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Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
... However, this change has also transformed the indicators of the public sphere. The public sphere is no longer dominated by middle-class orientation and semantics that favour high culture, but by popular content that appeals to a wider range of social groups (Jameson 2012). ...
... The hybridisation of social spaces, as illustrated above, demonstrates the significant influence of spatial relations on the character of postmodern society. This confirms the voices that have emphasised the growing importance of spatiality (Foucault 1980(Foucault , 2006Harvey 1992;Jameson 2012). At the same time, this spatial hybridisation also shows that spaces with previously stable meanings are increasingly being extended with layers of meaning that allow for substantially different interpretations. ...
This paper interprets the changing traits of religiosity in modern and postmodern societies from the perspective of spatial turn. The analysis examines the impact of social experience and action on spatial structure and how changes in spatial structure have influenced individual actions and experiences over the past decade, with a specific emphasis on the relationship to transcendence. The analysis explores the impact of the interaction of social spaces and actions on religiosity, in order to provide new insights into the interpretation of religious phenomena through a novel approach to the study of religion. It focuses on the consequences of individualisation, hybridisation, and globalisation, and analyses how these transformations are shaping contemporary religiosity in the global north. The paper argues that spatial structural changes are reinforcing more individualised forms of religiosity, often separated from traditional institutionalised religiosity. This gives greater scope to subject-organised ‘patchwork religiosity’, which inevitably reinforces a new kind of religious syncretism. The reflection unravels the spatial aspects of this transformation in a novel way.
... The global market needs us to believe that "the latest" is the most valuable, in fashion, gadgets, films, and, of course, books. The ephemeral is a cultural dominant of postmodernity, and a synonym of value in the logic of global capitalism (Jameson 1993(Jameson , 1992. By suggesting that there are "founding" texts in each and every community, literature articulates various forms of resistance to the ephemeral, and this is of course why it seems dysfunctional to public interest, or why it is taken as ancillary in public discourse. ...
... They belong to both a subjective knowledge and to a shared knowledge. Language itself is shared and yet each writer of literature makes it new and makes it different, even unique, and poets show how language differs from itself (Deleuze, reading Kafka, docet (1977, 1993). 13 Without falling into the trap of a narrowly content-based, and merely instrumental evaluation of literature (which is the prevalent trick of censorship, even in the name of political correctness) I also believe that art is a transformative event. ...
2008. “”Literature’s Versions of its own Transmission of Values” in Ethics in Culture. The
dissemination of values through Literature and Other Media A.Erll, H.Grabes,
A.Nuenning (eds), Ethics in Culture, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2008, pp.19-34.
... In architectural discourse, it is difficult to discuss the atrium building without referencing Frederic Jameson's 1984 essay on Portman's Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, which Jameson presented as a spatial manifestation of the cultural turn of late capitalism, a fact that Rice confronts in the opening pages of his new book. 1 Following Jameson's interpretation, architecture critics including Michael Sorkin condemned the atrium building as a symbol of the decline of urban life and public spaces -a privatised, placeless environment akin to the shopping mall and gated community. 2 In that interpretation, Portman's disorienting interiors were the peak of architectural alienation. ...
... 21 Thus, whilst the transition into this epoch extended certain aspects of imperialist monopolisation, for Jameson it is 'decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and allpervasive'. 22 Consequently, the late capitalist epoch is perhaps centrally defined by an increasingly 'undramatic' and 'imperceptible' acceleration of capitalist exploitation. As touched upon earlier, when the operations of late capitalism are perceived as increasingly illegible, there is a theoretical tendency to embrace such a sense of imperceptibility; admitting powerlessness in front of an invisible social totality. ...
... Denken wir an den Protest der Anorektikerin gegen den schwachen Vater, so ist die Patientin, eingebunden in die symbolischen Reststrukturen, noch eher eine Suchende -gegenüber der Bulimikerin als potentiell Niemals-Findende. Zwischen Weltlosigkeit und Welthaltigkeit gibt es somit nur eine Art Wahl, aber keine Gewissheit (Waltz 2001, S. 121 Findet der anorektische Kampf gegen den schwachen Vater noch in der symbolischen Ordnung statt -im Patientinnen-Kontext gelegentlich der Subversion zugeschrieben -, also vor einem Sinnhorizont, so kennt die Bulimie weder Vergangenheit noch Zukunft, sondern befindet sich ausschließlich in der Gegenwart; die Patientin personifiziert geradezu den postmodernen Verlust von Historizität, wie Jameson (2001) ihn versteht. ...
