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.     

THE CREATIVE ASSEMBLAGE

This paper contributes to theorizing contemporary art collaborations in the context of the mediatory labour required of artists, and the complexity of the collaborative contexts in which aesthetic production is now enmeshed. In order to account for this complexity without reducing its analysis to ‘structured fields’ or ‘systems’, we use elements of assemblage theory in a quite specific way: drawing on DeLanda's work on social and organizational forms; and Law's ‘method assemblage’ to analyse the specificity of working interfaces that craft new boundaries and working relations. We develop a case study of C3West, an Australian initiative encompassing arts institutions, businesses, and communities. The analysis traces assemblage processes that generate dispersed working arrangements (partnerships, intersectoral, and interdisciplinary working interfaces) across apparently incommensurable domains, yet without forming overarching structures or requiring common rationales for cooperation. To demonstrate the work of assemblage, we discuss the practices of French artist Sylvie Blocher and the multidisciplinary collective, Campement Urbain, who employ aesthetic and performative means to forge new institutional practices and alliances for intervening in urban planning processes in regional Sydney.     

Methods as forces of subjectivation: experiments in the remaking of official statistics

ABSTRACT

We develop the concept of methods as ‘forces of subjectivation’ in relation to experiments we have encountered in a study of government methods for generating official population statistics. These experiments problematise the subjects of traditional methods based on paper questionnaires and offer new digital technologies and data sources as possible solutions. We reflect on these experiments in relation to recent work on sociological and digital research methods as inventive and live. What this work identifies in relation to questions of research methods we take up to think about government methods in two ways. One concerns how government method experiments offered as solutions to problematic subjects, once put into action, change initial problem formulations and are inventive of new ones. Secondly, they are also inventive of their subjects who do not pre-exist but come into being through the agential capacities that methods configure. Both aspects of methods, we argue, are the result of the interactions and dynamics between human and technological actors, the outcomes of which cannot be settled in advance.     

BIRDS OF THE INTERNET

Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provides elements for the composition of a ‘birder's handbook’ to forms of participation on the Internet that have been observed and analyzed over the last 10 years. It is intended to help scholars across the disciplines distinguish fleeting forms of participation: first, the authors highlight the fact that participation on the Internet nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’ that stand in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; second, the authors map the different forms of action and exchange that take place amongst these two entities, showing how forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and how they relate to the resource that is created through participation; and third, we describe forms of governance, or variation in how tasks and goals are made available to, and modifiable by, different participants of either a formal enterprise or an organized public.     

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?     

A Multitude of Hopes: Humanism and Subjectivity in E.P. Thompson and Antonio Negri

E.P. Thompson's work on working-class formation is widely recognized as one of the crucial contributions to Marxist historiography in the twentieth century. His emphasis on notions of agency and subjectivity is intimately linked to a radical recasting of the socialist agenda against the objectivism of an earlier, ‘orthodox’, Marxism and of a later, and more theoretically sophisticated, structuralism. Thompson's conception of working-class agency as the primary element in historical materialism parallels Antonio Negri's theorization of proletarian subjectivity as an expansive process of collective self-constitution. In particular, Negri's analysis of ‘power’ as an autonomous dynamic of social creation offers an essential development of Thompson's ideas and a fresh theoretical template for the political re-actualization of radical humanism.     

From the Obligation of Birth to the Obligation of Care: Esposito’s Biophilosophy and Recalcati’s ‘New Symptoms’

This essay addresses the controversial status of subjectivity in Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics and articulates it using Recalcati’s psychoanalytical theory, with the aim of promoting a non-vitalistic affirmative biopolitics. In biopolitical theory in general, and in Esposito’s especially, subjectivity has a problematic status: while life precedes intersubjectivity, it is not clear whether subjectivity is regarded as a consequence or as the precondition of intersubjectivity (and thus of life). Esposito acknowledges such an aporia, the subjectum suppositum, but fails to recognise it in his own reasoning, ultimately envisioning a powerful interpretative and transformative paradigm – affirmative biopolitics – whilst leaving at its core a life-less subject. In this essay, I read Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics through Recalcati’s clinical approach to the ‘new symptoms’, with the aim of envisioning a subjectivity compatible with the ontogenetic primacy of life posited by biopolitical theory. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to suggest that an affirmative biopolitics, grounded on the promotion of neither a pre-subjective bare life, nor of a lifeless subject, but of a fully subjective life, a living subject is possible.     

