Investigamos nesta pesquisa o que denominamos vídeos amadores de acontecimentos: filmagens operadas por pessoas \"comuns\" que flagram um acontecimento de relevância midiática. Esses flagrantes amadores são apropriados pelo jornalismo profissional e pelos grupos de comunicação em geral ou então encontram circulação direta em espaços digitais, onde, supostamente, circulam com maior autonomia. Entre as questões endereçadas ao objeto empírico, podemos citar: 1. O modo específico como angariam seus efeitos de real: quais os operadores realistas e a historicidade desses efeitos de sentido no interior do percurso do audiovisual. 2. Os modos de obtenção dos efeitos de verdade e de evidência, entendidas numa chave discursiva, e o vínculo com os regimes de verdade (Foucault, 2001). 3. A política das imagens, partindo-se da hipótese de que o fenômeno da difusão dos vídeos amadores acontecimentos esteja associado à emergência de novos sujeitos e novos lugares de fala nas mídias. 4. O estatuto de acontecimento dessas imagens: de que modo estas se inserem e participam da construção de acontecimentos de maior amplitude; 5. Finalmente, uma indagação que é pano de fundo e atravessa todo o trabalho é a compreensão do lugar dessas imagens no interior da cultura midiática e o que revelam sobre o regime do visível contemporâneo. A tese está divida em quatro capítulos. Nos capítulos 1 e 2, conciliamos análise de imagens consagradas com a exposição de algumas teorias e conceitos norteadores. No primeiro, enfocamos o exemplo paradigmático do filme de Zapruder, o amador que flagrou o assassinato de Kennedy. Aprofundamos a qualidade de evidência documental: sobretudo o contraste entre a eloquência do referente e o caráter incompleto e ambíguo dos flagrantes visuais de acontecimentos. No segundo, o episódio do atentado de 11 de setembro serve de base para a reflexão sobre a inserção das captações amadoras nas transformações no regime de visibilidade contemporâneo e nas configurações dos meios de comunicação. Os capítulos seguintes são mais detidos na análise de vídeos, ambos centrados em imagens de forte teor político e em exemplos brasileiros. No capítulo 3, o objeto de análise são imagens tomadas no interior dos protestos durante os acontecimentos de junho de 2013 no Brasil. No capítulo 4, examinamos vídeos de violência policial na periferia registrados por moradores, evidências aptas a impor acontecimentos à pauta noticiosa. / The following thesis investigates amateur videos of events, images shot by ordinary people that capture an occurrence of great media relevance. These amateur images are either incorporated by professional journalism and media groups or shared in digital platforms where, supposedly, they acquire a more autonomous status. Among the questions to be addressed regarding the topic of our investigation, we include: 1. The particular way these videos build reality effects, their realist traits and historical dimension. 2. The modes of obtaining truth effects and evidence value, their discursive dimension and connection with regimes of truth (Foucault, 2001). 3. The politics of aesthetics considering, as a hypothesis, that the phenomenon of massive sharing of amateur videos of events is associated with the emergence of new subjectivities. 4. The fact that these images are events by themselves and how they participate and intervene in larger scale occurrences; 5. Finally, the core issue of our research is to understand the importance of these images in our current media culture and what they reveal about contemporary visibility regime. The thesis is divided in four chapters. In chapters 1 and 2, we analyze consecrated images in the light of certain theoretical standpoints and guiding concepts. The first chapter is dedicated to the paradigmatic example of the Zapruder film, the amateur footage that captured Kennedy\'s assassination. On the second chapter, the nine/eleven events help us to understand the importance of amateur footage in the transformation of media coverage and of our contemporary visibility regime. The following chapters are dedicated to the analysis of Brazilian videos with high political content. In chapter 3, our main subjects are the images shot during the wave of protests that took over Brazil in June of 2013. The last chapter is dedicated to videos of police violence in Brazilian suburbs, registered by the local population, pieces of evidence with the strength to impose their presence in news agenda.

This dissertation explores the social and political dimensions of aesthetic autonomy as it is given formal expression in Wallace Stevens’s poetry of the 1930s and the early 1940s. Whereas modernist claims to autonomy are often said to rest upon an ideological assertion of art’s detachment from socio-historical concerns, I argue that, in Stevens’s work, autonomy is conceived in relational terms, which gives rise to new lines of interconnection between his poetry and its cultural situation. Written over a period when the political efficacy of literature became a staple of discussion among a myriad of writers and critics, Stevens’s poetry offers an understanding of autonomy not as an escape from, but as a productive condition for imagining alternative forms of engagement with the historical crisis with which it has to reckon. In taking into account the cultural context from which Stevens’s poetics of autonomy emerged, my study aims to highlight the significance of the concept to the poet’s exploration of the tension between aesthetic and social domains, to his imaginative formations of collective agency, and to the vexed relationship between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking. By transposing the theoretical discussion of autonomy into the register of historical scrutiny, I hope to pave the way for a rethinking of autonomy and its relevance to the period’s radical and modernist writing, literary debates, and cultural politics. For this purpose, I draw on recent theories, such as those offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, on poetry, politics, and (in)aesthetics, which serve to complicate the working definitions of modernist autonomy as literature’s immunity from the world, and to indicate an alternative path for analyzing its critical and contextual implications.