... 3 Hollander argues that historically there has been a gatekeeping effect in hagiology that impedes "some of the most interesting analyses that comparative hagiology may engender-for instance around sanctifying representations (verbal and otherwise) of politicians, soldiers, celebrities, or animals" (Hollander 2020, p. 6). 4 This is akin to Mark Taylor's definition of religion as "an emergent, complex, adaptive network of symbols, myths, and rituals that, on the one hand, figure schemata of feeling, thinking, and acting in ways that lend life meaning and purpose and, on the other, disrupt, dislocate, and disfigure every stabilizing structure" (Taylor 2007, p. 12). 5 Early in the course on saints, time is spent working with definitions of religion and asking students to create their own in conversation with their classmates. Considerable time is granted to thinking about late capitalism, as Jameson explores in his chapters on culture and economics (Ch. 1, 8) (Jameson 1991). 6 She goes on to explain, "At the heart of each of these realignments of religious interest is the explicit monetization of value. ...
This paper argues that a comparative study of saints is not only a useful classroom tool for historians and religionists, but an exceptionally powerful locus of pedagogical insight and cultural understanding. By reframing contemporary consumptive patterns, media representations, and power discourses as religious vectors of saintliness, the professor has an opportunity to explore and assess cultural values, rituals, beliefs, worldviews, communities, traditions, and meaning making in the contemporary college student’s world. By acknowledging the dangers and possibilities of the category of saint while reframing the ascetical impact on developing subjectivities, we propose six pedagogical examples of how this might best be deployed.
... Desse modo, a profundidade e a densidade são dissipadas. Assim, acresce o caráter imediato e sensacionalista de eventos e espetáculos que passaram a moldar a consciência individual e coletiva(JAMESON, 1984).ParaGiddens (2002) que, não adota a condição pós-moderna, percebe a existência de uma fase diferente na modernidade, isto é, a alta modernidade (ou modernidade tardia). Esta caracteriza-se por um ceticismo generalizado perante a razão providencial entendida como o aumento da compreensão da realidade face aos riscos para a própria humanidade. ...
ABSTRACT Starting from the typology proposed by Foucault on heterotopias, we propose to reflect in this paper on its applicability to tourist places in the city of Belém, in the Brazilian state of Pará. Heterotopias are based on real and concrete places where utopias are realized, which have a transforming role in space by reflecting other times, ways of life or even counterculture actions. In this sense, we rely on qualitative and dialectical methodology to debate, discern and defend the proposed concepts, based on ethnographic research on: Estação da Docas, Forte do Castelo and two restaurants. We conclude that Foucauldian heterotopias are fully justified in the cases treated, as they allow us to understand the duality of significance of these spaces for-and between-residents and tourists that subsidize conceptions, urban planning, leisure proposals and quality of life in cities and, in Belém, in particular.
... For the embedding narrative is the narrative of a narrative.' 73 The parents ask forgiveness, the son says it was all God's will, they all set up house together, and the family founds a large village. ...
The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France.
The author’s innovation is to read ethnographic researches as play scripts—to see printed folktales as accounts of live performances. One storyteller after another comments symbolically on what it is like to be a formerly colonised population. Storytelling women, in particular, combine diverse plots and characters to create traditional-sounding stories, which could not have been predicted from the African, Malagasy, Indian, and European traditions coexisting in Mayotte. Haring’s account shows them to be particularly skilled at irony and ambiguity, conveying both submissive and rebellious attitudes in their tales. He makes Mayotte storytelling accessible to a new, English-speaking audience and demonstrates that traditional storytellers in those years were preserving, but also critiquing, their inherited social order in a changing world. Their creative intentions, cultural influences and widely different narrative styles constitute Mayotte’s system of the arts of the word.
Literary specialists, folklore enthusiasts, and people who like reading stories will find much to appreciate in this engaging and sophisticated book.
... The images people post on social networks illustrate a society shaped by capitalism, consumerism, liberalism, and digital media (Boltanski 2022, Boltanski andChiapello 2018;Boltanski and Esquerre, 2020;Chomsky and Waterstone 2021;Han 2021aHan , 2021bHan , 2018Han , 2015aHan , 2015bStiegler 2019Stiegler , 2014Fisher 2009;Bauman 1998;Augé 1995). The 1990s were a crucial decade, marking the boundary between two eras: postmodernism (Preve 2010;Jameson 1998Jameson , 1991Bauman 1997;Ceserani 1997;Bourdieu 1993;Lyotard 1992Lyotard , 1984Harvey 1989) and the Information Age (Castells 2009. See also Potter andLópez 2001). ...
