“Please turn out the lights.As long as we’re going to talk about films, we might as well do it in the dark.We have all been here before. By the time we are eighteen years old, say the statisticians, we have been here five hundred times.No, not in this very room, but in this generic darkness, the only place left in our culture intended entirely for concentrated exercise of one, or at most two, of our senses.”

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is an investigation into loss, losing and being lost. Taking in subjects as eclectic as memory and mapmaking, Hitchcock movies and Renaissance painting, Rebecca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty. This book combines memoir, history and philosophy, shedding glittering new light on the way we live now.

The most startling thing about disasters, according to author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become -one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

As part of the Berlin Art Week 2022 three exhibitions have been curated at C/O Berlin under the title Queerness in Photography. In the accompanying newspaper, CN Lester talks about visibility, seeing, and perspectives. They state that queer, especially trans people, “are not visible, but hypervisible—an important distinction frequently pointed out by trans people, particularly trans women. We are not seen, but sighted; illuminating nothing, this invisibility paints a target on the backs of the people it spotlights” (p. 8). Lester comments specifically on one of the exhibitions, the Lifshitz collection, and how it shows not only how queer people want to be seen but how queer people see each other. Thereby, this article is a helpful framework for understanding the possibility of a queer perspective being something active, meaning seeing instead of being sighted.

CN Lester brings in the practice of “letting your gaze grow soft”, relying on the peripheral vision and taking in relations between things in a space, as well as their general presence, instead of specific, sharp focus (p. 10). In the context of gender and trans people, this means not paying attention to gendered markers of appearance, but instead holding “open the possibility of who a person is and might be, and it takes cues from the whole information given—most crucially, the information delivered subtly, brashly, and/or in deep vulnerable ways be the person being seen” (p. 10). This other, queer, passive (“in the queer meaning of the term”, p. 10), soft, non-hierarchical, and sensing way of looking can be a fruitful practice for exploring dizziness, queerness, and mutual care.

https://co-berlin.org/en/program/exhibitions/queerness-photography

Virginia Woolf’s blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of writers and the silent fate of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman’s need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

This book continues the work Deleuze and Guattari began in Anti-Oedipus and has now become established as one of the classic studies of the development of critical theory in the late twentieth century. It occupies an important place at the center of the debate reassessing the works of Freud and Marx, advancing an approach that is neither Freudian nor Marxist but which learns from both to find an entirely new and radical path. It presents an attempt to pioneer a variety of social and psychological analyses free of the philosophical encumbrances criticized by postmodern writers. A Thousand Plateaus is an essential text for feminists, literary theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and others interested in the problems of contemporary Western culture.

In this highly insightful analysis of Western and Chinese concepts of efficacy, François Jullien subtly delves into the metaphysical preconceptions of the two civilizations, to account for their diverging patterns of action in warfare, politics and diplomacy. He shows how Western and Chinese strategies work in several domains (e.g. the battlefield) and analyses two resulting acts of war. The Chinese strategist manipulates his own troops and the enemy to win a battle without waging war and brings about victory effortlessly. Efficacy in China is thus conceived of in terms of transformation (as opposed to action) and manipulation, making it closer to what is understood as efficacy in the West. Jullien's brilliant interpretations of an array of recondite texts are key to understanding our own conceptions of action, time and reality in this foray into the world of Chinese thought.

The authors investigate technical assistance strategies in supporting the use of research evidence, particularly the contribution of participatory processes. They distinguish five participatory process: informing (providing information), consulting (obtaining feedback), involving (working together to develop alternatives), collaborating (partnering in each aspect of decision making), and co-creating (empowering to make decisions).

Interesting in the context of dizziness and co-creation is the aspect of empowerment, which can be discussed as giving control and the capability to act independently.

https://doi.org/10.1332/174426419X15579811791990

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Fondateur de la discipline iconologique, créateur du prestigieux institut qui porte son nom, Aby Warburg (1866–1929) a compté parmi ses disciples les plus célèbres historiens de l’art du siècle: Panofsky, Wind, Saxl. Mais ces héritiers ont, pour la plupart, préféré développer une «iconologie restreinte» fondée sur le déchiffrement et l’interprétation des symboles – là où Warburg, nourri de Nietzsche et de Burckhardt, entendait assumer les risques d’une «iconologie critique».Philippe-Alain Michaud prolonge les intuitions de Warburg en introduisant dans son analyse le daguerréotype, les expériences de Marey, le cinéma primitif, la danse de Loïe Fuller, toutes pratiques qui affleurent dans l’interprétation warburgienne des images et qui en éclairent la singularité.

In his comedy Amphitryon, published in 1807 but not first performed until 1899, Heinrich von Kleist takes up a popular theme from Greek mythology: Zeus, the father of the gods (in Kleist's play: Jupiter), attends the absence of the general Amphitryon with his wife Alcmene, with whom he begets the demigod Heracles. The problems of the princely couple are ironically mirrored in the parallel plot about Mercury, the boat of the gods, Amphitryon's servant Sosias and his wife Charis. If in Molière's Amphitryon (1668), Kleist's original ("A comedy based on Molière"), the focus is on the rivalry between lover and husband, in Kleist's play it becomes a struggle for consciousness, identity and alienation.

Stuart Kaufman deduced in Antichaoas and Adaptation, that chaos is part of a complex system of behaviour. He made an important observation that any network or dynamical system, which is finite and oscillatory, will have a finite number of states, and must eventually re-enter a state it has previously encountered. Consequently, it will cycle repeatedly through the same states.

In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything in our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.

Kataraina Bonnevier’s PhD dissertation is a “formal experiment in writing” (p. 388) where she explores architecture in its queerness and theatricality. The author looks at architecture as something active and aims to contribute to a shift “towards a built environment which does not simply repeat repressive structures but tries to resist discriminations and dismantle hierarchies” (p. 15). Most parts of the thesis are written in the form of lectures as performances in writing, attempting “both to read and enact building constellations from a queer feminist perspective”. Thereby, Bonnevier aims “not only to explain and critique from a detached perspective but also to create and show architecture enacted” (p. 386).

The thesis is a fruitful ressource for thinking together dizziness and (somatic) architecture. To Bonnevier, how spaces are distributed “has a performative force of authority [... yet] any building [...] yields an excess of possibilities” (p. 369). The author touches upon the materiality of architecture and its influence on and relations with bodies. She advocates for understanding and creating architecture less determined but more supple and transformative. A queer perspective on architecture is an interpretation, not the assumption “that queerness is an essentialist core of some buildings, and not others [...] but the cultural production around us is not as straight as heteronormativity makes it appear” (p. 22). How we understand our built environment is influenced by heteronormativity (p. 370). Bonnevier investigates reflections and reiterations of power relations in architecture, yet focuses on her “search for critically queer architecture” (p. 371). To her, seeing buildings as “queer performative acts, and not static preconditions” helps opening to possibilities of non-normative interpretations and understandings of architecture (p. 22).

