eTopia (E-Journal)
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Super-Material Culture: Thinking Through a New Discourse of Ruins
Get PDFThe discourse on ruins, like ruins themselves, is fragmented and dispersed. Representing both decay and what remains, the ruins’ relationship to temporality is complicated—they can be construed as means for both looking back, as well as looking towards the future. The recent resurgence of literature and theory on the subject matter is consolidating existing work and defining new lines of inquiry. This article investigates the current discourse on ruins through three recent texts. Significant to them all is the dialectical nature of the ruin as both the absence of, and endurance of, material form. All three texts consider ruins through the lens of the built environment and problematize classic conceptions of ruination in consideration of the contemporary moment. Looking at ruination through architecture theory provides a contrast to the romantic accounts of ruins that originally defined the discourse. Through these texts we can see certain limitations of the discourse of ruins, but also visible are nuanced approaches that redefine the ruin as more than just a site or object, but also a set of processes that reflect our relationships to material culture and the built environment. To this I assert a necessity to reconfigure the way we de ne ruins in light of the contemporary moment. The discourse of ruins, while still speaking through earlier tropes of a fragmented ruin studies, is no longer just a survey of the subject of the ruin—it is becoming a mode through which we evaluate the changing nature of our relationship to material culture. KEYWORDS: Ruins, Ruination, Architecture, Super-materiality, Waste
Conditions for a Digital Metaphysic
Get PDFThrough an interpretation of Plato and Aristotle, I argue that the founding values of traditional metaphysics were made possible by speci c conditions of language and metaphor. Using the premises drawn from these Greek philosophers, I evaluate the ways digital media do and do not diverge from those conditions. In order to comprehend the novelty of digital media theoretically, we must first understand which features of ‘thought’ are conserved between different media systems. My position contrasts particularly with that of N. Katherine Hayles who, in My Mother was a Computer (2005), asserts that the novelty of digital media renders the conceptual resources of ‘traditional media’ inadequate to theorize it. Most of Hayles’s analysis and comparison is devoted to the properties of digital code and the interaction between code and hardware. I argue, by employing a semiotic division of language between syntagmatic and associative axes, that programming languages lack the semantic indeterminacy required to constitute a new worldview, as Hayles proposes. Finally, I argue that Hayles’s argument fails to articulate specifically how epiphenomena come to affect thinking. While there are differences between print and digital text, instead of looking to epiphenomenal causation, I propose a line of inquiry that would compare their histories as systems. Far from casting off traditional metaphysics, digital technology may actually better approximate some of their goals, for it enables a more thorough self-erasure of its own material which never comes into a phenomenal purview. KEYWORDS: Media eory, Digital Humanities, Metaphysics, Visual Culture
Are Podcasts the New Radio? Thresholds in the Macro-Environment
Get PDFThis paper considers the podcast and the current status of its disruptive relationship to traditional forms of audio entertainment. The tremendous growth of podcast adoption has yet to develop into substantial growth in revenues as the billion dollar profits of linear radio broadcasters continue to grossly dwarf the monetization structures of even the most frequently downloaded podcasts. While the self-organization and immaterial labour driving the podcast moment could be described as a challenge to the capacities of capital, this paper follows political economist Vincent Mosco’s lead of moving beyond discontinuities between old and new communication technologies to evenly attend to their continuities as well. I argue that while the unpaid labour collected into most podcasts seems to locate these cultural products outside of capitalist relations, the uniquely intimate affect podcasts generate represents a continuity between digital and linear audio media as it is captured by capital in the form of both targeted- and influencer-marketing from merchants and brand building social strategies of established broadcasters. Tracing continuities and discontinuities between podcasts and radio, this paper concludes that podcasts should not be considered an over-the-top disrupter to terrestrial radio. It is too soon to predict the degree to which they will enter this role in the future. KEYWORDS: podcast; communication technology; radio; disruption; immaterial labour
Dis-located Bodies: Dao and Deep Reality in Embodied Experience
Get PDFThis paper addresses the problems of the totality of Euro-American rationalist thinking that often dis-locates embodied thought and being through a consensus of scientific management and amusement. The culture of consensus perpetuates non- thinking being through the eradication of individuality in a totality. The realization of this tranquilized familiarity is a product of deep reality: the reflection of cultural practices, norms, and epistemologies that existentially affect one’s life revealed through the investigation of those very practices, norms, and epistemologies that underlie most cultural assumptions. Access to deep reality reveals the phenomenology of apathy. Examining the consensus of being that rationalist thought dictates and learning from other forms of knowledge such as Daoist philosophy alongside Euro-American thought offers a way of being on the periphery of rationalist thought that resists subsumption. Deep reality takes into consideration that other modes of thinking and being harmonize the mind/body dis-location: it is a way of thinking that attempts to expand beyond the Eurocentric philosophical tradition. Revealing from the periphery that commonality is more present than absent, dis-location forms the realization that the mastery of rationalist thought is alienated from itself, demonstrating that it is one mode of thinking among many that is in constant transformation. KEYWORDS: deep reality, rationalist thought, philosophical Daoism, dis-location, embodiment, apathy
AESTHETIC FREEDOM IN GROUNDWORK FOR THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE POWER OF JUDGMENT
Get PDFThe impetus for this paper began in a seminar I’m currently enrolled in this semester at Albany,Politics in Poetry. In this seminar I’ve been considering various relations between the political and the aesthetic. During the course of the seminar I’ve found the ways we articulate the various relations between the political and the aesthetic to be not only complicated, but infinitely more difficult to discuss when we’ve proceeded by way of a close reading of a particular poem, poet,or statement of poetics
