Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10434475
Uluğ Kuzuoğlu
Shaoling Ma's Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861–1906 is an investigation of mediation in the final decades of the Qing empire (1644–1912), when China was forcefully incorporated into an uneven world order. The beautifully titled book foregrounds mediation rather than media as a theoretical framework for scrutinizing the relationship between media technologies and discursive practices. It constantly straddles the fluid border between technologies of inscription and their cultural, literary, and symbolic ramifications. In contrast to many recent studies, Ma does not treat media technologies as discrete artifacts. This is not a book on a singular medium like the phonograph or the telegraph. Understanding late Qing technology and culture, she argues, can take place only through demonstrating how different media bled into one another both technologically and discursively. As such, instead of taking a single medium, she explores them all. It's a whirlwind of ideas. Print, photography, stereography, telegraphy, and phonography appear together with diplomatic records, poetry, and science fiction.The Stone and the Wireless follows a rather unusual time frame. It starts in 1861 with the establishment of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Zongli Yamen) and ends with the establishment of the Ministry of Posts and Communications (Youchuan Bu) in 1906. The two dates mark a period in which the Qing witnessed an unprecedented transformation in diplomacy, bureaucracy, and communications. But this book is far from a structural analysis of these transformations. It is a meditation on mediation, as it follows the late Qing figures who contemplated the new world through new media. From diplomats to feminists, late Qing intellectuals lived and thought through the new technologies that surrounded them. The number of figures and themes covered in this book is impressive.Ma frames her book through three loaded concepts in three parts: “Recordings” (ji), “Transmission/Biography” (chuan/zhuan), and “Interconnectivity” (tong). Familiar to all China scholars, these terms acquire new meanings in Ma's work as she uses them for theorizing media in a late Qing context. While each of these mediatic practices has existed for centuries in China, their nineteenth-century reincarnations offer a fruitful ground to explore the technological, literary, and gendered entanglements of media and mediation. “Recordings” reflects on the medium of diplomatic and official records along with other technologies of inscription such as the phonograph. “Transmission/Biography” explores the mediations between femininity, technology, and sentimentality. “Interconnectivity,” the personal favorite of this reviewer, examines the infrastructural transformations that altered both Chinese literary thought and the representations of China in Western media.Literary scholars, media scholars, and historians will find a lot to think with in this book, as Ma brings together poetry, telegraphy, photograp
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10909672
Jussi Parikka
Abstract This article addresses the question of the planetary through three practices that relate to design and architectural pedagogy and research as well as the broader context of Anthropocene discussions. From Strelka Institute's Terraforming program to the Terra Forma book by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes, and Axelle Grégoire and a discussion of the Royal College of Art's architecture program's studio “Something in the Air: Politics of the Atmosphere,” the article focuses on framing of “problem spaces” (Celia Lury's term) through studio briefs as well as experimental visualization and mapping. While discussing methodological underpinnings of planetarity as a problem space, the article mobilizes the neologism “natural history of logistics” to analyze practices of scale in the critical design studio briefs and discourses at the center of the article. The term is pitched as a temporary conceptual anchor for a relation specific to the technological framing of a polyscalar Earth.