Since the advent of social media like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok – which are mainly based on worldwide image sharing – we have witnessed the radicalization of a phenomenon that was already established: “iconomania.” Iconomania is the tendency to place images everywhere and document in pictures everything we do in daily life, from looking in the mirror to dressing, eating to travelling, from having a shower to crying. People feel the urge to share the happiest moments and saddest circumstances of their lives on social media, and they do so constantly. The result is an entire life spent on devices such as computers and smartphones. Often, this has dramatic social and psychological repercussions, such as increased anxiety, depression, and solitude. The consequences of this phenomenon may also be historical and political, with direct implications for political elections, the notion of democracy, and the role of truth(s) in society. In this study, I will assess the effects of the production, circulation, and consumption of images in social networks on human existence. I will also consider the roles of capitalism, consumerism, and liberalism in social media.
The representation system was developed based on Plato's words in the seventh chapter of the Republic, according to which simulacra are copies of reality. The representation of reality or the nature of the image-reality relationship, has always been an essential topic of study in the philosophy of art. The mechanical recording and reproduction of the world by the camera in the modern era is the turning point in the representation of reality, ultimately leading to the collapse of the representation system. This study investigates the image-reality relationship using a descriptive-analytical approach to identify the relationship of cinematic images with reality. It first discusses the Realism in Film Theory centered on Andre Bazin and then Jean Baudrillard's thoughts on Hyperreality in postmodernism. The study shows that Realism in Film Theory has also addressed the problem of the representation of reality in cinema within the framework of the traditional concept of representation and based on the principle of referring images to external reality. However, by questioning the idea of representation in postmodernism and analyzing the process of separating reality from its visual signs, Baudrillard offers a new reading of the image-reality relationship.
Sociology began as a scientific discipline in large part by defining itself by what it was NOT, namely, psychology. This means that within sociology there has always been an uncertainty over whether subjective phenomena, including selves, identities, emotions, consciousness, feelings, or experience, are topics worthy of scientific analysis and observation within the discipline. Some argue that psychology is vital to doing sociology (as an accepted or foundational “first principle”), while others reject it because it falls outside the scope of sociological concerns. In this paper I analyze antisubjectivism in sociology in the form of Donald Black’s “pure sociology,” as well as the antihumanist network theory of Stephan Fuchs. I conclude by suggesting that if sociologists are serious about achieving their long sought after but elusive “science of society,” then the sort of antisubjectivism, antihumanism, and antiessentialism being propounded by Black, Fuchs, and others should receive serious consideration in current and future sociological work.
A former student of the late Fredric Jameson from the 1990s reflects in PMLA on his teacher's lasting significance through a discussion of his practice of "metacommentary."
Also available as: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/name-of-metacommentary-fredric-jameson/35E835266578BD5DD3A695EDAC34193B
El presente artículo analiza los fundamentos discursivos de la polémica exposición Primitivism in 20th Century Art, celebrada en el MoMA (1984/1985) y comisariada por William Rubin. Así mismo, examina por orden de publicación las tres principales críticas articuladas en su contra, escritas por Thomas McEvilley, James Clifford y Hal Foster. Estos autores manifestaron una sólida conciencia posmoderna al identificar en Primitivism in 20th Century Art los axiomas más perniciosos del discurso ilustrado de la modernidad occidental, en el que cual se incluye el relato formalista del arte moderno. Entre estos axiomas destacan la pretensión universal de las tesis de William Rubin; la comprensión del Otro cultural como sujeto no histórico; la canonización de Picasso como genio del primitivismo; el sentido teleológico-lineal del progreso artístico; la lógica de autonomía y autorrealización del arte occidental. También se señalarán y comentarán las principales diferencias argumentales de los textos de McEvilley, Clifford y Foster, así como sus aspectos más característicos. Se pondrá, pues, de manifiesto que la crítica poscolonial de Thomas McEvilley está vehiculada por un imperfecto relativismo cultural, ya que el crítico asume ciertas categorías esencialistas de la narrativa de Primitivism. Respecto al texto de James Clifford se destacará la continuidad de su discurso crítico con algunas metodologías de la Global Art History, sobre todo con aquellas que atañen al replanteamiento de paradigmas histórico-temporales y a la comprensión transcultural de las prácticas artísticas. En cuanto a la crítica de Hal Foster, se distinguirán ciertos recursos conceptuales que vertebran su pensamiento como teórico; del mismo modo, se profundizará tanto en su singular interpretación del primitivismo como en sus formulaciones contra-discursivas.
The present paper argues that Bseiso's "Footsteps" is a counter-hegemonic ideological poem. Bseiso employs powerful rhetorical patterns in order to subvert the hegemonic and ideological concepts practiced and promulgated by the Zionist occupation. It also proves that "Footsteps" challenges Zionist colonial and imperial narratives and instills the Palestinian resistance poetry into the core of the national struggle against the Zionist tyranny and injustice. It also proves Bseiso is an organic intellectual in Gramscian terms.
