Article archive

Answering the question: What is to be done? (education) David cunningham The question ʻWhat is to be done?ʼ, Adorno remarked, frequently ʻsabotages the logical progress of knowledge that alone allows for changeʼ . However, despite being always-already-inscribed within the imperatives of instrumental rationality, it is, he acknowledged, nonetheless ʻunavoidableʼ. [1] This is especially so for […]

An aesthetic education against aesthetic education Stewart martin Documenta 12ʼs commitment to the question of what is to be done in education is to be welcomed from an institution that has sought to sustain itself as an autonomous cultural realm, a public sphere, in the face of its fabulous state sponsorship and relations to the […]

Doing something and doing nothing Esther leslie Culture is put busily to work these days. In Europe, certainly, culture is made the bearer of promises – the promise of a better quality of life, of a more educated public, of a more efficient and value-added cultural sphere, and, not least, the promise of regenerated economies. […]

Writing in 1970, the French philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre proposed a ʻtheoretical hypothesisʼ: by ʻurban revolution I refer to the transformations that affect contemporary society, ranging from the period when questions of growth and industrialization predominate … to the period when the urban problematic becomes predominant, when the search for solutions and modalities […]

Neo-classic Alain Badiou’s Being and Event Peter osborne If anyone was in doubt about the continuing grip of French philosophy on the theoretical imagination of the anglophone humanities, the reception of the writings of Alain Badiou must surely have put paid to such reservations. The translation of his magnum opus, Being and Event, in spring […]

Deleuze and cosmopolitanism John sellars The status of the political within the work of Gilles Deleuze has recently become a topic of contention. [1] Two recent books argue the case for two extremes among a range of possible interpretations. At one end of the spectrum, Peter Hallward has argued that Deleuzeʼs personal ethic of deterritorialization […]

Whatever happened to martial law? Detainees and the logic of emergency Mark neocleous Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated. Guantánamo guard diary entry, 20 December 2002What is a detainee? The term has been given a […]

The promise of justice Howard caygill Breaking the promise of justice is an act peculiarly repugnant to reason. It implies a double betrayal: not only of the promised justice but also of the justice of the promise. Nevertheless, how is it possible to do justice to the promise of justice? Especially when this very promise […]

Diderot’s egg Divorcing materialism from eliminativism Isabelle stengers I have taken the invitation to speak about materials and materialisms* as an opportunity to re-examine the position I adopted nearly thirty years ago now, when writing La Nouvelle Alliance (translated as Order Out of Chaos) with Ilya Prigogine. [1] In that book, I proposed a definition […]

Going into the mould Materials and process in the architectural specification Katie lloyd thomas To know the true hylomorphic relation it is not enough to go into the workshop and work with the artisan: one must go into the mould itself to follow the operation of form-taking at different levels and scales of physical reality. […]

Clouds of architecture Mark dorrian According to the newspapers, the recent unveiling of Frank Gehryʼs design for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation – to be built in the Jardin dʼAcclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne – left observers struggling for a suitable metaphor. However, as the Guardian reported it, the architect himself seemed in […]

The inorganic open Nanotechnology and physical being Nathan brown But what is an object? Bernard Stiegler, Technics and TimeWhat is the status of the object in contemporary philosophy? How is the question of the object sutured to particular determinations of the concept of ʻlifeʼ – a concept that, according to Giorgio Agamben, ʻmust constitute the […]

materials and materialisms 2 The pig in the bath New materialisms and cultural studies Michelle henning On 24 July 1945 the Austrian logical positivist Otto Neurath, who had been closely involved in the economic and social projects of Red Vienna in the 1920s, visited the borough of Bilston near Wolverhampton, to advise councillors on their […]

The incomplete materialism of French materialist feminism Alison stone According to one important and influential line of feminist interrogation of the category of sex, we only believe that there are two biological sexes because our thought and perception are constrained by the two-gender social system under which we currently live. [1] The French materialist feminists […]

Sexmat, revisited Stella sandford As a genre of intellectual production, ‘feminist theory’ emerged in the 1980s, hot on the heels of the criticisms of the white Eurocentrism and heterosexism of classic second-wave writing. The conjunction of these criticisms and the growing influence of various philosophical and psychoanalytic theoretical elements developed, in one strand of feminist […]

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity Stewart martin Art’s relation to commodification is an unavoidable and entrenched condition for much of the theory, history and practice of art today; so entrenched, in fact, as to have become implicit and assumed for many. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, considerations of this relation have […]

Recent cultural histories have gone to considerable lengths to define an ‘alternative modernity’ for China, going back to the commercial developments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. [1] As delineated via the complex relationship between dominant Western and ‘other’ versions of modernity, its general form has been indicated by, for example, Dorothy Hodgson, […]

Dossier documenta 12 magazines projectDebaclethe magazines – such as consultation about their presentation at the exhibition, and their modes of participation in the accompanying series of talks – Documenta simply broke the agreement. It had nothing to gain from realizing the project, rather than merely staging its idea. Indeed, the Magazines Project team seemed genuinely […]

The sublime whiff of criticality Radical culture research collective Documenta has always had a political agenda. The first Documenta, organized by Arnold Bode in 1955, was intended to signal to the international art world that the dark days of Nazi philistinism were definitively over: Germany’s demonstrative openness to ‘avant-garde’ art could be taken as a […]

Magazines field, or, the next Documenta should be curated by magazines Patricia Canetti with Leandro de Paula Canal Contemporâneo I attended Documenta 12 on two different occasions: in June, for the show’s opening, and in July, in order to participate with Canal Contemporâneo in the Magazines Project’s Lunch Lectures. Each visit was marked by an […]

The big lie Dario Corbeira and irene montero, Brumaria When Brumaria was invited to take part in the Documenta 12 Magazines Project, in February 2006, we were filled with enthusiasm. We drew up an ambitious project, ‘Art: The Radical Political Imagination’, which, based on post-1968 experiences and recent experiments in counter-hegemonic practices, tried to set […]