large, as Critchley’s definition of “active” nihilism implies. Examples in this realm span far-right and racist acts of terror, so-called Incels who fantasize about murdering women and, relatedly, the so-called “epidemic” of domestic violence and femicide. In each case, a nihilist dilemma lies at the heart of the futilitarian condition and articulates the challenge of transforming futility from an individual experience to a source of collective solidarity. The relationship between futility and nihilism thus concerns how political possibilities are (im)mobilized, how subjective experiences of meaninglessness or pointlessness can be turned inward, outward, or both depending on the extant forms of collectivity available to them. While Futilitarianism explores “the relationship between political desire and the practice of politics” and suggests that “the pandemic has accentuated the simultaneous decline of political deliberation and increase of political desire for the wider populace” (130), the many examples Vallelly discusses are only the beginning of where analysis and critique might go using the conceptual tools this book offers.
{"title":"Unsettling the Politics of Race: Kevin Bruyneel's Settler Memory","authors":"Siddhant Issar","doi":"10.1353/tae.2022.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0051","url":null,"abstract":"large, as Critchley’s definition of “active” nihilism implies. Examples in this realm span far-right and racist acts of terror, so-called Incels who fantasize about murdering women and, relatedly, the so-called “epidemic” of domestic violence and femicide. In each case, a nihilist dilemma lies at the heart of the futilitarian condition and articulates the challenge of transforming futility from an individual experience to a source of collective solidarity. The relationship between futility and nihilism thus concerns how political possibilities are (im)mobilized, how subjective experiences of meaninglessness or pointlessness can be turned inward, outward, or both depending on the extant forms of collectivity available to them. While Futilitarianism explores “the relationship between political desire and the practice of politics” and suggests that “the pandemic has accentuated the simultaneous decline of political deliberation and increase of political desire for the wider populace” (130), the many examples Vallelly discusses are only the beginning of where analysis and critique might go using the conceptual tools this book offers.","PeriodicalId":55174,"journal":{"name":"Discrete Event Dynamic Systems-Theory and Applications","volume":"402 1","pages":"954 - 958"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77352956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Most approaches to dignity's history, and its meanings, rely on a hierarchical grammar that elevates the dignified individual. Hierarchy links dignity, through the armament of rights, to coercive bodies and mechanisms that give political substance to dignity claims. This essay seeks in Mohandas Gandhi's thought an alternative practice of dignity, one that departs from this dominant tendency. Unlike most counterparts in the western canon, Gandhian dignity gives ontological priority to vulnerability. Gandhi's anti-hierarchical conception frames dignity in direct relation to existing inequalities, and is elaborated through experiments in proximate living, and via service to the most vulnerable.
{"title":"\"To become like a particle of dust\": Dignity as a Gandhian Practice","authors":"Manu Samnotra","doi":"10.1353/tae.2022.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0043","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Most approaches to dignity's history, and its meanings, rely on a hierarchical grammar that elevates the dignified individual. Hierarchy links dignity, through the armament of rights, to coercive bodies and mechanisms that give political substance to dignity claims. This essay seeks in Mohandas Gandhi's thought an alternative practice of dignity, one that departs from this dominant tendency. Unlike most counterparts in the western canon, Gandhian dignity gives ontological priority to vulnerability. Gandhi's anti-hierarchical conception frames dignity in direct relation to existing inequalities, and is elaborated through experiments in proximate living, and via service to the most vulnerable.","PeriodicalId":55174,"journal":{"name":"Discrete Event Dynamic Systems-Theory and Applications","volume":"18 1","pages":"829 - 850"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87760204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article examines Edmund Burke and Ottobah Cugoano's aesthetic thought in relation to eighteenth-century racial slavery. It interrogates their ideas of the sublime and beautiful which contribute to their different political positions on the abolition of slavery: whereas the former advocated the gradual abolition of the slave trade and distant emancipation, the latter sought the immediate abolition of the trade and rapid emancipation. It contends that Burke's discussions of the sublime and beautiful were racialized, his advocacy of white authority on plantation slavery was rooted in his aesthetics, and his evocation of the Black sublime throughout his long career fit well with attempts to ameliorate, reform, and gradually abolish slavery. In contrast, Ottobah Cugoano's discussion of the sublime, the beautiful, and rejection of white authority supported his advocacy for the immediate abolition of the slave trade and rapid emancipation of enslaved peoples. The article also examines the reverberation of the logics of eighteenth-century racial aesthetics in current contexts.
