Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1515/culture-2020-0014
J. Gilbert
Abstract Attitudes to digital communication technologies since the 1990s have been characterized by waves of optimism and pessimism, as enthusiasts have highlighted their democratic and liberating potentials, while critics have pointed to the socially, politically and psychologically deleterious consequences of unchecked digital capitalism. This paper seeks to develop an analytical framework capable of appreciating and assessing the capacities of such technologies both to genuinely enhance democratic agency, and to become tools through which capitalist power is enhanced with widespread negative consequences. The paper in particular deploys my concept of ‘potent collectivity’ in order to name the type of democratic agency that such media technologies can be seen both to enable and enhance under certain circumstances, and to inhibit under others. It also considers the affective qualities of ‘potent collectivity’, and in particular the utility of a Deleuzo-Spinozan concept of ‘collective joy’ as designating the affective quality typical of ‘potent collectivity’. The paper uses the specific example of left-wing political activism in the UK during the period 2015-17 to illustrate the potential for platform technologies to enable new forms of democratic mobilization, while arguing for an analytical position that eschews any simple celebration of the liberating potential of new technologies; remaining sensitive to the negative features of ‘platform capitalism’.
{"title":"Platforms and Potency: Democracy and Collective Agency in the Age of Social Media","authors":"J. Gilbert","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Attitudes to digital communication technologies since the 1990s have been characterized by waves of optimism and pessimism, as enthusiasts have highlighted their democratic and liberating potentials, while critics have pointed to the socially, politically and psychologically deleterious consequences of unchecked digital capitalism. This paper seeks to develop an analytical framework capable of appreciating and assessing the capacities of such technologies both to genuinely enhance democratic agency, and to become tools through which capitalist power is enhanced with widespread negative consequences. The paper in particular deploys my concept of ‘potent collectivity’ in order to name the type of democratic agency that such media technologies can be seen both to enable and enhance under certain circumstances, and to inhibit under others. It also considers the affective qualities of ‘potent collectivity’, and in particular the utility of a Deleuzo-Spinozan concept of ‘collective joy’ as designating the affective quality typical of ‘potent collectivity’. The paper uses the specific example of left-wing political activism in the UK during the period 2015-17 to illustrate the potential for platform technologies to enable new forms of democratic mobilization, while arguing for an analytical position that eschews any simple celebration of the liberating potential of new technologies; remaining sensitive to the negative features of ‘platform capitalism’.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"154 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43112489","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 : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1515/culture-2020-0001
S. Trinder
Abstract Spatial fixing was an integral part of maintaining imperial power structures throughout the colonial period, and like other discourses, it later found itself reproduced in cinema. As such, the physical and mental use of space has become key to the dissemination of ideological messages in many films. Confronting this tendency, this study applies theories of postcolonialism to selected examples of contemporary Hollywood film to examine how far it reconstructs traditional binaries of space. This investigation finds that despite attempts to disseminate more culturally sensitive and globally-minded portrayals of the Other, space remains particularly problematic. It also remains vital to storytelling narratives of race, gender, class and society in consideration of the film cases analysed in this study. While Fanonian notions of space continue to permeate cinema—with Total Recall and Avatar in particular drawing upon stereotypical motifs, it is possible to observe developments upon these discourses. Elysium and District 9 exemplify this, with each feature employing space to address increased questioning of US cultural superiority since the failed Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and the 2008 global economic crash.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1515/culture-2020-0005
Gabriela Loureiro
Abstract The aim of this article is to pay tribute to Marielle Franco, a Brazilian LGBTQ+ Black activist from the favela who was brutally executed in March 14, 2018. Taking Marielle’s life and death as a case study, I will demonstrate how she embodied Black feminist theory and practice and how her execution can be better addressed by situating it within the context of spatialities of race and the necropolitical governance of Rio de Janeiro.