Queer, according to Bonnevier, “is an excessive term of performative force” which “implies interchangeabilty and excess; the possibility to move, make several interpretations, slide over, or reposition limits” (p. 372). Following Sedgwick’s Tendencies, queer also is a political force due to “its slipperiness, of performing that which is not embraced by normative pressures” (p. 373).

http://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:11685/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Being Numerous shatters the mainstream consensus on politics and personhood, offering in its place a bracing analysis of a perilous world and how we should live in it. Beginning with an interrogation of what it means to fight fascism, Natasha Lennard explores the limits of individual rights, the criminalization of political dissent, the myths of radical sex, and the ghosts in our lives. At once politically committed and philosophically capacious, Being Numerous is a revaluation of the idea that the personal is political, and situates as the central question of our time--How can we live a non-fascist life?

Hannah Arendt’s insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill the vital essence of these concepts and use them to regain a frame of reference for the future. To participate in these exercises is to associate, in action, with one of the most original and fruitful minds of the twentieth century.

Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs) is a 1952 [1967] book by Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and intellectual from Martiniqu. The book is written in the style of autoethnography, in which Fanon shares his own experiences while presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche.There is a double process that is economic and internalized through the epidermalization of inferiority.

The violent overtones in Fanon can be broken down into two categories: The violence of the colonizer through annihilation of body, psyche, culture, along with the demarcation of space. And secondly the violence of the colonized as an attempt to retrieve dignity, sense of self, and history through anti-colonial struggle.

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Emerging from the confluence of theory and practice, Blue Sky Body combines full-length critical essays with a kaleidoscopic selection of fragments from journal entries, performance texts, and other unpublished materials to offer a series of entry points organized by seven keywords: city, song, movement, theater, sex, document, politics. Brimming with thoughtful and sometimes provocative takes on embodiment, technology, decoloniality, the university, and the politics of knowledge, the work shared here models the integration of artistic and embodied research with critical thought, opening new avenues for transformative action and experimentation.

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Groundless is, at the same time, Vilém Flusser’s autobiography and a singular title in the author’s literary production as a thinker. Written in 1973, one year after his return to Europe, when the author was only fifty-three years old, this work addresses a variety of themes, beyond the experiences of the one who reports them. Through an experimental structure, Vilém Flusser presents to the readers a series of philosophical dialogues that he maintained with the people who marked him during his life in Brazil. Among them, Alex Bloch, Haroldo de Campos, João Guimarães Rosa, Milton Vargas, Dora Ferreira da Silva, Vicente Ferreira da Silva, Miguel Reale, Samson Flexor, and Mira Schendel. In a letter to Milton Vargas of 1973, Flusser writes: "To write a biography at 53 means 'to make biography', in the sense in which Hegel says that to write the history of philosophy means to make history and philosophy. ... to write a biography is not contemplation, but action ..." With this intention in mind, Vilém Flusser wrote a book where he explores how his past experiences, especially the experiences within the Brazilian reality, influenced him in the formation of his philosophical project. The particularity with which he describes this process in Portuguese makes it a work of great value in the field of philosophy and communication and deserves to be published in English translated from its original version in Portuguese. This edition differs from the posthumous German edition of 1993 in that it restores the structure of the text to the author’s original manuscript. Groundless is a key text for the study and understanding of Vilém Flusser’s work as a philosopher.

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Body and Mature Behavior is a study of human development that is concerned with the relationships between movement, emotional maturity, and behaviour patterns. Moshe Feldenkrais was superbly aware of the muscular responses, tensions, and rigidity that lead to both physical and emotional problems. He delves straight to the heart of his case: a condensed description of the conditions of our existence, touching upon topics like neurology, prehistory, child development, individual-societal relationships, and more. A fascinating discussion of gravitation and the anti-gravity mechanism is followed by a discussion of the effects of emotion on posture and on personal patterns of movement. Feldenkrais speaks to the importance of acknowledging the inseparability of body and mind.

Robin Wall Kimmerer pledges for a wider ecological consciousness that involves acknowledging the human reciprocal relationship with other beings in this world. Especially the introduction, as well as the first chapter, Skywoman Falling, offer points of relation to queerness and dizziness. The author writes about the importance of the collective and lived reciprocity, of plants and forest teaching us about the destructive and constructive elements of change, about the possibilities of standing at the brink, and of those of falling.

Guattari's final book is a succinct summary of his socio-philosophical outlook. It includes critical reflections on Lacanian psychoanalysis, structuralism, information theory, postmodernism, and the thought of Heidegger, Bakhtin, Barthes and others.

This text is a conversation between the collective MYCKET (Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Bonnevier, Thérèse Kristiansson) and Alexandra Falagara and Brita Lindvall Leitmann, graphic designers of the magazine Bang and founders of the design studio Bastion Agency Studio Lab. They explore the possibilities of resistance in a spatial framework that involves patriarchal structures and ask: “How can the rooms we create be part of a feminist method for change?” (p. 30). Space is seen as a social enactor, and queer ethics and queer aesthetics of space are being addressed. The authors challenge ideas around purity, cleanliness, and neutrality within spaces, and draw connections to racist beliefs and power structures.

The text itself is not only written but designed and gets more colorful, playful, maximalist, and messy as it evolves. Thereby the authors challenge norms within layout and typography. This punctuates statements like: “[W]hy not just go with fur on the walls, the floors, the ceilings, just cover everything in fur! Let the boundaries between the surfaces of the room be evened out buy fuzz!” (p. 32).

The community isn’t a mode of being, much less a ‘making’ of the individual subject. It isn’t the subject’s expansion or multiplication but its exposure to what interrupts the closing and turns it inside out: a dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in the continuity of the subject. (Esposito)http://on-dizziness.com/communitas/

Henri Michaux (1899–1984) was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer and painter who wrote in French and who later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style and for a body of work that includes poetry, travelogues and art criticism. Michaux travelled widely, tried his hand at several careers and experimented with drugs.

The most famous and influential work of distinguished French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Creative Evolution features the fullest expression of the philosopher's ideas about the problem of existence, propounding a theory of evolution completely distinct from these of earlier thinkers and scientists.In discussing the meaning of life, Bergson considers the order of nature and the form of intelligence, including the geometrical tendency of the intellect, and examines mechanisms of thought and illusion. In addition, he presents a critique of the idea of immutability and the concept of nothingness, from Plato and Aristotle through the evolutionism of his contemporaries.

This study of the creative process is about capturing those moments that make life worth living. Legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi reveals what leads to these moments—be it the excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab—so that this knowledge can be used to enrich people's lives. Drawing on nearly one hundred interviews with exceptional people, from biologists and physicists, to politicians and business leaders, to poets and artists, as well as his thirty years of research on the subject, Csikszentmihalyi uses his famous flow theory to explore the creative process. He discusses such ideas as why creative individuals are often seen as selfish and arrogant, and why the ‘tortured genius’ is largely a myth. Most important, he explains why creativity needs to be cultivated and is necessary for the future of our country, if not the world.

Natalie Oswin makes the simple statement that space is being actively produced as heterosexualized. The author shows how queer geographies have started criticizing how geographical theorizing often has an implicit heterosexual bias. Oswin argues for a queer approach in geography that does not “only” focus on queer lives like gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people, but deeply challenges and deconstructs heteropatriarchal structures and intersectional constellations of power. This means including postcolonial, feminist, materialist, and race theories.

https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507085213

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Crowds and Power is a revolutionary work in which Elias Canetti finds a new way of looking at human history and psychology. Breathtaking in its range and erudition, it explores Shiite festivals and the English Civil war, the finger exercises of monkeys and the effects of inflation in Weimar Germany. In this study of the interplay of crowds, Canetti offers one of the most profound and startling portraits of the human condition.

