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LUMINATO FESTIVAL: TORONTO’S ANSWER TO THE CRISIS OF SPACE AND PLACE FOR CITIZENS
Get PDFDragan Klaic, a leading researcher on festivals in Europe, believes the new emerging purpose of festivals is that they"increasingly… are not just artistic packages with appealing and valued content but instruments to re-examine the urban dynamics, … within the city space.…[F]estivals challenge the habitual pathways and perceptions…. In the urban space, functionally dominated by housing and consumerism, festivals reaffirm the public sphere in its civic dimension, including polemic, debate, critique and collective passion for a certain art form or topic.… [F]estivals appear as a precious force to mark the perimeters of the public sphere, upgrade it by the concentration of creative gestures and their collective appreciation"(202-203).Klaic captures a theme of central importance, one that has been debated already within the context of broadcast media, the Internet and newspaper industry, but that still has yet to be thoroughly explored by theorists within the context of the cultural sphere of festivals: the public sphere. Specifically, because of the nature of festivals as a spatiotemporal event within the physical space of the city, and because political, socioeconomic as well as artistic-cultural spaces intersect the festival event, festivals areunique points of convergence in the context of the public sphere
Nostalgia for Crisis: Representing Revolution in North American Popular Culture
Get PDFIn contemporary North America we no longer have revolutions; instead we have nostalgia for revolution. Benjamin Arditi’s Politics on the Edges of Liberalism argues that the continued presence of marginal radical politics in Western liberal democracies is evidence of our nostalgia for revolution and that we are mourning an ideal state of the past. I argue that another more widespread site of evidence for our nostalgia for revolution is the proliferation of popular artefacts branded with revolutionary iconography. As a symbol, revolution is omnipresent in North American culture. It is on our t-shirts, magazine covers, book jackets, advertising posters,and in our language and conversations describing new political realities and cultural contexts.We are collectors of revolutionary culture: we wear it, read it, buy it, and talk about it
ARCHITECTURES OF CRISIS IN BLINDESS AND SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
Get PDFThis paper endeavours to do two things at once. It posits, firstly, that Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness (2008) and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), can be conceptualized through the language of crisis and quarantine, in order to illustrate how architectural and discursive enclosures—or the synchronized acts of building and narrating crisis—work to anxiously “contain the outbreak” and regulate the wayward text or body. At the same time, this paper also looks at the ways in which Synecdoche, when compared to the more prototypical quarantine film, Blindness, is in the end rather ambivalent with regards to the disciplinary project of quarantine, and in fact leaves room for unresolved tensions and renegade narratives which function to significantly trouble the articulation and containment of crisis
THE ‘NIGHT OF THE WORLD’: POWER, SUBJECTION, AND CRISIS
Get PDFIn what follows, my primary objective is to argue for, and articulate, the contours of a psychoanalytic critique of ideology; then I want to add a few things about how this relates to the public support of Authority during times of economic crisis and the recent CUPE 3903 strike at York University – something of which I hope will add to a Marxian critique of ideology. The psychoanalytic critique of ideology that I defend is one that is informed by the work of the contemporary philosopher and psychoanalyst, Slavoj Žižek,whose re-interpretation of the work of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, is enhanced by his understanding of German Idealist philosophy, from Kant, through Schelling, to Hegel. It is with Hegel that the title of my presentation, the ‘Night of theWorld’, is associated (see Žižek, Ticklish Subject).For Hegel (as read by Žižek), ‘night’ indicates something about the pre-Symbolic,or the pre-Ontological world of blind drives; or, the world prior to its linguistic/symbolic dismemberment. What I posit as crisis, or disruption – or, in the psychoanalytic sense,trauma – is an encounter with the negativity (or the ‘nothingness’, in philosophical terms)of this ‘night of the world’. As I hope to make clear, it is through disruptions, or traumas, that we can come to understand something about the truth of the existing state of things by analyzing it from the perspective of negativity – this, after all, is what dialectics is about
ENGAGING WITH MAL(E)FUNCTIONS: GENDER AND ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS IN DAPHNE MARLATT’S ANA HISTORIC
