Abstract:This essay argues that the discourses of love and affective attachments are remapped from our primary social relationships onto our household objects, providing further insight into our current crisis of social reproduction. Turning to Marie Kondo's widely circulated imperative to retain only those objects (socks, furniture, household goods) that "spark joy," and to cultivate affective attachment to those objects, this essay explores the directive toward intense consumerism as a means to manage personal and cultural anxieties during times of neoliberal precarity.
{"title":"Marie Kondo and the Joy of Things: Affective Discourses of Housekeeping","authors":"Kristin M. Swenson","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that the discourses of love and affective attachments are remapped from our primary social relationships onto our household objects, providing further insight into our current crisis of social reproduction. Turning to Marie Kondo's widely circulated imperative to retain only those objects (socks, furniture, household goods) that \"spark joy,\" and to cultivate affective attachment to those objects, this essay explores the directive toward intense consumerism as a means to manage personal and cultural anxieties during times of neoliberal precarity.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"8 4 1","pages":"30 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75792255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay identifies and describes the "antiquarian impulse" in 9/11 docudrama, arguing that fixation on 9/11's material culture undermines human agency and abdicates national responsibility by ascribing agency to 9/11's artifacts. The essay finds a precedent for this acquiescence in nineteenth-century literary antiquarianism, which used similar techniques of deflection to diminish the ongoing role settlers played in Indigenous annihilation. Though these distinct moments in literary history are not analogous, they both bend temporality to facilitate national narratives of innocence, unpreparedness, and inevitable war. Whereas nineteenth-century antiquarian literature depicts the extinction of the "vanishing Indian" as an event that had already taken place, 9/11 antiquarianism fabricates a similarly specious spatiotemporal architecture wherein the nation is beset by inevitable "failures of imagination" that are mitigated only unending, borderless wars. The essay argues that antiquarian impulse in literature and film has consequences for how we approach both human agency and twenty-first-century warfare.
{"title":"Vanishing People: Politics, Preservation, and the Antiquarian Impulse in 9/11 Docudrama","authors":"Kristina Garvin","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay identifies and describes the \"antiquarian impulse\" in 9/11 docudrama, arguing that fixation on 9/11's material culture undermines human agency and abdicates national responsibility by ascribing agency to 9/11's artifacts. The essay finds a precedent for this acquiescence in nineteenth-century literary antiquarianism, which used similar techniques of deflection to diminish the ongoing role settlers played in Indigenous annihilation. Though these distinct moments in literary history are not analogous, they both bend temporality to facilitate national narratives of innocence, unpreparedness, and inevitable war. Whereas nineteenth-century antiquarian literature depicts the extinction of the \"vanishing Indian\" as an event that had already taken place, 9/11 antiquarianism fabricates a similarly specious spatiotemporal architecture wherein the nation is beset by inevitable \"failures of imagination\" that are mitigated only unending, borderless wars. The essay argues that antiquarian impulse in literature and film has consequences for how we approach both human agency and twenty-first-century warfare.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"20 1","pages":"145 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90442599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A brash “selfmade” billionaire with no previous political experience is elected to the nation’s highest office, buoyed by a rising tide of populism. Sophisticated manipulation of the media stokes xenophobia and resentment toward elites. The chattering classes decry declining press freedom and the hyperpolarization of society, while supporters seem happy to toss a monkey wrench into national politics as usual. While this farce may now be familiar to American readers, the tragedy began for Italians in 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi first took office as prime minister. Berlusconi continued to dominate Italian politics through 2011 and whose specter still hangs over Italy even now, always seemingly one clever joke and a smile away from the news cycle. More important than Forza Italia, the centerright political party he founded prior to his first election, is Berlusconi’s control of Mediaset, Italy’s largest mass media company. The Economist calculated that, while in office, Berlusconi had “wielded influence over some 90% of Italy’s broadcast media,” the primary source of news for a majority of Italians.1 Berlusconi took advantage of the media liberalization that followed the widespread popularity of pirate radio during the 1970s, epitomizing the appropriation of resistance that would characterize his political career. But the politicization of the media in Italy certainly
