherto undreamt of directions. The removal of the locus of power and control from the hierarchic project of design, will lead to opportunities for innovation that will be constrained only by the tardiness in producing digestable objects. See http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=344