Public Lecture - Lenticular Dwelling with Ghassan Hage

The idea of co-existing realities and multi- or pluri-realism has become a key theme in the critical anthropological current of thought known as ‘the ontological turn’.

Modernity’s obsession with mono-existence, from monogamy to monotheism to mono-ethno-nationalism and mono-perspectivism is relativized by examining Amazonian multi-perspectivist ontology.

This has proven helpful to me in thinking the nature of diasporic existence that I have theorized as taking a lenticular form. A lenticular is an image that appears differently depending on how you look at it. Think of the granulated postcards that change images depending on the angle from which they are seen: smiling face/frowning face, Harbour Bridge/Opera House, Jesus/Mary.

In contrast with the single image/reality captured in the common photograph the lenticular surface contains a multiplicity of images/realities that reveal themselves perspectively. It should be stressed that the lenticular surface does not offer one image that looks differently according to how you look at it, it contains many (usually two and sometimes three) images/realities that only come forth from a particular perspective in the process of encountering the surface. I will use this to reflect on what it means to think of diasporic dwelling as a lenticular process involving oscillation between a multiplicity of realities.

Ghassan Hage is Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne. His work covers critical anthropological theory, the anthropology of migration and the comparative analysis of nationalism, multiculturalism and racism. He has held many visiting professorships around the world including at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Amsterdam, L’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Harvard. His most recent works are Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination (2015) and Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2017).

The ADI Symposium Aesthetic Anxiety or Performative Subjectivity: National narratives encountering migrant architecture in Australia will take place at Deakin University's Geelong Waterfront Campus on Friday, 17 November from 9am to 6pm.

Supported by Alfred Deakin Institute of Globalisation and Citizenship,  the symposium aims for a dialogue between scholars and organisational representatives exploring diversity and identity in architecture.

Register for this symposium

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