Pub Date : 2024-01-22DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2286223
Chris Doyen
A recontextualisation of Roland Barthes’s concepts of the third meaning and the punctum is presented through an analysis of Bruce Nauman’s installation art and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. ...
通过分析布鲁斯-瑙曼（Bruce Nauman）的装置艺术和安东宁-阿尔陶（Antonin Artaud）的《残酷剧场》，对罗兰-巴特（Roland Barthes）的 "第三种意义"（the third meaning）和 "标点符号"（punctum）概念进行了重新诠释。...
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Pub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2265088
Nieves Pascual Soler
In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, as home cooking grew in the US, sales of cookbooks surged and community cookbooks started showing up in the households of the country. This essay is concerne...
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Pub Date : 2023-11-16DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2266160
Kayci Merritte
In this essay, the food texture of softness is analysed through the lens of food and culture studies as a boundary crossing and connecting texture that conjoins the US military and civilian realms....
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Pub Date : 2023-11-10DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2266159
Ben Scholl, Milena Droumeva
ABSTRACTWhile its candy-coated shell may provide a clever camouflage for younger markets, this paper acknowledges that militarisation has been made pleasurable in more sensuous ways. Deploying gamespace soundwalking as a method, we attune to the ways Fortnite's sound design rehearses the neoliberal citizen-soldier on a sonic dimension. Yet, its capitalist priorities both corner youth markets while letting young players experiment with counterplay. To arrive at this conclusion, this paper illustrates the application of a novel method within game and sound studies – gamespace soundwalking. In the case of Fornite where the narrative context is individual military victory, the affective atmosphere ought to be one of keen attention to warfare, ambience and combat events. But how is war specifically depicted there? What is the significance of the sonic environment in forming a sense of place? We argue that method must take us beyond a semiotic analysis of the sonic components of Fortnite; we need a real-time ethnographic exploration of gameplay. In so doing, we tune in to Fortnite's ear-candy sound design as it exemplifies neoliberal standardisation of sound environments – masking grizzly conflict zones – as well as consumptive priorities that reach spectacular levels and the militarised Taylorist perfection of the citizen-soldier.KEYWORDS: Neoliberalismdigital consumptionFortnitegameplaymilitarizationsoundwalking Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 ‘My’ Twitter feed refers to the lead author's. Acknowledging that Twitter's algorithm is personalised for each user, this example is intentionally anecdotal and may not have been replicated for other users.2 Recordings were made with the Playstation 4's built-in gameplay capture feature, which captures the last fifteen minutes of game audio and visuals, allowing for direct uploads to YouTube (See the Appendix).Additional informationNotes on contributorsBen SchollBen Scholl is a Ph.D. student in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He holds a BComm. in Business Administration and an M.A. in Communication and Social Justice from the University of Windsor. In his thesis, Ben intends to explore the intersection of algorithmic platform governance with the institutionalisation of Canadian professional esports via ethnographic approaches.Milena DroumevaDr. Milena Droumeva is an Associate Professor of Communication and Sound Studies at Simon Fraser University specialising in sound studies, sensory and multimodal ethnography. They have a background in acoustic ecology and work across the fields of urban soundscape research, sonification for public engagement, as well as gender and sound in video games.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-10DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2265085
Peter J. Woods
Since Luigi Russolo first published The Art of Noise in 1913, certain lineages of experimental musicians have iterated on the futurist’s positioning of noise as militarised sound. But the deployment of noise within (ostensibly pleasurable) music sits in contrast to the role of sound within modern warfare, as nation states have produced and deployed sonic weaponry for decades. Drawing on this conceptual difference, I use this paper to explore the relationship between militarism and pleasure within contemporary noise music through Kristeva’s conception of the abject. In doing so, I argue that the politics of noise music trade in the dual nature of abjection, producing a critique of militarism while simultaneously reinscribing its logics. To illustrate this contention, I examine two albums that engage militarism in distinct ways: Author & Punisher’s Beastland and Eric Lunde’s LRAD: Compositions for the Long Range Acoustic Device. Through this comparison, I reveal how noise and noise music can both produce a derealization of violence common to modern militarism (thus reinforcing structural violence) and produce new ways of engaging noise music’s obfuscated critique of militarism through jouissance without absolving the genre of reinforcing military logics through music.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-10DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2265087
Michał Dawid Żmuda