{"title":"On the Sublime and Beautiful: Edmund Burke, Ottobah Cugoano, and Reverberations of Eighteenth-Century Racial Aesthetics","authors":"Tacuma Peters","doi":"10.1353/tae.2022.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0041","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines Edmund Burke and Ottobah Cugoano's aesthetic thought in relation to eighteenth-century racial slavery. It interrogates their ideas of the sublime and beautiful which contribute to their different political positions on the abolition of slavery: whereas the former advocated the gradual abolition of the slave trade and distant emancipation, the latter sought the immediate abolition of the trade and rapid emancipation. It contends that Burke's discussions of the sublime and beautiful were racialized, his advocacy of white authority on plantation slavery was rooted in his aesthetics, and his evocation of the Black sublime throughout his long career fit well with attempts to ameliorate, reform, and gradually abolish slavery. In contrast, Ottobah Cugoano's discussion of the sublime, the beautiful, and rejection of white authority supported his advocacy for the immediate abolition of the slave trade and rapid emancipation of enslaved peoples. The article also examines the reverberation of the logics of eighteenth-century racial aesthetics in current contexts.","PeriodicalId":55174,"journal":{"name":"Discrete Event Dynamic Systems-Theory and Applications","volume":"73 3","pages":"780 - 803"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72629351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","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 since the nineteenth-century, Black males have been deemed pathogenic/criminals who pose a threat to White civilization, thus are worthy of eradication. This justification, I advance, has roots in nineteenth-twentieth century eugenic theories of Black males as hereditary criminals. Such eugenic theories are prevalent in the writings of white vigilantes, and medical reports of Black males who have died from police brutality.
{"title":"Eugenic Caricatures of Black Male Death from the Nineteenth- to Twenty-first Centuries","authors":"Ruwe Dalitso","doi":"10.1353/tae.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay, I argue that since the nineteenth-century, Black males have been deemed pathogenic/criminals who pose a threat to White civilization, thus are worthy of eradication. This justification, I advance, has roots in nineteenth-twentieth century eugenic theories of Black males as hereditary criminals. Such eugenic theories are prevalent in the writings of white vigilantes, and medical reports of Black males who have died from police brutality.","PeriodicalId":55174,"journal":{"name":"Discrete Event Dynamic Systems-Theory and Applications","volume":"36 1","pages":"665 - 688"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90983044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay addresses the rise of what is understood to be a global techno-theodicy. Recognizing the pandemic of 2020 as representing the first crisis of the post-liberal order, it maps out the changing nature of religious power as it relates to the appropriation of the abstract, from earlier claims on the monotheistic God to the powers of salvation and redemption invested in technology today. Technology in these terms is no longer seen as enabling, let alone a tool for advancing or progressing the lived conditions of life on earth. Nor can it further be seen as an integral force that shapes being in the world alone. It's now presented to us as the only thing which could save a fragile and broken humanity from itself. This has been achieved by collapsing the human into the species, collapsing the species into nature, and collapsing nature into the technological in such a way that there remains no distinction. This results in an outright assault on the poetic sensibility and the art of possibility. Moreover, it also reaches further into the philosophy of death and the remaining frontiers yet to be colonized.
