Tag: collectivity

  • Durkheim on individualisation and the weakening of collective experience

    Durkheim on individualisation and the weakening of collective experience

    From On Suicide pg 215-216. If I understand correctly this is what Durkheim understands by social integration. As he write on pg 216, “to say of a group that it has less communal life than another is also to say that it is less strongly integrated, because the state of integration of a social aggregate […]

  • The Face in the Crowd

    I saw a wonderful exhibition this weekend, collecting work by Alex Prager combining photography and film in intricately staged hyper-real scenes. The collection that has been playing on mind since seeing it is Face In The Crowd. If you click on the screenshot below, it will take you to the website where you can see the […]

  • Social acceleration and the possibility of the sacred 

    I just returned from a Remembrance Day service, pondering the relationship between acceleration and the profane after finding the array of people walking past and through the service deeply irritating. It occurred to me that what marks out such a space as sacred, distinguished from the normal flow on everyday life, rests as much on […]

  • The fetishisation of the event 

    From Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, loc 3468: Generic demands to experiment, create and prefigure are commonplace, but concrete proposals are all too often met with a wave of criticism outlining every possible point at which things might go wrong. In light of this dual tendency –for novelty, but against the […]

  • the problem of ‘community’

    From Spam, by Finn Brunton, pg 6-7: Two qualities unite these disparate uses of “community.” First, deep uncertainties about properties and edges: is community about location and face-to-face proximity, or does it consist of affective bonds that can be established by a text message as they are by an embrace? Does it encompass huge swathes […]

  • digital capitalism, fetishistic disavowal and faux-collectives 

    From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 1384: One start- up sentiment mining application, for example, claims to “understand how the web feels ” via a “vibology meter.” 56 This version of prosopopoeia – attributing an imagined and unified voice to a dispersed and invisible aggregate that cannot speak for itself – enacts the fetishistic disavowal […]