Writers and artists are always asked about their process, including the crucial question, “How do you do meaningful creative work while also earning a living?” Currey set out to amass as much information as he could find about the routines “brilliant and successful” creators adopted and followed, and the result is a zestful survey of the working habits of “some of the greatest minds of the last four hundred years.” This zealous and judicious volume brims with quotes and fascinating disclosures about the vagaries of the creative life. Currey outs the habits of nearly 200 choreographers, comedians, composers, caricaturists, filmmakers, philosophers, playwrights, painters, poets, scientists, sculptors, and writers in a dizzying array that includes Benjamin Franklin, Henri Matisse, Nikola Tesla, Stephen King, Twyla Tharp, Federico Fellini, Ann Beattie, Gustav Mahler, and Toni Morrison. Here are early birds and night owls, the phenomenally rigorous and the nearly dysfunctional. George Balanchine thought things out while ironing. Maya Angelou writes sequestered in a “tiny, mean” hotel room. Marilynne Robinson confesses, “I really am incapable of discipline.” Currey’s compendium is elucidating and delectable. —Donna Seaman

In beiden Texten unternimmt es der Autor, einen bestimmten „Gegenstand“ – im „Notizbuch“ ein bestimmter Kiefernwald, im anderen Fall der Himmel der Provence an einem bestimmten Ort zu einer bestimmten Zeit – mit poetischen Mitteln zu erforschen, ihn in einem Poem zu „erobern“, ohne dass das Objekt in seiner Gesetzmäßigkeit zugunsten einer vorgegebenen poetischen Formel verschwindet. Ponges Ziel ist es, die Objekte in der Sprache (v)erstehen zu lassen. Das Resultat dieser Bemühungen kann nicht mehr ein für sich stehendes, von seiner Entstehung losgelöstes Gedicht sein, sondern nur die Gesamtheit des Prozesses, in dem der Autor den Gegenstand in Worten, die für ihn und nur für ihn zutreffen, nachkonstruiert und die Nachkonstruktion dann durch das Objekt korrigieren lässt.

According to the poet and philosopher Lucretius, ‘clinamen’, is the unpredictable tendency for atoms to swerve. This indeterminacy provides the free will which living things throughout the world have. In his poem ‘On the Nature of Things’ he states:

This collection shows how Deleuze's philosophy is shaking up research in the humanities and social sciences. Deleuzian thinking is having a significant impact on research practices in the Social Sciences not least because one of its key implications is the demand to break down the false divide between theory and practice. This book brings together international academics from a range of Social Science and Humanities disciplines to reflect on how Deleuze's philosophy is opening up and shaping methodologies and practices of empirical research.

Denken/Ordnen von Georges Perec ist ein Buch über das Schreiben. Denn was ist Schreiben, wenn nicht fortlaufendes Denken und Ordnen – Anordnen, Umordnen, Aussortieren, Einsortieren? Für Perec jedenfalls muss hier das Rätsel und die Faszination des Schreibens liegen. Schreiben (und das Leben selbst) hat er immer wieder mit einem Puzzle-Spiel verglichen.

Marginalized by the scientific age with its metaphysical and philosophical systems, the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution.
Exploring the deleterious effects of the systematic downgrading of the senses in Western philosophy, Michel Serres - a member of the Académie Française and one of France's leading philosophers - traces a topology of human perception. Writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience.
The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle's label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could?

Dread: The Dizziness of Freedom reflects on possible re-articulations of the concept of dread in our times. Associated with the “dizziness of freedom” by Søren Kierkegaard, and with “the ecstasy of nihilism” by China Miéville, the experience of dread is a defining characteristic of the contemporary human condition, and -according to the contributors to this volume -an essential and potentially productive emotion. However dark and fatalistic its connotations, through its dialectical coupling of caution and transgression, of paralysis and overdrive, dread allows us to imagine the world differently. Through conversations with and essays by some of today’s foremost cultural commentators, this book explores the creative agency of dread -an agency that is created by the very forces wishing to suppress or even destroy it -as well as its politics and related conceptions of fear and anxiety.

Thompson et al. engage with ecological solidarity as a conceptual tool to address protected areas in their interconnectivity with their surroundings. The authors define ecological solidarity “as the reciprocal interdependence of living organisms amongst each other and with spatial and temporal variation in their physical environment” (p. 414) and explain how it “is based on the notion that individuals become united around a common goal and are conscious of their common interests and shared responsibility” (p. 417). The authors state that human societies “are part of a natural contract with the rest of the living world […and] can be seen to be responsible for their actions and the consequences of their actions” (p. 417).

In the context of queerness, dizziness, and togetherness, Ecological Solidarity as a scientific concept enriches artistic discussions of modes of togetherness of humans with our ecologies.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631069111000321

adrienne maree brown views change as something constant in the world we live in. The author invites readers to not block this change but rather live and learn with(in) it. brown describes emergent strategy as a “strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions” (p. 6). For brown, emergence is a way of grasping the “connective tissue of all that exists” and “our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change” (p. 7). brown formulates the goal of the book as strengthening the intelligence our whole bodies have. It is addressed towards those who are “co-creating the future” and aims to generate “more options for working with each other and embodying the things we fight for” (p. 10). The author argues for intentionally changing “in ways that grow out capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for” (p. 20).

brown offers ways of engaging with change and chaos, amongst others by collectively imagining beyond fears. This makes it an interesting resource in the context of dizziness as a concept that also involves change and chaos.

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The authors state that there is a lack of answers to the question of “how to collaborate?” and propose a framework on transdisciplinary collaboration processes, based on challenges they retrieved from literature as well as from practical experience. They argue for applying co-creation methods and introduce four stages grounded in those methods: Stakeholder mapping (collaboration initiation, identifying stakeholders and their relation), scope definition (co-creating a common vision), strategic impact mapping (co-creating a map of the strategy needed to realize the vision), and roadmap definition (co-creating a map of concrete necessary steps).

The authors point out the dynamic nature of transdisciplinary collaboration, and the inherent need for both theoretical and practical reflection and iteration. With their four-steps framework they offer a concrete tool for collaborative processes, which can thereby be a tool for reducing dizziness within those processes.