{"title":"Resistance Comes First: Pirate TV as Postmedia Activism","authors":"J. Sannicandro","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0033","url":null,"abstract":"A brash “selfmade” billionaire with no previous political experience is elected to the nation’s highest office, buoyed by a rising tide of populism. Sophisticated manipulation of the media stokes xenophobia and resentment toward elites. The chattering classes decry declining press freedom and the hyperpolarization of society, while supporters seem happy to toss a monkey wrench into national politics as usual. While this farce may now be familiar to American readers, the tragedy began for Italians in 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi first took office as prime minister. Berlusconi continued to dominate Italian politics through 2011 and whose specter still hangs over Italy even now, always seemingly one clever joke and a smile away from the news cycle. More important than Forza Italia, the centerright political party he founded prior to his first election, is Berlusconi’s control of Mediaset, Italy’s largest mass media company. The Economist calculated that, while in office, Berlusconi had “wielded influence over some 90% of Italy’s broadcast media,” the primary source of news for a majority of Italians.1 Berlusconi took advantage of the media liberalization that followed the widespread popularity of pirate radio during the 1970s, epitomizing the appropriation of resistance that would characterize his political career. But the politicization of the media in Italy certainly","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"6 1","pages":"194 - 211"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89232254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay develops a materialist account of rhetoric from the perspective of primitive accumulation. Drawing on biopolitical theory and Marxian discussions of capital's dispossessive practices, we demonstrate how—within the regional context of the Euro-Western tradition—the partition of political space (polis) from the space of the economic household (oikos) operates as a material-discursive apparatus that sorts bodies in relation to a figure of "full" humanity, rationalizing violent accumulation and designating some bodies as a-rhetorical and therefore not fully human. We explore the function of this apparatus in ancient Athenian texts on oikonomia and rhetoric before turning to its rearticulation under contemporary capitalism. We argue that the articulation of oikos, polis, and rhetoric demonstrates the violence underwriting so-called "immaterial" labor as well as contemporary humanist fantasies of political agency.
{"title":"Considering Rhetoric From the Standpoint of Primitive Accumulation","authors":"Joshua S. Hanan, Matthew W. Bost","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay develops a materialist account of rhetoric from the perspective of primitive accumulation. Drawing on biopolitical theory and Marxian discussions of capital's dispossessive practices, we demonstrate how—within the regional context of the Euro-Western tradition—the partition of political space (polis) from the space of the economic household (oikos) operates as a material-discursive apparatus that sorts bodies in relation to a figure of \"full\" humanity, rationalizing violent accumulation and designating some bodies as a-rhetorical and therefore not fully human. We explore the function of this apparatus in ancient Athenian texts on oikonomia and rhetoric before turning to its rearticulation under contemporary capitalism. We argue that the articulation of oikos, polis, and rhetoric demonstrates the violence underwriting so-called \"immaterial\" labor as well as contemporary humanist fantasies of political agency.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"12 1","pages":"72 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85599749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The zombie has often been used as a metaphor for industrial production and mass consumption, but older interpretations of zombies as industrial workers or ideologically duped consumers do not adequately explain why the zombie apocalypse has captured our imagination today. This essay analyzes modes of production and forms of labor that emerged over the last decade in China and the United States. Specifically, it discusses the form of production Foxconn developed to produce modern electronics, and application-based labor such as Uber/Lyft, in order to provide a foil for an analysis of our contemporary economic anxieties. I argue that the "dead" labor Marx locates in industrial production has not simply been "outsourced" over the last forty years: it has been transformed into "undead" labor and has returned in a new, spectral form.
