Design as Power: Paul Virilio and the Governmentality of Design Expertise

Abstract

Using sources from popular media, and ethnographic data collected from a university‐based urban design studio, I challenge Paul Virilio’s assertion that the modern human condition is dominated by a process of emotional synchronisation based on fear (the result, according to Virilio, of a collusion of technology and speed), and offer the analogous idea that contemporary consumer capitalism works toward a synchronisation of desire, operating, at least in part, through the ideologies and machinations of the idea of design. To do this, I analyse designerly approaches to problem‐solving as potential disciplining forces, or technologies of governmentality, which help to create order by manufacturing certain subjectivities like consumer, community member, or sense‐of‐place – subjectivities that are amenable to neo‐liberal notions of civil society in consumer‐capitalism. Ultimately, I argue that Virilio’s ‘art criticism of technology’, but also common critiques thereof, both depoliticise aesthetic judgement and work together toward the obfuscation of power within the symbolic economy of neo‐liberal consumer capitalism.     

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.     

Between freedom and futility: on the political uses of corporate globalizing discourses

ABSTRACT

From frequent television advertisements to posters in jet bridges all over the globe, the public is continuously subjected to messages affirming the inception of a flat, borderless world. While these discourses suggest globalization is bringing humanity together into a globally connected, cosmopolitan world order, such corporate advertisements also seek to convey the desirability and inevitability of a borderless economy in which they may roam unfettered. To illustrate how these ideas are communicated, I investigate three emblematic cases: Emirates Airlines, HSBC, and Itaú. By interrogating their public discourses, this article elucidates how powerful actors seek to construct global (or regional–global) imaginaries for consumers by deploying esthetically pleasing (and, at times, seemingly ‘subversive’) advertisements. Their ultimate effect is to demonstrate the would-be futility of attempts to regulate the spread of global capitalism or their own profit-seeking behavior. Through showing how pop-culture artifacts attempt to ‘sell’ teleological global capitalism to audiences, this article contributes to the burgeoning literature on the cultural political economy of globalization. To conclude, I briefly explore how this analysis relates to important political debates concerning agency in globalization, the feasibility of state regulation of global capitalism, and the construction of alternative global imaginaries/orders.     

Performing Difference: Repetition in Context

Abstract

In this essay, I sketch a performative, constitutive theory of difference that avoids the major trappings of this discussion in current communication scholarship. Building from Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler, I argue that by focusing on difference in intercultural communication scholarship we can, as a discipline, create more complex understandings of people in cultural contexts. I first examine how difference has been written in communication scholarship. Second, I offer a reading of Deleuze and Butler who, together, provide the grounding for seeing the repetition of difference as political and contingent ontology. I conclude by examining an everyday context, showing how intercultural communication scholarship can benefit from this kind of analysis.     

Nietzsche,Tragedy, and Liberal Moral Psychology

Abstract

This essay discusses Nietzsche's tragic moral psychology and its significance for liberal political philosophy. In the essay, I sketch out what I view to be the basic features of Nietzsche's tragic psychology, which is strongly opposed to the Socratic and Stoic traditions, and I show how this perspective can be distinguished from the moral psychology that informs liberalism's position on issues such as personhood and political history. I conclude with a few suggestions for viewing Nietzsche's thought as a necessary corrective to a certain dogmatism that still inhabits liberal theory, in this way enabling liberal thought to conceptualise human nature and the human good in more creative and complex ways.     

The separation of economy and sentiment: a comparison of how individuals perceive hostile worlds

ABSTRACT

Analyses of the relationship between economy and sentiment tend to focus on connection rather than separation. Scholars recognize that individuals sometimes identify moral conflicts between economy and sentiment, but primarily focus their research on the boundary or relational work performed to mitigate or disappear the conflict. Instead, I analyze how individuals talk about the relationship between economy and sentiment as separate or hostile, comparing two theoretically distinct groups: non-religious individuals and practicing evangelicals. The comparison allows me to analyze patterns of discourse and boundary-making based on access to institutionalized culture. I find that both groups articulate perceptions of hostile worlds by: (1) maintaining the taboo against talking about money, (2) recommending neutral separation, and (3) demarcating areas of life as too sacred for money. Through comparison, I find that non-religious respondents describe a less permeable vertical boundary line, whereby economy and sentiment are separated into separate spheres, as if side-by-side, while evangelicals describe a more permeable horizontal boundary line, where separation is maintained through the use of consistent hierarchical discourses that assert the moral importance of sentiment over economy. My findings underscore how unequal access to cultural schema differentially shape how individuals connect economy and sentiment, if at all.     