This dissertation engages a very general question: what matters politically? This question is characterized as a point of heresy, as a site through which different political stances differentiate themselves from one another and account for their differences. Building on the concept of aesthetics of politics developed by Jacques Rancière, I seek to free up this concept’s critical and analytical potential by arguing that different aesthetics of politics act as prerequisites to divergent determinations of political importance. More precisely, I argue that significant formulations of how variations in distributions of political importance occur tend to presuppose particular accounts of the relationships between perception and interpretation, sensibility and understanding, or how we sense and how we make sense. While the concept of aesthetics is tied to particular histories of what has been called Western Modernity, I argue that Western political thought has been characterized by a deep concern for questions of perception since its allegedly inaugural texts in Classical Greece, and that the so-called postmodern condition continues to put into play aesthetic terms of political engagement. To test this hypothesis positing that we always already think of politics aesthetically, I map five influential aesthetics of politics: aesthetics of prevalence, aesthetics of emancipation, aesthetics of temperament, aesthetics of friction, and aesthetics of endurance. Each one is already manifold. To make sense of these multiplicities, each aesthetics of politics is studied through a fourfold engagement with the politics of one of the senses of the age-old fivefold of sight, taste, hearing, touch, and smell. The politics of each sense are engaged along a politological, an artistico-political, a polemological and a hauntological folds. I am thereby able to show the intricacies of how the problem of political importance has been and is being dealt with. / Graduate / 0615 / simonlab@uvic.ca

This dissertation engages a very general question: what matters politically? This question is characterized as a point of heresy, as a site through which different political stances differentiate themselves from one another and account for their differences. Building on the concept of aesthetics of politics developed by Jacques Rancière, I seek to free up this concept’s critical and analytical potential by arguing that different aesthetics of politics act as prerequisites to divergent determinations of political importance. More precisely, I argue that significant formulations of how variations in distributions of political importance occur tend to presuppose particular accounts of the relationships between perception and interpretation, sensibility and understanding, or how we sense and how we make sense. While the concept of aesthetics is tied to particular histories of what has been called Western Modernity, I argue that Western political thought has been characterized by a deep concern for questions of perception since its allegedly inaugural texts in Classical Greece, and that the so-called postmodern condition continues to put into play aesthetic terms of political engagement. To test this hypothesis positing that we always already think of politics aesthetically, I map five influential aesthetics of politics: aesthetics of prevalence, aesthetics of emancipation, aesthetics of temperament, aesthetics of friction, and aesthetics of endurance. Each one is already manifold. To make sense of these multiplicities, each aesthetics of politics is studied through a fourfold engagement with the politics of one of the senses of the age-old fivefold of sight, taste, hearing, touch, and smell. The politics of each sense are engaged along a politological, an artistico-political, a polemological and a hauntological folds. I am thereby able to show the intricacies of how the problem of political importance has been and is being dealt with. / Graduate / 0615 / simonlab@uvic.ca

