Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900537
Peter Szendy
Conspiracy has probably become one of the key notions—or fantasies—of our times. Conspiracy, in the modern acceptation of the word, as in “conspiracy theory,” has not only filled the mediasphere in which we live and breathe but it has also overshadowed—maybe we should say repressed—its ancient meaning. Surprisingly, this forgotten sense was revived on a poster lithographed by Andy Warhol in 1969 for a group exhibition in a Chicago gallery. The poster was meant to benefit the legal defense fund for the Chicago Seven (who were charged by the federal government with conspiracy for organizing anti-Vietnam War protests). Warhol used the image of an electric chair (as he did in a series of paintings titled Little Electric Chairs in 1964-5) and he printed the following words over it: “conspiracy means to breathe together.” The remarks that follow are a first attempt to attune our ears to what this largely buried meaning bears as a future-in-the-past. Unearthing the forgotten resonances of conspiracy as co-inspiring could certainly be described as an archaeological gesture. But since my excavation aims at finding something hidden in what we think of (reductively) as the most immaterial (or subtle) of media, i.e., air or the atmosphere, it could also be characterized as anarchaeological, as a sort of reversed or upside-down archaeology, directed upwards, towards the unground of the aerial. The very possibility of breathing, and breathing together, has maybe never seemed as fragile as now, after a coronavirus pandemic (with face masks and ventilator shortages), after the culmination of decades of racist chokeholds by law-enforcement in the United States and elsewhere, after more than a century of airpocalyptic smog episodes worldwide (the word “smog” was coined in 1904 by the Treasurer of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society to designate the “London particular” which “consists much more of smoke than of true fog,” while “airpocalypse” appeared in 2013 to refer to record atmospheric pollution in Beijing).1 How do we still breathe and share breath, when and if we do?
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Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900536
T. Ingold
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Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900526
Chantal Jaquet
The Lily of the Valley, published by Balzac in 1836, can be considered as a standard in olfactory literature since the novel is entirely built on the perception of odors and the central role of breathing in romantic relationships. As the title indicates, it is in the floral and olfactory registers that the essence of love expresses itself. Perfume presides over the birth of love, the recognition of the other, and the definition of the woman’s identity. We can read it as a poetics of breathing that tells another story and reenchants the world. The Lily of the Valley offers a powerful antidote to the impediments to breathing nowadays. I try here to interpret it like an ode celebrating another way of inhaling the world through love and perfumes.
{"title":"The Lily of the Valley, or Love as Breathing in the Scent","authors":"Chantal Jaquet","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900526","url":null,"abstract":"The Lily of the Valley, published by Balzac in 1836, can be considered as a standard in olfactory literature since the novel is entirely built on the perception of odors and the central role of breathing in romantic relationships. As the title indicates, it is in the floral and olfactory registers that the essence of love expresses itself. Perfume presides over the birth of love, the recognition of the other, and the definition of the woman’s identity. We can read it as a poetics of breathing that tells another story and reenchants the world. The Lily of the Valley offers a powerful antidote to the impediments to breathing nowadays. I try here to interpret it like an ode celebrating another way of inhaling the world through love and perfumes.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44682158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907146
Craig Eklund
Abstract: Critics often misinterpret Beckett’s Worstward Ho as being about the phenomenology of presence. The narrator, however, engages not with things that exist but, instead, the process of imaginative conjuring. The procedure resembles Sartre’s phenomenological method in The Imaginary and Beckett’s fictional depiction of the imagination serves as a corrective to Sartre’s “essential poverty” of the image—its lack of context. Worstward Ho demonstrates instead the image’s polyvalent contextual compatibility, which explains not only the referential ambivalence of Beckett’s work, but also the truth function of fiction itself, wherein the imaginary particular is amenable to general insights into the real.