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13020614

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The edition of Film Culture number 65–66 is devoted to the writings and works of Paul Sharits. Other authors include Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss and Linda Cathcart.
Paul Sharits is an artist who can reflect on and evoke both the feeling of being mentally dizzy and the physical manifestation in a single work, namely his film installation Epileptic Seizure Comparision. In his text "A Cinematics Model for Film Studies in Higher Education" he quotes the following poem by Robert Graves:

From the golden age of art movies and underground cinema to X-rated porn, splatter films, and midnight movies, this breathtaking thriller is a tour de force of cinematic fact and fantasy, full of metaphysical mysteries that will haunt the dreams of every moviegoer. Jonathan Gates could not have anticipated that his student studies would lead him to uncover the secret history of the movies—a tale of intrigue, deception, and death that stretches back to the 14th century. But he succumbs to what will be a lifelong obsession with the mysterious Max Castle, a nearly forgotten genius of the silent screen who later became the greatest director of horror films, only to vanish in the 1940s, at the height of his talent. Now, 20 years later, as Jonathan seeks the truth behind Castle's disappearance, the innocent entertainments of his youth—the sexy sirens, the screwball comedies, the high romance—take on a sinister appearance. His tortured quest takes him from Hollywood's Skid Row into the shadowy lore of ancient religious heresies. He encounters a cast of exotic characters, including Orson Welles and John Huston, who teach him that there's more to film than meets the eye, and journeys through the dark side of nostalgia, where the Three Stooges and Shirley Temple join company with an alien god whose purposes are anything but entertainment.

Gilles Deleuze had several paintings by Francis Bacon hanging in his Paris apartment, and the painter’s method and style, as well as his motifs of seriality, difference, and repetition influenced Deleuze’s work. In considering Bacon, Deleuze offers implicit and explicit insights into the origins and development of his own philosophical and aesthetic ideas, ideas that represent a turning point in his intellectual trajectory. First published in French in 1981, Francis Bacon has come to be recognised as one of Deleuze’s most significant texts in aesthetics. Anticipating his work on cinema, the baroque, and literary criticism, the book can be read not only as a study of Bacon’s paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuze’s broader philosophy of art.

Geburtsakt der PhilosophieErschrocken schaut der Heide Schaf mich an,
als säh’s in mir den ersten Menschenmann.
Sein Blick steckt an; wir stehen wie im Schlaf;
mir ist, ich säh zum ersten Mal ein Schaf.

In the context of bringing together queerness and dizziness, the definition of queering by Anna Light  is specifically relevant, since it points out the dizzying effect queerness and queering can have. According to the author, “to ‘queer’ something, taking the Greek root of the word, is to treat it obliquely, to cross it, to go in an adverse or opposite direction. In other words, ‘queering’ is problematizing apparently structural and foundational relationships with critical intent, and, within this, clowning is as legitimate a way of problematizing as more solemn means of turning the world upside down.” (p. 3–4)

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/experiencingcriticaltheory/Light-Heterodoxy.pdf

Humans have always sought life-changing visions, and for thousands of years have used hallucinogenic compounds to achieve them. As a young doctor in California in the 1960s, Oliver Sacks had both a personal and a professional interest in psychedelics. These, along with his early migraine experiences, launched a lifelong investigation into the varieties of hallucinatory experience.Here, with his usual elegance, curiosity and compassion, Dr. Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organisation and structure of the brain. It also looks at how hallucinogens have influenced every culture’s folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all and a vital part of the human condition.

What could it mean to live the life of an artist, and how can it be done? Is it a form of sleepwalking or a sullen selfassertion? How is it possible to unite literary, scientific or philosophical deliberations with art? The artist duo Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond uses film as a tool to visually discuss the present with all its contradictions, following the realisation that to record images always correlates with a form of modeling reality. In their book, Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond combine a comprehensive collection of their collaborative filmic work (1999 – 2013) with texts by authors who have accompanied them along the way.

Olivier Vallerand argues to consider the self-identification and context (e.g. experiences) of an individual when talking about (queer) space. Furthermore, the author pledges to go beyond limits of gay- and lesbian-oriented architecture, to completely rethink the design, use, and analysis of our environment. To Vallerand, taking the perspective of queer theory on architecture is located at the intersections of the social and aesthetics, and therefore has a queer utopian potential.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/42570000

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Martin Buber's I and Thou has long been acclaimed as a classic. Many prominent writers have acknowledged its influence on their work; students of intellectual history consider it a landmark; and the generation born after World War II considers Buber one of its prophets. Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways: (1) that of the "I" toward an "It," toward an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience; (2) that of the "I" toward "Thou," in which we move into existence in a relationship without bounds. One of the major themes of the book is that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. All of our relationships, Buber contends, bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou.

Nineteenth-century chemists were faced with a particular problem; how to depict the atoms and molecules that are beyond the direct reach of our bodily senses. In visualising this microworld, these scientists were the first to move beyond high-level philosophical speculations regarding the unseen. In Image and Reality, Alan Rocke focuses on the community of organic chemists in Germany to provide the basis for a fuller understanding of the nature of scientific creativity. Rocke uses a variety of sources, including private correspondence, diagrams and illustrations, scientific papers, and public statements, to investigate their ability to not only imagine the invisibly tiny atoms and molecules upon which they operated daily, but to build detailed and empirically based pictures of how all of the atoms in complicated molecules were interconnected.

Christopher Reeds sees queer space as a space that is in the active process of taking place and claiming territory. He proposes to work with the term imminent (lat. imminere, to loom over or to threaten), ready to take place, including the threatening character of queerness. According to Reed, queer space is collectively created by queer people. Even if the creators of the space depart, they leave traces behind, to the delight or discomfort of those who find them. The author also addresses the visual character of queer, describing it as “in your face” (p.64), implying a visual confrontation and being the opposite of in the closet.

https://doi.org/10.2307/777657

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In this book, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is introduced as a framework that “seeks a new relation between society, research and innovation, to better align both the process and its outcomes with the values, needs and expectations of society” (xi). In the book both drivers and barriers to the institutional implementation of RRI are being discussed, in each case focusing on structure, culture, and interchangeability.

RRI is a response to challenges within research and innovation, like public mistrust in science or research misconduct. Thereby, it can both be discussed if RRI can be a tool in navigating dizziness, as well as what aspects of dizziness occur within RRI (drivers and barriers).

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-54286-3

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This ground-breaking work of philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, and sinology is certain to bring the audience to think and experience what may at first seem impossible: the richness of a bland sound, a bland meaning, a bland painting, a bland poem. In presenting the value of blandness through as many concrete examples and original texts as possible, Jullien allows the undifferentiated foundation of all things—blandness itself—to appear. After completing this book, readers will re-evaluate those familiar Western lines of thought where blandness is associated with a lack—the undesirable absence of particular, defining qualities. Jullien traces the elusive appearance and crucial value of blandness from its beginnings in the Taoist and Confucian traditions to its integration into literary and visual aesthetics in the late-medieval period and beyond.

This book is addressed to everyone who is struggling and experimenting today, to everyone who is a true contemporary of what Stengers dares to call "the intrusion of Gaia," this "nature" that has left behind its traditional role and now has the power to question us all. In Catastrophic Times is neither a book of prophecy nor a survival guide. Here, Stengers reminds us that it falls to us to experiment with the apparatuses that make us capable of surviving without sinking into barbarism, to create what nourishes trust where panicked impotence threatens.