本文通过与设计和建筑教育学和研究以及人类世讨论的更广泛背景相关的三个实践来解决行星问题。从Strelka Institute的Terraforming项目到frsamdsamrique Aït-Touati、Alexandra ar nes和Axelle grsamuire的Terra Forma书籍，以及对皇家艺术学院建筑项目的工作室“Something in the Air: Politics of the Atmosphere”的讨论，这篇文章着重于通过工作室简报以及实验性的可视化和绘图来构建“问题空间”(Celia Lury的术语)。在讨论行星作为问题空间的方法论基础时，文章运用新词“物流的自然史”来分析文章中心关键设计工作室简报和话语中的规模实践。这个术语被定位为一个临时的概念锚，用于特定于多标量地球的技术框架的关系。
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10434391
Senel Wanniarachchi
Abstract While existing scholarship is largely interested in exploring how a particular (nonhuman) animal symbol is mobilized to support a specific exclusionary agenda, what happens when the very nation is imagined as a “web” of different constituent “species”? In this article, the author examines four nonhuman animal symbols—the lion, the tiger, the pig, and the butterfly, which have been mobilized in Sri Lanka to delineate (imaginary) boundaries between different communities that reside there. The article combines critical animal studies and nationalism studies scholarship with affect theory to complicate the current understandings on the relationships between animality, affect, and nationalism. A focus on affect, the author argues, can open up a line of inquiry that is invisible to our current accounts on the relationships between animality and nationalism by demonstrating how animality can be instrumentalized as a tool for not only domination and subordination but also subversion, refusal, and contestation. Tracing the different ways in which animality gets mobilized to represent various communities that reside within the nation, the article highlights the complex ways in which animality can be mobilized within nation-building and how bodies negotiate and respond to such assignations.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10434461
Margrit Shildrick
Hot on the heels of a spate of her own previous books addressing the posthuman, Rosi Braidotti has turned the full focus of her gaze on the uniquely feminist perspective that has nurtured the development of the field. Posthuman Feminism makes a strong case that feminist thought, as far back as the early second wave, has set out many of the grounds on which this highly pertinent—and urgent—area of study has been built. A scholar at the heart of feminist philosophy as it threw off its more reformist aims in the 1990s, Braidotti has always been notable for her ability to rethink the significance of her own research and not fall into the trap of believing that there is one single answer that would disassemble the structures of patriarchy to the benefit of not just women, but all the other others. Posthuman Feminism is deeply inclusive in its reach and committed to a traversality that demands the attention of academics across the humanities and social sciences.Right from the start, the structure of the book makes clear its investments, with part 1 focusing on posthuman feminism as critique, and the more lengthy part 2 turning to posthuman feminism as creation. Braidotti is nothing if not thoroughly apprised of the dangers of the contemporary global situation—and here COVID-19 is an inevitable intruder into the text, alongside the climate crisis, the reemergence of white supremacist beliefs and values and much more—but she is also optimistic that feminist thought can chart a way out to a more vital and all-encompassing futurity. As in her previous work, she frequently references the two meanings of power, derived from Spinoza, as either potestas—the power to dominate—or potentia, the emergent power of self-affirmative action. The latter is what feminism has always brought to the table, and Braidotti puts great emphasis throughout on her claim that intergenerational feminist analyses have been an important precursor of contemporary posthuman theory. Even though it still clings to the embodied human subject as its major referent, emancipatory thought must be appreciated for its embrace of vilified and devalued subjects—women in general, and especially LGBTQ+, disabled, Indigenous, and colonized peoples—but now is the time for progressive thinkers to dis-identify with what the convention understands as human. In her subsequent critique, Braidotti opens up the field to acknowledge that the voices of the socially and politically unheard have played an extensive role in developing posthuman thought. Her turn to less familiar feminist scholars writing out of the experience of being Black or Indigenous, sexually excluded, environmentally attuned, or anomalously embodied is an important corrective to the mainstream history of (effectively white) feminism. Her contention is that it is precisely these other others who have thought beyond the boundaries of the human and seen the affinities that develop a posthuman understanding of the world and all its living elem
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10434349
Taylor Mitchell
