Pub Date : 2000-10-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367210
R. Ferguson
Abstract Race and sexuality have always intersected in African‐American racial formation. In this article, I argue that this intersection has inspired certain epistemological, political, economic and cultural formations. In terms of epistemology, American sociology and African‐American literature have historically addressed the connections between race and sexuality. Both were interested in the ways that African‐American racial formation transgressed ideal heterosexual and patriarchal boundaries. As far as cultural formations were concerned, such transgressions materially and symbolically aligned African‐American racial formation with homosexuality. Attending to the political and economic effect of this alignment, I maintain that it helped to articulate African‐American racial difference and worked to exclude African‐Americans from the privileges of state and capital. Thus, the article argues that African‐American racial subordination can best be understood as it converges with heteronormative and patriarchal modes of regulation and exclusion. After showing how the most prominent sociology during the 1940s (Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy) marked African‐Americans as pathologically heterosexual, I go on to read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to determine how the alignment between blackness and homosexuality suggests alternative and oppositional epistemological, cultural and political practices.
{"title":"The nightmares of the heteronormative","authors":"R. Ferguson","doi":"10.1080/14797580009367210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367210","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Race and sexuality have always intersected in African‐American racial formation. In this article, I argue that this intersection has inspired certain epistemological, political, economic and cultural formations. In terms of epistemology, American sociology and African‐American literature have historically addressed the connections between race and sexuality. Both were interested in the ways that African‐American racial formation transgressed ideal heterosexual and patriarchal boundaries. As far as cultural formations were concerned, such transgressions materially and symbolically aligned African‐American racial formation with homosexuality. Attending to the political and economic effect of this alignment, I maintain that it helped to articulate African‐American racial difference and worked to exclude African‐Americans from the privileges of state and capital. Thus, the article argues that African‐American racial subordination can best be understood as it converges with heteronormative and patriarchal modes of regulation and exclusion. After showing how the most prominent sociology during the 1940s (Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy) marked African‐Americans as pathologically heterosexual, I go on to read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to determine how the alignment between blackness and homosexuality suggests alternative and oppositional epistemological, cultural and political practices.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121186137","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}
Pub Date : 2000-10-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367213
Imogen Tyler, E. Loizidou
Lauren Berlant is Professor of̂ English and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Berlant's research and published work reflect an inter-disciplinary trajectory and a (counter) political agenda. She works between several academic disciplines, English, Law, Cultural studies, Politics, Queer studies, and Women's studies. What binds her different projects together is her interest in the force of optimism in peoples' attachments to each other and to concepts, for example, of the good life, good intentions, political worlds, and transparent affects (such as love and pain). These attachments are especially animated in proximity to the formal institutions of collective life, such as the family, academia, and the nation, but are engendered in conventional practices as well. Berlant is soon to complete a trilogy of books which focus on questions of national fantasy and citizenship. In the first, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1991) Berlant argues that citizenship is the place where nationality, subjectivity, and agency meet. In the final book in the trilogy, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1997), Berlant focuses more explicitly on the question of the citizen, via an analysis of the privatisation of national culture in the Reaganite period. This book uses the pilgrimage to Washington narrative as its structuring trope and asks why things that cannot act as citizens foetuses and children, for example bear so much of the burden of defining official and popular discussions of citizenship in contemporary mass national culture. She analyses the relationship between the hegemonic politics of intimacy that places sex and family at the centre of national life and structural economic and cultural forces that also engender subjectivity, fantasy, and value. The trilogy will soon be completed by The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of American Sentimentality, a book about 'women's culture' and its historic role in the production of national/capitalist norms of affect and identity. Along with this trilogy, she has recently edited Intimacy (University of Chicago Press, 2000), an elaboration of an issue of Critical Inquiry, of which she is co-editor. In the interview we have tried to engage with the promise that emerged out of our conversations with Berlant, which involved initial face to face meetings in Lancaster and Chicago and culminated in the 'live' transatlantic e-mail interview transcribed here. We have directed
