Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-8593595
J. Darlington
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
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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
在这本书中，圣克鲁斯加州大学艺术史和视觉文化教授t.j. Demos将人类世描述为一个抽象的概念，为理解人类提供了一种简化的方法。正如Demos所表明的那样，人类世这个标签似乎是资本主义的一个操纵性结构，旨在同化、控制和掩盖人类的差异本质。相反，艺术历史学家和文化评论家Demos将人类描绘成一个不愿表达自己为一体的差异振动场。通过这种坚持，Demos使我们看到资本主义利益是如何利用人类世的普遍逻辑，将资本家、公司和石化工业带来的环境破坏归咎于全人类。根据Demos的说法，有必要抵制通过参与像人类世这样的总体叙事来模糊企业责任，这种叙事将消费主义人类活动的当代归化视为环境退化的唯一肇事者。相反，我们必须关注环境活动家和无力的社区，他们反对环境退化，或成为环境退化的受害者，并在此过程中使人类中心主义站不住脚。在他的书的前两章中，Demos揭示了资本主义的策略，这些策略使人类世的概念得以流传。他展示了资本主义如何利用卫星引导的人类破坏生态活动的图像来牵连整个人类。这些图像为B o o o o o o o o o提供了基础
{"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-8593494
A. Koutsourakis
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.
{"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-8593508
Ethan Stoneman
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.
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Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-8593522
M. Featherstone, Mark Mehdi Saadeti
{"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Pub Date : 2020-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-8233476
N. Douglas
{"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Pub Date : 2020-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-8233392
Sarah Hayden
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.
摘要:“New Eelam”是一个基于云的数字订阅住房项目，为自由的“全球公民”提供理想的家园，他们实践高流动性、后政治乌托邦主义和极简主义的室内设计。这篇文章揭示了艺术家克里斯托弗·库伦德兰·托马斯作品中这种非物质化存在的梦想的政治和文化意义。这篇文章将艺术对象的非物质化映射到云计算和极简主义生活方式的非物质化上，讨论了两个正在进行的系列:当陈词滥调成为形式(2012 -)和新伊拉姆(2016 -)。首先，它探讨了新伊拉姆如何征召其公众将自己想象成道德和美学上优越的新世界秩序的先锋。然后，它使用了库伦德兰·托马斯(Kulendran Thomas)对1969年展览《活在你的脑海里》(Live in Your Head)的潜台词。《当态度变成形式》分析这个“数字现实”中的实验是如何利用非物质化来唤起人们对当代艺术市场、大规模移民和地缘政治现实之间关系的迫切认识。
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