Nonauthoritarian authority : cities, materiality, and the aesthetics of power / Julian Brigstocke.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brigstocke, Julian, author.

Series:

RGS-IBG book series ; 2996-5241

RGS-IBG book series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authority.

Authoritarianism.

Power (Social sciences).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 257 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

London : LSE Press, 2026.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

Authority is not a word with many positive connotations. It suggests power-hungry dictators, trigger-happy police, stifling bureaucracies, and monumental urban landscapes. In Nonauthoritarian Authority Julian Brigstocke argues that in these shattered times, anti-authoritarianism is not enough: a radical, speculative reinvention of authority is needed. He introduces the idea of non-authoritarian authority: a form of power that pluralises marginalised and hidden voices, recognises diverse agencies, and amplifies heterogeneous demands. Engaging with key philosophical debates around materiality, experience, feeling, agency, and landscape, Nonauthoritarian Authority stages a series of experiments with thinking, reading, researching, and writing non-authoritarian authority. Dramatising a speculative search for barely sensed, dispersed authorities, Brigstocke’s experiments in thinking explore the intrinsically spatial nature of authority, through empirical studies of violent urban borders in Rio de Janeiro, colonial material infrastructures in Hong Kong, monumental architecture in Paris, and everyday spaces of encounter in the UK. Offering an intricate and playful reflection on the relationship between authority, urban forms, and writing, each exercise in thinking links form and genre to a distinctive way of imagining authority. Each chapter simultaneously critiques a form of authoritarian authority and searches for a new, nonauthoritarian authority within the rubble of the old.

Contents:

1. Authority and modernity

2. Attuning to emergent, everyday, ordinary authorities

3. Spaces and aesthetics of authority

4. Four speculative figures of authority: attention, care, birth, attunement

5. Lectio divina – reading Arendt’s ‘What is authority?’

6. Authority, authorship, form, and genre: a horoscope for the neurotic and paranoid

7. Atmospheric authority and emotional borderwork in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro

8. Landscapes of thinking, or, where am I when I think?

9. Granular authority, bureaucracy, and the aesthetics of sand in colonial Hong Kong

10. Authority, modernity, and the factory of emotions

11. Speculative provocations for a nonauthoritarian authority

Notes:

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). For more detailed information consult the publisher's website. ‡u https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISBN:

1-911712-56-X