Abstract:This article argues that Toll of the Sea (1922), the first film to use the two-strip (red and green) Technicolor system—and also the first to star Anna May Wong—is a work whose manifestation of color is inherently linked to its understanding of interracial relations. While the film's Madame Butterfly–inspired narrative and usage of Orientalist mise-en-scène would appear to imply that color is used to allegorize racial evidence, this article proposes instead that the film's color is aligned with the autoerotic, uncoupled position of Wong's character Lotus Flower. This article seeks to establish a historiography of this racialized loneliness that persists not only within the film but also across contemporaneous immigration law and the problematics of white/Asian miscegenation that informed Wong's career. In elaborating sexual consummation as a racialized structure, the article presents a means of aligning—although not necessarily reconciling—Asian American critiques of sexual teleology with accounts of anti-Asian legislation and formal analyses of early Technicolor ornamentation.
{"title":"Lotus Flower's Colors: Interracial Autoeroticism and The Toll of the Sea","authors":"Erin Nunoda","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that Toll of the Sea (1922), the first film to use the two-strip (red and green) Technicolor system—and also the first to star Anna May Wong—is a work whose manifestation of color is inherently linked to its understanding of interracial relations. While the film's Madame Butterfly–inspired narrative and usage of Orientalist mise-en-scène would appear to imply that color is used to allegorize racial evidence, this article proposes instead that the film's color is aligned with the autoerotic, uncoupled position of Wong's character Lotus Flower. This article seeks to establish a historiography of this racialized loneliness that persists not only within the film but also across contemporaneous immigration law and the problematics of white/Asian miscegenation that informed Wong's career. In elaborating sexual consummation as a racialized structure, the article presents a means of aligning—although not necessarily reconciling—Asian American critiques of sexual teleology with accounts of anti-Asian legislation and formal analyses of early Technicolor ornamentation.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"71 1","pages":"115 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75659555","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 explores nineteenth-century European architectural designs in relation to vision, surveillance, and spectatorship. It contributes to the material and posthuman turn in humanity studies. Focusing on Ledoux's design of the salt factory Saline de Chaux, Schinkel's panoramic facilities, the ancient Roman theater described by Vitruvius, and Boullée's Cenotaph of Newton, this essay takes these architectures as optical apparatuses with a clear awareness of the light path setting and power regimes. Challenging the divisions between surveillance and spectatorship, the amphitheater and the panoptic machine, this essay argues for a subject-object position that merges these regimes in the act of seeing within the operation of communities. In showcasing how architecture, as established codes of articulation, visualizes the grids within which actions and interpretations are situated, this essay suggests a detailed historical reading that complicates the architectural space as heterotopias—the sites of struggle between reality and virtuality that open to the future.
摘要:本文探讨了19世纪欧洲建筑设计与视觉、监视和观赏性的关系。它有助于人类研究的物质转向和后人类转向。本文以Ledoux设计的盐厂Saline de Chaux、Schinkel设计的全景设施、Vitruvius描述的古罗马剧场、boulle设计的牛顿纪念碑为重点，将这些建筑作为光学装置，对光路设置和权力制度有清晰的认识。这篇文章挑战了监视和观看、圆形剧场和全景机器之间的分歧，提出了一个主客体的立场，将这些制度融合在一起，在社区的运作中观察。通过展示建筑，作为既定的表达规范，如何将行动和解释所在的网格可视化，本文提出了一种详细的历史解读，将建筑空间复杂化为异托邦——现实与虚拟之间的斗争场所，向未来开放。
{"title":"The Desire to See: Binary Systems, Architectural Space, and the Ontology of Being-with","authors":"Yijun Sun","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores nineteenth-century European architectural designs in relation to vision, surveillance, and spectatorship. It contributes to the material and posthuman turn in humanity studies. Focusing on Ledoux's design of the salt factory Saline de Chaux, Schinkel's panoramic facilities, the ancient Roman theater described by Vitruvius, and Boullée's Cenotaph of Newton, this essay takes these architectures as optical apparatuses with a clear awareness of the light path setting and power regimes. Challenging the divisions between surveillance and spectatorship, the amphitheater and the panoptic machine, this essay argues for a subject-object position that merges these regimes in the act of seeing within the operation of communities. In showcasing how architecture, as established codes of articulation, visualizes the grids within which actions and interpretations are situated, this essay suggests a detailed historical reading that complicates the architectural space as heterotopias—the sites of struggle between reality and virtuality that open to the future.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"6 1","pages":"1 - 22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88557420","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:To see is to observe, to attend to. It is essentially to understand, to stand under what hides itself in the field of vision. However, to the extent that understanding implies nonknowing, seeing brings with it an unseeing that haunts the horizon of the visible. This essay addresses the idea of the invisible by looking at four images—a simple line drawing, two photographs, and a painting—and unpacks them according to their modes of presentation and varying degrees of verisimilitude. This is to show how unseeing makes possible the insight that the image is but also the absence that the act of vision necessarily incurs. The essay's objective is to elucidate what "seeing something" actually means, especially when the images one faces are often twice removed from the objects they represent, as is increasingly the case in today's digitalized or mediated world.