ABSTRACTThe article examines the relationship between the military model of autonomous weapons and the use of AI combat entities in computer games. The author explores how the technological and discursive model of autonomous weapons functions in the software created to entertain the players. The methodology of the article is based on Kittlerian media discourse analysis and media archaeology. The article focuses on a case of predatory AI that hunts the player in Alien: Isolation game. The author compares technologies of automated warfare (the Igloo White Operation, Predator and Reaper drones, Project Pigeon etc.) with the game to reveal that certain military aspects (automated tracking, killing, manhunt, mental manipulation etc.) recur in the software. The pleasure of playing games masks the military entrapment. The author explains how the software exploits the joys of being ‘immersed’ in a machine. The gameplay implements the cybernetic project of man-machine interaction, providing the player with an illusion of control. In reality, the AI system manages the player’s behaviour and emotions, making them enjoy being preyed on. The author ponders how the domesticated pleasure of playing against killing bots may be used to develop autonomous weapons and become weaponised against humans.KEYWORDS: Autonomous weapondigital gameAlien: Isolationartificial intelligencemedia archaeology Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 2K is a game publishing company.Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichał Dawid ŻmudaMichał Dawid Żmuda, Ph.D., assistant professor in the College of Humanities at the University of Rzeszow in Poland, Fulbright graduate. He was a visiting research assistant in the Comparative Media/Writing Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2015/2016), and in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen (2018). He is currently interested in media archaeology of the shooting techniques in technical media and the discourse networks behind technologies of flow (flowing substances, electrons, information, subjects, etc.).
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Pub Date : 2023-11-10DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2262175
Bonaventure Muzigirwa Munganga
ABSTRACTThis paper aims to establish how ecological thinking, or the idea of interconnectedness among all beings, from the Indigenous onto-epistemic view in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart warrants a poetics of being and identity as fluid, floating, permeable, or leaking, never rigid or definitive. It builds on the idea of the mesh and the aesthetics of uncanny and how this view attunes to the Indigenous openness for kinship with, companionship of, intimacy and becoming with other beings. Such a view thus enacts Harley, the main protagonist, as regenerating his effaced Aboriginal identity through entanglements and becoming with all beings, humans and nonhumans, or Country at large, in both the latter’s material and spiritual aspects.KEYWORDS: Benangmeshpoetics of being and identify AcknowledgementsThis paper is a summary of the fourth chapter of my doctoral thesis and so I hereby wish to thank the UNSW-Sydney Graduate Research School for granting me the Scientia, most generous Scientia scholarship for my doctoral training. I wish to also thank my supervisory team, Professors Brigitta Olubas, Elizabeth McMahon and my reader Emeritus Professor Bill Ashcroft for their hard-hitting feedback on my work, from the initial stages of my Scientia scholarship application, throughout the development of the full project proposal, to the thesis completion stage.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Additional informationNotes on contributorsBonaventure Muzigirwa MungangaBonaventure Muzigirwa Munganga took his first degree in English (ISP/Bukavu, DR Congo), then an MA in Literary Stylistics (University of Birmingham, UK) and has just completed a PhD in English Literary Studies (UNSW, Sydney). His research interests broadly span Literary and Cultural Theory and Criticism, Aesthetics and Politics, and Philosophy and Literature. Bonaventure’s doctoral thesis was on Indigenous Australian Speculative Fiction and studied how the mesh or the idea of interconnectedness among all beings pollinates this literature, and how the texts’ aesthetics warrant their reading as sites of human and nonhuman entanglements. The intervention put the texts in the context of Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies to substantiate how these underpin the texts’ writing and how the texts’ aesthetics in turn shape our reading and understanding of the writers’ commitments. The thesis ended by bringing ecological thinking in these narratives in conversation with African epistemologies, cosmologies and the relevant African literary archives. This end shapes Bonaventure’s current, and much narrower, interest in Comparative Black Indigenous African and Australian Cultures, Literatures and Arts, with a focus on epistemologies, (eco)aesthetics and poetics, posthumanism, postcolonialism and decolonial critique, as well as the possible synergies among these areas to forge contemporary and other (yet to be named) interdisciplinary literary and cultural rese
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Pub Date : 2023-11-10DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2265086
Derek S. Denman