This chapter discusses the structure and limitations of digital media in the construction and reproduction of collective memory, focusing in particular on the historical continuities of conflict, class, and ideology. Understanding post-memory as mediated memories and, as such, added layers constructing memory, social media are perceived as devices connecting between generations and narrations. Drawing from the theoretical framework of post-memory (Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), the study critically explores the significances of digital media, especially focusing on YouTube, as a platform that supports social interaction and promotes active engagement with past events, whilst at the same time shaping the public discourse and frames among the community.
The analysis included more than 800 online comments relating to the most popular video regarding the Varkiza Treaty (view count/Synthiki tis Varkizas); it contemplates the visual style and narrative in juxtaposition with the user engagement in the comments section. The chapter situates such videos within the context of cultural artefacts that increasingly proliferate and represent an increasing trend in the production of mediated online collective memory. As such, it articulates and opens a discussion around what the production, structure, and limitations of the medium may mean, in shaping contemporary conversations about the Greek Civil War.
This paper explored Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections published in 2001 with the objective of tracing the portrayal of characters' mere existence as commodified. The paper analyzed the profound impact of consumer culture on characters including the Lambert family members and identified the capitalist forces that had fueled it. The novel's commercial success and the reception made it an ideal source to explore contemporary American society and life within the consumerist-capitalist nexus. The research chronologically traced problems of the characters as the novel was linked to medicalization, capitalist influence on family dynamics, consumerism, materialism, privatization and class stereotypes and its connection to the capitalist agendas. Along with the characters and instances the paper provided insight relating to the problem from literary theorists and critics like Benedict Anderson, Jean Baudrillard,Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Ewen, Frantz Fanon, Paul Farmer, Michel Foucault and Fredric Jameson. Through this study the paper brought out the key insight on American society, its individuals, their struggles, aspirations and discussed the ways the capitalist agendas had taken advantage of it.
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) may be read as an extended meditation on the universal desire to return – to a putative golden age or lost paradise – and the eerie effects that are produced when this desire is realized. More specifically, the show explores the prevalent desire amongst TV audiences to continually “return” to beloved fictional spaces and characters. Drawing on psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of the uncanny, as well as film and media studies, the article explores the theme of returning within the show’s fictional and meta-fictional cosmos (the characters’ and viewers’ dream of going back) in relation to Lynch’s highly critical portrayal of the medium of television. In Lynch’s cinematic aesthetics of the uncanny, television (associated with consumerism, the nuclear family, and mindless repetition) is portrayed as a malign influence, providing faux nostalgia devoid of meaning or experiential value. Given that most of the returns in Twin Peaks: The Return always turn out to be unhomely, I suggest that Lynch’s take on TV culture may be read as a general commentary on the social and political nightmares created by a fetishization of the (real or fictional) past.
This paper will examine a means by which contemporary videogames can recover a Lost Future. Central to this is expanding upon Mark Fisher’s (2022a, 2022b)[1] and Simon Reynolds’ (2012) insights provided around hauntology in the context of popular music. Hauntology begins to provide an answer to the question surrounding the viability of the future, in that nostalgia is instead a symptom of hauntology, a byproduct of media’s increasing unwillingness to escape its past compounded by an inability to imagine a different future. This is where my concept of “Hauntological Form” is significant. It serves two core purposes; the first is to acknowledge contemporary videogames increasing dependence on past form and secondly that this can offer a solution to provide a version of newness, albeit at the cost of novelty. A distinction between newness and novelty is crucial in understanding the extent to which contemporary videogames are beholden to the past as well as what is available to provide something different enough to products that have come before.
[1] Both Capitalist Realism (originally published 2009) and Ghosts of My Life (originally 2014) were republished as second editions in 2022.
https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/cinephile/article/view/199657
Anything that can be automated, will be. The “magic” that digital technology has brought us — self-driving cars, Bitcoin, high frequency trading, the internet of things, social networking, mass surveillance, the 2009 housing bubble — has not been considered from an ideological perspective. The Critique of Digital Capitalism identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities, and also describes digital capitalism as an ideologically “invisible” framework that is realized in technology. Written as a series of articles between 2003 and 2015, the book provides a broad critical scope for understanding the inherent demands of capitalist protocols for expansion without constraint (regardless of social, legal or ethical limits) that are increasingly being realized as autonomous systems that are no longer dependent on human labor or oversight and implemented without social discussion of their impacts. The digital illusion of infinite resources, infinite production, and no costs appears as an “end to scarcity,” whereby digital production supposedly eliminates costs and makes everything equally available to everyone. This fantasy of production without consumption hides the physical costs and real-world impacts of these technologies.
