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":null,"pages":null},"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}
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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Abstract:Deligny's practical theory can be envisioned as a materialism. This materialism is based on the dialectical, conflictual, symbiotic, and bipolar coexistence of the "human" and the "Man-that-we-are," of the innate and the acquired, and of the milieu of the human and that of the animal. It is founded with a view to the space—the conditions and circumstances—that make it so that the individual becomes what they are. In brief his materialism is heir to a thought of the milieu as a determinate dimension of the production of the individual. This article was originally published in French in "Lenine," Actuel Marx, no. 62 (2017): 124–39.
{"title":"The Concrete Materialism of Fernand Deligny: Toward a Thought of the Human Milieu","authors":"M. Miguel, Edward Guetti","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Deligny's practical theory can be envisioned as a materialism. This materialism is based on the dialectical, conflictual, symbiotic, and bipolar coexistence of the \"human\" and the \"Man-that-we-are,\" of the innate and the acquired, and of the milieu of the human and that of the animal. It is founded with a view to the space—the conditions and circumstances—that make it so that the individual becomes what they are. In brief his materialism is heir to a thought of the milieu as a determinate dimension of the production of the individual. This article was originally published in French in \"Lenine,\" Actuel Marx, no. 62 (2017): 124–39.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80816123","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}
H. Skott-Myhre, S. Kouri, Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
Abstract:This article engages a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of the process of subjectification that produces the settler as a social subject. The analysis is rooted in a reading of Lacan through Deleuze and Guattari, which the article argues may offer an alternative nonessentialist and more historically grounded analysis. Specifically, this article attends to the role that the fetish plays in the ongoing cultural appropriation of Indigenous spirituality and culture within an ongoing neocolonial material context.
{"title":"The Perversity of Colonial Desire: The Erotics of the Settler Unconscious","authors":"H. Skott-Myhre, S. Kouri, Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article engages a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of the process of subjectification that produces the settler as a social subject. The analysis is rooted in a reading of Lacan through Deleuze and Guattari, which the article argues may offer an alternative nonessentialist and more historically grounded analysis. Specifically, this article attends to the role that the fetish plays in the ongoing cultural appropriation of Indigenous spirituality and culture within an ongoing neocolonial material context.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87876996","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 article explores through a reading of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz how public transport as a public space serves as a technology of discipline. First, the article argues that modern subjectivity is articulated at least in part through public transport as a public space. Second, the article outlines how the conception of modernity formed in public transport as a public space requires defining the lumpenproletariat as a constitutive other of modernity insofar as they cannot substantially participate in the public culture of modern public transport. Third, in order to maintain its hegemony, modern culture disciplines the lumpenproletariat into becoming modern subjects by using the public space of modern public transport as a disciplinary technology.
{"title":"Modernity, Hegemony, and Public Transport as Public Space: A Reading of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz","authors":"Maxwell Woods","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores through a reading of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz how public transport as a public space serves as a technology of discipline. First, the article argues that modern subjectivity is articulated at least in part through public transport as a public space. Second, the article outlines how the conception of modernity formed in public transport as a public space requires defining the lumpenproletariat as a constitutive other of modernity insofar as they cannot substantially participate in the public culture of modern public transport. Third, in order to maintain its hegemony, modern culture disciplines the lumpenproletariat into becoming modern subjects by using the public space of modern public transport as a disciplinary technology.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79005675","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 its examination of the popular critical deployment of "postmodernism" in analyses of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's final and most widely read text, Dictée, this essay aligns Cha's work with the modernist documentary. Readers have often suggested that Cha's postmodernist innovations highlight Dictée's radical break from a larger cultural timeline. This essay proposes, instead, that the text updates, rather than turns away from, documentary techniques of a prior era. It does so specifically, this essay argues, within the context of global economic transformations wrought by late capitalism. By mapping some of the contradictory relations of late capitalist history onto a formal intersection between the limits of historical documentation and the technics of mediation, Cha demonstrates how changes in the structure of capitalism prompt changing concepts of what it means to document history.
摘要:本文考察了“后现代主义”在分析莎·哈·庆·查(Theresa Hak Kyung Cha)最后也是最广泛阅读的文本《dictsame》时的流行批评部署，并将查的作品与现代主义纪录片联系起来。读者们经常认为，金庸的后现代主义创新凸显了他与更大的文化时间线的彻底决裂。这篇文章提出，相反，文本更新，而不是背离，前一个时代的纪实技术。本文认为，在晚期资本主义所造成的全球经济转型的背景下，它确实是这样做的。通过将晚期资本主义历史的一些矛盾关系映射到历史文献的局限性和调解技术之间的正式交叉点上，金庸展示了资本主义结构的变化如何促使对记录历史的意义的概念发生变化。
{"title":"Dislocation and Surplus in Dictée's Sites of Recording","authors":"T. J. Nez","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In its examination of the popular critical deployment of \"postmodernism\" in analyses of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's final and most widely read text, Dictée, this essay aligns Cha's work with the modernist documentary. Readers have often suggested that Cha's postmodernist innovations highlight Dictée's radical break from a larger cultural timeline. This essay proposes, instead, that the text updates, rather than turns away from, documentary techniques of a prior era. It does so specifically, this essay argues, within the context of global economic transformations wrought by late capitalism. By mapping some of the contradictory relations of late capitalist history onto a formal intersection between the limits of historical documentation and the technics of mediation, Cha demonstrates how changes in the structure of capitalism prompt changing concepts of what it means to document history.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77537806","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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