Abstract This article analyzes Tash Aw's novel We, the Survivors and Jewel Maranan's documentary film In the Claws of a Century Wanting, works that trace a poetics of survival as neoliberalism's good-life fantasies become decreasingly credible. It proposes that Aw's and Maranan's texts delineate part of a framework for narrating endurance under capitalism, contributing to an archive of detachment from neoliberal narrativity. Capitalism's modes of violence are embedded in ordinary life and legitimized through a pervasive neoliberal ideology that espouses heroic individualism, personal responsibility, and free-market dynamics. The politics of everyday worlds interpreted through neoliberal storytelling fail to show the contested entanglements of affect and exhaustion that make up endurance under capitalism. The texts analyzed here present their subjects as nonsovereign and embedded in the nonhomogeneous project of global capitalism and engage an eventfulness that exposes capitalism's subtle modes of violence. Moreover, through an ambiguous construction of subjects, they orient readers toward an implicated solidarity while refusing to locate a resolution within neoliberal ontology. This article contributes to the emergent aesthetics of survival detached from the good life promise of neoliberalism.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10434489
Anke Finger
What do you associate with the word laboratory or lab? The various images, imprinted on the minds of many Western readers of fiction—think Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (1818)—or fans of the (mad) scientist depicted over the history of film, oscillating somewhere between genius, God, and gangster, have left a certain taste of unease or discontent, to reference a Freudian title. Didn't COVID-19 arise from a lab, so the controversy goes? But then, didn't the COVID vaccinations also arise from labs?The LAB Book arrives at an auspicious moment: a worldwide pandemic certainly invites new debates about the cultural politics of laboratories. Importantly, this book invites us to think about and rethink what a lab is, what it can and cannot do, and how we engage with it as a cultural phenomenon of experimentation, knowledge production, and actor or facilitator for creating approaches to our world's complex problems. The authors fittingly start out by marking the term's inflationary application in that “the first difficulty in talking about labs with any precision is that the metaphor of the lab has permeated contemporary culture to the degree that it can apply to just about anything” (1). They suggest a heuristic they call “the extended laboratory model” to address and analyze what they designate as a “lab discourse” that “invoke[s] an entire network of power relations” (6) To structure the cultural history of this discourse, the book is divided into six chapters, each of which presents an aspect of the extended laboratory model concept: space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, the imaginary, and techniques. The approach is comparative—although this reader considers it phenomenological as well—and emerges from the three authors’ background in media archeology and media studies. As such, they revise Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's definition of a lab—“scientific activity is not about ‘nature,’ it is a fierce fight to construct reality”—as put forth in their study on Laboratory Life as a social environment from 1986. Instead, Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka propose a lab's “cultural and media (studies) activity . . . as a fierce fight to construct and deconstruct the material contexts of how culture comes about” (25). Labs, then, are very much the hybrid spaces where culture happens.The focus on hybridity presents another of the main arguments in this book whereby the notion of the word lab as signifier is broadened and deepened, given its application in numerous areas (arts, humanities, social sciences, natural or hard sciences, design, architecture, maker spaces, studios, public/private). The discussion of the main aspects or elements—space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, the imaginary, and techniques—over the six chapters is necessarily, instructively, and thankfully interdisciplinary. Each chapter, including the introduction but excluding chapter 6, features one to three case studies—for example, Middlebury College's French-Langua
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10434363
Kathleen Ditzig, Fang-Tze Hsu
Art Histories of a Forever War is an exploration of modern art in postwar Taiwan and its enduring resonances. To understand this historical milieu, the exhibition unpacks and contextualizes Taiwan's modern art as part of a Cold War convergence of art, design, and technology.1 On a global scale, and in relation to the American military-industrial complex and its attendant neo-imperialism (Immerwahr 2020: 13–144), the post–World War II and early Cold War period of the 1940s–60s has been described as “a period of accelerated commercialization, of decolonization and—in the context of advanced aesthetic practice and thought—of considered reassessment of the effects and legacies of the modernist avant-garde” (Martin 2005: 4). Modernity in this period was transformed by wartime techno-scientific developments and the competition for cultural supremacy between the United States and the Soviet Union.From the design of boardrooms to visual anthropology to cultural exchange programs based on the belief that art could be a medium for building diplomatic