Black Swan,Cracked Porcelain and Becoming-Animal

The film Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, provides a fruitful context for thinking about Deleuze's conceptualisation of structural transformation as a ‘presubjective’ process involving a critical and creative politics of engagement. Nina is a young dancer who has just secured the lead role in the New York Ballet's new production of Swan Lake. This role not only requires her to dance the pure and innocent character of the White Swan – a role that mirrors Nina's character in real life, and for which she is well suited – but also as the seductive and darkly erotic character of the Black Swan, a role quite alien to Nina. The film traces Nina's desperate efforts to meet the demands of this doubled characterisation. Through new forms of engagement with her peers, she enters into a ‘becoming-swan’ that frees her from the restraints and constraints imposed by her existing self. While this transformative process enables her to realise aesthetic perfection in her art, this comes at a heavy price: Nina not only is creatively destabilised, but ultimately is destroyed by the transformation she endures. By considering this work of cinema in light of Deleuze's writings on cinema, on ‘becoming-animal’, and on ‘Porcelain and Volcano’, this essay reflects upon a crucial question underlying much of Deleuze's political thought: how is it possible to privilege radical subjective and social transformation, without these structures of necessary coherence also ‘cracking up’ and being destroyed in the process?     

Power and Performativity in the Creation of the UK Fishing-Rights Market

Judith Butler's work on performativity takes an explicitly Foucauldian approach to politics. The economic performativity literature, in comparison, has been criticised for failing to foreground power. This paper uses a case study of market creation in UK marine fisheries to suggest, after Butler, ways in which a Foucauldian analysis of the exercise of power can inform our understanding of economic performativity.     

The Elasticity of Thought: A Note on the Drive in Worringer and Freud

Abstract

The essay approaches recent discussions of ‘life’ and biopolitics from the historical context of early 20th century German vitalist thought. By closely analysing the concept of the ‘drive’ in art historian Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the essay shows how the paradoxes of those texts prefigure and contribute to the contemporary problematic of ‘life’ in theoretical discourse across the humanities. In Worringer and Freud, the drive is an ‘elastic’ concept stretching beyond – and yet constitutive of – the epistemological object (‘life’) that it is called upon to describe. The distortion of the drive in each author's thought – from an impulse of organic vitality to a principle of inorganic primordiality – manifests the contradictory ‘life’ of vitalist concepts themselves in their elastic potential for transformation, regression and contradiction.     

Anxiety and Aporia: Or,What, for Lacan,Makes Deconstruction Reassuring?

While originally Lacan seconds Heidegger's contention that ‘anxiety has no object’, in the early 1960s, he dismisses his own earlier position as a childish reassurance and argues, to the contrary, that ‘anxiety is not without an object’. With particular attention to his use of the double negative, ‘not without’, this essay examines this turning point in Lacan's thinking in order to explain the opposition between his psychoanalytic critical theory and Derrida's deconstruction. The arguments that Lacan brings to bear on his work of the 1950s closely approximate those that Derrida levels against Heidegger in the formulation of his own concept of ‘the aporia of the impossible’. Indeed, as commentators often emphasise, the formal logic of Lacan's later thinking is strictly isomorphic with Derrida's philosophy; and their respective concepts of anxiety and aporia are frequently misconstrued, accordingly, as simply identical. However, insofar as Lacan discerns a content in this formal negativity, contesting the idealism of his earlier theory and reasserting the materialist objectivity of the Freudian ‘lost object,’ as intractably Real, the two do not coincide. On the contrary, Lacan's repudiation of Heidegger's concept of anxiety extends equally to Derrida's aporia, as if, for Derrida, Heidegger's existential phenomenology were not reassuring enough.     

From biblical exegesis to crises of european modernity: Reflections on girardian theory and its limitations

Over the last two decades the field of ‘Girard studies’ – the application of René Girard's theories on mimetic desire and sacrificial violence to cultural artifacts – has tended to focus increasingly on Biblical texts and theological implications of Girard's interpretation of Christianity as a ‘theory of man.’ After summarizing Girardian theory in its current form, this essay stresses the applicability of the theory to François Furet's reading of the crisis of bourgeois culture and to Pascal Bruckner's reading of the malaise of the post Cold War world and the ethnic crises associated with the break‐up of the former Yugoslavia. This essay also demonstrates how Girardian theory illuminates the recent historical and judicial crises associated with France's efforts to come to terms with the memory and legacy of the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II. The essay concludes with a brief assessment of the advantages as well as the pitfalls of employing Girardian theory to demystify the crises of modernity.     