{"title":"The promise of Lauren Berlant: An interview","authors":"Imogen Tyler, E. Loizidou","doi":"10.1080/14797580009367213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367213","url":null,"abstract":"Lauren Berlant is Professor of̂ English and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Berlant's research and published work reflect an inter-disciplinary trajectory and a (counter) political agenda. She works between several academic disciplines, English, Law, Cultural studies, Politics, Queer studies, and Women's studies. What binds her different projects together is her interest in the force of optimism in peoples' attachments to each other and to concepts, for example, of the good life, good intentions, political worlds, and transparent affects (such as love and pain). These attachments are especially animated in proximity to the formal institutions of collective life, such as the family, academia, and the nation, but are engendered in conventional practices as well. Berlant is soon to complete a trilogy of books which focus on questions of national fantasy and citizenship. In the first, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1991) Berlant argues that citizenship is the place where nationality, subjectivity, and agency meet. In the final book in the trilogy, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1997), Berlant focuses more explicitly on the question of the citizen, via an analysis of the privatisation of national culture in the Reaganite period. This book uses the pilgrimage to Washington narrative as its structuring trope and asks why things that cannot act as citizens foetuses and children, for example bear so much of the burden of defining official and popular discussions of citizenship in contemporary mass national culture. She analyses the relationship between the hegemonic politics of intimacy that places sex and family at the centre of national life and structural economic and cultural forces that also engender subjectivity, fantasy, and value. The trilogy will soon be completed by The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of American Sentimentality, a book about 'women's culture' and its historic role in the production of national/capitalist norms of affect and identity. Along with this trilogy, she has recently edited Intimacy (University of Chicago Press, 2000), an elaboration of an issue of Critical Inquiry, of which she is co-editor. In the interview we have tried to engage with the promise that emerged out of our conversations with Berlant, which involved initial face to face meetings in Lancaster and Chicago and culminated in the 'live' transatlantic e-mail interview transcribed here. We have directed","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122317251","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}
Pub Date : 2000-10-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367209
L. Cacho
Abstract This article examines how the ideology of white injury both conceals and sustains inequitable social relations in turn‐of‐the‐millenium California. Understanding the political and economic context of California in the early 1990s in relation to media, law, and culture helps explain why Californian citizens passed the unconstitutional initiative, Proposition 187, in 1994. Targeting undocumented Mexican immigrants, this ‘color‐blind’ Proposition functioned to conflate economic insecurities with racial anxieties. An analysis of culture, law, and media discloses how racial anxieties limit our understandings of exploitative capitalist relations, serving to artificially augment the white middle‐class ‘ wealth, opportunities, and power, while making vulnerable populations in the United States even more open to exploitation.
{"title":"The people of California are suffering': The ideology of white injury in discourses of immigration","authors":"L. Cacho","doi":"10.1080/14797580009367209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367209","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines how the ideology of white injury both conceals and sustains inequitable social relations in turn‐of‐the‐millenium California. Understanding the political and economic context of California in the early 1990s in relation to media, law, and culture helps explain why Californian citizens passed the unconstitutional initiative, Proposition 187, in 1994. Targeting undocumented Mexican immigrants, this ‘color‐blind’ Proposition functioned to conflate economic insecurities with racial anxieties. An analysis of culture, law, and media discloses how racial anxieties limit our understandings of exploitative capitalist relations, serving to artificially augment the white middle‐class ‘ wealth, opportunities, and power, while making vulnerable populations in the United States even more open to exploitation.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125784847","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}
Pub Date : 2000-10-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367212
Scott Wilson
Abstract This essay reads Deleuze and Guattari's Anti‐Oedipus, somewhat perversely, as a radical Lacanian means of conceptualizing hypermodern capitalism. If, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is psychoanalysis that rediscovers and retraces the death instinct in classical, nineteenth‐century capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis better exemplifies the ways in which the deterritorializing flows of twenty‐frrst‐century global capitalism have overcoded and overwritten that classical, nineteenth‐century order of things. Taking Bret Easton Ellis's novel, American Psycho as its symptomatic text, this essay discusses the implications, raised hysterically in the novel, of an unrestricted economy in which the ‘subject’ is no longer held in place by a governing (master or paternal) signifier in relation to a traditional symbolic order. The essay shows how Lacan's notion of ‘the Other’ has been reconfigured, in relation to consumer capitalism, such that it takes the form of a purely machinic imperative that turns the subject into an economically dividuated producing/product. The subject has become a little machine hooked up to the big machine that maintains it in debt in a continual process of consumption‐production of commodities, brands and identities.