{"title":"Seeing … What? Four Images and Their (In)Visibility","authors":"Briankle G. Chang","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:To see is to observe, to attend to. It is essentially to understand, to stand under what hides itself in the field of vision. However, to the extent that understanding implies nonknowing, seeing brings with it an unseeing that haunts the horizon of the visible. This essay addresses the idea of the invisible by looking at four images—a simple line drawing, two photographs, and a painting—and unpacks them according to their modes of presentation and varying degrees of verisimilitude. This is to show how unseeing makes possible the insight that the image is but also the absence that the act of vision necessarily incurs. The essay's objective is to elucidate what \"seeing something\" actually means, especially when the images one faces are often twice removed from the objects they represent, as is increasingly the case in today's digitalized or mediated world.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"34 1","pages":"23 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88988411","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 argues that the difference between human labor and its robotic simulation lies in the human capacity to refuse to labor. To make this argument, the article examines Nam June Paik's Robot K-456 (1964)—an electronic sculpture that both performed and refusedto perform experimental music—in light of cybernetic robots since the Second World War. In addition to these robots, Paik's work also relates to their precedents in eighteenth-century musical automata, which, as incipient posthumans, had challenged the boundary between humans and machines. Drawing theories of the posthuman together with the critique of political economy, the article concludes that Paik's robot ultimately affirms that the capacity for self-negation is uniquely human by failing at its own self-destruction.
摘要:本文认为人类劳动与其机器人模拟的区别在于人类拒绝劳动的能力。为了证明这一观点，本文根据二战以来的控制论机器人，研究了白南骏(Nam June Paik)的机器人K-456(1964)——一个既表演又拒绝表演实验音乐的电子雕塑。除了这些机器人，白南准的作品还涉及到18世纪音乐自动机的先例，这些音乐自动机作为早期的后人类，挑战了人类和机器之间的界限。文章将后人类理论与政治经济学批判结合在一起，总结道:“机器人的自我毁灭失败，最终证实了人类独有的自我否定能力。”
{"title":"Technological Catastrophe and the Robots of Nam June Paik","authors":"G. Barrett","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that the difference between human labor and its robotic simulation lies in the human capacity to refuse to labor. To make this argument, the article examines Nam June Paik's Robot K-456 (1964)—an electronic sculpture that both performed and refusedto perform experimental music—in light of cybernetic robots since the Second World War. In addition to these robots, Paik's work also relates to their precedents in eighteenth-century musical automata, which, as incipient posthumans, had challenged the boundary between humans and machines. Drawing theories of the posthuman together with the critique of political economy, the article concludes that Paik's robot ultimately affirms that the capacity for self-negation is uniquely human by failing at its own self-destruction.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"164 1","pages":"56 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72810941","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 tracks an allegorical figure termed the "child-citizen" in order to consider how the nonlinear temporality of Asian racialized development illuminates the ambivalent logic of Asian North American citizenship as one premised on a simultaneous identification with and disavowal of settler colonial erasures of Indigenous presence. The primary literary work under consideration is the 2001 novel The Kappa Child by Japanese Canadian author Hiromi Goto. Informed by the critical lens of new materialism, this essay reads The Kappa Child through and as a feminist and queer reckoning with Darwinian evolutionary theory that provides an asynchronous model of development, which ultimately figures Asian racialized settlerhood as an uneven (dis)identification with the circuits of citizenship.
