Cultural Politics最新文献

{"title":"Cloak and Dagger","authors":"J. Darlington","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8593595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8593595","url":null,"abstract":"The history of the modern state is the history of intelligence gathering. Feudal allegiances are supplanted by organized bureaucracies. Individual authority figures are replaced by complex systems. Individual codes of honor are subsumed under nationwide laws. Turning governance into “the state” — a unified organization — requires the circulation and control of information. As Ioanna Iordanou argues in her new history, Venice’s Secret Service, the creation of a secret service is therefore not secondary to the emergence of the state but, in fact, fundamental to it. At times, Iordanou goes even further, telling us that the state itself, as an early modern creation, is founded on intelligence and the secret services that gather and transmit it. At first glance, Venice’s Secret Service is a history book. It is packed with fascinating historical color, tales of espionage, ciphers, and underhand plots. The author has plumbed the extensive Venetian archives and grounds her study in an expansive knowledge of the secret service’s everyday operations. Yet, while its subject matter is sufficiently distant that one would be forgiven for thinking it only of interest to the antiquarian, Iordanou’s real focus lies in organizational structures and the contemporary parallels one can find there. She uses her indepth research to quietly undermine sociological presumptions about the industrial foundations of the modern state. Rather than the factory model, as promoted by Max Weber, Iordanou traces the birth of states to the early modern period when “nearly all European states underwent a process of ‘arcanisation.’ Secrecy strictures were endorsed, the acquisition of secret knowledge was systematised, and B o o k R e v i e w","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"34 1","pages":"408 - 411"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76579724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Being against the Anthropocene","authors":"Saswat Snigdha Deepak Samay Das, Snigdha Mondal, Deepak Mathew","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8593609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8593609","url":null,"abstract":"In this book T. J. Demos, professor of art history and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, characterizes the Anthropocene as an abstract concept that offers a reductive approach to understanding humanity. As Demos makes evident, the label Anthropocene seems to be a manipulative construct of capitalism designed to assimilate, control, and mask the differential nature of humanity. In contrast, Demos, an art historian and cultural critic, depicts humanity as a vibrating field of differences that is reluctant to express itself as oneness. Through this insistence Demos enables us to see how capitalist interests appropriate the universalizing logic of the Anthropocene to blame humanity in its entirety as responsible for environmental devastation brought about by the capitalists, the corporations, and the petrochemical industries. According to Demos, it is necessary to resist obscuring corporate accountability by partaking in an overarching narrative like the Anthropocene that posits contemporary naturalization of the consumerist human activity as sole perpetrator of environmental degradation. Instead, we must give attention to environmental activists and powerless communities that fight against, or stand as victims of environmental degradation, and in the process make anthropocentrism untenable. In the first two chapters of his book, Demos throws light on capitalist stratagems that keep the concept of the Anthropocene afloat. He shows how capitalism uses satelliteguided images of ecodestructive human activities to implicate the whole of humanity. These images provide the foundation for B o o k R e v i e w","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"12 1","pages":"412 - 414"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87835953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Militant Ethics: Daniel Schmid's Film Adaptation of Fassbinder's Garbage, the City, and Death","authors":"A. Koutsourakis","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8593494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8593494","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The publication of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (Garbage, the City, and Death; 1976) constitutes one of the major scandals in German cultural history. The play was accused of being anti-Semitic, because one of its key characters, a real estate speculator, was merely called the Rich Jew. Furthermore, some (negative) dramatis personae in the play openly express anti-Semitic views. When asked to respond, Fassbinder retorted that philo-Semites (in the West Germany of the time) are in fact anti-Semites, because they refuse to see how the victims of oppression can at times assume the roles and positions assigned to them by pernicious social structures. Fassbinder's vilification on the part of the right-wing press prevented the play's staging; subsequently, in 1984 and 1985–86 two Frankfurt productions were banned due to the reaction on the part of the local Jewish community. A similar controversy sparked off by the film adaptation of the play Shadow of Angels by Daniel Schmid. During the film's screening at the Cannes Film Festival the Israeli delegation walked out, while there was also rumor of censorship in France. Gilles Deleuze wrote an article for Le Monde titled \"The Rich Jew\" defending the film and the director. Deleuze's article triggered a furious reaction from Shoah (1985) director, Claude Lanzmann, who responded in Le Monde and attacked the cultural snobbery and \"endemic terrorism\" of the left-wing cinephile community. Lanzmann saw the film as wholly anti-Semitic and suggested that it identifies the Jew—all Jews—with money. While the author acknowledges the complexity of the subject, he revisits the debate and the film to unpack its ethical/aesthetic intricacy and propose a pathway that can potentially enable us to think of ways that political incorrectness can function as a means of exposing the persistence of historical and ethical questions that are ostentatiously resolved. He does this by drawing on Alain Badiou's idea of militant ethics and Jacques Rancière's redefinition of critical art as one that produces dissensus.