The Collectivity Of Life

The Collectivity of Life is a study of autobiographical writing and oral histories situated in the late twentieth century United States. The central thesis is that by studying how the authors of these narratives articulate space in their stories, we can uncover a recurring critique of meritocratic individualism and reconstruct a counter-mythology that locates social mobility in collectivist experiences. Fourteen autobiographical works are studied, including those of Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Barack Obama, and numerous other from multiple ethnic and several regions of the U.S., ranging from 1964 through 2008. More than 40 oral histories housed in archives in several regions of the country help to establish the book’s goal. By using a concept of space, this book shifts the focus of personal narrative from the internal resources of the individual to networks of support and collective efforts in the formation of their identities and the basis of their life accomplishments.

Broad perspective on collectivity in the life sciences, from microorganisms to human consensus, and the theoretical and empirical opportunities and challenges. Many researchers and scholars in the life sciences have become increasingly critical of the traditional methodological focus on the individual. This volume counters such methodological individualism by exploring recent and influential work in the life sciences that utilizes notions of collectivity, sociality, rich interactions, and emergent phenomena as essential explanatory tools to handle numerous persistent scientific questions in the life sciences. The contributors consider case studies of collectivity that range from microorganisms to human consensus, discussing theoretical and empirical challenges and the innovative methods and solutions scientists have devised. The contributors offer historical, philosophical, and biological perspectives on collectivity, and describe collective phenomena seen in insects, the immune system, communication, and human collectivity, with examples ranging from cooperative transport in the longhorn crazy ant to the evolution of autobiographical memory. They examine ways of explaining collectivity, including case studies and modeling approaches, and explore collectivity's explanatory power. They present a comprehensive look at a specific case of collectivity: the Holobiont notion (the idea of a multi-species collective, a host and diverse microorganisms) and the hologenome theory (which posits that the holobiont and its hologenome are a unit of adaption). The volume concludes with reflections on the work of the late physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, pioneer in the study of collective phenomena in living systems. Contributors Oren Bader, John Beatty, Dinah R. Davison, Daniel Dor, Ofer Feinerman, Raghavendra Gadagkar, Scott F. Gilbert, Snait B. Gissis, Deborah M. Gordon, James Griesemer, Zachariah I. Grochau-Wright, Erik R. Hanschen, Eva Jablonka, Mohit Kumar Jolly, Anat Kolumbus, Ehud Lamm, Herbert Levine, Arnon Levy, Xue-Fei Li, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Yael Lubin, Eva Maria Luef, Ehud Meron, Richard E. Michod, Samir Okasha, Simone Pika, Joan Roughgarden, Eugene Rosenberg, Ayelet Shavit, Yael Silver, Alfred I. Tauber, Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg

In Always More Than One, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation?

This book addresses the complex relationship between architecture and public life. It’s a study of architecture and urbanism as cultural activity that both reflects and gives shape to our social relations, public institutions and political processes. Written by an international range of contributors, the chapters address the intersection of public life and the built environment around the themes of authority and planning, the welfare state, place and identity and autonomy. The book covers a diverse range of material from Foucault’s evolving thoughts on space to land-scraping leisure centres in inter-war Belgium. It unpacks concepts such as ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’ alongside themes of self-organisation and authorship. Architecture and Collective Life reflects on urban and architectural practice and historical, political and social change. As such this book will be of great interest to students and academics in architecture and urbanism as well as practicing architects.

This book takes as its point of departure the historical fact that it was Orthodox pioneers of German origin, in contrast to their Eastern European counterparts, who successfully developed religious kibbutz life.

The book tells the story of communal living from about 1850 until today. Three motives of sharing - the economic, political and social intention - divide the residential objects, which are investigated in a historical analysis and allocated to nine development phases. The author investigates and compares different forms of housing and the way they developed from their origins until today; she illustrates how everyday shared living and the degrees of privacy in housing are practiced in Europe. Owing to its comprehensive documentation, the analysis of typologies, layout plans, and user and expert interviews, the book can also be considered to be a lexicon or handbook on communal living. A detailed overview that is unique in this form.

For decades we have witnessed the emergence of a media age of illusion that is based on the principles of physics—the multidimensionality, immateriality, and non-locality of the unified field of energy and information—as a virtual reality. As a result, a new paradigm shift has reframed the cognitive unconscious of individuals and collectives and generated a worldview in which mediated illusion prevails. Exploring the Collective Unconscious in a Digital Age investigates the cognitive significance of an altered mediated reality that appears to have all the dimensions of a dreamscape. This book presents the idea that if the digital media-sphere proves to be structurally and functionally analogous to a dreamscape, the Collective Unconscious researched by Carl Jung and the Cognitive Unconscious researched by George Lakoff are susceptible to research according to the parameters of hard science. This pivotal research-based publication is ideally designed for use by psychologists, theorists, researchers, and graduate-level students studying human cognition and the influence of the digital media revolution.

First published in 1993, Fictions of Collective Life argues that the distinctive forms of modern popular culture can only be understood through the ways we dramatize public life, and that in the dramatic ‘fiction’ of collective experience we represent the terms of social order. The argument is richly illustrated with chapters on the theoretical character of performance in modernity; photography as the first means of mass representation; the nature of public discourse in mass democracy; and the elaboration of space for theatrical performance; and the marketing of culture and communication through mass systems of distribution. The book aims to provide a framework within which any of the popular cultural forms of modernity can be understood. Drawing upon and adapting the extensive literature of cultural studies, the author offers a distinctive and original sociological perspective on the relationship between individual and community in popular culture. The author also sets out the distinctive features of change in late-modern and postmodern culture. This book will be of interest to students of sociology, cultural studies, and related fields.