{"title":"“Say a Body. Where None.”: Beckett’s Worstward Ho and Sartre’s Theory of the Imagination","authors":"Craig Eklund","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907146","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Critics often misinterpret Beckett’s Worstward Ho as being about the phenomenology of presence. The narrator, however, engages not with things that exist but, instead, the process of imaginative conjuring. The procedure resembles Sartre’s phenomenological method in The Imaginary and Beckett’s fictional depiction of the imagination serves as a corrective to Sartre’s “essential poverty” of the image—its lack of context. Worstward Ho demonstrates instead the image’s polyvalent contextual compatibility, which explains not only the referential ambivalence of Beckett’s work, but also the truth function of fiction itself, wherein the imaginary particular is amenable to general insights into the real.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907154
Kenneth Surin
Reviewed by: The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation by Jason Demers Kenneth Surin Demers, Jason. The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation. University of Toronto Press, 2019. 218pp. This most welcome book gets off on the right foot by eschewing such problematic terms as “post-structuralism” or “French theory” in studying the work of French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. These terms are of a strictly Anglo-Atlantic provenance, a convenient but misleading encapsulation that facilitated their journey or translation into the Anglo-Atlantic world. Instead, Demers prefers to view this transmission as an ensemble of relays between “people, groups, places, ideas, and moments in time” (3), as well as codes; metalanguages; markets for symbolic capital, a notion derived from Pierre Bourdieu; and “networks of feeling” (5n), a term the author borrowed from Raymond Williams. Demers observes, for example, that there was a relay or “mutual implication” (5) between Paris and Columbia University, which occurred in the aftermath of the events of May ’68, that recalled a somewhat earlier circuit, also leading to Paris, which involved the mid-1960s Berkeley free speech movement. To approach the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault by resorting to terms such as “post-structuralism” or “French theory” severs them from the crucial relays and circuits constituting the complex and highly mobile transpositions of their work to an American intellectual and political milieu, and vice versa, and it is clear that Demers views, quite rightly, that the political and the intellectual are inextricably bound up with each other. Demers acknowledges his debt here to the versions of assemblage theory formulated in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory and A New Philosophy of Society, and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Buttressing these texts for Demers is the work of catalytic significance undertaken by Deleuze and Guattari on assemblages/ensembles. The supervening context for these processes of transmission between France and the Anglo-American world is the global May ’68. Demers’s first chapter deals with Derrida and the notions of translation and margins in order to delineate and analyze the “contiguous [End Page 127] relationship between campus and community” (12). The difficulty Demers grasps here is that Derrida’s work on the place of philosophy, already premised on the defining notion that there is no “we” in the philosophical domain, is rooted in the French educational system, and so is deracinated, inevitably, by its movement out of France into the Anglo-Atlantic world. After seeking to account for the implications of this uprooting, Demers shows convincingly how the later Derrida moved (somewhat) away from the political evas
{"title":"The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation by Jason Demers (review)","authors":"Kenneth Surin","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907154","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation by Jason Demers Kenneth Surin Demers, Jason. The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation. University of Toronto Press, 2019. 218pp. This most welcome book gets off on the right foot by eschewing such problematic terms as “post-structuralism” or “French theory” in studying the work of French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. These terms are of a strictly Anglo-Atlantic provenance, a convenient but misleading encapsulation that facilitated their journey or translation into the Anglo-Atlantic world. Instead, Demers prefers to view this transmission as an ensemble of relays between “people, groups, places, ideas, and moments in time” (3), as well as codes; metalanguages; markets for symbolic capital, a notion derived from Pierre Bourdieu; and “networks of feeling” (5n), a term the author borrowed from Raymond Williams. Demers observes, for example, that there was a relay or “mutual implication” (5) between Paris and Columbia University, which occurred in the aftermath of the events of May ’68, that recalled a somewhat earlier circuit, also leading to Paris, which involved the mid-1960s Berkeley free speech movement. To approach the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault by resorting to terms such as “post-structuralism” or “French theory” severs them from the crucial relays and circuits constituting the complex and highly mobile transpositions of their work to an American intellectual and political milieu, and vice versa, and it is clear that Demers