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"8 1","pages":"281 - 302"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89076119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Spectral Archives, Weird Sciences, Haunted Data","authors":"T. Sutherland","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8593623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8593623","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"29-32 1","pages":"415 - 417"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89367413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"After Englobement: Carl Schmitt, Peter Sloterdijk, and the Rediscovery of the Uncompressible","authors":"Ethan Stoneman","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8593508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8593508","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article positions Peter Sloterdijk's spheres project against Carl Schmitt's spatial writings, showing that Sloterdijk's anthropo-philosophical approach to spatial analysis implies a theoretical strategy for thinking beyond Schmitt's fatalistic view of the deep contingencies shaping human social existence. Schmitt's spatial pessimism is particularly noticeable in Land and Sea, in which he recounts the unfolding of world history as a succession of spatial epochs, arguing that the modern era can best be understood as the achievement of a centuries-long path toward a unified global space of nihilistic anarchy—a development that he comes to refer to as englobement. The legacy of Schmitt's spatial history of modernity can be seen most urgently today by its influence on the emergent right-wing identitarian and neo-Eurasian movements, which seek to transform Schmitt's pessimistic nostalgia for a prior mode of spatial ordering into an expansionist geopolitics. The author maintains that, against that legacy, Sloterdijk proposes \"spherology,\" a unique practice of spatial anthropology through which he teases out an art of writing at the service of experience, seeking to understand the phenomenon of human togetherness not in terms of determinate political or territorial forms but as a function of shared spaces (spheres) set up and stretched out through shared living in them. By affirming and potentially informing the ever-renewable possibility of lived extendedness in local-shared enclosures, Sloterdijk's theorization of the spatial constitutes a compelling countercurrent or immunological defense against the forces of nostalgia and resignation that feed into reactionary spatial thought.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"17 1","pages":"303 - 321"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81894977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Existence, Poetic Revealing, and the Work of Art: Interview with Mehdi Saadeti","authors":"M. Featherstone, Mark Mehdi Saadeti","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8593522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8593522","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"31 1","pages":"322 - 339"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79105612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Utopianism of Luxury","authors":"M. Featherstone","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8233448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8233448","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"24 1","pages":"270 - 273"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80204216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Overrepresentation of the State?","authors":"N. Douglas","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8233476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8233476","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"1 1","pages":"277 - 279"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88422108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Transmediale's Postdigital Proposition","authors":"S. Wark","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8233462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8233462","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"21 1","pages":"274 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74361850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When Attitudes Become Platitudes, Live in the Cloud: Dematerialization in the Work of Christopher Kulendran Thomas","authors":"Sarah Hayden","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8233392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8233392","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\"New Eelam\" is a cloud-based digital subscription housing project offering ideal homes to footloose \"global citizens\" who practice high mobility, postpolitical utopianism, and minimalist interior design. This article uncovers the political and cultural significance of this dream of dematerialized existence in the work of the artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Mapping the dematerialization of the art object onto the dematerializations of cloud computing and minimalist lifestyles, this article addresses two ongoing series: When Platitudes Become Form (2012–) and New Eelam (2016–). First, it explores how New Eelam conscripts its public into imagining itself as the morally and aesthetically superior advance-guard of a new world order. Then, it uses Kulendran Thomas's submerged invocation of the 1969 exhibition Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form to analyze how this experiment in \"digital realty\" uses dematerialization to solicit urgent realizations about the relationships between the contemporary art market, mass migration, and geopolitical reality.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":"33 1","pages":"192 - 213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80962505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}