Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles

Mukerji, Chandra

doi:10.1215/08992363-1630663

Cited by 27 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…This is precisely what scholars within the social studies of science argue when they claim that it would be simply impossible to make sense of how truth-claims, evidence, or objectivity are produced, if we were to focus exclusively on what scientists do while ignoring what materials do (Barad 2007;Daston and Galison 2007;Haraway 1997;Latour 1987;Law 1991;Pickering 1995). In a similar vein, historians and urban theorists have demonstrated the need to attend to the physical properties of the built environment to understand how different logics of governance and power come into being (Domínguez Rubio and Fogué 2013;Graham and Marvin 2001;Graham 2000;Joyce 2003;Mukerji 2012;Scott 1999). Even psychology, one of the "immaterial" social sciences par excellence, has joined this exploration of the material through different paradigms, like the "distributed cognition" or "embodied cognition" paradigms, which depart from the long-established Cartesian view of cognition as an immaterial process operating through symbolically expressed puzzles, to propose a novel view of cognition as a materially embedded and distributed practice (Clark and Chalmers 1998;Clark 2008;Hutchins 1995;Lakoff and Johnson 1999).…”

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confidence: 99%

Preserving the unpreservable: docile and unruly objects at MoMA

Rubio

2014

Theor Soc

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The aim of this article is to theorize how materials can play an active, constitutive, and causally effective role in the production and sustenance of cultural forms and meanings. It does so through an empirical exploration of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA). The article describes the museum as an "objectification machine" that endeavors to transform and to stabilize artworks as meaningful "objects" that can be exhibited, classified, and circulated. The article explains how the extent to which the museum succeeds in this process of stabilization ultimately depends on the material properties of artworks and, more specially, on whether these behave as "docile" or "unruly" objects. Drawing on different empirical examples, the article explores how docile and unruly objects shape organizational dynamics within the museum and, through them, the wider processes of institutional and cultural reproduction. The article uses this empirical example to highlight the importance of developing a new "material sensibility" that restores heuristic dignity to the material within cultural sociology.Keywords Museums . Materiality . Docile objects . Unruly objects . Cultural sociology Although still incipient and somewhat dispersed, it is nonetheless possible to detect the contours of a novel "sensibility" within cultural sociology that calls for the need to incorporate the material into the study of cultural forms, processes and meanings. This "material sensibility," as one might call it, has slowly emerged over the last years driven by a more or less heterogeneous collection of authors who, despite their methodological and theoretical differences, share the conviction that materials have been unduly neglected in the sociological study of culture. As Chandra Mukerji has put it (1997, p. 36), there is a growing need "to approach material culture without reducing objects to instantiations of discourse or realizations of cognitive representations," and to avoid "the disappearance of the material world behind language." In a similar vein, Harvey Theor Soc (2014) 43:617-645

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confidence: 99%

Preserving the unpreservable: docile and unruly objects at MoMA

Rubio

2014

Theor Soc

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“…Kings, of course, had to perform as well; but the denotations and connotations they performed within came from different semiotics. And what was the French Court but a magnificent material and aesthetic apparatus for the performance of royal power [Mukerji 2012]? Robespierre,3 then, struggled with the problem of emergency powers as possessed by an executive in a republic, and the relationship of these powers to the people as the ultimate source of the right to rule.…”

Section: Enunciative State Of Exceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Power and the French Revolution: Toward a Sociology of Sovereignty

