Culture Theory and Critique最新文献

{"title":"The longue durée of extraterritoriality and global capital","authors":"M. A. Mihatsch, Michael Mulligan","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2021.1894960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1894960","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates the shifting nature of the concept of extraterritoriality at particular junctures in history from the Italian city states to contemporary visions of floating micro-sovereignties. Extraterritoriality is the exercise of the jurisdiction by one state or non-state actor within the territory of another state. Since extraterritoriality is a challenge to the fundamental principle of sovereignty, it is by definition an exception in relation to sovereignty. As sovereignty evolved and changed over time, so did extraterritoriality – and, in the discussed cases, it changed primarily to be able to fulfil the needs of agents of global capital. The article discusses the privileges granted to the Italian city states by the Byzantines and the Ottoman capitulations, extraterritoriality on the colonial frontier, private investments in the Middle East and the proliferation of ideas of micro-sovereignty by Libertarian politicians and Silicon Valley billionaires. The article makes three distinct arguments: first, extraterritoriality has to be understood in relation to shifting notions of sovereignty. Secondly, extraterritoriality emerged within the context of colonial and imperial inequality and any extraterritorial relations contain the echoes of these structures of inequality. Finally, extraterritoriality is often driven and shaped by the needs of global capital, trying to avoid specific sovereign structures.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"52 1","pages":"7 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74935102","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":"Survival gone viral","authors":"E. Illas","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1856701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1856701","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the Covid-19 pandemic has made it more evident that the question of survival plays a structural role in the politics of globalisation. Like a virus that feeds off living cells without producing new ones, globalisation builds on blurring the previously differentiated spaces of the state, the market, war, and nature. The pandemic has exacerbated the instability that results from this blurring of the political spaces of modernity. Amidst this instability, survival has become a prevailing and yet liminal condition for the appearance of politics itself. Rather than interpreting this condition as a biopolitical reduction of political life to mere life, as Giorgio Agamben or Roberto Esposito have done, my theorisation claims that global survival has produced a hyperpoliticization of all events and acts of social life. I illustrate these logics with the political centrality of life in the Black Lives Matter movement.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"4 1","pages":"457 - 465"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82471234","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":"How risk is shared: an interview with Anne McGuire","authors":"Francis Russell, A. Mcguire","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2021.1914124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1914124","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This interview was conducted via email in late 2020 in preparation for Lockdown: Mental Illness, Wellness, and COVID-19, a three-day online conference organised by myself, Madison Magladry (Curtin University), Debra Shaw (University of East London), and Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London). Anne McGuire had agreed to speak as a keynote, but time differences between Western Australia and Canada made even a Zoom call keynote impractical (the difficulties of syncing Zoom sessions and time zones became one of the many new problems of academic life in 2020). Accordingly, McGuire very kindly agreed to respond to my questions via email, the results of which were subsequently published in the conference catalogue, and served as a platform for a panel discussion on the final day, which included Will Davies (Goldsmiths), Stephanie Alice Baker (City, University of London), and Jeremy Gilbert. I had become aware of McGuire’s work through my own research on neoliberal mental healthcare and the newly emerging logics of spectrality that could be detected in institutional psychiatry’s interest in dimensions of health, illness, and comorbidity, and in the popular discourses around the ‘mental health spectrum’. As an academic working in disability studies, McGuire’s work on ‘mental illness’ (or madness, as many would prefer) is thought provoking and productive in its capacity to reassess contemporary institutional and discursive reformulations of health, sanity, and normality—and, furthermore, how these reformulations are irreducibly linked to the disempowerment and exploitation of the mad. McGuire’s work took on a new significance for me in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent global lockdowns, and with the emerging global discussion of the necessity of a more positive stance on tele-health and digital platforms for ‘sufferers’ of ‘mental illnesses’. Her capacity to show how supposedly novel and progressive forms of psychopathology and care—such as the notion of the mental health spectrum, which purportedly moves us beyond stigmatising notions of abnormality—reproduce hierarchies and social injustice, was incredibly helpful for negotiating the rhetoric of ‘the new normal’ that pervaded 2020. It was in the attempt to locate the meaning of the ‘new normal’ for those circumscribed within the institutions and discourses of ‘mental illness’—i.e., the reinvention of existing norms, inequalities, and injustices both in response to, and in some instances by way of the COVID-19 pandemic—that I turned to, and continue to turn to, McGuire’s work.