Fighting for the Other's Rights First: Levinasian Perspectives on Occupy Gezi's Standing Protest

This essay re-explores the tie between ethics and politics in the thought of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas and is specifically concerned with the political consequences that might be drawn from his unique account of ethics. In response to Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani's recent reading of Levinasian politics as ethicoliberatory praxis, this essay attempts to exemplify such politics in relation to the silent standing protest that occurred throughout Occupy Gezi. As will be illustrated, this particular form of protest was symbolic of a struggle that was not tied to a classical notion of autonomous agency, but partially arose from ‘radical passivity’. It will be suggested that the protester's tacit participation in a shared endeavour to create responsive idioms for the Other can exemplify Levinasian ‘response-ability’ as a concrete praxis. Relying on Levinasian terminology, I suggest that Occupy Gezi's forms of silent protest created an ‘un-said Saying’ that disturbed the realm of politics from an ethical stance. Alongside a Levinasian reading, the protester's performed standstill will be explored in relation to what Butler and Athanasiou term ‘two senses of dispossession’ together with the concept implied by the Greek στα´σι? [stasis]. As I contend, stasis manages to escape from the principle of non-contradiction in Being through integrating Being's Other in implicating both movement and stillness, activity and passivity. Hereby, stasis potentially points to an-other peace before politics, thereby offering a prolific alternative to the classic Hobbesian account of a dichotomy between war and peace.     

Imagining the New Order Nation: Materiality and Hyperreality in Indonesia

This paper examines the tension between the materiality of information and communications technologies and the hyperreality which they are thought to produce. The setting for our analysis is Indonesia, where the most recent innovations in communications technologies co-exist alongside ancient – but still functional – ‘predecessor’ devices. Building upon Benedict Anderson's work on late-colonial Indonesia and Chandra Mukerji's work on seventeenth-century French formal gardens, we examine how the national imaginaries specific to Suharto's New Order state are embedded in the materiality of the present.     

Redefining Resistance: Seeking Fanon's Subject Between ‘the Unified’ and ‘the Dispersed’

Abstract

This essay reads two differing conceptions of subjectivity in Frantz Fanon's work as corresponding to a shift in subjective orientation in certain moments of crisis, from what I term a unified individual – the subject of psychoanalysis – to a dispersed subject, the frenzied participant in collective activity. I believe that such a potential duality within the subject is best adopted when analysing Fanon's oeuvre, as well as when examining a subject's behaviour as participant in forms of unstructured collective protest such as rioting. Whereas the unified subject of psychoanalysis best expresses the consciously self-reflective individual in society, the dispersed subject expresses a subjectivity operating in excess of individualism. This dispersed subject acts collectively, as an object moving in tandem with other objects, without individual reflection. I argue that this shift comprises the initial spark of insurrection suggested in Fanon's work, the moment in which he sees the people pitched ‘in a single direction, from which there is no turning back’; and what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the explosive moment of ‘conflagration’. The two subject positions between which the subject shifts exist as two potential sides of every subject and comprise the ‘Manichean’ world in which Fanon's subject is entrenched.     

How to Make your Audience Suffer: Melodrama,Masochism and Dead Time in Lars von Trier's Dogville

Abstract

Both fans and critics of Lars von Trier's work would likely agree with his capacity to make his audience suffer. This essay canvasses the devices through which the suffering of women in von Trier's melodramas is rendered excruciating to watch. Drawing on Deleuze's influential account of masochism, the first part of the essay discusses how von Trier's film Dogville foregrounds the complicated relationship that suffering has with pleasure and power. The second part of the essay focuses on the temporal dynamics of melodrama and the creative ways in which Lars von Trier disturbs the rhythms of suffering on screen. In particular I argue that von Trier introduces intervals of ‘dead time’ that make the passage of time itself painful to the audience and that open up a larger cultural history of temporal disorder. This part of the essay looks back to von Trier's early experiments with time in Psychomobile 1: The World Clock (2000) and forward to more recent innovative play with time and movement in Melancholia (2011) to make the case for rethinking the temporal dimensions of mediated suffering and the significance of time in the work of Lars von Trier.     