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openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Stengers_2015_In-Catastrophic-Times.pdf

These 130 short texts—aphoristic, interlacing, and sometimes perplexing—target a perennial philosophical problem: Our consciousness and our experience of reality are inconsistent, fragmentary, and unstable; God is dead, and our identity as subjects discordant. How can we establish a new mode of thought that does not cling to new gods or the false security of rationality? Marcus Steinweg, as he did in his earlier book The Terror of Evidence, constructs a philosophical position from fragments, maxims, meditations, and notes, formulating a philosophy of thought that expresses and enacts the inconsistency of our reality.                     Steinweg considers, among other topics, life as a game (“To think is to play because no thought is firmly grounded”); sexuality (“wasteful, contradictory, and contingent”); desire (”Desire has a thousand names; It's earned none of them”); reality (“overdetermined and excessively complex”); and world (“a nonconcept”). He disposes of philosophy in one sentence (“Philosophy is a continual process of its own redefinition.”) but spends multiple pages on “A Tear in Immanence,” invoking Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and others. He describes “Wandering with Foucault” (“Thought entails wandering as well as straying into madness”) and brings together Derrida and Debord. He poses a question: “Why should a cat be more mysterious than a dog?” and later answers one: “Beauty is truth because truth is beauty.” By the end, we have accompanied Steinweg on converging trains of thought. “Thinking means continuing to think,” he writes, adding “But thinking can only pose questions by answering others.” The question of inconsistency? Asked and answered, and asked.

In recent years, the idea of art as an act of research has gained increasing currency, greatly enlarging the parameters of art itself. Intellectual Birdhouse gathers a broad range of interpretations of this paradigm shift through writings by authors from a range of disciplines. Tom Holert offers "Scattered Thoughts on 'Artistic Research' and 'Social Responsibility'"; Hito Steyerl assesses research as an "Aesthetic of Resistance"; Hannes Rickli discusses art and biology; Michael Schwab interviews Henk Borgdorff; Sabine Flach looks at Kandinsky's merging of art and science; Penelope Haralambidou writes on "Allegory, Architecture and Figural Theory"; Florian Hecker and Sonia Matos discuss psychoactive acoustic experiences; and Renee Green writes on "Paradoxes Experienced by Artist-Thinkers." Other contributors include Jan Svenungsson, Henk Slager, Sarat Maharaj and Francisco Varela, Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Raqs Media Collective, Marcus Steinweg, Bracha L. Ettinger, Jonathan Miles, Paul Carter, Gina Badger and Alise Upitis.

Claude Levis-Strauss approaches Mauss by combining anthropology and structural linguistics to assess his achievements and intentions arguing that Mauss - who at the time represented the mainstream of French anthropology - was in fact structuralist mangue. He then goes on to formulate the central tenets of structuralist thought: the belief in societies being organised on immutable and unconscious laws.

In this interview, Alok Vaid-Menon speaks about a world beyond the gender binary and criticize the hierarchal duality between protectors and a minority, suggesting another approach: “And I think ultimately what we need is to reframe the dialogue […]. This is not a minority issue. We can’t talk about this as a majority of people offering to assist a minority. Why would we ever want to live in a world where people are hated for expressing themselves. That’s not a world I am interested in being a part of. There is no dignity, let alone decency, let alone glamor, let alone beauty, in a world where people are persecuted for self-expression. What this attack, what this crusade, what this theology that masquerades itself as biology is actually about, is about limiting possibility for all people. It’s about telling people you have to stay in the boxes that you are confined to growing up. You don’t get to figure yourself out on your own terms. And so of course they’re coming for trans people first, because we might be the most visible. But they’re going to continue to come for everyone else right after that fact. And that’s why we have to reframe the dialogue. This is not about our allyship, this is about the creation of a more beautiful world.”

When it comes to an exploration of “seeing queerly” as a practice and perspective, the work of Vaid-Menon may help understand how such a practice and perspective can foster togetherness: Specifically, modes of togetherness that are not about protecting or even pitying a minority, but rather about unconditional compassion that is disengaged from comprehension.‍

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWAs_2oGNB8

Starting in the mid-1990s, Joachim Koester developed an oeuvre that could be described as a complex web, in which journalistic and historical research fuses with personal and fictive narratives. Walking a fine line between documentary and fiction, Koester’s films, photos, and installations re-examine and activate forgotten histories, failed utopias and the obsolete. In his work, bygone counter-cultural movements re-emerge in the same way that geographical and spiritual journeys are retraced.Joachim Koester: ‘Of Spirits and Empty Spaces’ is published to accompany five independent, complementary exhibitions of the work of Joachim Koester, at Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; S.M.A.K., Ghent; and Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève.

Elyse Lightman Samuels writes about how centering joy can help us to move “towards an expansive sense of possibility, of curiosity, and to open our imaginations of what we’re capable of, individually, and collectively”. She quotes parts of her conversation with Bridgit Antoinette Evans, who said that we “have to build up our capacity to hold grief, and to hold accountability for the harm that we may have contributed to, and we need to be able to express joy, and to believe in ourselves and in our potential to build something new”.

These words by Lightman Samuels and Evans are fruitful, e.g., when thinking about the destructive and constructive elements inherent in queerness and dizziness, or when considering joy and togetherness as helping us navigate through states of uncertainty and unstableness.‍

https://popcollab.org/joy-is-an-act-of-resistance/

Der Band bearbeitet die Kultur des Jahrmarkts und dessen modernen Verwandten, des Themenparks als einen Ort, an dem sich das Vergnügen manifestiert. Die Frage nach der Faszination solcher Orte streift die Geschichte des Salzburger Dult, der Luxemburger Schueberfouer, des Hamburger Hugo Haase Parks oder des Wiener Praters. Die Beiträge zeichnen die Geschichte des Karussells, des Jahrmarktkinos, der Geisterbahn, der Achterbahn oder der fast vergessenen Jahrmarktsorgel nach, arbeiten eine Sozialgeschichte der Schaustellerei heraus, analysieren die Motivationen, Jahrmärkte und Vergnügungsparks zu besuchen und zeigen, wie das Phänomen in der Literatur, im Film und in der bildenden Kunst aufgegriffen und thematisiert wird.

This book begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

This article helps understanding why “home”, while often assumed to be a safe place, can be rather the opposite for LGBTQIA+ people. In the search for new safe spaces, LGBTQIA+ people often enter queer spaces that are risky, public, or temporary. The text offers a start for thinking about the apparent binaries of private and public, safe and unsafe.

https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v37i0.175

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Der Band untersucht die Bedeutung von Mimesis für Kultur, Gesellschaft und Kunst. Gegenwärtig als Grundkonzept der Anthropologie entworfen, erschließt sich dem Menschen die Welt über mimetische Zugänge. Mimetische Prozesse lassen sich vom körperlichen Handeln bis zu ästhetischen Produktionen verfolgen, vom Konkreten bis zum Fiktiven. Der Band beschreibt ihre Wirkungsweisen zuerst auf der Ebene der sozialen Praxis, dann auf der von Ritualen und Spielen, schließlich auf jener des Ästhetischen.

What sort of hallway was it? I haven’t the slight idea even now, and it ought to be that way. Everything should. Everything should take place slowly and incorrectly so that man doesn’t get a chance to start feeling proud, so that man is sad and perplexed.

This anthology examines the rising phenomenon of moving image practice in recent art and theory, tracing its genealogies in experimental cinema and video, body art, performance, site-specific art and installation from the 1960s onwards. Contextualizing new developments made possible by advances in digital and networked technology, it locates contemporary art centred on the moving image within a global framework.