{"title":"The Techno-Theodicy: How Technology Became the New Religion","authors":"Brad Evans, Chantal Meza","doi":"10.1353/tae.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay addresses the rise of what is understood to be a global techno-theodicy. Recognizing the pandemic of 2020 as representing the first crisis of the post-liberal order, it maps out the changing nature of religious power as it relates to the appropriation of the abstract, from earlier claims on the monotheistic God to the powers of salvation and redemption invested in technology today. Technology in these terms is no longer seen as enabling, let alone a tool for advancing or progressing the lived conditions of life on earth. Nor can it further be seen as an integral force that shapes being in the world alone. It's now presented to us as the only thing which could save a fragile and broken humanity from itself. This has been achieved by collapsing the human into the species, collapsing the species into nature, and collapsing nature into the technological in such a way that there remains no distinction. This results in an outright assault on the poetic sensibility and the art of possibility. Moreover, it also reaches further into the philosophy of death and the remaining frontiers yet to be colonized.","PeriodicalId":55174,"journal":{"name":"Discrete Event Dynamic Systems-Theory and Applications","volume":"48 1","pages":"639 - 664"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78888161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The "right to the city," as first announced by Henri Lefebvre, is a direct challenge to the current allocation, use and governance of urban spaces. This essay seeks to demonstrate that in addition to expanding our conventional conception of rights, Lefebvre also proposes a new understanding of citizenship. This concept of citizenship simultaneously undermines the Westphalian system's cramped view of citizenship as legal membership in a particular nation state—emphasizing, instead, the vital link between citizenship and inhabitance—and promotes a more robust model in which citizens manage their own urban spaces. While expressing support for Lefebvre's basic goals, the essay critically examines proposals to extend urban citizens' self-management of their city to a right to participate in any decision—even those of multinational corporations and other nation states––whose policies may impact the city.
{"title":"Henri Lefebvre: Reclaiming Urban Space, Recovering Citizenship","authors":"S. Roulier","doi":"10.1353/tae.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The \"right to the city,\" as first announced by Henri Lefebvre, is a direct challenge to the current allocation, use and governance of urban spaces. This essay seeks to demonstrate that in addition to expanding our conventional conception of rights, Lefebvre also proposes a new understanding of citizenship. This concept of citizenship simultaneously undermines the Westphalian system's cramped view of citizenship as legal membership in a particular nation state—emphasizing, instead, the vital link between citizenship and inhabitance—and promotes a more robust model in which citizens manage their own urban spaces. While expressing support for Lefebvre's basic goals, the essay critically examines proposals to extend urban citizens' self-management of their city to a right to participate in any decision—even those of multinational corporations and other nation states––whose policies may impact the city.","PeriodicalId":55174,"journal":{"name":"Discrete Event Dynamic Systems-Theory and Applications","volume":"88 7 1","pages":"595 - 613"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87705904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article examines norms of labor and individuation inaugurated by late liberal directives to optimize intimate life as a site of personal fulfilment. Analyzing ethnographic material on US polyamory, I identify "the contract complex"—a set of techniques for managing multiple relationships—as a person-making regime that enables dramatic intimate transformations while extending classical liberalism's hierarchical privileging of autonomy over dependence. Persisting gendered binaries structure this phenomenon, with the late liberal home masculinized as it is re-imagined from a natural site of nurture to one of choice, and the person feminized as a site of therapeutic self-nurture through self-discovery.
{"title":"Contracts, Polyamory, and Late Liberalism: The Relational Production of Unrelationality","authors":"Julienne Obadia","doi":"10.1353/tae.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines norms of labor and individuation inaugurated by late liberal directives to optimize intimate life as a site of personal fulfilment. Analyzing ethnographic material on US polyamory, I identify \"the contract complex\"—a set of techniques for managing multiple relationships—as a person-making regime that enables dramatic intimate transformations while extending classical liberalism's hierarchical privileging of autonomy over dependence. Persisting gendered binaries structure this phenomenon, with the late liberal home masculinized as it is re-imagined from a natural site of nurture to one of choice, and the person feminized as a site of therapeutic self-nurture through self-discovery.","PeriodicalId":55174,"journal":{"name":"Discrete Event Dynamic Systems-Theory and Applications","volume":"35 1","pages":"509 - 535"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80091028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Public debate surrounding the "unrepresentability" of historical acts of violence urgently calls into question representation in the public spaces of art and politics. This article argues that framing the unrepresentable in ethical terms perpetuates the divisions and ideologies that contemporary politics seeks to rectify. As an alternative, we draw on Jacques Rancière's critique of ethics to outline an aesthetics of unrepresentability rooted in an indeterminate act of bearing witness. We outline a non-ethical politics of the unrepresentable through a politicized reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to show how Rancière's concept of political dissensus helps us witness the violent erasure of the "spark of life" that we glimpse in unrepresentable events and figures.