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"481 - 494"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89889744","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":"Quantifying music: imagined metrics in digital startup culture","authors":"Thomas Hodgson","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2021.1894961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1894961","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper examines the lived experiences and ethical dilemmas of investors and staff in London’s digital music startup culture. Startups often rely on what I term ‘imagined metrics’ to attract investment and to measure the efficacy of their technologies. However, this stands in stark contrast to the qualitative ways music is understood within these organisations and subsequently experienced via the technologies they build. Drawing on ethnographic observations alongside interview data, I suggest that these metrics have few true believers. Instead, critiques of imagined metrics and their susceptibility to exaggeration and misrepresentation are ubiquitous. This culture of scepticism is not incidental: it is a crucial pathway through which otherwise volatile startup culture is normalised. Investors, founders and staff often publicly acknowledge the unreliability of the numbers with which they work, even as metrics continue to underpin the decision-making process. Metrics thus do not require true belief to secure their effects. Yet, against this backdrop, processes of quantification increasingly shape digital music consumption. Resisting the classic equation of quantification with Weberian rationalisation, this study instead shows that metrics are imbued with emotions and interpretive narratives that extend well beyond the older trust in numbers (Porter [1995]. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"52 1","pages":"424 - 439"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84556232","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":"Amateur mortality","authors":"Maxwell Hyett","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2021.1916399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1916399","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Near the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi published three short meditations on the possible, not probable, outcome of the pandemic. Due to the sudden imposition of isolation and concrete needs, Berardi suggests that death has re-entered contemporary discourse. As a consequence, he speculates that the capitalist postponement of joy may be replaced by time as enjoyment. This text critically accompanies Berardi in imagining the possible outcome of the pandemic by suggesting that it is not death but mortality that offers a pivotal use of time and enjoyment. Mortality, as Hannah Arendt defines it, extends beyond the temporality of survivalist labour and into durable works that contribute to the construction of a human world. Here it is argued that this world and its work is held together by love, in a robust philosophical sense, that is embodied by amateur practice, primarily developed in relation to the work of Bernard Stiegler. Through the work of Stiegler, Donna Haraway and Byung-Chul Han, this paper argues that, masked by professionalism and marketing, amateurism lurks in the possible ruins of pre-COVID life, ready to emerge in the key areas identified by Berardi’s texts.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"38 1","pages":"466 - 480"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73805383","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":"Performing the post-panopticon condition: on the 3rdi project by Wafaa Bilal (2010–2011)","authors":"S. Tabatabaei","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1802611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1802611","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT During a year-long project in 2010–2011, Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, grafted a camera at the back of his head that captured one image per minute and transmitted it to the website www.3rdi.me. The project attracted public attention that consolidated a critical discourse around this project. Bilal’s project was perceived as a participation in the configuration of selfhood and embodiment, locating the project within digitised networks of surveillance. This article studies the 3rdi project at the cross-section of the prevalent use of wearable technologies, racialisation of surveillance, and surveillance art in order to account for the ways in which with this project Bilal has intervened within the representation of diasporic identity construction of the Middle Easterners in the post-9/11 era and how the project portended the yet to come presidential executive order 13769, commonly known as the Travel Ban, issued by President Donald Trump in 2017.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"359 - 373"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87016667","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 politics of positionality: the difference between post-, anti-, and de-colonial methods","authors":"Benjamin P. Davis, Jason Walsh","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1808801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1808801","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay works at the intersection of two trends, one longstanding and one relatively more recent. First, it takes place against the background of the overwhelming influence that the category of ‘identity’ exercises on both contemporary knowledge production and political practice. Second, it responds to what has been called the ‘decolonial turn’ in theory. We compare the work of Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, and Walter Mignolo in terms of the following question: What kind of reflexive method do they deploy in response to their recognition of the politics of knowledge production, that is, the existence of a relationship between social position and epistemic position? We then develop a novel distinction between post-colonial, anti-colonial, and de-colonial perspectives, one based not on backward-looking intellectual genealogies but on forward-looking political practices.