Trace And Aura

From one of the foremost medievalists of our time, a groundbreaking work on history and memory that goes well beyond the life of this influential saint. Elected bishop of Milan by popular acclaim in 374, Ambrose went on to become one of the four original Doctors of the Church. There is much more to this book, however, than the captivating story of the bishop who baptized Saint Augustine in the fourth century. Trace and Aura investigates how a crucial figure from the past can return in different guises over and over again, in a city that he inspired and shaped through his beliefs and political convictions. His recurring lives actually span more than ten centuries, from the fourth to the sixteenth. In the process of following Ambrose’s various reincarnations, Patrick Boucheron draws compelling connections between religion, government, tyranny, the Italian commune, Milan’s yearning for autonomy, and many other aspects of this fascinating relationship between a city and its spiritual mentor who strangely seems to resist being manipulated by the needs and ambitions of those in power.

Diagnoses our contemporary spatial experience as fundamentally totalitarian through a multilayered critical theory of space. We live today within a system in which state and corporate power aim to render space flat, transparent, and uniform, for only then can it be truly controlled. The gaze of power and the commodity form are capable of infiltrating even the darkest of corners, and often, we invite them into our most private spaces. We do so as a matter of convenience, but also to placate ourselves and cope with the alienation inherent in our everyday lives. The resulting dominant space can best be termed totalitarian. It is space stripped of uniqueness, deprived of the “spatial aura” necessary for authentic experience. In Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura, Saladdin Ahmed sets out to help us grasp what has been lost before no trace remains. He draws attention to that which we might prefer not to see, but despite the bleakness of this indictment of reality, the book also offers a message of hope. Namely, it is only once we comprehend the magnitude of the threat to our spatial experience and our own complicity in sustaining this system that we can begin to resist the totalizing forces at work. “This is a clear and important contribution to the existing literature and contemporary political thought in general. It expounds upon Benjamin’s analysis of the aura in his famous essay, ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ and, importantly, illustrates how this concept is incredibly pertinent to our society today.” — Mary Caputi, author of Feminism and Power: The Need for Critical Theory

Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape experience, this book situates the concept within landscape’s aesthetic traditions, and reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy. With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic exertions of the eighteenth-century. Implicated in the more formal categories of the Sublime and the Picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition of beautiful sadness. The book proposes a range of conditions which are conducive to melancholy, and presents examples from each, including: The Void, The Uncanny, Silence, Shadows and Darkness, Aura, Liminality, Fragments, Leavings, Submersion, Weathering and Patina.

COMPARATIVE URBANISM ‘Comparative Urbanism fully transforms the scope and purpose of urban studies today, distilling innovative conceptual and methodological tools. The theoretical and empirical scope is astounding, enlightening, emboldening. Robinson peels away conceptual labels that have anointed some cities as paradigmatic and left others as mere copies. She recalibrates overly used theoretical perspectives, resurrects forgotten ones long in need of a dusting off, and brings to the fore those often marginalised. Robinson’s approach radically re-distributes who speaks for the urban, and which urban conditions shape our theoretical understandings. With Comparative Urbanism in our hands, we can start the practice of urban studies anywhere and be relevant to any number of elsewheres.’ Jane M. Jacobs, Professor of Urban Studies, Yale-NUS College, Singapore ‘How to think the multiplicity of urban realities at the same time, across different times and rhythmic arrangements; how to move with the emergences and stand-stills, with conceptualisations that do justice to all things gathered under the name of the urban. How to imagine comparatively amongst differences that remain different, individualised outcomes, but yet exist in-common. No book has so carefully conducted a specifically urban philosophy on these matters, capable of beginning and ending anywhere.’ AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Research Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield The rapid pace and changing nature of twenty-first century urbanisation as well as the diversity of global urban experiences calls for new theories and new methodologies in urban studies. In Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies, Jennifer Robinson proposes grounds for reformatting comparative urban practice and offers a wide range of tactics for researching global urban experiences. The focus is on inventing new concepts as well as revising existing approaches. Inspired by postcolonial and decolonial critiques of urban studies she advocates for an experimental comparative urbanism, open to learning from different urban experiences and to expanding conversations amongst urban scholars across the globe. The book features a wealth of examples of comparative urban research, concerned with many dimensions of urban life. A range of theoretical and philosophical approaches ground an understanding of the radical revisability and emergent nature of concepts of the urban. Advanced students, urbanists and scholars will be prompted to compose comparisons which trace the interconnected and relational character of the urban, and to think with the variety of urban experiences and urbanisation processes across the globe, to produce the new insights the twenty-first century urban world demands.

Brands, which are major economic entities and major symbols of market mediations, are increasingly appearing in the social arena as cultural actors in their own right. Their quest for social legitimacy and to have control over the markets goes beyond the usual framework of their communication with initiatives that have begun to have an impact on the French cultural landscape. Media, digital content, educational kits, museum exhibitions and so on are the actions of an unadvertization, which has the potential to transform not only the rapport brands have with the public but also representations of knowledge and culture. The communicative approach at the heart of this book illuminates the contemporary transformations of communication, highlighting three main types of cultural mediations: media, education, and cultural heritage institutions. Cultural Mediations of Brands thus provides a theoretical and critical analysis of the brand and the symbolic effectiveness attributed to it.

The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics in two poets from the reign of Domitian. Gunderson offers a comprehensive overview of the Epigrams of Martial and the Siluae of Statius. The praise of power found in these texts is not something forced upon these poems, nor is it a mere appendage to these works. Instead, power and poetry as a pair are a fundamental dyad that can and should be traced throughout the two collections. It is present even when the emperor himself is not the topic of discussion. In Martial the portrait of power is constantly shifting. Poetic play takes up the topic of political power and 'plays around with it'. The initial relatively sportive attitude darkens over time. Late in the game we have ecstasies of humiliation. After Domitian dies the project tries to get back to the old games, but it cannot. Statius' Siluae merge the lies one tells to power with the lies of poetry more generally. Poetic mastery and political mastery cannot be dissociated. The glib, glitzy poetry of contemporary life articulates a radical modernism that is self-authorizing, and so complicit with a power whose structure it mirrors. What does it mean to praise praise poetry? To celebrate celebrations? Gunderson's discussion opens and closes with a meditation upon the dangers of complicit criticism and the seductions of a discourse of pure art in a world where the art is anything but pure.

Following the spirit of Benjamin's Arcades Project, this book acts as a kaleidoscope of change in the 21st century, tracing its different reflections in the international contemporary while seeking to understand individual/collective reactions to change through a series of creative methodologies.