The critique introduced in this book develops from basic questions about how digital technologies directly change the structure of society: why is “Digital Rights Management” not only the dominant “solution” for distributing digital information, but also the only option being considered? During the burst of the “Housing Bubble” burst 2009, why were the immaterial commodities being traded of primary concern, but the actual physical assets and the impacts on the people living in them generally ignored? How do surveillance (pervasive monitoring) and agnotology (culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data) coincide as mutually reinforcing technologies of control and restraint? If technology makes the assumptions of its society manifest as instrumentality — then what ideology is being realized in the form of the digital computer? This final question animates the critical framework this analysis proposes.
Digital capitalism is a dramatically new configuration of the historical dynamics of production, labor and consumption that results in a new variant of historical capitalism. This contemporary, globalized network of production and distribution depends on digital capitalism’s refusal of established social restraints: existing laws are an impediment to the transcendent aspects of digital technology. Its utopian claims mask its authoritarian result: the superficial “objectivity” of computer systems are supposed to replace established protections with machinic function — the uniform imposition of whatever ideology informs the design. However, machines are never impartial: they reify the ideologies they are built to enact. The critical analysis of capitalist ideologies as they become digital is essential to challenging this process. Contesting their domination depends on theoretical analysis. This critique challenges received ideas about the relationship between labor, commodity production and value, in the process demonstrating how the historical Marxist analysis depends on assumptions that are no longer valid. This book therefore provides a unique, critical toolset for the analysis of digital capitalist hegemonics.
This open access publication contains the full text of the book.
This chapter briefly explores the interconnectedness of Neuromancer, postmodernism, and critical posthumanism. I’ll then turn to Molly Millions as a problematic figure of the posthuman, partly because of the divisive responses to her feminist potential. In so doing, Molly’s complicated role as a cyborg and the ensuing critical reception of this character offer different ways of thinking about the posthuman, particularly concerning gender roles in our cybernetic future-present. As a result, the chapter concludes that Molly may be less a figure of the posthuman than a figure of the post/human, a term I’ll unpack in the next chapter after turning to Case, the novel’s other protagonist.
The article explores the relationship between canonicity and the border between high and low culture within music. It departs from the assumption that the border is mainly constituted and upheld by what are considered oppositional high and low poles. Likewise, the border rests on musical as well as extramusical dimensions and can consequently be discerned in music as well as its social, cultural, and economic infrastructure or context. By becoming a crucial building block in the infrastructure of popular music in the 1940s, music charts laid the groundwork for a more clear-cut antagonism between high and low in music, based on the impetus of an implied opposition between canonicity and charts. Even though this opposition remains an indicator – and a microcosm – of the border between high and low in music, the cultural weight and status of both the classical canon and the pop charts have changed considerably, not least because of the so-called digital revolution. The last part of the article discusses how this shift from analog to digital has altered the relationship between canonicity and the distinction of high and low in music.
First used in 1980, “new romantics” was a term applied to describe a British youth culture recognized initially for its sartorial extravagance and penchant for electronic music. Closely associated with the Blitz nightclub in London's Covent Garden (as well as milieus elsewhere in the UK), new romantics appeared to signal a break from the prescribed aesthetics and sensibilities of punk, rejecting angry oppositionism for glamour and aspiration. In response, cultural commentators have often sought to establish connections between new romantism and the advent of Thatcherism and “the 1980s.” This article challenges such an interpretation, offering a more complex analysis of new romanticism rooted in nascent readings of postmodernism. It also shifts our understandings of the periodization of postwar British history and the concept of “popular individualism,” arguing that youth culture provides invaluable insight both to broader processes of sociocultural change and to the construction of the (post)modern self.
This article sets out to reveal the way that word and image are combined in wholly inventive ways in the work of artist, Will Maclean and poet/historian, Angus Martin. The initial exhibition by Maclean The Ring-Net in 1978, and the publication of Martin’s book The Ring-Net Fishermen in 1981, were their early representations of the world of herring fishing. Their word-image collaborations brought a sensory experience to a new audience: an experience akin, in fact, to the multi-dimensional reality of the ring-net fishermen themselves. The correspondence between the two men during their research period revealed their determination to give absolute priority to the oral testimony of the fishermen above that of any commentators (professional or otherwise) on the industry. The correspondence also signalled the need for the use of both word and image to communicate and transfer information with real accuracy. This article focuses not only on the original Ring-Net research but also on a more recent collaboration where Martin’s poems are set alongside Maclean’s ink drawings in the publication One Time in a Tale of Herring (2010). There are a number of areas of overlap between Maclean’s drawings and the hand-written selection of Martin’s fishing poems. First there is the ‘thingly’ element: the attention above all to nouns and verbs in the poems and the unadorned nature of the drawings; second the phenomenological: the priority given to the sensuous aspects of the fisherman’s experience in the poems and the link to the gestural expressionism of the drawings. Most arresting of all, though, is the way that the image seeks the word and the word seeks the image.
