{"title":":Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical","authors":"P. Mendes-Flohr","doi":"10.1086/723674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723674","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48688401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article traces the emergence of ecomedia in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. I take this emergence as an opportunity to think through the relations of sensing technologies and animals as well as the transformative potential of these relations for critical thought. I turn to the camera trap and the Geiger counter first to understand how these sensor-based media are used to generate data around environmental inquiry as well as how they may be reassembled to help us take measure of the aftereffects of the 3.11 disasters through and with located relationships and encounters among species, human and nonhuman. By exploring how ecomedia invite nonhuman makings to enter the analytical frame, I hope to arrive at an understanding of environmental harm not as a futurological threat but as an ongoing event that calls for new forms of agentic thinking and enactments of multispecies struggle and collaboration.
{"title":"Ecomedia in the Wild: Camera Traps, Geiger Counters, and Radioactive Boars","authors":"D. O'Neill","doi":"10.1086/723627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723627","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the emergence of ecomedia in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. I take this emergence as an opportunity to think through the relations of sensing technologies and animals as well as the transformative potential of these relations for critical thought. I turn to the camera trap and the Geiger counter first to understand how these sensor-based media are used to generate data around environmental inquiry as well as how they may be reassembled to help us take measure of the aftereffects of the 3.11 disasters through and with located relationships and encounters among species, human and nonhuman. By exploring how ecomedia invite nonhuman makings to enter the analytical frame, I hope to arrive at an understanding of environmental harm not as a futurological threat but as an ongoing event that calls for new forms of agentic thinking and enactments of multispecies struggle and collaboration.","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":"49 1","pages":"337 - 358"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41748686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value","authors":"B. Geoghegan","doi":"10.1086/723669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723669","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44995738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Often presented as a new form of materialism, theories of media have been repeatedly fascinated by the idea of dematerialization—more precisely, by a vision of the history of technical media as a process teleologically oriented toward a future characterized by the overcoming of the weight, the opaqueness, and the resistance of materiality and by the advent of new, pervasive forms of instantaneous communication. Light, be it natural or artificial, has often played a key role in this historical narrative. With its diffused presence, limitless plasticity, ultimate speed, ambiguous status between infinitely small particles and electromagnetic waves, and crucial role in the transmission of images and signals, light has often raised the question of the materiality of media itself, pointing to the possibility of immediacy—of an immediate, instantaneous, immaterial transmission. In this article I analyze the presence of this idea of dematerialization as the end point of media history in the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and Marshall McLuhan, whose thinking about media is centered on the assumption that light is the most fundamental medium, one that leads the entire range of technical media to gradually dematerialize and merge within the environment or even dissolve into the atmosphere.
{"title":"Toward Dematerialization: Light, Medium, Environment","authors":"A. Somaini","doi":"10.1086/723719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723719","url":null,"abstract":"Often presented as a new form of materialism, theories of media have been repeatedly fascinated by the idea of dematerialization—more precisely, by a vision of the history of technical media as a process teleologically oriented toward a future characterized by the overcoming of the weight, the opaqueness, and the resistance of materiality and by the advent of new, pervasive forms of instantaneous communication. Light, be it natural or artificial, has often played a key role in this historical narrative. With its diffused presence, limitless plasticity, ultimate speed, ambiguous status between infinitely small particles and electromagnetic waves, and crucial role in the transmission of images and signals, light has often raised the question of the materiality of media itself, pointing to the possibility of immediacy—of an immediate, instantaneous, immaterial transmission. In this article I analyze the presence of this idea of dematerialization as the end point of media history in the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and Marshall McLuhan, whose thinking about media is centered on the assumption that light is the most fundamental medium, one that leads the entire range of technical media to gradually dematerialize and merge within the environment or even dissolve into the atmosphere.","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":"49 1","pages":"384 - 405"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44022327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article considers the expropriation, description, and cultivation of land as a central problem for media history and political ecology. Recent work in the history and theory of media has posited the cultivation of land as a primordial cultural technique or a material operation that underlies signification. Such work stops short, however, of considering that operation—which begins with the drawing of lines on the ground—as a form of labor and hence a dimension of political economy comparable to Rousseau’s account of the origin of property. John Bellamy Foster has shown how Marx’s early development of a neo-Epicurean materialism led, when informed by mid-nineteenth-century scientific agriculture, to what Foster calls Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” the disruption of the metabolic interchange between nature and society mediated by human labor. This article returns to the unfinished business of critical theory that rejoins the critique of culture with the critique of nature, by showing how a mediapolitics of land governs the dialectical processes described by eco-Marxists like Foster. Specifically, the article considers the material production of land for both agriculture and industry, informed by scientific agriculture and with plantation slavery as a limit case, through the work of Henry Charles Carey. Rethinking the political economy of land in this way extends the cultural materialism predominant in media history and theory into a more fully historical materialism adequate to an ecological situation in which all that may once have been solid has truly melted, or burned, into air.
