In this thesis I have argued that Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy forms a sandbox for Young Adults to consider and play around issues of social justice. I have linked the events in the books to...Show moreIn this thesis I have argued that Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy forms a sandbox for Young Adults to consider and play around issues of social justice. I have linked the events in the books to events in historical or contemporary societies and have done so by making use of Foucault's political theory of a control and disciplinary society.Show less
In this thesis, I will argue that the individual can resist the status quo, that is the existing state of affairs. A resistance through art. I do not interpret art as just a painting, but I use a...Show moreIn this thesis, I will argue that the individual can resist the status quo, that is the existing state of affairs. A resistance through art. I do not interpret art as just a painting, but I use a broader conceptualization in which all aspects of human life guided by aesthetics, that is guided by a demand for a creative and beautiful sensual existence, can be seen as art. I will explore resistance as an aesthetic practice by reading the twentieth-century philosophers Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault alongside one another. Both authors analysed how individuals are constituted within systems of power and how dominant structures of power can be resisted. I will argue that their theories are not only compatible with each other, but that they also complement one another. Taken together, both theories present the individual with the opportunity to resist the status quo through a form of aesthetic practices.Show less
In order to comprehend the current form of neoliberal policies, an examination of neoliberalism’s theoretical foundation is necessary. Located in the immediate post war years and mostly in F.A....Show moreIn order to comprehend the current form of neoliberal policies, an examination of neoliberalism’s theoretical foundation is necessary. Located in the immediate post war years and mostly in F.A. Hayek’s work, neoliberalism is treated as an attempt of ‘liberal revival’ based primarily on classical British liberalism and contrasted with continental liberalism and welfare politics. Hayek’s attempts to establish the link of neoliberalism and classical liberalism based upon three main pillars: individual freedom, spontaneous order of the market and the rule of law. The first part of the research is devoted to analyzing the core concepts under a Hayekian light by providing historical contextualisation. In the second part, the three core concepts are examined based Michel Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics. Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics assists the current research in challenging the Hayekian construction of linking neoliberalism with classical liberalism. The main observation made by Foucault is the accentuation of the economic aspect of liberalism in the neoliberal construction; the ‘economization of the non-economic’. The conclusions drawn from the second part of the research, based on the Foucauldian approach of the core concepts of neoliberalism, endeavour to challenge the Hayekian rationale in constructing our current understanding of neoliberalism; although neoliberalism is built upon the notion of freedom, we are inevitably controlled through freedom.Show less
In 1787 ontwerpt Jeremy Bentham een gevangenis waarbinnen een aantal in die tijd weinig controversieel geachte correctieve mechanismen op vernieuwend efficiënte wijze worden geoperationaliseerd....Show moreIn 1787 ontwerpt Jeremy Bentham een gevangenis waarbinnen een aantal in die tijd weinig controversieel geachte correctieve mechanismen op vernieuwend efficiënte wijze worden geoperationaliseerd. Het ontwerp is eenvoudig: vanuit een centrale toren kan een inspecteur in een oogwenk alle gevangenen zien, terwijl hij zelf voor hen onzichtbaar blijft. Zo worden de gevangenen gedwongen om het toezicht en daarmee de discipline te verinnerlijken. Twee eeuwen later wijdt Michel Foucault aan dit ‘panoptisme’ een hoofdstuk dat wel zo duister is, dat het in herinnering roepen ervan sedertdien garant is komen te staan voor een onmiddellijke diskwalificatie van om het even welk beleidsvoorstel. De panoptische zelfdiscipline zou immers de algemene vrijheid te draconisch beknotten. In weerwil van deze unheimische verbintenis van panoptisme en onvrijheid, breekt dit werkstuk een lans voor Benthams architectonische figuur. De stelling is namelijk dat een algemene vrijheidsbeperking binnen een panoptisch model dikwijls in dienst staat van de verruiming van een andere, complementaire opvatting van vrijheid. Hierbij wordt aangesloten bij de twee opvattingen van vrijheid die Isaiah Berlin onderscheidde. Bij wijze van voorbeeld wordt de in oktober 2017 aangekondigde kilometerheffing eerst panoptisch geduid, om vervolgens te bespreken hoe de vrijheid van de burger juist dankzij het panoptisme evenwichtig geborgd blijft.Show less
Aan de hand van de opvattingen van Foucault en Freud over het idee dat bepaalde uitingen van seks ofwel primair, afgeleid, geproduceerd, dan wel onderdrukt zijn wordt nagegaan welke rol macht heeft...Show moreAan de hand van de opvattingen van Foucault en Freud over het idee dat bepaalde uitingen van seks ofwel primair, afgeleid, geproduceerd, dan wel onderdrukt zijn wordt nagegaan welke rol macht heeft ten opzichte van seks en seksualiteit. Het onderzoek wordt ingebed op de spanning die tussen Freud en Foucault heerst, doordat Foucault de repressiehypothese ondermijnt en Freud hieraan juist grond geeft. Er zal worden aangetoond dat de polarisatie tussen Freud en Foucault ongegrond is, omdat Foucaults analyse een Freudiaans moment van repressie kent, en Freuds boven-ik vergelijkbaar is met de zelfrelatie van Foucault.Show less