The logic of practice in the practice of logics: practicing journalism and its relationship with business in times of technological changes

This paper investigates the workings of institutional logics in practice, by focusing in particular on the interplay between material, practical and linguistic dimensions of practices. In other words, drawing on Bourdieu's sens pratique, the paper explores the logic of practice in the practice of logics through a six months full-time ethnographic study at Il Sole-24 Ore, the largest Italian financial newspaper, between 2007 and 2008. An original conceptual framework is developed to analyse how the logic of journalism is enacted vis-à-vis that of advertising in a setting in which an old technology for news production – print newspaper – coexists with a new one – website – and thus encounters between new and old technological possibilities make workings of institutional logics particularly visible. The findings point out different mechanisms of institutional work dealing with actions that, made possible by new technological possibilities, are potentially, but not necessarily classified as divergent from institutional logics.     

Thoughts from Abroad: Theodor Adorno as Postcolonial Theorist

Abstract

This article shows that the work of the German Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno offers a surprisingly rich resource for postcolonial theory. Adorno's work addresses the world outside Europe more often than one might expect. But it is not so much what Adorno thinks as how he thinks that makes him a postcolonialist. Adorno's philosophy of negative dialectics tracks particular phenomena to the totality of which they are a part. Everything, from the most innocuous details of everyday life to the Holocaust and imperialism, is linked to the world‐encircling, thought‐frustrating and violence‐inducing system of capitalism. But Adorno's characteristic negativity also makes him sensitive to that system's fallibility and its vulnerability to alternatives. The article therefore touches on the normative dimensions of Adorno's moral philosophy. Adorno's work commands attention because of its dialectical style of thinking, its consequent focus on capitalism's intrinsic violence, its belief that effective political action presupposes introspection and a moral capacity for empathy with others' suffering, and its attractive conviction that these aptitudes can be enabled by aesthetic experience. Accordingly, the essay concludes with a reading of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace. This article seeks to show that an Adornian postcolonial criticism is as concerned with the gratuitous longevity of capitalism and imperialism as it is inspired by the prospect of erecting a more just and egalitarian social order.     

Foucault's Overlooked Organisation: Revisiting his Critical Works

In this essay I propose a new reading of Michel Foucault's main thesis about biopower and biopolitics. I argue that organisation represents the neglected key to Foucault's new conceptualisation of power as something that is less political and more organisational. This unique contribution was lost even on his closest interlocutors. Foucault's work on power had a strong influence on organisation and management theory but interestingly not for the reasons I am proposing. In fact, although theorists in management and organisation studies have emphasised power in relation to discipline, control and subjectivity they have overlooked the transformative meaning of Foucault's organisation. His work on biopolitics has attracted opposition, too, as evidenced by the controversy sparked by Giorgio Agamben about Foucault's biopolitics. From Agamben's critique, it appears that Foucault's notions of politics and power do not allow a deconstruction of the violence of the concentration camp. However, a critical reading of Primo Levi's biographical narratives reveals the camp as a place where the prisoners’ ability to organise their daily lives secured survival. To make sense of Levi's revelation, I use John Dewey's notion of habits as forms of organisation and reconnect it to Foucault's organisation. A shared understanding of the objective conditions of human activity and experience highlights the similarities between Dewey's pragmatism and Foucault's pragmatic metaphysics. In the end, however, Foucault's metaphysical background has caught up with him, pushing him away from his own most radical proposal that organisation was the new form of power and the new substance of politics.     