Investigamos nesta pesquisa o que denominamos vídeos amadores de acontecimentos: filmagens operadas por pessoas \"comuns\" que flagram um acontecimento de relevância midiática. Esses flagrantes amadores são apropriados pelo jornalismo profissional e pelos grupos de comunicação em geral ou então encontram circulação direta em espaços digitais, onde, supostamente, circulam com maior autonomia. Entre as questões endereçadas ao objeto empírico, podemos citar: 1. O modo específico como angariam seus efeitos de real: quais os operadores realistas e a historicidade desses efeitos de sentido no interior do percurso do audiovisual. 2. Os modos de obtenção dos efeitos de verdade e de evidência, entendidas numa chave discursiva, e o vínculo com os regimes de verdade (Foucault, 2001). 3. A política das imagens, partindo-se da hipótese de que o fenômeno da difusão dos vídeos amadores acontecimentos esteja associado à emergência de novos sujeitos e novos lugares de fala nas mídias. 4. O estatuto de acontecimento dessas imagens: de que modo estas se inserem e participam da construção de acontecimentos de maior amplitude; 5. Finalmente, uma indagação que é pano de fundo e atravessa todo o trabalho é a compreensão do lugar dessas imagens no interior da cultura midiática e o que revelam sobre o regime do visível contemporâneo. A tese está divida em quatro capítulos. Nos capítulos 1 e 2, conciliamos análise de imagens consagradas com a exposição de algumas teorias e conceitos norteadores. No primeiro, enfocamos o exemplo paradigmático do filme de Zapruder, o amador que flagrou o assassinato de Kennedy. Aprofundamos a qualidade de evidência documental: sobretudo o contraste entre a eloquência do referente e o caráter incompleto e ambíguo dos flagrantes visuais de acontecimentos. No segundo, o episódio do atentado de 11 de setembro serve de base para a reflexão sobre a inserção das captações amadoras nas transformações no regime de visibilidade contemporâneo e nas configurações dos meios de comunicação. Os capítulos seguintes são mais detidos na análise de vídeos, ambos centrados em imagens de forte teor político e em exemplos brasileiros. No capítulo 3, o objeto de análise são imagens tomadas no interior dos protestos durante os acontecimentos de junho de 2013 no Brasil. No capítulo 4, examinamos vídeos de violência policial na periferia registrados por moradores, evidências aptas a impor acontecimentos à pauta noticiosa. / The following thesis investigates amateur videos of events, images shot by ordinary people that capture an occurrence of great media relevance. These amateur images are either incorporated by professional journalism and media groups or shared in digital platforms where, supposedly, they acquire a more autonomous status. Among the questions to be addressed regarding the topic of our investigation, we include: 1. The particular way these videos build reality effects, their realist traits and historical dimension. 2. The modes of obtaining truth effects and evidence value, their discursive dimension and connection with regimes of truth (Foucault, 2001). 3. The politics of aesthetics considering, as a hypothesis, that the phenomenon of massive sharing of amateur videos of events is associated with the emergence of new subjectivities. 4. The fact that these images are events by themselves and how they participate and intervene in larger scale occurrences; 5. Finally, the core issue of our research is to understand the importance of these images in our current media culture and what they reveal about contemporary visibility regime. The thesis is divided in four chapters. In chapters 1 and 2, we analyze consecrated images in the light of certain theoretical standpoints and guiding concepts. The first chapter is dedicated to the paradigmatic example of the Zapruder film, the amateur footage that captured Kennedy\'s assassination. On the second chapter, the nine/eleven events help us to understand the importance of amateur footage in the transformation of media coverage and of our contemporary visibility regime. The following chapters are dedicated to the analysis of Brazilian videos with high political content. In chapter 3, our main subjects are the images shot during the wave of protests that took over Brazil in June of 2013. The last chapter is dedicated to videos of police violence in Brazilian suburbs, registered by the local population, pieces of evidence with the strength to impose their presence in news agenda.

No description available.

Exploring both political aesthetics and the politics of aesthetics to outline an environmental ruralism for art in public spaces, this practice lead research project postulates a “complemental practice”, outlining its methodology and contexts for operation, the rural, spaces of leisure and the public realm. It is a response to threats to spatial and environmental commons from heritage, place-making and nostalgia, psychological inhibition such as a sense of global contingency and widespread economic exploitation. Responses by artists to this situation can be characterised as a binary of dialogism (Kester, 2004) and relational antagonism (Bishop, 2004), i.e. consensual/collaborative or antagonistic/autonomous practices. Informing both is the work of Jacques Rancière who theorises an ethical and social turn in the arts. Through both commissioned and self-initiated projects this thesis offers an interpretation of Jacques Rancière’s conception of dissensus (Rancière, 2010) modulated through an application of the work of philosopher Slajov Žižek on environmental politics and complementarity - the inscription of the universal within the particular (Žižek, 2011). The thesis’ originality lies in this theoretical synthesis which sets out a complemental practice based on dissensus and the undecidability of subject and context, but which dismisses any inflexible schema of either aesthetic autonomy or ethico-political egalitarianism. In addition it suggests an approach to practice in this field and a situation for this - a dissensual infrastructure for the common public realm which is socially relational and evolutionary over time.

