With its minimalist narrative and long durational recordings of a family living on the margins of modern society and drifting around deserted urban spaces in Taiwan, Stray Dogs ( Jiaoyou, Tsai Ming-liang, 2013) provides a productive reading of cinematic slowness and a critique of the globalising domination of capitalism and neoliberalism in a locally and culturally specific context. This article examines how the representation of cinematic slowness in Stray Dogs encompasses both a narrative that requires the audience’s sympathetic and intellectual (...) understanding and a durational perception of time that calls for empathy and intuition. Moreover, this article aims to reveal how the film’s temporal illegibility, resulting from its radical use of long takes and unresolved differentiation between the past and the present, transforms a prolonged hesitant moment into an act of resistance against the ongoing capitalist and neoliberal standardisation, rationalisation and homogenisation of time’s, or more specifically duration’s, heterogenous nature. By exploring the potential of ethical hesitation and political resistance, underscored by slow aesthetics such as the use of long takes, this article aims to make the case for a specific and unique understanding of slowness as a philosophical signifier of empathy. (shrink)

This thesis is about the crisis in representation that accompanies the attempt to account for lived experience, with particular reference to bodily pain in social science. The diagnosis of this problem of experience identifies epistemology as an inappropriate means of knowing that initiates a translational paradox unable to satisfy the simultaneous demands of making lived experience familiar in representational form yet retaining the foreignness of the original experience at the same time. This problem of simultaneity is not a problem, however, (...) if it is built into a way of knowing, something that escapes epistemological conditions of possibility with its either/or of singularities. To know in such ‘double vision’, or fractionally, characterises post-epistemological thinking. This thesis draws on a relatively underdeveloped method for practicing a fractional means of knowing from post- actor-network theory, that of the pinboard, and explores how it might be usefully applied to the problem of experience. The thesis constitutes an experiment in producing a social science account of the lived experience of chronic pain using this method as an alternative to conventional epistemological techniques that initiate the problem of experience. Through initial theoretical discussion, followed by reflection on its practical application involving the construction of fractional accounts of lived experience for five participants experiencing chronic pain, the pinboard is developed as a technique that seeks to maintain ‘double vision’ whilst inherently resisting attempts to resolve the juxtaposition it makes visible, enacting and engaging in an ontological politics with conventional methods of social analysis. This includes discussion of how the method might be transported from methodological knowledge spaces to effectively intervene on such conventional methods. (shrink)