Nachbilder sind optische Phänomene, mit denen das ¬Sehen sich selbst in den Blick nimmt. Seit der Empirismus im 18. Jahrhundert die Subjektivität der Wahrnehmung erschloss, traktierten Wissenschaftler, Künstler und Philosophen ihre Augen, um sie nicht als Empfänger, sondern als Erzeuger von Licht- und Farbphänomenen zu erfahren. Der Band stellt u. a. die Frage, welche Bildkonzepte mit der Entdeckung der visionären Möglichkeiten des Sehens auftauchen und versammelt Beiträge, die die physiologische Frage nach dem Sehen mit der produktionsästhetischen Frage nach dem Bild verknüpfen.

"Notes From the Future of Art" is the first English language publication by Jerzy Ludwinski (1930-2000), the Polish art historian, critic, curator, founder of the Mona Lisa Gallery in Wroclaw, founder and mentor of the "structural art" pioneers Grupa Zamek, editor of the group's magazine "Struktury" and professor at the Polish Academy of Fine Arts. Ludwinski dissolved the compartmentalization of all these vocations in the course of his career, operating on the periphery of the state system as an informal éminence grise to Poland's avant-garde during the 50s and 60s. Ludwinski argued that "art" was no longer an appropriate designation for what was done in its name: "It is quite possible...that today we do not practice art any longer, simply because we have missed the moment when it transformed into something quite different, which we are unable to name. It is certain, however, that what we practice today presents greater possibilities.

Object-Oriented Philosophy is a blog by Graham Harman, professor at the American University in Cairo and full-time resident of Ankara, Turkey. Harman is a contemporary philosopher of metaphysics, who attempts to reverse the linguistic turn of Western philosophy. He terms his ideas ‘object-oriented ontology’.

As part of the Berlin Art Week 2022 three exhibitions have been curated at C/O Berlin under the title Queerness in Photography. In the accompanying newspaper, Karin Köppert discusses visible queer pain in photographs as something that is perceived as uncomfortable or “indigestible” (p. 29). The author describes this “indigestibility as a productive queering force that does not seek to be recognised but to disrupt normative ways of being and perceiving” (p. 29). This is specifically relevant when discussing the dizzying effect of queerness in a disturbing, disruptive sense.

According to Köppert, queer “means nothing other than a critique of power” (p. 29). Queerness has an active character, that can’t simply be exhibited, since, “[i]deally, queerness causes something—to structures and institutions, perceptions and imaginations. This requires (not only, but also) this disturbance, this indigestibility” (p. 31).

https://co-berlin.org/en/program/exhibitions/queerness-photography

The multiple must be made, not always by adding another dimension, rather in the simplest way, by dint of sobriety... A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radices. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes... Even some animals are, in their pack forms. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all their function of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout... The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couch grass.

Oskar Hansen’s (1922–2005) theoretical concept of “open form” was developed in the context of international debates around late-modern architecture in the 1950s. Open form assumed that no artistic expression is complete until it has been appropriated by its users or beholders. In the following decades, the concept became a key principle of performance and film art, and led to the development of process-oriented and interdisciplinary artistic techniques. Hansen’s concept revolutionised the traditional means of artistic communication.

This is the first critical biography of the painter and experimental filmmaker Oskar Fischinger. Active in avant-garde art circles in Germany between the two world wars, Fischinger and his family would emigrate to Los Angeles just ahead of the Nazis' denunciation of degenerate art. Fischinger's pioneering experiments in Visual Music and the melding of graphic arts, abstract design, and sound were instrumental in shaping animation into an art and cinematic form and inspiring animators to pursue its aesthetic potential. An accomplished representational animator who eventually worked uneasily under contract for Paramount, MGM, and Disney, Fischinger produced numerous abstract animated films over his lifetime, invented machines such as the "Wax Machine" and the "Lumigraph" for creating images, and became an accomplished and influential abstract painter. A labor of love for author William Moritz and the product of decades of research, Optical Poetry also includes an extensive filmography and testimonials from those who knew or were influenced by Fischinger.

Sarah Ahmed describes orientations as an influence in how we reside in space, what directions we take, and also what gets in reach by doing so. From this perspectives she looks at sexual orientation and asks: “What does it mean for sexuality to be lived as oriented?” (p. 543). To Ahmed, orientations are not only directed towards the present but also the future, since they offer the possibility of changing directions. This is relevant in the context of queering and dizziness, since this change involves uncertainty about where we will end up, “risking departure from the straight and narrow [path] makes new futures possible, which might involve going astray, getting lost, or even becoming queer.” (p. 554).

Moving on diverging paths and lines (Ahmed discusses this on the example of lesbian desires that move us sideways) can feel like opening up a whole new world, since objects put other objects in reach. This can be connected to the potential of queering and dizziness, if viewed as something that rouses and puts us off balance or pushes us off a certain path: Space for action can emerge.

The author states that bodies orient themselves towards objects that are in reach, and queer objects are often not near enough. Following Merleau-Ponty, Ahmed describes how queer objects are fleeting, which means that an orientation toward what slips is included in a queer phenomenology. Queer phenomenology becomes a disorientation device, and queer a way to approach what is retreating. Ahmed concludes these thoughts: “Queer would become a matter of how one approaches the object that slips away, a way to inhabit the world at the point at which things fleet.” (p. 566). Considering this might be helpful in thinking queering and dizziness together, approaching queer as a possibility to navigate within the state of dizziness, where things might seem to slip away.

Ahmed addresses the duality in the term queer, being both used for non-straight sexualities (this could be broadened e.g. by non-cis genders) and for being oblique, off-line, or deviant. According to the author both meanings need to be included when talking about queer. This is a helpful approach when thinking about queering as well: It is important to differ between queer as a self-identification and queer as a feminist and political term, but it is also not possible to completely isolate them from each other, especially when considering queer bodies and the (both intended and unintended) queering effect they can have. Concerning this (un)intended effect, it is also important to point out, which Ahmed does in her text as well, that disorientation is not an obligation or responsibility for people who identify as queer, it “is not up to queers to disorient straights” (p. 569), even though queers can queer simply by existing. This always needs to be remembered when considering the potential of queering and its dizzying effect.

https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/202832

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Finnish philosopher Juha Varto offers ten meditations on a theme inspired by Harri Laakso, who suggested that we “stop talking about the different types of knowing and admit … that in art we are dealing with something that is ‘otherwise-than-knowing’”. Although art is seen as the ability to change the world by transforming our sensory perception of reality, it also results in a change in ideas, understanding and insight. Art is seen as the ability to change the world by orientation: by radically transforming the “sensible”, or sensory through the reality of what one sees, hears, tastes, touches and smells, which unavoidably results in a change in ideas, understanding and insight. It may be about distancing, it may be about getting closer; sometimes it is ironic or camp, sometimes it is a serious attempt to find illuminating concepts and their verbalisations, and sometimes it is the need to create new myths or just tell stories.

Phenomenology of Perception stands in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. However, Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and ‘intellectualism’ on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world.