THE ILLUSION OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY:COCA-COLA AND CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP
Get PDFUnder contemporary globalization, corporations have achieved a size and scope unparalleled to any other time in history (May 24). In response to growing corporate power,there have been contestations from unions, environmentalists, and anti-corporate activists stressing corporate reform. One result of social pressure has been the incorporation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaigns into corporate branding strategies (May 201). On thesurface, these campaigns appear to address and integrate social concerns into regular business practices. Yet, I argue that CSR campaigns are one component of a broader strategy to improvethe management of market crises by incorporating criticisms into corporate managed social responsibility initiatives and can be understood using Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Instead of addressing critiques in a substantive manner, CSR initiatives “break off the sharp points of contention” to bolster legitimacy for free market policies (Hobsbawm). To further understand this process, I focus on the Coca-Cola Company’s CSR campaigns on two scales; theinternational and the national in Chile
THE NEGLECT OF THE AUTHOR IN NEW HISTORICISM
Get PDFWhen discussing the emergence of New Historicism in American scholarship, it is imperative to assess its origins and influences. Mikhail Bakhtin’s exploration of the multiples of languages within the novel and Michel Foucault’s analysis of the role of the author in texts both catapulted the development of New Historical scholarship. Today, this method of scholarship approaches the author as a non-autonomous agent subjected by the multiple social, political, and cultural forces of his or her era. Similarly, literature is perceived as an art form not unique from others and should be analyzed to point toward overarching power structures to the same degree as any other mode of representation. In considering the author as a social construct, many New Historicists neglect to perceive the author as a potential formulator or modifier of reigning ideology. The fact of the matter is that literature is able to shape the ideology of a society, not merely represent it. In viewing the author as a construct of his time period, critics fail to attempt to determine which literary works were revolutionary in their ability to manipulate and change a given society’s underlying modes of thinking and practice
The Cyborg Affect: Encountering Via Switch
Get PDFThis paper is the presentation of a new thinking toward the idea of “encounter” in relation. Following the emphasis on encounter—that is, a form of situating relation in communication and culture—I would like to summarize the idea of “switch” and expand this thinking toward a new consideration of our relationship with technology. This contributes to understanding relation and encounter in affective and not effective terms. If relation is affective, embodied in both technology and ourselves (if we should make such distinctions), then this changes our conception of the encounter, what it means, and how it can be applied toward creating new theoretical terrai
“WE ARE THE WORLD”: THE FLIGHT FROM IMPOTENCE IN THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE
Get PDFPunctuating a recent music video we see, in his white glove and gold jacket, before his infamous face-whitening surgeries, the Michael Jackson of old. This video, for the song “We are the World 25,” is introduced, directly into camera, by a sincere Jamie Foxx, who implores viewers to give generously to help the recovery effort in Haiti. “Do more than just watch,”he says. “Take action.” Then, before the expected images of Haitians, and even before the singing celebrities themselves, we see a host of signatures unfolding on a black background.From the beginning, then, this video walks a very thin line: clearly banking on the reputations of singers who have made their careers as spectacles, as images, the video goes to some lengths to claim an authentic, and even superior, political position. “Give what you can,”Jamie Foxx says, “as I have.”The video’s repeated use of the image of Michael Jackson signifies this tenuous, if not contradictory, position. Who, after all, is more exemplary of the cultural logic of the societyof the spectacle than Michael Jackson? And who, in the pantheon of MTV singers, spent more time claiming authenticity and declaring our collective responsibility for a universal humanity? The video presents an excess of repetition and citation, in terms of its music and lyrics, the images Michael Jackson himself, as well as the chorus of Jackson-citing celebrity singers. But, despite the obvious point that these images and these performers are perhaps the most manufactured and least authentic imaginable, the video’s authenticity, as well as its anxiety over its own search for authenticity, is almost hyperbolically announced. My goal in this short essay is to read this video in relation to Agamben’s claims about the spectacle in his book The Coming Community. I will argue that it is precisely this citationality, this identity without essence—what is clearly a profoundly inauthentic announcement of authenticity—that Agamben sees as, potentially, the road out of the spectacle society. This video promiseswhat Agamben calls “whatever” politics (1), so–called politics, or, in Derrida’s terminology, a politics “under erasure” ( OG 23). At the same time, this video reveals the parallel logic,suggested in juridical terms in Agamben’s Homo Sacer, in which the anxiety of nonbelonging and inauthenticity leads to a more extreme and potentially violent search for essential group belonging and authentic political identity
Media of Autonomy: Community Radios of Dakar
Get PDFFrom September to December 2009 I conducted interviews with different actors in the field ofcommunity radio in Dakar, Senegal. These actors included practitioners or journalists, technicians and directors, consultants, trainers and project managers in NGOs specialized in media development, and civil servants from major governmental regulations institutions. Although the research literature on radio for development tends to focus on rural radio stations, I chose to focus on stations in Dakar because their urban location and physical proximity to international actors confer on them a front-line role, exacerbating the forces affecting their activity. The region of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, accounts for approximately 20 percent of the country’s population. It kept its place as the regional (West African) capital from the colonial era, housing many transnational organizations, NGOs, and cooperation agencies’ main quarters/offices and concentrating most of the country’s economic activity (United Nations 2007). Through this research I discovered that the strong presence of international developmentactors poses a significant difference between the workings of community radio in Dakar versusthe North American context