Research Note: The Resources of Culture
By Graeme Macdonald
“I should have thought of it before, it’s too late now.”
Italo Calvino, The Petrol Pump
The opening sentence of Italo Calvino’s 1974 story “The Petrol Pump” expresses a regret wearily familiar to 21st century energy-angst.
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Subject of Desire/Subject of Drive: The Emergence of Žižekian Media Studies
By Matthew Flisfeder
Jodi Dean. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Polity, 2010. 140 pp.
Paul A. Taylor. Žižek and the Media. Polity, 2011. 192 pp.
Fabio Vighi. Sexual Difference in European Cinema: The Curse of Enjoyment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 256 pp.
Those familiar with Slavoj Žižek will know that a great deal of his work is bound up with later theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. While Lacan has long been an influential figure in media and cultural theory, the three books reviewed here demonstrate an emerging field of Žižekian media studies that is distinct from the earlier Lacanian media studies.
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Atoning, Reconciling, and Forgiving: Interdisciplinary Investigations of Justice
By Jill Scott
Linda Radzik. Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Joanna R. Quinn. Reconciliation(s): Transitional Justice in Postconflict Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
Julie McGonegal. Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
The three books under review in this essay are united by their concern for justice and reconciliation in the aftermath of conflict and wrongdoing, but each addresses these questions with a unique disciplinary lens.
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Research Note: Reimagining Creative Economy through the lens of Multiple Colonialisms
By Adam Saifer
In April 2017, I traveled to Edmonton, Canada to sit in on the Reimagining Creative Economy: Transnational Histories, Local Practices, Regional Struggles workshop (RCE) at the University of Alberta. Two weeks earlier, Richard Florida—originator of the celebrated and derided (depending on who you ask) theory of the creative class—published his newest tome, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It (2017).
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Figuring Those Who Have Already Been Dead: Destructive Plasticity and the Form of Absence
By Richard Iveson
Catherine Malabou. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Trans. Steven Miller. Fordham University Press, 2012. 268pp.
For nearly twenty years, French philosopher Catherine Malabou has been exploring the unpredictable terrain of metamorphosis, through which she has evolved the important concept of plasticity (plasticité) understood as the hermeneutic motor scheme of our “new age.” By this, she means that plasticity is a singular scheme or motive that opens the door to the current epoch by enabling the interpretation of phenomena and major events as they arise.
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Regarding Feelings and Forms
By Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
Eugenie Brinkema. The Forms of the Affects. Duke University Press, 2014. 347 pp.
Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, eds. Feeling Photography. Duke University Press, 2014. 397 pp.
As a psychoanalytic cultural theorist, thinking about these books together ensnares me in my familiar oscillating trap: between the visceral imagery of Freud and the hygienic schemas of Lacan. Reading Freud is to vicariously feel his theories of psyche; I am seduced by this provocation of idiosyncratic feeling.
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The Shape of Things
By Sam Han
Peter Sloterdijk. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 2011. 664pp.
For anyone even remotely interested in philosophy, when a figure sets out to “correct” Heidegger, you want to pay attention. This is not necessarily out of admiration for the author of Being and Time, or his ideas, but rather out of a genuine curiosity made up of equal parts amazement and horror.
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Moving Mountains: Art History for the Neoliberal Era
By Danielle Child
Nato Thompson, ed. Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011. Creative Time Books and MIT Press, 2012. 280 pp.
Living as Form is an important volume for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of socially engaged art. The volume accompanies an exhibition of the same name held in Essex Street Market, Manhattan, curated by Nato Thompson and co-authored by Creative Time—a New York-based non-profit arts organization—and Independent Curators International, NY.
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An Archive for Affect Theory
By Russ Leo
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2010. 416 pp.
“There is no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be” (3): Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth insist on this point, and The Affect Theory Reader demonstrates its critical import in contemporary debates concerning that most slippery term, “affect.” Seigworth and Gregg, under the artfully provocative heading “An Inventory of Shimmers,” attend in brief to a wide variety of theories of affect—from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, psychology, and post-Cartesian philosophies (read: Spinozism) to Marxism, feminism, science and technology studies, queer studies, and various histories of emotion.
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Middle Games and Possible Communisms
By Ryan Culpepper
Lucio Magri. The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Verso, 2011. 434 pp.
The trickiest and most demanding moment in chess is the one that separates the middle game—when many pieces are still on the board, forces still appear level in positions not codified in theory, and each player has a plan of action—from the approach to the endgame.
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A Long Chinese Century?