From the moral to the neural: brain scans,decision-making,and the problematization of economic (ir)rationality

Advances in brain imaging techniques have opened new fields of investigation and often challenged conventional assumptions concerning human behaviour. This ‘neuromolecular gaze’ [Rose, N. &; Abi-Rached, J. (2013) Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ] also heralds new ways of intervening in the regulation of social phenomena, based on the objectification of the cerebral processes that underlie individual conducts. Neuroeconomics applies this brain-centric perspective to the study of economic decision-making. This paper engages with the two dominant approaches in neuroeconomics. The first section concentrates on the work of Paul Glimcher, who considers economic models and their correlative notion of ‘utility maximization’ as providing the neurosciences with a theoretical framework as to how the brain solves decision problems. The second section discusses the findings of behavioural neuroeconomics, which attempts to model departures from the rationality axiom by measuring the cognitive and emotional biases that have their sources in the brain’s complex architecture. Whereas both strands of neuroeconomics rely on a benchmark of economic rationality, this paper argues that they reformulate in allegedly neutral neuroscientific terms a behavioural norm that is basically moral in nature. If rational decision-making conditions economic and indeed evolutionary survival, and yet if most people regularly fail as utility optimizers, then understanding the neural causes of such failures should help people better themselves and behave as good homines ?conomici.     

Optimising ‘cash flows’: converting corporate finance to hard currency

Following recent works that have underlined the increasing search for liquidity in economic exchange, this article studies how illiquid forms of money are converted into liquid forms by corporate finance actors. In the name of ‘shareholder value’, the various forms of value generated by companies (such as ‘trade credit’) tend to be increasingly transformed into liquid forms of money that are easily distributable to shareholders (‘cash flows’). Describing this phenomenon as an example of what anthropologists of money call ‘conversion’, this paper highlights how such a conversion process was necessary for the historical development of ‘shareholder value’ policies in corporate finance. Considering documentary sources and interviews with consultants, auditors, and private equity fund managers involved in ‘cash flow’ optimisation practices, this paper details this conversion phenomenon and shows how it has relied on the historical elaboration of specific metrological, technical, legal, and moral norms.     

The social life of measurement: how methods have shaped the idea of culture in urban regeneration

Although ‘culture-led regeneration’ has been critiqued as both a concept and practice, it is clear that policy-makers continue to make efforts to use cultural activity of varying forms to achieve ends which could be (and are) described in terms of urban ‘regeneration’. Whilst the idea of culture-led urban regeneration had gained considerable prominence in a range of policy by the early twenty-first century, many questions have remained over how exactly such ‘regenerative’ outcomes could be convincingly demonstrated, despite much activity to attempt such demonstration over the course of preceding years. The desire for convincing evidence can be seen in a continued, and increasing, focus on evaluation, and methods aimed at providing evidence of impact and outcomes. In light of the renewed political focus in recent years on ‘proving’ the effects and value of cultural activity, this paper considers the continuation of practice in this area, and asks what lessons, if any, have been learned in evaluative practice which seeks to demonstrate the regenerative effects of culture. In light of the continuation of apparently problematic practices, the paper seeks to delineate and account for what has been learned, and what has not.     

Intimacy and Self-Abstraction: Radio as New Media in Aboriginal Australia

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a number of Indigenous radio stations around Australia began to use digital programming and digital music libraries, at times pre-programming their broadcast signal days in advance through various forms of digital audio workstation (DAW). This shift initially caused both celebration and concern, and occasioned reflection by many producers on how radio ought to work and sound. For some producers the shift to digital pre-programming seemed a threat to the intimate address that Aboriginal radio entailed. On the other hand, some of these same producers began to re-imagine the audience to which such indigenous media might now aspire and to celebrate the sheer quantity of Aboriginal programming that a smaller number of producers could now produce. In challenging radio's naturalised ‘liveness’ for Aboriginal radio producers this oscillation suggests a distinct media ideology (Gershon 2010a), a sense of what radio media ought to accomplish, that draws together forms of intimate address and public abstraction. In my analysis I re-imagine John Durham Peters' heuristic dichotomy of dialogue and dissemination as a tension between intimacy and self-abstraction in order to suggest how radio as ‘new media’ continues to animate some longstanding dynamics of Aboriginal cultural production.     