{"title":"On the Fence: Media, Ecology, Marx","authors":"Reinhold Martin","doi":"10.1086/723721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723721","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the expropriation, description, and cultivation of land as a central problem for media history and political ecology. Recent work in the history and theory of media has posited the cultivation of land as a primordial cultural technique or a material operation that underlies signification. Such work stops short, however, of considering that operation—which begins with the drawing of lines on the ground—as a form of labor and hence a dimension of political economy comparable to Rousseau’s account of the origin of property. John Bellamy Foster has shown how Marx’s early development of a neo-Epicurean materialism led, when informed by mid-nineteenth-century scientific agriculture, to what Foster calls Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” the disruption of the metabolic interchange between nature and society mediated by human labor. This article returns to the unfinished business of critical theory that rejoins the critique of culture with the critique of nature, by showing how a mediapolitics of land governs the dialectical processes described by eco-Marxists like Foster. Specifically, the article considers the material production of land for both agriculture and industry, informed by scientific agriculture and with plantation slavery as a limit case, through the work of Henry Charles Carey. Rethinking the political economy of land in this way extends the cultural materialism predominant in media history and theory into a more fully historical materialism adequate to an ecological situation in which all that may once have been solid has truly melted, or burned, into air.","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":"49 1","pages":"359 - 383"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44619022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Modern Times: Temporality in Art and Politics","authors":"D. Panagia","doi":"10.1086/723665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723665","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46286707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Stranger Fictions: A History of the Novel in Arabic Translation","authors":"Dima Ayoub","doi":"10.1086/723672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723672","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47471650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ecological crises provoked by technological transformations under the pressure of capitalism have prompted a move toward new modes of environmental thinking within the humanities and social sciences. A critical locus has been media studies, where the environmental quality of media as that which surrounds and connects us—along with the resource-intensive requirements for the production and circulation of media forms—has led to a dramatic refiguring of the discipline’s objects and methods. As technologies saturate our planet, media have ballooned to take up our entire living sphere. Our living environment—air, earth, ocean, sky—has become saturated by media technologies ranging from planetary satellites, undersea cables, surveillance cameras, and ubiquitous screens, such that our understanding ofmedium has come to be theorized in environmental terms.Here,medium is not a static object. More than a set of discrete technologies, the very concept of a medium has evolved into a complex ecology with flexible boundaries, seen most readily in the context of infrastructures, systems, and networks. Taken in this expansive frame, all media may be understood as environmental. This does not mean that media simply reflect or mediate nature as it has been historically constructed—a familiar argument within critical theory—but rather that all environments, natural or artificial, become sites for the mediation of
{"title":"Introduction: Medium/Environment","authors":"Weihong Bao, J. Gaboury, Daniel Morgan","doi":"10.1086/723667","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723667","url":null,"abstract":"Ecological crises provoked by technological transformations under the pressure of capitalism have prompted a move toward new modes of environmental thinking within the humanities and social sciences. A critical locus has been media studies, where the environmental quality of media as that which surrounds and connects us—along with the resource-intensive requirements for the production and circulation of media forms—has led to a dramatic refiguring of the discipline’s objects and methods. As technologies saturate our planet, media have ballooned to take up our entire living sphere. Our living environment—air, earth, ocean, sky—has become saturated by media technologies ranging from planetary satellites, undersea cables, surveillance cameras, and ubiquitous screens, such that our understanding ofmedium has come to be theorized in environmental terms.Here,medium is not a static object. More than a set of discrete technologies, the very concept of a medium has evolved into a complex ecology with flexible boundaries, seen most readily in the context of infrastructures, systems, and networks. Taken in this expansive frame, all media may be understood as environmental. This does not mean that media simply reflect or mediate nature as it has been historically constructed—a familiar argument within critical theory—but rather that all environments, natural or artificial, become sites for the mediation of","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":"49 1","pages":"301 - 314"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48502862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930","authors":"Britt Rusert","doi":"10.1086/723670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723670","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46370764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}