understanding, cultural production in this period was motivated by an interest in shaping human subjectivity. While pertinent to American art history,2 these policies had a global effect: the Cold War competition between the US and the Soviet Union to ideologically determine what progress and modernity meant for the world had an effect on how these ideas were employed in campaigns to win “hearts and minds” (Krenn 2005). In this way, the exhibition's reference to the Cold War is not a simple periodization demarcating the period after World War II; instead, the Cold War symbolizes a worlding process of imaginatively and technologically modulating oneself as part of an international competition to define what was “modern.”To further elaborate, we unpack the argument via three interconnected sections of the exhibition. “Cosmotechnics after Space” interrogates the specific cosmotechnics of modern art practices in Taiwan in light of the technological developments that arose out of the space race, such as satellite photography and the moon landing. Cosmotechnics, a term coined by philosopher Hui Yuk, refers to the unification of moral and cosmic orders through craft or art making.3 In this view, art practices, like tools and technology, do not just produce things but are world-making processes.“Global Domestic” focuses on the emergence of a shared global experience mediated through home appliances and crafts. This thread takes an expanded view of how art and craft from Taiwan, supported by American economic aid as a strategy to strengthen Taiwan's economic development and to develop them for export, contributed to the construction of a “global domestic.”“Aesthetic Networks of a Free World” examines the internationalization projects of Taiwan's modern artists in this period. The free world, a phrase often used in propaganda, refers to the Western bloc and the network of countries allied with the United States. The Rep
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10434321
Yuxing Zhang
Abstract Container aquaculture—a method that uses shipping boxes equipped with information technologies—is presented in China as an emblem of smart farming, and as a technological solution to the environmental degradation in natural water resources resulting from intensified aquacultural production. Container aquaculture aims at creating an orderly, self-contained ecosystem wherein the fish are managed in tandem with the water milieu via data governance. Its infrastructure operatively automates aquacultural practices into optimizable modules and programs biological and mechanical processes into interlocked components bearing distinctive functionalities within the artificial ecosystem. This article argues that the case of container aquaculture shows that algorithmically regulated and automated ecosystematic management does not always fulfill its promise; one still needs to navigate a dense web of interspecies associations filled with gaps and crossings between modes of being and values. Datafication is just one way to know and organize. An algorithmically controlled ecosystem cannot always accommodate the open-endedness of more-than-human ecologies. Drawing on works by Tsing, Stengers, and Satsuka, this article reappropriates what should be counted as the “smart” in farming by resituating it as a world-making practice in ecological collectives rather than in an abstract ecosystem, eschewing the fantasy of a singular criterion of evaluation and control.
{"title":"Thinking Inside the Box","authors":"Yuxing Zhang","doi":"10.1215/17432197-10434321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10434321","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Container aquaculture—a method that uses shipping boxes equipped with information technologies—is presented in China as an emblem of smart farming, and as a technological solution to the environmental degradation in natural water resources resulting from intensified aquacultural production. Container aquaculture aims at creating an orderly, self-contained ecosystem wherein the fish are managed in tandem with the water milieu via data governance. Its infrastructure operatively automates aquacultural practices into optimizable modules and programs biological and mechanical processes into interlocked components bearing distinctive functionalities within the artificial ecosystem. This article argues that the case of container aquaculture shows that algorithmically regulated and automated ecosystematic management does not always fulfill its promise; one still needs to navigate a dense web of interspecies associations filled with gaps and crossings between modes of being and values. Datafication is just one way to know and organize. An algorithmically controlled ecosystem cannot always accommodate the open-endedness of more-than-human ecologies. Drawing on works by Tsing, Stengers, and Satsuka, this article reappropriates what should be counted as the “smart” in farming by resituating it as a world-making practice in ecological collectives rather than in an abstract ecosystem, eschewing the fantasy of a singular criterion of evaluation and control.","PeriodicalId":413879,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics: An International Journal","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135856663","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10434405