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"22 1","pages":"374 - 388"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84174129","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":"No love without conflict: rights to the city, cultural activism, and the ‘irony of affect’ in São Paulo, Brazil","authors":"Shannon Garland","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1856699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1856699","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses how love arose as a political ethos in São Paulo, Brazil. The meaning and feeling of love emerged as middle-class artists sought to do what they love as work; activists demanded rights to the city through cultural intervention; and a hit song by an obscure rapper lamented that ‘love doesn’t exist in São Paulo’. Cultural activists tied love’s affective resonance to the mayoral campaign of politician Fernando Haddad, who likewise framed his transit policy in loving terms. The article describes how middle-class musical aesthetics stemming from the idea of ‘racial democracy’, as well as artists’ and activists’ desire to ‘do what you love’ as work, eschewed the racialised class conflict that produced an unloving city, leading to a politically impotent articulation of love. The article advances a materialist approach to affect through social reproduction theory, suggesting that the concept of affect is useful only if it takes account of the social politics that shape affective resonance, particularly the central conflict between human life and the generation of capital. It argues that affects brought forth through cultural products like music only serve political change if overtly connected to a larger programme of structural transformation which incorporates class conflict.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"30 1","pages":"283 - 302"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74246751","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 romance with affect: sonic politics in a time of political exhaustion","authors":"A. Hofman","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1848603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1848603","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay offers a close reading of the promises ingrained in the political potential of aural experience in the recent literature addressing affect. It focuses on why, how and when scholars privilege affect when thinking about the political capacities of music and sound in the current moment of global neoliberalism. The essay reflects on scholarly works that theorise political agency after 2008 and concentrates on affect as a need or a quest for a theoretical framework that proposes new avenues to act politically. It starts from the assumption that scholarly production that employs affect tells us much less about the very political potential of affect, and much more about a desire for a radical reshaping of our understanding of where and how we search for political potentialities. The second part of the essay presents a critical perspective on this desire and the relationship between affective and ideological politics. Using my ethnographic work on activist singing in the area of former Yugoslavia as an example that offers a perspective from the former state-socialist world, I take a critical look at the potential inscribed in affective politics beyond liberal political thought.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"303 - 318"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89303599","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":"If you sing, you will surely feel happy: the affect-emotion gap and the efficacy of devotional song in Bali","authors":"Nicole Reisnour","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2021.1884987","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1884987","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay examines the social efficacy of musically mediated religious feeling, drawing on fieldwork conducted with a community of Balinese Hindus who have become devotees of ISKCON, the international devotional movement popularly known as the Hare Krishnas. Through analysis of my conversations and musical interactions with members of this community, I argue that ISKCON’s narratives and practices of feeling render the affective stirrings that people experience while singing into knowable signs of spiritual progress while at the same time generating the bodily sensibilities that enable participants to experience those affects with greater levels of intensity. Bringing these ethnographic insights into conversation with an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that theorizes a productive ‘gap’ between affective intensity and discursive qualification, this essay proposes that, rather than affect giving way to emotion through a linear process of discursive capture, the two remain in a continual, mutually sustaining interplay. Extending the concept of the affect-emotion gap to the domain of music, the essay offers ethnographic and theoretical insight into the processes by which music’s affective affordances become efficacious in social life.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"9 1","pages":"133 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80047007","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}