By Peter Hitchcock
Giovanni Arrighi. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. Verso, 2007. 420 pp.
This is a brave and provocative book by a writer who gave us some of the most brilliant critiques of geopolitics and geoeconomics of recent years. Arrighi described his projects as comparative historical-sociology which in terms of the works themselves is another way of thinking the world system as such (in contradistinction to the methodologies and conclusions of Wallerstein and Brenner).
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The Mass Reading Event and the Citizen-Reader
By Sarah Brouillette and Lina Shoumarova
Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. Routledge, 2013. 370 pp.
Reading Beyond the Book presents the results of an extensive program of research into what the authors call mass reading events (MREs). It features case studies of the Richard and Judy Book Club, Canada Reads, and a variety of One Book, One Community (OBOC) programs: from Seattle Reads, which was the first program of its kind, and went on after its 1999 launch to become the basic toolkit for OBOC programs all over the world, to Get Into Reading, a grassroots program that aims to have Liverpool’s underprivileged communities reading classic literature together.
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Spinoza and the Politics of the Future
By Miriam Tola
Antonio Negri. Spinoza for Our Time. Columbia University Press, 2013. xix + 125 pp
Hasana Sharp. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. University of Chicago Press, 2011. xii + 241 pp.
Nowhere has the capacity of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy to enable radical politics been asserted more forcefully than in Antonio Negri’s The Savage Anomaly. Published in 1981, the book marked a turning point in Spinoza scholarship by establishing Spinoza as a thinker of revolutionary immanence.
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The Art World’s Dark Matter
By Bruce Barber
Gregory Sholette. Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. Pluto Press, 2011. 240 pp.
In Lana Jokel’s 1972 film monograph on Andy Warhol (Blackwood Films), the artist is asked to conjecture what he considers will become the next major international art movement. With his voice stammering a little under the weight of the question, Warhol responds in a familiar affected manner with “ah…it’ll be…ah…p ….
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America’s Primitive Turn: Capital and the “War on Terror” in Post-9/11 America
By Jaafar Aksikas
Paul Smith. Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 176 pp.
The field of contemporary cultural studies, especially with its importation into the American academy, often assumes a scepticism toward the uses of Marxist political economy and of Marxist approaches to culture, including more robust, non-reductive Marxist approaches and models, where cultural phenomena and cultural forms are understood within the context of their social totality—economic, political, and cultural. Paul Smith is one of the very few cultural studies scholars writing today who does not share this scepticism in the least and the result, in the case of his latest book Primitive America, is a provocative, original, and unorthodox critique of contemporary American capital and culture.
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On Pinking the Commons
By Carolyn Sale
Caren Irr. Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright. University of Iowa Press, 2010. 214 pp.
Straddling a quarter-century between Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), Caren Irr’s Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright (2010) has an exciting premise: it proposes to read the work of four novelists — Le Guin, Silko, Kathy Acker, and Andrea K.
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Under the Hood of Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology
By Liam Young
Wolfgang Ernst. Digital Memory and the Archive. Jussi Parikka, ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 265 pp.
The allure of the archive as a concept, space, form, and metaphor has proven irresistible for continentally inflected media and cultural studies over the last two decades. The “archive fever” diagnosed by Derrida in 1995 has only become more acute as the ever-accelerating digitization of culture, memory, and history has fundamentally reconfigured archives, both real and imaginary.
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The Pig Stays in the Picture: Visual/Literary Narratives of Human-Animal Intimacies
By Sarah O’Brien
Susan McHugh. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 280pp.
Some of the most productive work currently being done in the emerging field of Animal Studies responds in earnest to the title of John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?” (1980).
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The Trials of Translation: Psychoanalysis and Islam
By Alessandra Capperdoni
Fethi Benslama. Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam. Trans. Robert Bononno. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 272 pp.
Robert Bononno’s English translation of Fethi Benslama’s La psychoanalyse à l’épreuve de Islam is a welcome contribution to debates about the role of religion in the contemporary world at a time when divisions and polarizations occupy a central stage in public rhetoric.
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Urban Revolution and the ‘Chinese Century’
By Leslie Sklair
Thomas Campanella. The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World. Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Xiangming Chen. Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Since the 1980s, China has built more skyscrapers; more office buildings; more shopping malls and hotels; more housing estates and gated communities; more highways, bridges, subways, and tunnels; more public parks, playgrounds, squares, and plazas; more golf courses and resorts and theme parks than any other nation on earth—indeed, than probably all other nations combined (Campanella 14).