What is the ‘Social’ in Climate Change Research? A Case Study on Scientific Representations from Chile

Over the last few decades climate change has been gaining importance in international scientific and political debates. However, the social sciences, especially in Latin America, have only lately become interested in the subject and their approach is still vague. Scientific understanding of global environmental change and the process of designing public policies to face them are characterized by their complexity as well as by epistemic and normative uncertainties. This makes it necessary to problematize the way in which research efforts understand ‘the social’ of climate change. How do ‘the climate’ and ‘the social’ interpenetrate as scientific objects? What does the resulting field look like? Is the combination capable of promoting reflexivity and collaboration on the issue, or does it merely become dispersed with diffuse boundaries? Our paper seeks to answer these and other related questions using Chile as a case study and examining peer-reviewed scientific research on the topic. By combining in-depth qualitative content analysis of each paper with a statistical meta-analysis, we were able to: characterize the key content and forms of such literature; identify divisions and patterns within it; and, discuss some factors and trends that may help explain these. We conclude that the literature displays two competing trends: while it is inclined to become fragmented beyond the scope of the ‘mitigation’ black box, it also tends to cluster along the lines of methodological distinctions traditionally contested within the social sciences. This, in turn, highlights the persistence of disciplinary divisions within an allegedly interdisciplinary field.

     

Character and organization

In recent years, questions of ‘character’ have become increasingly prominent in a range of policy contexts, from education to social welfare and from business to healthcare. What unites these various contemporary paens is an assumption that building ‘character’ is a crucial component of ethics and that it holds the key to establishing and maintaining virtuous conduct; moreover, that the cultivation of ‘character’ is at best under-valued and at worst actively undermined and denigrated in any number of contemporary economic and organizational practices. In this paper, we seek to interrogate key aspects of this upsurge of interest in ‘character’ as it has been articulated in particular recent and on-going debates about the reform of organizational life. We argue that this ‘turn’ suffers precisely from an abstraction and lack of contextual specificity – not simply in relation to questions of ‘character formation,’ but also in regard to matters of organization, and indeed the relationship of the one to the other – that severely curtails both its ethical reach and explanatory power.     

Giving Perverse Accounts

Abstract

This paper critically examines the questions of agency and subject‐formation in Judith Butler’s book Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). The article problematizes Butler’s defense of agency and argues that her theorization of the subject (however in‐process) as individuated and differentiated from the other involves an economy of le propre (the proper, property, ownership) that establishes the self as a Gestalt totality that must be symptomatically, i.e. narcissistically and aggressively, defended. In contrast to Butler’s ‘account’ of ‘oneself’ I proceed to offer a non‐humanist, non‐individualist, non‐Oedipal perverse model of the subject that rejects the ideological demand of Gestalt totality of identity and destabilizes the borders between self and other. In such a model of perverse personhood there is no identifiable and coherent ‘one’ for which to give an ‘account’.     

ART AS WORK

This paper uses empirical work on a piece of performance art to think through the relation between ‘work’ and ‘art’, and by implication, ‘culture’ and ‘economy’. Beginning with the idea that the intelligibility of both is produced through similar forms of rule following and rule breaking, I suggest that this throws into question the empirical and historical novelty of the idea of the creative worker. As institutionalists have argued, the work of art is produced through its relation to various organizations, just as work organizations rely on creative rule bending and elaboration. Examples of contemporary art are enrolled in the argument along the way in order to suggest that we can find many insights into the nature of work, culture and economy in comparing the practices of artists with the practices of workers.     

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.     

Ethical consumption applications as failed market innovations: exploring consumer (non) acceptance of ‘quasi’ market devices

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I conceptualise ethical consumption applications (ECAs) as market innovations inflected in processes of configuring market actors and market (re)framings. The introduction of ECAs through the work of civil society is not only about changing frames of market exchange, but also work in the register of making ‘good consumers’ and consumers as ‘agents of change’ and moralising markets. Thus, a more accurate concept for these devices is suggested: ‘quasi’ market devices. The main aim of this paper is to analyse how consumers attached to and resisted use of ECAs designed to assist in product choices and shape responsible everyday practices. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Sweden, the article applies a methodology grounded in Science and Technology-inspired market studies in combination with Consumer Culture Theory’s (CCT) interest in identity work and sense-making associated with technology consumption. Although available at the time of the empirical data collection period of the study, all three apps were off the market during the analytic work of this paper; a major argument for focusing on barriers to acceptance of the apps and trying to conceptualise how such non-acceptance can be understood.     