Simulating the Ethical Community: Interactive Game Media and Engaging Human Rights Claims

Abstract

This paper examines the external bystander’s (un)ethical engagement with the suffering of distant others in the brave new world of the 21st century, where, thanks to the growth of information technologies, we are all daily spectators and bystanders of human atrocity. In a recent turn, humanitarian movements have sought to incite their audiences to action through the use of simulation and new game media – the last few years have seen a surge of ‘serious games’ such as Darfur is Dying and Sim Sweatshop, as well as the creation in online community Second Life of simulated refugee camps and political protests. The paper draws on the post‐modern theories of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj ?i?ek, as well as the ethical philosophies of Michael Ignatieff, Stanley Cohen and Avishai Margalit, to expose the limitations of this move, arguing that interactivity and public remembering via online simulations are more properly aligned, in the real world, to interpassivity and ethical amnesia than to the forging of an effective ethical community of human beings.     

Muslim women against FEMEN: Asserting agency in online spaces

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the activist group FEMEN and the online reactions to their “International Topless Jihad Day” protests. Specifically, I analyze the vernacular discourses present in the Facebook group Muslim Women Against FEMEN and their counter-protests as they articulate their dissatisfaction with FEMEN’s imperialist feminism. I argue that online spaces can provide meaningful sites for Muslim women to reassert their agency alongside of, rather than despite of, their Muslim identity. Tensions over the boundaries of feminist activism help us understand how digital spaces can aid in developing a more capacious understanding of agency that actively decolonizes imperialist feminist politics.     

A Multimodal Approach to Identity: Theorizing the Self through Embodiment,Spatiality, and Temporality

Abstract

This article problematizes the theoretical assumption of communication-as-symbolic that delimits the way identity is theorized. I argue that deconstructing identity requires moving beyond the symbolic construction of social categories, and instead focusing on how a perceptual and embodied subject is constituted through communication. Informed by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenologically driven approach to critical inquiry, I present a multimodal approach that reveals how perceptual subjectivity and the reflexive body are constituted within, and constitutive of, the symbolic mechanisms of social construction. Utilizing various examples pertinent to intercultural communication, I theorize cultural identity through the perspective of communication-as-embodied.     

The exhausted futures of neoliberalism: from promissory legitimacy to social anomy

ABSTRACT

The distinction between input-oriented legitimacy and output-oriented legitimacy (Scharpf, Fritz W, 1997. Economic Integration, Democracy and the Welfare State. Journal of European Public Policy, 4, 18–36) has been one of the most influential distinctions in political science. In this article I introduce a third arrangement supporting the legitimacy of political processes which I call promise-oriented legitimacy or, simply, promissory legitimacy. This term refers to the support political authority can gain from the credibility of promises political leaders make regarding future states of the world when justifying decisions and persuading others to follow them in their proposed course of action. Decisions gain support through claims about future development. Legitimacy crises arise if promises that were found credible become discredited and fail to motivate. I develop the concept of promissory legitimacy based on a discussion of what can be considered the most far-reaching political promissory regime of the last forty years: neoliberalism.     

Language ideology and identity construction in public educational meetings

ABSTRACT

The study explores educational meetings that have a goal of promoting the Belarusian language and providing a platform for people who want to interact in this language. These meetings are not like any traditional language courses; they are rather a public discussion space for a community of people who speak Belarusian, try to speak this language, or are interested in it. Findings demonstrate how the identity of a Belarusian-speaking Belarusian is interactionally constructed and speaking Belarusian is framed in relation to identity formation and language ideology.     

White America's Construction of Black Bodies: The Case of Ron Artest as a Model of Covert Racial Ideology in the NBA's Discourse

Abstract

Hybridization scholars have shown that the implosion of culture in response to globalization has led nations to feel threatened and thus reclaim their cultural differences. Nouvelle Star, the French version of American Idol, is a powerful representation of this process. The global format which emphasized popularity and emotions was rejected to showcase traits considered to be distinctly French: intellectualism and musical taste. By exploring the franchise's history and analyzing Nouvelle Star's episodes and audience responses, this paper describes how global similarities and national differences were produced in a movement of cultural hybridization.     

What should we do with our gut?

ABSTRACT

This article explores how breakthrough neuroscientific research regarding the Microbiome-Gut-Brain-Axis (MGBA) resonates with Catherine Malabou’s discussions of a delocalised, decentralised, plastic brain. Inspired by Malabou’s materialist methodology, as well as her confrontation of neuroscientific and psychoanalytic paradigms, the article unpacks the imbrication of symbolic and neuro-microbiological treatments of the gut and its excreta. Interlacing the thought of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein and Malabou alongside current MGBA research and critical studies of science and technology, I reveal how symbolic and microbial transmissions in early childhood development reflect a multimodal and multitemporal formation that challenges the established imaginary associated with functional gut and subject development. Secondly, I consider how MGBA research bears upon questions of difference, examining its further materialisation of Malabou’s otherness in a world without exteriority. Through this discussion I question the significance of this biological paradigm shift, as it disturbs notions of agency and the subject/environment distinction, opening to pressing ethical questions at this moment in human history. Through these varied interrogations and provocations, I provide a preliminary window into the potential of MGBA research to enable new departures for thinking the fragmentary movement of form and time underpinning Malabou’s motor schema of plasticity.     