Korea's blacklist scandal: governmentality,culture, and creativity

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on the relationship between culture and governance, exploring how the practice of government has invoked conflicts and crises in the Korean culture industries. The Park Geun-Hye regime used culture as a central engine to boost Korea's national economy by adopting the new slogan, ‘Creative Korea’, to embody the country's national values within the international community. However, the regime's constant emphasis on creative economies came under attack when it was discovered that the Ministry of Culture and Tourism abused its authority by censuring 9,473 artists who were critical of the regime. Through an analysis of journalistic interviews with artists, critics and cultural practitioners, this paper examines how the relationships of governmentality, culture and creativity have been negotiated in the process of regime change. In addition, this paper explores how the Korean Wave phenomenon – the transnational expansion of Korean popular culture – during the past two decades has reshaped the society's perception of the governor–governed relationship within the cultural sphere.     

Back in the bazaar: taking Pierre Bourdieu to a trading room

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of aesthetic judgment, this text offers an inductive account of financial reasoning inside a trading room. Driven to maximise bank profits, trading room operators do not find ‘one best way’. Rather they choose among several possible winning strategies: mathematical arbitrage, economic analysis, chartist analysis. These strategies differ sharply from one another in their conception of the market, method, proximity to scholarly knowledge, and legitimacy. We show that the choice of one method depends on a system of tastes and distastes that are both historical – depending on individuals’ social and educational background – and relational – depending on the individual's relative position within the trading room viewed as a field.     

Acts of Irreconcilable Mourning: Post-Holocaust Witness and Testimony

Abstract

This essay revisits the question of post-Shoah responses to cataclysm in light of the now-urgent question of transmission – the shift in mourning and memory between first-generation survivors and later generations. Offering a different but complementary analysis to those in trauma or memory studies, I argue that post-Shoah witness and testimony are acts of ‘irreconcilable mourning’. This sense of mourning departs from post-Freudian approaches that focus on closure. Instead, irreconcilable mourning is a non-totalising approach to loss that resists ‘redemption’ and instead necessitates an ongoing, creative, and critical response to loss. In the course of this argument, I examine first-generation accounts such as Primo Levi's and Elie Wiesel's to highlight the necessity and contingency of transmission by interrogating concepts such as the ‘unsayable’ and the remnant. I then focus on Art Spiegelman's second-generation Maus: A Survivor's Tale, bringing cross-generational questions of witness and testimony as acts of irreconcilable mourning into the fold of Marianne Hirsch's ‘postmemory’ and Edith Wyschogrod's heterological history-telling.     

The Law's Markets

Recent research has suggested that one of the key ways in which economics and cognate calculative discourses and practices ‘perform’ the economy is through the drawing of conceptual boundaries between economic activities and entities of various sorts. One such boundary is the boundary between markets. This article shows that a critical contemporary arena for the differentiation of one product or service market from another is competition (or antitrust) law, which, through its work of market definition, seeks to identify the boundaries of competition: the location of the borders between meaningful economic spaces within which buyers and sellers encounter one another and establish prices. The article argues that in envisioning markets (‘the law's markets’), competition law simultaneously constitutes markets, and it demonstrates this through an empirical examination of the exercise of such law in three economic sectors: insurance, grocery retailing, and pay-television. It also shows, however, that competition law is perennially dogged by conflict – both over the placement of such conceptual boundaries, and over the very process of placement and the status of the market boundary itself – and that its application and effects can only be understood in this light.     

THE PROPER COPY

Efforts to make (and keep) knowledge public have provided a powerful counter-model to the recent expansion of exclusive intellectual property rights in such arenas as information technology, digital media, biological research, and pharmaceutical access. While sympathetic to the impulse to counteract the new ‘enclosures’ with knowledge made public, this essay critically interrogates some of the constitutive limits – in fact, the constitutive outsides – to these counter formulations. Paying particular attention to how public domain initiatives, like their strict intellectual property counterparts, also police the line between the proper and the improper copy, I argue that mechanisms for keeping knowledge public do not just circle the wagons against the predations of the Monsantos and Microsofts of the world. In their rhetorical and normative commitments to the proper copy, they also risk reproducing some of the same constrictions and exclusions that we tend to associate with (privatized) acts of enclosure itself. I explore this argument first in reference to creative commons and copyright, which can reproduce a strong ideological commitment to improvement – ‘innovation’ or ‘creativity’ – against the mere copy. What is the cost, I ask, of making the idea of improvement the price of admission not just to intellectual property claims, but to participation in newly ‘democratic’ public and common spaces of knowledge production? Second, I look to global pharmaceutical politics – specifically, regulatory efforts to improve access to cheaper copied and generic drugs in Argentina – to raise questions about the public domain's normative place in the continued expansion and harmonization of intellectual property regimes in the so-called global South. Together, these discussions suggest how the public domain and the commons, like their IP counterparts, can rhetorically and normatively expand and be secured against the improper copy.     

