Producing Places

Producing places is a twofold topic. It can refer to places as sites that produce something, that are productive, that have operations unfold, or actions happen, or objects emerge. Or it can refer to the fabrication of places as specific entities themselves. With the extended availability and practicability of digital positioning, locating, and tracking systems, it has become evident that places are not just there, but that they are generated, that they are subject to media-technological operations and effects.

This paper situates Einstein’s theory of relativity within broader networks of communication. The speed of light, explained Einstein, was an unsurpassable velocity if, and only if, it was considered in terms of “arbitrary” and “voluntary“ signals. Light signals in physics belong within a broader set of signs and symbols that include communication and military signals, understood by reference to Helmholtz, Saussure, media philosophies from WWII to ‘68 (Lavelle, Ong, McLuhan) and Derrida. Once light signals in physics are considered in relation to semaphore, print, telegraph, radio, computers and tape recorders, Kittler and Habermas provide us with conflicting ways for understanding science and technology, rationality and consensus. We conclude with a study of “flash and bang” in popular accounts of relativity theory to understand the role of theoretical science in the transmission of information and violence.

Labor is both punishment and curse. At least this is what the mythical scenes of division and exclusion in Hesiod and in the Old Testament dramatise. At the same time they can be regarded as symptoms of misogyny. Without doubt, those two mythical scenes and the divine power to curse and sentence have held their spell over the economic tractates from antiquity to the modern period. How do the ancient writings of economic theory-and specifically Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics-regulate female Pleonexia on the one hand, and the limitless penal labor imposed on men on the other? How in turn do the economic tractates of the modern period-and here specifically John Locke’s famous essays on the economy of labor-respond to the problem of female hybris on the one hand and the characteristical burden and suffering associated with labor on the other? What role does the differentiation and separation between free and unfree, productive and reproductive labor and, not least, the economic marginalisation of reproductive labor, play in this? And finally: In what way do »King Bee« and Queen Bee, Nurse Bee and Drone appear in this context as figures of an at once mythical and economic zoology, whose emblematic efficacy extends up to Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees?

The Infinite Cinema: A Discussion with Mr. Xu Chi on »The Limit of Cinema«1 Cinema has no limit, cinema is infinite! (If Mr. Xu Chi thinks cinema has its own limit, which is bound by time and space, cinema can actually lengthen, bend forward, spread out, and transcend its limit to become infinite.) Any art must have its own limit of existence. Once the limit is exceeded, art will perish. Such death does not mean the extermination of art, but rather the life of art expands and creates such tension that it cannot but transcend this limit and develop into another newly emergent art so as to continue its existence. An art’s realm of activity is surrounded by the crosses of death; if an art wants to roll out of these crosses, art must mutate to maintain its life. This is what Mr. Xu meant by the limit of art. …

Presented here is a two-part essay written by Li Lishui, published in the film journal Dianying jishibao (»The Movie Chronicle«) in Chongqing, China, during the Second World War. By now an obscure name, the author Li Lishui was a journalist and translator in wartime Chongqing who worked for the state operated Central Film Studio. Li participated in the cultural scene in wartime Chongqing, as evidenced in the publications that survive today.…

The architecture of cities provides infrastructures for thousands of people. Yet if it seems that the primary task of this architecture is to make the administration of many people, their living together, their work, their leisure, possible on a rational and dense basis, we ought not oversee that the fulfillment of these functions is not a sufficient condition of what makes a city. Important characteristics of urbanity rather enable the meeting of a multitude of people. Cities count among the conditions for social events insofar as they assemble. In my paper, I propose to analyze this architectural condition as the decisive difference between »Being With« in contrast to just »Being next to«.

William H. Whyte’s instructional film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1979), which chronicles the findings of his decade-long study of people’s behavior in small urban spaces in New York City in the 1970s, offers a precise analysis of the rules of attraction that draw people into places and that keep them attached. By combining direct observation with complex technical arrangements and new forms of movement studies, Whyte’s study advocates a quintessentially process-oriented understanding of ‘placemaking’ that shaped a new bottom-up approach to urban design in the 1970s.

The paper deals with different spatiotemporal relations within different collectives and the attitudes towards places and the ground arising from them. Drawing resources from Latour, Serres and ethnologists/anthropologists Viveiros de Castro and Descola, it follows up Haudricourt’s opposition between direct positive and indirect negative action towards domesticated species and the further consequences that might derive from these different modes of operation. It concludes with an outlook on affinities between the security-mode of power as described by Foucault and the Eastern distribution of agency as described by Haudricourt and Jullien.

Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local. We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced. The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics-the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata-to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy.

Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) concentrates a historico-political problematic in the figure of a ship named ›SAN DOMINICK‹. This paper focuses on the distinctive political character of the slave ship in revolt. The partisan uprising produces an interrogation of the concept of sovereignty and the operations of exclusion on which it is premised. Superimposing the sovereign ship of state and the slave ship, Melville’s novella presents a relation constitutive of the Atlantic world.

Based on the ›patchwork‹ as a concept of (political) heterarchy, the paper explores the formal and medial space of M. Brady’s collaged group portrait of the 36th US-Senate and House of Representatives (1859). Poised between unity and decomposition, the image constitutes a congenial map of American politics, its specific relationism and ›proximal distances.‹ However, Brady’s subsequent work sees this lose patchwork disintegrate during the Civil War and then solidify under Lincoln’s paternal rule.