{"title":"To be Black, Queer and Radical: Centring the epistemology of Marielle Franco","authors":"Gabriela Loureiro","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The aim of this article is to pay tribute to Marielle Franco, a Brazilian LGBTQ+ Black activist from the favela who was brutally executed in March 14, 2018. Taking Marielle’s life and death as a case study, I will demonstrate how she embodied Black feminist theory and practice and how her execution can be better addressed by situating it within the context of spatialities of race and the necropolitical governance of Rio de Janeiro.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"50 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44257406","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 : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1515/culture-2020-0002
Kamal Sbiri
Abstract This article examines the construction of transcultural identity as it results from the process of border crossing in Tahir Shah’s The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca (2007. London: Bantam Books). Whereas mobility is mostly characterized by the movement from north to south, The Caliph’s House describes an inverted motion from England to Casablanca in search for belonging. With his roots in Afganistan and historical ties with Morocco, Tahir Shah provides new narrative lines that delve into questions of alterity, mobility, and negotiating difference when crossing borders. With this in mind, I aim to show how alterity is refracted within the migrant’s identity. In so doing, I seek to clarify how this refraction helps in producing forms of selves that recognize all notions of silences and transform them metonymically into moments of conversation. With the help of Stephen Clingman’s theory on transnational literature, I will show that integration can be achieved successfully when difference is negotiated as part of the process of bordering.
摘要本文在塔希尔·沙阿（Tahir Shah）的《哈里发之家：卡萨布兰卡的一年》（the Caliph’s House：A Year in Casablanca）（2007）中考察了跨文化身份的构建，因为它是跨越边境过程的结果。伦敦：Bantam Books）。虽然流动性主要表现为从北向南的流动，但《哈里发之家》描述了从英格兰到卡萨布兰卡寻找归属的反向流动。塔希尔·沙阿植根于阿富汗，与摩洛哥有着历史联系，他提供了新的叙事线索，深入探讨了跨越边境时的争吵、流动性和谈判分歧等问题。考虑到这一点，我的目的是展示移民身份中的矛盾是如何折射的。在这样做的过程中，我试图澄清这种折射是如何帮助产生自我形式的，这些自我形式识别沉默的所有概念，并将其转喻转化为对话时刻。借助斯蒂芬·克林格曼的跨国文学理论，我将表明，当差异作为边界过程的一部分进行谈判时，可以成功地实现一体化。
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Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1515/culture-2020-0009
Chhandita Das, P. Tripathi
Abstract Contemporary times have triggered for an interdisciplinary cusp between disciplines that were conventionally read in a hinged academic encore. The Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ near Allahabad city where three holy rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati converge, is believed to be the holiest riverscape as one drop of amrit (nectar) during ocean churning by Gods and demons fell into its water and therefore, bathing and dipping in this sangam or confluence is considered auspicious. It is not that people only experience such spiritual values, rather internalize the same, even sometimes beyond religious restraints formulating a holistic human and ecological bonding. Therefore, river or for that matter riverscape like sangam transcends the environmental physical boundary to the living one as it shapes people’s experiences and accordingly adds meaning in their lives. Indian English author Neelum Saran Gour’s fictional representation of the riverscape of Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ in her select writings like Allahabad Aria (2015), Invisible Ink (2015), and Requiem in Raga Janki (2018) are woven within the interdisciplinary framework of ‘eco-spirituality’. The present research will examine how riverscape as an eco-spiritual entity shapes individuals’ experiences and helps them to locate the ‘self’ both in vyashti (the individual) and samashti (the collective) scale.