{"title":"Undead Labor and Instruments of Production: Zombies, Foxconn, and the Gig Economy","authors":"Brynnar Swenson","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The zombie has often been used as a metaphor for industrial production and mass consumption, but older interpretations of zombies as industrial workers or ideologically duped consumers do not adequately explain why the zombie apocalypse has captured our imagination today. This essay analyzes modes of production and forms of labor that emerged over the last decade in China and the United States. Specifically, it discusses the form of production Foxconn developed to produce modern electronics, and application-based labor such as Uber/Lyft, in order to provide a foil for an analysis of our contemporary economic anxieties. I argue that the \"dead\" labor Marx locates in industrial production has not simply been \"outsourced\" over the last forty years: it has been transformed into \"undead\" labor and has returned in a new, spectral form.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"61 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81535379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This is a curious book. On the one hand, Underglobalization takes up a series of topical problems in the study of contemporary China and the world through the lens of media(tion) and urban forms. Neves concentrates on revealing how artistic and media creativity of and in realms of the illicit— those arenas not sanctioned by state or dominant media power— help expose the attempted legal suppression of everyday urban forms that shape the lives of citydwelling people, in Beijing and elsewhere. By focusing on the piratical, or the “illegitimate” underbelly of contemporary urban society, Neves makes visible the dialectical ways in which Beijingers live in constant dialogue with (but are not subordinated to) the legitimating powers of state, brand, and media. Taking the practice of urban dwelling as a process of producing realms of the fake is helpful, necessary, and important. It illumines the necessarily layered environments of Beijing life in the twentyfirst century, without prescribing some “solution” that reinforces dominant power.
{"title":"Thinking Piratically","authors":"Rebecca E. Karl","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0032","url":null,"abstract":"This is a curious book. On the one hand, Underglobalization takes up a series of topical problems in the study of contemporary China and the world through the lens of media(tion) and urban forms. Neves concentrates on revealing how artistic and media creativity of and in realms of the illicit— those arenas not sanctioned by state or dominant media power— help expose the attempted legal suppression of everyday urban forms that shape the lives of citydwelling people, in Beijing and elsewhere. By focusing on the piratical, or the “illegitimate” underbelly of contemporary urban society, Neves makes visible the dialectical ways in which Beijingers live in constant dialogue with (but are not subordinated to) the legitimating powers of state, brand, and media. Taking the practice of urban dwelling as a process of producing realms of the fake is helpful, necessary, and important. It illumines the necessarily layered environments of Beijing life in the twentyfirst century, without prescribing some “solution” that reinforces dominant power.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"44 1","pages":"185 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77236629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In this essay, I argue that social movements should appropriate fixed capital in moments of rebellion, utilizing it to halt capitalist production. Through this process, struggles over, for, and through fixed capital enable the prefiguring of new modes of (re)production, raising the fundamental political question of who governs the infrastructures at hand. I turn to the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 as an example of dispossessed people utilizing fixed capital to interrupt the continuation of an exploitative prison system. Finally, I offer an assessment of how explicit engagement with fixed capital and other material objects or built environments clarifies the ways that antagonistic compositional power might irreversibly damage the logics of capture within and against which rebellious potential emerges.
{"title":"Cramped Space: Finding Rebellious Potential in Fixed Capital During the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971","authors":"K. Siegfried","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay, I argue that social movements should appropriate fixed capital in moments of rebellion, utilizing it to halt capitalist production. Through this process, struggles over, for, and through fixed capital enable the prefiguring of new modes of (re)production, raising the fundamental political question of who governs the infrastructures at hand. I turn to the Attica Prison uprising of 1971 as an example of dispossessed people utilizing fixed capital to interrupt the continuation of an exploitative prison system. Finally, I offer an assessment of how explicit engagement with fixed capital and other material objects or built environments clarifies the ways that antagonistic compositional power might irreversibly damage the logics of capture within and against which rebellious potential emerges.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"42 1","pages":"113 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85721507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Linking Marx and Spinoza, this essay theorizes labor-power as "an individual's aggregate of affective capacities in its transindividual constitution of itself and the world." Appropriation of labor-power is always also appropriation of affective—scientific, technological, organizational, etc.—capacities. Drawing on Jacques Lacan, I argue that affective exploitation dates back to the precapitalist modes of production of slavery and serfdom and that capitalism's innovation consists in intertwining this age-old affective exploitation with economic exploitation (surplus-value). Being driven to transform into surplus-value ever more affective (practical, cognitive, emotional) capacities, capital also propels an unforeseen advance in these capacities—evidenced in the scientific and technological achievements of capitalist modernity. Therein lies capital's tension, as a Janus-faced machine of both revolutionary affective potential and abyssal powers of affective exploitation. Today's informatized capitalism—in which the means of production coincide with the means of entertainment (information)—obtains unforeseen exploitation of surplus (i.e., unpaid) labor while fostering the techno-utopian fantasy that our labor contributes to our individual flourishing.
