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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Matory’s The Fetish Revisited relates lacunae in Freudian and Marxist theory to Afro- Atlantic spiritual and commercial life. Build-ing on a long tradition of critique of the “fetish- as- concept,” Matory resituates the fetish in a matrix of economic, ideational, and geopolitical relations. Beginning with the erotic life of middle- class, white Amer-ica, he demonstrates that fetish play, bondage, and sadomasochism and master/servant play disclose fantasies of denigrated Blackness— a literal embodiment of “kink” (2018, xii– xiii)— in which racialized and eroticized power may be negotiated and transacted. Matory is inter-ested not only in the imaginative dimensions of such play but also in the material objects that reside and circulate within its ritualized practice. As he moves into his introduction to Freud and Marx, Matory claims that “Freud knew as well as Marx and the Afro- Atlantic priests that things and the value attributed to them powerfully mediate human relationships” (xix). Social rivalries produce the fetish as a site of contested social meaning (xix– xx), powerfully recalling Pietz’s seminal article series on “The Problem of the Fetish” (1985, 1987, 1988). and hence cross-
{"title":"Rethinking Freud and Marx through Afro-Atlantic Religions","authors":"Brendon Nicholls","doi":"10.1353/cul.2022.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2022.0040","url":null,"abstract":"Matory’s The Fetish Revisited relates lacunae in Freudian and Marxist theory to Afro- Atlantic spiritual and commercial life. Build-ing on a long tradition of critique of the “fetish- as- concept,” Matory resituates the fetish in a matrix of economic, ideational, and geopolitical relations. Beginning with the erotic life of middle- class, white Amer-ica, he demonstrates that fetish play, bondage, and sadomasochism and master/servant play disclose fantasies of denigrated Blackness— a literal embodiment of “kink” (2018, xii– xiii)— in which racialized and eroticized power may be negotiated and transacted. Matory is inter-ested not only in the imaginative dimensions of such play but also in the material objects that reside and circulate within its ritualized practice. As he moves into his introduction to Freud and Marx, Matory claims that “Freud knew as well as Marx and the Afro- Atlantic priests that things and the value attributed to them powerfully mediate human relationships” (xix). Social rivalries produce the fetish as a site of contested social meaning (xix– xx), powerfully recalling Pietz’s seminal article series on “The Problem of the Fetish” (1985, 1987, 1988). and hence cross-","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91365472","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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Three key words in the subtitle of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s most recent book announce the thematic limit of its drastically absolute title Omnicide. On the face of it, mania, fatality, and the “futureindelirium” are matters the book deals with in an attempt to excavate the most recent trends (from the middle of the last century or so) in literatures in Arabic, Persian, and French by Arab and Iranian writers. It does so in the format of a lexicon of manias, each of which are illustrated, elaborated, exemplified, echoed, and imaged through leitmotifs quoted from snatches of text from “vanguard” writers from that part of the world. The book is built around this format of lexicon, quotation, and thematic elaboration to perform a set of readings that transcend the territoriality attached to the literatures of the East and recuperate the texts’ maniacal energies. It does so with such deliberation that despite its playful presentation, a distinct thesis emerges at the intersection of three axes corresponding to its three subtitles: an antipsychological understanding of mania, a poeticfigural preoccupation with fatality, and an unselfconscious, even undramatic heralding of a futureindelirium that, according to the book’s narrative, is already underway. There are echoes here of preoccupations of several EuroAmerican modernisms: this review will focus on the deliberate, untheorized resurfacings of EuroAmerican theory in this otherwise innovative book about some avantgarde literatures of the East. In its partial archiving of “middleeastern” manias, we will note signs of a GrecoLatinity,
{"title":"Return to Greco-Latinity","authors":"Shad Naved","doi":"10.1353/cul.2022.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2022.0043","url":null,"abstract":"Three key words in the subtitle of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s most recent book announce the thematic limit of its drastically absolute title Omnicide. On the face of it, mania, fatality, and the “futureindelirium” are matters the book deals with in an attempt to excavate the most recent trends (from the middle of the last century or so) in literatures in Arabic, Persian, and French by Arab and Iranian writers. It does so in the format of a lexicon of manias, each of which are illustrated, elaborated, exemplified, echoed, and imaged through leitmotifs quoted from snatches of text from “vanguard” writers from that part of the world. The book is built around this format of lexicon, quotation, and thematic elaboration to perform a set of readings that transcend the territoriality attached to the literatures of the East and recuperate the texts’ maniacal energies. It does so with such deliberation that despite its playful presentation, a distinct thesis emerges at the intersection