{"title":"Schizocapital and the branding of American psychosis","authors":"Scott Wilson","doi":"10.1080/14797580009367212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367212","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay reads Deleuze and Guattari's Anti‐Oedipus, somewhat perversely, as a radical Lacanian means of conceptualizing hypermodern capitalism. If, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is psychoanalysis that rediscovers and retraces the death instinct in classical, nineteenth‐century capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis better exemplifies the ways in which the deterritorializing flows of twenty‐frrst‐century global capitalism have overcoded and overwritten that classical, nineteenth‐century order of things. Taking Bret Easton Ellis's novel, American Psycho as its symptomatic text, this essay discusses the implications, raised hysterically in the novel, of an unrestricted economy in which the ‘subject’ is no longer held in place by a governing (master or paternal) signifier in relation to a traditional symbolic order. The essay shows how Lacan's notion of ‘the Other’ has been reconfigured, in relation to consumer capitalism, such that it takes the form of a purely machinic imperative that turns the subject into an economically dividuated producing/product. The subject has become a little machine hooked up to the big machine that maintains it in debt in a continual process of consumption‐production of commodities, brands and identities.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"315 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132768801","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}
Pub Date : 2000-07-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367201
D. Inglis, J. Hughson
Abstract This article provides a critique of the postmodernist notion that there has been of recent years a dissolution of the divide between aesthetics and practical activities, between Art and Life. It does so by considering the game of soccer from a phenomenological viewpoint, which shows that the game possesses intrinsically ‘aesthetic’ qualities. The conditions of possibility of such qualities are understood by introducing the idea of the ‘proto‐aesthetics’ of soccer and other mundane phenomena. By considering the proto‐aesthetics of the quotidian we argue that recent changes in the nature of practical life should not be regarded as due to ‘aestheticisation’ but rather as springing from processes of commodification.
{"title":"The beautiful game and the proto‐aesthetics of the everyday","authors":"D. Inglis, J. Hughson","doi":"10.1080/14797580009367201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367201","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article provides a critique of the postmodernist notion that there has been of recent years a dissolution of the divide between aesthetics and practical activities, between Art and Life. It does so by considering the game of soccer from a phenomenological viewpoint, which shows that the game possesses intrinsically ‘aesthetic’ qualities. The conditions of possibility of such qualities are understood by introducing the idea of the ‘proto‐aesthetics’ of soccer and other mundane phenomena. By considering the proto‐aesthetics of the quotidian we argue that recent changes in the nature of practical life should not be regarded as due to ‘aestheticisation’ but rather as springing from processes of commodification.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122047845","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}
Pub Date : 2000-07-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367205
J. Higgins
Abstract A review article of Louis Menand (ed) 1996: The Future of Academic Freedom. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press and Bill Readings 1996: The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press.
{"title":"Academic freedom and the university","authors":"J. Higgins","doi":"10.1080/14797580009367205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367205","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A review article of Louis Menand (ed) 1996: The Future of Academic Freedom. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press and Bill Readings 1996: The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":" September","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131976246","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}
Pub Date : 2000-07-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367203
L. McFall
Abstract This paper sets out to review the role accorded to advertising in recent critical work. This work, I suggest, has been underscored by an ‘epochalist’ concern to map distinctions in the form of the culture/ economy relationship between the contemporary era and earlier periods. Significance has been accorded to the particular transformative potential of advertising and this is often related to research which emphasises the increasingly symbolic, persuasive and pervasive nature of advertising. In what follows, I make three central propositions. Firstly, I argue that writers on advertising share a number of concerns particularly about the effect the evolving nature of advertising has on the relationship between people and objects and between culture and economy. Secondly I suggest that these writers share with certain other critical theorists a very particular approach to the definition of key entities like meaning, culture and economy. These very particular definitions are pivotal to the epochalist explanation of advertising's role in the transformation of the culture/ economy relation. Finally, I attempt to show, through a brief look at historical uses of persuasion in advertising, that the problem with epochalist theory lies in a tendency to overgeneralise a wide range of specific forces.
{"title":"A mediating institution?: Using an historical study of advertising practice to rethink culture and economy","authors":"L. McFall","doi":"10.1080/14797580009367203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367203","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper sets out to review the role accorded to advertising in recent critical work. This work, I suggest, has been underscored by an ‘epochalist’ concern to map distinctions in the form of the culture/ economy relationship between the contemporary era and earlier periods. Significance has been accorded to the particular transformative potential of advertising and this is often related to research which emphasises the increasingly symbolic, persuasive and pervasive nature of advertising. In what follows, I make three central propositions. Firstly, I argue that writers on advertising share a number of concerns particularly about the effect the evolving nature of advertising has on the relationship between people and objects and between culture and economy. Secondly I suggest that these writers share with certain other critical theorists a very particular approach to the definition of key entities like meaning, culture and economy. These very particular definitions are pivotal to the epochalist explanation of advertising's role in the transformation of the culture/ economy relation. Finally, I attempt to show, through a brief look at historical uses of persuasion in advertising, that the problem with epochalist theory lies in a tendency to overgeneralise a wide range of specific forces.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122221621","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}
Pub Date : 2000-07-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367202
J. Street
Abstract How does music ‐ or any cultural artefact ‐ assume significance for those who encounter it? Why does one sound or image come to matter, while others are overlooked or forgotten? The answer is not to be found in the sounds alone, but in the context and conditions in which they are heard. This article explores this argument by considering the case of The Anthology of American Folk Music, a set of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, which has exercised an extraordinary power over popular music since its release in 1952. Using the arguments expounded by Robert Cantwell and Greil Marcus, and pointing to the uses of music in establishing national identities and mobilising social movements, the article argues for an understanding of music's significance that links social experience, aesthetic pleasure and political values.
