Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9964913
J. Bowsher
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Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9964787
Sergio Meijide Casas
Unlike its English version, first published in 2011, Discours, figure was published in Spanish in 1979, four years after Francisco Franco's death, during the Spanish transition to democracy. The relevance of this information is connected to the fact that the man who introduced Lyotard to the Spanish intellectual scene was the now controversial Spanish liberal-conservative journalist Federico Jiménez Losantos. However, at the time, Losantos was not only known for being an unwavering supporter of Maoism, but he was also among the first promoters of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Barcelona and one of the main theorists devoted to the study of reductive abstraction in Spain. The purpose of this article is threefold, as it intends to (1) break down the publishing dynamics that led to Lyotard's work being translated into Spanish so early on; (2) delve into the context of that translation within a very specific framework, which is the shift toward liberalism of many post-’68 Maoists; and (3) analyze the poor reception of Lyotard's work by the Spanish-speaking public. To approach these questions, this article resorts to one of the fundamental premises of the economy of desire that Lyotard postulated in the 1970s: that any research on political economy must be paired with an analysis of its libidinal economy.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9716282
A. Means, Graham B. Slater
Abstract:Who can imagine a future today? Any sense of progress, or belief in the future, appears as merely another exclusive privilege of the ultrarich. Time seems to be accelerating faster than catastrophic trajectories can be metabolized. Meanwhile, hypermodern capitalism is eroding its own conditions of possibility, intensifying historical injuries and societal fractures, and destabilizing modern assumptions regarding space, time, and security. The supposed end of history that characterized the neoliberal era has morphed into a reckoning with the end of a world — perhaps not the world as such, but the world as it is being made and unmade by the spatial, temporal, racial, linguistic, technological, and imperial drives of hypermodern capitalism, particularly its global, financialized, and algorithmic forms. Scholars of political economy have drawn attention to the fracturing of the neoliberal phase of late capitalism and its hegemonic constellation, and how this fracture has led to a moment of historical uncertainty and transition in the dynamics of power and contestation across societies. Similarly, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have highlighted the existential and political challenges presented by the Anthropocene’s apocalyptic implications. This article argues that the dialectical crises of capitalism and ecology are converging in a cultural condition of collective disorientation: a return of history bereft of futurity. Through an analysis of catastrophic precarity in the hypermodern era, the article tracks collective disorientation and catastrophic precarity across four registers — accumulation, time, space, and agency — before ending with a discussion of implications of the analysis for alternative orientations.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9716210
B. Stiegler, Danielle Ross
Every human being, whatever his race, nationality, religion or politics, is capable of anything and everything. A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on the subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol. — Chester Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9716225
James Dutton
This article takes up German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's attention to air and atmospheres to argue for the influential part “objective” thinking plays in disseminating viral pandemics. It follows Sloterdijk's broad approach to “air-conditioning” to interpret the way modern cultures increasingly work to explicate and construct objective figures of (and in) air. A fundamental, yet invisible, “anthropopoietic” element, air resists the forms and figures we use to describe it. This is acutely demonstrated by airborne viruses like COVID-19 and the pandemics they create, where the medial willingness to perceive or “figure” the air becomes a critical, everyday necessity. When Sloterdijk attributes the spread of “affective epidemics” to mass-media technologies, he draws attention to how airborne transmission is a symptom of breathing the same air, which, by affecting and altering air-conditions to reproduce identical figures all across the globe, increases its spread. This article argues that the willingness to make air objective—in both senses of identifying its material properties, and believing in a uniform or consensus figure—eradicates the possibility of vital difference. In doing so, inhabiting what Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior” of reproducible sameness that props up international exchange, modern, globalized culture becomes far more susceptible to the rapid spread of epidemics. Virality is increased by the sameness of objective air-conditioning, and by reintroducing difference into the atmosphere we can bring back its life-giving potential.