of three axes corresponding to its three subtitles: an antipsychological understanding of mania, a poeticfigural preoccupation with fatality, and an unselfconscious, even undramatic heralding of a futureindelirium that, according to the book’s narrative, is already underway. There are echoes here of preoccupations of several EuroAmerican modernisms: this review will focus on the deliberate, untheorized resurfacings of EuroAmerican theory in this otherwise innovative book about some avantgarde literatures of the East. In its partial archiving of “middleeastern” manias, we will note signs of a GrecoLatinity,","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83342024","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 argues for a materialist elaboration of the insight that historical time is nonidentical with itself. It sees in such time the seeds of utopian futurity that lie latent in the historical present yet are systematically foreclosed by it. The utopianism at issue involves a radical constriction of desire and a global redistribution of precarity, which together render the utopian imagination responsive to the finite character of the earth's resources. Certain works of contemporary literature are especially revelatory in this context. They invite us to live through the texture of their forms both the heterogeneity of historical time and the incipience of a transfigured future in which (to quote Anahid Nersessian) the world will be "lightened of the burden of furnishing abundance" because humans have become "agents of less catastrophic harm."
{"title":"Capitalism, Temporality, Precarity: Utopian Form and its Discontents In Contemporary Literature and Theory","authors":"Greg Forter","doi":"10.1353/cul.2022.0048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2022.0048","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues for a materialist elaboration of the insight that historical time is nonidentical with itself. It sees in such time the seeds of utopian futurity that lie latent in the historical present yet are systematically foreclosed by it. The utopianism at issue involves a radical constriction of desire and a global redistribution of precarity, which together render the utopian imagination responsive to the finite character of the earth's resources. Certain works of contemporary literature are especially revelatory in this context. They invite us to live through the texture of their forms both the heterogeneity of historical time and the incipience of a transfigured future in which (to quote Anahid Nersessian) the world will be \"lightened of the burden of furnishing abundance\" because humans have become \"agents of less catastrophic harm.\"","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73796124","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:Using Hannah Arendt's lectures on aesthetic judgement, this paper asks what it means to dismiss, reject, even hate a film, and how this might be useful to democracy. Through a discussion of the appearance of aesthetic judgment in Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990), Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (Patricia Rozema, 1988) this paper explores the repercussions of declaring "I hate this movie"—what it means when this is said and what kinds of projects it allows. Through examinations of these films, this article argues that hatred is a valuable response because it demands that the contours of its rejection be explored and guarded, and it ultimately yields something that might be called "thought." This article contends that hatred always requires explanation, an articulated defense that measures one's own mind against the one responsible for the film—and indeed against those who judge it differently. But the measured response that hatred demands also pushes up against its own contingency, always revealing its unstable grounding and its capacity to be overwritten and reevaluated. In this regard, hatred of a film can serve as a kind of testing ground for participation in democracy.
{"title":"On the Political Potential of Hating Movies","authors":"Kalling Heck","doi":"10.1353/cul.2022.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2022.0039","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Using Hannah Arendt's lectures on aesthetic judgement, this paper asks what it means to dismiss, reject, even hate a film, and how this might be useful to democracy. Through a discussion of the appearance of aesthetic judgment in Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990), Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (Patricia Rozema, 1988) this paper explores the repercussions of declaring \"I hate this movie\"—what it means when this is said and what kinds of projects it allows. Through examinations of these films, this article argues that hatred is a valuable response because it demands that the contours of its rejection be explored and guarded, and it ultimately yields something that might be called \"thought.\" This article contends that hatred always requires explanation, an articulated defense that measures one's own mind against the one responsible for the film—and indeed against those who judge it differently. But the measured response that hatred demands also pushes up against its own contingency, always revealing its unstable grounding and its capacity to be overwritten and reevaluated. In this regard, hatred of a film can serve as a kind of testing ground for participation in democracy.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81621324","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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