{"title":"Marx's Affect (and Its Exploitation)","authors":"A. K. Kordela","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Linking Marx and Spinoza, this essay theorizes labor-power as \"an individual's aggregate of affective capacities in its transindividual constitution of itself and the world.\" Appropriation of labor-power is always also appropriation of affective—scientific, technological, organizational, etc.—capacities. Drawing on Jacques Lacan, I argue that affective exploitation dates back to the precapitalist modes of production of slavery and serfdom and that capitalism's innovation consists in intertwining this age-old affective exploitation with economic exploitation (surplus-value). Being driven to transform into surplus-value ever more affective (practical, cognitive, emotional) capacities, capital also propels an unforeseen advance in these capacities—evidenced in the scientific and technological achievements of capitalist modernity. Therein lies capital's tension, as a Janus-faced machine of both revolutionary affective potential and abyssal powers of affective exploitation. Today's informatized capitalism—in which the means of production coincide with the means of entertainment (information)—obtains unforeseen exploitation of surplus (i.e., unpaid) labor while fostering the techno-utopian fantasy that our labor contributes to our individual flourishing.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"22 1","pages":"43 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79973537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Even before the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Yogita Goyal’s erudite and nuanced study of “the global afterlives of slavery” would have been acclaimed as an important academic book. But in the months (and now years) that have followed, the work has come to seem even more important and urgent. It opens, after all, with a consideration of memorialization and monuments, which have become such an important point of contestation in the U.S. Specifically, Goyal cites Toni Morrison, whose enormously influential Beloved was shaped by the novelist’s deep regret that there was “no suitable memorial” to the slave experience: not a “plaque or wreath or threehundredfoot tower,” not even a “small bench by the road” (1). Goyal uses this poignant starting point to comment on the massive body of literature about the slave experience that has arisen since the publication of Beloved in 1987. Whether in forms that replicate those of the nineteenthcentury slave narrative or those that break with its tropes and structures of feeling, the remembrance of slavery has radically shaped contemporary writing in the U.S. and beyond over the past three decades. And yet, Morrison’s lament over inadequate public memorialization still seemed completely apt and timely in the last years of the Trump presidency,
{"title":"Rethinking Freedom: Slavery, Time, and Affect in the Global Novel","authors":"R. Barnard","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Even before the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Yogita Goyal’s erudite and nuanced study of “the global afterlives of slavery” would have been acclaimed as an important academic book. But in the months (and now years) that have followed, the work has come to seem even more important and urgent. It opens, after all, with a consideration of memorialization and monuments, which have become such an important point of contestation in the U.S. Specifically, Goyal cites Toni Morrison, whose enormously influential Beloved was shaped by the novelist’s deep regret that there was “no suitable memorial” to the slave experience: not a “plaque or wreath or threehundredfoot tower,” not even a “small bench by the road” (1). Goyal uses this poignant starting point to comment on the massive body of literature about the slave experience that has arisen since the publication of Beloved in 1987. Whether in forms that replicate those of the nineteenthcentury slave narrative or those that break with its tropes and structures of feeling, the remembrance of slavery has radically shaped contemporary writing in the U.S. and beyond over the past three decades. And yet, Morrison’s lament over inadequate public memorialization still seemed completely apt and timely in the last years of the Trump presidency,","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"179 - 184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86236301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A History of Forgetting","authors":"Elizabeth Wijaya","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"8 1","pages":"197 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85511392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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