{"title":"Experiencing the Riverscape: An Eco-Spiritual Decoding of Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ in select writings of Neelum Saran Gour","authors":"Chhandita Das, P. Tripathi","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Contemporary times have triggered for an interdisciplinary cusp between disciplines that were conventionally read in a hinged academic encore. The Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ near Allahabad city where three holy rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati converge, is believed to be the holiest riverscape as one drop of amrit (nectar) during ocean churning by Gods and demons fell into its water and therefore, bathing and dipping in this sangam or confluence is considered auspicious. It is not that people only experience such spiritual values, rather internalize the same, even sometimes beyond religious restraints formulating a holistic human and ecological bonding. Therefore, river or for that matter riverscape like sangam transcends the environmental physical boundary to the living one as it shapes people’s experiences and accordingly adds meaning in their lives. Indian English author Neelum Saran Gour’s fictional representation of the riverscape of Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ in her select writings like Allahabad Aria (2015), Invisible Ink (2015), and Requiem in Raga Janki (2018) are woven within the interdisciplinary framework of ‘eco-spirituality’. The present research will examine how riverscape as an eco-spiritual entity shapes individuals’ experiences and helps them to locate the ‘self’ both in vyashti (the individual) and samashti (the collective) scale.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"96 - 106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48088068","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 : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1515/culture-2020-0015
Selena Savić, Viktor Bedö, Michaela Büsse, Y. Martins, Shintaro Miyazaki
Abstract This article explores the use of agent-based modelling as a critical and playful form of engagement with cooperative housing organizations. Because of its inherent complexities vis-à-vis decision-making, commoning is a well-suited field of study to explore the potential of humanities-driven experimental design (media) research to provoke critical reflection, problem-finding and productive complication. By introducing two different agent-based models, the interdisciplinary research team discusses their experience with setting up parameters for modelling, their implications, and the possibilities and limits of employing modelling techniques as a basis for decision-making. While it shows that modelling can be helpful in detecting long-term results of decisions or testing out effects of unlikely yet challenging events, modelling might act as a discursive practice uncovering hidden assumptions inherent in the model setup and generating an increase of scientific uncertainty. The project “ThinkingToys for Commoning” thus argues for a critical modelling practice and culture, in which models act as toys for probing alternative modes of living together and exploring the constructedness of methods. In countering late forms of capitalism, the resulting situated and critical practice provides avenues for enabling more self-determined forms of governance.
{"title":"Toys for Conviviality. Situating Commoning, Computation and Modelling","authors":"Selena Savić, Viktor Bedö, Michaela Büsse, Y. Martins, Shintaro Miyazaki","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the use of agent-based modelling as a critical and playful form of engagement with cooperative housing organizations. Because of its inherent complexities vis-à-vis decision-making, commoning is a well-suited field of study to explore the potential of humanities-driven experimental design (media) research to provoke critical reflection, problem-finding and productive complication. By introducing two different agent-based models, the interdisciplinary research team discusses their experience with setting up parameters for modelling, their implications, and the possibilities and limits of employing modelling techniques as a basis for decision-making. While it shows that modelling can be helpful in detecting long-term results of decisions or testing out effects of unlikely yet challenging events, modelling might act as a discursive practice uncovering hidden assumptions inherent in the model setup and generating an increase of scientific uncertainty. The project “ThinkingToys for Commoning” thus argues for a critical modelling practice and culture, in which models act as toys for probing alternative modes of living together and exploring the constructedness of methods. In countering late forms of capitalism, the resulting situated and critical practice provides avenues for enabling more self-determined forms of governance.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"143 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47729331","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 : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1515/culture-2020-0011
Frank Adloff