Get PDFDaphne Marlatt's novel Ana Historic presents a female-oriented version of historical events not based on male-centered modes of representation. Marlatt fictionalizes aspects of historical and literary documents to carve out a space for an imagined female history that counters masculine production- based narratives previouslywritten about the logging camps of British Columbia. Ana Historic provides a concise look at previous representations of resources and women, which offers insight into how these issues inform a contemporary viewpoint regarding natural resources. Moreover, if the environmental crisis we are experiencing globally is a result of industrialization, have women been manufactured in a similar fashion? And if so, how can North Americans attempt to counter environmental crisis from a societal perspective that is heavily implicated in upholding patriarchal structures? The answer extends beyond mere syllogism, and into the complicated realm of capital: both monetary and social. Revisiting Ana Historic in our current moment of environmental uncertainty reflects the interconnected relationship between so-called natural spaces and engendered representation. This causes an identity crisis for landscapes and gender, leading to the manipulation of these spaces by established patriarchal institutions and industrializing structures. This represents an extension beyond the consideration of women as "Mother Nature" and relates specifically to their manipulation by men into resources that furthermale capital. Marlatt's transformation of the forest into a manufactured product mimics her transformation of the female protagonists into appropriately functioning wives and mothers. Marlatt's main protagonists Ana, Ina, Annie resist manufacture and become the monsters of male-functions. The transformation of landscapes and women involves looking at the forest as represented in the natural environment, the sawmill, and the finished product. The malfunction of the proper male functioning in the novel is what I come to label as mal(e)functions. The term mal(e)functions, while embodying the simultaneity of two words also represents the non male-oriented spaces in the novel; that of the forest and the female protagonists. The split in the term also represents the fissures of male centered narratives where women and environmental consciousness can exist
Crisis' as Tool in the Digital Games Industry: Resistance or Command and Conquer?
Get PDFFrom media-driven moral panics to colossal business failures, digital games have historically been rife with crisis, defining the games industry and its practices to a significant degree. More recently, media discourse regarding the very aggressive global economic crisis is host to an ideological game where the form and context of crisis is shaped into a number of disparate and sometimes contradictory conclusions about the current state of digital game development. I will provide an overview pinpointing some of the recent claims made about the digital games industry and relate this discursive context to the ongoing challenges of the peoplewho work within it. Additionally, in an effort to address the title and theme of the Intersections2009 Conference, I wish to highlight the ways in which crisis can be “disruptive”, but also manipulable and productive in ways that reveal both hegemonic industry mandates and opportunities for bottom-up mobilization
Time's Arrow as Postmodern Apocalypse: Temporal Ruptures, Perpetual Crisis and the Cultural Imagination
Get PDFMartin Amis’s 1991 novel Time’s Arrow narrativizes two major breaks: a split of consciousness that separates the narrator and protagonist who occupy the same body, and a split in temporality that confuses past and future, so that the narrator attempts to understand the protagonist’s life in reverse.1 These schisms within the narrative parallel and invoke two major historical ruptures of the twentieth century: the Holocaust that happened, and the nuclear holocaust that looked likely to occur. Time’s Arrow, set within this historical framework,suggests these holocausts jointly destabilized the directionality and flow of time, trapping the post-World War Two generations in a perpetual postmodern apocalyptic condition. Following Fredric Jameson, I understand “postmodern” as a “periodizing concept” (3), referring to the cultural logic underlying late modern socioeconomic formations and the expression of that logic in the aesthetic realm. Jameson’s analysis of late modern society’s pathological relationship with time and history is particularly relevant to Time’s Arrow. The novel is postmodern in its literary style, with its destabilized first-person narrative voice and refusal of conventional linear time, but style here expresses a deeper cultural crisis, including the parallel loss of “a sense of history” and of “the sense of a viable future” (Hollinger 166-167). In the ever-present shadow of two catastrophic crises—one lurking behind and one looming ahead—the narrative points to massive devastation in either direction, undermining, but not negating, the conceivability of a (better) future. Amis’s novel most powerfully illustrates the continuity between the ‘greatest’ crises ofthe twentieth century by portraying apocalypse and rupture as perpetual phenomena, and evoking the difficulty of imagining beyond them
Recycling as a Crisis of Meaning