These words, from the Introduction of Thomas Campanella’s brilliant book, decisively set the scene for what can truly be described as the world-historical phenomenon of how the Chinese authorities working closely with local and transnational entrepreneurs of various types have stormed into the twenty-first century.
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Cloud Control
By Ricky d’Andrea Crano
Tung-Hui Hu. A Prehistory of the Cloud. The MIT Press, 2015. xxix, 219 pp.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. The MIT Press, 2016. xiv, 246 pp.
What do Pony Express stations, Victorian sewers, World War II bunkers, interstate highway truck stops, and the post-9/11 CIA practice of extraordinary rendition all have in common? As Tung-Hui Hu demonstrates in his debut scholarly monograph, they each prefigure and in one way or another sculpt our current conceptions of digitally networked computing.
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Culture, Technology and Hyper-Industrial Capitalism
By Tai Neilson, Lisa Daily, Gavin Mueller and David Rheams
Bernard Stiegler. The Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Trans. Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold. Polity Press, 2011. 194 pp.
In The Decadence of Industrial Democracies Bernard Stiegler presents a singular take on the culture industry in the hyper-industrial age and offers a radical understanding of technological and cultural change. Stiegler applies his philosophical approach developed in Technics and Time to the Americanized culture industry at the heart of industrial democracies. Echoing the Frankfurt School, he describes the willingness of consumer citizens to trade leisure time for consumptive habits.
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“Intellectual Craftwork”: Reading Barbara Godard
By Erin Wunker
Barbara Godard. Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli. NeWest Press, 2008.
I met Barbara Godard once. She was the plenary speaker at the McGill English Graduate Students’ Conference when I was in the first year of my Master’s. I remember being awed first by the vertigo-inducing complexity of her plenary paper, and then, later, when I was able to talk with her at the evening reception.
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Media Theory at the Limits of Communication
By Aleksandra Kaminska
Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark. Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. University of Chicago Press, 2014. 210 pp.
“By being off the radar, you move in a different space, a jubilee zone of exception.”
—John Durham Peters, “Speaking Into the iPhone”
Like all such rare and catastrophic events, the disappearance of flight MH370 during a routine flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing in March 2014 spurred a frenzy of media coverage and public fascination.
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Trauma and the Limits of Counter-Memory
By Kelli Moore
Dora Apel. War Culture and the Contest of Images. Rutgers University Press, 2012. 273 pp.
War Culture and the Contest of Images comes in the wake of the Bush administration’s corporatized media production, chiefly represented by Colin Powell’s testimony before the U.N. Security Council on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the current extension of policies and practices of the Obama administration that continue to drive underground public knowledge and debate about secret detention camps.
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How to Save the World: A Politics of the People
By Mathias Nilges
Enrique Dussel. Twenty Theses on Politics. Duke University Press, 2008. 184 pp.
At the center of Enrique Dussel’s Twenty Theses on Politics stand a series of basic yet monumental questions. What is power? What is politics? Can power be held? Can it be taken?
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Leftist Politics on the Couch
By Simon Orpana
Charles Wells. The Subject of Liberation. Bloomsbury, 2014. 245 pp.
When was the last time you left work early for an appointment with your Lacanian analyst? This is not the set-up to yet another Žižekian attempt at instructive humour, but rather one of the possible implications of Charles Wells’ argument for how Lacanian psychoanalysis can help us define and move towards a more liberated society.
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Branding in Everyday Life
By Mehita Iqani
Melissa Aronczyk and Devon Powers, eds. Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture. Peter Lang, 2010. 339 pp.
Blowing Up the Brand, an edited collection originating from a conference of the same name held in New York in 2009, does not so much seek to provide definitions for the brand as it does critically engage with “the increasingly central role of brands in contemporary culture” (5).
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Becoming Analogical
By Chad Vollrath
Gilbert Simondon. Two Lessons on Animal and Man. Trans. Drew S. Burk. Univocal, 2012. 88 pp.
In 2009, Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, published a special issue dedicated to “the occasion of the forthcoming publication of the English translation of Gilbert Simondon’s L’individuation psychique et collective” (De Boever et al.
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Spectral Places, Subjectivities and Politics
By Juliana Martínez
María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury, 2013. 569 pp.
With an all-star Table of Contents that includes Giorgio Agamben, Arjun Appadurai, Ulrich Baer, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others, The Spectralities Reader compiles the founding texts of what the editors call the “spectral turn,” as well as the more salient critiques that have fuelled one of the more productive debates in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts over the last twenty-five years.
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