The present thesis seeks to analyze the specific issues emerging from the transition of a private collection into the public realms of the museum, exemplified by a specific exhibition. "For Your...Show moreThe present thesis seeks to analyze the specific issues emerging from the transition of a private collection into the public realms of the museum, exemplified by a specific exhibition. "For Your Eyes Only. A Private Collection between Mannerism and Surrealism" has displayed Richard and Ulla Dreyfus-Best’s private collection for the general public at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice and the Kunstmuseum Basel as a travelling exhibition in 2014. The interaction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ has been a central aspect when examining the origins of the museum. Although these interrelations have been academically acknowledged in a historical context and in connection with the alleged “boom” of personal-collection museums, the curatorial standpoint of this transition has been fairly neglected. Moreover, neither the Dreyfus-Best collection, nor its public display has been thorogouly investigated. Thus, new insights beyond the object’s textual and formal connections haven’t been published so far. The following research intends to outlines the underlying structures of the collection’s transition from the private into the public realm of the Kunstmuseum Basel. The main research objective is thus to unfold the ways of curatorial reinterpretation in order to understand how a private collection is made understandable and intellectually accessible for the public by means of particular structures and concepts of order. The Dreyfus-Best collection’s similarities to a Renaissance Wunderkammer will be used as starting point to question whether similar structures were implemented in the curatorial concept of the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum. Furthermore, Michel Foucault’s account on the ‘Renaissance episteme’ will be examined, in order to propose a certain applicability of these ordering principles to the basic structure of the museum-exhibition.Show less
This thesis focuses on the period at the end of the nineteenth century when knowledge of the colonized cultures and their histories became an integral part of European imperial policies. In the...Show moreThis thesis focuses on the period at the end of the nineteenth century when knowledge of the colonized cultures and their histories became an integral part of European imperial policies. In the search for tools legitimizing their overseas venture, architecture turned out to be one of the most visual and lasting tools for boosting such efforts. It is precisely by exploring this aspect of empire-building through architecture that my thesis attempts to redress the lacunae of historical research on colonial architecture as a measure for studying colonial history. Conventional historiography has largely neglected this aspect of empire-building, leaving much of it for architects, urbanists and art historians to deal with. Most of the scholarly contributions to colonial architecture have not yet been able to sufficiently expose the underlying imperial designs or the socio-cultural processes behind such building projects. In this thesis, I have made attempts to trace these processes and examine them from a comparative perspective using Foucault’s power/knowledge dimension. By pitching the three former Asian colonies of British-India, Dutch-Indies and French-Indochina next to each other and analysing the hybrid architecture found in their main public buildings, the ways in which the colonial government tried to impress the people through their building styles can be revealed. They resorted to the incorporation of often randomly mixed local architectural elements into buildings which looked European otherwise. This resulted in buildings depicting hybrid architectural styles. Such designs reflected a self-proclaimed European mastery in managing knowledge of the colonized cultures. In trying to claim their legitimacy as new rulers, colonial governments went to great lengths, using the visual qualities of architecture to shield a relatively weak system. The erection of confident and mighty stone facades, however, did little to bury the lingering orientalist prejudices and the inherent unequal status of the colonizers and the colonized. In fact, the knowledge on local histories generated by the colonizers helped create local identities that gave a boost to the upcoming nationalistic movements. But there were interesting differences among the colonies though, that this comparative exercise laid bare. The nuances manifested in the different colonies in terms of the willingness to spend financial resources, the often conflicting objectives between colonial institutions, the effects of shifting colonial policies and the paradoxical underlying principles that defined those policies, and other contextual factors, led to differences in imperial policies and their consequent architectural plans. By probing into these differences as well as by highlighting the similarities cutting across all the three colonies, my thesis contributes to understanding the varying shades of colonialism through the seemingly silent yet starkly telling structures.Show less