{"title":"Invisible republics and secret histories: A politics of music","authors":"J. Street","doi":"10.1080/14797580009367202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367202","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract How does music ‐ or any cultural artefact ‐ assume significance for those who encounter it? Why does one sound or image come to matter, while others are overlooked or forgotten? The answer is not to be found in the sounds alone, but in the context and conditions in which they are heard. This article explores this argument by considering the case of The Anthology of American Folk Music, a set of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, which has exercised an extraordinary power over popular music since its release in 1952. Using the arguments expounded by Robert Cantwell and Greil Marcus, and pointing to the uses of music in establishing national identities and mobilising social movements, the article argues for an understanding of music's significance that links social experience, aesthetic pleasure and political values.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"31 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121132943","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}
Pub Date : 2000-07-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367204
G. Pattison
Abstract In ‘Defending the City’ George Pattison seeks to defend the modern city against the charge — made, for example, by Graham Ward — that it is a merely secular phenomenon. Instead, he argues that, in its essence, it is multi‐dimensional and pluralistic, representing a range of diverse possibilities, creative as well as destructive. Also, the modern city is shown to anticipate the essential features of the postmodern city. The argument is illustrated by references to Pugin's critique of architectural eclecticism, to Dostoevsky's invocation of the fantastical reality of St. Petersburg, to Kierkegaard and to Murnau's film Sunrise. It is claimed that the best Christian response to the city is to defend, not to subvert, its pluralism.
{"title":"Defending the city","authors":"G. Pattison","doi":"10.1080/14797580009367204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367204","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In ‘Defending the City’ George Pattison seeks to defend the modern city against the charge — made, for example, by Graham Ward — that it is a merely secular phenomenon. Instead, he argues that, in its essence, it is multi‐dimensional and pluralistic, representing a range of diverse possibilities, creative as well as destructive. Also, the modern city is shown to anticipate the essential features of the postmodern city. The argument is illustrated by references to Pugin's critique of architectural eclecticism, to Dostoevsky's invocation of the fantastical reality of St. Petersburg, to Kierkegaard and to Murnau's film Sunrise. It is claimed that the best Christian response to the city is to defend, not to subvert, its pluralism.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115167866","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}
Pub Date : 2000-07-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367200
A. Mackenzie
Abstract In the ways that they currently link images and bodies, online computer games are not just a new form of commodity. As toys, they also materialise a collective, historical temporality. Disjunctions in the timing and spacing of action in computer game play suggest a different kind of temporality might be involved in the formation of contemporary collectives. These games highlight the role of ‘realtime’ in the constitution of an experience of speed. Through Giorgio Agamben's notion of the whatever body, and a particular realtime game, this paper argues that computer games can help locate certain rhythms and times associated with globalised informatic collectives. The whatever body provides a way of negotiating the globalised yet inessential commonality of information, in terms of a temporality which wavers between a‐historical synchronisation and singular events.
{"title":"Losing time at the PlayStation: Realtime individuation and the whatever body","authors":"A. Mackenzie","doi":"10.1080/14797580009367200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367200","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the ways that they currently link images and bodies, online computer games are not just a new form of commodity. As toys, they also materialise a collective, historical temporality. Disjunctions in the timing and spacing of action in computer game play suggest a different kind of temporality might be involved in the formation of contemporary collectives. These games highlight the role of ‘realtime’ in the constitution of an experience of speed. Through Giorgio Agamben's notion of the whatever body, and a particular realtime game, this paper argues that computer games can help locate certain rhythms and times associated with globalised informatic collectives. The whatever body provides a way of negotiating the globalised yet inessential commonality of information, in terms of a temporality which wavers between a‐historical synchronisation and singular events.","PeriodicalId":296129,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Values","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134331538","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}