[pt] A presente dissertação é fruto de uma investigação sobre formas e possibilidades de atuação política na cidade contemporânea. Em contraponto direto à crise de projeto e da representatividade política instaurada na contemporaneidade, as ações de urbanismo tático pareciam inicialmente responder aos anseios desta investigação. Tratam-se de atos apropriativos e de ativação de espaços da cidade movidos pelas próprias populações. Mas uma análise dos discursos políticos produzidos pelos agentes do caso de urbanismo tático desenvolvido no Largo da Batata (SP), dão a ver a fraqueza de atos baseados na oposição entre sociedade civil e Estado. Explicitamos de que forma estas ações são atravessadas pelo poder biopolítico e pelas estruturas da cidade neoliberal. Mas se a cartografia complexa e microfísica das relações de poder contemporâneo incide sobre os corpos e vidas de todos e de cada um, então uma ação política não necessariamente deve se dar em afronta ao aparelho de Estado. Assim vemos emergir de uma miríade de práticas sua potência micropolítica, dentre elas, a arte no regime estético. Seu caráter eminentemente dissensual produz fissuras na partilha do sensível e, em contato com o espectador emancipado, possibilita a produção de singularidades, a contrapelo das experiências massificantes que predominam nas grandes cidades contemporâneas. Ao final desta dissertação nos debruçamos sobre as relações entre corpo, política e cidade nos trabalhos artísticos do coletivo Opavivará!, apresentados de forma ensaística. / [en] This dissertation is the result of an investigation about forms and possibilities of political action in the contemporary city. In direct counterpoint to the project and the political representativeness crisis established in contemporary times, the actions of tactical urbanism seemed initially to respond to the aspirations of this investigation. These acts of appropriation and activation of public spaces are put in place by the populations themselves. However a careful review of the political speeches produced by the agents of the Batata Precisa de Você, a case of tactical urbanism developed in Largo da Batata (SP), shows the weakness of any political act based on the opposition between civil society and State. We explain how these actions are crossed by biopolitical power and inscribed inside structures of the neoliberal cities. But if the complex and microphysical cartography of contemporary relations of power affects the bodies and lives of each person and everyone, then a political action does not necessarily takes place in defiance of the State apparatus. Thus we see emerge from a myriad of practices the emergence of its micro political potential, amongst them art in the aesthetic regime. Its eminently dissensual character produces cracks in the distribution of the sensible and, in contact with the emancipated spectator, enables the production of singularities, in opposition to the mass experiences that prevail in most of great contemporary cities. At the end of this dissertation we focus on the relations between body, politics and city in the artistic works of the collective Opavivará!, presented as an essay.

Consacrée à l'imaginaire du « dialogue euro-méditerranéen » tel qu'il se manifeste depuis le milieu des années 1990 en particulier (après la Déclaration de Barcelone en 1995 puis la mise en place de la Politique Européenne de Voisinage), cette thèse se penche sur trois cas d'étude qu'elle se propose d'analyser par le biais d'une approche transdisciplinaire. La première partie cherche à comprendre comment se construit et circule un « cinéma méditerranéen » et le savoir sur cette possible cinématographie régionale en analysant quatre festivals qui lui sont consacrés à Alger, Bruxelles, Montpellier et Tétouan. La deuxième partie s'intéresse aux enjeux que soulèvent des programmes sélectionnés par l'Union européenne (Euromed Audiovisuel et Marseille-Provence Capitale européenne de la culture) en procédant notamment à une analyse de discours portés par ces programmes et de films qu'ils ont soutenus. La troisième et dernière partie propose une analyse de Révolution Zendj (Thawra Zanj, Tariq Teguia, Algérie/France/Liban/Qatar, 2013) et, par extension, de la manière dont les questions informant ce film du point de vue de la mise en langue, du sous-titrage et du montage se présentent dans d'autres œuvres cinématographiques. L'étude conjointe des festivals, des programmes institutionnels dédiés au champ des productions culturelles et des films, permet de mettre au jour les implications esthétiques et politiques d'un imaginaire dominant du « dialogue » et du « cinéma méditerranéen ». Elle rend également compte de formes et de pratiques d'articulation des voix, des langues, des points de vue et des récits, qui permettent d'imaginer autrement la Méditerranée et les rapports entre les personnes qui se trouvent vivre dans cet espace et leurs histoires. / This thesis seeks to question the imaginary around the "Euro-Mediterranean dialogue", a topos inspired by - and unfolding since - the 1995 Barcelona Declaration and the ensuing Neighborhood Policies. It focuses on three case studies that it analyses according to an interdisciplinary approach. The first part examines both the construction and circulation of a so-called "Mediterranean cinema", and the knowledge around this supposed regional production in the context of four festivals dedicated to it and taking place in Algiers, Brussels, Montpellier and Tetouan. The second part examines the concerns raised by programs selected for support by the European Union through Euromed Audiovisuel and Marseille-Provence Capitale européenne de la culture (Marseille-Provence, European Capital of Culture). These concerns are addressed through an analysis of the discourse produced by these programs and the films funded by them. The third and last part proposes an analysis of the film Zanj Revolution (Thawra Zanj, Tariq Teguia, Algeria/France/Lebanon/Qatar, 2013) and, by extension, examines the way in which questions related to the mise-en-langue, subtitling and editing that inform this film are present in other films. The intertwined study of festivals, of institutional programs dedicated to cultural productions and of films sheds light on the aesthetic and political implications of a dominant imaginary of "dialogue" and "Mediterranean cinema". The thesis also explores forms and practices that articulate voices, languages, points of view and narratives that are capable of weaving an alternative imaginary of the Mediterranean and of the histories and the relations between the people who happen to live in this space.

No description available.