Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Citizenship and the Good Life
- 2 Spaces of the Prudent Self
- 3 The Biopolitics of Sexuality and the Hypothesis of an Erotic Art: Foucault and Psychoanalysis
- 4 Elective Spaces: Creating Space to Care
- 5 Interpreting Dao (道) between ‘Way-making’ and ‘Be-wëgen’
- 6 Constructing Each Other: Contemporary Travel of Urban-Design Ideas between China and the West
- 7 A Tale of Two Courts: The Interactions of the Dutch and Chinese Political Elites with their Cities
- 8 Urban Acupuncture: Care and Ideology in the Writing of the City in Eleventh-Century China
- 9 The Value and Meaning of Temporality and its Relationship to Identity in Kunming City, China
- 10 Junzi (君子), the Confucian Concept of the ‘Gentleman’, and its Influence on South Korean Land-Use Planning
- 11 Home Within Movement: The Japanese Concept of Ma (間): Sensing Space-time Intensity in Aesthetics of Movement
- 12 The Concept of ‘Home’: The Javanese Creative Interpretation of Omah Bhetari Sri: A Dialogue between Tradition and Modernity
- Afterword
- Index
- Publications / Asian Cities
4 - Elective Spaces: Creating Space to Care
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Citizenship and the Good Life
- 2 Spaces of the Prudent Self
- 3 The Biopolitics of Sexuality and the Hypothesis of an Erotic Art: Foucault and Psychoanalysis
- 4 Elective Spaces: Creating Space to Care
- 5 Interpreting Dao (道) between ‘Way-making’ and ‘Be-wëgen’
- 6 Constructing Each Other: Contemporary Travel of Urban-Design Ideas between China and the West
- 7 A Tale of Two Courts: The Interactions of the Dutch and Chinese Political Elites with their Cities
- 8 Urban Acupuncture: Care and Ideology in the Writing of the City in Eleventh-Century China
- 9 The Value and Meaning of Temporality and its Relationship to Identity in Kunming City, China
- 10 Junzi (君子), the Confucian Concept of the ‘Gentleman’, and its Influence on South Korean Land-Use Planning
- 11 Home Within Movement: The Japanese Concept of Ma (間): Sensing Space-time Intensity in Aesthetics of Movement
- 12 The Concept of ‘Home’: The Javanese Creative Interpretation of Omah Bhetari Sri: A Dialogue between Tradition and Modernity
- Afterword
- Index
- Publications / Asian Cities
Summary
Abstract
It is possible to see the city as a chaotic and organic coalition of juxtaposed forms, containing remnants of past generations’ dreams and disappointments. However, on the socio-political scale, a rhythm of collective ordering continuously gains momentum without the need for conjuring hidden committees or transcendent laws. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus provides a useful insight into the overly echoed threat of Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of eternal return of the same, noting that in the current epoch, ‘technicity […] eliminates the marginal practices on the basis of which new worlds could be disclosed and dooms us to what Nietzsche already saw as the eternal return of the same’ (Dreyfus 2003: 17). Theorists often employ the fear of forever reliving the same existence as the most poetic of warnings and yet with the vagueness of recalling a dream. There is something immediate for us today in Nietzsche's doctrine from a century ago. As the patterns of socio-political organization spin upon their axes, habits and emerging ways for individuals to live as themselves and each other are pulled within the form, categorized, labelled, stamped and stowed, stabilizing all practices and avoiding shifts to other styles of existence. This chapter focuses on the role of architecture in motivating the care to create new worlds.
Keywords: elective space, aesthetic event, free beauty
Context of the care of the self
A canonical, philosophical means to resist the eternal return of the same is through a non-derivative, explicit, intentionally, and electively sought practice of care. The diverse methods for the care of the self as taught by different philosophers share a basic structure. It is a trifold effort: first, unsettling categorical knowledge; second, having the experience of a primordial paradox which unsettles non-conceptual coping methods; and finally, engaging systems with thriving subjective purposiveness. This threefold structure is my own abstraction of the historically echoed art of the care of the self. The subject matter here is the role of architecture in this trifold effort of care.
The hope of side-stepping a life of merely playing out the roles and rules defined by others is a longstanding issue in philosophy, and although Michel Foucault's genealogy may use a wider comb than most historians would like, it seems fair to grant his assertion that the practices of the ‘care of the self’ emerged as a core philosophical concern by the time of Socrates.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the WestCare of the Self, pp. 79 - 102Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018