Reed¹

2018

Historická Sociologie

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Abstract:In what sense was the French Revolution exceptional -a moment of potential liberation both unique and uncertain? "Exceptionality" has a specific meaning in political philosophy, and, using this meaning as a departure point, this paper develops a specifically sociological typology of states of exception -enunciative, reciprocal, and structural -grounded in a Hegelian sociology of power. The schema is useful for parsing and interpreting several of Robespierre's most important speeches during the Revolution. This analysis leads to retheorization of modernity in the French Revolution, with specific attention to the interpretation, in Paris, of the revolution in Saint Domingue.Keywords: state of exception; Robespierre; Haitian revolution; sociology of revolutions; G. W. F. He gel DOI: 10.14712/23363525.2018.38 On May 26, 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, president of the National Convention, gave the speech, "On the Enemies of the Nation. " It is an articulation of the utility and necessity of violence to defend the republic under siege inside (civil war) and outside (the international coalition against revolutionary France), and it is an "either you are with us or against us" speech. In it, Robespierre argues that assassination is the remaining tool of the counterrevolutionaries. He then works the binaries: on the one hand, he explains, there is "the mass of citizens, pure, simple, thirsting for justice and friends of liberty, " and, on the other, "a mass of the ambitious and intriguers […] who abuse the learning that the advantages of the ancien régime gave them in order to fool public opinion. " The implication is that steel must be met with steel in defense of the republic, and that revolutionary sacrifice is glory in posterity: "To make war on crime is the path to the tomb and to immorality; to favor crime is the path to the throne and the scaffold" [Robespierre 2004[Robespierre (1794The speech is similar in rhetorical structure to his more famous speeches, including the one that advocated the execution of the King. However, in the middle of this particular speech, Robespierre pauses briefly for a reflection that is out of the character with the rest of the speech: "The moment in which we find ourselves is favorable, but it is perhaps unique. In the state of equilibrium in which things are it is easy to consolidate liberty, and it is easy to lose it. " He then quickly returns to his invective. But for a few spoken lines, he meditates on the meaning of what is taking place as an event in the history of the world, and as a social crisis uncertain in its direction. Perhaps, one even senses that he finds the event somewhat opaque to those whose decisions would determine it. USA. E-mail: iar2c@virginia.edu. H I S T O R I C K Á S O C I O L O G I E 1/2018In what sense was the French Revolution exceptional [Jourdan 2011] -a moment of potential liberation both unique and uncertain? There are many everyday, philosophical and historical meanings of the term "exception. " But the meaning which is the most reveali...

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“…Enacting roles within the dream world of Roman revival forced nobles to inhabit these political logics and entertain them as real. They are not forced to learn the lessons, per se, but in a controlled space like Versailles where courtiers lived, the lessons embedded in the chateau and park were hard to escape Mukerji (2012).…”

Section: State Imaginariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The dreams of Rome legitimated territorial practices, also the use of legal precedents from Rome, and set out a more worldly logic of power. In other words, the ancient world was used to construct by logistical means a modern dream of power Mukerji (2012Mukerji ( , 2017a.…”

Section: State Imaginariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The state of things: state history and theory reconfigured

Joyce

Mukerji

2017

Theor Soc

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This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse problems by different means in multiple locations. So, educating children is not continuous with governing colonies even though both are necessary to nineteenth-century states. For this reason, states use logistical means of coordination to link sites, and they make the power of the state seem unitary even though the exercise of state power is not.Keywords Assemblages . Bureaucracy . Infrastructure . Logistics . Materiality . Political culture In spite of efforts to rethink the character of states and how they operate, most theories of the state still treat it as a unitary actor. But it is not. States are assemblages of the active agencies of many and often conflicting people and objects in a myriad of sites from prisons to schools, military bases and highways. They are held together, sometimes very uncertainly, at particular key sites and through the actions of key actors and processes, human and nonhuman Joyce (2013; Joyce and Bennett 2010). We therefore approach the state in terms of the material processes and practices it employs to explain its complex and emergent forms. The state is an assemblage that is distinguished as a

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Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles

Cited by 27 publications

References 1 publication

Preserving the unpreservable: docile and unruly objects at MoMA

Preserving the unpreservable: docile and unruly objects at MoMA

Power and the French Revolution: Toward a Sociology of Sovereignty

The state of things: state history and theory reconfigured

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