Affirmative Precarity: Ai Weiwei and Margarita Cabrera

Davidson, Jane Chin

doi:10.1177/1470412912468709

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…While I am partially sympathetic to this view, I do not find it wholly convincing. Consider as an example a scenario in which I acquire a painting by, say, Monet and then decide to burn it (lest this example feel contrived, I would direct the reader to the actual case of Ai Weiwei's exhibitionist destruction of a Han dynasty urn [46]). In many jurisdictions I would have the right to do so (notably, in the USA Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, 17 USC Section 106A, limits this right somewhat) but I would nevertheless argue that to exercise this legal right would be morally impermissible for it would cause undue harm to others.…”

Section: Duty-based Objections To Suicidementioning

confidence: 99%

On the Subjective Value of Life

Arandjelović

2023

Philosophies

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Claims (or the implicit assumption of the inherent worth of life) are pervasive and remain virtually unchallenged. I have already argued that these outright moral dictates are thinly veiled vestiges of theological ethics which, following the removal of their theological foundations, remain little more than nebulous claims supported only by fear of the consequences of a challenge. In my previous work, I rejected an a priori claim of an objective life’s worth, which is the worth that we should assign to others’ lives, and elucidated a principled framework that gives rise to the said worth immediately, as a consequence of the experiences of its sentient environment. Herein, I address the complementary question of the value of one’s own life, which is the subjective value of life and, thus, Camus’s (in)famous view that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”. As before, I rejected the inherency of a life’s worth, showing it to be contradictio in adjecto, and instead show how this worth too can in large part be seen to emerge from sentient experiences of the subject. Many of these are innately linked to experiences of other sentient beings as objects, thus erecting a framework that is both principled and thoroughly humane with Schopenhauer’s ‘loving kindness’ running through it. Practically, my framework illuminates an understanding of suicide as a real-world phenomenon, helping those who remain living to understand a deceased one’s decision, and paving the way to answering questions, such as when there should be an attempt to prevent suicide, and what means of suicide prevention are ethically permissible.

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Section: Duty-based Objections To Suicidementioning

confidence: 99%

On the Subjective Value of Life

Arandjelović

2023

Philosophies

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show abstract

“…While I am partially sympathetic to this view, I do not find it wholly convincing. Consider as an example a scenario in which I acquire a painting by, say, Monet and then decide to burn it (lest this example feel contrived, I would direct the reader to the actual case of Ai Weiwei's exhibitionist destruction of a Han dynasty urn (Davidson, 2013)). In many jurisdictions I would have the right to do so (notably, in the USA Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, 17 USC Section 106A, limits this right somewhat) but I would nevertheless argue that to exercise this legal right would be morally impermissible for it would cause undue harm to others.…”

Section: Duty Based Objections To Suicidementioning

confidence: 99%

On the Subjective Value of Life

Arandjelović¹

2023

Preprint

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Claims or the implicit assumption of the inherent worth of life are pervasive and remain virtually unchallenged. I have already argued that these outright moral dictates are thinly veiled vestiges of theological ethics which, following the removal of their theological foundations, remain little more than nebulous claims supported only by fear of the consequences of a challenge. In my previous work, I rejected an a priori claim of an objective life’s worth, which is the worth that we should assign to others’ lives, and elucidated a principled framework that gives rise to the said worth immediately, as a consequence of the experiences of its sentient environment. Herein, I address the complementary question of the value of one’s own life, which is the subjective value of life and, thus, Camus’s (in)famous view that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”. As before, I rejected the inherency of a life’s worth, showing it to be contradictio in adjecto, and instead show how this worth too can in large part be seen to emerge from sentient experiences of the subject. Many of these are innately linked to experiences of other sentient beings as objects, thus erecting a framework that is both principled and thoroughly humane with Schopenhauer’s ‘loving kindness’ running through it. Practically, my framework illuminates an understanding of suicide as a real-world phenomenon, helping those who remain living to understand a deceased one’s decision, and paving the way to answering questions, such as when there should be an attempt to prevent suicide, and what means of suicide prevention are ethically permissible.

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“…In this nexus of late-capitalist overdeterminations and the indeterminacies of waste, the possibilities of precarity open up. While it does not offer the ‘affirmative precarity’ evident in artistic subversions of precarious landscapes (Davidson 2013: 128), new experiences, perspectives and material positions emerge.…”

Section: Bringing Waste Back To Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

“… 1 Davidson (2013: 128) speaks of the ‘affirmative dialectics of precarity’ of conceptual art, which allies devalued labour and material discards on the soft borders of the global South. The dialectical play of precarity in Ashaiman, however, is not so easily drawn, grounded as it is in the quest for material security over and above symbolic claims.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Waste work and the dialectics of precarity in urban Ghana: durable bodies and disposable things

Chalfin¹

2019

Africa

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What can the dialectics of waste work tell us about the urban underclass in the flux of late capitalism? What might waste reveal more broadly about the contradictions and uncharted possibilities of material accumulation in urban Africa? Utilizing a relational optic, these issues are explored from the perspective of young men working in the rubbish dumps of Ghana's ‘edge city’ of Ashaiman, a space where the detritus of local and global markets and struggles for urban survival converge. Here, day-to-day entanglements with city dwellers’ discarded items muddy the expected terms of economic dispossession and attainment. At Ashaiman's dump, the perils of social and bodily breakdown are matched by the promise of expanded reproduction via waste work, invigorating the economic prospects of the region's footloose underemployed. Relevant well beyond Ghana, such inversions point to an insistent underside of late-capitalist overproduction: namely, in this dense space of discard and decay, those on the lowest rungs of the urban economic ladder meld bodily expenditure, social aspiration and material breakdown to forge fragile futures and to format urban space. Blending materialisms new and old, a view from Ashaiman's dump bridges the insights of relational ontologies focused on the agency of things and labour-based renderings of capitalism's transformation.

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Affirmative Precarity: Ai Weiwei and Margarita Cabrera

Cited by 6 publications

References 11 publications

On the Subjective Value of Life

On the Subjective Value of Life

On the Subjective Value of Life

Waste work and the dialectics of precarity in urban Ghana: durable bodies and disposable things

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