This text excerpt is part of my manuscript which is progressing well. The main argumentative purpose of my investigation is to explain the longevity of Europe’s empires in the Americas from the 16th till 19th century. Herein, I provide theory formation based on a new concept which I’m developing: friction-based cohesion. It describes empires which were engaged in structural friction and thus created domestic coherence. Structural friction, then, refers to competition, which was often based on ideas of zero-sum thinking, exclusivity, monopolies and conflicts in many sections such as politics, military, religion and trade. In the following text I concentrate on the Greater Caribbean and provide a new temporal classification which accounts for all European empires throughout the centuries as well as a classification of inter-imperial interactions resulting in 3 major geostrategic options: expansion, defense and stalemate.
Schlagwort: expansion
Jutta Vinzent presents a working paper on her final chapter to her monograph „From Space in Modern Art to a Spatial Art History. Reassessing Constructivism“
This paper is not a contribution to enlightening any subject historically, but evaluates a new methodology developed and termed by me as “Spatial Art History.” This methodology may be of interest to anybody interested in objects and social relations, as it makes use of ideas related to the Spatial Turn (including Lefebvre and Soja) and of (actor-) network theories (Latour particularly), emphasising relationality and proposing a way in which to relate ‘objects’ (understood as things), particularly art objects, with the social, namely through “spacing.” While the Spatial Art History is developed in the introduction to my forthcoming monograph that explores particularly Constructivist art of the first half of the twentieth century, the colloquium paper is the final chapter titled „Outlook“. It consists of two parts: first it will relate concepts of space to those of the Spatial Turn and distinguish their relevance to modernism (including modern art), arguing that it were concepts of space which dominated Modernity and the modern project, therefore characterising it not only by acceleration (i.e. via time) but also by ‘expansion’ (via space). Second, it will evaluate the Spatial Methodology by considering its gains and pitfalls, asking what it actually brings to the fore that other methodologies have failed to consider yet.