„Zum Denken gehört Selbstbeschleunigung und Präzision. Das gilt für jedes Denken: das Risiko einzugehen, ebenso präzise wie kopflos zu sein. Es gibt keine Wissenschaft, keinen Tanz, keine Politik, keine Kunst, keine Musik, keine Ökonomie – um nur sechs Denkformen zu nennen – jenseits des Wagnisses, übertrieben und exakt zu sein! Die Wissenschaft übertreibt sich auf die Grenze des Wißbaren. Im Tanz skandiert das Subjekt seinen Kontakt zum Boden, der brüchiger Grund seines Weltaufenthalts bleibt. Um mehr als entpolitisierte Administration zu sein, muss die Politik Ideen riskieren, die sie an die Grenze ihrer Handlungsfähigkeit führen. Kunst öffnet sich der Dimension der Nicht-Kunst, um Kunst statt Ästhetik zu sein. In der Musik rührt das Subjekt an die jeden Laut durchziehende Stille. Die Wahrheit der Ökonomie ist ihre Tendenz ins Anökonomische. In allen Fällen geht es darum, die Kompossibilität von Präzision und Exzess zu artikulieren.“

Irene Molina writes this prologue for “Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice” which aims at (re-)thinking architecture and the arts within socio-spatial struggles. In her introductory words, Molina mentions the political potential of intersectionality to challenge power structures and argues for including time and space in an intersectional perspective, since they are essential for understanding power relations.

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“In the fields of observation chance favours only the prepared mind.”
Louis Pasteur (Moser, p. 95)
This book gives an account of Albert Hofmann’s incidental and hazardous discovery of LSD and its implications for scientific narratives, relating to neuroscience as well as philosophical epistemology. The well-known basis of the LSD-narrative is Hofmann’s bicycle ride after having tested the hallucinogenic ergotamines:

This text has been distributed by queers at pride march in New York in 1990. When engaging with the term queer, the manifesto and its narrative are important references that can’t be left out. It is, partly or in its full version, still distributed or cited today. It is written as an activist piece by and for queer people as an encouragement to be out, loud, proud, to form a community, being other, and embrace rage, otherness, and anger: “Queers are being attacked on all fronts and I’m afraid it’s okay with us. [...] Feel some rage. If rage doesn’t empower you, try fear. If that doesn’t work, try panic.”

The mere act of being alive and queer is communicated as a “rebellious act”, and the readers are encouraged to fight for their rights, since rights “are not given [... but] taken, by force if necessary”. Straight people are referred to as “your enemy”. Queer art is referred to as “quite simply a threat to the world” and “the last safe place for lesbians and gay men to thrive”. There are some well-known references in the text, like “Every time we fuck, we win”—explained by queers coming out despite being rejected by society “just to love each other”. The term queer is being connected to trouble, strange, eccentric, and mysterious.

The otherness and possibility of being queer is pointed out in different parts: “Being queer means leading a different sort of life.” or “Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility.”. The otherness is described as the reason for either being paralyzed or politicized, again together with pointing out the need for activism and not hiding queerness from oneself or others.

http://www.qrd.org/qrd/misc/text/queers.read.this

Adam Nathaniel Furman works with queer spaces and queer aesthetics within architecture. They state that it is crucial to separate queer aesthetics from clichés around LGBTQIA+ people like rainbows and glitter. Furman defines queer aesthetics as a way of creating “novelty and difference” (p. 21), being related to mainstream ideas of good taste but transforming them from an outside position with some connection to the inside – a position often taken by queer individuals and communities. Furman uses queer aesthetics “as an oxymoron because it’s not a fixed set of looks or things, it’s actually about a relationship with the mainstream at any given point in time” (p. 22). Furman brings in the concept of cuteness and describes it as something subversive that challenges norms and disrupts deadlocked categories. Cuteness questions what is intellectual and has the potential of making things fun and accessible, and “it really messes up our sense of hierarchy” (p. 22). Including Furman’s understanding of queer aesthetics and cuteness can be fruitful in the discussion of dizziness and queering due to their disruptive and transforming character.

https://www.incl-publication.com/queer-aesthetics

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Ece Canlı looks at queering design processes, thereby also at queer aesthetics and queer methodologies. The author defines queer as something that “aims to trigger a broader social critique about not only sexuality and gender, but also other social-political issues in the way of posing new strategies against patronizing normalizations in society” (p. 2).  Canlı talks about queering (not queer) design, and queered (not queer) aesthetics, pointing out the active character of the term. According to Canlı, queer is hard to define, since it is “a shaky grounded site for struggle and resistance” (p. 3)—which offers a fruitful parallel between queerness and dizziness.

https://www.academia.edu/12246562/Queering_Design_A_Theoretical_View_on_Design_vs_Gender_Performativity_2014_

This is a detailed report of the research project “Queering Public Space” that has been carried out in collaboration between the service firm Arup and the University of Westminster. It explores the relationship between queer people and public spaces, mainly by presenting findings from literature and archival research, interviews, and analyzation of public spaces. It offers a rich resource on the importance, context, history, and feasibility of queering public spaces.

https://www.arup.com/-/media/arup/files/publications/q/queering-public-space-report.pdf

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The author looks at ways of organizing collectives, and asks how those can be produced without reproducing “capitalist or neoliberal designs, but [...] use our differences to build communities” instead (p. 936). In their text, Chloé Vitry refers to Ahmed’s “Queer Phenomenlogy” and describes organizing as the production of spaces that orient bodies (p. 939). They discuss queer organizing as a practice of resistance, of bodies not aligning to certain spaces (p. 936). Vitry intends to explore “the shape that spaces can take when they are ‘queered’ by bodies thrown out of line (or place), and what potential field of actions might open up to organize queerly” (p. 940).

Vitry uses the term queering space both in the sense of an adjective (the space queers bodies that are not aligned) as well as a noun (the queering of the space) and, following Ahmed, explains that capitalist and normative spaces queer bodies. To the author, queering space means resisting capitalist spaces and their straightening effect by disorienting them “by stepping out of line” (p. 947). Following Ahmed again, Vitry describes how collectives emerge from having a shared direction, and how queer collectives can emerge by turning away: “If queering space is turning away from the straightening effects of certain lines [...], then queering organizing could be allowing bodies to turn energy, time, and resources freely to other directions” (p. 945). The disorienting effect of queering space as well as the freedom of taking various directions can fruitfully be explored from the perspective of dizziness.

https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12560

This article is relevant for dizziness in the context of (somatic) architecture, knowledge production, and queerness—specifically when thinking about how heteronormativity constitutes our built environment. Hartmann and Manka state that our built environment is not objective or free of power relations. According to them, buildings must reflect the lived experiences of the average and show the inhomogeneity of the users. The authors bring up Katharina Bonnevier and the work of the Swedish collective MYCKET that works with architecture as actual, materialized proposals for social change, to avoid getting stuck in fighting. MYCKET has “touching architecture” as a methodology of doing artistic research, thinking about touching and getting touched by architecture, and what possibilities touch offers. Finally, Hartmann and Manka talk about knowledge production and argue that shared and situated knowledge does not only produce knowledge, but also trust.

https://futurelab.tuwien.ac.at/content/download/106734/file/future.lab%20Magazin%2013_Web_Kern.pdf

Thrills and funfairs. Attractions at fairs and amusement parks. A sociological cultural history

Roller coaster, carousel or Ferris wheel: this exciting sociological cultural history of fairs and amusement parks presents the amusement facilities there and explores the question of what exactly makes such popular amusements so appealing. And it shows: These technical attractions generate transcendent experiences that are demanded and retrieved by the recipients as a reflex to a differentiated modernity.