{"title":"Embryonic Citizenship: Disidentifications of Asian Racialized Settlerhood","authors":"Jennifer Wang","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay tracks an allegorical figure termed the \"child-citizen\" in order to consider how the nonlinear temporality of Asian racialized development illuminates the ambivalent logic of Asian North American citizenship as one premised on a simultaneous identification with and disavowal of settler colonial erasures of Indigenous presence. The primary literary work under consideration is the 2001 novel The Kappa Child by Japanese Canadian author Hiromi Goto. Informed by the critical lens of new materialism, this essay reads The Kappa Child through and as a feminist and queer reckoning with Darwinian evolutionary theory that provides an asynchronous model of development, which ultimately figures Asian racialized settlerhood as an uneven (dis)identification with the circuits of citizenship.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"77 1","pages":"114 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74435114","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}
One of the more striking features of the ascendance of biopolitics as an analytic resource has been the frequency with which “life” has been grafted to the pronoun “itself.” Whether posed as the essential target of power or, alternatively, as the primary terrain of resistance to that power, life has undeniably achieved a certain critical autonomy as a theoretical subject and a referential sign within contemporary cultural and political thought. Much has been made of this renewed interest in life itself. On some accounts, it marks a veritable break with those problematics of language and discursivity that, as the story goes, preoccupied cultural criticism throughout the twentieth century. For others it is the violent strictures of modern humanism that might finally be dislodged by this resurgence, which promises to release life from the grasp of all anthropologisms both dominant and residual. Approached in terms of the trope of the “itself,” however, the current fascination with life may appear as less a rupture than as the reprise of a metaphysics of the proper that has long accompanied the concept and the question of life.1 From this angle, what Sylvia Wynter (2006, 117) has consistently diagnosed as the “biocentric descriptive statement” governing our modernity would now also seem a particularly apt description for some of the most prominent critical protocols that govern the theoretical humanities as well. Given that this ubiquitous collocation “life itself” now routinely appears under the auspices of the discourse of biopolitics, it is perhaps
{"title":"Life Without Condition","authors":"Michael Litwack","doi":"10.1353/cul.2022.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2022.0041","url":null,"abstract":"One of the more striking features of the ascendance of biopolitics as an analytic resource has been the frequency with which “life” has been grafted to the pronoun “itself.” Whether posed as the essential target of power or, alternatively, as the primary terrain of resistance to that power, life has undeniably achieved a certain critical autonomy as a theoretical subject and a referential sign within contemporary cultural and political thought. Much has been made of this renewed interest in life itself. On some accounts, it marks a veritable break with those problematics of language and discursivity that, as the story goes, preoccupied cultural criticism throughout the twentieth century. For others it is the violent strictures of modern humanism that might finally be dislodged by this resurgence, which promises to release life from the grasp of all anthropologisms both dominant and residual. Approached in terms of the trope of the “itself,” however, the current fascination with life may appear as less a rupture than as the reprise of a metaphysics of the proper that has long accompanied the concept and the question of life.1 From this angle, what Sylvia Wynter (2006, 117) has consistently diagnosed as the “biocentric descriptive statement” governing our modernity would now also seem a particularly apt description for some of the most prominent critical protocols that govern the theoretical humanities as well. Given that this ubiquitous collocation “life itself” now routinely appears under the auspices of the discourse of biopolitics, it is perhaps","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"11 1","pages":"156 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79100090","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 examines how the French avant-garde journal Tel Quel and its dual critique of language and capitalism—or "semantic materialism"—might be of relevance for literary studies today. By revisiting Tel Quel's intellectual development leading up to May 1968, the article argues that the review's shifting aesthetic and theoretical alliances during these years represent the building blocks of its materialism. It further defines this political semiotic by examining and extending claims from Tel Quel associates Jean-Joseph Goux and Pierre Guyotat. Finally, the article considers how semantic materialism relates to more contemporary Marxist approaches to literary reading.
{"title":"Semantic Materialism, Linguistic Value: Tel Quel's Jetsam","authors":"Marc Kohlbry","doi":"10.1353/cul.2022.0047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2022.0047","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines how the French avant-garde journal Tel Quel and its dual critique of language and capitalism—or \"semantic materialism\"—might be of relevance for literary studies today. By revisiting Tel Quel's intellectual development leading up to May 1968, the article argues that the review's shifting aesthetic and theoretical alliances during these years represent the building blocks of its materialism. It further defines this political semiotic by examining and extending claims from Tel Quel associates Jean-Joseph Goux and Pierre Guyotat. Finally, the article considers how semantic materialism relates to more contemporary Marxist approaches to literary reading.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"40 1","pages":"28 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77715080","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}
The machine itself is forged by movements back and forth between the entrenched priorities of extractive capitalism, the growing lead times between drilling and production in a world where oil drilling and frack-ing require more extreme technologies, white ressentiment against other regions and peoples of color, neoliberal hubris, race and class exploitation, imperial drives, hungry dispossessed peoples, impositions of selective austerity, growing fossil fuel emissions, agricultural deforestation, refu-gee pressures, sea- level rise, spiraling glacier melts, expanding drought zones, changes in the ocean conveyor, loss of fisheries, and ocean acidi fication . . . no single factor, agency, or force is entirely in charge. (69)
{"title":"Extinction by Litany? Identifying Capitalism's Transformative Effects on Planetary Complex Systems","authors":"Kai Bosworth","doi":"10.1353/cul.2022.0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2022.0042","url":null,"abstract":"The machine itself is forged by movements back and forth between the entrenched priorities of extractive capitalism, the growing lead times between drilling and production in a world where oil drilling and frack-ing require more extreme technologies, white ressentiment against other regions and peoples of color, neoliberal hubris, race and class exploitation, imperial drives, hungry dispossessed peoples, impositions of selective austerity, growing fossil fuel emissions, agricultural deforestation, refu-gee pressures, sea- level rise, spiraling glacier melts, expanding drought zones, changes in the ocean conveyor, loss of fisheries, and ocean acidi fication . . . no single factor, agency, or force is entirely in charge. (69)","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"177 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80485542","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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