{"title":"Objective Breathing","authors":"James Dutton","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9716225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9716225","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article takes up German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's attention to air and atmospheres to argue for the influential part “objective” thinking plays in disseminating viral pandemics. It follows Sloterdijk's broad approach to “air-conditioning” to interpret the way modern cultures increasingly work to explicate and construct objective figures of (and in) air. A fundamental, yet invisible, “anthropopoietic” element, air resists the forms and figures we use to describe it. This is acutely demonstrated by airborne viruses like COVID-19 and the pandemics they create, where the medial willingness to perceive or “figure” the air becomes a critical, everyday necessity. When Sloterdijk attributes the spread of “affective epidemics” to mass-media technologies, he draws attention to how airborne transmission is a symptom of breathing the same air, which, by affecting and altering air-conditions to reproduce identical figures all across the globe, increases its spread. This article argues that the willingness to make air objective—in both senses of identifying its material properties, and believing in a uniform or consensus figure—eradicates the possibility of vital difference. In doing so, inhabiting what Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior” of reproducible sameness that props up international exchange, modern, globalized culture becomes far more susceptible to the rapid spread of epidemics. Virality is increased by the sameness of objective air-conditioning, and by reintroducing difference into the atmosphere we can bring back its life-giving potential.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83186887","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9716338
H. Powell
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9716182
Abstract:The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler published Pharmacologie du Front national in 2013. It is above all a response to the 2012 French presidential election, which, despite the election of François Hollande, gave evidence of the rising influence of the far-right National Front, and thus of a growing regressive tendency in the politics of the Western representative democracies. But Stiegler’s concern in this regard can be traced back to his first book and is present throughout his work, which has always been concerned with the positive technical (default of) origin of the conjunction of desire and knowledge, and the irreducibility of the tendency for these to be undermined by what he will call the negative pharmacological side of technics. In Pharmacologie du Front national, he draws attention to a third dimension of the pharmakon: its tendency to lead to the designation of the pharmakos, or the scapegoat, as that negative side takes hold. For Stiegler, the industrial populism characteristic of today’s consumerist economico-technological model inevitably and dangerously leads to political populism. He thus calls for a new critique of ideology, one that returns to its starting point in Marx and Engels, overcomes the limitations of Marxist and Althusserian materialisms that ultimately remain grounded in an oppositional metaphysics, and provides new practical and conceptual weapons in the struggle against contemporary ideology, whose essential motto is that “there is no alternative.”
摘要:法国哲学家斯蒂格勒(Bernard Stiegler)于2013年出版《Pharmacologie du Front national》。这首先是对2012年法国总统大选的回应，尽管弗朗索瓦·奥朗德(francois Hollande)当选，但那次大选证明了极右翼的国民阵线(National Front)的影响力不断上升，从而表明西方代议制民主国家的政治日益倒退。但斯蒂格勒在这方面的关注可以追溯到他的第一本书，并贯穿他的整个作品，他一直关注的是欲望和知识结合的积极技术(默认)起源，以及这种趋势的不可约性，这种趋势被他称之为技术的消极药理方面所破坏。在《国民阵线药理学》一书中，他将人们的注意力引向了制药商的第三个维度:当消极的一面占据上风时，它往往会导致制药商被指定为替罪羊。斯蒂格勒认为，当今消费主义经济技术模式的工业民粹主义特征不可避免地危险地导致政治民粹主义。因此，他呼吁对意识形态进行一种新的批判，这种批判要回到马克思和恩格斯的起点，克服马克思主义和阿尔都塞唯物主义最终仍以对立形而上学为基础的局限性，并为与当代意识形态的斗争提供新的实践和概念武器，当代意识形态的基本座右铭是“别无选择”。
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9716310
J. Dutkiewicz
Consider the Get Well card. Sending a card like this to someone convalescing from an injury or, more likely in our pandemic present, a disease, on the face of it does very little for the afflicted party. It’s just a gesture. One that says “Hey, I’m here, I’m thinking of you.” The card’s value, writes Chris Ingraham in Gestures of Concern, “lies less in being effective than in being expressive” (2). Taken together, however, far from being either explicitly political or entirely trite, “noninstrumental expressive acts” like sending Get Well cards serve to “enact a spirit of sociality that builds an affective commonwealth” (2). Ingraham, a professor of communication at the University of Utah, argues that as scholars and citizens we need to pay more attention to forms of relations, communication, and rhetoric that go beyond the explicit, verbal, and instrumental, to those that subtly and often imperceptibly shape the affective worlds we inhabit. While scholars of cultural politics have long been concerned with finding the political in the personal and quotidian, Ingraham asks us to think of those everyday actions that prefigure or skirt the political, but that nonetheless help shape the affective commonwealth we inhabit and where our politics are formed. Ingraham’s project is neither prescriptive nor normative; he does not call for anyone to engage in any specific gestures of concern, nor does he suggest that individual actions will in and of themselves contribute to lasting political or even affective changes. Rather, his is a call for attunement to everyday rhetoric and action. This is a welcome invitation. In almost everything we do, we both start from and help create affects and dispositions “that orient us to one another and to B o o k R e v i e w
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