Get PDFIn laymen’s terms, recycling is “good for the environment.” It involves “doing your bit” to help “save the Earth.” Yet, recycling requires high expenditures of energy and virgin materials, and produces pollutants, greenhouse gases and waste; it creates products that are “down-cycled” because they are not as robust as their predecessors, nor are such products usually recyclable themselves. Of the fifteen to thirty percent of recyclables that are retrieved from the waste stream, “almost half” are buried or burned due to contamination or market fluctuations that devalue recyclables over virgin materials (McDonough and Braungart, 56-60; Rogers, 176-179; Luke, 115-135; Rathje, 203-7;MacBride; Ackerman; EPA; Grassroots Recycling Network, Taxpayers for CommonSense, Materials Efficiency Project and Friends of the Earth). Furthermore, recycling infrastructure creates a framework where disposables become naturalized commodities instead of allowing practices of waste redesign, reduction or elimination. How is the schism between the popular perception of recycling as “good for the environment” and its less environmentally sound industrial processes maintained? By critiquing the visual culture of recycling campaigns, I argue that the meaning of recycling has been decontextualized, narrowed, and naturalized, thus functioning as a commodity sign.That is, recycling has been “abstracted from [its] context and then reframed in terms of the assumptions and interpretive rules of the advertising framework” through which it is promoted (Goldman, 5). I identify three main characteristics of the recycling commodity-sign. First, the individual, rather than government or industry, is represented as the primary unit of social change. Secondly, recycling is depicted as an act that ends at the blue bins, cutting out the industrial side of the cycle. Finally, recycling is symbolized as something that benefits the environment “in general” rather than as a specific form of waste management. Overall, I argue that recycling, instead of being a solution to environmental or waste crises, in fact constitutes a crisis of meaning that allows environmental degradation and derisory waste practices to continue
THE “CLAWS OF ABSOLUTE NECESSITY”: DELEUZE ON CULTURE
Get PDFIn this day and age of Žižekian rock star theorists and overly-abstruse philosophers, the institutional study of cultural theory can be understood as firmly entrenched in two camps. The first, pandering to the leftovers of the MTV generation and readers of Totem Books’ Introducing series, are engaged in what can be called a type of theoretical bricolage; why shouldn’t one be able to reference Lacan’s borromean knot in a discussion of early nineties Norwegian blackmetal or 4G cellular wireless technology (from a Marxist perspective, of course)? The other camp, which often adheres to a strict nomenclature so esoteric that only those at the graduate level can penetrate their meaning, enjoys a certain performativity of the text; the form of their work, unlike the relatively straightforward and at times journalistic style of the former group,attempts to structurally mimic the logic of their thought. It could be called a type of philosophical, meta-textual performance art. This group would argue that essays have anaesthetic autonomy (see Theodor Adorno’s “The Essay as Form”). Each camp exists on one side of an invisible line that can be called the continental/analytic divide, and if we push this sensible difference further we can justifiably say that, in the last analysis, the difference is one of“positive” and “negative” thought; between a positivist logic founded on the necessity of presuppositions (the logic of word games, game theory, etc.) and a thought that is intrinsic,parasitic even, to thought itself (deconstruction, Gadamerian hermeneutics, etc.). One group envisions a need for answers while the other seeks to identify problems. This difference has been and might always be one of contentious debate, and it is certainly the locus of one of the chief frustrations permeating the theoretical realm of this ephemeral thing we call “Cultural Studies”
RE-MAPPING THE RIVER ON FILM
Get PDFWorking in Southeast Asia as an academic and as a staff member for an environmental organization, I have witnessed non-fiction film being increasingly used for environmental advocacy and awareness-building, especially in the context of hydropower development. Such films seek to highlight the threats posed by hydropower to rivers and to the local residents who depend on them. However, my experiences with some of these films bring to light the degree to which the films themselves re-assert or produce specific claims about particular places and about development. As a geographer, I want to explore the cartographic possibilities and pitfalls of activist film projects.What cartographic stories does film tell? Are films, like maps, constitutive of technologies of power? As non-fiction film has been increasingly produced for environmental causes worldwide, I believe that “film-as-map” deserves interrogation. Accordingly, film is examined here as a medium through which non-governmental organizations (NGOs),activists and local residents collaboratively stake claims, construct boundaries and effectually re-map the river. I want to explore what ways film can offer marginalized groups an avenue to push for change or resistance against unjust development schemes (similar to countermapping strategies). Also, what are the disadvantages of using such strategies and how can film benefit from critiques and analysis from within the discipline of geography