This article historicizes and conceptualizes the Myanmar radical tradition: a tradition of thought and practice that has animated radical politics across Myanmar’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From anti-colonial struggle to decolonization, and from communist insurgency to left feminism, ethnic rebellion, and today’s revolutionary upsurge following the 2021 coup d’état, this radical tradition is best understood not as something bounded or solitary. Rather, it names a productive conjoining of radical thought and practice from within Myanmar, as well as from other times and places, beginning in the imperial world order of the early twentieth century. Revisiting scholarship on transatlantic and transpacific radicalisms, we argue that attention to imperialism offers important insights into Myanmar’s modern history and contemporary dynamics, including the Myanmar radical tradition. Yet, the Myanmar radical tradition—heterogeneous and internally conflictual, a site of historical dispute—also sheds light on the changing imperial world order, which we show has a fundamentally reactive, counter-revolutionary quality. Today’s late imperialism, we argue, can be seen as a retaliatory response to the long arc of decolonization, a story within which Myanmar’s contemporary revolutionary struggle renders the Myanmar radical tradition very much a living tradition.
The science fiction writer Han Song's trilogy Hospital, published between 2016 and 2018 in China, presents an eerie world of eternal pain within futuristic hospitals. With Michael Berry's translation coming out from January 2023, this work by one of the most well-known writers of contemporary Chinese science fiction is made available to an English readership. This article interrogates the nature of this pain which articulates not an impending risk of death but the patients’ inability to die. Through a process of datafication and digitalization, the patients are converted into streams of algorithmic codes and dehumanized as digital “profiles” to be collected, deposited, and re-accessed. These “profiles” become sophisticated enough to develop their own agency that replaces the patients as the targets of biopolitics, indicating an ontological transition that disempowers human beings and subjectivizes the meta-being of the patients’ digital “changelings.” I argue that this ontological transition signals a historical change in governmentality, epistemology, and political economy, gesturing towards new methods for the governance and commodification of populations in a discourse of patior ergo sum — I suffer, therefore I am.
Discoveries in biomedicine and biotechnology, especially in diagnostics, have made prevention and (self)surveillance increasingly important in the context of health practices. Frederike Offizier offers a cultural critique of the intersection between health, security and identity, and explores how the focus on risk and security changes our understanding of health and transforms our relationship to our bodies. Analyzing a wide variety of texts, from life writing to fiction, she offers a critical intervention on how this shift in the medical gaze produces new paradigms of difference and new biomedically facilitated identities: biosecurity individuals.
Niklas Luhmann's media theory is outlined in his work "Die Realität der Massenmedien," published in 1995 towards the end of his life, focusing on traditional mass media such as print and television. The theory does not encompass the internet or social media in their contemporary forms. Nevertheless, Luhmann's media theory appears relevant to social media, prompting an update to include not only mass media but also social media in the study of modern political profiling.
Martin Esslin emphasizes that ‘‘instead of being in suspense as to what will happen next, the spectators are, in the Theatre of the Absurd, put into suspense as to what the play may mean. This suspense continues even after the curtain has come down’’ (1960, p. 14). In accordance with Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdung effects, alienating the audience from the characters and urging him/her to think, question and respond to the events or the dialogues taking place on stage, Pinter’s plays — with all the obscurity and uncertainty the characters are caught in — endow their audiences with more than enough tools to become subjects in the meaning-making process of his plays. No matter whether Pinter’s works are categorized as modernist through his transformation of the audience into subjects or just like more recently categorized as postmodernist in the works of Austin Quigley and Mireia Aragay (2009), what enables Pinter to be categorized as both is the obscurity of the language that he uses, and particularly in case of postmodernism, just like Fredric Jameson’s assertion of the “breakdown in the signifying chain” (1984, p.71), the broken correlation between the signified and signifiers in the dialogues that Pinter uses, creates the effect of ambiguity in his works. Pinter, in parallel to these definitions, states that ‘‘If I’m being explicit, I’m failing’’ (qtd in Knowles, 2009, p. 75). Considering how important the creation of ambiguity and uncertainty in Pinter’s plays is, this essay focuses on the creation process of the Theatre of the Absurd in Pinter’s Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes by examining the handwritten and type scripted manuscripts available in the Harold Pinter Archive at the British Library (UK).