{"title":"An Indistinct Fear: Jacques Ranciere, Mary Shelley, and the Aesthetics of the Unrepresentable","authors":"Katharina Clausius, S. Honisch","doi":"10.1353/tae.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Public debate surrounding the \"unrepresentability\" of historical acts of violence urgently calls into question representation in the public spaces of art and politics. This article argues that framing the unrepresentable in ethical terms perpetuates the divisions and ideologies that contemporary politics seeks to rectify. As an alternative, we draw on Jacques Rancière's critique of ethics to outline an aesthetics of unrepresentability rooted in an indeterminate act of bearing witness. We outline a non-ethical politics of the unrepresentable through a politicized reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to show how Rancière's concept of political dissensus helps us witness the violent erasure of the \"spark of life\" that we glimpse in unrepresentable events and figures.","PeriodicalId":55174,"journal":{"name":"Discrete Event Dynamic Systems-Theory and Applications","volume":"25 1","pages":"536 - 564"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76725433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Differing Not Merely in Degree but Also in Kind: A Review of Lorna N. Bracewell's Why We Lost the Sex Wars","authors":"I. Gonzales","doi":"10.1353/tae.2022.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0034","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55174,"journal":{"name":"Discrete Event Dynamic Systems-Theory and Applications","volume":"189 1","pages":"710 - 713"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77943852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:While appreciating the role systemic shocks play in setting the stage for fascism, this essay focuses on molecular processes that help to turn systemic upheavals in particular directions. The idea is to explore how a fascist cohort coalesces, for its membership is never entirely reducible to an aggregation of race, class, gender or faith positions. To start, I review recent work in neuroscience and cultural theory on how embodied precursors to perception, judgment, and action unfold below cultural awareness. That account is then linked to bodily stresses and social binds faced by specific cohorts. Such a conjunction, under the right conditions, can be the formation of a spiritual assemblage ripened to embrace and enact fascist takeover attempts. Such an assemblage expresses the armored male syndrome, even when it overflows the class of angry white men who provide its basis. After drawing upon the film Glengarry Glen Ross to portray multimodal features of fascist contagion, I suggest that such processes are not only involved in fascist formations. Since there is never a vacuum on the visceral register of cultural life, the inversion of these influences at multiple social sites is essential to negotiating a democratic ethos within cultural institutions that both feed and exceed electoral politics.
{"title":"Bodily Stresses, Cultural Drives, Fascist Contagions","authors":"W. Connolly","doi":"10.1353/tae.2022.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2022.0033","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:While appreciating the role systemic shocks play in setting the stage for fascism, this essay focuses on molecular processes that help to turn systemic upheavals in particular directions. The idea is to explore how a fascist cohort coalesces, for its membership is never entirely reducible to an aggregation of race, class, gender or faith positions. To start, I review recent work in neuroscience and cultural theory on how embodied precursors to perception, judgment, and action unfold below cultural awareness. That account is then linked to bodily stresses and social binds faced by specific cohorts. Such a conjunction, under the right conditions, can be the formation of a spiritual assemblage ripened to embrace and enact fascist takeover attempts. Such an assemblage expresses the armored male syndrome, even when it overflows the class of angry white men who provide its basis. After drawing upon the film Glengarry Glen Ross to portray multimodal features of fascist contagion, I suggest that such processes are not only involved in fascist formations. Since there is never a vacuum on the visceral register of cultural life, the inversion of these influences at multiple social sites is essential to negotiating a democratic ethos within cultural institutions that both feed and exceed electoral politics.","PeriodicalId":55174,"journal":{"name":"Discrete Event Dynamic Systems-Theory and Applications","volume":"10 1","pages":"689 - 709"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73984404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}