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Friederike Mayröcker is one of Europe’s most exciting avant-garde poets. In a career spanning more than sixty years, this “dadaelian artificer”, as she has been described by Christopher Middleton, has pushed back the limits of convention to reveal the “deep structure” of existence – its elation and its abysses.

This work offers a new philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity—the incipiency at the heart of movement—Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form. Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson's idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists.

What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’ that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence.

Arguing for the poem. In her collection of essays, Monika Rinck argues for the relevance of the poem and asks about the friendlier possibilities of the incomprehensible and the idiotic, the silly and the overwrought. Poet, Reader and Idiot set out to answer the most burning poetological questions of recent years. And because it is about the poem, it is always also about the world we live in, about our present: Why are we unhappy? What is wrong with our society? And what actually happened to the diva?

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Schwindel zählt zu den häufigsten Symptomen mit denen HNO-Ärzte konfrontiert sind. Die adäquate Diagnostik und Therapie der verschiedenen Schwindelformen ist komplex. Im aktuellen Band aus der Reihe HNO Praxis heute teilt ein interdisziplinäres Expertenteam sein Wissen.

Orientierung ist eine Frage der Perspektive. Im Sinne der historischen Epistemologie entwickelt Rebekka Ladewig diese Perspektive in theoretischen und experimentellen Szenen des Schwindels. Diese umfassen die philosophischen Gedankenexperimente des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts sowie die sinnesphysiologische Experimentalisierung des Schwindels zwischen 1800 und 1900 bis hin zu den technischen Milieus des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts mit ihren apparativen Techniken und der materiellen Kultur der Schwindelerzeugung. Michael Polanyis Konzept des impliziten Wissens ist theoretischer Einsatz- und Endpunkt dieser Analyse. Sie verschiebt das Augenmerk von der Theorie der Wissenschaft auf deren Randzonen, auf die personengebundene, lokale und praktische Verfasstheit des Wissensprozesses, die sich dem Fokus der traditionellen Wissenschaftsforschung systematisch entzieht.

Kaum eine Erfahrung dürfte ein bündigeres Resümee der Befindlichkeiten der Gegenwartskultur, ihrer Verunsicherungen und Verlockungen, ihrer Erwartungen und Zweifel geben als jene des Schwindels, in der Angst und Lust nah beieinander liegen und Taumel und Täuschung zweideutig ineinander spielen. Folgt man dem Schwindel als einem Leitsymptom der kulturhistorischen Diagnose, so stößt man in den ästhetischen und wissenschaftlichen Diskursen, in denen Schwindelerfahrungen zumal in den letzten zwei Jahrhunderten thematisiert und inszeniert wurden, auf jene irritierenden Herausforderungen an den Gleichgewichtssinn moderner Subjekte, die den Weg der Modernisierung von ihren emphatischen Anfängen bis zur Enttäuschung in der Posthistoire begleitet haben.

Openness to experience is characterized by flexible and inclusive cognition. Here we investigated whether this extends to basic visual perception, such that open people combine information more flexibly, even at low-levels of perceptual processing. We used binocular rivalry, where the brain alternates between perceptual solutions and times where neither solution is fully suppressed, mixed percept. Study 1 showed that openness is positively associated with duration of mixed percept and ruled out the possibility of response bias. Study 2 showed that mixed percept increased following a positive mood induction particularly for open people. Overall, the results showed that openness is linked to differences in low-level visual perceptual experience. Further studies should investigate whether common neural processes may drive this.

These extraordinary letters give the fullest and most poignant record we have of John Keats’s aspirations as a poet, his life as a literary man about town, his close relationship with his siblings, and, later, his passionate, jealous, and frustrated love for Fanny Brawne.

Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of "semblance" as a way to approach this question.

Written between 1945 and 1947, the essays in Sense and Non-Sense provide an excellent introduction to Merleau-Ponty's thought. They summarize his previous insights and exhibit their widest range of application-in aesthetics, ethics, politics, and the sciences of man. Each essay opens new perspectives to man's search for reason.

A la fois dispositif technique et spectacle, manière de penser les images et système de représentations, le cinéma est une détermination instable. Selon une démarche qui trouve son origine dans la méthode d’analyse développée par Aby Warburg au cours des années 1920, ce recueil montre les échanges et les transferts qui se produisent entre histoire de l’art et cinéma, des recherches d’Étienne-Jules Marey et des films Lumière au cinéma expérimental (Jack Smith, Anthony McCall...), de l’art des tapis et des spectacles pyrotechniques à la bande dessinée et au dessin animé (George Herriman, Walt Disney). Le cinéma est envisagé depuis ses bords, c’est-à-dire depuis ses origines et ses marges - expérimentales, underground et populaires -, là où ses propriétés rencontrent celles de la peinture, de la sculpture, du dessin, voire de la musique, esquissant une histoire ouverte où les registres, les médiums et les techniques ne sont pas entièrement fixés.

Our contemporary societies place more and more emphasis on the singular and the unique.  The industrial societies of the early 20th century produced standardized products, cities, subjects and organizations which tended to look the same, but in our late-modern societies, we value the exceptional - unique objects, experiences, places, individuals, events and communities which are beyond the ordinary and which claim a certain authenticity.  Industrial society’s logic of the general has been replaced by late modernity’s logic of the particular.

In this major new book, Andreas Reckwitz examines the causes, structures and consequences of the society of singularities in which we now live. The transformation from industrial to cultural capitalism, the rise of digital technologies and their ‘culture machine’ and the emergence of an educated, urban new middle class form a powerful engine for the singularization of the social. In late modernity, what is singular is valorized and stirs the emotions, while what is general has to remain in the background, and this has profound social consequences. The society of singularities systematically produces devaluation and inequality: winner-takes-all markets, job polarization, the neglect of rural regions and the alienation of the traditional middle class. The emergence of populism and the rise of aggressive forms of nationalism which emphasize the cultural authenticity of one’s own people thus turn out to be the other side of singularization.

This prize-winning book offers a new perspective on how modern societies have changed in recent decades and it will be of great value to anyone interested in the forces that are shaping our world today.

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Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, productivity is no longer just a matter of labour, but affects the formation of the self, blurring the division between personal and professional lives. Encouraged to believe that we ourselves are flexible and autonomous, we experience a creeping isolation that has both social and political impacts, and serves the purposes of capital accumulation and social control.

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.

In this interview, Katarina Bonnevier talks about her work, the work of MYCKET Collaborations, and her interest in the queer in architecture. Amongst others, Bonnevier brings up the importance of joy and states: “Everything should continue to be driven by joy. Hopefully, by working like that, we will transform the way things are being done.”

In the context of queerness and dizziness, joy can be seen as a fruitful aspect of queer that inherits possibilities to help navigate through states of dizziness.‍

https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/89000/stockholm-the-excess-of-meaning-and-the-labour-of-joy-in-a-queer-practice-of-architecture