ABSTRACTWhat happens if we interpret representations of policing as a shared cinematic universe. What continuities emerge between stories of the formal institution of the police, vigilantism, and settler and imperial force? What contradictions become evident within logics of policing, and how are these contradictions resolved, cementing the role of police in political order? A cinematic universe suggests a different aesthetic relation than the idea of a genre. The aim is not to establish a common narrative structure, but to detail a condition of order that holds together despite its tangents and tensions. Police films hold together in much the same way, attempting to reconcile the production of racial capitalism with liberal imaginaries. By framing police films as a cinematic universe, I demonstrate how attachments to policing work not only through ideology but also through enchantment. Appeals to police as guarantors of safety, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, rely on immersion in a world in which force and pacification are subsumed by police stories of dramatic tension, humor, and moral triumph. The ideology that sustains policing today works through a process of world-building, whereby sprawling elements of a cinematic universe reveal new details and intrigues of enforcing imperial, capitalist order.KEYWORDS: Policecopagandamediaabolitionaffect AcknowledgmentsThanks to Miloš Jovanović and Andrew Poe for discussing the initial idea for this article and to Maria Adelmann, Kellan Anfinson, and Stephanie Erev, who provided detailed comments. Thanks to the Danish Society for Marxist Studies, the University of Copenhagen Political Theory Research Group, and the Western Political Science Association for the chance to present earlier versions of this work. I am appreciative of the thoughtful comments and editorial guidance provided by Alex Adams, Amy Gaeta, and two anonymous reviewers.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Following Travis Linnemann (Citation2022, 25), I use the term ‘police stories’ to refer to the set of narratives conveying a cultural ‘common sense’ (in the Gramscian sense), connecting police to notions of law, order, safety and justice.2 Social media has also become fertile ground for copaganda. As part of Operation Safety Net, a program designed to contain protests during the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis planned to spend $1.2 million to have social media influencers share city-approved content (MPD150 and MediaJustice Citation2021). The plan was met with intense criticism and subsequently abandoned (Vigdor Citation2021).3 Kraska (Citation1996, 425) reflects on the enjoyment that may arise in the critical researcher of the police, and turns this moment of enjoyment into a way of understanding the 'vitality of militarism'.4 Sorel sees myths as sources of mobilization for revolutionary political action. For Heilbrun, myth denotes stor
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Pub Date : 2023-10-09DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2257404
Gregers Andersen
With the early 2020s fostering an array of intensified climate-driven catastrophes, a key question is how humanity will respond to its impending transgressions of climatic and ecosystemic tipping points. In this light, this article explores how some of the world’s richest entrepreneurs and companies resort to desperate science fiction, that is, to increasingly drastic techno-optimistic ventures. More precisely, the article zooms in on plans put forward and financially supported by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Google in order to show how these ventures manifest as (1) fanciful plans of leaving Earth and settling on other planets, (2) major geoengineering schemes in which the Earth System becomes the object of terraforming and (3) attempts to manipulate human behaviour via big data. Furthermore, the article argues that these three forms of desperate science fiction are deeply problematic, because they siphon attention away from important democratic conversations about which degrowth-models societies across the planet should pursue and seek to develop. To change this, the article argues, we need to see the three forms of desperate science fiction advanced by Musk, Bezos, Gates and Google for what they are: deceptive attempts to preserve a deeply unjust and destructive economic system.
{"title":"Desperate science fiction: on how Musk, Bezos, Gates and Google plan to escape socio-ecological collapse","authors":"Gregers Andersen","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2023.2257404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2023.2257404","url":null,"abstract":"With the early 2020s fostering an array of intensified climate-driven catastrophes, a key question is how humanity will respond to its impending transgressions of climatic and ecosystemic tipping points. In this light, this article explores how some of the world’s richest entrepreneurs and companies resort to desperate science fiction, that is, to increasingly drastic techno-optimistic ventures. More precisely, the article zooms in on plans put forward and financially supported by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Google in order to show how these ventures manifest as (1) fanciful plans of leaving Earth and settling on other planets, (2) major geoengineering schemes in which the Earth System becomes the object of terraforming and (3) attempts to manipulate human behaviour via big data. Furthermore, the article argues that these three forms of desperate science fiction are deeply problematic, because they siphon attention away from important democratic conversations about which degrowth-models societies across the planet should pursue and seek to develop. To change this, the article argues, we need to see the three forms of desperate science fiction advanced by Musk, Bezos, Gates and Google for what they are: deceptive attempts to preserve a deeply unjust and destructive economic system.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135147218","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 : 2023-08-31DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2023.2247192
Evangelos Chrysagis, Panos Kompatsiaris
{"title":"Introduction: manifestos of the contemporary","authors":"Evangelos Chrysagis, Panos Kompatsiaris","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2023.2247192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2023.2247192","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79856292","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}
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