‘Beasts of Burden’: Productive Tensions between Haraway and Radical Animal Rights Activism

Coming from a critical animal studies perspective, this essay develops an urgent challenge to what Zipporah Weisberg describes as the ‘largely depoliticized approach within animal studies’ (2009: 5), with a focus on the work of Donna Haraway. Drawing on grassroots activist literature and practice, the essay analyses some productive tensions between animal rights perspectives and the work of Haraway, which centre on their different strategies for challenging the symbolic and material role of animals within biocapitalism. This approach reinstates the value of activist praxis to animal studies, arguing that it has the capacity to unsettle the positioning of animals as biocapital more successfully than Haraway's own ethical project. Due to being at the heart of debates between Haraway and theorists from within critical animal studies, vegan activism illustrates an animal rights practice that can work to undermine the structures that render animals ‘legitimately’ exploitable: despite Haraway's arguments to the contrary. The work of activists involved in the Hori-zone, a temporary eco-village established as a protest camp near the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, is used to explore how veganism can be used as a micro-sociological tactic to challenge the exploitation that pervades everyday life.     

What They Said (She Said) I Said: Attribution and Expertise in Digital Circulation

Theorists of discourse have long recognised the complexities of attributing reported speech in textual circulation. Yet rarely does one follow words from an original speech event through their many re-entextualisations, and it has proved particularly difficult to capture such circulations between oral events, print, and online media. This article captures such movements by following the mediatised – and politicised – afterlife of a speech event that would normally be classified, in academia, as ‘a talk’. It begins with a talk on Russia, given by the author-anthropologist of this paper, that was (mis)reported in Russian by a Voice of America (VOA) journalist, then traces the resulting text's subsequent movement from the VOA website into the Russian fieldsite that the oral talk described. It explores how the tone and substance of debates over politics and representation were enabled, constrained, and otherwise shaped by the particular textual circulations made possible in digital media. As the text traversed online newspapers, comments forums, blogs, social media networks, and private-turned-public personal emails, it produced a body of commentary that was both directly and indirectly a struggle over representation. While substantive debates unfolded over ethnic and national politics, much of the online commentary concerned the expertise of the commenters weighing in and the expertise and identity of the anthropologist who had been cited. This essay argues that Russian commenters and posters were productively using the intertextual gaps offered by digital circulation, while minimising those gaps' increasing breadth and depth by attributing ‘original’ authorship to a discrete, stable person.     

In the Blink of an Eye: The Augenblick of Sudden Change and Transformative Learning in Lukács and Benjamin

Abstract

Although much work dedicated to clarifying the link between learning and change has made a sincere effort to show how change can be a part of the learning process of every individual's life, the progressive functionalist approach to understanding this link in developmental psychology has created a blind spot when it comes to a consideration of the possibilities of sudden change. Developmental approaches to understanding change are also evident in macro‐level politics, and they have increasingly become part of other spheres of social life such as education where the individualized inculcation of skills has come to define the progressive mantra of learning and telos of schooling.

Instead of remaining within the confines of liberal progressivism or functionalism that advance a notion of transformation in gradual, piecemeal, and developmental terms, change needs to be re‐conceptualised to account for the ways that learning can be a momentous, sudden, and sometimes violent event. To this end this article discusses temporal, sensory, and perceptual change through use of the concept of ‘Augenblick’ – a German term connoting a fleeting moment of time normally associated with a form of sight. Focusing on the theories of education inherent in the work of Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin this article demonstrates how micro‐ and macro‐ forms of expressions of the Augenblick occurring at not only the individual, but also the social level in the context of revolutionary politics force us to rethink the ways that the dominance of liberal conceptions of learning prefigure the horizon of the possibility of change.