Examining relations between ‘therapy culture’ and the ‘risk society’, this essay suggests that the novel developed to offer a powerful workout for the kinds of socio-cognitive capacities and gratifications required by the complex and ‘emergent’ cultures of modernity: recursive skills of mindreading and mental time-travelling, the negotiation of plural ontologies. Its development of a unique mode of ‘double voicing’ allowed readers to situate the interior life in a complex and dynamic relation to the social. Reading novels challenges the default, making ‘safe’, capacities of the probabilistic or Bayesian brain. In its self-referentiality and invention of the idea of fictionality, the novel provides an education into awareness of the limits of models and their dangerous fetishisation. The novel therefore answers Wittgenstein’s search for a discourse that might provide a therapy for errors in thinking, embedded deep in structural and analogical functions of language and especially those perceptual metaphors of vision that carry the epistemological beliefs that looking in is the route to self-transparency.
Literary psychogeography is one of the concepts that deals with the impact of certain geographical places on the human psyche. It is an interdisciplinary approach that connects psychology, geography, and literature. The aim of this research paper is to examine the theory of literary psychogeography on Leila Aboulela's fifth novel, Bird Summons (2019) within the theoretical framework of Catherina Loffler. It deals with three female heroines who have decided to go on a road trip to the Scottish Highlands to visit the grave of Lady Evelyn Cobbold. Aboulela explores the three women's struggle with their personal choices and commitments in life. She skilfully deals with their psychologies, their lost dreams, nostalgia, and their heroic metamorphosis. The women's psychogeographical voyages at the forest along with their nostalgia lead to their physical metamorphosis to experience heroic transformation of their souls to achieve self-actualization in life.
This chapter analyzes a sector of ultra-low-budget filmmaking in the Ecuadorian coastal town of Chone. “Chonewood” is considered a small cinema in that it defies the quitocentrismo of Ecuador’s “official cinema.” The characters who comprise “Chomewood” movies tend to be Montubio (coastal peasants) in contrast to the light-skinned, middle-class urbanite characters that comprise the country’s film board-backed cinema. The author situates Chomewood filmmaking in the context of two imaginaries specific to the Montubio experience. First, there is what he refers to as “pirate modernity,” a collectivistic defiance of Ecuador’s audiovisual divide. Second, this small cinema sector has revitalized the nineteenth-century notion of “radical modernity,” an alternative notion of Ecuatorianidad, which took form during the Liberal Revolution (1895–1920). The author’s examination of various Chonewood films demonstrates that they are complex, multivalent texts through which local subjectivities of the Ecuadorian negotiated and reimagined.KeywordsEcuadorSmall CinemasChoneChonewoodMontubioModernityPirate ModernityRural
The attributes of literature in the market economy are needed to be re-examined. Contemporary literary production has not only aesthetic and ideology but also commodity attributes. However, to propose and analyze the commodity attribute of literature is not to wave the flag and cheer for the commercialization of art. By acknowledging and understanding the commodity attribute of artistic production, we can effectively widen the living space of literary and artistic activities, and keep alert to the threat of capital to art, preventing it from killing the nature of art in the process of maximizing profit. Adhering to the spiritual character of literature in literary production, the Chinese form will try to achieve the harmonious development of the artistic value of literature and market demand. Suggestions are given to the future development of artistic production from aspects of personalization, comprehensiveness, and public interest. When the division of labor ceases to be compulsory, the capitalistic attributes of literature will gradually fade away. The full emancipation of human beings is precisely the goal and the intended orientation of contemporary artistic production.
With historical materialistic view of science and technology as the first productive force, the revolutionary influence of technology on literature and ideological construction function of science and technology are elaborated. For literary creation, high technology dismantles the content, structure, and expression of traditional literary texts, as well as to provide new opportunities for literature. It updates our understanding of the world, brings novel aesthetic experiences and imaginations, and urges innovative literary styles and structures, which leads to a restructuring of literary concepts. With its own unique attributes and advantages, contemporary literary creation should remain reflective and transcendent toward science and technology to facilitate human beings to achieve poetic dwelling in an age of high technology. As for reading, a digital era of “Internet reading” is coming followed by the era of “text reading” and “picture reading.” The convenience of “Internet reading” changes readers’ perception and thinking habits. The reshaping of the reading subject and the emphasis on “the reader’s autonomy” is the most fundamental strategy to deal with the shortcomings of the “Internet reading era” such as fragmentation of information, weakening of deep thinking and forgetting. The “Internet reading era” calls for readers with competence to choose, critical ability, and productive capacity.