views, quite rightly, that the political and the intellectual are inextricably bound up with each other. Demers acknowledges his debt here to the versions of assemblage theory formulated in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory and A New Philosophy of Society, and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Buttressing these texts for Demers is the work of catalytic significance undertaken by Deleuze and Guattari on assemblages/ensembles. The supervening context for these processes of transmission between France and the Anglo-American world is the global May ’68. Demers’s first chapter deals with Derrida and the notions of translation and margins in order to delineate and analyze the “contiguous [End Page 127] relationship between campus and community” (12). The difficulty Demers grasps here is that Derrida’s work on the place of philosophy, already premised on the defining notion that there is no “we” in the philosophical domain, is rooted in the French educational system, and so is deracinated, inevitably, by its movement out of France into the Anglo-Atlantic world. After seeking to account for the implications of this uprooting, Demers shows convincingly how the later Derrida moved (somewhat) away from the political evas","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907149
Luke Munn
Abstract: AI technologies mine past data to anticipate future events, and yet our world of environmental and political crisis ushers in unprecedented conditions. Mixing examples of operational environments (AI in the oil and gas industry) with insights from media, cultural, and environmental studies, this article explores this grappling with uncertainty. To manage uncertainty, companies strive to internalize the complexity and contingency of the real world, collecting more data, designing more accurate sensors, and developing more exhaustive models. And yet prediction is a fraught exercise that struggles with correlation versus causation, the epistemological outside (the unknown), and the ontological outside (the open-endedness of the future). In addition, technology’s role in accelerating and intensifying the destructive logics of capital contributes to more volatile planetary conditions, undermining the stability and continuity that prediction requires. The article thus argues that, at a fundamental level, a highly fluid future will increasingly frustrate any meaningful degree of prediction. Keywords: prediction, knowledge, AI, machine learning, uncertainty, climate change
{"title":"The End of Prediction? AI Technologies in a No-Analog World","authors":"Luke Munn","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907149","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: AI technologies mine past data to anticipate future events, and yet our world of environmental and political crisis ushers in unprecedented conditions. Mixing examples of operational environments (AI in the oil and gas industry) with insights from media, cultural, and environmental studies, this article explores this grappling with uncertainty. To manage uncertainty, companies strive to internalize the complexity and contingency of the real world, collecting more data, designing more accurate sensors, and developing more exhaustive models. And yet prediction is a fraught exercise that struggles with correlation versus causation, the epistemological outside (the unknown), and the ontological outside (the open-endedness of the future). In addition, technology’s role in accelerating and intensifying the destructive logics of capital contributes to more volatile planetary conditions, undermining the stability and continuity that prediction requires. The article thus argues that, at a fundamental level, a highly fluid future will increasingly frustrate any meaningful degree of prediction. Keywords: prediction, knowledge, AI, machine learning, uncertainty, climate change","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907151
Avril Tynan
Abstract: Knock ou Le Triomphe de la Médicine [ Knock, or the Triumph of Medicine ] (1923) is a satirical play by Jules Romains parodying the hierarchical power relationship between patient and doctor and the supposed infallibility of science in the early twentieth century. Drawing on the phenomenological work of German physician Herbert Plügge (1970), I argue that the play exploits the physical interconnections between the healthy body and the sick body to present health as a deceptive state of hidden or imminent illness. By anticipating illness, the play shatters the illusion of health in ways that are ethically, psychosocially, and biomedically salient.
{"title":"Anticipating Illness: The Illusion of Health in Knock ou Le Triomphe de la Médicine","authors":"Avril Tynan","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907151","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Knock ou Le Triomphe de la Médicine [ Knock, or the Triumph of Medicine ] (1923) is a satirical play by Jules Romains parodying the hierarchical power relationship between patient and doctor and the supposed infallibility of science in the early twentieth century. Drawing on the phenomenological work of German physician Herbert Plügge (1970), I argue that the play exploits the physical interconnections between the healthy body and the sick body to present health as a deceptive state of hidden or imminent illness. By anticipating illness, the play shatters the illusion of health in ways that are ethically, psychosocially, and biomedically salient.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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