Fernando Esquivel-Suarez
Abstract This article analyzes the controversy caused in 2017 by US rapper Wiz Khalifa's narco-tour photos in Medellín, Colombia. Narco-tours are day-long excursions through the mobster Pablo Escobar's landmarks in the city: his properties, the neighborhoods he built, and the roof where the police killed him after years of waging war against the Colombian state. Unlike the polemic films and series on the Colombian drug lord, the Wiz Khalifa controversy was the first time an outcry about the depiction of Escobar was aimed at a US Black artist, particularly a rapper. The outraged reaction exhibited by politicians, audiences, and the national media reveal an unexplored archive of exchanges, miscommunications, and negotiations between, on one hand, a long list of hip-hop household names—including Jay-Z, Nas, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and many others—who have incorporated the image of Escobar in their music, lyrics, aesthetics, and rhetoric and, on the other hand, Colombian institutional memorialization of the war on drugs. The author argues that Wiz Khalifa's pictures exemplify how mainstream hip-hop brings together the images of the Black American “hustler” and the Latin American “narco.” The juxtaposition of these two images is a denunciation of the similar conditions in Colombia and the United States that force people into the trade as well as a complicated and gory representation of the neoliberal ethos Escobar represents. The article concludes by registering how hip-hop's artistic uses of “Pablo”—as Escobar is known in the genre—clash with Colombian elites’ iconoclastic and moralistic stance in opposition to any representation of Escobar in the media.
{"title":"The Wiz Khalifa Controversy and Hip-Hop's Pablo Escobar Archives","authors":"Fernando Esquivel-Suarez","doi":"10.1215/17432197-10434405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10434405","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes the controversy caused in 2017 by US rapper Wiz Khalifa's narco-tour photos in Medellín, Colombia. Narco-tours are day-long excursions through the mobster Pablo Escobar's landmarks in the city: his properties, the neighborhoods he built, and the roof where the police killed him after years of waging war against the Colombian state. Unlike the polemic films and series on the Colombian drug lord, the Wiz Khalifa controversy was the first time an outcry about the depiction of Escobar was aimed at a US Black artist, particularly a rapper. The outraged reaction exhibited by politicians, audiences, and the national media reveal an unexplored archive of exchanges, miscommunications, and negotiations between, on one hand, a long list of hip-hop household names—including Jay-Z, Nas, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and many others—who have incorporated the image of Escobar in their music, lyrics, aesthetics, and rhetoric and, on the other hand, Colombian institutional memorialization of the war on drugs. The author argues that Wiz Khalifa's pictures exemplify how mainstream hip-hop brings together the images of the Black American “hustler” and the Latin American “narco.” The juxtaposition of these two images is a denunciation of the similar conditions in Colombia and the United States that force people into the trade as well as a complicated and gory representation of the neoliberal ethos Escobar represents. The article concludes by registering how hip-hop's artistic uses of “Pablo”—as Escobar is known in the genre—clash with Colombian elites’ iconoclastic and moralistic stance in opposition to any representation of Escobar in the media.","PeriodicalId":413879,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics: An International Journal","volume":"150 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135856658","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-8797571
C. Gray
To understand 2020’s pandemic is to see virus as a language we can use By drawing on viral principles—viruses are infections through information, viruses can be understood only through percentages and exponentials, and viruses are zombies from outer space—the dynamics of our twenty-first-century virus crisis can be discerned, even influenced The crisis isn't just biological, it is about ideas and how they propagate through, for example, conspiracy theories and inflammatory actions Viral emotions are integral to what is happening, as attention to both the virus of fascism and fear-based reactions to COVID-19 make clear The opposite of fear, or perhaps the product of fear sometimes, is bravery Hope is beyond that Viruses spread because of their intrinsic properties and the relevant vectors, catalysts, growth mediums, and controls Our future will be shaped by a wide range of viruses We know it will be abnormal, but viruses will not act alone Much of nature, and thus human culture, is beyond the viral The key issue is control and just what mix of authoritarian control, self-control, and out-of-control (in both senses) we will end up living with
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