Literature, Science, and Public Policy shows how literature can influence public policy concerning scientific controversies in genetics and other areas. Literature brings unique insights to issues involving cloning, GMOs, gene editing, and more by dramatizing their full human complexity. Literature's value for public policy is demonstrated by striking examples that range from the literary response to evolution in the Victorian era through the modern synthesis of evolution and genetics in the mid-twentieth century to present-day genomics. Outlining practical steps for humanists who want to help shape public policy, this book offers vivid readings of novels by H. G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Aldous Huxley, Robert Heinlein, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gary Shteyngart, and others that illustrate the important insights that literary studies can bring to debates about science and society. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This chapter discusses developments in contemporary French poetic practice which, it argues, cohere around a preoccupation with the evolving character of the real as the object of cognition and symbolic practice. This evolution, linked to changes in the built and digital landscapes, has the urban as its privileged theatre. But this relevance of the urban space is manifested just as much by a crisis of urban representation—one to which the fluid parameters of poetic practice and creation are particularly attuned—as it is of a stably represented and representable reality. The chapter engages with the problematics of cognitive mapping (Jameson) as a way of framing the problem for poetic practice, revisiting the origins of that theoretical metaphor in behavioural science (Tolman), before briefly exploring a series of broadly poetic responses (Alferi, Tarkos, Pennequin, Quintane), approached through their self-conceptualisations as poetic dispositifs, to the complexities of uttering the urban real.KeywordsPoetic practiceCognitive mappingUrban experienceAgoraUtterance
Dispositif
This study discusses the role of community participation in making "PERDA", using the Normative Political Science (Political Philosophy) approach. The main idea is that "good governance" is a concretization of the idea of democracy at the local government level. The demand for the involvement of all "stakeholders" is the demand for democracy, with the framework of thinking that the owner of the government is not the government itself but all citizens. Therefore, all policy planning and implementation are not the business of the government alone but the affairs of the whole community. Local government is required to carry out good governance in its implementation. That means the local government must be organized democratically involving three elements, namely the government bureaucracy (state), parliament (political society), and the whole society (civil society). What is new here is the role of public participation in formulating policies in the form of "procedural" and at the same time "substantial" PERDA.
Suomalaisen mediatutkimuksen historiaa -sarjassa esitellään tekijänsä uran tai alan kehityksen kannalta merkille pantavia töitä. Tarkoitus on samalla herättää kiinnostusta kotimaisen tutkimuksen historiaan, jonka kokonaisesitys on edelleen laatimatta. Numerossa 2/2019 alkanut kirjoitussarja päättyy tähän. Veikko Pietilä. Tiedotustutkimus: teitä ja tienviittoja. Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, tiedotus- opin laitos, 1982. Veikko Pietilä. Joukkoviestintätutkimuksen valtateillä: tutkimusalan kehitystä jäljittämässä. Tampere: Vastapaino, 1997.
The first book of the online-network Norient discusses contemporary movements and trends within globalised music scenes in Europe, Africa, Latin-America, Asia and the US. In Out of the Absurdity of Life – Globale Musik, journalists, scientists, artists and photographers question protest and provocation within the US, Ghana and England. They dive into the shrill party worlds of São Paulo, trace the reinvention of Syrian synthesizer-pop and discuss the provocation potential of Latin-American copulation dance-moves. Journalistic and scientific. Part of the book is in German, part in English.
Literary studies in the new millennium are described as "post-theoretical," which implies a paradigm shift from the deconstructive linchpin of capital-t Theory, to a more socially, politically and environmentally engaged, future-oriented, and reparative drive in our discipline. There is a change of attention from the relativist epistemology of poststructuralism to realist ontology in the new fields of study such as posthumanism and new materialism. Post-theory holds two concurrent attitudes toward Theory: acknowledgement and critique. On the one hand, it is indebted to the legacy of Theory and forms discursive practices in relation to it; on the other hand, it is critical of Theory's anti-essentialism or lack of ethos, and reassesses its foundational axioms with contemporary ontological anxieties and motives. Ours is a chaotic century with manifold problems such as terrorism, war, economic crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, climate changes, oil and water crises, Anthropocene, consumerism, migration, digitalisation, and the question of democracy, etc. This sense of emergency, and its representations in literature, eventually, calls for "character" (essential, mental and moral vision, ethos) and genuine critique (evaluation) from the academics in humanities. This paper aims to offer an outline of the network of practices in literary studies as well as their ethical and aesthetic allegiances with this demand for "character" in mind.
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