Agencing femininity: digital Mrs. Consumer in intra-action

ABSTRACT

Social media is abound with women writing about consumption goods and practices associated with femininity and heterosexual nuclear family life, such as being married, dressing, cooking and home decoration. This article examines how the housewife ideal can be an attractive identity in the 2010s and, drawing on the post-humanist performativity by Karen Barad (2007), it maps the material-discursive agencies that enable the re-emergence of this figure. Building on in-depth interviews with women who refer to themselves as influencers and bloggers, and visual and textual analyses of their Instagram-accounts, including links to sponsors and comments from followers, the article analyzes how the tensions between these women's real lives and their cyber lives, become meaningful in this technological culture. The breaking of boundaries between human and non-human resulting from digital technology has re-configured the housewife role by transforming boundaries between intimate and commercial practices. By focusing on the three areas: Transforming the feminine body, Transforming Intimacy, and Entrepreneurial femininity the article shows how agency emerges from within transforming practices of body, intimacy and entrepreneurship, intra-acting within this new housewife phenomenon. In doing so it discusses the negotiations and space for agency these women thought that digital technologies provided for them.     

Half and Half: An (Auto)ethnography of Hybrid Identities in a Korean American Mother-Daughter Relationship

Abstract

This essay focuses on how immigrant mothers and second generation interracial daughters construct, perform, and negotiate racial and ethnic hybrid identities. Placing my mother's experiences in dialogue with my own experiences, I (auto)ethnographically examine how we navigate our mother-daughter relationship and intercultural and interracial identities in relation to discourses of Asian American-ness. I identify three sites for identity formation: location, language, and the dialectical tension of assimilation-preservation. I argue that the enactment of a racial self is not always a conscious part of one's identity. Rather, we each enact racialized cultural identities that are contextually performed and continuously shifting.     

Price-effectiveness: pharmacoeconomics,value and the right price for HPV vaccines

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a pragmatist approach to pricing, this article discusses the impact of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) in the pricing strategies of pharmaceutical companies. Through an analysis of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination, this article illustrates the strategic appropriation of evidence-based medicine (narratives and practices) that pharmaceutical companies have undertaken to enhance the value of their products. While governments are concentrated on the measurement of costs and efficiency (cost-effectiveness), companies attempt to find the threshold of effectiveness that supports their estimation of value. I have called such mode of calculation, price-effectiveness. Pharmaceutical companies engage in different ways with CEA in devising their own price strategies. First, CEA is used as an instrument to raise HPV vaccines as a matter of interest for health authorities. Second, companies produce models to maximise the effectiveness of their products. Third, the expense side of CEA has opened an opportunity to represent some conditions as diseases in order to increase the potential value of the vaccine, expressed in a higher price. Debates and practices of pricing offer a unique opportunity to trace how particular forms of quantification have become the common ground in the demonstration of value in healthcare and the adaptation of companies.     

Subaltern voices and postcolonial schizophrenia: The political tensions of M.I.A.’s Kala

ABSTRACT

Banned from the U.S. during the “war on terror,” the British/Sri Lankan hip-hop artist M.I.A. responded by recording her 2007 album Kala in multiple locations throughout the global South, collating indigenous musical styles and unorthodox recording techniques. Via a critical/cultural analysis, this paper explores M.I.A.’s work on Kala as subaltern resistance mobilized by “differential movement,” particularly in its mode of production, which operated outside of, and in opposition to, institutional mechanisms designed to expunge or neutralize politically subversive art and artists. Yet M.I.A.’s musical sampling also surfaces conflicts between creative freedom and cultural appropriation, emblematizing “postcolonialist/postmodern schizophrenia” (Vályi, 2011. Remixing cultures: Bartók and Kodály in the age of indigenous cultural rights. In K. McLeod & R. Kuenzli (Eds.), Cutting across media: Appropriation art, interventionist collage, and copyright law (pp. 219–236). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.).     

The moral economy of face: marketized gift and depoliticized solidarity in South Korea’s fair trade

ABSTRACT

Metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade is frequently described as ‘face-to-face commerce’ and its goal is presented as pursuing ‘global trade with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade relies on the metaphors of face, this article analyzes the political implications and limits of the trope. I first examine the intimate connection between gift-exchange and face based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the gift and I present face as a locus of symbolic recognition and politics. Next, drawing on ethnographic research into Beautiful Coffee, the largest fair trade organization in South Korea, I illuminate fair trade as a hybrid practice of ‘marketized gift-exchange’ in which the various faces of producers and consumers are produced and circulated along with market transactions. In examining the meanings of those faces, I maintain that the prevalent metaphor of face in fair trade betrays the contradictory nature of market-based solidarity that is sought through the activism to redefine the whole economic structure based on moral and ethical practices.