Abstract The paper develops a concept of conviviality as a form of friendly togetherness that includes people, technical infrastructures and nature. Therefore, Marcel Mauss’s concept of the gift, different strands of thinking about conviviality (e.g. Ivan Illich), John Dewey’ experimentalism and the political theory and movement of convivialism are firstly depicted and discussed. The goal, secondly, is to integrate these various theoretical perspectives in order a) to better grasp already existent forms of conviviality and to b) develop an analytical and normative standpoint that on the one hand helps to evaluate unsustainable, non-convivial and on the other convivial forms of living together. Thus, such an analytical and normative model of modes of conviviality points out that associative self-organisation is decisive for the theory and practice of conviviality. Exchange without remuneration (between people and between people and nature) as well as self-organised gathering can be seen as the basis of a convivial social order which is differentiated from a solely instrumental, unsustainable and monetarily defined version of prosperity and the good life.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1515/culture-2020-0007
F. Trento
Abstract According to the philosopher Fabián Ludueña, before biopolitics, Rome and Greece put in motion the zoopolitics of an Anthropotechnical machine. The practice of expositio is the foundational zoopolitical human gesture. It consisted of leaving new-born children exposed at street markets to be sold as slaves, or in nature, left to survive (or die). The spectres of those body-minds still haunt our onto-epistemologies: by creatively fabulating with Ludueña’s work, I suggest looking back to the broken chains of the production of able bodies instead of perpetuating the reproductive futurity. Ludueña’s work investigates how and why the figure of the spectre gradually disappeared from the discursive milieu, and why it needs to be brought back into the spotlight. Its potential resides in its existence between binary categories like God and human, man and animal, male and female. It queers, defying epistemological boundaries, what it means to be dead or alive. Melanie Yergeau employs the term “neuroqueer” to talk about the non-neurotypical and queer subjectivities that are a continuum of indiscernibility and are violently dislodged into binary categories. In the conclusion, I argue for operationalising the concept of the spectre to help to short-circuit the able-neurotypical and heteronormative futurism, looking back to the ghosts of the exposed children.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1515/culture-2020-0012
B. Ronge
Abstract The article sets out the thesis that the social-ontological account based on the form of life concept can be used to analytically and normatively reflect alternative economies and their attempt to overcome capitalistic structures.2 To develop the thesis, I provide conceptual work on the “economic form of life”, pointing at its plasticity due to the general substitutability of economic practices. Against this background, I argue that Capitalism makes use of this plasticity to create a fully commodified, radical contingent form of life. Actors of alternative economies can wake up of from this dream world of Capitalism by using the substitutability of economic practices to deconstruct the capitalist form of life. The two most important practices for doing so are the practices of “in-sourcing” and “solidary out-sourcing”. They also reveal the normative kernel of conviviality, namely to seek to do justice to the economicity of human life. The paper ends with locating the presented form-of-life-account within the strand of literature on alternative economies.
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Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1515/culture-2020-0013
Andreas Beinsteiner
Abstract In his book Tools for Conviviality (1975), Ivan Illich calls for human self-limitation in technology development. His aim is neither environmental protection nor the prevention of unforeseen side-effects of technology development, but the comprehensibility of technologies’ operating principles for the user. For if the construction or repairing of tools requires expert knowledge inaccessible to the public, this necessarily entails social imbalances in power. In a similar manner, Bernard Stiegler conceives the delegation of know-how to technological systems as a kind of proletarianization that ultimately may result in a loss of savoir-vivre. Without sweepingly rejecting the division of labour, automation or specialized knowledge, practices of commoning respond to such diagnoses: free software like GNU/Linux or open hardware largely succeed in unlinking the expert knowledge that advanced computing doubtlessly requires from problematic power effects. From this perspective, proprietary algorithms are problematic, as their lack of transparency prevents conviviality. This also holds for the practices of data aggregation and extraction which steadily increase the information gap between platform providers and users. An even more fundamental problem is posed by so-called “self-learning”, i.e., recursively adapting, algorithms: it is not clear how and to what extent the knowledge and instructions generated by “artificial intelligence” can be traced and reconstructed by human insight. Thus, we are confronted with a situation of potentially non-recoverable proletarianization and non-conviviality that exposes a renewed urgency of Illich’s considerations concerning technological self-limitation.
Ivan Illich在1975年出版的《Tools for conviality》一书中呼吁人类在技术发展中要有自我限制。他的目的既不是保护环境，也不是防止技术发展的不可预见的副作用，而是使用户能够理解技术的操作原理。因为如果工具的建造或修理需要公众无法获得的专业知识，这必然导致社会权力的不平衡。以类似的方式，伯纳德·斯蒂格勒(Bernard Stiegler)认为，将技术诀窍委托给技术系统，是一种无产阶级化，最终可能导致失去生活技巧。在没有彻底否定劳动分工、自动化或专业知识的情况下，对这样的诊断做出普遍反应的做法:像GNU/Linux这样的自由软件或开放硬件在很大程度上成功地将高级计算无疑需要的专家知识与有问题的权力效应分离开来。从这个角度来看，专有算法是有问题的，因为它们缺乏透明度，阻碍了合欢性。这也适用于数据聚合和提取的实践，这些实践稳步增加了平台提供商和用户之间的信息差距。所谓的“自我学习”(即递归自适应算法)带来了一个更根本的问题:目前尚不清楚“人工智能”产生的知识和指令如何以及在多大程度上可以被人类的洞察力追踪和重建。因此，我们面临着一种潜在的不可恢复的无产阶级化和非愉悦性的情况，这暴露了伊里奇关于技术自我限制的考虑的新的紧迫性。
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