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This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meaning of the 'social' based on Durkheim's philosophy of society is investigated as a 'collective representation'. It is proposed that this origin of the 'social' operates according to the 'spirit of postmodernism' which constitutes a common response to modernity, which later differentiates itself into the currents of sociology and postmodernism.

This paper is a response to the notion of 'live sociology' and its call for new forms of attentiveness to the social, which also involves cultivation of time. Picking up from this observation, the paper asks: how can we find a way of using temporality systematically and routinely in our research practices? The argument concentrates on the concept of the past, and proposes a model for how the past can be reactivated and used analytically to deepen our understanding of contemporary life. To do this, the paper recovers and deploys the ancient technique of enargeia/vividness, and reconsiders Weber's sociology based on ideal-types, all in the effort to show how a special kind of a surrogate temporality/past could serve as a point of contact with things not directly observable. The aim is to show how vivid, enlivened past can be readapted for use as a type of method that triggers the release of new forms of sociological imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, introduces the sixth and final installment of “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal’s “Symposium on the Consequence of Blur.” Suggesting that “Fuzzy Studies” should be understood in the context of a desultory campaign against zeal conducted in the journal for almost twenty years, he explains that the editors’ assumption has been that any authentic case for the less adamant modes of thinking, or the less focused ways of seeing, needs to be unenthusiastic and carefully ramified. To establish the distinction between overenthused and unemphatic approaches to blur, he contrasts the ecstatically amorphous “Blur building” (on Switzerland’s Lake Neuchâtel) with examples of classical Chinese landscape painting. Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio, in their book blur: the making of nothing, chronicle the development of their plans for the Blur building and, in the process, inadvertently show that, to overbear various negative associations of blur and fog, the authors/architects grew self-contradictorily emphatic about the need to produce de-emphasis in architecture and in modern life. Perl shows how this self-contradiction appears also in phenomenology-inflected writings on blur by T. J. Clark, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, J.-P. Sartre, and Georges Bataille, but not in the work of the phenomenologist (and sinologist) François Jullien, whose book The Great Image Has No Form analyzes the role of blur in classical Chinese art theory and practice. Where traditional Western painting, Jullien argues, calls for voyeuristically intense focus, traditional Chinese painting stimulates “dé-tente, relaxation or ‘untensing’.” Intense focus on a blur is still, Perl observes, an intense focus. In describing a painting by the Yuan Dynasty master Ni Zan, Perl concludes that the only way to be un-self-contradictorily positive about fuzziness, whether in logic or aesthetics, is to de-reify and de-differentiate with the aim of achieving blandness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article employs music to describe the dynamics of Central European identity at the turn of the 20th century. Conceptually, the analysis is based on the notion of cultural resonance and the distinction between political territories, which isolate identity, and cultural landscapes which let it escape. This theoretical understanding is derived from the acoustic philosophy and musical practice of two Central European composers, Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók. Exemplified here is artistic ‘extra-territorial’ identity, which is indeed how Theodor Adorno at one point referred to the ‘peripheral’ sound coming from the region. This process of identity construction amplifies paradoxical middle spaces, which Jean Luc Nancy describes evocatively as a cultural mêlée. The vitality of cultural resonance is fuelled by this primary contact with mundane reality and the ‘navigational hesitation’ underpinning identity and its many trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Starting from the recently translated biography of Max Weber by Joachim Radkau, this essay re-evaluates Weber's 'science of reality' in relation to his personality, the cultural context of the early twentieth century, and the position of Weber's thought in the sociological canon. The argument progresses through sequentially enlarged analyses, which propose that Weber's general style of thinking is a type of dissonant composition that places emphasis on the many relationships between cultural reality and the concepts derived from it, and not as much on its content. The logic of such a compositional approach to reality is based on similar principles found in sound and music, which Weber in fact uses in a more latent as well as more active form, to pursue his aim of a style of thinking as 'aesthetics of dissonance'. The latter is a sort of 'methodological wedge' that pries open the many layers of reality. As such, Weber's 'science of reality' is an early 'classical' example of a recent and much needed call for a social science as the 'art of listening'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coming from the premise that in order to capture the social in action, we have to be able to re-construct or re-assemble reality through parallel histories, I propose to re-examine the notion of modern subjective culture by focusing on a historically specific interaction of human and non-human actors. The main vehicle of comparison utilized for this purpose is the cultural history of psychoanalysis and contemporary furniture design. Specifically, the bent-wood furniture and its emblematic example, the Thonet chair, are used to recover a cultural history of design through bending. By cross-referencing such design practice with the contemporaneous to it moment of psychoanalysis, I propose that the cultural logic of the fin de siècle, viewed through this particular configuration of the human and material cultures, rests on the practice of plasticity; a conditions which, since then, has become an indispensable component of modern individuality and its numerous identity “construction-projects”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]