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"Stupidity"
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Stupid International Relations
Abstract
This article responds to a number of recent debates in the field of International Relations (ir) that have contributed to the image of ir as a post-racial and post-colonial discipline. As such, the present intervention asks how the politics of colonial racism continues to structure ir precisely at a time when this issue has been relegated to the discipline's uncomfortable history. The key contention will be that the image of ir as a post-racial and post-colonial discipline is facilitated by an ideology of stupidity. The latter is defined as a regime of naturalising the contingency of ideas as well as the inability to transform them. As such, the stupidity of ir enhances its incapacity to address phenomena that escape the artificial boundaries of its disciplinary identity, in this case the politics of colonial racism. Specifically, this ideology of stupidity is characterised by two modalities. The first modality concerns a process of gentrification through which alternative forms of knowing that defy ir's disciplinary identity have either been assimilated into a conception of ir that strips it of its more transformative potential or simply annihilated into non-existence. The latter constitutes a second modality of the ideology of stupidity as the destruction of alternative epistemological perspectives. However, as stupidity constitutes a transcendental structure of thought that can never be eliminated entirely, the article concludes that overcoming stupidity in ir requires constant vigilance towards its systemic institutionalisation, as it is the later that distributes its image of a post-racial and post-colonial discipline.
Journal Article
A short history of stupidity
We are living, it is often said, in a golden age of stupidity, in which boneheaded, mendacious politicians get elected by voters who've become too mindless to realise their interests are ill served by narcissists, while vapid social media influencers corrupt their no less witless followers with groundless conspiracy theories and eye-wateringly foolish takedowns of scientific expertise. Our time, one might be forgiven for thinking, is one in which the fool's gold of stupidity has become a desirable commodity, a must-have, with bumbling celebrities venerated more than those who have more than two brain cells to rub together. Jeffries analyses how we got into this parlous state. He considers what great minds have to tell us about the slippery nature of stupidity. If today we are living in a fool's paradise, has our species become too dim to learn anything from its rich history of folly?
BOOK
Everyone Knows Who is Stupid Around Here
Far from alien to our daily lives, stupidity seems evident to most people. However, discerning what is stupid may not be as easy as it looks, especially when talking about architecture. To specify what architectural stupidity is, we must acknowledge that not all failures of architecture are ‘errors’, some are worse. This article discusses the already architecturally situated concept of error and distinguishes it from stupidity in terms of ‘technicities’ that fail. The Simondonian concept of technicity helps to locate error and stupidity according to their mutative potentials. We argue that the difference between the two is materialised in a failed theme park in Ankara. Planned as one of the municipality’s signature projects of the 2010s, Ankapark damages the tangible and intangible relationships within the land it sits on, Atatürk Forest Farm. This park, with its seemingly erroneous processes of engagement with the built environment and human and non-human inhabitants, bypasses any rationale and transforms a productive urban territory into an intransitive field for knowledge systems, institutions and disciplines. The cancerous mutation it feeds does not inform any knowledge system to the point that ‘it can no longer stand itself’, providing only ‘stupidity in stupidity’.
Journal Article
Overcoming Disciplinary Stupidity
This article explores the challenge of designing public spaces in hyperdiverse cities and argues that including knowledge often considered ‘stupid’ is key towards inclusive design approaches. It discusses recent shifts towards co-creation, co-design and placemaking by highlighting the importance of engaging with collective stupidity beyond presumed disciplinary intelligence. The integration of stupid or unconventional ideas in collective creation processes could help better problematise design challenges in public spaces and better engage with diverse perspectives to address diversity effectively. First, we will sketch the main societal pushes and academic turns supporting the enhancement of stupidity through the collective creation of public space for contemporary inclusive and hyperdiverse cities. Then, drawing on a comparative literature study of key authors introducing paradigmatic shifts for today’s theoretical framing and understanding of collective creation, diversity and design ethics in public space, we propose a non-conclusive series of design capacities for public space designers. These designer capacities are situated in contextual and sociocultural awareness, sensitivity to socio-spatial relations and narrative inquiry, and designing with the tacit, hence with empathy and responsibility. Finally, we highlight the relation between stupidity and failure in urban design and present relevant success practices. However complimentary to traditional design capacities, we conclude that these ethico-aesthetic approaches might challenge traditional notions of intelligence, beauty or authorship in design in favour of diversity and inclusivity.
Journal Article
The Transcendental Stupidity of Architecture
This article discusses, within the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze’s philosophy, how stupidity comes to be seen as a positive possibility for thought. Nomad architecture, which is contrasted with the state science of architecture, has a certain stupidity about it, but this is nothing other than the stupidity which allows us access to the groundless ground, the field of the real, which can be perceived as a depth within the forms which architecture creates as an aftereffect. Examples are given, including that of the 2017 Grenfell fire and Anne Querrien’s nomadic architectural work.
Journal Article
To be wise or to think?
The purpose of this article is both to try to answer the question: To be wise or to think?and draw the reader's attention to implications regarding wisdom and thinking that can be derived by analyzing the content of M. Heidegger's treatise What Is Called Thinking?Special attention is paid to the thesis he put forward – we do not think yet. In this way, the role of the artist and art in arriving at a definitive answer to the question posed by Heidegger is emphasized. The conclusions that result from the analyses are additionally illustrated with an example taken from fiction. It serves as an exemplification, so one of the many possible forms of aesthetic thinking inherent in artistic creation is referred to in the considerations, like in the case of Heidegger pointing to poetry.
Journal Article