Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture最新文献

{"title":"Artaud’s Contagious Cries: Virtuality as Aurality","authors":"Amin Erfani","doi":"10.1353/dis.2023.a907669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2023.a907669","url":null,"abstract":"Artaud’s Contagious Cries: Virtuality as Aurality Amin Erfani (bio) The plague takes dormant images, latent disorder and suddenly carries them to the point of the most extreme gestures. Theatre also takes gestures and develops them to the limit. Just like the plague, it reforges the links between what does and does not exist, between the virtual nature of the possible and the material nature of existence. —Antonin Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague” The viral and the virtual bear an uncanny affinity in an age marked by a deadly global pandemic and a profusion of new media. Two works by Antonin Artaud are particularly timely to think through contagion and technology together in the current environment, where the shock effect of real life exceeds the foresight of artistic representation. During a global scourge, life itself aligns with what Artaud describes as the Theater of Cruelty: it “disturbs our peace of mind, releases our repressed subconscious, drives us to a kind of potential rebellion.”1 The first work by Artaud that calls our attention is his seminal essay “The Theater and the Plague,” [End Page 117] first published in La Nouvelle Revue Française on October 1, 1934, a few years before his long-term internment in the asylum. The second work is the now notorious and initially censured radio performance “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” first recorded in 1947 not long after his excruciating nine-year internment came to an end. These works, read together, demonstrate an approach to “theatricality” that exceeds the theater as a mere discipline. They also establish the realm of the virtual as a liminal space between media technology and life, one that is hospitable to the advent of the unpredictable and radical Other. This emergence, within the “non-space” of the virtual, occurs in an aural mode insofar as it fundamentally overwhelms preestablished modes of representation. For Artaud, virtuality and aurality are intimately bound together: neither fully present, nor completely absent, the Other emerges yet lacks recognizable form. Its advent is cataclysmic because it occurs unpredictably, threatens the established order, and reawakens repressed and incomprehensible delirium. Theater, in Artaud’s terms, proves to be neither sheer technical contrivance nor mere natural phenomenon. As such, it unsettles foundational dichotomies at the heart of Aristotelean precepts—techne versus physis, the technological versus the biological, art versus life—and establishes itself as a generative supplement to those binaries. Artaud’s redefinition of theater as being, not opposed to but supplemental to life, draws a parallel between virality and the virtuality. Its mode of communication, distinct from narrative discourse and mimetic representations, is one of virtual contamination, which Artaud describes here as “psychic” and “oneiric.” The aural modality responsible for such virtual contamination—most evident through but not limited to the radiophonic med","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532830","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":"That's All","authors":"Jalal Toufic","doi":"10.5040/9780571291786.40000081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9780571291786.40000081","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":"2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"1999-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75288222","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 Evidence: Life and Nothing More by Abbas Kiarostami","authors":"J. Nancy","doi":"10.5040/9781474275729.ch-091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474275729.ch-091","url":null,"abstract":"And Life Goes on is, in its French translation (\"I will come back to it\"), the title of the film made in 1992 by Abbas Kiarostami.1 Among ordinary expressions, among current ways of speaking, that is to say, ways that have an immediately recognizable value and that can be exchanged without difficulty (that are exchanged for nothing, for their own echo and that, therefore , are worth nothing . . . ) , this one speaks of this constant and inevitable flow of life, which continues its course in spite of everything, in spite of mourning and catastrophe. In fact, the film tells us from the beginning, by means of a voice on the radio: \"The magnitude of the disaster is enormous\" (it's about the 1990 earthquake in Iran). The expression says that it has to continue and it also says that it is good that it continues, that life is really, perhaps, also that: that it goes on. The expression says nothing about \"life,\" its goal, its meaning, its quality; it does not say that it is the life of the species, or that of the universe that would unfold itself above that of individuals (no doubt, in the middle of the film, we will see a young couple getting married after the catastrophe, but we will not see the birth of a child) ; the expression does not imply an indifference to death, or to any form of completion or accomplishment. Quite the contrary, in a sense, the film is itself this accomplishment, it accomplishes, it shows that: the catastrophe, the continuity, and also something else, the image that the film both represents and designates at the","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":"13 1","pages":"5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"1999-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87522314","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":"Nation, Race, and Immigration: German Indentities After Unification","authors":"Andreas Huyssen","doi":"10.4324/9780203610213-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203610213-9","url":null,"abstract":"Over three decades ago, the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, author of an important and much ignored book about German guilt ( Die Schuldfrage , 1946), claimed that the history of German nationalism was finished and done with. National unity, he argued, was forever lost as a result of the guilt of the German state, and the demand for reunification to him was nothing but a denial of what had happened during the Third Reich.1 Jaspers' s critique was directed against a then strident conservative discourse of reunification which was coupled with the bellicose nonrecognition of the GDR and the demand, especially by the organizations of Eastern refugees ( Vertriebenenverbande) , to keep the question of the Eastern borders open. He was the first to articulate an argument against a unified German nation-state that has since been widely adopted in Germany, even though at the time Jaspers himself was rejected by the right and mostly ignored by the left. While the division of Germany in 1949 into two states was the political result of the emerging Cold War superpower confrontation and had nothing much to do with retribution for the crimes of the Third Reich, a rhetoric of punishment and retribution regarding the question of national unity became the basis for a","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":"186 1","pages":"2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"1994-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79755384","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":"Voices of a Voice","authors":"J. Lyotard","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt20mvd1k.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20mvd1k.7","url":null,"abstract":"I shall not in the present paper attempt any discussion of the psychological significance of obsessional thinking. Such a discussion would be of extraordinary value in its results, and would do more to clarify our ideas upon the nature of the conscious and the unconscious than any study of hysteria or the phenomena of hypnosis. It would be a most desirable thing if the philosophers and psychologists who develop brilliant theoretical views on the unconscious","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":"218 1","pages":"16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"1992-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89106960","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":"A Tale of Two Jacques","authors":"J. Gallop","doi":"10.1215/9780822384021-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384021-007","url":null,"abstract":"In the Fall of 1974, 1 heard that Derrida was to lecture on Lacan in Buffalo. I drove the four hours from Ithaca to Buffalo, frantically looked for the building on a campus I didn't know, arrived after Derrida had begun, finding a seat way back in the balcony. In that already distracted state, I had a lot of trouble following the lecture, but it nonetheless threw me into a defensive panic. Derrida was saying terrible things about Lacan. About six months later \"Le Facteur de la verite\" came out in","PeriodicalId":40808,"journal":{"name":"Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture","volume":"2 1","pages":"6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"1992-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84941661","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}