The neurotic academic: anxiety,casualisation, and governance in the neoliberalising university

Based on empirical research conducted with academic staff working on fixed-term contracts, the article explores the subjective experience of anxiety in the UK’s ‘neoliberalising’ higher education (HE) sector. As HE undergoes a process of marketisation, and the teaching and research activities of academics are increasingly measured and scrutinised, the contemporary academy appears to be suffused with anxiety. Coupled with pressures facing all staff, 34% of academic employees are currently working on a fixed-term contract and so must contend with the multiple forms of uncertainty associated with their so-called ‘casualised’ positions. While anxiety is often perceived as an individualised affliction for which employees are encouraged to take personal responsibility, the article argues that it should be conceptualised in two ways: firstly, as a symptom of wider processes at work in the neoliberalising sector; and secondly, as a ‘tactic’ of what Isin [(2004). The neurotic citizen. Citizenship Studies, 8 (3), 217–235] refers to as ‘neuroliberal’ governance. The article concludes by proposing that the figure of the ‘neurotic academic’ is emblematic of the contradictions facing the contemporary academy.     

ART-SCIENCE

In this paper we examine the emergent field of art-science, part of a heterogeneous space of overlapping interdisciplinary practices at the intersection of the arts, sciences and technologies. Art-science is often thought to exemplify Nowotny et al.'s (2001) ‘mode-2’ knowledge production; indeed the institutions supporting art-science invariably claim that art-science contributes to the ‘contextualization of science’ by rendering scientific and technical knowledge more accessible and accountable to its publics. Our argument, however, is that this approach fails to capture the ways in which art-science exhibits its own complex trajectories, which cannot be grasped in terms of an epochal transition in the mode of knowledge production. Drawing on ethnographic research on art-science practitioners and institutions in the USA, UK and Australia, our first aim is to indicate the heterogeneity of art-science by contrasting distinctive forms and genealogies of art-science. A second aim follows. Rather than simply multiplying the connections between science and its publics, we suggest that art-science is instructive in highlighting radically divergent conceptions and practices of publicness, and point to two such forms. We examine, first, the relations between science, art and the public in the UK from C. P. Snow's ‘two cultures’ essay to the activities of the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. In these developments, art that is in dialogue with science is conceived primarily as a means by which the (absent) public for science can be interpellated: science is understood as complete, and as needing only to be communicated or applied, while art provides the means through which the public can be assembled and mobilized on behalf of science. We contrast this with a novel institutional programme in art-science pedagogy at the University of California, Irvine: the Masters programme in Arts, Computation and Engineering (ACE). Through the contents of the ACE teaching programme and the case of an art-science project concerned with the measurement of air pollution by ACE faculty member Beatriz da Costa, and with reference to the work of Hannah Arendt and Barbara Cassin, we suggest that art-science can act not so much as a way of assembling a public for science, but as a public experiment.     

‘TONY SOPRANO ON MANAGEMENT’

This article develops the concept of ‘alternative cultural tourism’ through an in-depth study of the Prague Fringe Festival (PFF). In doing so, it argues that existing approaches to cultural tourism often fail to differentiate between different forms of culture (i.e. alternative versus mainstream), whilst also interrogating the criteria by which festivals can be understood as examples of alternative cultural tourism. Utilising a combination of both quantitative and qualitative data, involving audiences, festival performers and workers/volunteers, it is asserted that the PFF brings together a diverse mix of cultures, and seeks to create a more participatory and engaging tourist experience. Additionally, its more egalitarian organising structure produces different kinds of work and social relations in the production of art and culture – particularly between various groups working within the festival, but also in the creation of different ideas about audience engagement, performer relations, and engagement with the local community (through the idea of the ‘festival participant’). The article concludes by briefly exploring the potential of alternative cultural tourism to provide more meaningful and sustainable models of urban cultural development.